Ponderance

The NMC (New Media Consortium) Online Conference on The Impact of Digital Media takes place across the next two days. From the look of the abstracts, the conference has a number of great papers as well as keynotes by two outstanding digital media thinkers, Howard Rheingold and danah boyd (the full conference programme is here). I'm giving what they're calling a poster presentation -- which is really uploading slides and a paper and allowing conference participants to make comments asynchronously, as opposed to the live video-chat full papers. My presentation is called "Student Podcasting and Participatory Pedagogies", with this abstract:

In the past two years podcasting has found a home in university teaching and learning but has primarily replicated the top-down delivery of lectures in the form of "coursecasts" or "profcasts." However, this poster will explore the more dynamic and creative possibilities unleashed when students create and distribute their own podcasts as part of the learning experience. Tama Leaver will extrapolate from an honours course entitled iGeneration in which students created podcasts as their major assignments and argue that student podcasting combines the best attributes of social software and pedagogical practice to enhance student engagement in participatory culture and vastly improve digital literacy.

The paper is quite similar to the iPodium paper I gave at AoIR 7.0 last month and I think after the discussions during this conference it'll be time to finally write up the full version and get the paper published.

I'm quite excited about being involved in a fully online conference and being able to chat to some really interesting and innovative people, but there is one minor hitch: since I'm in a GMT+8 timezone, "Tuesday's" live events occur between 12am and 6.30am Wednesday morning my time, while "Wednesday's" events occur between 11pm Wednesday and 5am Thursday. Thankfully, there is a recorded archive of each paper after it's given, but I would really like the chance to interact as much as possible. I have the feeling I'll make in until 2am tonight -- until the end of Howard Rheingold's session -- and then maybe I'll get up before 4am Thursday morning and hear danah boyd's keynote on "Networked Publics: Youth Socialization on MySpace New".

The only downside to the conference is that it's a paid event, so the exciting sessions are only open to conference participants.

Perhaps I should have gotten more organised and participated in the NMC symposium that ran inside Second Life, held in the lead up to the full conference. Recordings of all the Second Life events are available and can be found here. For more on the experience of the Second Life events, check out Christy Dena's account of her in-world talk (and check out the podcast of her talk, too).

Okay, it's almost midnight (and thus almost 9am in California) so I'm off to log into the conference ...

Update:

Howard Rheingold's keynote "The Pedagogy of Civic Participation" is currently underway, but for those not logged into the conference, Howard gave the talk in the Second Life symposium the other day and you can hear the podcast here. [Via Smartmobs]

[Tags: nmc | digitalmedia | conference | danahboyd | howardrheingold | studentpodcasting | pedagogy]