Tomorrow at MiT5
April 26, 2007 at 07:28 Come by MiT5 if you are in Boston. It's a truly amazing group of people coming together for this conference.
The podcast of the plenary is at http://cms.mit.edu/podcasts/MIT5/mit5-plenary2-collaboration.mp3
Links to all plenaries (podcasts and videos): http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/index.html
Friday, April 27
5:45-7:15
Bartos Theater
Media Lab (E15)
Plenary Conversation 2
Collaboration and Collective Intelligence
"Collective Intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds" have become central buzz phrases in recent discussions of networked culture. But what do they really mean? What do we know about the new forms of collaboration that is emerging as people work together across geographic distances online? Are we working, learning, socializing, creating, consuming, and playing in new ways as a result of the emergence of our participation in online communities? What have we learned over the past decade that may help us to design more powerful communities in the real world? What lessons can we carry from our Second Lives into our First?
Speakers
Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use focusing on children and youth's changing relationships to media and communications. She has been conducting ongoing research on kids' technoculture in Japan and the US, and is co-editor of Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. She is a research scientist at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and a visiting associate professor at Keio University in Japan.
Cory Ondrejka is the chief technology officer at Linden Lab where he leads the team developing Second Life. He also spearheaded the decision to allow users to retain the IP rights to their creations and helped craft Linden's virtual real estate policy. While an officer in the United States Navy, he worked at the National Security Agency and graduated from the Navy Nuclear Power School.
Trebor Scholz is assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo and research fellow at the Hochschule fuer Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich. He is founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity and has contributed essays to several books, journals, and periodicals and co-edited The Art of Free Cooperation forthcoming with Autonomedia (NYC).
Moderator:
Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the book The Future of Work. Malone has published over 75 articles, research papers, and book chapters and is an inventor with 11 patents.
[Trebor]
Axel Bruns wrote a summary of our plenary session yesterday:
We're now in the second plenary session at MiT5, which was opened by Tom Malone who began by introducing the concept of collective intelligence (and MIT is now starting a Center for Collective Intelligence). The first speaker is Trebor Scholz from the Institute for Distributed Creativity, and he notes that one of the key questions in participatory, collective environments is now that of labour - all the many activities performed by the users in such spaces can be described as a form of labour, but in the main such labour contributes particularly to the value of the spaces within which it takes place, not so much to the fortune of those performing that labour. This, Trebor says, is a further move towards the commercialisation of social life - the very few benefit from the work of the very many, in a classic capitalist move.
Some 40% of all online traffic is today created by some ten pages; some 12% of time spent online by Americans is spent on MySpace; this is further boosted by convergent devices which connect to such spaces even from social, mobile situations. At the same time, in the process users build friendships, share life experiences, gain fame, find dates and jobs - but their personal information is pressed into pre-defined patterns, their profiles are often owned by the proprietors of these spaces, and there is a strong lock-in to some of these lifecaching spaces: it is very difficult for users to leave without losing a great deal of their social network. There is a great need to make these power and property relations more transparent to Net users, and to fairly share the monetary value of the invisible labour contributed by users. This is a question of media literacy.
Cory Ondrejka, the Chief Technology Officer for Second Life, is the next speaker (and he also spearheaded the decision by Linden Labs to allow users to retain property in the creations they contribute to the environment). He begins by noting that Linden Labs itself is run on a radically distributed internal structure, and says that this has also influenced the design of Second Life itself. In particular, he notes the fact that Second Life is not a game - there is no ultimate goal, and no in-built conflict motivating user actions. In many ways, Second Life resembles a country (its game space is roughly the size of Singapore, it's in-game economy has a GDP of some US$60m monthly), but Cory is very adamant that Linden is not a government, but a corporation.
Cory suggests that the core difference between Second Life and the Web is that the Web remains fundamentally a solo experience, even in spite of its communicative features; Second Life, on the other hand, is very much a group environment which allows immediately for synchronous interaction between participating users. This also enables more effective user co-creation both of the in-game spaces and of the Second Life environment itself.
Last up is Mimi Ito. She focusses especially on the functioning of the collective imagination in the digital age; today, this is conducted often through the activation of media references in personalised and customised ways. Media has become the conduit through which we connect to a larger body of culture that is beyond the grasp of the individual. Rich media content is a vocabulary through which we communicate and share - relying on an abundance of media references as well as an abundance of media forms and formats. In Japan, Pokemon is a particularly salient example for this; it boosted the complexity of form and content of children's media beyond any level previously imaginable, and involves an intense exchange of information as well as physical media. While perhaps appearing mundane, it models learning which takes place in a group social setting, and demonstrates participation (and modes of participation) which are highly relevant in the participatory age.
Technorati : MiT5, Second Life
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Nick Montfort wrote a short piece on Grandtextauto
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2007/04/27/friday-at-mit5/
[Trebor]
Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures (4/27) podcast
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mitcms/podcast/~5/112851008/mit5-plenary4-remixing.mp3
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mitcms/podcast/~3/112752455/mit_5_copyright_fair_use_and_t.php
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mitcms/podcast/~5/112752457/mit5-plenary3-copyright.mp3
MIT 5: Summary Perspectives - recorded Apr. 29, 2007 - (1hr20min / 92.5MB)
Some MiT5 Slide Presentations
http://www.slideshare.net/tag/mit5
Interview with Henry Jenkins
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2235950045917177402&q=henry+jenkins
April 29, 2007
MIT 5: Learning through Remixing
Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers.
MIT 5: Learning through Remixing (1hr38min / 113.2M)
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_5_learning_through_remixin.php
Jean Burgess post on MiT5 (I hope there still be a chance to meet)
Somebody twittering the conference ("twittering")
http://twitter.com/LR
More reports:
http://blogenabyme.wordpress.com/2007/04/28/quick-takes-from-mit5/
http://justtv.wordpress.com/2007/04/28/mit5-day-2/
http://creativitymachine.net/2007/04/29/mit5-slides/
http://bciptf.org/blog/2007/04/28/mit5-creativity-ownership-and-collaboration-in-the-digital-age/
[Trebor]
[Trebor]
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