2012 NMC Summer Conference

"Where She Is" is an excerpt from Timothy Drury's presentation entitled, "Still Here." It showcases projected stills and video images he has shot over the years, set to a score of original compositions that he performed live (with some help from tracks he has pre-recorded into Logic.) Timothy has a particularly strong affinity for each image and each piece of music, especially in their design and atmosphere and the memories that each one evokes. The title of the performance is a reference to a musical composition he wrote in honor of his mother. When he began to compose the piece, he wished he could create something so deep and so beautiful, that wherever she was, she might be able to hear it and experience it with him somehow. That continues to be his wish as he composes new work and captures new images.

Lord David Puttnam receives the NMC Fellows Award, the NMC's highest individual honor, presented to recognize his lifetime achievement and extraordinary contributions to the field of new media. His award is proceeded by a question and answer session in which Lord David Puttnam answer questions from the audience at The 2012 NMC Summer Conference.

Education – No Silver Bullet? In his presentation, Lord Puttnam examines ways in which the ability of Information and Communications Technologies to transform education and learning outcomes could be radically accelerated. He sets out some concrete examples of how this could be achieved and examines the broader impact that such an acceleration could have on young citizens and society as a whole.

A Bill Frakes Film: Members of the NMC Community discuss ideas that matter in their personal and professional lives.

Ideas that Matter: Keith R. Krueger discusses the problems in Technology and K-12, highlighting that the number of students in K-12 dwarfs Higher Ed. Only about 65% of school districts have a person dedicated to technology leadership and Keith feels that the metaphor for how K-12 thinks of technology is based on a hero-mentality with just one hero teacher or model school. Instead we need each school to be an ecosystem of innovation. Keith discusses the hurdles that are in the way of this goal. Keith R. Krueger is CEO of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a nonprofit organization that serves as the voice of K-12 school system technology leaders in North America. CoSN’s mission is empowering educational leaders to leverage technology to realize engaging learning environments.

Ideas that Matter: Dr. Ruben R. Puentedura breaks down how to think about the information from the 2012 NMC Horizon Report, and how the technologies outlined in it relate to us as humans. He brings to the forefront the connection between humans and technology, beginning with the first fully human skeleton. Ruben is the Founder and President of Hippasus, an educational consulting firm focusing on transformative applications of information technologies to education. While a teaching fellow at Harvard University, he co-developed new courses in the introductory sciences, aimed at increasing the breadth and depth of science understanding for majors and non-majors alike.

Multimedia Literacy Skills Across the Curriculum: William Shewbridge and Christine Ferrera describe their innovative course which provides digital media skills to students across many disciplines. A one-credit class, designed to complement existing courses, it integrates visual assignments into the curriculum without sacrificing valuable class time for skills training. Students use these skills for deeper engagement in foreign language, history, and more.

Jared Bendis and Mike Kenney present "You Have How Many Students? How 500 Students Created 100 Comic Books about Science.” After a professor erroneously invited 250+ chemistry students to submit a video project with the lab’s 16 cameras, CASE explored how to provide a robust media experience that scaled for a large class. This presentation addresses issues and solutions surrounding this course, and how they encored the following semester.

Alyssa Goodman & Patricia Udomprasert present "An Alternate Universe of Learning, Through the Eyes of WorldWide Telescope." The WorldWide Telescope allows us to use all the data we’ve collected about our universe and study it in a deeply immersive online environment. Imagine a future where data from other spatially-complex subjects (anatomy, geology) are online, as vastly available as astronomical data. See an entire alternate universe of learning.

Andrew Goodman presents "Augmented Reality for the Masses: A Case Study in Democratizing an Emerging Technology." Using a combination of Google Maps, Google Sites, and the Augmented Reality (AR) browser Wikitude, the presenter created a comprehensiveAR guide to Brown University’s historic architecture. Get a hands-on demonstration of the process, and leave equipped with the techniques needed to add AR authoring to your portfolio of teaching tools.

Brandon Muramatsu presents "iCampus Student Innovation Exposition: The iCampus Student Prize" which recognizes innovative and creative applications of technology that improve living and learning at MIT. The competition builds upon the entrepreneurism and spirit of service exhibited by MIT students to solve the world’s problems by focusing attention on improvements at home, in MIT’s education, and student life.

Carole Burns presents "Backpack Journalism in Ahmedabad, India." This past January, a team of Marquette University students, led by two faculty members, traveled to Ahmedabad, India and created the first Macintosh Computer Lab at an Indian University. They taught a two-week course in backpack journalism, explaining the journalistic uses of digital media to St. Xavier’s College.

Chuiyuan Meng presents "Development Story: An Interactive Music Listening Experience for iPad." Experience an iPad application that presents musical content by integrating multimedia elements in a student-engaging, teacher-friendly way. Students visually identify musical events and structures as they occur; the learning process is enhanced with additional content, including videostreams. In addition, we’ll discuss developing the app using the latest web technologies.

Christopher Blaire Bundy presents "Explore the Seven Cs" about how to create compelling, decision-based, narrative case studies and scenarios to draw students deeper into course content by establishing roles and goals that help reinforce contextualized learning. We have learned that interactive, narrative content should follow seven simple principals to keep learners immersed and engaged: Content, Context, Challenge(s), Characters, Choices, Consequences, and Connections.

Michael Reese presents "Academic Integrity: Mashed Up." Johns Hopkins motivated incoming freshmen to fully engage in academic integrity training and learn how academics conduct research by creating analogies to audio mashups: researchers and musicians synthesize previous work into something new. We also created scenarios to explain common situations leading to academic dishonesty, competition, procrastination, etc.

Fernanda Da Costa headed up a team that became champion ofthe Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technologycompetition. Their gaming project was recognized by themunicipal, regional and national governments of Brazil. Shewent on to join Axis3D with a focus on development of training and educational games.

Carlos Miranda Levy is a Social Entrepreneur and Information and Communication Technologies for Human Development professional with 15 years of field experience in information society, human development, innovation, education, government, open knowledge, social networks, social entrepreneurship, ecology, disaster relief and recoveryin Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. He is acknowledged as one of “20 Latin American Leaders of the Internet” (CNN,2000) and was awarded the Google Developing World Scholarship (2004).

George Zaidan is an MIT ’08 graduate and a Goldwater Scholar who has written and hosted for The Weather Channel and worked on Alton Brown's science/cooking Opus, Good Eats. He founded Free Energy Productions LLC. He has produced video for MIT, IBR, Sangari Active Science, Discover Magazine and New Scientist; and created a web series called Pocket Science that performs lossless compression on research articles to form 3-minute bites.

Ignacio Rodriquez is working on a project in Caracas, Venezuela to aid public school children in improving their math skills, particularly important for those living in an environment of poor teaching conditions, drugs and crime, which leaves them with a very small gap for learning. He also coordinated a project on Educational Awareness in four different countries reaching out to thousands of people; and participated in the Education World Forum in 2011 where he had the opportunity to address 50 Ministers of educationand express his concern on the need of involving young people in Education policy-making.

Ivica Alpeza is a Board member of the Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions (OBESSU), which is a platform for cooperation between the national school student unions active in general secondary and secondary vocational education in Europe. Ivica has been involved in youth work for many years, in particular within the school student movement, first in the Bosnia and Herzegovina national school student union, ASuBiH and later on at the European level with OBESSU.

Ponce Samanuego is a start-up social entrepreneur from the Philippines. He is in a mission to be in “service of those who serve” by providing civil society groups with social innovation and social entrepreneurship services. His project has been named Philippine Winner in the BiD Network and Citibank’s Business in Development Challenge 2010.

2012 NMC Summer Conference Digest

helen Keegan (@heloukee) is Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and Social Technologies at the University of Salford, MediaCity UK. Her expertise lies in curriculum innovation and the development of new pedagogies, focusing on creativity and interdisciplinarity. A recognized international speaker, her research focuses on digital culture, digital identity and literacy, and the interplay between formal and informal learning. As a multi-disciplinary practitioner, she works across media arts and the sciences, developing partnerships and creative approaches to learning and collaboration. She has been recognized by JISC as one of 10 institutional innovators in UK Higher Education, by ALT-Epigeum for her effective use of video in education, and in July 2011 she was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award in recognition of distinguished achievement in teaching and support of student learning at the University of Salford. Helen is an executive board member of the Digital Cluster – a centre of excellence which combines and leads on high quality research, enterprise and teaching in the areas of informatics, digital media, and new and convergent technologies. You can find out more about her work on her blog, Heloukee: EdTech and Digital Culture.

Ideas that Matter: Lev Gonick brings to light some staggering statistics in Cleveland, and discusses the process of transforming our education culture from one built off scarcity to one built out of abundance. In 2004 Lev and Case Western Reserve University founded what is today known as OneCommunity, the award-winning regional community network now reaching 22 counties in Northeast Ohio. In 2009 Case Western Reserve University began extending gigabit fiber to the home in Cleveland’s inner city.

Ideas that Matter: Malcolm Brown discusses problems and opportunities in transforming learning and the concept of a “wicked problem” in which the cause of the problem is complex and ambiguous. Problems bring us to opportunities and Brown discusses methodology called “design thinking,” which outlines the process to take advantage of such opportunities. Malcolm Brown has been Director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative since 2009 and has initiated major ELI undertakings such as its Seeking Evidence of Impact program. Prior to assuming the ELI directorship, he was the Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College, overseeing a team active in instructional technology, research computing,classroom technology, and pedagogical innovation.

Ideas that Matter: Scott Sayre, who moved from working in academia for over twenty years to a position that immersed him in the museum world, discusses storytelling in relation to art pieces in museums, and how stories of each museum piece are taught in a specific way, leaving many aspects of the story out. New media is the key to illuminating these untold stories. Scott Sayre is a founder and principal at Sandbox Studios, a Minneapolis-based group that works with museums and other non-profits to plan, create, manage,and assess education programs and technology projects. Sandbox Studios creatively applies tested technologies and innovative educational strategies to bring museum collections and people together.

Ideas that Matter: Sherry Lassiter feels that we’ve lost our desire to make things, and seeks to inspire and celebrate “making and digital fabrication.” She began teaching a class on “How to Make (almost) Anything,” using digital fabrication technology. The class model went on to inspire “Fablabs” all over the world. These labs provide tools and guidance to allow students to tinker and modify the world around them. Sherry Lassiter is a former science documentary television producer, writer, director who decided she wanted to become a part of the story, rather than just telling other people’s stories. To that end, she changed careers (after 18 years in the TV biz), coming to MIT and working at the Media Lab. She now runs the Fab Foundation and international fab lab network.

Gary Kidney presents ‘Semi-Viral’ Video as an Agent of Change. Rice University used a semi-viral strategy (activity limited to campus) to distribute a video’s URL. Our approach catapulted change initiatives faster than ever before. Seeing how the “viral tree” worked and encouraged us to consider more viral communications activities. After all, the best advertising comes from person-to-person sharing.

Joichi Ito discusses innovation in open networks, the nature of risk, start-ups and the role and trajectory of the MIT Media Lab in this environment. Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is also General Manager of Neoteny Labs, a start-up fund focusing on Asia and the Middle East.

Ideas that Matter: Dr. Vijay Kumar brings up the rhetoric of crisis in education versus rhetoric of optimism, innovation, and opportunity. He goes on to focus on the optimism that open content, courseware, communities and data are bringing in the abundance they provide on the educational supply side. This is redefining what, where, and how people learn. Dr. Vijay Kumar provides leadership for planning and implementing technology-enabled educational innovations at MIT. In his prior roles at MIT as Assistant Provost and Director of Academic Computing, as well as other institutions, Kumar’s work focused on the effective integration of information technology in education. Kumar was the Principal Investigator of the Open Knowledge Initiative, the MIT-led collaborative project supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop an open architecture for enterprise educational applications.

Video update for the NMC Community, featuring the NMC's own Amy Parker.

The invitation video for the upcoming NMC Summer Conference 2012 at MIT in Boston.