[spectre] Conference on New Media Education

[Trebor Scholz]

>Share, Share Widely
A Conference on New Media Education

>Friday, May 6th, 11am - 8pm

The Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th street)
New York City

http://conference.newmediaeducation.org -- website

After-Party
Friday, May 6th, 9pm

The Thing
459 W. 19th St 
(between 9th and 10th Ave)
New York, NY
10011

Join us for an intensive one day conference about new media education.
Connect with new media researchers and educators, present, discuss, and
exchange syllabi or other public domain materials in a temporary gift
economy zone. Bring your USB memory key and laptop.

The conference will be podcast.
http://podcast.newmediaeducation.org -- podcast

"Share, Share Widely" is organized by the Institute for Distributed
Creativity (iDC) in collaboration with the Office of the Associate Provost
for Instructional Technology and the New Media Lab, The Graduate Center,
City University of New York.

Please RSVP  to idc [@] distributedcreativity.org

>Participants: 
Joline Blais (University of Maine), Beatriz DaCosta (UC Irvine), Ben Chang
(School of the Arts Institute Chicago), Alison Colman (Ohio University
School of Art), Mary Flanagan (Hunter College, CUNY), Pattie Belle Hastings
(Quinnipiac University), Tiffany Holmes (School of the Arts Institute of
Chicago), Jon Ippolito (Guggenheim Museum and University of Maine), Natalie
Jeremijenko (UC San Diego), Hana Iverson (Temple University), Molly Krause
(Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University), Patrick
Lichty (Intelligent Agent Magazine), Martin Lucas (Hunter College, CUNY),
Colleen Macklin (Parsons School of Design), Daniel Perlin (Interactive
Telecommunication Program), Andrea Polli (Hunter College, CUNY), Douglas
Repetto (Columbia University), Stephanie Rothenberg (SUNY at Buffalo), Chris
Salter (Concordia University, Montreal), Brooke Singer (SUNY at Purchase),
Liz Slagus (Eyebeam), Thomas Slomka (SUNY at Buffalo), Mark Tribe (Columbia
University), McKenzie Wark (New School), Ricardo Miranda Zuniga (The College
of New Jersey).

>Respondents: 
Stanley Aronowitz (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Timothy Druckrey (Media Critic, NYC, and MICA)
Trebor Scholz (SUNY at Buffalo)

>Concept/Production:
Trebor Scholz (Institute for Distributed Creativity)

>Remote Contributors (see Media Blog):
Saul Albert (University of Openess), Richard Barbrook (Westminster
University, London), Susan Collins (Slade School, London), Eugene I.
Dairianathan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Brian Goldfarb
(UC San Diego), Alex Halavais (SUNY at Buffalo), Jeff Knowlton (UC San
Diego), Paul Benedict Lincoln (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore),
Geert Lovink (Hogeschool van Amsterdam/ University of Amsterdam), Nathan
Martin (Carnegie Mellon University), Kevin McCauley (City Varsity,
University of Cape Town/University of Stellenbosch, South Africa), Jason
Noland (University of Toronto), Ricardo Rosas (Comum Lab, Sao Paulo,
Brazil), Joel Slayton (San Jose State University), Paul Vanouse (SUNY at
Buffalo)

>Interviews Leading Up To Conference:
(as part of WebCamTalk 1.0)
Megan Boler (University of Toronto), Joline Blais (University of Maine),
Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology), Lily Diaz (University of
Art and Design, Helsinki), Elizabeth Goodman (San Francisco Art Institute),
William Grishold (UC San Diego), Lisa Gye (Swinburne University), John
Hopkins (Neoscenes.net), Jon Ippolito (Guggenheim Museum, University of
Maine), Adriene Jenik (UC San Diego), Molly Krause (Harvard University),
Patrick Lichty (Intelligent Agent Magazine), Wolfgang Münch (LASALLE_SIA,
Singapore), Anna Munster (University of New South Wales, Sydney), Eduardo
Navas (UC San Diego), Randall Packer (American University, Washington),
Simon Penny (UC Irvine), Warren Sack (UC Santa Cruz), Christoph Spehr
(Berlin), Ricardo Miranda Zuniga (The College of New Jersey)

http://newmediaeducation.org -- WebCamTalk 1.0
http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ -- iDC List Archives

>Conference Advisory Committee:
Stephen Brier (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Timothy Druckrey (Media Critic, NYC)
Richard Maxwell (Queens College, CUNY)

>Acknowledgments:
Many thanks to Nikolina Knezevic (visiting scholar at New School University,
intern at the Institute for Distributed Creativity).

>Introduction:
Over the past ten years new-media art programs have been started at
universities. Departments are shaped, many positions in this field open up
and student interest is massive. In China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and
Thailand enormous developments will take place in the next few years in "new
media" art education.  At the same time technologists, artists and educators
acknowledge a crisis mode: from Germany to Canada, Finland, Ireland,
Australia, Taiwan and Singapore to the United States and beyond. But so far,
at least in the United States there has been surprisingly little public
debate about education in new-media art.

Many educators point to a widespread tension between vocational training and
a solid critical education. There is no stable "new media industry" for
which a static skill set would prepare the graduate for his or her
professional future in today's post-dotcom era.  Between Futurist narratives
of progress with all their techno-optimism and the technophobia often
encountered in more traditional narratives-- how do we educate students to
be equally familiar with technical concepts, theory, history, and art?

How can new media theory be activated as a wake-up call for students leading
to radical change? Which educational structure proves more effective:
cross-disciplinary, theme-based research groups or media-based departments?
Does the current new media art curriculum allow for play, failure, and
experiment? How can we introduce free software into the new media classroom
when businesses still hardly make use of open source or free software? How
can we break out of the self-contained university lab? What are examples of
meaningful connections between media production in the university and
cultural institutions as well as technology businesses? How can we introduce
politics into the new media lab?

Between imagined flat hierarchies and the traditional models of top-down
education, participants will give examples based on their experiences that
offer a middle-ground between these extremes. Further questions address
anti-intellectualism in the classroom and the high demands on educators in
this area in which technology and theory have few precedents and change
rapidly. In response to this-- several distributed learning tools will be
presented that link up new-media educators to share code, theory, and art in
real time.

-Vocational training versus solid critical education

-Open Source Software, open access, open content, technologies of sharing

-Edblogging, blogsperiments

-Creation of meaningful connections between art, theory, technology, and
history

-Education of politics, politics in education

-Shaping of core curriculum without fear of experiments and failure

-Distributed learning tools: empowering for the knowledge commons
(organizing academic knowledge and connecting new media educators)

-Intellectual property issues in academia

-Diversity in the new media art classroom

-Use of wifi devices to connect people on campus and in the classroom

-Uses of social software in the classroom (wikis, and weblogs, voice over
IP, del.icio.us, IM, and Flickr)

-Battles over the wireless commons

-Models for connecting university labs with outside institutions and
non-profit organizations.

A network of new media educators will be formed as result of this
conference.
http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc -- join mailing list

-------------------------------------------------
Institute for Distributed Creativity
http://distributedcreativity.org/

The Graduate Center, CUNY
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/