CMS News Archives

Posted by Cushman Truckster at 10:41 AM in Accomplishments, , Media Appearances | Permalink

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.

Posted by Cushman Truckster at 1:41 PM in Accomplishments, Announcements | Permalink

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

Posted by Justin Bland at 4:35 PM in Accomplishments | Permalink

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.

Posted by Justin Bland at 3:05 PM in Accomplishments, CMS In The Press | Permalink

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.

Posted by Brad Seawell at 1:08 PM in Accomplishments, CMS In The Press | Permalink

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" »

Posted by Brad Seawell at 11:22 AM in Accomplishments | Permalink

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.

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 2:40 PM in Accomplishments | Permalink

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.

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 11:43 AM in Accomplishments | Permalink

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."

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 9:30 AM in Accomplishments | Permalink

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.

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 1:16 PM in Accomplishments, Announcements | Permalink

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.

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 2:11 PM in Accomplishments, Announcements | Permalink

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!

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 1:36 PM in Accomplishments, Announcements | Permalink

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.

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 11:58 AM in Accomplishments | Permalink

David Thorburn is among the five professors who have been named as MacVicar Fellows for 2002. (read the article)

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 12:00 PM in Accomplishments | Permalink

From the MIT News Office: "21 individuals, teams receive MIT Excellence Awards".

Posted by CMS Webmaster at 12:04 PM in Accomplishments | Permalink