The NMC Symposium on the Evolution of Communication
December 4-5, 2007
The Call for Proposals for the Symposium on the Evolution of Communication is now closed. Proposals for presentations for this special 2-day, live online event, was held December 4-5, 2007 in the virtual world of Second Life, were solicited from October 18 through November 5. The NMC's recent release of Social Networking, the “Third Place,” and the Evolution of Communication is intended to help inform and illuminate both the call for proposals and the Symposium itself.
The Symposium on the Evolution of Communication explored the premise that technology has not only mediated communication in countless ways, but that the very ways we communicate—and even the ways we talk and think about communication—are changing as a result.
Part of this premise is backward looking, in the sense that if we set literature and the creative side of communication aside for a moment, the formal communication strategies we have been taught in schools were often focused on how to convey lots of ideas or information (at relatively infrequent intervals) and generally in the form of written papers, books, or compilations.
Added to and fueling the premise is an admittedly unscientific assessment of how we have added to those forms in recent years. A look in almost any direction will reveal patterns of communication very different than the traditional writing in which we were trained. Small bursts of information, technology-mediated for the most part, permeate our experiences, and increasingly we have people with whom we are in contact almost constantly—and more so every day, these people are scattered across the globe.
Mediated by new tools and new technologies that have made the marginal cost of long distance communication essentially free, both work and social activities are commonly shared by groups of people who need not be geographically near each other to be close. Our premise, simply put, is that these and similar trends represent a significant shift in the way we interact with others and in the way we understand the nature of those interactions.
The symposium was conducted entirely online in the virtual world of Second Life. Sessions, which were conducted live, incorporated a variety of visuals and rich media, and were generally about 45 minutes in length, with about one-third to one-half that time devoted to dialog with participants using in-world voice chat.
Proposals were encouraged on the topic in any of the following areas, but this list is not exhaustive and selections were not limited to these categories:
This event is the tenth in the ongoing series of specially focused online gatherings that explore new ideas and issues related to technology and learning. The NMC Series of Virtual Symposia is itself an exploration of emerging forms of collaboration and tools.
Each accepted proposal will receive one complimentary registration code which can be used by anyone. All presenters must register; for sessions with multiple presenters, the comp registration can be used by any one of the presenters in the session (the others must register and pay the registration fee), or used to reduce the cost for all.