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A good friend of mine from my times at Hopkins High is currently working at the advertising agency M! - aka, modernitsa. She helps make ads for huge car company brands, like Hummer and Cadillac, and also has a soft side for shoes, doing Rockport and Converse ads. Sure, she and the M! crew very well may be sucking on the corporate nipple, but what the hell else is an advertising agency supposed to do? They do some work for non-profits, I guess.

Despite this, they have a pretty brilliant approach to self advertising: check out the 2.0 approach to leveraging the webs existing resources by visiting their site here:

http://www.modernista.com/7/index.php

This evening, Tim and I rode up to the Digital Media Commons’ Video and Performance Studio to check out two events: Enjoy Your Flight and Note Works. Enjoy your flight was a bizarre recreation of an airport environment, replete with video surveillance equipment, TSA employees, gates and waiting areas, as well as various disgruntled passengers. While in the security line and sitting in the gate areas we were being watched and questioned by various characters, including TSA employees, a man asking us to sign a petition in favor of the Protect America act - another man freaking out about having to wait in line. One interesting component is that attendees were asked to participate in various ways. For example, Tim was handed an envelope with an ear piece in it; funny to see him wearing it. The interesting thing, though is that one couldn’t really tell who was or wasn’t part of the recreation. Aside from the personas people put on, the whole event seemed like a strange psychological experiment. Normal people began acting in strange ways, when I sat down I asked the woman next to me if the seat was taken, and then picked up a magazine on it - pretending to look through it. People started asking where others were going, small talk broke out - people really seemed to believe that they really might be going somewhere. After about 30 minutes, a terrorist did appear, running out of the waiting area with security in pursuit.

Note Works was a pretty rad installation where participants could interact with and arrange icons to play different musical sounds, set intervals, tones, etc. I’m not sure it was as intuitive as the creators may have hoped, but my 10 minutes or so at the controls led me to create an interesting composition on E, C, A, and B. I wonder if they recorded this too?

Both of these projects were a part of the GROCS initiative, a Digital Media Commons program that funds student research that uses digital media in collaborative learning. Check out the flickr stream for more visuals, including ones of Tim being searched by TSA employees - sort of.

Here’s the latest presentation created by the University of Michigan OER team. Last week, I presented this slideshow in two sections of a UM undergraduate Sociology class. The goal was to explain the not only the history of open educational resources initiatives, but also to discuss the student-centric publication model we’re proposing for the University of Michigan called the dScribe model.

Much to my surprise, the students were quite excited to actually become dScribes - actually eager to help faculty prepare materials for publication on our forthcoming OER site.  Many said it would be a worthwhile experience to work alongside (even if it were asynchronous) their instructor and with the OER team to assemble course materials for publication.  Responding to a question about whether they would utilize resources generated by a school-wide OER initiative, many said it would allow them to “shop” for classes and also better plan out a curriculum.  When asked about the benefit of creating an open educational environment for people around the world to access, many agreed that it was a really meaningful endeavor.

The largest concern, however, revolved around two familiar arguments. First, that an OER initiative like this would simply give away a UM education: “Why would I or my parents pay 40,000 a year when I could just get it for free?” Second, posting resources online for anyone to access would simply provide classmates with one more reason not to attend class: “If everything is available online, no one would show up.”

I guess it’s refreshing to know that these were the two central concerns.  MIT OCW has been pretty successful at deflating these arguments, saying that MIT OCW is not an MIT education and that it is not meant to replace the classroom experience.  I did my best to present versions of these arguments and after finishing, most seemed somewhat convinced that they had the upper hand by being the students who would actually receive a diploma. And, the fact that class materials would not be ready for public view until the end of the semester - or after - meant that not showing up to class (or relying on previous semester’s OER material) would not be a substitute for the in class experience. Overall, these presentations and positive reactions provide our team with an eagerness to finish up the back end work of software development, learn from our pilot initiatives, and get this student-centric model scaled-up across the University.

For now, download or view the presentation here

A beautiful collection of photographs from this year’s Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year Competition.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007

Here’s a pretty great conservation idea from changethemargins.com

The premise:

• Narrower margin settings = more text/page = less paper used = fewer $$ spent (and more trees).

Check out GOOD magazine’s write up on it, here