NMC Conversations #1
[download MP3] 15.3 Mb 17:03
This is the kick off this new podcast series where Larry, Alan, and Rachel talk about the plans for this podcast series, why we are doing it, and outlining some things to look forward to in the future.
In our first few recordings, we are trying some different audio technologies as we refine the form. Today, we held a conference call on our telephone bridge we use for meetings, where the hosting service provides an optional audio recording.
Today’s conversations included:
- What nmc conversations is — the format, guests, upcoming topics.
- Why we want to do this — some of the history of the NMC’s focus on podcasts — its appearance in the 2006 Horizon Report, the Spring 2006 Online Conference on Personal Broadcasting last April with keynotes by Phil Long and Laura Blankenship
- NMC Web 2.0 (Our new web site) and how this fits in with some exciting new things coming up
- A reflection on how rich media content is changing how we think about almost everything.
We are now adding transcripts to our shows… read on.
NMC Conversations #1: Transcript
Larry Johnson (LJ): Welcome to NMC Conversations, a series of dialogues around ideas, events, and emerging technologies. My name is Larry Johnson, the CEO of The New Media Consortium, and today we want to kick off a new series of conversations about these topics. We’ll be talking with guests, we’ll be talking with staff from the NMC, and today I am joined by Alan Levine and Rachel Smith, two of my colleagues from the NMC. How are you doing today?
Alan Levine (AL): We’re doing good. It’s a Friday, right?
Rachel Smith (RS): Doing very well. Yes, Fridays are good.
LJ: Fridays are good, that’s right. So, what we hope to do today is to talk about what we plan to do with this new series, to launch it with a bit of back and forth among the three of us about what we would like to do. And so, without much further ado, I am going to ask each of you what your thoughts are for the series, and then I will weigh in on that topic myself. Why don’t you give it a start Alan.
AL: That’s great. I am excited about this. In fact, I know a couple NMC members have asked for this over the year because they see it as a great way to keep in touch with what we are doing, and podcasting is something that a lot of our members are engaged with and I think we should participate on that level.
LJ: I agree totally, and it’s nice just to have a chance to talk with the two of you more often.
AL: We’ll be on schedule then, right?
LJ: Absolutely.
AL: I think that the one podcast I used to listen to a lot was IT Conversations, so I hope we’re not stomping on their territory with our title here, but I really like the notion and the approach of making this conversational.
LJ: I like that approach quite a bit as well. Cole Camplese and the crew up there at Penn State have done a really good job with that. And Rachel, how are you doing today?
RS: I’m doing good. I am also happy that it’s Friday, and I’m happy to be doing this first Conversation. I am looking forward to the stuff that we will talk about. I also think that it’s good thing for the three of us just to chat and maybe get some comments and feedback from people after they listen to it, and kind of continue the conversation that way.
LJ: Yeah, I am looking forward to that myself. What we have in mind for this series, as both of you know, is that we will be having these Conversations limited to about 15 minutes, and each one of them in the future will be focused on a particular topic. We are going to start off with the NMC’s initiatives as a springboard, but we are also going to be focusing podcasts on NMC events, on emerging ideas, and we have even had an idea for a podcast of a “News of the Weird,” NMC style. Some of the upcoming topics I would like to mention; the next one that we are going to do is on the general topic of emerging technology. As Rachel well knows, as one of the lead writers for the Horizon Report, and of course we are all three involved in that effort quite a bit, that is something we think about a lot at NMC, and we are thinking about inviting Phil Long, one of the NMC board members, to be part of that Conversation.
RS: Surprise, Phil!
LJ: We’ll talk to him before this is published. In fact, as full disclosure, we haven’t actually invited any of these people yet, but we’ll be able to edit out this comment by the time we actually go to press.
AL: I think we should leave it in.
LJ: And maybe we will. I think Phil can add a unique perspective in that Phil has been involved in the Horizon Report for a number of years, he also chaired the advisory board the year before last, and in his job at MIT he does a fantastic job of keeping track of where things are going for that institution, and in his role as lead strategy provider for instructional technology and technology in general. We are also going to be looking in the following podcast after that at the new scholarship. We are hoping to invite Bryan Alexander, who is up at Middlebury, to weigh in on that. Rachel, haven’t we been talking to Bryan and NITLE about some collaborations?
RS: We sure have. We have been talking about ways that the two organizations might work together, the members might work together, to explore what new scholarship is and how we can do new scholarship activities and support things that are being done.
AL: He sounds so good in audio, so it will be a great thrill to have him on our podcast.
LJ: Yeah, he is going to add a lot. Then, we have one that I am really looking forward to on new media literacy and learning. What we want to do on that one is invite another NMC board member, Kristina Woolsey. Those of you who don’t know Kristina, Kristina is someone who has been involved in our field from the very beginning, actually from before the beginning, and started her career at Atari and ended up at Apple. She ran the Apple Media Lab, and she had thought about this topic literally all of her life and I know she will have a lot to add on that one.
RS: She has been one of my heroes for many, many years, and I was just thrilled when I found out that she was on the board back when I joined NMC. It was great.
LJ: Other topics that we are looking forward to; we are going to spend some time talking about Pachyderm, the Pachyderm Project. Many of you listening know about Pachyderm, it has been a project that NMC has been involved in for many years, but you may not know some of the interesting directions it has been taking lately with efforts in our testbed in Texas. We have been working with Texas art museums and such, and so we are going to invite some folks from there. That will be one that Rachel will chair, because Rachel is the director of the Pachyderm Project. In the future, we are going to be also looking at virtual worlds and NMC’s efforts there, so I think we have a pretty good slate of topics for the next several months and that’s what we’re going to be looking at as we go into this. What I wanted to talk a little bit about with you two today was to help people understand why we want to do this. You alluded, Alan, to some of the work that has been going on at a couple of our members, but the history of NMC’s focus on podcasts actually goes back quite a few years, doesn’t it?
AL: Absolutely.
LJ: I can remember the first time that we talked about it was in the 2006 Horizon Report, where it was featured as one of the projects for, what did we call it back then?
RS: Personal broadcasting.
LJ: Personal broadcasting, yeah, and we included not only podcasting but we included video blogging in that as well and kind of were looking at the whole phenomenon of personal expression through rich media. How do you see that that’s changed in the time since we came out with that?
AL: It has definitely shifted a lot more towards expression by video. Just the prevalence of getting things by email and reading more on blogs, to where people are using video from YouTube and other video sharing sites as readily as they are using images. It is really becoming a common media platform, especially as it gets viewable on more mobile devices. The creation tools are just dropping in terms of complexity, so it’s a nice outlet for people to be able to communicate in video.
RS: Yeah, video seems to have taken off really well in terms of people making little ones, just about all kinds of topics. I remember back when we were preparing that Horizon Report looking at some examples of video blogs, or vlogs, or what have you, and I haven’t seen as many of those. Maybe it’s just because the ones I tend to read don’t tend to use video, but it seems like the video has gone to YouTube and that when people want to put it in their blogs it goes up on YouTube and they refer to it rather than making the blog out of their video, which was kind of the direction it looked like it was going to take at the time.
AL: There are a few interesting projects going in that direction. I have seen some people doing some video blogs from places like India and Iraq, and it’s kind of an interesting way to communicate to places that a lot of people might never get to.
LJ: Yeah. And then, I have seen as well, kind of the merger of video and audio. One project that I would point to are the artcasts at SFMOMA. The February edition (audio only mp3 / enhanced podcast with images) focuses on contemporary art of the Bay Area, but when you listen to those, they play really well on a video Ipod, and what they are, actually, are still images, but in association with the audio they give the sensation of a video itself. So I think that we are seeing some very interesting ways that the forms are emerging. It would be very easy to take something like an artcast and put it up on YouTube. I don’t believe that they have done that yet, but it is certainly something that that would lend itself to.
AL: As for tools, that was the UPS guy delivering my JK Audio telephone bridge for recording audio.
RS: Wow. How very timely.
LJ: Oh wow. How timely, yeah. Well we can try and use that on our next podcast.
AL: We were actually somewhat inspired to do this from the podcast done at Penn State, the ETS talks from Cole Camplese. I found some of those when I was looking for links to the shared Horizon Report, and they had a recent podcast session where they talked about the Horizon Report. The style they do is fun. They have several people speaking, and it’s very conversational.
LJ: They had D’Arcy, our friend D’Arcy Norman, from up at the University of Calgary, just last week.
AL: Yeah, talking about Twitter and other kinds of bizarre technology. We thank Cole and his crew for some inspiration.
RS: I have really enjoyed listening to those ETS talk ones. Very thought provoking.
LJ: Yeah, they have a nice format, too, a nice give and take. We are kind of modeling some of our approach on some of that, and we’ll see how it goes. One of the things I wanted to point out today and talk a little bit about, particularly given your work in this area, Alan, is in the next few weeks we are going to be unrolling quite a few new things in the NMC. A project that we have been working on now since April, which we are calling NMC 2.0. These podcasts are very much a part of that effort, and maybe you might speak a little bit to how people are going to see these fold into that and some of the features they can look forward to.
AL: Absolutely. This was originally the project I thought I would get done over the summer, which has kind of become my own joke about how complex the thing we are creating is.
RS: Last summer? (chuckling)
AL: Well, my original timeline.
LJ: Yeah. We started in April and he is going to have it done after the summer conference.
RS: I was going to say, next summer, no problem.
AL: We are building, and we are in beta right now. We have, really, a community driven new website that is extremely dynamic and has many different pieces, including ways for our members, they’ll be creating accounts that they’ll be able to create content and contribute to it. We are able to mix and match and mix and burn all kinds of content into new forms. What we are thinking about this piece of it, NMC Conversations, we might be publishing this on its own blog site. We’ll be able to pull that information right into the new site and be something that can appear on our aggregated news page. People can decide to put it on their own user page, etc. You get the podcast you can subscribe to and be able to download to your players, and listen to us yammer while you are on the treadmill at the gym. It’s all going to be nicely, loosely connected.
LJ: We have had the chance to all be part of the beta testing for that. So Rachel, what is your favorite feature so far?
RS: You know, I love that when I want to update a page all I have to do is go to the page and click a button and I can just type it. I don’t have to launch Dreamweaver, and launch FTP Voyager, and make my changes, and make sure I have the latest copy, and then realize that there is a more recent copy on the server that I am about to overwrite. All of that just goes away. I can just go and make the changes. And I love that our members will be able to do that. That our website will really be a community-built place, where when I go there I’ll see stuff that I didn’t know was there. I just love that aspect of it.
LJ: Yeah. It ties in really well with one of the things that was identified in the most recent Horizon Report, which was the idea of user-generated content. We are hoping that members will be adding all kinds of posts and comments and their own spotlights about the work that they are doing, and sharing that information with the other members. One of the coolest features that I like about the website, and there is actually quite a long list, but we have a new Google map that will show you exactly where everybody is, and you can even zoom in via satellite and look at their campuses. It’s kind of cool.
AL: Yeah. We just hope we got all the latitude and longitude right.
LJ: Well, we got it close anyway.
RS: Yeah. If your campus isn’t in the right place, then just let us know.
LJ: That’s right.
AL: If we put University of Michigan in one of the lakes, you will be able to log in and correct it for us.
LJ: Yeah. That’s true, you can help edit that kind of thing. I think we are probably near the end of our first 15 minutes, and so what I would like to do is to maybe sum things up a little bit about where we are with rich media, and podcasts certainly are in that category. I think that is has been a very, very interesting period of time over the last three or four years, where we have seen the convergence of all kinds of media coming together. But even more importantly, what we have seen is that the tools to work with that media have become almost ubiquitous and many of them free. The very tool that we are going to be using to do the post-production on this podcast is Audacity, which is an open source, free editing tool, and more and more we are seeing that kind of thing happen. It’s a very positive time, I think, for people that have been working in new media for most of their careers, as the three of us have, and so we would love to hear your thoughts about where all that is going. I certainly think that it is going to change almost everything. It already has begun to really impact the way that we think about television. Television is evolving into something very much different than what it was just a few years ago. So I invite you to join us for our next in this series of podcasts. You can find these podcasts on our website at http://www.nmc.org/podcasts We would love to have your thoughts, so please post them as comments there. Alan and Rachel, I will leave the closing thoughts to you, and appreciate you joining us today.
RS: Thanks Larry.
AL: This has been great. I am excited for the next one. I am really looking forward to having some guest conversationalists join us, and definitely bringing in a lot more of our NMC membership. As of our last member survey, we know anecdotally that a lot of our members are really active, and in many places leading us, in the act of doing podcasting, so it seems very timely that we get started and put the NMC twist on this.
LJ: Absolutely. The closing thought is yours, Rachel.
RS: Even if you’re not doing podcasts, go ahead and leave us a comment or drop us a note and let us know what you would like to hear us talk about. We would be very happy for ideas that you might have about things that would be of interest to you.
LJ: Alrighty. We’ll see you next time. Bye now.
AL: See you.
RS: Bye bye.
