History of the NMC
The NMC was founded in 1993 by a group of hardware manufacturers, software developers, and publishers who realized that the ultimate success of their multimedia-capable products depended upon their acceptance by the higher education community in a way that had never been achieved before.
These companies -- Apple Computer, Adobe Systems, Macromedia, and Sony -- guessed that a community of innovators embedded in leading colleges and universities would amplify the impact of their tools in a wide range of disciplines, and that such a community could be uniquely self-sustaining and adaptive.
To that end, the founding partners launched the first Search for Excellence, to identify schools in which an investment in multimedia capacity could bear fruit. The colleges among the first group of 22 academic institutions were chosen for their demonstrated competence at using new media technologies, as well as their geographic distribution and breadth of academic specialties.
Those 22 institutions initiated an explosion of collaborative activities, and their working group—then called the New Media Centers—quickly evolved into an independent not-for-profit 501(c)3 corporation by early 1994, with headquarters in San Francisco.
In 1995 and 1998, the organization expanded the membership in two international searches, and today, the NMC now includes nearly 300 extraordinary colleges, universities, and museums working together to expand the boundaries of teaching, learning, and creative expression.
In 2002, the NMC moved its national headquarters to Austin, Texas, and began to organize its projects and activities into broad but focused initiatives. Working through these initiatives, today's NMC has earned a well-deserved reputation as a leader in the inventive application of technology to challenges in teaching, learning, and creative expression.
In 2003, the NMC launched the Horizon Project, a fowward-looking ongoing research project. Each year, the annual Horizon Report identifies important developments, technologies, challenges and trends -- and many of these find their way into important NMC projects like Pachyderm, the New Scholarship Initiative, NMC Virtual Worlds, and more. Pachyderm Project, one of the NMC's longest running and most successful efforts, kicked off in 2003, with the support of the Insitute for Museum and Library Services.
In 2006, the NMC was selected by the MacArthur Foundation to coordinate the production of six volumes of work intended to define digital media and its impacts. Also in 2006, the NMC launched its highly successful NMC Campus Project, which continues to be the largest educational effort in any virtual space, involving more than 100 institutions and some 7,500 individuals.
In 2007, the NMC launched the first edition of the NMC Summer Conference Proceedings, under the umbrella of the New Scholarhip Initiative. NMC Virtual Worlds, a services unit of the NMC, also launched in 2007. In 2008, with the launch of the Open Virtual Worlds project, NMC Virtual Worlds became the umbrella for that effort as well and the NMC Campus project, and NMC CEO Larry Johnson presented testimony to the US Congress on the nature and potential of virtual worlds.
In 2008, the NMC celebrates its fifteenth anniversary, as it continues to look for ways to shape the ways the academy views technology and its applications for teaching, learning, and creative expression.
