NMC News

Registration is now open for the Third Annual Pachyderm Conference scheduled for September 22-24, 2008 in San Antonio, Texas!

Click here to register now!

For further details on the conference please see
http://www.nmc.org/2008-pachyderm-conference

Hotel Accomodations
The conference will be held at the Hotel Contessa, located on the famous and fun San Antonio Riverwalk. A block of sleeping rooms has been reserved for conference attendees at the Hotel Contessa for $169 single/double. The Hotel Contessa is an all-suites hotel that offers a separate living and sleeping area. Wireless connectivity is complimentary for all conference attendees staying at the hotel.

Please make your hotel reservations no later than Friday, September 5 in order to receive the special room rate and to ensure room availability. Be sure to mention that you are with NMC or The New Media Consortium in order to receive the special room rate.

Hotel Contessa
306 West Market St.
San Antonio, Texas
210-229-9222
866-435-0900 toll free
http://www.thehotelcontessa.com/default_.asp

For complete details on accommodations and travel
http://www.nmc.org/2008-pachyderm-conference/travel

Preliminary Conference Schedule
The preliminary conference schedule can be found here
http://www.nmc.org/2008-pachyderm-conference/program

Watch the NMC website for further details!

All of us at NMC look forward to seeing you in San Antonio!

The 2008 Pachyderm Conference will take place September 22-24, 2008, in San Antonio, Texas. This is the third annual Pachyderm Conference.

The focus of the conference is to bring together Pachyderm authors, developers, and others in an ongoing conversation about how to communicate effectively with digital media. The conference provides a forum for beginners to learn from established experts, and for those with more advanced skills to exchange ideas and gather inspiration from their peers.

The theme of this year’s conference is the power of story. Highlights will include final details about the next release of Pachyderm, as well as a special showcase of presentations that demonstrate the deep connection between story and audience.

This year, the conference will take a form that involves the audience in ways much like the "unconference" model. The unconference model allows room for spontaneous presentations to come from the audience.

“We are hoping to hear from attendees before the conference about the kinds of things they would like to see and do,” explains Rachel Smith, Vice President of NMC Services. “Of course, we are very much looking forward to the topics that will arise at the conference itself. We are also asking for people to send us links to current projects they are working on, especially those that tell a story effectively, for an online showcase.” Links and suggestions may be forwarded directly to Ms. Smith at rachel@nmc.org.

In addition to informal or on-the-fly “unconference” sessions, a variety of more traditional session types will take place, such as keynotes, panels, and showcases.

Further information about the conference is available on the conference website.

As part of its role in benchmarking the field of New Media, the NMC is sharing the results of its annual survey of member organizations.

Between January and April 2008, we surveyed 276 NMC institutions to collect information on services provided, technologies used, current projects, and staffing. Below you will find the results of this survey, including data on use of NMC benefits media services provided, exploration of new technologies, support for technologies, projects in virtual worlds, use of open-source tools, and staffing/salary data.

Download NMC 2008 Member Organization Survey Summary (1.4 Mb PDF)

In comparison to the last survey, these organizations have notably increased in their use of external audio and video hosting services (including iTunesU, Google Video, YouTube, etc), increasing from 18% of organizations using such services n December 2006 to 49% of organizations for the current survey. This partly reflects an increase in the percentages of NMC organizations using iTunesU (growing from 18% to 31%) and the expanded use of video hosting sites. For 2008, 21% of NMC organizations report having a YouTube channel and another 28% are researching this option.

Not even an option in the previous survey, 14% of NMC organizations are using Google Applications for staff and/or student productivity applications and another 45% are researching this as an option or is in process of setting it up.

Generally organizations are more likely to host their own wiki service (45%) than hosting blogging services (19%). For both technologies, more than one quarter of the organizations are referring users to externally hosted services.

More than half of responding organizations have a project in Second Life; while the majority of projects are classified as research, 50% report having a virtual world project related to a specific course, and 14% have some sort of institutional presence in a virtual world space.

We hope this information is useful for looking at the New Media field as a whole and for benchmaring your own organization, If you have any questions about or suggestions for our surveys, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Howard 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.

The NMC is honored that this mashup includes selections of Howard's keynote presented in Second Life at the 2007 NMC Symposium on the Evolution of Communication, which you can also find in CommentPress format from the NMC at http://wp.nmc.org/coevolution

The Horizon.au project opened tonight as we brought together nearly 40 education Australian leaders with a welcome dinner in Melbourne. NMC staff introduced the project and provided an overview of the activities for the meeting on July 10.

All participants got an opportunity to share a special interest of theirs in the area of emerging technologies, which were visually recorded by NMC's Rachel Smith.

The New Media Consortium (NMC) has announced the 2008 cohort of Virtual Learning Prize (VLP) awardees. The NMC Virtual Learning Prize, part of a $100,000 competitive program of awards, is intended to create a collection of innovative open-source learning experiences that make use of the unique attributes of a virtual learning environment.

The NMC Virtual Learning Prize is envisioned as a way to surface and realize creative ideas for how to make optimal use of a virtual setting, using a process that provides recognition, financial incentives, professional development services, and a return for education as a whole.

The first-round awardees are:

Tim Bell
University of Canterbury
"Computer Science Unplugged in a virtual world"

Natasha Boskic
University of British Columbia
"Collaborative creative writing in predesigned space"

Eric Hackathorn
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
"Exploring Weather and Climate Change Through a Climate Time Line"

Lisa Ortiz
Metropolitan State College of Denver
"Experience Virtual Disabilities"

Heidi Trotta
Seton Hall University
"Endangered Ecosystems - The Virtual Salt Water Marsh (Part 2 - A Case-Based Learning Scenario)"

Ruth Tringham
University of California, Berkeley
"Student-Designed Virtual Archaeology Class"

Thomas Waters
University of Pittsburgh
"Measuring Heart Rate and How Medications Affect Heart Rate"

Michael Zerbe
Stark State College of Technology
"First World Economics in Second Life"

Nearly 75 applications were received in the initial round of this highly competitive program. Each awardee will receive US$5,000 -- a cash incentive paid to the awardee of $500 as well as $4,500 in expert development assistance from the NMC Virtual Worlds team to create their proposed learning experience.

As many as 20 awards will be distributed during the 2008-9 award year – since all 20 were not awarded in the first round, the process remains open, and proposals will continue to be accepted until all funds have been expended.

For further information, or to download a proposal submission form, please see the Virtual Learning Prize website. Questions related to the criteria or the submission of an application should be directed to virtual-learning@nmc.org.

Welcome NMC Members who joined in June 2008!

• Alliance for Information & Technology Innovation
• University of Notre Dame
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne
• University of New South Wales
• University of Queensland
• Virginia Commonwealth University
  

Today NMC leadership Larry Johnson, Rachel Smith, and Alan Levine visited with University of Melbourne Vice Principal, Information and CIO Linda O'Brien and staff. Enjoying a lovely lunch at the University House, NMC shared initiatives and led a discusson of the Horizon.au project that brought them to Australia.

Our hosts shared a wide range of interesting projects and uses of emerging technology at the university, including a new forward looking strategic plan.

Following lunch, we participated in afternoon sessions of the iCampus meetings intended to bring together interested researchers and teachers in use of the remote instrumentation and virtual world technologies pioneered by the project that orginated at MIT.

modified from creative commons licensed flickr photo by pierre pouliquin

From July 5-20, 2008, the NMC leadership team of CEO Larry Johnson and Vice Presidents Rachel Smith and Alan Levine will be in Australia establishing a new phase of the Horizon Project and meeting with colleagues at our five Australian NMC member organizations. Look for a string of news stories and podcasts from this tour.

The primary purpose of the trip is the launch of Horizon.au -- a version of the Horizon project specifically focused on emerging technology in higher education for the Australia / New Zealand region. An advisory board has been convened and will meet face to face in Melbourne July 9-10 to generate the topics for a new Horizon Report. Like our other Horizon Projects, a majority of the work will take place openly in the wiki, and we invite interested persons to participate there by helping provide examples and tagging web resources.

While in Melbourne, we will be meeting with colleagues from University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology who are also co-hosts for the Horizon.au meeting. We also will be participating in an iCampus regional meeting.

There will be another stop in Brisbane for meetings at new NMC member University of Queensland followed by 3 days in Sydney to meet with colleagues at the University of Sydney, new NMC Member University of New South Wales and our long standing NMC member organization at the University of Wollongong. Our colleague Angela Thomas at the University of Sydney has arranged a number of local meetings and a dinner with colleagues we have known virtually through our Second Life projects.

Keep tuned to the NMC News feed for more updates!