keynote

Closing Keynote, 2008 NMC Summer Conference, Princeton University
Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

New media technologies make it easy for us to circulate, appropriate, transform, and recirculate media content on an unprecedented scale. It is part of the mythology of MIT that young people learn to become engineers by taking apart household gadgets and putting them back together again. Can we say the same thing about contemporary artists and humanists — that they learn by breaking down and remixing elements of their own culture? We falsify the creative process when we teach young people that great art comes from single and isolated intellects rather than emerging from the creative engagement with and appropriation from older cultural traditions.

Opening Keynote, 2008 NMC Summer Conference, Princeton University
Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE

The days of walled-off learning, where students are separated into grades, disciplines and physical locations, are giving way to programs in which students are encouraged to look beyond lecture halls, labs, and textbooks. Technology offers opportunities to bring together people, tools, and data in a global commons . Creating a global commons requires more than removing barriers posed by subject matter, geography, economics, or age. It requires a new set of models that may challenge many of our historic assumptions about authority and education. This presentation explores principles and examples that hint at a future global commons .

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