2007 Summer Conference- Tags, Media, Links...

The 2007 NMC Summer Conference was an amazing event for the NMC and its participants. In our ongoing effort to capture much of the experience for those that were not present (and those that were too), here we try to summarize a vast array of resources we have gathered for you on the "new" NMC web site.

Below we descibe more in the use of "tagging" content to aggregate it externally among many web sites, but on the new NMC web site, any content we or you create can also be tagged with keywords, so by using the nmc2007 keyword/tag on every bit of content, we have an easy way to pull it all together into one collection.

And as a side note, any logged in user for the NMC web site can add tags to any content; simply look for the Tag This! tab. This way, you can help tag perhaps an item we missed, or better describe it for others. But more! In your own profile, you have ana bility to generate your own NMC tag cloud, so you can use it to create your own folksonomy organized collection of NMC content.

Audio and Video

Thanks to the IUPUI media staff. we left Indianapolis with CDs of recorded audio from the plenary presentations, which you can find among other audio/video content in the NMC Podcasts. We will soon have video of these sessions too, but for now we have audio from:

• Fantasy Regnant - opening keynote by Edward Castronova.
• Motion Design and Process - special lunch keynote by Scott Pagano
• New Media Means New Choices - closing keynote by Kristina Woolsey

With our portable audio we were able to capture recordings from a number of special sessions. And as a bonus, a number of these presentations have been uploaded to Slideshare (a site that converts PowerPoint to web-based flash content), so in these web pages, we have the embedded slideshare version of the presentation and the audio!

• Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise: Socio-emotional Dimensions of Digital Culture Which are Transforming the Shape of New Media Literacies by Angela Thomas
• View From Second Life Trenches: Are You a Pioneer or a Settler? by Cytnthia Colongne
• Leveraging the Affordances, Minimizing the Barriers of Virtual Worlds panel discussion

We even put together a single audio player that has all of these recordings in one package.

For the recipients of the NMC Centers for Excellence Awards, we have the videos each institution produced and showed at the conference:

• Otis College of Art & Design
• University of British Columbia
• University of Wisconsin-Madison

And finally, as we do every year, the conference closed with the promotional video for the NMC 2008 Summer Conference, hosted by Princeton University - see the action by the Conference Taskforce Unit.

Presentation Links and Resources

Like past years, we try to gather web links and presentation files from the concurrent sessions- as typical in a conference, you may want to return to these for folowup, sharing with collleagues, or trying to learn from a session you missed. Infuture conferences, as we roll out a new NMC event registration system, this will all be captured on the new web site, but for this year we had to do the web 1.0 approach and ask presenters to email us the links.

You can find links to materials from the plenary sessions, pre-converence workshops, 5 minutes of fame, concurrent sessions, and posters.

One thing different we did this year was to ask presenters who typically email us their PowerPoint files, to upload them directly to Slideshare, and tag them nmc2007 to make them easily. This worked our very well with 14 presentations available at http://www.slideshare.net/tag/nmc2007

Also, like last year, we will feature a reprise of the posters set up in the virtual space of NMC Campus in Second Life, Displays of the posters from the conference can be viewed July 20-27. At 12:00 PM (PDT) on July 20, we invite the poster presenters to log in to Second Life so you can chat with them about their poster content. And this year, you can even use the new voice chat capability to talk to each other! Look for details at the NMC Campus Observer.

Tag This Conference and Other Web 2.0 Goodness

With so many web tools we continue to explore, we asked people at the conference to "tag" any media they created with the official nmc2007 tag so we could aggregate the results. NMC people are great at playing tag! Available, and maybe still growing, are:

• Blog posts tracked in technorati (includes automatically any content on the NMC website that ahs the nmc200y as a keyword) 46 posts tracked
• Photos from flickr (1048 photos tagged)
• Websites bookamrked in del.ico.us (109 sites bookmarked)
• Presentations uploaded to slideshare (14 presentations shared)

In addition, we explored a few other web 2.0 tools, a few that were "fed" by the tagging actiivity:

• Attendr map - a few days before the conference, we emailed registered aprticipants and asked them to "amp" themselves, assign themselves descriptive "tags",a nd indicate relationshiops with others on the map they know or would like to meet. More than 180 people followed through!
• Pageflakes Conference Portal - This free site provides a place to insert widgets and syndication feeds from many external resources, so we included no only all of the tagged streams listed above, but also local infomartion from widgets for weather, local attractions, a message board. Pageflakes is a powerful content tool!
• Tumblog - another automatic tool that aggregates content from the sources above via RSS and presents a blog like reverse chronology of conference coverage