Impact of Digital Media SHUCDT notes

from abstract: "The UC Berkeley Journalism and Architecture schools are using a video game to tell the story of Oakland's famed 7th Street jazz and blues club scene in the 1940s and 1950s, and its subsequent destruction by urban redevelopment. Learners will access the virtual world over the Internet, adopt avatar figures, walk up and down the street, enter clubs, listen to music of the era, interact with other online visitors and fight to save the clubs."
Game built using the Torque game engine http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=1
Not sure how much of a game this is. It sounds like quite an accurate reconstration of the place where journalism students are charged with researching the history.
Players pawn possessions in order to play and continue playing - fairly realistic behaviour for the era they're trying to reconstruct. You have to bargain with the pawn shop owner.
Interprofessional exercise: architecture students and journalism students.

from abstract: "...The ability of computers to combine text, images, and sounds together into remixed messages from original material and cultural artifacts creates a new type of literacy. Remixed messages and Internet shorthand are forms of expression that are based on a visual or “gestalt” understanding of information."
Content creation is the killer app on the Internet she says. I know what she means - people have a new capacity, but this is a very simplistic, technology focussed perspective. I think the 'killer' word will fade very quickly as such apps are going to become very everyday and common place very quickly. She's talking about 'remix' or mashing of content. Now that is slightly more interesting for us, because it's related to post modernism and changing outlooks of what contemporary culture means.
The computer is a great equaliser and educators need to bridge the divide between generations and young people still need adult guides.
Some back chat (I've removed the names):
Q: Any thoughts on the sticky issue of IP, copyright?
: Q: Who owns the IP of a remix?
: there will be a radical change in our ideas of rights.
: Can I submit my homework as a remix?
: Youtube has started to make contracts w/ media companies
...
: Q: But more than copyright in the negative sense, what about the value and courtesy of providing attribution, e.g. a la creative commons?
: How do you define plagarism in the age of remix?
: Distributed data right management
: plagiarism is a slightly old school concept
: There is an electric moment when someone attributes your work
: maybe a new word?
: linktribution
: open source attribution - does that assume we all have the same value system?
: How can people learn to remix?
: isn't homework always a part of remixing? I think a better emphasis is on attribution
...
: linktribute... the more i look at it the more i like it

So if you hear people talking about linktribution... it was invented here.

Presenters from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art
From abstract: " "Steve" (www.steve.museum) is a research project on social tagging of museum collections. Project team members have learned firsthand about the usefulness of social tagging methods for eliciting user-contributed terms from cataloguers with specialist knowledge not usually available to museum professionals."
Example of what public searchers expect to find compared to museum record. No common terms.
Steve tool has been released as Open Source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/steve-museum/

From abstract: "As a substitute for [these] inaccessible publics, network publics like MySpace are emerging to provide contemporary American youth with a necessary site for peer engagement. While networked publics provide space for various critical forms of sociality, the architecture of the sites that support networked publics is fundamentally different than the physical architecture that we take for granted in unmediated life. Persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences are all properties that today's youth must face in their public expressions. "
If we're wondering about the student of the future this has to be a good starting point. The last sentence I've quoted from the abstract above suggests to me that the DI should avoid the temptation to use the phrase 'dumbing down' when thinking about the DN - actually I think we're looking at a highly sophisticated ability to draw upon networks.
Why Teens Love MySpace: 1997 social networking space called Six Degrees - MySpace (MyS) is not first. Historically MyS comes from a lineage of dating sites (Friendster). Bands used it to find (date!) their fans.
MyS emerged because it saw the band opportunity and the desire for groups of youth to network. Originally targetted at an older age range, but now MS sees 14 year olds as target.
MyS allows people to make friends who links to each other. They are making friends online with people who they know in real life. It's another place to 'hang out'.
The guestbook feature developed into a conversational space. Friend to friend communication in the witness of other people - likea public hug. This is meant to be overheard. A public statement of loyalty.
DB explains that this generation were the first generation who access to each other has been highly moderated/restricted by parents due to safety concerns. They have had to be resourceful therefore.
Here's some talk from the back chat:
Teacher: [pupils don't like it] ...they say it's cluttered and the interface isn't easy to work with
contributor1: I was at a lecture last night where Barry Wellman (another social network sociologist) asserted that most MySpace accounts were 'bogus' -- unmaintained experiments -- and that the stats therefore were 'meaningless'.
DB talks about:
Persistence - what you say hangs around
searchability
Replicability - copy and paste it out of context
Invisible audiences - 76 people listening to this, but who are you? "I can't see you" What sort of people are you. Therefore, how does this affect the way I communicate when I speak into the ether?
See: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/10/10/comscore_misint.html comScore misinterprets data: MySpace is *NOT* gray
Q&As
There's a problem that has emerged as the adult world has discovered MyS - MyS does not really work, or can be understood, when multiple generations are in there.
Adults are much more concerned about knowing where their children are than the privacy of their children.
A lot of back chat in relation to DOPA saying kids need a place to practice safely - this is important to us too. We need to note that DNs coming to our blended envorinoment may see online as being safe and different, as a place to practice and be intimate and to trust those around them in ways that us DNs may not understand. I may not be right.
Also note that DB's keynote was very US-centric.