Dynamic Knowledge Initiative
How can technology drive the formation of new knowledge, expand dialog, and fuel the exchange of ideas?
At the center of this initiative are the NMC's values of collaboration and community, and the activities within it cut across the full scope of the NMC's efforts. The Dynamic Knowledge Initiative (DKI) began several years ago with an exploration of social computing and the tools that could support it, and was greatly informed by the work of Douglas Engelbart. Early efforts included extensive literature reviews on topics like learning object and visual literacy, and the NMC's first forays into online meetings. The DKI is the impetus behind the NMC Series of Online Conferences and Virtual Symposia, as well as the extensive online social networking tools that are at the center of the NMC's website and its growing community in the virtual world of Second Life.
- Focus on: collaboration and ways to create new knowledge
- Stimulate: effective use of social tools in support of knowledge generation and sharing
Convene
people around ideas
- NMC Series of Online Conferences
- NMC Campus Teachers Buzz (Second Life)
- Events and Symposia in Second Life (ongoing)
- Online Conference on Social Computing (Nov 2004)
Catalyze
dialog and new ideas
- MacArthur Series on Digital Media & Learning
- NMC Campus in Second Life
- Social networking focus to website
- Town Meetings at conferences
- New Scholarship Initiative
- NMC Series of Online Conferences
- New focus area initiatives
Build Community
engage people
- Marcus Digital Arts Education Project
- Second Life communities (Teachers’ Buzz, Studio NMC, arts community)
- NMC Flickr streams (NMC Photos, NMC Virtual Worlds, 2006 Summer Conference)
- NMC blogs & wikis
- Collaborations with ELI and ECAR
- Forums on NMC website
- Social networking tools for NMC projects
Contribute
produce things
- Volumes in MacArthur Series on Digital Media & Learning
- Folksonomic approach to NMC website
- NMC blogs (NMC Campus Observer)
- Project wikis (Horizon, NMC Campus, NMCpedia)
- NMC Series of Online Conferences (Archive)
- Discussion-based publications (Maximizing Campus Impact)
- Topical literature reviews
The content below is related to this initiative and comes from various places across the NMC web site. Items are listed in reverse chronological order.
Dynamic Knowledge Initiative
What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media
Posted June 23rd, 2008 by Alan Levine
Closing Keynote, 2008 NMC Summer Conference, Princeton University
Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
New media technologies make it easy for us to circulate, appropriate, transform, and recirculate media content on an unprecedented scale. It is part of the mythology of MIT that young people learn to become engineers by taking apart household gadgets and putting them back together again. Can we say the same thing about contemporary artists and humanists — that they learn by breaking down and remixing elements of their own culture? We falsify the creative process when we teach young people that great art comes from single and isolated intellects rather than emerging from the creative engagement with and appropriation from older cultural traditions.
NMC@15
Posted June 23rd, 2008 by Alan Levine
In celebration of the 15th anniversary of the NMC, we asked our members to share via flickr a collection of creative photos that somehow represented the number 15 and we also solicited their photos of NMC memories. Combining these with ones from the NMC's own vast archive, we commissioned this video that was shared at the opening of the conference.
The soundtrack was from the performance of NMC members who participate in the Rock Hall Jam at the 2006 NMC Summer Conference in Cleveland-- sit back and enjoy the show!
Get Flash to see this player.
La Historia del NMC Campus en Second Life
Posted December 10th, 2007 by Alan LevineOur video on NMC and Second Life, NMC Campus: Seriously Engaging continues to be one of the most requested media items viewed on our web site. While it has been close to 2 years since we published this video, it is viewed in recently more than 700 times per month, and this does not even count where it is accessed on other sites such as YouTube, blip.tv, and Google Video. But one of the more fascinating uses of the video is on >dotSUB, a web site where visitors can annotate the movie with translations of its captions into more than 100 other languages.
What We Talk About When We Tag About Art
Posted September 28th, 2007 by NMCOpening Plenary for the 2007 NMC Pachyderm Conference
Symposium on Creativity Photo Stream
Posted August 30th, 2007 by Alan LevineDuring the August 12-18 NMC Symposium on Creativity in Second Life we asked participants to share any of their event photos stored in flickr by marking them wit the tag slcreativity.
We had a large amount of cooperation, as there are more than 1000 phots tagged with slcreativity on flickr . In celebration, we used some free software and those images to generate a series of photomosaics- taking one photo from the collection
we can recast it as a mosaic made of hundreds of thumbnails of all the images:
NMC Second Life Web Video Jukebox
Posted July 27th, 2007 by Alan LevineThis NMC Second Life video "jukebox" uses a new web tool called vodpod to assemble a dynamic collection of related videos:
2007 Summer Conference- Tags, Media, Links...
Posted July 12th, 2007 by NMCThe 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.
Participate in Horizon Project 2008 Simply By Tagging
Posted July 3rd, 2007 by NMCThe process and effort on the 2007 Horizon Report is archived on the Horizon Wiki. Our research and resource sharing among thhe Advisory Board was greatly enhanced this year by active use of social bookmarking via the del.icio.us web service, and the resources tracked there became very valuable on the writing of the final report.
Adding a new resource takes less than a minute by anyone actively browsing the web, simply using the del.icio.us browser tools and tagging resources with our hz07 tag - the collection is available at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07 and is also collected here in the NMC web site via our RSS aggregation tools
And people continue to add to the collection.
Materials from Directors Meeting: An Experiment in Dynamic Knowledge
Posted March 24th, 2007 by Alan LevineAs a small example of how the new NMC 2.0 web site enables an environment of dynamic Knowledge, we posted individual content pieces that represent media collected at the 2007 NMC Directors Meeting in Denver. Some of these are podcast media, some are page content types.
By tagging each content piece on our site as 2007 Directors meeting, we create a single web address that can provide this information together: http://www.nmc.org/20/keyword/2007-directors-meeting
NMC 2.0: The Content Is You
Posted November 8th, 2006 by NMCAt the 2006 NMC Fall Regional Conference in San Antonio, Alan Levine (NMC) and Tom Hapgood (University of Arkansas) provided an overview of the types of features and functionality under consideration for the new web site for NMC. The theme was on very dynamic content, tagging, user generated content. Disciussion with the audience was meant to solicit ideas that would fow into the development process.
The slides from the presentation are available via Slideshare.net , a great way to distribute PowerPoint authored presentations in web friendly Flash format.
Other information from the presentation, include all referenced web sites, is available at:http://www.nmc.org/nmcpedia/Content_Is_You_Links
