Keynote Presentations

Opening Keynote:Excellence, and Nothing Less
Holly Willis; Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California

Whether you call new media a field, a discipline or an interdisciplinary movement, one thing is clear: new media is pervasive. Witness the rampant calls for 21st century literacies rooted in the digital, or the transformation of academic programs through the potentials of media technologies. As new media expands in diverse directions, encompassing design, transforming art, and reimagining the humanities and sciences through storytelling and visualization, it's time to stop and take stock, reflecting on the ways the particular insights and practices of new media might help us revitalize not just a field or a discipline, but contemporary education itself. To do this, though, we must avoid the lack of rigor that may come with ubiquity and instead understand the unique potentials of new media, highlight its powerful paradigms and articulate shared expectations for nothing less than excellence.

Holly Willis is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts, as well as Director of Academic Programs at the University of Southern California ’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy , where she teaches, organizes workshops and oversees academic programs designed to introduce new media literacy skills across USC’s campus and curriculum.

Willis’ current research centers on the intersection of media art, graphic design and rhetoric, and the ways ideas and formal strategies from each might inform contemporary scholarly practices. She oversees the IML’s research in the pedagogical uses of multiuser virtual environments such as Second Life, promotes the use of numerous online tools for writing and research, and is currently developing ideas centered on a pedagogical practice transformed algorithimically, asking what a pedagogical practice grounded in algorithmic unfolding and machinic processes might look like.

Willis is also the editor of The New Ecology of Things (Art Center College of Design, 2007), a collection of essays, words, images and fiction that grapples with the potential and design challenges of pervasive computing, and she is the author of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, which chronicles the advent of digital filmmakingtools and their impact on contemporary media practices. The former editor of RES Magazine, Dr. Willis has written extensively on experimental media practices and emerging pedagogical models for a variety of publications, and is currently editing a collection of essays centered on multimedia scholarship.

Closing Keynote: Beyond “Administered Intellectuality”: Accreditation in a New Key
Gardner Campbell; Associate Professor of Literature and Media; Director, Academy for Teaching and Learning, Baylor University

Accreditation is at the very center of American higher education. Ideally, the process empowers organizational, intellectual, and educational excellence. All too often, however, the process sinks to the lowest common bureaucratic denominator of academic life: more committees, more window-dressing, and a whole lot of get-it-over -with. It’s time for accreditation in a new key, one that fosters creativity, innovation, and multi-modality in the very practice of accreditation itself. We have an extraordinary opportunity to walk the walk, to free ourselves from the trap of “administered intellectuality” that characterizes much schooling, and to lead by example as higher education around the world seeks new paradigms for teaching, learning, and scholarship in the context of what Clay Shirky rightly calls “the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”

Dr. Gardner Campbell serves as Associatate Professor of Literature and Media, as well as the founding Director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor University. Before coming to Baylor, Dr. Campbell was Professor of English in the Department of English, Speech and Linguistics at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Gardner received his PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 1992, where he also did his Master's thesis. His BA is from Wake Forest University. His research interests include literature of the English Renaissance, film studies, new media studies, and teaching and learning technologies.