NMC Podcasts

The Story of the NMC: A Networked Improvement Community

Alan Levine — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:06:28 -0800

This video includes the background images and recorded audio of an NMC presentation at the Program for the Future event, December 8, 2008, held to honor to innovation of Doug Engelbart on the 40th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos. Larry Johnson, Raqchel Smith, and Alan Levine were invited to share how the NMC is an example of what Engelbart described as a "networked improvement community" that he forecast as necessary to deal with complex problems.

The Program for the Future event was designed to further Engelbart's ideas of Collective Intelligence, which was featured on the four to five year horizon of the 2008 NMC Horizon Report-- see http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2008/chapters/collective-intelligence/

Angela Thomas and Virtual Macbeth NMC Conversation #10

Alan Levine — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:18:22 -0800

In this NMC Conversation we are transglobal! Larry (in Texas), Rachel (in California), and Alan (temporarily in Iceland) talk with Angela Thomas in Sydney, Australia. Angela, a senior lecturer in English Arts and New Media Literacies at the University of Sydney. The NMC and Angela have collaborated numerous times since first meeting her in Second Life back in 2006, and she has presented several times at our Second Life conferences as well as being a featured speaker at the 2006 NMC Summer Conference.

We invited Angela to talk about her recent work on Virtual Macbeth, a deeply immersive Second Life experience designed to create a feeling for the visitor of the influences on and psychology of being "inside" Macbeth's head. The NMC Virtual Worlds team built the entire project and brought her ideas to life.

Angela shares with us some interesting information on the design aspects of the project, the success in working with a large number of colleagues in its production, and its potential for teaching and learning. If you have not taken the time to visit Virtual Macbeth, carve out some time and enter Macbeth's head via http://slurl.com/secondlife/Macbeth/44/54/54.

Rock the Academy

Alan Levine — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:13:11 -0700

This is the promotional video we produced for the 2008 NMC Fall Virtual Symposium, Rock the Academy: Radical Teaching, Unbounded Learning. All image, video, and music content is from creative commons or public domain sources.

The video is available here as Quicktime or from YouTube... help make it go viral!

Welcome Susan Chun and Steve: NMC Conversation #9

NMC — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:05:20 -0700

Recently the NMC shared the news that we was awarded a a three-year $955,000 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) that provides another opportunity to partner with museums on an innovative software development project. For the grant, Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied, NMC will coordinate a project to further develop the Steve tagging application, a tool that simplifies the navigation of online museum collections by allowing viewers to tag an image with descriptive terms.

In bringing the Steve project to NMC we are excited to introduce Susan Chun as a new staff member of NMC to direct the project. We recently met in person at the NMC office in Austin, and took the face to face opportunity to welcome Susan and have her engage us in a conversation about Steve.

Reflections on the Horizon.au Project Meeting

Alan Levine — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:37:07 -0700

After a full day of brainstorming and discussion to generate the first short list of topics for the first Horizon.au report, participants gathered at the University of Melbourne for an evening reception. We took the opportunity to ask several participants what they thought were highlights of the day, which you can hear in this podcast.

We also hade made a version of this as an enhanced podcast with pictures of the participants who spoke to us - you can watch/listen in iTune:
http://media.nmc.org/2008/07/horizon-au-reflections.m4a

Horizon.au in Photos

Alan Levine — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:37:22 -0700

As a sample of the activity for the July 10-11, 2008 Horizon.au meeting in Melbourne, Australia, here is a short video slide show of pictures from the meeting combined with an ambient mix of the discussions.

At this meeting, 37 gathered members of the Horizon.au advisory board met and processed the initial list of topics to be included in this new report, and distilled the voting down to a soon to be announced short list of 12 items to be contenders for the final report.

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Look for more pictures tagged hzau08 in flickr.

Invitation to NMC 2009- Come to Monterey

Alan Levine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:35:26 -0700

As tradition, the closing of one NMC Summer conference ends with an invitation to the next!

From the stage of Alexander Hall at Princeton, John Ittelson and Arlene Krebs from CSU Monterey Bay provided a video overview and glorious sunset embossed invitation to entice people to come west in 2009 for the next NMC Summer Conference.

What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media

Alan Levine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:25:55 -0700

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.

In this presentation, Jenkins will address the ways that contemporary remix culture — whether embodied in music, You Tube videos, or fan fiction — forces us to reconsider older forms of cultural appropriation. Drawing on materials being developed by MIT’s Project NML, this presentation will explore the concept of “new media literacies” and explain why we see appropriation as a core cultural competency for the 21st century. Jenkins will explore how this concept might shake up how we teach traditional literary texts like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, how we respond to contemporary youth culture, and how we talk to young people about the ethical dimensions of their relationship to media content.

Presentation available as:

Sonic Foundry Mediasite video and slides (available through July 30, 2008)
Mediasite archive on nmc web (Windows only)
Quicktime video on nmc web (129 Mb Mb, 1:04:11)
MP3 audio on nmc web (58.8 Mb, 1:04:11)

Where Do We Go? - Lennon Bus Video

Alan Levine — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:31:10 -0700

The John Lennon Bus was special feature at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference, where conference participants had opportunities to tour the bus and even get their own 15 minute session to record a sound loop. A special one day workship was made available for conference participants who signed up on our wiki; 7 participants were chosen to spend a full day experience where they recorded a song and created a video.

At the closing session, everyone at the conference got to see the video Where do We Go created by the group known as the "Digital Philosophers"

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The Digital Philosophers include:

Neil Gomes (vocals)
Nita Paul (vocals)
Grover Saunders (drums)
Susan Fou (keyboard)
Andy Curran (guitar)
Jay Field (guitar)
Randy J. Malta (bass)

If you like the video, it is also available in ipod format (25.3 Mb .m4v, 2:38)

NMC@15

Alan Levine — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:56:12 -0700

In celebration of the 15th anniversary of the NMC, we asked our members to share via flickr a collection of creative photos that somehow represented the number 15 and we also solicited their photos of NMC memories. Combining these with ones from the NMC's own vast archive, we commissioned this video that was shared at the opening of the conference.

The soundtrack was from the performance of NMC members who participate in the Rock Hall Jam at the 2006 NMC Summer Conference in Cleveland-- sit back and enjoy the show!

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