NMC Conversations is our new effort to provide our members and interested readers a series of short recorded podcasts that serve to highlight the activities, initiatives, and projects of the New Media Consortium and its member organizations.
About twice a month, senior staff Larry Johnson, Rachel Smith, and Alan Levine will record a somewhat informal conversation about NMC projects, initiates, events, or just current ideas we are thinking about. In the future, we will invite special guest participants.
About Larry Johnson
Larry is Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC). He is an acknowledged expert on the effective application of new media in many contexts, and has worked extensively to build common ground among museums and universities across North America and in more than a dozen other countries. He is the author a number of important books on the topic, and dozens of monographs, chapters, and articles exploring emerging trends and issues related to that work.
In his current post, Dr. Johnson routinely brings visionaries and thought leaders from across the globe together to define and explore new ways of thinking about and using technology, and to examine emerging trends and issues. The NMC’s annual Horizon Report has become one of the leading tools used by senior executives in universities and museums to set priorities for technology planning. NMC summits and large-scale projects have helped set the agenda for topics such as visual literacy, learning objects, educational gaming, the future of scholarship, and the new web. Recent examples are the NMC’s high-profile experimental campus in the virtual world of Second Life and its leadership role in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning.
Having served as president and senior executive at institutions in both the higher education and not-for-profit realms, Dr. Johnson has more than 25 years of experience leading high-profile, high-stakes projects. His educational background includes an MBA in Finance and a Ph.D. in Education that focused on research and evaluation. Among many other recognitions, Dr. Johnson has been honored as a Distinguished Graduate by the University of Texas at Austin.
About Rachel Smith
Rachel is the Vice President, NMC Services for the New Media Consortium (NMC). A specialist in project coordination and user interface design, Ms. Smith leads the NMC’s projects and fee-based services, working with NMC members to involve them in NMC activities and projects. Ms. Smith directs all NMC internal and external publications, including the annual Horizon Report, and authors instructional materials, guides, and monographs on the creative and technical aspects of teaching with technology. She serves as an interorganizational liaison, bringing together NMC members from around the globe to develop new projects. A trained visual facilitator, Ms. Smith has guided and recorded conversations on topics from new media literacy to emerging forms of scholarship and publication.
Ms. Smith has over 11 years of experience developing and directing technology projects for higher education. In her previous post at the California State University Center for Distributed Learning, she was involved with the development of online educational materials including MERLOT, Biology Labs On-Line, and Light Bridge, among others.
About Alan Levine
Alan is Vice President, NMC Community and CTO for the New Media Consortium (NMC). He is widely recognized nationally and internationally for expertise in the application of new technologies to educational environments and was a pioneer on the web going back to 1993. An early proponent of weblogs for information sharing, he shares his ideas and discoveries at CogDogBlog.
In his current post with the NMC, Alan has infused the organization with applications of web 2.0 tools, including a new NMC web site as an online community featuring rich media, user-generated content, folksonomy tools, and social presence. He has established web sites for the NMC Campus Observer (Second Life activities) and the NMC Virtual Worlds initiative running on open source blog software and created new wiki sites to support the NMC Horizon project activities and a hub for Second Life resources.
Before joining the NMC, Alan served 14 years as Instructional Technologist at the Maricopa Community Colleges in Phoenix, Arizona where he was actively engaged in research and development of learning technologies. Alan was a key contributor to significant efforts such as Ocotillo, a faculty-led initiative that promotes innovation and drives change, created the Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX), a virtual warehouse of innovation that pioneered the use of RSS in syndicating learning object content, and developed Feed2JS, an open source software shared for allowing people to easily incorporate RSS content into web pages.
