October 20, 2006
As part of the NMC’s 12 day symposium on the The Impact of Digital Media, last night (from midnight til 2am) I attended a live press conference run by the MacArthur Foundation. The press conference was held simulataneously in New York, and at the NMC campus in Second Life. It was a wonderful event and I felt privileged to be attending. I got to hear Mimi Ito and Henry Jenkins, and I even managed to get a question relayed from Second Life to the panellists in NY, which they generously responded to!! There’s two fantastic summaries of the event and what was said by Beth and Rik, a series of pictures taken from the NMC here, and a list of links to the audio and more media coverage at the NMC Observer blog. Meanwhile, here are a few of my favourite pics:
Listening to Mimi Ito:
Listening to Henry Jenkins:
The SL Crowd (That’s me sitting next to Christy in the front row!)
Listening to the President of the MacArthur Foundation, Jonathan Fanton, who announced a 50 million dollar funding roll out over the next 5 years to improve the research into the teaching of digital media, with the burning question: How is digital media changing the way that children learn and develop and what are the implications?
Tonight from midnight to 4am its my turn to speak! See my previous post for the list of events organised for this 4 hour session, it should be both stimulating and fun.
October 17, 2006
On Friday I am giving a talk titled The Avatar as Communication, as part of the The New Media Consortium’s Impact of Digital Media 12 day symposium. From their site comes this explanation:
The New Media Consortium will host the 12-day symposium on the NMC campus in Second Life, focusing on the impact of digital media on all aspects of our daily lives. The Symposium on the Impact of Digital Media will explore the ways we encounter and understand digital media — inside such a setting. This virtual symposium is informed by the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, a two-year project in which the NMC is helping to explore the impact of digital media on our lives in a variety of ways, and encouraging dialogue among experts, visionaries, and thought leaders from around the globe.
In my dual role as an educator in Second Life and as editor of Slatenight (a magazine about the Arts, education, culture and entertainment in SL) I was invited to plan a live event inside Second Life for Sl residents.
I have planned a four hour series of events, and here is our program:
Friday October 20th 7am-11am - Live Event SLATENIGHT hosted events
* The Avatar as Communication - Dr Angela Thomas, Sydney University (Anya Ixchel, editor of Slatenight)
* Fashion parade: Fashioning the Avatar (showcasing the range of unique identities in SL)
* Remediation of the Art Space in SL - Christy Dena, Sydney University (Lythe Witte, writer for Slatenight)
* Music in Second Life: Panel Discussion and Live Music - with Silas Scarborough, ZeroOne Paz, Mel Cheeky, Cybster Curtis and Billy Thunders (Cletis Carr)
* Future Perfect: Projections forward to an even better world - Dell Wilberg (creative designer of Slatenight)
* Engaging the Disengaged: Using SL to Revitalize the Undergraduate Classroom - Danielle Mirliss and Heidi Trotta, Seton Hall University, NY (Danielle Damone and Heidi TeeCee, writers for Slatenight)
So, if you are in SL, come along and listen to us - our voices will be streamed into world as will the music, and you’ll probably hear lots of laughing and informal chatting during the fashion show - oh and the musicians tell me I will never be able to shut them up, so you may even hear me getting very stern trying to keep them in line *grin*
If you have Second Life downloaded already, and are a member of the NMC guests group (to access the NMC sim you need to be a guest of the group), here is the SLURL.
For a list of ongoing posts about the many other symposium events (including a talk with Howard Rheingold!), check the NMC Observer.
October 13, 2006
Slatenight 1.2 is available now - in Second Life at any Slatenight kiosk, and at the website slatenight.com
Articles this issue include the following:
and there’s lots more about art, identity, relationships in SL, musical events, SL lifestyles and more! Phew… and issue 3 is shaping up nicely, with some fabulous articles covering the arts, education, culture, and life in Second Life.
October 12, 2006
October 8, 2006
Unfortunately for me, I was giving a keynote at the Australian Sysytemic Functional Linguistics conference last week which meant I missed the Association for Internet Researchers conference which clashed with it!!
FORTUNATELY for me, thanks to the great efforts of Kevin Lim, I was able to still see some of the speakers in post-presentation interviews about their work!!! What a fabulous idea this is! Here is my friend Christy Dena speaking about her work on cross-media narratives and ARGs - the lighting is bad but isn’t she just wonderful!
And here is Mary-Helen, the “witty knitter”, who is in the same faculty as me!!! 
Sorry M-H I couldn’t get the code to embed this video but if you send it to me I will add in it directly. (Here is Mary-Helen’s fascinating blog!)
October 4, 2006
Featuring James Gee, Henry Jenkins, some teachers, and a great MIT game being used to teach US History…
September 21, 2006
September 20, 2006
I just heard about One Web Day today - a way for people to celebrate the impact of the internet in their lives. The site gives many ways to celebrate, including sharing your own personal stories about how the web has changed your life, and uploading pictures to a common photo sharing site.
Hunter Glass from Second Life told me about it and is organising a special event in SL to mark the occasion, so if you are about in SL on the 22nd, stay tuned for details about a party! Meanwhile check out the site. Nice links to John Perry Barlow, the cyberspace manifesto principles/ethos and so on as well.
September 17, 2006
Yesterday I went to the most fascinating presentation by Christy Dena and she has totally converted me into the heady world of Mono-Polymorphism!! This was one of the best “big picture” conceptualisations for the many forms of distributred narratives, ARGs, digital fiction, fan fiction and media franchise narrative “events” that I have ever seen. I love talks like this because they remind me how SLOW education is in this field and really challenge my thinking to new levels. Here is Christy’s abstract - if only I had some of her mind blowing slides to show too!
Mono-Polymorphism: A Paradigm for Understanding Cross-Media Entertainment
Christy Dena
In the age of cross-media production works are distributed over time and space like never before. A story can be adapted into numerous media and arts forms; episodes traverse television and digital games; a plot can stretch from a book to the web; a work of fiction can be indistinguishable from reality and a work of art indistinguishable from marketing. The methodological discourses touched by this phenomenon are, among others, Narratology, Ludology, Media Studies and Semiotics. How does one recognise, analyse and frame these works? Introducing Mono-Polymorphism: the theory where many forms and the singular co-exist. Giddy with the notion of a ‘unified theory of everything’, this theory seeks to provide a schema for understanding the meta-discursive, taxonomical, and rhetorical complexity of these works. And yes, the dissonance with ‘mono-polymorphism’ is intentional.
September 6, 2006
with Julian Dibbell!! OK I am exaggerating but look at how he signed my copy of Play Money - what a sweetheart!!
For anybody who doesn’t know, Julian spent a year surviving on the money he made in the virtual world, Ultima Online. He’s now making cash from Second Life (I bought his in world book as well as his real one from inside the world, giving him my Lindens as I stood chatting with him in a virtual bookstore). Virtual economies, virtual businesses - so fascinating. My own virtual business (editor of the SL Arts magazine Slatenight) is in the red right now, so I have a lot to learn
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