New Media & Learning Initiative

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Dominik W. Neuffer

With more schedule challenges, Gardner Campbell and I missed a podcast last week, so last night we turned out the recorder one more time for the last of our sessions for the Fall 2010 New Media Faculty Development Seminars that Gardner facilitated at Baylor University, and was also replicated out in our networked groups.

It's been two weeks since our last podcast covering the New Media Faculty Development Seminar. Two weeks ago the Baylore group discussed Sherry Turkle's essay on the the psychology of game play in Video Games and Computer Holding Power (pp 499-513 in The New Media Reader; also found online as a full excerpt from the New Media Reader site). The loca facilitators brought in perspectives on the economic impact of video games, which has been outselling all other forms of entertainment for some time. Gardner noted amonf the student sin his first year seminar, it was apparent that a majority of them were arriving with four or more years of extensive game experience, usually in Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games.

In this latest installment of our podcasts for Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty Development Seminar Gardner Campbell reviews the discussion activities of the Baylor University seminar group. This week, the reading was two selections by Brenda Laurel, The Six Elements and the Casual Relations Between Them

and Dramatic Interaction in a Small World,  found on pp 563-573 in the New Media Reader  (available as a PDF from the the Media Reader web site). 

This past week in the  Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty Development Seminar the reading was Bill Viola's Will There be Condominiums in Data Space?, found on pp 463-470  of the New Media Reader (which can be found online as a PDF document). The students in Gardner's first year seminar had asked if they could join the meeting of the "adult group"= the faculty development seminar that week was covering the same reading the students were doing in their class. About two thirds of the students showed up for the faculty seminar, and as Gardner notes, none of them requested "extra credit."

There's a lot of coughing and colds going around; I'm coming off of 9 day bout and tonight Gardner was down for the count. But in our effort to pull more voices into the weekly (or in these case, bi-weekly) podcast, I spoke tonight with Cindy Jennings, who is leading the seminar group at University of South Carolina Upstate and Tom Haymes, who is leading the group at Houston Community Colleges.

In this next installment of our podcasts for Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty Development Seminar Gardner Campbell reviews the discussion activities of the Baylore group over the reading of Vannevar Bush's seminal essay, As We May Think. Gardner actually led two discussions- one at Baylor, and one via Skype with the group Tom Haymes is leading at Houston Community College.

From what we can track from these discussios and others going on in the networks, we are seeing a lot of activity around the readings in our networked groups as well as their blogs and social media outlets. The Netvibes hub is a great portal to this network of networks.

The start of this round of the New Media Faculty Seminar is off to a great start. For Fall of 2010, ring leader Gardner Campbell is calling it Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty Development Seminar. His seminar group at Baylor University had their first meeting this week. What is new this time around is he has fostered a network of other groups at various locations, following the readings his seminar is doing, holding their own discussions, and then doing some networked sharing of ideas via blogs, tags, tweets, forums, etc.

This week is the opening meeting of the New Media Faculty Seminar for participants at Baylor University (as well as other groups forming at other institutions-- see the Networked Seminar Directory. In this podcast, we talk again with Gardner Campbell about the seminar and what will happen in this first meetup.

The readings for this seminar are from the New Media Reader (since the seminar is based around key essays, Gardner most strongly states "the textbook is required" -- you can purchase it for less than $40 on Amazon). Because many of you may not have the book yet, most of the readings this week can also be found online.