The ongoing theme of the NMC's series of regional conferences is "New Challenges ... New Ideas," and this year, three challenges in particular provided the spark at the core of the program.

• The Future of Scholarship: The future of scholarship is evolving, and evolving rapidly. Contemporary writing and other creative works have seen considerable scholarly experimentation, but all areas of scholarship are seeing examples that diverge from traditional forms and take advantage of affordances offered by emerging media and tools. This track is designed to highlight exciting new forms of scholarship that are arising, and to showcase model practices. At the same time, the goal is to look not only at the promise and potential of these developments, but also to encourage frank discussions about the challenges they pose, especially for aspiring scholars.



• Bringing Virtual 3-D Worlds to Reality: The science and technology underlying virtual worlds have long made these metaverses rich landscapes for explorations of 3-dimensional forms in science and engineering. Recently, with the influence of immersive gaming technologies, we have also begun to see them develop as compelling social spaces. This track is devoted to an exploration of emerging practices in the use of these spaces, including experimental worlds created with new tools like Croquet, commercial metaverses like Second Life and World of Warcraft, as well as the range of supporting concepts and assessment strategies.



• Embracing the New Web: The web is undergoing yet another transformation, one being driven by the tremendous impact of social networking and folksonomic tools. Community-driven sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, and others that have almost no content of their own, yet have become some of the most popular and most-visited sites on the web. How are these approaches going to impact the way we develop content for college, university, or museum web sites? What are the implications we should be considering, and what are the unresolved issues?