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CMS News Archives
Advertising shops are scouring for creative technologists: a rare breed familiar with technology and conversant with new forms of media, but also able to translate that know-how into compelling digital-branding vehicles.
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Look beyond portfolio schools to the growing group of programs that incubate tech-minded talent. Favorites include the Rochester Institute of Technology, the aforementioned Hyper Island, a Swedish digital-ad school, MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and New York University's interactive telecommunications program. Also expected to be a breeding ground for new digital talent is Boulder Digital Works, a new stateside graduate program featuring mini-courses from Hyper Island.
Advertising Age: Where to Find Tech-Focused Advertising Talent
From a press release issued by the Media Development Authority of Singapore:
Since running yearly summer internship programmes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2007, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (GAMBIT) has trained 77 students from various local tertiary institutes in games research and development. Of these, 41 of them have since found employment in the Singapore games and media industries while the remaining is largely still serving national service.
That's a remarkable accomplishment and testament to the GAMBIT program. GAMBIT staff added their thoughts:
We here at the Cambridge office are very excited by this announcement, and look forward to working closely with our partners across the ocean to find more job placements for our highly skilled and talented students.
Via Associated Degree, a clearinghouse for continuing education programs, comes an impressive list of blogs for new media students, including three CMS blogs:
New Media students are on the verge of an exciting and evolving field of study. With topics ranging from social networking to innovative art forms to gaming to Internet policy and politics falling under this umbrella, there is plenty for students to learn about and stay connected with. Adding these blogs to your favorite reader will help you keep current on all that is happening in the world of New Media.
Included were Confessions of an Aca-Fan, former co-director Henry Jenkins' blog; the Project New Media Literacies blog; and Nick Monfort's collaboration on computer and gaming narrative, Grand Text Auto.
Also included was friend-of-CMS David Nieborg's blog Gamespace.nl.
From the MIT News Office:
Five MIT students have received a 2009 Anthony Sun Fellowship Award to pursue international internships this summer through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI).
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science senior Scot Frank will continue his pioneering work on a low-cost solar cooker in western China. Physics senior Charles Agoos will work with a China Educational Technology Initiative (CETI) team to help expand OpenCourseWare programs in Taiwan and Fuzhou, China.
A sophomore in architecture, Katelyn Snyder, will work on historical preservation in the Old City of Acre (Akko), Israel.
Chris Moses, a brain and cognitive sciences junior and president of STeLA, the Science and Technology Leadership Association, will join a research team at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan.
A graduate student in comparative media studies, Madeline Clare Elish, will explore the intersection of art, science and technology at the Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain.
MISTI Director Suzanne Berger, the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science, presented the awards on April 29 at an annual gala honoring the more than 360 MIT students who will intern in nine countries this year through MISTI.
Berger also acknowledged the European Club for its contribution to MISTI internships in Europe, and she thanked Josep Maria Cervera of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce for its founding sponsorship of the MIT-Spain Program.
MIT Energy Initiative Director Ernest Moniz, the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, discussed the importance of international experience and the global response to climate change in his keynote address.
From the MIT News Office:
An image taken by Eric Schmiedl, a senior in the Comparative Media Studies program, will be included as part of a web gallery for American Photography 25, one of the most prestigious photo competitions in the country. Fewer than 1 percent of the 10,000-plus images submitted were chosen for the honor. Schmiedl's image was originally taken for the cover of a student-driven calendar meant to raise money for an Institute scholarship.
MIT News Office, Awards and Honors: April 29, 2009
CMS Co-Director Henry Jenkins last month joined the likes of Madeleine Albright, Craig Newmark, and Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson for a panel on how public policy and private initiatives can better meet the public's information needs.
Jenkins participated in a similar panel at Aspen last year on media and values and blogged about the experience:
As I found myself making small talk with everyone from the heads of major media companies to former members of the Bush administration, the one topic which seemed to have captured everyone's interest was Harry Potter. Almost everyone had stories to tell about the experience of reading the final book in the series. In Convergence Culture, I suggested that fan communities might offer us better chances to talk about shared values across the ideological divides that currently shape American politics because they offer us shared fantasies and common reference points. Well, this was a pretty dramatic illustration of that principle at work.
Junot Diaz talks about his Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on The Colbert Report. Click here to watch the interview.
A new computer game developed by MIT and Singaporean students makes it possible for visually impaired people to play the game on a level field with their sighted friends.
Read entire article here.
Eric Klopfer, Scheller Career Development Professor of Science Education and Educational Technology, Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP), and Co-Director of CMS research project The Education Arcade, will receive the Education Award on May 12 from the American Institute of Biological Sciences. The award is presented to an individual who has made significant contributions to education in the biological sciences, at any level of formal or informal education. Read article
Following a successful five-year experiment, MIT faculty voted unanimously to make Comparative Media Studies a permanent SB program at their meeting on April 16, 2008.
Read article in The Tech.
Read press release from MIT News Office.
CMS and the MIT Media Lab were awarded $5 million to fund a Center for Future Civic Media where researchers will experiment with new technologies to empower community news. Read the Boston Globe story.
The Education Arcade Project Manager Scot Osterweil's "The Road From Zoombiniville" was the top rated presentation at this year's Serious Games Summit. The Summit was part of the Game Developers Conference held March 5-9 in San Francisco.
Continue reading "Scot Osterweil Gives Highest Rated Presentation at Serious Games Summit" »
Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide has been awarded the 2007 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
The award selection committee members, Greg Smith (chair), Pam Wojcik, and Daniel Bernardi, reviewed 87 books for this year’s competition. They drafted the following citation for Convergence Culture:
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide reclaims the new media buzzword ‘convergence’ as a productive but not quite predictable interaction among synergistic corporations, migratory audiences, and multiple technological platforms.
He discusses how this unruly process is redefining public culture through popular culture, and Jenkins's approachable prose reaches out to both media scholars and non-specialized audiences alike. The terms he uses (‘participatory culture,’ ‘collective intelligence,’ ‘affective economics,’ ‘transmedia storytelling’) are already reconfiguring the way we think about the contemporary media environment.
The award will be announced on Thursday evening, March 8 at the SCMS conference in Chicago.
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture has been nominated as a finalist for the 2006 Edublog Awards for Best Research Paper! The whitepaper is part of a grant by the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation for use by Project NML (New Media Literacies). The white paper was written by CMS director and NML Primary Investigator Henry Jenkins; Ravi Purushotma, 2006 graduate of MIT Comparative Media Studies; Katherine Clinton, education consultant for NML; Margaret Weigel, Research Manager for NML; and Alice J. Robison, postdoctoral fellow in the Comparative Media Studies program.
Read about the white paper, and the other finalists for the award here.
From GameDaily BIZ:
Late today, David Edery informed us that he will be joining Microsoft's Xbox group. He will fill the role of Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade.
David received his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He then went on to be a consultant in the industry and an affiliate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He has also helped found the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) at MIT and aided the growth of the CMS program's game design curriculum.
"Xbox Live Arcade is one of the most exciting things happening in the game industry," said an enthusiastic Edery exclusively to GameDaily BIZ. "It offers new opportunities to broaden the gaming market, to try out new gameplay (and business) models, and to entertain people. Suffice to say, I can't wait to join up."
Graduate student Sam Ford (2007) was a member of the panel "The Perils and Promise of Interdisciplinarity" on Friday, April 14, at the National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Conference in Atlanta.
His presentation, entitled "Break the Walls Down: Trumpeting a Desire to Blur Disciplinary Lines in Academia," was part of a four-member discussion about the current status of interdisciplinary studies in American academic institutions. He was joined by Dr. Ted Hovet, head of the film studies minor and member of the English faculty at Western Kentucky University; Dr. Dale Rigby, writing professor at Western Kentucky University; and Amanda Ford, independent scholar.
The panel members were joined by about 30 audience members who actively participated in the discussion, which turned into a brainstorming session about the place of interdisciplinary studies in the current academic structure. All four panel members and most of the audience members have multiple interests that do not fit clearly into a traditional academic field, making the carving of an academic niche difficult, especially at schools and in programs more tied to a traditional academic structure.
Ford presented MIT's Comparative Media Studies program as a potential alternative, where the department has most of its faculty spread across the university. The discussion included debates about costs of attending graduate school and doctoral programs for students not entirely happy with the structuring of most academic programs; the debate of looking outside academia, where interest in multiple areas may be, in some ways, better received and even celebrated; and a look at the positive moves toward embracing and effectively utilizing interdisciplinary studies. The group also looked at the potential reasons why universities are so invested in guarding against interdisciplinary studies and the misconceptions many people have with blurring or breaking some of the barriers built up between various strands of academia.
Ravi Purushotma ('06) and Dan Roy ('07) flew out to San Jose recently for the Game Developers Conference where they presented their work modding the LucasArts adventure game Grim Fandango to teach Spanish. The original game is an undisputed classic in the industry, and its focus on the Mexican Day of the Dead makes it a good choice for teaching Spanish.
They also showed updates of their Sims 2 project, providing students with a modified version The Sims 2 suited for learning a foreign language.
Purushotma and Roy plan to continue conceptualizing the most effective ways of marrying entertaining technology with the best language learning theory to engage students in a new way around language.
Please bear with us... we're just getting the new version of the CMS Website up and running (which is a major accomplishment in and of itself!), so we're in the process of rounding up announcements, details of past accomplishments, and more historical CMS news items, which will be added into this section as soon as possible.
In the meantime, you can get a better sense of what everyone involved in CMS has been doing by looking at In Medias Res, our official department newsletter.
And, if you know of an accomplishment you think should be mentioned here, please let us know!
The MIT News Office has an article entitled "'BollySpace' melds Indian film traditions with digital media, about an initiative by CMS graduate students Aswin Punathambekar, Zhan Li and Sangita Shresthova.
David Thorburn is among the five professors who have been named as MacVicar Fellows for 2002. (read the article)
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