The 2008 NMC Summer Conference, hosted at Princeton University, is coming up soon, so we thought it was a good time to have an NMC conversation with conference host, David Hopkins, Manager of the New Media Center at Princeton.

In our conversation, David has shared what this experience means for Princeton and an overview of what the “Conference Task Force” has been up to. If you missed it, check out the “24′ themed video they showed at Indianapolis last year:
Conference Task Force video (16.7 Mb Quicktime

David also gave us some idea what people can expect when they arrive on campus and decribed the facilities we’d be using. He also gave the photographers a heads up about the black squirrels, they are real!

Also joining the conversation was Nancy Reeves, Director of Member Services for NMC and Chief Meeting Planner- she let us know that registrations were on pace to set a record (this week we passed 500). Nancy told us about some of the special activities including the opening reception Wednesday night, where besides the usual good food, there will be a record number of exhibitors, both from local New Jersey companies, but also a number of projects from NMC member organizations.

Thursday night is another fun evening activity, the “Interactives” event hosted by Princeton. David promised some fun gams, and advised us to brush up on our Princeton trivia.

And of course, the days are filled with our usual array of interesting sessions, stimulating keynotes, poster sessions, Center of Excellence Awards, and the fast paced Five Minutes of Fame. Larry described a special feature just added - a pre-conference workshop on digital SLR photography with Sports Illustrated photographer Bill Frakes and Don Henderson, our NMC Board member from Apple. Inc. Bill is also doing a lunch time keynote on Thursday.

And Larry also shared the news that the John Lennon Bus will be present for the entire conference- this is an amazing music and video studio on wheels. We are announcing two special opportunities for conference attendees to get some “time on the bus”- one is a drawing for 6 people to spend a day on the Lennon Bus recording music and the other is Rock Hall 2.0 - a chance for anyone to sign up for a 15 minute session to record any kind of audio loop, that will ultimately be shared as a free resource.

And there are a lot of things happening at the conference celebrating the 15th year of the NMC - check out the NMC@15 photo collection (and add your own photos of “fifteen-ness” soon as we are making a commemorative video).

This will be another NMC conference experience to remember, to connect, and to learn– so if you are still thinking about this, run over now and register! See you in Princeton June 11!

Our newest conversation is a celebration and reflection for the Pachyderm Project as we talke about the NMC’s announcement for Pachyderm Services. Now the NMC offers hosted subscriptions allowing individual and organizational to create accounts and create Pachyderm published content. The full details are on the new Pachyderm Services web site.

In today’s conversation, we welcome special guests Peter Samis, Associate Curator of the Education and Program Manager for Interactive Educational Technologies at SFMOMA, where Pachyderm was “born” ans Scott Sayre, from Sandbox Studios, who is currently the chair of the Pachyderm Council guiding the future of Pachyderm.

So we cover in this session both the past, present, and future of Pachyderm.

Just back from New Orleans, Larry, Rachel, and Alan share their reflections on the 2007 New Orleans Regional NMC Conference at Tulane including reviews of the keynote sessions, their highlights from the program sessions, and memories of the special events, especially the Second Line parade. Mostly, this conference wove together cohesive themes of the power of digital storytelling, music, creativity, community, the capacity of human potential especially in face of events such as the post Katrina flooding of the city.

To connect to this experience, see the tagged web sites, blog posts, and 800 plus flickr photos collected under our Tag This Conference effort and the media from the nmc site associated with the conference.

And in reference to the closing section, we provide again the digital story created and shared by Joe Lambert:

Read on for a full transcript of this conversation…

Larry Johnson (LJ): Hello everyone. I want to welcome you to NMC Conversations. This is the sixth in our series of chats with Alan Levine, Rachel Smith, and myself. Today we want to talk about the New Orleans Regional Conference that we just had. But, before we do that, I want to welcome both Rachel and Alan. How are ya’ll doing today?

Rachel Smith (RS): Doing very well. I am actually enjoying a cup of café au lait from Café du Monde right here in my home.

Alan Levine (AL): Oh, wow.

RS: I am into the spirit of things.

LJ: How perfect. I should go get my green-and-white striped hat.

AL: And, we should just, like, sprinkle sugar all over our desks.

RS: That’s right.

LJ: Go get the confectioners sugar and pile it on my keyboard and I’ll have a café du keyboard.

AL: We don’t recommend that.

LJ: You know, we’ve been doing regional conferences now for the past three years, and it’s really been a remarkable arc. We had the first one… well, the very first regional that ever happened in the NMC was up at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and that was back in the late 90’s; a remarkable conference in and of itself. And then there was a period of time when there weren’t any regionals for a while. We began doing regionals again in 2005 with a conference at Yale that actually launched our gaming initiative at the NMC. It was quite a remarkable conference. Last year, we were at Trinity, and really focused on new scholarship, and we had quite a few really engaging sessions around that topic. And this year, we really focused on the idea of storytelling. And so, the regionals have always been a way for us to dig down into a topic or an area of interest in some depth. That certainly did happen in New Orleans, didn’t it?

AL: Absolutely.

RS: It really did. Tulane was such a perfect place to hold this conference. The people were just so friendly and welcoming. As a setting, it was just such a special place to be. The building we were in, as you know, was brand new. I think, Larry, you got the hard hat tour the last time you were there, right? It was still under construction?

LJ: I did. Yeah, I did. It really turned out nice.

RS: It was a gorgeous space, yeah, perfect for the kinds of things that we were doing.

AL: Just the drive through some of the neighborhoods from the hotel.

LJ: Oh, down St. Charles, yeah.

AL: Yeah, where you could still see signs of some of the Katrina effects. Just for me, not really having seen that part of New Orleans before, just the variety and architecture, yeah, it was just mind boggling. And then the Tulane campus is just spectacular.

LJ: Yeah, of course, that whole area had special meaning for me because my daughter was married right at Loyola next door, in the cathedral there, and we rode the street cars up and down St. Charles as part of that celebration. It’s a nice city, New Orleans. There’s really a lot of personal connection to the city for me.

AL: For the conference, the fact that it is a small conference, in many ways is a plus, not a detriment, because of the kind of interactions you can have. You can pretty much almost meet everybody there if you try. And, ironically, I have some colleagues, you know, I work in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I’ve got good colleagues at Arizona State University, and I didn’t really get a chance to talk to my friends, Ruvi, and unfortunately Sam couldn’t make it, and some others from their department. I had to go to New Orleans to talk to them, but it was great. We had some great conversations. That kind of typifies, you know, there was good space between the sessions to meet new people and talk about either your work or what was going on at the sessions.

LJ: Yeah. You know, a highlight for me was, it started right off at the beginning of that conference, with the opening keynote by Nick Spitzer, who, of course, does a radio show on National Public Radio, so he is a phenomenally excellent speaker. But more than that, his understanding of the history of New Orleans and the impact of the jazz and art on the culture of the city is probably unmatched by anyone. He is just tremendously knowledgeable about it. His keynote address used the music and vintage photographs from his archives to really set up the importance of what he called “cultural continuity,” and that’s the theme that resonated with me through the whole conference. It still resonates through to me today. Of course, it’s very important to the folks in New Orleans as they really work on bringing the city back. But I think that it’s important to all of us, and I got the sense in the crowd that others felt the same way. It really did open up the conference, don’t ya’ll agree?

RS: Absolutely.

AL: It was impactful for me. I remember resonating with the small piece where he talked about the musicians and their sort of skills and background. The fact that they come from this background of learning a craft at age 5, so they were builders or welders or electricians…

LJ: Plasterers.

AL: Yeah, the plasterer stories.

RS: You know I didn’t look at the buildings the same way after I heard that.

LJ: Yeah, I know, I didn’t either.

RS: I only saw the plaster and thought about the people that had done that.

LJ: Yeah, can you imagine the whistling that had gone on at those job sites. It must have been pretty amazing.

AL: And then I was one of the many people who went out and bought the CD of the music that he had that benefits Habitat for Humanity. I listened to that on the plane ride home. I think I listened to it three times. I enjoyed that music a lot.

LJ: Yeah, really good stuff.

AL: I had a treat to be able to introduce Suzan Jenkins for the lunch keynote. Like Nick, who spoke with basically just his words and music and pictures, no bullet slides, Suzan just talked, and she was marvelous talking about the work she is doing with the Thelonious Monk Institute, which is more or less a graduate program for jazz musicians. It is really a lot about culture and really continued that arc that Nick started. I was, like, if I had an ounce of musical skill, I would love to be in that program.

LJ: They send the students out into the schools. As folks know, in public education, programs like music and in the arts are increasingly under-funded. So it’s a really nice strategy to get really high-level musicians out into the community and into the schools to help kids get that passion early.

AL: And, she talked about almost some of the same themes that Nick did, about some of these classic musicians. There was Ironing Board Sam, who plays a keyboard mounted on an ironing board stuck inside a giant fish tank. And that’s all she said, and I was curious to learn about it, so I went back and Googled him, and I was just enthralled by this. I can just imagine the stories that would flow from that. And at the same time, she talked about weaving all this with Web 2.0 technologies. She’s got an amazing program. I am anxious to follow what goes on down there.

RS: You know, it just continued all through the conference. And then the closing keynote by Michael Mizell-Nelson was just so moving. He is, as you know, from the University of New Orleans, and he’s with the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which is an online database of personal stories from Katrina and Rita. They are stories that just cover every human emotion. There is hope, there’s triumph, there’s loss, and it’s just these little facets of what it’s really like, what it was really like for people, and taken together they give you this picture of the humanness of what people went through. It was really remarkable. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s at hurricanearchive.org. Michael was good enough to share how it has moved him personally to be working with these stories.

AL: Just the breadth of it was pretty incredible. The list kept going on and on about the difference of collections that they have developed there. It’s an amazing resource.

LJ: That theme of personal story really was the thread that connected everything in the conference, I think. It started in the opening keynote, it went through the conversations with Suzan and Ironing Board Sam, and into Michael’s keynote at the beginning. But it also permeated all the sessions in quite a dramatic way. For me, one of the sessions that really stuck out was Bill Shewbridge’s session. He is up at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. They are doing a remarkable project with senior citizens up there, to capture their digital stories, and they’ve gotten quite a bit of external support. These are really, I mean, they are broadcast quality little vignettes. He played more than a dozen during the session. There was one that really stuck out of a woman who was born and raised in the UK and she married over there. Her husband was killed in an air battle over the Sea of Japan and there was very little information about it. Years later, her son became interested and learned Japanese and went to Japan and actually met the family of the pilot that shot him down.

RS: Wow.

LJ: The two families came together after that. It touches me just to remember the video. They came together in this reconciliation that was captured on this 4-minute video so eloquently, and you think about what an amazing story that is and it’s so wonderful that an institution like UMBC can be out there to facilitate this kind of thing. It was a remarkable session.

AL: Wow. I think my heart just skipped a beat listening to that.

RS: Yeah. The different ways that people use to tell stories was also a major theme, as well as the stories they were telling. One of the sessions that really captured my interest was Ruben Puentedura’s session on web comics and storytelling through web comics. He talked about the history of web comics and how they started and how they are now, and he showed different types of web comics and explained how you can use this for storytelling even if you don’t have any artistic expertise at all. He showed methods and tools that you can use to put together a comic; clip art and the one with…

LJ: I remember the one where all the pictures were the same in every one of the series of stories.

RS: Right, and only the text changes, exactly. Ruben’s just got such a good sense of humor anyway, but I think he was the perfect person to talk about that. I really, really enjoyed that session.

AL: I have to agree. Sometimes you go to something and your mind gets opened to a whole new genre that you didn’t even know existed. I was going to talk about that session, but… I also had a great time sitting in on Joe Lambert’s story circle session. I have known Joe for years. We’ve worked with him on projects. I worked with faculty when I was at Maricopa and we were teaching digital storytelling, so I was always on the supporting end of some of this work, and I wanted to experience some because I hadn’t yet gone to one of Joe’s workshops to see what goes on. The story circles are so integral to that process that helps people find their story. They work as a group activity and they get a lot of feedback. Again, just watching Joe work with people is a real learning experience for me because he just connects so well, and he’s got this almost infinite bag of tricks and things that he just pulls out of his back pocket that seem so genuine and in the moment. He had the group introduce themselves, which was very basic, but we did this exercise where we had to write on one side of a card with one word 10 things that we love, and on the opposite side 10 things that we hate. A couple people had to read them off, and the point was that people had to identify which one of those really stuck out to them as being odd for being on that list, and that becomes a springboard for generating a story idea. He talked about how that plays out in his storytelling workshops. It was just marvelous. This wasn’t a presentation, this was an activity, but we learned so much about the story circle process.

LJ: You know, Ruben’s and Joe’s sessions both, in a way, were getting at the same thing, which was how do you boil a story down to the atomic level so that you’re really distilling the essence of the pure story out of it and letting the chaff, if you will, fall away in the process. They take very, very different approaches, but they both get there. It was nice to think about story in that way. We had some fun times in the evenings, too. We did learn a lot, but we also got to have some fun. One of the high points for me was going to the Tulane president’s residence on the campus, which is a glorious, spectacular antebellum mansion. Spending time in all of that history with the art and the furnishings, and really everything in the home telling a story that reaches back into the 1800’s, was really a wonderful event.

AL: And the jazz band that was Tulane faculty.

LJ: Oh, yeah. Wow, were they good or what. Yeah.

AL: And then, also, the video that the folks at Tulane produced all about the history of the house and being used for sets in… was it Runaway Jury that was filmed there?

LJ: Yeah. I was just, actually, going to ask you to maybe talk about what we did the next day.

AL: Oh, man.

RS: Oh yeah, Thursday. That’s going to go down in history. This was the NMC Second Line. For those of our listeners who aren’t familiar with it, the second line is a New Orleans tradition and it involves a marching band, which is the First Line. The marching band plays music and marches, and then the people are behind the marching band and they’re dancing and waving handkerchiefs as they go along behind it. Second lines are used in New Orleans for all kinds of celebrations, like funeral processions that start with a sort of a dirge all the way to the cemetery, and then after the body is interred, the Second Line leads the people away again with music that is much more upbeat. It’s a celebration of the person’s life and just how wonderful life is. Ours was very much a celebration of life and being in New Orleans.

LJ: Our hosts, Derek and Marie, really did a fantastic job of laying out the tradition of second lines.

RS: They did.

LJ: This was another moment that the conference and its setting had a personal touch for me, because we did one at my daughter’s wedding and we had a horse and a carriage. Some of them are quite elaborate and it was a lot of fun. We had some special little props that helped us do that. One was that the Tulane folks printed up special hankies for us that had not only the logo of the conference and the fleur de lis of New Orleans, but also the tag cloud of all the themes that were part of the event. It was really kind of cool.

AL: That was brilliant. And then, of course, the little surprise thing that you got, Larry; the umbrella. I don’t know how you would describe that in a podcast, because you need to see the picture.

LJ: Yeah. We’ll have to put a photograph of it on the website.

RS: There is. There are photos up on the Flickr site.

LJ: Oh, that’s right. In fact, there are nearly 800 photos from the conference on the Flickr site with the tag. That whole idea of tagging websites and photographs and all of the related NMC events, that’s really taken off. That was a great idea, Alan, to do that, and we’ve gotten a lot of resources at this conference as a result.

AL: Absolutely. Then, we marched, basically, across the campus to the art gallery where we had our reception. We got, not only some good food and drink, et cetera, but we had a chance to see some special exhibits. And one downstairs that was all video and media art. There was one in that right gallery, I don’t know if you saw, that was basically three projections.

LJ: Oh, yeah.

AL: It was one woman, actually, but she played three different parts, more or less going through her daily routine, and they all sort did the same thing. They picked up their spoon with their right hand, they dipped it in their cereal bowl, but occasionally one was just a little out of sync. And then they would switch scenes. It was just an amazing…

LJ: Yeah. One screen she was in Red Rocks in the Utah desert, and the next she was downtown in the middle of the city, and the other one in a field somewhere.

AL: Yeah. They would switch though, doing exactly the same thing. And then upstairs, they had the multimedia exhibit curated by Derek [and David], and some fabulous multimedia art was done up there.

LJ: Yeah. My favorite piece in that one was the projection that went down at the intersection of the floor and the wall with the…

RS: Petals.

AL: Yeah.

LJ: The falling petals that fell onto the floor. Just a little tiny little thing and it was so beautiful.

AL: I like the one that had the boom microphone. It would pick up conversation ambiently and would do some sort of remixing so you would hear it later. It was almost like the whisper box in Second Life to some degree.

RS: The biological art that had the tank, the little glass vase that had the mud and water in it, the bacteria, with the overlay that let the light through.

LJ: Derek was telling me that they actually climbed up on the roof of that, because there is a skylight above that gallery, and they masked off some of the windows so they had exactly the optimal light for that culture to grow in there. Just the depth that the Tulane folks went to make everything be perfect for us; it was just remarkable. Derek, and Marie, and Anne, and Sheldon, just did a fantastic job, don’t you agree?

AL: Absolutely. And then Rachel tapped me on the shoulder and said she found something in a stairwell, it started with a sign. So what exactly… what happened Rachel?

RS: I found a sign taped to a closed door, and the sign said “The Graffiti Project is over. Please do not draw on the walls” and I thought “I like the sign.” So I was taking a picture of the sign and Derek Toten comes over and he goes “What are you taking a picture of?” And I said “This sign, which I thought was really cool!” And he said “Oh, you think the sign is really cool, look at this…” and he opens the door, and it opens onto the stairwell, the building stairwell, which is four stories tall, and every inch of the walls and the handrails and the pipes that are in there is just covered with layer upon layer of brilliantly colored graffiti art. It was a project that they had where the students would come in and paint something in graffiti, and then the next one would come in and would work into that, and over it, and overlay it, and the whole stairwell, every inch, was covered.

LJ: Yeah. They really got into it.

RS: Yeah.

LJ: They finally had to say “Please stop painting the building.”

RS: Right. “Okay, we’re done now.” There are photos of this on Flickr. They don’t do it justice, but they’ll give you an idea. They are tagged with the conference tag, nmc2007reg, and they are also tagged with the word graffiti, so you can find it with those. It was just really amazing to be in that space and see… Well, it was pink. That’s what I remember; it was pink.

LJ: Yeah. I tell you, we really got to experience, I think, the really vital parts of New Orleans. One thing that I carried home with me from that entire experience was just such an appreciation for the spirit of that city, and how deeply important it is to the people there. Of course, we got to see both the parts that… mostly we saw the parts that had been restored, the tourist districts and the Garden District, which were largely unaffected in the first place, and they look pretty normal now. Through the talks and the comments of the local folks there and the hosts, we also got a sense of the challenges in the city. There was a panel session of folks who had been activists, really, who had begun blogging right in the middle of the catastrophe. In fact, some of them were the only real news sources that were coming out, and those people continued to work over the two years since then, to try and help rebuild the city. They’ve run into considerable challenges along the way, as anyone who reads the paper knows. I just was struck by one of hundreds of stories that came up in those and similar conversations, of how you have Internet in a situation like that. This one guy on the panel worked in the shipyards, and there was a cruise ship there that everyone was evacuated from, but the cruise ship had satellite internet. He actually ran a wire from the cruise ship down the street into the neighborhood so that the neighborhood could have Internet access for news, and be able to get word out to the Internet, and the communication. I was just thinking “That guy really belongs in the NMC.” That’s the kind of stuff that we all resonate with, just that “let’s get this done.” It was really, all in all, a really, really remarkable experience. Alan talked at the beginning of this talk, and we’re coming to the end now, about driving into the city and seeing the buildings that will never be restored juxtaposed to the ones that have been lovingly restored, and that discontinuity there was apparent. Whenever you took the time to go around a corner you could see it. As I think about the big picture of the conference, it really was about the importance of story, the importance of collective memory, and of a shared sense of culture. It came through in this event in a most powerful and compelling way for me. I’m really glad that we had the opportunity to go there. Closing thoughts, folks?

RS: I just love New Orleans. I love the city; the art, music, and food, and the people.

LJ: We had to leave early to get back right after the conference, but a large group of people stayed. Alan, do you want to tell us a little bit about what happened on Friday afternoon?

AL: Absolutely. I just wanted to add a little bit. I know, when I followed the Katrina news, at one point I had this knee-jerk reaction. Also, somewhat being a geologist, you’ve got this major city, it’s built below sea level, it’s secured some by crumbly, levee mounds of dirt. It’s like, you know, maybe there shouldn’t be a city there. Of course, people say that often about Phoenix, where I live. You don’t need a modern city in the middle of a desert with millions of people and no water. So, who am I to say that? But having been there and really tapped into, through the presenters and the people we talked to, how rich and deep that culture is. I’ll never have that thought again. That really resonated. Two days after I got back, I got an e-mail from Joe Lambert, who had gone out on the tour with the Tulane folks, where they… I think they called it the Desolation Tour… and they basically drove through some parts of the city that were still not “rebuilt” and still showing signs of the devastating effects.

LJ: The 9th ward, and places that will never be rebuilt.

AL: Yeah. Joe had taken some still images, and he went home and he did a digital story on this, using his voice and some wonderful music. It was a real treat because, as Larry and I were talking the other day, usually when Joe does his presentations he nearly always uses other people’s stories, because he wants to showcase the work that they do. To see Joe’s own story, which is posted on YouTube, and will be put on the NMC Conversations site with this podcast, it was just such a fitting way, for me, to wrap up the whole New Orleans experience.

LJ: I would recommend the video to everyone. We’ve run a little long on this particular podcast, but it was such a remarkable conference that I think it was worth doing. There was just so much to tell. I want to thank you, Rachel, for being part of this conversation.

RS: Of course.

LJ: And Alan.

RS: I am now at the bottom of the cup of my café au lait, so it’s must be time.

AL: That’s the timer.

LJ: That’s right. Did you get the box of Beignet mix with that?

RS: I’m going to. I haven’t yet, but I am going to.

LJ: Thanks to you, as well, Alan, for your comments and stuff. Let’s go ahead and wrap NMC Conversations #6 up, and thank you for being here.

AL: Alright, Goodbye.

RS: Thank you, Larry. Goodbye.

Continuing from Conversation #4, we again cover the Horizon Project theme by talking with Bryan Alexander on the 2007 Horizon Report horizon of New Scholarship.

As Director of Research for NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Bryan researches and develops programs on the advanced uses of information technology in liberal arts contexts. His interests “concern mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, and social software. Other interests include digital writing, copyright and intellectual property, information literacy, project management, information design, and interdisciplinary collaboration”. In addition to publishing on NITLE blog’s Liberal Education Today, he posts frequently to his own blog, Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education, travels incessantly for workshops and invited presentations, and publishes his work in places such as EDUCAUSE Review.

Based on discussions we have had with Bryan about connecting NMC and NITLE , and his active participation in our Future of Scholarship Track at the NMC 2006 Regional Conference, we were excited to connect with him for a conversation about one of NMC’s focus initiatives- New Scholarship.

While we started with some talk about the relationship of blogging and scholarship, we arched more broadly to areas of academic practices, publishing, innovation theory, and affordances of powerful tools such as visualization. We might have gone for hours if someone was not watching the clock.

For reference, resources mentioned include:

• NITLE http://www.nitle.org/
• NITLE blog Liberal Education Today http://b2e.nitle.org/
• Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education
  http://infocult.typepad.com/
• Horizon Project http://horizon.nmc.org/
• NMC New Scholarship Initiative
  http://www.nmc.org/horizonproject/2007/new-scholarship
• Echo Chamber
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber#As_a_metaphor
• Valdis Krebs - Political Books and Polarized Readers
  http://www.orgnet.com/divided.html
• Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Kajob Nielsen)
  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html
• Bryan’s Dracublog http://infocult.typepad.com/dracula/
• Pulse: The Coming of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things by Robert Renay
  http://www.pulsethebook.com/
  http://www.pulsethebook.com/about/what-the-book-is-about/
• Visualizing Population Data- Gapminder http://www.gapminder.org/
• Everett M. Rogers- Diffusion of Innovations
  http://www.amazon.com/Diffusion-Innovations-5th-Everett-Rogers/dp/0743222091
• H-Net http://www.h-net.org/
• Connecticut College K-HHMI Visiting Fellows
  http://k-hhmi.conncoll.edu/k-hhmi-fellows.html
• Ithaka: University Publishing in a Digital Age
  http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/university-publishing

Read on for a full transcript of this conversation…

Alan Levine (AL): We are now live.

Rachel Smith (RS): I was alive before, I don’t know about you people.

AL: Okay.

RS: Welcome to the NMC Conversations. I am Rachel Smith from the New Media Consortium, and I am really pleased to be doing this again. Last time we had a conversation about activities around the Horizon Report, and we are going to continue the Horizon Report theme this time. We are going to focus on one topic. We are going to talk about New Scholarship. Here on the call with me are Larry and Alan from the New Media Consortium. Hi guys.

AL: Hi Rachel.

Larry Johnson (LJ): Hi Rachel. Glad to be here.

AL: Sorry. We’re talking over each other in tandem.

RS: In stereo. We also have a special guest this time. We have Bryan Alexander, who is the Director for Research of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, or NITLE. Bryan has been on the board of the Horizon Report for the past three years, so he is a major contributor and shaper of the way that the report comes out. Bryan, welcome to the Conversation.

Bryan Alexander (BA): Greetings, and welcome to everybody else. Thanks for having me.

RS: Absolutely. Could you tell us a little bit, Bryan, about what you are up to these days?

BA: Well, I’m, right now, doing several different functions with NITLE. As the Director of Research, one of my responsibilities is what we refer to as environmental scanning. I keep an eye on new developments in technology insofar as the impacts of teaching and learning on the small liberal arts campus. I have a general net to throw wide for the whole world. The second part of that is that I have a portfolio with a few different topics that I specialize in. One of them is Web 2.0 and learning. The second one is gaming and learning. The third one, which has been kind of quiet for a couple years but might be coming back, is wireless and mobile computing and learning. I focus on those. In order to show what I have learned, and in order to share what we’ve discovered through a few different functions, I hold workshops at NITLE-affiliated campuses, I blog, I publish in traditional formats and digital formats. I also do a lot of networking and outreach to other institutions and other sectors. Sometimes this involves talks at other venues. For example, most recently, I have been to venues as diverse as the University of Michigan and the Special Forces Headquarters University. I also do collaborations with other folks like the NMC Horizon Project. I’ve got a few new projects coming down the pike. I’m not going to say any more about those right now, but check the NITLE blog and you’ll see them soon enough.

LJ: Well, I’ll tell you we’re just so pleased to have you on the call with us today, Bryan. We have, of course, been working with you for many, many years, and the work of NITLE intersects with, or parallels, the work of the NMC all the time. Several of the initiatives you mentioned, the educational gaming, the NMC also is very involved in as well. We are really happy to have you with us today. We began talking with you and NITLE about looking at New Scholarship, perhaps collaboratively, back in October, if you recall, when we had that as the focus of our Regional Conference in San Antonio. I know that NITLE has a great interest in that. Of course, as a blogger, all of us follow both you and the NITLE blog a lot, and are always looking for the new insights that can be found there.

AL: Ya, actually, I tend to forget. I think Bryan’s work is of such interest to what we do that I feel like he is in NMC, although NITLE is not officially a member; just the parallels and the overlap. I follow him more on his Infocult blog where he covers an amazing spectrum of technology, culture, gothic stuff, and all kinds of things from parts of the web that I don’t really get to see. He is a valuable part of my network through his blog, and these days also through the kind of chaotic, maybe questionable, but interesting environment of Twitter. I guess one thing is how you look at your work on your blogging, Bryan, as this level of scholarly work. There is some question among some people about what that is, but what I see you doing is uncovering interesting things, documenting them, and composing them. You also publish traditional articles and do more standard scholarly work. I am wondering where this blogging, now that blogging isn’t anything novel anymore, is kind of moving towards in the realm of scholarship.

BA: That is a great question. Thank you for the nice word with Infocult. Infocult has a very strange, diverse audience. I have a Bulgarian following that I can’t quite explain, but am really glad to see, for example. I think blogging right now, I do this, and NITLE does this, for a few reasons, under the rubric of scholarship. One is that, as you say, it is a great way for us to share things that we’ve found. There are other venues for doing that, such as Twitter, such as social bookmarking, but blogging has a few more affordances to it. One is that you have the comment feature, so you can always gather responses from the world, which is excellent. The second is that it gives us the time to annotate, explore, and expand on what we find. What is interesting is that there is this perpetual problem in studying the blogosphere. Valdis Krebs has done tremendous work on this, which is whether the blogosphere is an echo chamber or not. That is, do we tend to only blog about what we agree with, what we like, what we find interesting, and ignore the rest. One of the things that we found is that bloggers tend to link to the things that they can’t stand. They link to their enemies, they link to their opposites, they link to things in order to disagree with them. We are really learning a lot about the broad nature of blogging. It really is social networking beyond immediate affiliations. Another reason that we blog is because it provides a wonderful lived archive of our passage through time. We can look back over a year, over two years, and see what we have been interested in. It’s like looking in a diary in some ways, but a very public one, so that we can get a new perspective on issues that we found a while ago and it went nowhere, which is useful to know. We can also see just when we started paying attention to some things. On top of this, we have been researching how people blog, how they use it in teaching and learning and scholarship, and it’s great to be walking the talk at the same time. One way that blogging fits into scholarship is that it’s a great way to, if you will, workshop ideas, language, and approaches. If you can put out an idea, thesis, or observation and get feedback, that is an excellent way to use the blog to build your own scholarly work. The second way is, as I mentioned, the perspective you get over time from the lived experience of a blog. You can go back and see how your own ideas have changed. There might be concepts that you put out that actually, in retrospect, look quite powerful and you can use to revise what you have done. But, there are limitations to this. There are some cases where your research is of such a nature that you don’t want to share it. Perhaps it is controversial in a way that you find socially counterproductive. Perhaps you wish to approach your research under the head of Intellectual Property Protection, such as a patentable formula. Blogging doesn’t work for all scholarly uses, but for right now, it is definitely a very powerful adjunct.

AL: I am just wondering, I know we want to get to the topic of our talk, about the acceptance and any signs of recognition in academia of this, and two things leap to my mind. Jakob Nielsen’s article about that experts should write articles, not blogs, and, at a recent event I was at among some faculty, more than a few said that they don’t feel comfortable blogging until they are tenured.

BA: Yeah. There are a lot of obstacles for the greater apperception and adoption of blogging among scholars, and the second one is, I think, the larger one. That is, we still have this kind of chicken and the egg problem with scholarly promotion, tenure, and review when it comes to blogging and scholarship. That is, we don’t see a lot of examples of people getting promoted in part because of their blog. We don’t see enough examples of people getting tenured in part because of their blog. Because we see fewer examples, that makes people slightly disincentivised in terms of doing it themselves, which means fewer cases, which means fewer opportunities for to actually be rewarded, and so on. It’s kind of like the junior high school dance, where you have all the boys on one side and all the girls on the other side and no one wants to make the first move. The first problem is…

LJ: I think you’ll find that junior high school has changed these days.

BA: Yeah. Okay, that was a historical comment rather than a political one.

LJ: Yeah. We all definitely got it.

BA: But you know, I said junior high, I didn’t say middle school, right? I’ve already dated myself. My daughter is 12. I am being very practical about these things.

LJ: Oh, yeah, well…

BA: The Nielsen comment is, in some ways, a less powerful one, but a very subtle one. If you haven’t read the article, Nielsen argues that scholarly thinking–and he also argues for more sustained writing like deeper journalism–requires greater length, rather than a snapshot format. There are a lot of problems with this. I mean, one is that blogging is deeply heterogeneous. People feel free to blog a two sentence post or a 3000 word post. Moreover, you have formats where people are blogging pieces of a longer work. I, for myself for example, have been blogging the entire novel of Dracula. This is now the third year. Okay, that’s a scholarly edition. But, you can find works like Pulse, where an entire scholarly peer-reviewed book is being blogged in pieces. I mean, there are many technological affordances for this. You can take a look, for example, at LiveJournal which has the “cut,” and there are many ways that you can do this. I think that Nielsen is too shallow in his characterization of blogging. There are a few other problems, though, which are worth addressing. Do you mind if I get ahead of us on this, or should I come back?

RS: Yeah. Go ahead.

BA: Well, one major problem is what I have been nicknaming the Great Divide in digital architecture or digital politics and the world of culture and academia, which is the divide between the open web and the closed web. The Web 2.0 of wild and woolly conversations rippling across the world, and the world of silos, where you have content that is in some way inaccessible to the larger world. This is a divide that has rapidly erected itself, in that in academia we still don’t have really substantial conversations about it. In fact, I would argue that the majority of our campuses’ populations participating in this divide have already seen their careers shaped and affected by the structures of this divide, and yet have not actually made conscious choices about it. That is something which we really, really need to fix. So, for example, if someone is blogging behind a password, which is trivially easy to do, almost every platform supports this, does that count as a blog? It is a definitional question for blog studies, but also for practical studies. How do we know? Is this going to actually account for it? If a faculty member realizes that there is this divide, are they incentivised to publish their material in a dark archive? Say in a repository on campus for which only people with that IP address can look. Are they going to think “Well, that interesting handout with some new work. Should I put that on the open web or should I put that in a Blackboard space?” I mean, to one extent we have this growing body of work that is not accessible to the larger world, and we don’t even know how big it is. We don’t know how much research is locked away in spaces guarded by Blackboard. We don’t know how much original work is hidden in closed repositories. We have no way of knowing based on the very nature of it.

LJ: That is an interesting point. I am going to turn the conversation a little bit, if I may, Bryan, because I think that one of the things that we’re seeing is that people tend to talk about this new scholarship in terms of technologies. We’ve been doing that just now. We’ve been talking about blogs as a category, where traditionally scholarship has been thought of as an activity, as a collection of thoughts and ideas that are expressed. So in one way, talking about blogging as a form of new scholarship is kind of like talking about “Should I use a typewriter or a pencil?” It’s the ideas, I think, that almost anyone would agree is what counts for a good scholarship. But, what’s new today is the possibility to engage these technologies around those ideas, so that blogs are not just one way. You are able to get responses on blogs. But then, there also interesting things if we just expand from blogs to the larger web, in the way that you can visualize data that can’t be done on a printed page. Flash graphs, the kinds of things that Helmut Rohrer is doing with longitudinal studies of populations, that make those data so easy to understand. Whereas if they were buried in tables, even a very prestigious, well-read journal, I don’t think that the same kinds of understanding could happen. And then, my final point on this is, isn’t that really what research is all about, in one way, is to catalyze even further research? So, to the extent that we can use these new mediums to solicit ideas from the field in response, and visualize things a little better, that is the exciting promise of all this.

BA: Well, yes and no, to every one of your points. I do want to come back to your first point. I do think that it is important not to think in terms of strict technological determinism. That is, should I use pencil and paper or should I use pen and paper; a #2 pencil or #1 pencil? I think we’ve already had detailed politics around this before. We’ve been, for example, if you think about the creation of scholarly journals, which until recently took a lot of capital, so deciding should I publish in a disciplinary journal or an interdisciplinary journal was a major issue, not to mention which kind. The cost of journals, of course, has famously driven the spread of knowledge. I do think that it’s important to break the question back from two into one; is it technology, or is it what we do with it? The fact is that the technology gives us affordances to use. The technology shapes what we do with it and it’s important to see those two combined. So, for example, taking a look at blogging, it matters how we think about who sits on a promotion committee. It matters how you think about who’s writing this at the Chronicle. It also matters what the software lets us do. If you take a look at instant messaging, there is a huge uptick in adoption of instant messaging. Once, instant message platforms enabled easy archiving of conversations. Technology changed and drove a whole series of adoption issues, which brings me to your second point. There is a galaxy of new forms of scholarly publication available. If you think about publishing a GPS data set by itself. We’ve had antecedents for this before. It’s impossible to publish, say, charts and table from astronomical observations. But now, I can take your GPS data set, or your GIS data set, excuse me, and plug it into my copy from ESRI on my desktop, and manipulate it, and then add something new, and perhaps send it to you, or publish it in my blog, or publish it as a derivative work. There is a whole series of exciting options. To your third point, I think the social one is in many ways one of the most powerful, and that is the one that we are still beginning to process. I think the great divide I described really turns on this. We’re not always thrilled with the idea of increased feedback, or increased networking, or increased socialization of our work. Scholarship is indeed deeply, deeply about promulgating knowledge. At the same time, we’ve also had traditions that go against that and mitigate it. The ivory tower tradition is a real one. Look at the University of Paris. One of the reasons why it became an independent authority for a long time was to protect its scholars from the mob and the local government. If you look right here in the 20th century, through the politics in the United States, we’ve jealously protected tenure in order to protect people. Not always well, and in many cases we’ve failed, but we have this sense that scholarship is something to be conserved, as well as to be shared. I mentioned IP, and not just copyright but, specifically, patent issues. There’s another case where people are jealous about, literally jealous about, their scholarship. I once taught a digital narrative, digital story-telling workshop, where a scientist did a wonderful five minute video clip about his chemical work, and he insisted that I only show it to people once it got accepted for publication. It did, and I’ve been showing it ever since. The dynamic is a tricky one. There are all sorts of other issues too. I mean the politics of this. Certain research has political ramifications, depending on where you are. On top of this, there are whole layers of issues with the social spread of knowledge. One more is that we, in the United States, we have had a hard time grappling with the culture of the public intellectual. If Larry Johnson becomes the next great scholar in Texas history, well the Texas historians value the work that he does when he speaks on MPR. They value the work that he does when he speaks in front of the Texas legislature.

LJ: Ah, the Carl Sagan syndrome.

BD: Exactly. Carl Sagan is a great example, because this is a guy who did more for the spread of science than any human being in the past 75 years, and he is probably the most reviled scientist in the same period, just simply because Cosmos changed lives. It changed our culture, and people spit at what he did. It’s a tremendous, tremendous split.

LJ: Well, academia is not immune to the internecine kind of rivalries that you see in other fields.

BD: Well, generally speaking, yes. They are internecine, but also, there is the sense that a scholar who speaks to the public is dividing their time. They are not doing serious work. That is a perception which technology can enable, but that’s one is also part of that new scholarship. If Larry Johnson, the great Texas historian, publishes a GPS data set of, say, the area around Austin, I think most scholars would have a great time checking that out, testing its validity, and using it. But, if he publishes a wiki about his conclusion, and invites the world to edit it in order to help shape it, is this too public? It’s a good question.

LJ: You know, that leads to the final question that we have, which I am going to toss to Rachel because she’s itching to get in here…

RS: Thanks Larry.

LJ: …about when we might see all this. Take it away, Rachel.

RS: Thanks. Bryan, a lot of the points that you just made are so important and have such an impact on the way scholarship is done, and has been done, and will continue to be done. As you know, in the Horizon Report, New Scholarship has been placed on the long-term horizon, where it will be 4-5 years before these kinds of practices are mainstream. What I would like to know is if the trends that you are seeing are consistent with that? Do you think it is 4-5 years out, or not?

BD: I think in 4-5 years we might see about a 33% penetration in terms of production. That is maybe a third of the United States campus faculty producing digital scholarship. I think to cross over into the larger adoption curve, the bell curve, where we’re talking about 60, 70, or 80%, I think might take closer to a decade. There are some powerful demographic forces that have to move and they move a little more slowly than the technology. There is also the time of research, where it simply takes a lot of time to produce a scholarly monograph, or to really track a certain population in the wild. I do think, though, that what we will see within that curve is the flip side of this. When I’ve been speaking with people on NITLE-affiliated campuses across the US, there are very keen on making a difference between production and consumption. That is, the scholars producing these data sets and putting up large theses on the web versus scholars who are consuming digital scholarship, and, of course, students consuming the digital scholarship. In a sense, as Google rewards Web 2.0, and as students continue to be digital creatures, our students are already consuming digital scholarship to the extent that they can get to it, and our faculty, I think, increasingly are. So, within 4-5 years, I think, you’ll definitely see the majority of our faculty accessing digital scholarship, taking a look at it, and even the high-end stuff, looking at simulations, downloading 3D models and viewing it with Quicktime, perhaps visiting a lab site on Second Life where someone has built molecules hundreds of meters long and poking around there. I think the consumption curve will advance before the production curve does.

AL: But, compared to things we have on the horizon, this one is a little bit different. It is broader and it touches all the other horizons. It’s a little bit more difficult to get your hands around than being able to look at multi-player educational gaming or virtual worlds, which is a little bit closer to being about technology. The scholarship just has so many things that it reaches beyond technology to how we work and our social structures. It’s big.

LJ: I think that the take-away I am going to have today, Bryan, from your observations, is that we’re really talking about a social change when we’re talking about New Scholarship. I think that we’re talking about a change in the way that we perceive the very act of knowledge generation and knowledge catalyzation. Your predictions about the timeline, I think, are dead on. One of the things that is interesting about the Horizon Project is that we do talk about the timeline for things to enter into the mainstream. You mentioned 33%. I actually think that is a little high. When we are thinking about what we mean by that, we have got the classic bell curve that everybody is familiar with and Roger’s work from Arizona on the diffusion of innovation, it’s about 16% where most things just don’t reach any further penetration. If you can get into the 20-25% range, you are actually in the mainstream at that point, and it could take decades, as you observed, for it to really become ubiquitous. Very, very few things actually have made it to the 80-90%.

BA: Well, there’s e-mail, and that’s a big step.

LJ: Yeah.

BA: You have to take a look, I think, at one of the issues here that I mentioned, in terms of the great divide, is also recognizing certain things as digital scholarly activities. The whole H-net series of professional e-mail listers for scholarly purposes, for example, has been around since the 1990’s, and that’s a solid network of scholarly work that’s shared and discussed. I think that 20% is good. I think it matters, in part, which 20%. If you’re talking in terms of scale-free network analysis, if the 20% are the hubs, the connectors, then this might take off. One thing you might see along those lines is certain disciplines really taking off and others not.

LJ: Yeah, I agree with that.

BA: So you might see this more in foreign language.

LJ: Yeah, I think the sciences are actually pretty far out in front on some of this simply because the pace of change in those fields is really driving the way that they think about how they distribute their knowledge.

BS: It’s the face of change, Larry. I agree that it’s a huge, huge issue. In fact, Connecticut College did this great project where they had visiting scientists speak about new developments in their fields, and the publication for those speeches was CD-ROM. The reason for that was they didn’t want to maintain something on the web because it would be out of date within a year. They liked the time-bound nature of a disc.

RS: Wow.

BA: I’m sorry, Rachel. Go ahead.

RS: I was just going to say that this is definitely something that we are all going to keep following with interest as it changes and moves.

LJ: I think, too, that organizations like NITLE, and to the extent that we can in the NMC is hoping to try and do some things like that, is to help people understand what’s good. How do you recognize quality when some of these things are all so new?

BA: That’s one of the things that’s come up in NITLE conversations was should other groups serve as advocates for digital scholarship because there is no other body that will do it.

AL: I’m willing to, maybe, start collecting the bets. So, with digital and New Scholarship; are we at 33% in 4-5 years? Who wants to take 20%? We’ll get it up in Vegas on the boards.

RS: Okay, so I guess that makes Alan the New Scholarship bookie.

BA: Keep in mind that a recent Ithaka survey, which was taking a look at faculty attitudes toward libraries, had faculty use of blogging and Web 2.0 tools at between 2-4%, so this may take longer.

RS: Wow. There’s a ways to go.

BA: Larry, I think that your point about collaborative groups is really enormous. I think if you saw the Ithaka study on scholarly publication, one of the points that they were keen to make is that they think that some activities in scholarship are going to move towards inter-institutional collaborative platforms, simply because it no longer makes sense economically to have some things redundantly repeated across multiple university presses or multiple campuses. They also call for, let me see if I can find this, a 3rd party enterprise, or at least a catalytic force, in order to enable the whole list to function. It’s for marshalling resources, helping institutions find their place in your systems, leading the community towards shared visions of scholarly communication landscapes, and so on.

RS: I just wanted to thank you very much for your time today. Bryan has joined us from his home in rural Vermont. Bryan, I am pleased to say, is down for another year on the advisory board of the Horizon Report, so we’ll continue to have your insights. If you haven’t read the Horizon Report and you’d like to find it, you can find it at horizon.nmc.org , and Bryan, of course, blogs at infocult.typepad.com . Thank you so much, Bryan, for joining us today.

BA: Don’t forget the NITLE homepage, where the Liberal Education Today blog can be found right there on the page.

RS: Absolutely. Thanks everybody. Thanks Larry and Alan.

LJ: Thank you, Rachel.

BA: Thanks Rachel, thank you Alan, and thank you Larry.

RS: Until next time.

BA: Bye bye.

LJ: Alright, bye now.

With the arrival soon of the month of August, we at the NMC start thinking again about the Horizon Project as this is the time of year we assemble an advisory board that will generate the topics that will result in January 2008 as the next Horizon Report.

It was appropriate that we talked this time with two secondary school teachers, who work on two different continents, about the amazing project they ran this year based on the 2007 Horizon Report.

We spoke via Skype with both Vicki Davis, a teacher and technology leader at Westwood School in Camilla Georgia and her colleague Julie Lindsay, who is in transition from her position at the International School Dhaka (Bangladesh) to become an educational technology specialist at Qatar Academy (note, at the time of this call, Julie was on holiday on the Gold Coast of Australia, and our Skype connection was not optimal).

Ironically, I stumbled upon the project via a mention from Vicki via Twitter!

Their Horizon Project, which ran from April through the latter part of May this year, was an international collaboration between their two schools and three others in Austria, China, and Australia. In this project, student teams from across these geographically distant schools worked together to research the six topics of the Horizon Project. Using web 2.0 tools described in the report as well as others, they examines how the six will impact schools, politics, and society in the future.

This was an extension of the first Flat Classroom project, an award wining effort, that Vicki and Julie ran in December 2006.

We talked to Vicki and Julie about how their project came to be, what the students gained from the project, what the teachers gained, and heard fascinating insights into the ideas of the students. And it was exciting to hear that another iteration of their Horizon Project will take place in Spring 2008– plus we are hoping to have participation from these innovative teachers in our Horizon Advisory Board this year.

Some references mentioned in this interview include:

• NMC Horizon project:
  • NMC Horizon Project
  • Horizon Report 2007
  • Horizon Project Research Agenda
  • 2008 Horizon Project wiki
• Vicki Davis aka Cool Cat Teacher; Westwood Schools in Camillia Georgia http://www.westwoodschools.org/
• Julie Lindsay; International School Dhaka in Bangladesh; Qatar Academy, Doha, State of Qatar.
• International Horizon Project
• Found out about project on twitter http://twitter.com/coolcatteacher/statuses/22362401
• Flat Classroom Project (see NECC poster)
• Teams and Trends
• Rubrics
• Atif’s video on future of mobile phones
• Web 2.0 tools
  • Wikispaces free wikis
  • evoca record and publish podcasts, audio clips
  • Youtube video sharing
  • TeacherTube educational version of YouTube
  • Twitter group instant communcation, status sharing
  • Meebo IM tool
  • Elluminate virtual classroom
  • AirSet calendering
• del.icio.us links tagging standard

Read on for a full transcript of this conversation…

Alan Levine (AL) :Hello again. This is Alan Levine, and we’d like to welcome you to NMC Conversations Issue #3. It’s July 2007.

Rachel Smith (RS): Four.

AL: Issue #4. Thank you. Gotta keep track of these things. Thank you, Rachel. Anyhow, we’re going to talk today about the Horizon Project, because it’s about this time of year, in August, when we begin the process to start up the next year’s Horizon Project. We’re going to meet two teachers who we kind of met through this year’s Horizon Project. What have you seen so far, Larry, as we head into another round of the Horizon Project?