Roger Zender's Blog

NMC Conference Day 1

And so begins another blog... however, blogging for work is kinda like getting to bring your dog to work. It's involving something that you really enjoy but don't feel quite right doing. Speaking of which, when will taking your dog to work become a standard practice? I see Google's now doing it. Doesn't that mean that it's cool and everyone should jump on the bandwagon?

Part of the purpose of this blog is to share what I'm working on, or what I'm learning, with the Tech Team here at the Kelvin Smith Library. Attending this New Media Consoritium (NMC) Conference on campus is a perfect start. And what better way to start than to write about a workshop on Web 2.0 technologies! However, this didn't really occur to me until about 20 minutes into the workshop, as everyone is sitting there with their laptops and the presenter is encouraging people to use their computers as he's giving his presentation. I couldn't believe I didn't think to bring mine. I slipped out and came right back with it.

Now this blog won't necessarily be my personal synthesis on everything that was discussed, but more just documentation of my notes, with personal comments thrown in.

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Can You Wiki a Vlogcast? Web 2.0 and Rich Media
Peter B. Lewis Building, Room 106

Bryan Alexander, NITLE
Bryan's Blog: Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

This session explores the intersection of Web 2.0 social computing with new developments in rich media, examining the resulting pedagogical uses. Instructors discuss the different levels of interactivity afforded by syndication, aggregation, and mixing of sound and video files. Emphasis is placed on two case studies: how can podcasts become more responsive to users, as their content is enhanced by emergent tools and practices? How can video be collaboratively edited? New forms of storytelling are also considered.

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This session essentially summarized Web 2.0 technologies (social software applications) and Rich Media (photos, podcasts, digital video, etc). Many of the attendees were Instructional Technology / New Media people for various Higher Education Institutions. So much of what was discussed involved how these technologies affect students, faculty and learning.

Bryan first talked about his role at NITLE, where he serves as the Director of Research. Several projects of interest are:

CODEX: Faculty, librarians, and IT professionals from participating colleges are developing essential projects and resources to address the rapid growth in the quantity and availability of digital materials and the increasingly sophisticated means of accessing them. Emerging solutions include collaborative databases of media assets and communities of practice focused on effective strategies for digital asset management.

Latitude: Faculty and staff across the disciplines are integrating spatial reasoning into their courses and curricula. By teaching with GIS and other mapping tools, participants deploy powerful technologies to engage their students in complex analysis, modeling, and quantitative reasoning. As a result, students gain the ability critically to reframe and resolve challenging questions with sophisticated geographical awareness.Bryan discussed how this technology is not necessarily new. We can look back over decades to see how technology has affected us. Going back to the original DARPA network, the purpose of technology and a network has always been to connect people to information and to each other. Much of our culture looks at it as man vs. machine, but really we need to look at it from the social aspect of it. So this burst of social software applications is only an extension of our intended use of technology. Web 2.0 has several components:

• Microcontent (URL, picture, text, audio file, etc.)
• Social Software (Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, LastFM)
• Open Services (cross-silo / inter-domain)

In discussing Flickr, tags were brought up as one of the essential components of it. Tags are kind of the opposite to Meta Data. Tagging structure is flat ( not heirarchical), they are user generated and not controlled - often called a Folksonomy, as opposed to a Taxonomy. The next area discussed is that of Rich Media. This being media that is more complex and memory intensive than plain text. Examples include:

• Podcasting (which now spans everything from academic use to porncasting)
• Web Video (Google Video, You Tube, etc.)
• Mobile Video (iPod, PSP)
• Music (Pandora)

While much of this is readily available on your personal computer, imagine all of this on mobile technology / mobile phones. Then discussion started about how the US is severly lagging on the development and deployment of mobile networking technologies.Point made that Rich Media can be accessible "off-line" through these mobile technologies, while social software can't.

The Black Box Problem. While all these rich media technologies are becoming more and more accessible, they cannot be manipulated or searched as easily as text is. Video and audio are hard to crack. Though this is changing. Audacity is a free open source audio editing tool. There are also blogs that now allow you to post audio feedback. There are also sites such as ITConversations.com that will allow you to enter a section of time from an audio file, where it will then give you a URL that links to just that section of audio. The point being that slowly the "black box" problem is going away.

Gaming was also discussed during this session, as it is throughout the entire conference. There's even an entire conference track based on gaming. Bryan said that if you weren't part of it, then you're missing out. Gaming, while often shunned as being isolationist, is really just another extension of using technology to interact with others. Examples being that many of the more popular games involve working with (or against) other players, and many of these networked games bring in instant messaging or audio conferences. These can be powerful tools for learning and social interaction.

The real meat of this session comes with looking at how these areas of social software and rich media interact.
Two examples stood out:
PandoraFM: A mash-up of the tow technologies, where what you're listening to at Pandora is tracked and published over at LastFM.
smARThistory: A Project from Beth Harris and the SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology

Obviously, there was much more to this session. And I wish I could have better captured the more pedagogical points that Bryan made. Regardless, this is a start. I'd encourage you to check out this article on Web 2.0 technologies here. You can also check out his del.icio.us tags here.

When he found out that I represented a library, he also suggested I check out more information on Library 2.0. Maybe, just maybe, I'll write a blog entry on it.