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Klagenfurt, Austria has no traditional public library.  But what they do have is an intriguing solution to  giving their citizens access to books.  By using near field communications and QR codes, the municipality will be linking residents to public domain works in appropriate locations.  An example given in Engadget‘s posting about this project puts The Killer at the police station.  The creators of this distributed library hope to include other media in even more locations – and to offer up the recipe for creating a similar “library” in your own town.

It’s certainly a unique concept, especially as e-readers take on ever more prominence in our lives – and libraries find themselves tossing out physical collections that only continue growing at an alarming pace.  I like it much better than on-demand library printing (it just seems wasteful)!

Cyberpunk Saves the Day

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Just as when we were on the cusp of cyberpunk and didn’t know it, I’m hoping now for another new breed of writers, people who can craft drive-by speculations that leave us gasping with surprise.

My love of all things 80s and 90s artsy/techie of course has bred in me a fascination with the ethos of the cyberpunk.  It doesn’t help that I’m also a Stephenson junkie and a Gibson supporter…  Paolo Bacigalupi’s “How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi” was a delightful find in the latest issue of Wired magazine.  (And it’s available to read for free online now, too.)

Perhaps not too surprising since the staff at Wired’s always been on the cyberpunk bandwagon, though.  Probably actually helping turn its tenets into our reality.

The View from Here

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“Audacity is easily written off as naïveté, as overshooting your resources or talents. And that’s a danger. […] But you can’t make the future without imagining what it might look like.”

And I think all of us in the field of instructional technology at least aim to walk the fine line between dreaming up a future for our faculty, staff and student clients…and overstepping the (sometimes scant) resources we have to help shape it.

Wired has pulled together 7 fantastic steps that they themselves employ for helping to predict what’s coming next. Ranging from “explore the willful inefficiency” to “look for deep design”, the list has lots to learn from – and lots to apply to our day to day. 20 years of experience can’t be too wrong, right?

Getting Gestural with TeleHuman

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“Communication breaks down even with a subtle little thing,” Vertegaal said. “When you think about preserving human communication, it’s more about what you leave out rather than what you add. With this system, we’re trying to leave out as little as possible.”

Roel Vertegaal of the Queen’s University Human Media Lab discusses the benefit of making remote communication more natural with the TeleHuman projection system.  The device allows for a 3D image to be projected at life size into an environment and further allows users to glean subtle information about a presenter that would have been lost by transmission in 2D.  While this device isn’t perfect (yet), the technology already has clear classroom implications.  Imagine sending yourself to any campus in the Commonwealth without going anywhere at all.  Certainly much less jarring for the learner than the alternate, “Big Brother” on TV approach.

Check out the video for a few previews of how the TeleHuman system works:

There’s more about the TeleHuman and its sister, BodiPod at Wired‘s site.

Elementary

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AT&T demoed something remarkable that it calls Watson – and made it available as an API for developers today.  To quote Engadget, since they were on-hand:

“One day AT&T hopes to make this a standard feature of its services, eliminating the language barrier once and for all.”

Learn more by reading “AT&T Translator app hands-on: smashing the language barrier” (video included).

I hope AT&T does both make this a standard feature and smash the language barrier, because this is the kind of sci fi wonderfulness that makes me excited for the future and glad to be in the field of instructional technology.  Some might say that eliminating the need to learn a language may diminish the nuanced understanding of other cultures that language skills unlock.  To the contrary, I think Watson pulls down the barriers that prevent many people for getting curious enough about other cultures to even want to learn the language.  Were more people able to connect human to human with a mitigating tool to bridge the distance between tongues, it would bring the world just that much closer together.  Watson, then, is a beautiful thing.

Very Inspiring (and Validating)

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What I love about this image above is what it’s actually depicting:  three game developers working together on a delightful new iOS title, Waking Mars, that their company, Tiger Style Games put out recently.  All without ever actually sharing an office space or any set of company resources.  

The workplace is changing dramatically and the fact that top-notch, critically acclaimed products can be created without ever actually sharing any physical meeting space is proof.  Having worked on several freelance projects with clients in multiple separate states, I know just how well this model works.  And continuing to work remotely with clients at 9 Penn State campuses in all corners of the western half of PA shows me daily just how well it can work.

(Wired)

Unexpected Classroom Inspiration

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I think there’s a lot to be gleaned from this dim sum focused travel guide for Hong Kong, especially with all the community-based, student storytelling going on across the Commonwealth. What better way to get to the heart of a place than through the stomachs of its residents? With so many food traditions in the ethnic enclaves of Pittsburgh in particular, I could see this being a boon for faculty hoping to get their students out amongst the local business people.

In particular, I really liked the added layer of history attached to the ritual of eating the food in question and the places that the citizens eat that food.  The writing is crisp and concise and imparts all of the information while weaving a story. The only way to achieve such great results is to have a thorough understanding of the background material so the subtle connections can be made. The tie-in with our Scholarly Storytelling workshop does not escape me here…

Another thing I really liked about this clip is that – despite being decidedly high budget – many of the effects and devices are entirely approachable. Making paper cutouts of letters and using stop motion animations are both very accessible to first time filmmakers and add a certain charm to the finished product that would be missing otherwise.

Encouraging Exploration

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Lauren had an idea the other evening.

Following the rush of activity that was the TLT Symposium this year, we met up for a drink with other equally exhausted-but-happy coworkers.  She ran this idea past me as she handed me a vodka tonic (always the best way to ply me) and I loved what I heard.  Basically, the concept was to share inspiring content – the sort of thing we each naturally gravitate towards while browsing between tasks – in a way that also connected the physical space we all work in to the online world.

Snewok_Welcome

What we came up with Snewokolis.  The site (a WordPress-based installation) is the home of what we termed the Snewoks, creatures of pure inspiration, creativity and curiosity who will curate the content.  Each posting or “Wok” highlights something that the human behind the avatar has deemed worth sharing.

Where this gets fun is in the sharing, though.  The posts will be tied to QR codes and one of each code will be printed out and hidden somewhere in the ETS areas of Rider Building.  The preference is for the code to be stashed somewhere that either adds meaning to the media artifact it links to or vice versa.

TrillAn example of how this could work is found in my avatar’s first posting.  My Snewok, Trill posted a music video that explores the concept of the creatures of inspiration that live in each of us (an apropos first posting, to be sure).  I stashed it around the side of an information kiosk that displays the latest news about projects in our unit and from other departments and institutions.  A bit of a play on the creativity coming from within to be put on display and also a link to the video nature of the object to be found.

We wanted to make it really easy to take part in this activity, too so we took active steps to ease the migration to the Snewok’s home.  Lauren put together a default avatar, Fedault as well as a PSD file with other options for his appearance, should anyone want to customize him.  We also opted to do basic QR codes on nothing more than regular office paper held up with tape because we want to make it simple to quickly share posts and to ensure that they are a non-permanent, ever-changing part of the office.  We also assembled a Migrate page of the Snewokolis site to get everyone up to speed quickly.

Lauren’s hope and my own is for this to grow legs really quickly and to be adopted by others in the building.  The more unique viewpoints that can shape the course this art project/game takes, the better as I’m sure there are lots of directions Snewokolis could be taken that we hadn’t even the remotest inkling of.

Visualizing Impact

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My team is a big fan of infographics, and who can blame us?  They make just about any topic more understandable and also serve as great expression of graphic design chops. Plus, they are just fun to look at. So we thought it might not be a terrible idea to turn one of our staid, numbers-heavy event wrap up reports into an infographic of our very own. The recent Spring 2012 Forum at Berks seemed like the prime candidate and – with the help of both Lauren and Carla – I turned this around in a little over a day of planning and tinkering in Illustrator and Photoshop:

MCSpring2012Forum_Infographic

I think there’s the potential for this to expand to cover even more Media Commons events as well as our semester reports and wrap ups.

New MC Location at Altoona

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With the help of Penn State Altoona’s CIO, Joanne Peca and Library Director, Bonnie Imler – as well as the wonderful Instructional Technology staff, Media Commons has become a part of the new Information Commons.

Located on the lower level of the Library, the Information Commons is a collaborative workspace for students to study, research and more.  With reconfigurable furniture, its own information desk and an open floorplan, the Information Commons is a popular destination for those looking to do serious work.

In the Fall semester, I met with Joanne and Bonnie to discuss the Knowledge Commons project at UP and the successes Media Commons has had at other campuses with Library partnerships.  All were in agreement that separating the studio and editing spaces was the best bet for increasing usage of both as well as ensuring ready access to the editing computers (which had previously been behind a locked door and are now available when the Library is open to anyone who stops by).   A former microforms room was identified as a great candidate space and the changeover happened before the start of Spring semester.

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I have to say, I’m extremely pleased with the results and excited to see how the Media Commons can continue to grow at Altoona’s Ivyside location – and beyond!