NMC Projects

Horizon Project

As the centerpiece of NMC's Emerging Technologies Initiative, the Horizon Project charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative expression and produces the NMC’s annual Horizon Report.

The NMC’s Campus in Second Life

Launched under the banner of the Educational Gaming Initiative and with initial support from the MacArthur Foundation, the NMC Campus in Second Life has evolved into the largest educational presence in that virtual world, occupying the virtual equivalent of more than 500 acres. The campus is growing steadily as NMC member institutions add their efforts to ours in creating a state-of-the-art 3-D virtual laboratory for NMC member institutions and their faculty. The effort, which began in January 2006, has fostered a growing in-world community that numbers in the thousands, and supports an ongoing series of events, classes, demonstration projects, art exhibitions, learning experiences, and much much more. The entire history of the effort — and all the latest in current news and events — are chronicled on the blog site that chronicles our effort, the NMC Campus Observer.

Using a new web tool, we have created a Second Life web video Jukebox including more than 80 videos about Second Life, education, and artistic expression.

Pachyderm

The Pachyderm Project is a partnership led by The New Media Consortium and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), that received initial funding form the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Since 2003, the project has brought software development teams and digital library experts from NMC universities and museums together to create and refine Pachyderm, an open source authoring environment for creators of web-based and multimedia learning experiences who have deep content expertise, but few technical skills.

Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project for Texas Art Museums

The Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project for Texas Art Museums is a systemic effort to increase the capacity of museums across Texas to use new media to tell compelling stories about art and their collections. The project has introduced Texas museum professionals to Pachyderm and provided considerable training in the software and concepts of digital Storytelling. The project, which is now launched a second pashe, continues to work with Texas museums to help them learn to tell media-rich stories related to their collections and exhibitions on the Internet or in the museum. The learnings from this project inform the national and international efforts of many organizations in the museum sector committed to similar goals and outcomes.

MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Project

The MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning explored the intersection of digital media and learning from the perspectives of experts, visionaries, and thought leaders chosen from across the globe. The working hypothesis of the effort was that digital media had advanced significantly in recent years, enabling new forms of knowledge production, social networking, communication, and play. Through the use of such media, young people are engaged in an unprecedented exploration of language, games, social interaction, and self-directed education that can be used to support learning.