Keeping Scholarship Relevant

Scholarship in academe is the synthesis of a process and a medium. The process challenges thinkers to develop new ideas and to confirm the validity and usefulness of those ideas through affirmation and critique by others who seriously study and work within the field from which those ideas emerge. The medium for this historical effort has been the humble technology of cellulose whose chemical and structural stability and social adaptability have kept ideas alive through centuries and millennia but whose capacity allows but a small fraction of human forms of expression and recording. Thought is limited by its medium of expression. Can scholarship remain current and relevant in the next century by failing to encourage the inclusion of the many 21st century forms of audio, animation, video, virtual reality, electronic remote control and interaction?

The effort to employ and sustain the full range of human thought and expression in pursuit of academic scholarship has been mixed. Problems with such publishing have been chronicled in The State of the Art in Interactive Multimedia Journals for Academia (2000). It has been bittersweet to see the demise of IMEJ of Computer-Enhanced Learning (2006)and the birth of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, a research initiative of USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy.

Deep infrastructure problems remain to be solved. One problem is the tiny fraction of scholars who can do the equivalent of read and write in these other media at even the most elemental levels. Another is the absence of rewards for completing the academic training that would address this. A third problem that contributes greatly to the first is the absence of digital tools of much greater simplicity that would enable the more fully expressive multimedia works to be created by a larger number of scholars. What efforts are being made to rescue academe from the age of the digital dinosaurs? Which institutions are leaders in this effort? Can digital dinosaurs effectively teach the digital natives of 21st century classrooms? See John Seely Brown's keynote thoughts on these topics.

Sophie - Simplifying Multimedia Book Design

Multimedia designs have strained centuries of tradition in telling archiveable stories to the breaking point, from scholarly works to fiction. Yet like a chick pecking its way out of the shell, multimedia composition itself struggles for an easier route and for recognition of its right to existence. Monaghan's article in Chronicles of Higher Education (April 28, 2006, p. A41) reviews not only many of these struggles in higher education, but points to a new software application that promises to greatly simplify the composition challenge of assembling the multimedia work.

Titles are confusing right now as fourthworld.com has also used the same name for a similar product, but will be changing its name to something else. The Institute for the Future of the Book's new version, Sophie 2.0, which accents multimedia design is due, according to a recent email, in May, 2006.

Explanation of the goals of the Sophie project provide a good read, along with review of Sophie's predecessor history. Sophie is a product of the Institute for the Future of the Book http://www.annenberg.edu/futureofthebook/, a USC Institute.

To better understand what Sophie may become, it is helpful to look at TK3, which appears to be the commercial forerunner of the in-development open source and free application coming this summer. Viriginia Kuhn's review of TK3 is exceptionally detailed and thoughtful.

Online Conferences-Blogging Takes a Turn

The idea of online conferences has been exploding. Googling "online conferences" produced more than 181,000 hits on 4/13/2006. Some blogging only conferences have recently been spotted. Explore the blogcon links to them below, then ponder the strengths, weaknesses and questions this raises.
http://www.globalprblogweek.com/about/ September 19-23, 2005
http://www.higheredblogcon.com/index.php/about/ April 3-28, 2006

The second blogcon built on the ideas of the first, spreading out topic themes over a longer period of time. Nice. With podcasting now capable of encapsulating any media, the real challenge is to teach the necessary recording and composing skills to build the online presentations. That can easily be a series of online screen movies. Online conferences can capture much of the immediacy and interaction of face-to-face conferences. Their slightly slower pace of many of the online formats could also be seen as an advantage for stimulating deeper reflection. Online format also creates a kind of instant archive which is so expensive to reproduce with live events. Yet nothing online matches the "full bandwidth" of face-to-face interaction in a crowded audience of people during question and response time. This full-bandwidth communication makes it harder to misinterpret a speaker's tone and emotion. Physically relocating removes so many distractions to focusing on new ideas, but the physical return after the conference often leaves that focus behind, failing to create the change that was the intent of the conference.

What about new directions? Face-to-face and online conferences as unique species are easy to find. Where are the hybrid entities, conferences that attempt to combine the best of both? Will there be parallel play or will there be cross-over with live audiences mixing in with the online audience? We think of such events as being more powerful the more global they become, but what about the opposite, the opportunity for a company or an institution to have a hybrid conference day, like a required assembly, where everyone either is either presenter or audience for a day, and visible either live or online to all members of the hybrid audience?

The potential of hypbrid events for rich interplay of multiple media is immense.

Some are building open source tools to make online conferencing free.

http://dowire.org/wiki/Open_source_tools_for_online_conferences

Add microphone -iPod as Media Mixer

Tama Leaver's posting provides a spring overview of the 3 contenders for high quality audio recording to the video iPod from Belkin, Griffin and ExtremeMac.
http://ponderance.blogspot.com/2006/03/5g-video-ipod-microphones-are-almost.html

Promised for months, the litany is still "soon". But assume its true and consider. The video ipod plays audio, video, and stills, plus text and a variety of podcasts, but that's all about playback. The microphone input, professional quality no less, takes the iPod in a whole new direction, as the grabber of original data. Every cell phone has a camera, why not make that next? But the point is that the iPod is a premiere example of a multimedia (unimedia) product. Great versatility with great quality.

Let's hope those microphones become real products soon.