Conferences

Register by January 31 and receive a $100 discount. Hotel discount available until March 31.

The 2013 Sandbox Summit@MIT will delve into the ways imagination shapes ideas both in and out of the digital world. From a simple line drawing to conceptualizing in the fourth dimension, the way content is envisioned, presented, and received affects the way kids play, learn, and communicate.

Is it a product or a pixel that launches creative thinking? Does a virtual space have the same impact as a physical place? Can imagination be collaborative?

Register today.

MIT sponsors: The Education Arcade and Comparative Media Studies.

Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013 (evaluations begin in November). Please see the end of this call for papers for submission instructions.

The distinction between public and private -- where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested -- says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers. While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice. MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific "texts" dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them. It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.

Read the full call for papers…

Futures of Entertainment is an annual event exploring the current state and future of media properties, brands, and audiences. This year's event, Nov. 9-10 at MIT, will look at how media producers and audiences are relating to one another in new ways in a spreadable media landscape.

Register at the FOE website.

On June 17-19, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and MIT's Center for Civic Media will host the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: "The Story and the Algorithm". The conference is the leading gathering of media innovators shaping the future of news and information, and winners of the first Knight News Challenge of 2012, on networks, will be announced during the conference.

The MIT Center for Civic Media was the Knight News Challenge's first large grant recipient, allowing the Center to partner with Knight Foundation in its core mission to foster informed and engaged communities.

We're excited to again co-host ROFLCon, the home of all meme-etic lolz on the Internets.

The mobile revolution has not only changed the tools of play; it's changed the rules.

From toddlers to tweens to twenty-somethings, life is an ebook, ready to upload. Kids can—and do—play, connect, and communicate 24/7. The kind of device they own is secondary; a keyboard and fingers are really all they need. The rest is just i-candy.

Sandbox Summit will make sense of what this real-time technology is teaching our kids. And what their usage is teaching us. Come hear the latest research, touch the newest devices, and discover what happens after Gen Z.

Presented by the MIT Education Arcade and Comparative Media Studies

Check www.sandboxsummit.org soon for more information.

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called "a ceaseless spectacle of transition? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence.

For this seventh Media in Transition conference we want to focus directly on our core topic – the experience of transition. Our first conference in 1999 considered this subject, of course. But that was before Facebook, iPhones, BitTorrent, IPTV and many other changes. More...

As technology fuels an increasing number of products and places where kids play and learn, it is crucial that we design digital media to challenge and engage. Sandbox Summit presents a roster of innovators who are constantly raising the bar to ensure that today's kids become key players in the 21st century.

Our Center for Future Civic Media is a proud member of the local host committee for the National Conference for Media Reform (April 8-10, here in Boston). We'll be staffing a table if you'd like to hang with us.

More about the conference:

The National Conference for Media Reform is the biggest and best conference devoted to media, technology and democracy. Thousands of activists, media makers, educators, journalists, policymakers and people from across the country are coming to Boston for the fifth NCMR on April 8-10, 2011.

Together we will explore the future of journalism and public media, consider how technology is changing the world, look at the policies and politics shaping our media, and discuss strategies to build the movement for better media.

Get ready for three days of strategizing, networking, sharing skills, swapping information and inspiring one another in workshops, panels, caucuses, keynote speeches, meetings and parties. You won't want to miss this one-of-a-kind event dedicated to better media, technology and democracy.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and MIT's Center for Future Civic Media will host the Future of News and Civic Media Conference. The conference brings together past and present Knight News Challenge winners, media innovators, and community leaders – all working together to use new technologies to shape the future of news and civic media.

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research? Hosted by HyperStudio. More details about the conference at the HyperStudio website.

Presented by The Education Arcade.

First there were blocks. Then there was LEGO. Now there are apps. Kids today move seamlessly through multiple dimensions in their pursuit of fun. Today's tech play will all-too-soon become tomorrow's traditional play. What impact do emerging media platforms have on how play evolves? What role do young players have in shaping their playthings? Can a Wii teach playground rules? Is an ebook a phonics friend or foe? Is an avatar real? Come hear what the innovators in children's media, books, toys, virtual worlds, and education predict are the new playrooms for 21st century literacy. Step into the revolutionary world of kids' play. And get a grip on the future of fun.

About the Sandbox Summit: "The goal of Sandbox Summit is to ensure that the next generation of players becomes active innovators rather than passive consumers of technology. Through high-energy panels, hands-on demonstrations, and thought-provoking discussions with industry leaders, journalists, analysts, and educators, Sandbox Summit brings an added dimension to conversations and conference tables."

Comparative Media Studies Project New Media Literacies will host a one-day conference at MIT, Building 6-120, from 8:30 am to 5 pm on Saturday May 2, 2009. The $35.00 registration fee includes a choice of 4 out of 14 workshops, 2 presentations, and breakfast and lunch. Registration is available online at www.newmedialiteracies.org, and must be submitted by Friday 4/29.

Summary of conference: At Learning in a Participatory Culture, we will share our new web-based learning environment, the Learning Library, and host a series of conversations and workshops about the integration and implementation of the new media literacies across disciplines. Workshops include "The Complexities of Copyright: Shepard Fairey v. the AP," "Mapping in Participatory Culture: Boundaries," "Using Wikipedia in the Classroom," "21st Century Assessment," and more. Henry Jenkins' closing remarks will address the future of NML and participatory democracy.

Panelists at this conference will include members of the NML team, educators who have been working with NML materials in the field, and educational researchers. The conference is designed to engage anyone with an interest in the future of education, especially high school teachers and afterschool coordinators. The format itself will be participatory - we hope that attendees will join the conversation, and leave the conference equipped with new ideas and strategies.

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media.Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space.

Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts. Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes.

His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore's Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace. What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private? We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers, writers and visual artists on these broad themes.  Potential topics include:

• The digital archive
• The future of libraries and museums
• The past and future of the book
• Mobile media
• Historical systems of communication
• Media in the developing world
• Social networks
• Mapping media flows
• Approaches to media history
• Education and the changing media environment
• New forms of storytelling and expression
• Location-based entertainment
• Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
• New modes of circulation and distribution
• The transformation of television -- from broadcast to download
• Cosmopolitanism backlashes against media change
• Virtual worlds and digital tourism
• The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital   transformation?
• The fate of reading

Futures of Entertainment is organized around a "talk-show" style model, with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. Over the last two years this produced great, thorough treatments of the subject matter, getting industry and academic speakers together but avoiding product pitches.

This year's conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the Consortium's new projects as we move towards an increasingly global understanding of media convergence and content flows. Topics for this year's panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia, franchising, digital extensions and world building, comics, convergence and commerce, social media and spreadability, as well as renewed discussion about how and why to measure audience value.

Head over to the program page to see what we'll be discussing this year.

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Of course, the idea that artists build on earlier traditions or that new texts speak to and about earlier texts is scarcely a new idea. This fifth Media in Transition conference aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices.

For 50 years broadcast media have played a powerful role in shaping political culture and mediating citizen engagement in the democratic process. Now a participatory culture is putting the tools of media creation and critique in the hands of citizens themselves. We invite you to MIT—to explore the means, the message, and the meaning of the post-midterm, pre-presidential YouTube moment.

More details...

As advertisers look for new ways to engage audiences, content creators search for new audiences, and audiences quest for new ways to connect with culture, the nature of what counts as "entertainment" is rapidly changing. We are seeing the blurring of aesthetic and technological distinctions between media platforms, of "advertising" and "content" and of "creator" and "consumer." Futures of Entertainment brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture. The conference will consider developments such as user-generated content, transmedia storytelling, the rise of mobile media and the emergence of social networking. Speakers include: Chris Anderson (The Long Tail), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Michael Lebowitz (Big Spaceship), Paul Levitz (DC Comics), Diane Nelson (Warner Bros. Fan Relations), and Robert Tercek (Multimedia Networks). Co-sponsor: Convergence Culture Consortium.

This event is open to the public. Please register online.

Some say storytelling is at the heart of social life and personal identity. It is common today to speak of political candidates' "competing narratives," or of a group or culture's need to invent "a new narrative" for changing times. Stories are embedded in our commercials and our newscasts. Ancient narratives of humiliation and revenge are said to drive the lives of millions. New and emerging technologies have given global reach to stories old and new.

This fourth Media in Transition conference explores storytelling as a cultural practice, a social and political activity as well as an art form.

We want to talk about why some stories last, how they migrate across media forms within their own societies as well as other cultures and historical eras. We hope to encourage speculation about the ways in which stories are deployed in periods of media in transition, and about the way some stories easily inhabit different media simultaneously while other stories seem less adaptable.

We aim to stimulate a conversation among scholars, journalists and media professionals who may often speak only to their own tribal groups.

Terms such as “globalization” and “convergence” increasingly dominate discussions of our media environment, yet their meanings remain vague and context specific. Many factors make it difficult to make broad statements about these trends: the uneven flow of cultural products across national borders; the still nascent nature of the new media environment; unpredictable patterns of use and meaning among media consumers; diverse national histories of cultural exchange or isolation; and an unstable business climate which alternately encourages and discourages innovation and entrepreneurship.

Many core issues remain to be explored: Will globalization reduce or expand the world’s cultural diversity? Will new technologies empower international media makers to enter the American marketplace or leave them more exposed than ever before to U.S. cultural exports? How do we reconcile the competing forces of media convergence and media fragmentation that are shaping the current communications infrastructure? What patterns can we discern among convergent content and audiences across media forms and international borders? What are the implications of media convergence not only at the corporate level, but also at the grassroots level where users are in control of content, context, and flow?

In 1999, MIT hosted the first Media in Transition conference , bringing together an international array of scholars from many different disciplines to examine the process and consequences of media change. In 2002, we invite you back to MIT for the second Media in Transition conference. As in the first conference, we encourage reflection across disciplinary boundaries, and among theorists and practitioners—a citizenly discourse makes core ideas accessible to a broad public.

This second conference will focus on North American, European and Asian experiences, and will provide a platform for a historically and culturally comparative analysis of our media past, present and future. As in the first Media in Transition conference, presentations and multi-media demonstrations will be framed by plenary “conversations” in which distinguished panelists will speak briefly and then participate in extended dialogue with the audience.

Themes include:

• Changing peripheries and centers;
• World music—world media;
• News and information in the digital age;
• The Internet, policy and popular culture;
• Transnational political activism;
• Cultural disorder: regional censorship and transnational media;
• Unofficial cultures and cultures of resistance;
• Cultural authority/autonomy/markets;
• Historical precedents/precursors;
• Global media flows, local media meanings;
• Intellectual property: constructions, enforcements, implications;
• Cyber citizenry and the global public sphere;
• Digital culture: language and infrastructure;
• Convergence and fragmentation;
• Public service vs. the marketplace: traditions, histories and futures;
• Building a global base for local media production;
• Global fusion and cultural hybridity;
• “The Third Culture”—identity in an age of dislocation;
• The globalization of the media audience: re-examining “the global village”;
• The transformation of television;
• Narrative forms and cultural change.

This conference is designed to showcase the innovative work of classroom teachers in developing new pedagogical practices in response to the potentials of new media: the Internet, the web, CD Roms, digital photography, digital sound recording technologies, video recorders, streaming video and audio. It is very important to us that this be a conference where teachers can talk to each other about the changes that are taking place in their professional environment and where some "best practices" are shared with a larger community. To achieve this the conference is structured to include several breakout sessions where participants can interact with each other and the panelists around specific issues.

Issues to be addressed:

(1) How are students using the new media outside of school?

(2) What is being done to improve the level of support and professional development for teachers using new media in their classrooms?

(3) How may digital media enhance teaching of traditional subjects in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences?

(4) How can we mobilize student's creativity as media makers?

(5) How do we make sure all students have access to digital resources?

(6) What relationship exists between media literacy training and the wired classroom?

(7) How are creative teachers using digital resources to enhance, rather than replace, traditional pedagogy?

(8) What decisions are schools making which impact students' abilities to access and express themselves through digital media?

(9) How do teachers assess the quality of resources available to them on-line?

(10) How do educators evaluate digital media projects produced by their students?

(11) What kinds of collective efforts are needed to enhance the range of digital media collections available to teachers?

Part of an ongoing series of events focused on creativity in the digital age, the MIT Conference on Digital Cinema brings together filmmakers, critics, and media industry leaders to explore the nature of digital cinema and its cultural significance. The conference will combine screenings of significant works in digital cinema with panel discussions centered on such issues as the political consequence of broadening media access, the shifting status of amateur filmmaking, the aesthetics of this emerging media form, the economics of digital film production and distribution, the historical antecedents of digital cinema, and the ways in which digital cinema may influence our media future.

The MIT Conference on Digital Cinema is sponsored by ALWAYSi.com, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, and the MIT Communications Forum.

The computer and video game industry has now completed its first quarter century and has become a strong and vibrant force within the American entertainment industry. There is no question that interactive games are a medium which can already celebrate significant accomplishments and social and cultural contributions. The most exciting developments are surely yet to come.

The time has come to take an inventory of today's game industry and envision tomorrow's technological innovations and creative implications, not only from industrial and professional perspectives but from research being explored by cultural and media scholars. In much the same way industry leaders and academics worked together to establish a serious national conversation about the aesthetic and cultural importance of cinema in the 20th centry, we believe that academic and industry exchanges can promote the art of digital entertainment media for the 21st century.

As a first step, the Program in Comparative Media Studies and the Communications Forum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in cooperation with the Interactive Digital Software Association, invite you to a national conference to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Thursday, 10 February and Friday, 11 February 2000. Industry insiders and academic researchers will contribute to conversations designed to:

• Assess the state of the computer and video game industry;
• Evaluate how the industry has made use of the potentials of digital media;
• Discuss how it is responding to more diverse consumer tastes and interests;
• Speculate where games may go as a genre in the next decade.