De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies, lead by the rather wonderful Sue Thomas, a visionary digital narratives Professor, hosted another conference shindig this week focused – the Future of Creative Technologies. Quite a few big name academic speakers here, like Lev Manovich and Howard Rheingold.
Sadly, I found the debate this time just too academic and too technology focused rather than focusing on the aspirations and business opportunities of new technologies, which was a shame as the IOCT seminar in June on the future of social media was really quite visionary. Perhaps not for me – I was suprised that the delegates were almost entirely academics, and mainly from De Montfort itself thus not particularly great for networking.
A few take outs:
Content Workshop
Sue Thomas discussed her theories around ‘transliteracy’ – literacy across multiple channels, platforms and time scales beginning with Socrates who believed writing was an aid not to memory but to reminiscence. Transliteracy looks at how networks and individuals connect using different forms of media, but is also concerned with the ‘gaps’ between the networks where people are not connected to any specific groups. There is a role here perhaps for ‘amplified individuals’ (yeuch term…loudmouths perhaps?) to be allowed through the door to join the dots between groups, like old inter-tribe rituals.
Our attempts at drawing our own networks were hilariously messy and diverse – mine had arrows everywhere, linked by cities or ‘objects of interest’ as I believe all networks and groups of people are. We discussed that information supply isn’t as much a ‘data overload’ as a filter failure – we need guidance from authorative and trusted sources in our network.
This was taken up by Jim Hendler‘s talk on Web 3.0 – semantic search based around creating data sets and open APIs to allow collaboration, giving the example of a user-created wine recommendation list mixing up catalogues of wine with guidance. Or DVPedia - a mashup of Napster data on song and artist titles in a wiki format. In an era when more pictures are already uploaded to Flickr than all catalogued objects in all of the world’s museums, we are now creating an open archive of billions of cultural objects – but to be useful they need to be well catalogued (particularly through better meta-tagging) and openly available for re-use.
Howard Rheingold‘s presentation on the Social Media Classroom I think deserve study for another day or at least a homework class. He is developing an online classroom resource and teaching guide to enable teachers to teach participatory media literacy – which usually just happens after school. The pictures of a huge hall full of kids on laptop is awe-inspiring; sadly I think the reality given limited ICT budgets in British state schools means that chalk and learn teaching is likely to continue for some decades to come.
