podcast

Just back from New Orleans, Larry, Rachel, and Alan share their reflections on the 2007 New Orleans Regional NMC Conference at Tulane including reviews of the keynote sessions, their highlights from the program sessions, and memories of the special events, especially the Second Line parade. Mostly, this conference wove together cohesive themes of the power of digital storytelling, music, creativity, community, the capacity of human potential especially in face of events such as the post Katrina flooding of the city.

In a conference devoted to the wide and dazzling array of new media in relationship to intimate community life in New Orleans and elsewhere, much of what may be extended in the classroom, broadcast or global networks comes from original human forms of expression. The implications of which are: pre-modern forms of artistic communication still speak to us, old modern forms like radio offer time-tested models of extending oral tradition and traditional aesthetics, and new media at their best often aim to recreate and create anew community experiences that we may feel are lost when the market-drivenrush to new technology values form and efficiency over content.

Closing Plenary Keynote 2007 NMC Pachyderm Conference

Synergy is building in the Pachyderm user and development communities with Pachyderm’s entrance into the open-source realm. Linkages to other systems, new features, and innovative uses for the authoring tool are springing up from the community of developers. Looking ahead, key projects and initiatives are poised to pave an exciting future for Pachyderm. Nothing is set in stone, and you and the rest of the community can contribute, share, and change the future as Pachyderm moves ahead.

Thursday Luncheon Plenary Keynote for the 2007 NMC Pachyderm Conference

A brief lunchtime journey down a road less traveled by in order to illuminate “the way we do the things to do.” What do James Burke, Douglas Adams, and John Cowper Powys have to do with Pachyderm? More importantly, why are hard-boiled eggs often more useful than sledgehammers in the educational process?

Wednesday Luncheon Plenary Keynote for the 2007 NMC Pachyderm Conference

This presentation will demonstrate and discuss the second phase of a three-year, large-scale Pachyderm project called Integrating the Arts: Mummies, Manuscripts and Madonnas . This project, being produced for the Walters Art Museum by Sandbox Studios, is based on an interdisciplinary approach for K-12 teachers and students to a select number of ancient, medieval and Renaissance works of art in the Walter’s collection.

Opening Plenary for the 2007 NMC Pachyderm Conference

Continuing from Conversation #4, we again cover the Horizon Project theme by talking with Bryan Alexander on the 2007 Horizon Report horizon of New Scholarship. As Director of Research for NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Bryan researches and develops programs on the advanced uses of information technology in liberal arts contexts. While we started with some talk about the relationship of blogging and scholarship, we arched more broadly to areas of academic practices, publishing, innovation theory, and affordances of powerful tools such as visualization.

Closing keynote session at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference...

Early activities in the exploration of new media opportunities involved the invention of new media modes, forms and genres. These have included wikis, blogs, videologs, text messaging, email, hypermedia, and more. These representations have taken advantage of media-rich elements, interconnectivity, and social participation. Given the establishment of these "new media" uses, the challenge has now become the development of an expressive constituency that is competent in these new media forms, and, more importantly, that is capable of choosing which of these is important for what context.

It is not yet possible for us to duplicate the richness amd complexity of the real world in a virtual world. What instructional deisgn elements can we use to simulate real world experiences? What affordances do these virtual spaces offer that the real world does not and what are the barriers to success?

At the 2007 NMC Summer Conference, a panel of educators tackled these and other complex issues in an exploration in the use of virtual worlds in the classroom.