User Services Conference 2011

I attended my first – and last, as it’s now defunct – User Services Conference today with my Media Commons partner in crime (if you define crime as massive caffeine consumption at the complementary coffee bar) Hannah Inzko.  Held at the Penn Stater, the event was a chance for those who support the end users of PSU’s technology resources to come together and discuss how services are offered and how offerings can be improved.  We broke in to teams to discuss topics like “keeping current with new technologies” and “doing more with fewer resources” after a panel presentation on what support means.  It was very back to basics and a good way to spend a rainy (and then sunny) Monday.  Big thanks to Hannah for talking me into tagging along!

Evolution of Social AI

io9 asks the question “What can science fiction tell us about the future of social media?” by first defining social media as any communication that can be easily repurposed and shared without being tethered or hindered by a static form.  In that way, the entirety of our online content is social.  This realization serves to underline just how dramatically vast the body of this mostly un-studied cultural force really is.

As part of a panel at SXSW, futurists, bloggers and authors from the world of Science Fiction were brought together to discuss what lessons our stories of the coming years can teach us.  A common thread throughout the conversation was the unintended establishment of a permanently stored record of an increasingly blurred set of identities for each individual.  By contributing to a collective dialogue through reposting, commenting, sharing, etc we are each always leaving a record of ourselves in an internet overmind – no matter what facet of ourselves is operating at that time of the day.  Where do we go when the lines between personal and professional, work and family, home and afield, student and teacher blur to indistinction?  And how do we reconcile the statements made on and off the clock when they all aggregate in a single feed?

[…] citizens of this society […] have taken back user control by inventing new internal organs which are constantly negotiating privacy settings in every social situation.

– article author, Annalee Newitz discusses The Quantum Thief

The quote above sounds far-fetched but you could switch “organ” out for “context-aware mobile device” and arrive at our current point in time.  Will we develop even more ways of dealing with the need to continually censor and compartmentalize as more and more of our lives is permanently stored and readily accessible?   Will it matter to the next generation?  Already, I care very little about what others know of me and share to the point of consternating my significant other on a regular basis.  Will this be the new normal for society when the newly minted adults that are currently high school and college students take the reigns of a world that has always been social?

DML Wrap Up: Stuck in DC

The DML conference wrapped up yesterday, but so did my in-room internet so I had planned on writing up my final thoughts once I arrived back home in State College.  However, I find myself now writing them up at a new Hilton here in DC.  More on that in a moment…

Day three of the conference was really a winding down sort of affair.  In talking with Shivaani Selvaraj from Penn State Harrisburg, I learned there was at least one relatively interactive session – the HTML5 workshop she attended that was put on by the Mozilla foundation.  Overall, though, it seemed that the last day of the conference was dedicated to bringing together ideas discussed throughout and doling out the appropriate thank yous to everyone who helped make it happen.

The closing keynote did offer some interesting tidbits.  Presented by Muki Hansteen-Izora, most recently of Intel’s health technology wing, the session focused on ways that technology solutions can be designed to benefit human communities and their endeavors.  From work done in the early 90s with getting inner city youth online to his recent work finding ways to use algorithms to improve the lives of aging people in their own homes, Muki embodies a way of using technology and design to give back to humanity at large.

One thing that intrigued me from the wrap up keynote was the idea of turning a resource for a specific group into a larger communal center.  Would it be possible to make the Media Commons at some campuses a space that not just students could use but also disadvantaged individuals from the local fabric?  How would something like that work, if it’s even doable?

Unfortunately, an item that did not follow me back from Long Beach was the weather.  Instead of flying in to State College tonight from Dulles, I found myself delayed, then circling the airport, then returning to Washington and suddenly attempting to find a hotel last minute and a shuttle to take me there.  I suppose it’s better than taking a prop plane (or cab) into a sudden March blizzard but I might feel a little less exhausted if I didn’t get up at 4:00 am PST before this happened!

DML Conference Day Two

The first full day of conferencing at DML 2011 kicked off today in Long Beach and it certainly gave off a much more organized air than yesterday’s upside down workshop and keynote affair. I began my day in the Novel Content track with a panel discussion of the ways in which new modes of learning are being explored at several different levels from K-12 in suburban Wisconsin to textbook publishing to higher education.  Ideas of literacy were the primary focus, chiefly the concept of integrating “knowledgeable others” into the roster of accepted classroom information sources. Of particular interest to ETS was a staggering bit of information from the K-12 realm where a new game design course garnered enough buy-in from 9th through 12th graders to merit a full eight sections during its first year.  The EGC will certainly have a large pool of interested students in the coming years if this is a national trend.

Next was a panel on living a Networked Public Life curated by danah boyd.  I was probably the most starstruck at this session and for good reason.  danah brought together researchers who were discovering ideas of persona, celebrity, access and agency from diverse groups like Bay area tech professionals, Appalachian Queer youth, Australian aborigines and Indian mobile phone users.  My big take away from this session actually came from the work of Mary Gray with LGBT young people in rural environments, though peripherally.  I realized that there were lessons to be learned that are directly applicable to how I – and the Media Commons – interfaces with rural campuses in western PA.  Specifically, how we approach and assume values imposed by urban-oriented media and media creation.  Having myself grown up in a very rural place, I do know that it’s highly important to many of these communities to be identified as local and to be part of the familiar as opposed to be an outsider or anonymous.  It will certainly be a point to remember going forward with building MC communities at our less city-centric locations.

The day rounded out with a session on Emerging Platforms that covered the OLPC efforts in the West Bank, Twitter use in Philadelphia area elementary schools, inner city learning initiatives in San Francisco and New York and research from ETS’s own Heather Hughes.  Later, I made my way to the plenary panel which prompted a feisty backchannel discussion about pop culture in education, privilege in creating learning ecosystems and licensing for music from Requiem for a Dream.

If you are starting to gather that DML is a really varied (and vaguely disjointed) conference, you are headed in the right direction with your assessment.