NMC Podcasts

New Media Faculty Seminar Week 7

Alan Levine — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:58:18 -0800

It is Spring Break this week at Baylor University, so in this week's podcast with Gardner Campbell about the Faculty Development Seminar: New Media as a Platform for Integrative Learning we review last week's discussion, but the next meeting won;t take place until March 16, giving our participants a bit more time to dig into Marshall McLuhan.

The last seminar meeting at Baylor was a discussion of Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (pp 393-403 in the New Media Reader (found online as a free excerpt of The New Media Reader) and this was the first one facilitated by a seminar participant. Some of the active discussion points was on how the authors cast the computer as a creative tool, using music metaphors as well as the notion of the computer becoming a tool in which its users can create new tools. This is manifested today in projects like Scratch from MIT. The group also wrestled with the implcations of a focus on children, in speculating if there were suggestions that adults have "too much real responsibilities" to engage in child like exploration (a notion that Gardner nor I buy into!).

Gardner also highlighted an interesting post in the discussion forums , where Chris Hansen connected the article's idea about external media acting as a feedback mechanism to thinking, something that he works into the way he teaches writing (plus others chimed in to help find the mysterious missing last page of the article in the book!)

For the next seminar session (and remember you have an extra week to digest the reading), we move to two essays from Marshall McLuhan, excerpts from The Galaxy Reconfigured and The Medium is the Message (from Understanding Media) which are found on pp193-209 in the New Media Reader. You might be able to browse parts of The Galaxy Reconfigured in Google Books and there is a PDF for Understanding Media).

Known for the oft repeated, but perhaps little understand phrase "the medium is the message", McLuhan can be a bit "out there" on ideas, but Gardner suggests there is a lot of power and influence in McLuhan's work.

Or for a lighter view, we shared fond memories of the scene in Annie Hal l where Woody Allen pulls McLuhan in from the side to silence the loud critic behind him in line at the theater ("If life were only like this" is rather meta).

New Media Faculty Seminar Week 6

Alan Levine — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:25:41 -0800

In this installment of our series of podcasts with Gardner Campbell we check in on the Faculty Development Seminar: New Media as a Platform for Integrative Learning he is leading at Baylor University. Last week brought another unexpected surprise in that a winter storm dumped enough snow in Waco to close the campus ion Tuesday, so the seminar participants were asked to continuw their discussions of the New media Reader readings in the online seminar forum and their own blogs.

The reading for last week was Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines (pp 301-338 of The New Media Reader and is also available online as an excerpt from the book) and was again one that the participants had different experiences in interpreting. And Nelson has some strong words about the system of school, which Gardner drew a connection to the controversy published last week in the New York Times about the basketball program at SUNY Binghamton.

Looking ahead to this week is a reading centering on another visionary, Alan Kay, who in 1968 was present at Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos, an experience which strongly influences Kay's subsequent work in pioneering the concepts of the powerful personal compueter- a break from the then focus on mainframe / centralized computing.

Published in 1977, Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (pp 393-403 in the New Media Reader (found online as a free excerpt of The New Media Reader) describes the idea of the Dynabook the forerunner of today's laptop computer. Yet the brilliance of Kay's vision, was the idea that this machine was not solely for the use of engineers and scientists, but something children could learn to use and create things. This was a device not solely for consuming information, but perhaps even a tool that anyone could use (like Ted Nelson's idea) to create, and perhaps a tool that could create new tools.

Gardner shared how Kay's focus on computers as a tool for learning was strongly influenced by both Seymour Papert and Jerome Bruner. We discussed how all of these people we have been reading about were successful not as lone inventors of things, but scaffolding the work of others, and more so in the creators of ideas. Gardner related this to the the power of environments that promote the "circulation of ideas"as described in Steven Johnson's book Invention of Air.

This is the first week that the Baylor discussions will be facilitated by one of the local participants. It was Gardner's hope to solicit some of the virtual participants to sign up to help for one of the upcoming sessions (edit the course wiki to sign up). There has been a valuable flow of discussion between the Baylor and the external participants on the discussion forums.

Also, for reference, see this overview of the History of the Internet

New Media Faculty Seminar Week 5

Alan Levine — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:02:51 -0800

In week 5 of our series of podcasts with Gardner Campbell we get another update on the activities of the Faculty Development Seminar: New Media as a Platform for Integrative Learning he is leading at Baylot University. This week was special, for me, in that I was visiting campus and had the opportunity to sit in on the seminar.

The highlight of this week's discussion was in hearing the increased level of engagement by seminar participants with the ideas of the essays, in last week's discussion of Doug Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" (pp 93-108 in The New Media Reader, also found online). The bulk of the discussion was on the paragraph one participant identified as key, the "nugget" as described by Gardner:

The process of developing this conceptual framework brought out a number of significant realizations: that the intellectual effectiveness exercised today by a given human has little likelihood of being intelligence limited--that there are dozens of disciplines in engineering, mathematics, and the social, life, and physical sciences that can contribute improvements to the system of intellect-augmentation means; that any one such improvement can be expected to trigger a chain of coordinatingimprovements; that until every one of these disciplines comes to a standstill and we have exhausted all the improvement possibilities we could glean from it, we can expect to continue to develop improvements in this human-intellect system; that there is no particular reason not to expect gains in personal intellectual effectiveness from a concerted systemoriented approach that compare to those made in personal geographic mobility since horseback and sailboat days.

For this week, we move to a key reading; in fact the New Media Reader editors describe Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines as "the most important book in the history of new media." The reading is on pp 301-338 of The New Media Reader and is also available online as an excerpt from the book. Nelson's ideas are bold, counter-culture, but also clearly foreshadowed the rise of the "personal" computer. This unique book, self-published in the early 1970s, is itself contructed unusually, with one side (Computer Lib) a manifesto on the notion of everyone can and should understand computers, and the opposite end of the book (flipping it over) on the larger concepts of media and design of these new environments, represented by Nelson's Xanadu project. Nelsn also has some strong words about the educational system, likely to provoke a great deal of discussion this week.

Gardner also was pleased to cite the increase of activity on the Baylor "mother blogs" as well as the rich discussions in the online forums , including thoughtful posts from University of South Carolina Upstate Dean of Instructional Technology Cindy Jennings and instructional designer Anne-Marie Armstrong from Colorado.

NMC 2009 Summer Conference Highlights

Alan Levine — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:50:37 -0800

This 10 minute video provides a taste of the activities at the 2009 NMC Summer Conference which took place June 2009 in Monterey Bay, California. Footage includes local scenery, keynote presentations, breakout sessions, poster sessions, and testimonials from conference attendees.

Conference attendees received a DVD with this video and a full archive of the main sessions.

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You can also view this video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMhnxfKEODo

New Media Faculty Seminar Week 4

Alan Levine — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:03:37 -0800

It is now the fourth week of Baylor University Faculty Development Seminar: New Media as a Platform for Integrative Learning being conducted by Gardner Campbell. For this next in our series of podcasts with Gardner, we got to do the recording in a different way-- we were in the same room. Since we have NMC meetings in Austin later this week, I came a few days early to visit with Gardner and attend the seminar on Tuesday.

Last week, the seminar participants sunk their reading teeth into one of Gardner's "foundational" readings - Doug Engelbart;s "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" (pp 93-108 in The New Media Reader, also found online). For Gardner, the notion of augmenting human intellect is very much at the heart of what we ought to be doing in education. "Engelbart's vision was that the computer was an instantiation, in a kind of engineering or hardware, a way of extending or sharing our minds."

We talked more about how Engelbart's vision for the computer was another evolution of the person/machine relationship we have been tracing from Vannevar Bush to J.C.R. Licklider and now into something even larger, as Englebart projected that we do not even know the limits of what we can achieve via his augmented intellect approach.

As Gardner noted, this is a challenging reading and Gardner is himself challenged with leading the participants this week into a second Engelbart essay. "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect" (pp 231-246 in The New Medai Reader, also found online). In this reading, Engelbart describeshow the ideas of last week's readings were put into action at the SRI Augmentation Research Center in the time period of the landmark 1968 Mother of All Demos. Gardner plans to show key segments from the video as well as a very creative one done by an undergrad in his New Media Studies class last year.

For those following along virtually with the seminar, please join the conversations in the group discussion forums and see the blog posts being written by the Baylot participants .

New Media Faculty Seminar Week 3

Alan Levine — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:57:52 -0800

For the next in our series of podcasts with Gardner Campbell, we catch up on the in-person discussions of participants in the Baylor University Faculty Development Seminar: New Media as a Platform for Integrative Learning.

This week's topics covered Human-Computer Interaction as outlined in J.C.R. Licklider's Man-Computer Symbiosis (pp 74-81 in The New Media Reader, also found online). The Baylor participants approached LIcklider's ideas form several different angles, including a biologist suggestion that mutalism might be a better metaphor than symbiosis, as well as active discussions on advances in computer interfaces, such as gesture interfaces. Gardner also brought in the lighter element of the scene in Star Trek IV when Scotty tried to speak to a 1984 computer by using the mouse as a microphone.

Gardner also described an activity his group did. They each have 5th generation iPod Nanos, and they worked in pairs to video record each other reading and discussing a passage in this week's readings. We hope to have some of these available soon online on YouTube, and are hoping that some of the remote participants might try responding in video form.

The reading for the upcoming week is Doug Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" (pp 93-108 in The New Media Reader, also found online), which will lead to the powerful notions of collective intelligence--- Gardner notes that this reading gets a bit technical, but wants you to stay with it.

For our remote seminar participants, Gardner is inviting you to partner with the Baylor participants to sign up as a virtual facilitator for an upcoming session- this means helping to shape the notes and suggest related media to go along with the future readings. You should be able to sign up soon at the course wiki.

And there is a nice flow of communication happening at the seminar forum .

New Media Faculty Seminar Week 2

Alan Levine — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:29:08 -0800

In the second week of this series of podcasts with Gardner Campbell, we discuss how the first meeting of his Baylor University Faculty Development Seminar: New Media as a Platform for Integrative Learning. Gardner shared some details about the kinds of faculty and graduate students who are participating, their interests, and how he turned a "firehose" of web 2.0 tools their way.

We also discussed the participants reactions to both the Michael Wesh YouTube video, The Machine is Us/ing Us as well as last week's readings, especially Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay, As We May Think.

For those who are participating remotely, Gardner suggested the ways to connect to the seminar, primarily through the online discussion area he has set up (it is still open for people to join) but his way is not to provide a lot of overt structure, so he is eager to see what freely emerges.

Looking ahead to this week's activities, Gardner discussed the connections between the Bush essay and this week's reading, J.C.R. Licklider's Man-Computer Symbiosis (pp 74-81 in The New Media Reader, also found online).

For more resources, note people are starting to tag relevant resource in delicious for this seminar; if you want to add something, please use the tag baylor_nms_s10 (the latest items will appear in the sidebar of our NMC site).

Please feel free to join the conversations at http://www.atlhub.net/baylor_nms_s10/

New Media Faculty Seminar Week 1

Alan Levine — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:12:59 -0800

In our previous podcast, Gardner Campbell (Baylor University) described the Faculty Development Seminar he is running for faculty at Baylor, but also how people beyond this group, the NMC community, can also participate in the seminar and its online discussions.

As the seminar launches on Tuesday, and as part of our weekly coverage, we spoke with Gardner to get an idea what would happen this week.The Baylor participants have already been given readings in the textbook, the New Media Reader (since the seminar is based around key essays, Gardner most strongly advises "the textbook is required" -- you can purchase it for less than $40 on Amazon). Because many of you may not have the book yet, most of the readings this week can also be found online.

So if you want to participate, get ready by reading the following:

The New Media Reader preface by authors Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
Inventing the Media, introduction by Janet Murray (excerpt available as PDF)
As We May Think (1945) essay by Vannevar Bush, published in The Atlantic

This week, the Baylor group will be discussing these essays and relating them to Michael Wesch's ground breaking YouTube video, Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us as well as Robbie Dingo's Watch thw Worlds.

Introduction to the New Media Faculty Seminar

Alan Levine — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:18:55 -0800

Starting the week of January 25, 2010, Gardner Campbell, NMC Board member and Director of the Academy of Teaching and Learning at Baylor University, is leading New Media as a Platform for Integrative Learning: A Faculty Development Seminar -- a 12 week faculty seminar at Baylor.

In this podcast, Gardner talks about the design and plan for the seminar, which is modeled after his undergraduate New Media Studies class. But what is exciting for us, is that this seminar is going to have a participation component for the NMC community. The seminars at Baylor will take place every Tuesday afternoon, and each Monday before that, we will publish a recording where Gardner will summarize what has happened the week before and let us know what this week's seminar will cover.

You will be be able to participate along with the Baylor group in an online discussion area with topics that will parallel the weekly readings. Yes (as we joked in the interview), while some of the essays Gardner will assign are available online, there is a textbook- The New Media Reader edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (it is available on Amazon for $33.74). And during the course of the next 12 weeks, there will be other opportunities such as a Ustream.tv live webcast or other other New Media environments.

If you are interested, bookmark Gardner's wiki-syllabus at http://gardnercampbell.wetpaint.com/page/Baylor_NMS_S10, get the book, and stay tuned to our New Media Faculty Seminar site on Monday for the next podcast and more details on how to join the online community.

Doug Engelbart on the Invention of the Mouse

Alan Levine — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:20:39 -0800

As part of a new collaboration with the Doug Engelbart Institute, this is the first of several archived media resources the NMC is sharing as part of a new Engelbart Archive to honor this visionary in the field of New Media. In 2009, Doug was awarded the NMC's highest individual recognition being named as an NMC Fellow.

This interview was recorded in 2004 as part of Logitech's celebration of the one billionth mouse the company sold. In his own words, Engelbart describes how the development and thinking behind what has become the key modern computer interaction device.

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