"The internet of things"

Reboot!

OK, this is more about my first life, or maybe Life 1.5, online and digitized if not in SL, but still . . . . these posters (made by Mike Carrera in the CTMI) for my Reboot Summer Institute on Teaching with Digital Media are fab. 

Here is the info, but the Institute is only for Berklee faculty.

Teaching with Digital Media

Designed and taught by Lori Landay with support 
from Mike Carrera and Madeleine Toh

Click here to apply.

Tired of hauling bags of videotapes, overheads, audiocassettes, and CDs to class? Ready to move into the twenty-first century and use digital images, audio, video in your teaching?  Interested in making PowerPoint presentations, putting material online, or developing multimedia project assignments for your students?  The Reboot Institute on Teaching with Digital Media will provide a framework in which you can acquire new skills and complete a project that will complement your teaching.   

In this introductory level institute, participants will learn the basics of the different types of digital media (still images, digital audio, and digital video), the best ways to manipulate them, and what forms they can take in your teaching.  During the workshop sessions, participants will learn about digital media, and get a hands-on introduction to software including iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, iWeb, and iDVD), PowerPoint, Audacity, and Adobe Photoshop Elements applications. You’ll work with a mentor and the CTMI to create “learning objects” that make the most of the digital technologies available to us. The Institute is open to all faculty, regardless of prior experience with digital audio, images, and video.

To help develop the skills you’ll need to successfully complete the project, you’ll attend the kick-off dinner/planning session, a minimum of three workshops, and a project showcase at the end of the summer.  In the first three workshops, you’ll find out about the kinds of media that will comprise your project, whether it results in a multimedia DVD or an aesthetic and interesting PowerPoint presentation.   The fourth and fifth workshops branch out to cover resources at Berklee and to embrace forms of  “user-generated” digital media associated with “Web 2.0” such as podcasts, blogs, and virtual worlds; we’ll also explore some ideas for developing digital media assignments for your students.  You’ll work with a mentor (who will guide you through your project), resources (books and online resources), and the fine folks at the CTMI (who will help you acquire the skills you need to realize your project). We’ll conclude with a showcase of participants’ projects and a discussion of ways of enriching teaching with digital media.  

As a gift, participants will receive a USB Flash Drive, a training book, and a 3-month subscription to Lynda.com to support their projects. Lynda.com is an award-winning provider of educational materials, including an online training library. Faculty will have access to video tutorials and online courses on a variety of software and design topics, such as Photoshop, Web Design, Logic Pro, Garageband and many others. 


Dinner session: 
Overview and Project Planning
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
6:00–8:00 p.m.
The Loft, 921 Boylston
Dinner provided
Lunch provided


Workshop 1: Still Images
Thursday, May 28, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided


Workshop 2: Digital Audio
Thursday, June 4, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided


Workshop 3: Digital Video
Thursday, June 11, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided

Workshop 4: Teaching with Digital Media

Thursday, June 18, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided


Workshop 5: Moving Forward with Your Project
Thursday, June 25, 2009
10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Room 204/205,186 Mass. Ave.
Lunch provided


Project Showcase
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
6:00–8:00 p.m.
The Loft, 921 Boylston 
Dinner provided

NMC Virtual Art Exhibition: EXPERIENCE ART

The NMC, which does an excellent job in everything it does, has a new show at @ Ars Simulacra on the NMC Campus, curated by Tayzia Abattoir.  It brings together some of the best SL artists, including Misprint Thursday, Oberon Onmura, Glyph Graves, and Alizarin Goldflake.  Above, pics of Misprint's and Oberon's installations.  Here is the slurl.

I Click Therefore I Am

What does it mean to click?  

Steven Johnson’s assertion that the hyperlink is the “first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries” is an intriguing one for thinking about the connections possible in hypermedia. (Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997), 110-11.)  To think about a hyperlink as punctuation, as a connection, in hypertext and new media leads us to one way of thinking about interactivity.

In Second Life, clicking is even more than that, though, it is action and agency itself.  Sometimes you know what is going to happen, and sometimes you don't.  I have been thinking about this since I accidentally overstimulated Oberon Onmura's compelling piece "Awareness."  I am often "near-sighted" in SL, cammed in on something and unaware of my wider surroundings.  I was looking intently at Oberon's installation, at a glowing stick, and thought it was cleverly, ironically, saying in local chat: "Don't click this," not realizing it was the actual artist Oberon standing behind me telling me not to click it, because doing so would make more obelisk generators appear.  Oh, well.  You can watch the debacle unfold in the Brooklyn Is Watching podcast # 56  at around minute 25.  
Brooklyn Is Watching Episode 56
We podcasters really liked Oberon's piece.  Recently he showed me another, related piece that is installed at the NMC sim, where the avatar walks through the stationary obelisks and turns them a specific color instead of the obelisks moving around the space.  His work explores how data moves through virtual space, and leaves traces; the pieces I have seen demonstrate a remarkable restraint and elegant minimalism in a medium and environment that too often invites excess.

If SL is more than a little like Wonderland, and when we see "Click Me," we do, it is with an exploratory perspective, and with the expectation that no real harm can come to us.  In the same way that the kids today expect that toys will DO something and not just sit there quietly like a block, I am disappointed if there is nothing for me to click on.  I want everything to DO something, want it to be interactive.  I want to be able to get into an installation, and look for a pose ball or some other way to be a part of it.  It all has a big "click me" sign as far as I am concerned.  These days, I am sitting on everything if I can't find anything more interesting to do!

And that something would tell me, "Don't click this"--or someone, as it turned out--is a directive I interpreted immediately as ironic, as a challenge.  Maybe that says more about me, or about L1 these days, than SL, but I think it speaks to an expectation--or hope--of what SL, and in particular SL art, can be.   I want to have a playful, ludic interaction with my virtual environment and the objects within it.  I want it to trick me.  I want to be through the looking glass and be dazzled by Wonderland and its inhabitants.  I want to be shown something new, and to have that be an immersive experience that grabs me, or at least my avatar, in the surprising ways that an avatar can be grabbed.  When Oberon was showing me his piece at the new  NMC exhibition (which also houses Misprint Thursday's bridge MAY,  a must-see piece),  he told me about AM Radio's Death of Marat piece, also fantastic, at NMC, and a click that does not disappoint.  

The Ars Simulacra show at NMC opens on Friday, May 8, and I'll post the slurl then.

Boston Is Watching/Boston CyberArts Festival Presentation

Check out this SlideShare Presentation (clicking on slides 4, 6, 7, 11, 13 will take you to video on the web).  If you click the last slide, you can see the "trailer" for the screwball comedy about SL relationships that I've been working on, which was not part of the presentation yesterday.

Biw Web

View more presentations from LoriLanday.

Boston/Brooklyn Is Watching/Boston CyberArts Festival

There is a lot of looking and watching going on!!!!!!

Brooklyn Is Watching

Things are getting interesting as new machinima is underway

L1Leopard helps KinoEye Galaxy get ready for her, gulp, date!  Will screwball hijinks ensue, SL-style?  Oh, I think we can count on it!