Dynamic Knowledge Initiative
How can technology drive the formation of new knowledge, expand dialog, and fuel the exchange of ideas?
At the center of this initiative are the NMC's values of collaboration and community, and the activities within it cut across the full scope of the NMC's efforts. The Dynamic Knowledge Initiative (DKI) began several years ago with an exploration of social computing and the tools that could support it, and was greatly informed by the work of Douglas Engelbart. Early efforts included extensive literature reviews on topics like learning object and visual literacy, and the NMC's first forays into online meetings. The DKI is the impetus behind the NMC Series of Online Conferences and Virtual Symposia, as well as the extensive online social networking tools that are at the center of the NMC's website and its growing community in the virtual world of Second Life.
- Focus on: collaboration and ways to create new knowledge
- Stimulate: effective use of social tools in support of knowledge generation and sharing
Convene
people around ideas
- NMC Series of Online Conferences
- NMC Campus Teachers Buzz (Second Life)
- Events and Symposia in Second Life (ongoing)
- Online Conference on Social Computing (Nov 2004)
Catalyze
dialog and new ideas
- MacArthur Series on Digital Media & Learning
- NMC Campus in Second Life
- Social networking focus to website
- Town Meetings at conferences
- New Scholarship Initiative
- NMC Series of Online Conferences
- New focus area initiatives
Build Community
engage people
- Marcus Digital Arts Education Project
- Second Life communities (Teachers’ Buzz, Studio NMC, arts community)
- NMC Flickr streams (NMC Photos, NMC Virtual Worlds, 2006 Summer Conference)
- NMC blogs & wikis
- Collaborations with ELI and ECAR
- Forums on NMC website
- Social networking tools for NMC projects
Contribute
produce things
- Volumes in MacArthur Series on Digital Media & Learning
- Folksonomic approach to NMC website
- NMC blogs (NMC Campus Observer)
- Project wikis (Horizon, NMC Campus, NMCpedia)
- NMC Series of Online Conferences (Archive)
- Discussion-based publications (Maximizing Campus Impact)
- Topical literature reviews
The content below is related to this initiative and comes from various places across the NMC web site. Items are listed in reverse chronological order.
Dynamic Knowledge Initiative
Webinar Software Used at NMC Organizations
Posted September 9th, 2008 by Alan LevineAs another example of gathering data from our NMCTAB listserv without an avalanche of emails, we recently set up another Google Form to collect information in response to a question from Cheryl Schaffer from Emerson College, who has asked:
I would like to get a general sense of what technology other schools are using for Webinars. I am seeing interest in this from Faculty and Staff and would like to offer some solutions to them.
Within four days almost 30 people had responded- see below for the results, but from these individuals reported institutional use of the following webinar technologies (quite a few places have multiple systems in place):
Announcing the NMC Jam Pack!
Posted August 20th, 2008 by Larry Johnson
As many of you know, as past of the NMC's 15th anniversary celebration going on all year, participants at the NMC 2008 Summer Conference had a special opportunity to visit the John Lennon Bus - a world class audio/video studio on wheels-- and spend 15 minutes laying down a lick, a groove, a vocal, or other gem that was then processed by bus staff as Apple Sound Loops. The loop files are designed to be used in audio editing software to mix and match in tracks to generate new songs.
The loops are now ready at http://www.nmc.org/jampack, and we're are issuing a call for musical compositions using them as part of NMC@15-- it's time to put your jam on!
ePortfolio Use
Posted July 28th, 2008 by Alan LevineA few weeks ago we posted Collaborating without Email as an idea how to gather information from NMCTAB withoutn the usual round of long emails needing manual compilation. A member had asked to poll the NMCTAB on use of ePortolio software and whether that as a resource had been used in an accredidation process. We did this by setting up a form in Google docs that populates an online repadsheet.
The results included 25 responses collected in 9 days, without one email filling up the NMCTAB listserv. The results are available at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=prvl0yLfIeb5nQKy_I253HA
Howard Rheingold's Technosocial Koan
Posted July 21st, 2008 by Alan LevineHoward Rheingold continues to explore new forms of media expression in his new Vlog site including this new video, Rheingoldian mashup: A Technosocial Koan, 1977-2008
An experiment: This brief video mashes up remarks I made in previous episodes to convey a meta-message: From The Martian Report (1977) to The WELL(1989) to TED (2005) to the New Media Consortium (2007) to Jim Lehrer’s 2008 Newshour documentary, By The People, to my recent remarks to the Korean people.
What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media
Posted June 23rd, 2008 by Alan Levine
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.
NMC@15
Posted June 23rd, 2008 by Alan Levine
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!
Get Flash to see this player.
La Historia del NMC Campus en Second Life
Posted December 10th, 2007 by Alan LevineOur video on NMC and Second Life, NMC Campus: Seriously Engaging continues to be one of the most requested media items viewed on our web site. While it has been close to 2 years since we published this video, it is viewed in recently more than 700 times per month, and this does not even count where it is accessed on other sites such as YouTube, blip.tv, and Google Video. But one of the more fascinating uses of the video is on >dotSUB, a web site where visitors can annotate the movie with translations of its captions into more than 100 other languages.
What We Talk About When We Tag About Art
Posted September 28th, 2007 by NMCOpening Plenary for the 2007 NMC Pachyderm Conference
Symposium on Creativity Photo Stream
Posted August 30th, 2007 by Alan LevineDuring the August 12-18 NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life we asked participants to share any of their event photos stored in flickr by marking them wit the tag slcreativity.
We had a large amount of cooperation, as there are more than 1000 phots tagged with slcreativity on flickr . In celebration, we used some free software and those images to generate a series of photomosaics- taking one photo from the collection
we can recast it as a mosaic made of hundreds of thumbnails of all the images:
NMC Second Life Web Video Jukebox
Posted July 27th, 2007 by Alan LevineThis NMC Second Life video "jukebox" uses a new web tool called vodpod to assemble a dynamic collection of related videos:
