NMC News

Edutopia , a publication of the George Lucas Foundation, has a new article highlighting the Pachyderm project -- see The Elephant in the (Class)room: Pachyderm’s Multimedia Tool

Something large, friendly, and highly capable may be in your future. It’s Pachyderm multimedia-authoring software, a tool that allows you and your students to incorporate audio, video, text, and images into classroom presentations, digital term papers, and any multimedia project you encounter. The completed presentation can then be put on a CD or DVD, or downloaded to the author's Web site.

We are ramping up production and a schedule for more episodes of our NMC Conversations, a podcast series started a few months ago to highlight NMC projects and bringing in guests from our membership and community. We were really inspired by the ETS Podcasts published by Cole Camplese and colleagues at Penn State University. Their style is lively and informative, and we can only hope to emulate it.

The 2007 NMC Summer Conference was an amazing event for the NMC and its participants. In our ongoing effort to capture much of the experience for those that were not present (and those that were too), here we try to summarize a vast array of resources we have gathered for you on the "new" NMC web site.

Below we descibe more in the use of "tagging" content to aggregate it externally among many web sites, but on the new NMC web site, any content we or you create can also be tagged with keywords, so by using the nmc2007 keyword/tag on every bit of content, we have an easy way to pull it all together into one collection.

During the NMC Summer Conference today the New Media Consortium (NMC) announced that it has joined the Media Grid’s Immersive Education initiative to participate in the development of best practices and standards for virtual learning and game-based learning platforms. NMC is an international consortium of over 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. NMC member institutions are found in almost every state in the United States, across Canada, and in Europe, Asia and Australia. Among the consortium’s membership are an elite list of the most highly regarded colleges and universities in the world, innovative museums, research centers, foundations, and forward-thinking companies.

The New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of colleges, universities, and museums, today announced the recipients of the 2007 NMC Center of Excellence Award. The award, the highest honor bestowed by the NMC, recognizes demonstrated excellence and outstanding achievement in the application of technology to learning or creative expression.

Symbolized by a specially struck medallion suspended in a translucent obelisk, the Center of Excellence Award has been designed purposefully to make it distinct from other award or recognition programs. Colleges do not compete for the award, nor is it granted within predefined categories. The selection process is based on the MacArthur Awards, and like that program, the nominators and others involved in the selection process remain anonymous as a core principle of the program. They are chosen from organizations both within and outside the NMC, and represent a considerable diversity of knowledge.

Hello from Indianapolis! Here is one more 2007 NMC Summer Conference reminder to let you know of a few web related resources we are using this week, some of them just cooked up in the last few days.

Tag this Conference!

The New Media Consortium (NMC) has announced the 2007 Call to Membership, part of a global strategy to extend its work in stimulating new ideas, encouraging collaboration, and informing and influencing practice to new institutions and new audiences.

Today the New Media Consortium opened a survey aimed at drawing a picture of the current and planned activities and interests of educators involved in the virtual environment, Second Life.

Since March 2006 the NMC has been actively engaged in the frontier of virtual worlds with the establishment and expansion of its . This effort has been a natural extension of the research in previous reports from the NMC's Horizon Project.

To further our understanding of how educators are using Second Life as well as to better frame the demographics of this audience, we are conducting an online anonymous survey open now through May 25. If you are an educator (faculty, staff, student, adminsitrator) and have an active Second Life account, we appreciate your willingness to answer our 42 item survey available at:

http://tinyurl.com/2csr8v

As you are reading this, our new NMC site has been turned on as the primary web site for us at http://www.nmc.org and with that, NMC 2.0 is up and running! This has been a huge effort with a great deal of input starting back in June 2006 from NMC members, graphic design help from Tom Hapgood and Rachel Smith, programming and drupal expertise from The Longsight Group, support and data monitoring from the NMC staff, and a group of NMC Directors who provided some beta testing in March 2007.

The old site is now archive at http://archive.nmc.org and many of our historic URLs are all preserved and automatically redirected there, such as the 2007 Summer Conference site.