|
|
CMS News Archives
THE 13th ANNUAL CMS MEDIA SPECTACLE
Monday, April 25, 2011 32-155 6pm
CALL FOR ENTRIES
SEND US YOUR FILM/VIDEO
CASH PRIZES! 7 PRIZE CATEGORIES! The CMS Media Spectacle showcases video projects of all genres created by MIT students, staff, faculty and affiliates. To submit an entry, send your video to:
Becky Shepardson
E15-325
77 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139
bshep@mit.edu
Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction, and Audience Favorite.
Please include with your submission: contact email, video title, brief description, and running time. The maximum running time is 15 minutes. The deadline for submissions is April 13. Contact bshep@mit.edu with any questions.
Middle schoolers across the country will have the chance to become detectives in two weeks. Scientific detectives, that is.
On April 4, developers at MIT and scientists at the Smithsonian Institution will launch a website called Vanished that will enable middle schoolers to help solve a mystery surrounding an environmental disaster.
The students will be asked to collect data, conduct research, consult peers, and draw conclusions as they try to figure out what happened, and why.
[...]
Vanished was formatted like a game in order to show that failure is OK in science.
"You fail on a game lots of times on your way to succeeding, and then you actually gather the evidence you need from your failures. So we see that kids are more naturally drawn to it,'' said Scot Osterweil, a creative director of the education arcade.
Boston Globe -- Sparking curiosity by turning students into scientific sleuths
 CMS affiliate and long-time supporter Junot Díaz, who will return to teaching at CMS this fall, reflected on his love of Tokyo at newsweek.com yesterday. He loves "all the bells and whistles of its modernity. The strangeness of it, the impossible overwhelming scale."
But Junot goes on to address how cities, loved, cannot love back. Tokyo fell twice in the 20th century, only to be lovingly reborn:
Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable. No city in the world makes that vulnerability more explicit than Tokyo. In the last century alone Tokyo was destroyed two times. Once by the Great Kanto Earthquake and again by the bombings of World War II.
Each time Tokyo has risen anew.
Today, as radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station drifts toward Tokyo, I am again thinking about the vulnerability of cities and of our love for them. Perhaps cities provoke so much love because they know that in that love lies their own endurance. After all, isn't it true that for all their vulnerability, as long as a city is loved by someone it will never truly disappear? Isn't that what it really means to love a city the way I love Tokyo: to carry within yourself the possibility, however faintly, of its rebirth?
John Ellis
 Digital filming has transformed documentary, offering new potentials to filmmakers and at the same time transforming audience attitudes. Filmmakers have been able to work more informally with their subjects, giving rise to the fusion format of reality TV as well as changing the nature of documentaries themselves. From the audience perspective, affordable digital platforms mean that almost everyone knows what it is like to film and be filmed. The result is a transformation of the documentary genre, where films are now seen as documents of interactions rather than expositions of fact. Ellis explores this new phase in documentary, using methods derived from Goffman as well as an intimate understanding of the technologies of filming.
John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London, and this semester's visiting scholar at the Annenberg Institute, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Visible Fictions (1982), Seeing Things (2000) and TV FAQ (2007) and the co-author of Language and Materialism (1977). His Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation will appear in 2012, and is based in part on his 19 years as an independent producer for British TV, making documentaries about cinema and the arts, the politics of media, and the food industry. He served on the editorial board of Screen magazine (1975-1985), was the vice-chair of the film producers' association PACT (1988-1994), and now chairs the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC).
Download!
Continue reading "Podcast: "How Documentary Went Digital: the Implications of Informal Filming and Skeptical Audiences"" »
The computer's creative involvement in the visual and literary arts is the topic of this panel discussion, held on the occasion of the Drawing with Code: Computer Art from the Anne and Michael Spalter Collection exhibit at the deCordova. The panelists include that exhibit's curator George Fifield, exhibiting artist Mark Wilson, poet and Brown University professor John Cayley, and MIT Media Lab professor Leah Buechley. Held in collaboration with the deCordova Museum.
About the Purple Blurb series: Run by Nick Montfort, authors read and discuss their "D1G1T4L WR1T1NG" at MIT. All events are free and open to the public.
Download!
Continue reading "Podcast: From Purple Blurb, "Computers and Creativity: The Intersection of Art and Technology"" »
 We're so proud to share the news that Education Arcade research director Scot Osterweil was recently presented with an MIT Excellence Award.
Scot received an award in the "Bringing Out the Best" category. His CMS colleagues were there to cheer him on (see the video below):
Bringing Out the Best
Scot Osterweil
Research Director
Department of Urban Studies, School of Architecture & Planning
"Well-known in his field for helping to create the Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, our next awardee is an inspiration to game developers everywhere. But for those who work in MIT's Education Arcade, he is also a selfless mentor--the go-to guy for assistance of all kinds. He remains close enough to projects to provide influence, while giving others space to grow. As one nominator said, 'His faith in my abilities as a manager... have enabled me to tackle tasks and produce results I wouldn't have dreamed of under other leadership.'
"While exceptionally busy, he always makes time to help others--even assisting one staffer with design work to ensure her project met deadline. He has a wealth of experience, a brilliant mind, and a generous character.
"This award for Bringing out the Best goes to Scot Osterweil."
Download!
Continue reading "Scot Osterweil receives MIT Excellence Award" »
Our thanks to Stephanie Pappas of LiveScience for covering the sotry behind VANISHED, an augmented reality game for science students, developed by our research group The Education Arcade:
President Barack Obama may have urged Americans to celebrate science fair winners as if they were Super Bowl champions during his 2011 State of the Union address, but American students still struggle with science. Now, researchers hope to ignite kids' interest in science by drawing them into an activity long loved by children: computer games.
On April 4, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Smithsonian Institution plan to launch a first-of-its-kind "curated game" -- funded by the National Science Foundation -- that's designed to give middle-school students a peak into the process of science. The game, called "Vanished," is an environmental mystery game with a science-fiction twist, said Scot Osterweil, a game developer and creative director of MIT's Education Arcade. It's also an "augmented reality" game, meaning kids will do real-world experiments and activities that mesh with the fiction of the game.
"It is both a development and a research project," Osterweil told LiveScience. "What we want to see is whether, through this type of activity, kids evince real scientific reasoning."
Read the rest at LiveScience.com...
The digital age has been heralded but also pilloried for its impact on journalism. As newspapers continue their mutation into digital formats and as news and information are available from a seeming infinity of websites, what do we actually know about the dynamics of news-consumption online? What does the public do with online news? How influential are traditional news outlets in framing the news we get online?
Pablo Boczkowski is a Professor of Communications Studies at Northwestern Univeresity where he leads a research program that studies the transition from print to digital media. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (2004) and News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (2010).
Joshua Benton is the founding director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University -- an effort to help the news business make the radical changes required by the Internet age. Before that, he was an investigative reporter, columnist, foreign correspondent and rock critic for two newspapers, The Dallas Morning News and The Toledo Blade.
Moderator: Jason Spingarn-Koff, a 2010-11 Knight Journalism Fellow at MIT, is a documentary filmmaker specializing in the intersection of science, technology, and society. His feature documentary Life 2.0, about a group of people whose lives are transformed by the virtual world "Second Life," premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and will be featured on Oprah Winfrey's documentary film club in 2011. He served as producer of NOVA's The Great Robot Race, and the development producer for PBS's Emmy-winning Rx for Survival, as well as documentaries for Frontline and Time magazine. He is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Download!
Continue reading "Video: Communications Forum: "Online News: Public Sphere or Echo Chamber?"" »
Our thanks to Liz Losh and DMLcentral for writing up Professor Fox Harrell and his CMS course on digital representation:
 From ground-breaking work that he began in his Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab at Georgia Tech, Harrell has progressed to receiving a prestigious NSF CAREER grant in 2009 that brings together work in computer science, digital media, and science and technology studies.
Professor Harrell's research starts with the observations that "creating identities in the real world is an active creative act of imagination." He says "everyday people construct and maintain real world identities through how we talk, what we like, what we wear, how we move, what we use, and more."
[...]
In asking how young people understand the function of a "computational identity," Professor Harrell described joint work that draws on his AIR research and development and TERC Research Scientist Dr. Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell's empirical study of students in virtual worlds. They identify three distinct dimensions to how life on the screen is experienced (Veeragoudar Harrell & Harrell, 2009; Harrell, 2010). First, there is the spectrum that ranges from an "everyday understanding" to the perception of "something extraordinary." Second, there is an axis that ranges from seeing the avatar as an "extension of themselves" to seeing it as a completely "separate character." Third, they describe a theoretical line that connects the pole of totally "instrumental" approaches, as though the avatar is merely a tool to achieve a specific end, to the one that emphasizes unpredictable experimentation with "identity play."
Read more at "Identity, Avatars, Virtual Life - and Advancing Social Equity in the 'Real' World", via DMLcentral.
|
