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CMS News Archives
William Uricchio will speak about new directions in archiving-- social tagging, access, recycling
and the broader implications for the interaction between history and memory-- in his opening keynote for European Network for Cinema and Media Studies in Budapest, Hungary. Founded in February of 2006, NECS brings together scholars and researchers in the field of cinema, film and media studies with archivists and film and media professionals who share a common interest in academic film study and the preservation, distribution and programming of film and media art and the film heritage. Click here for more information.
The Center for Future Civic Media is collaborating with the MIT Communications Forum to host an ongoing series of conversations about media and civic engagement. Click here for full article.
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.
Sandbox Summit, the organization created to explore how technology is affecting the ways kids play, learn and connect in today's digital world, has announced the formation of its first Advisory Board. The announcement comes as summer, the unofficial season of play, is about to begin. Drawing from a variety of fields, the roster of accomplished professionals includes academics, educators, policy makers and toy developers. The Sandbox Summit 2008 Advisory Board members include: Scot Osterweil, Creative Director, MIT Education Arcade, et al.
Read the entire article here.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Chris Crawford (original founder of the GDC), Prof. Henry Jenkins (MIT), and Prof. James Paul Gee (University of Wisconsin-Madison) are all confirmed speakers for the upcoming Games for Change NYC conference, to be held June 3 and 4.
Games for Change is a conference about using video games and game technology for altruistic purposes.
Read the entire article here.
CMS is proud to announce that the Spring 2008 issue of its newsletter, In Medias Res, is now available for download. The new issue contains the following:
download 1.48MB PDF
download 15.87MB
print quality PDF
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From the Directors
CMS Undergraduate Major nearly ready for liftoff
Features
Center for Future Civic Media welcomes Ellen Hume; the new games curriculum at MIT; Live Action Anime at MIT; William Uricchio's new Media@MIT course; HyperStudio examines Missed Opportunities between the US and Iran; Futures of Entertainment 2 conference introduces Backchan.nl
Events
Spring 2008 Colloquium schedule; CMS Class of 2008 thesis presentation schedule; CMS hosts House, M.D.'s Katie Jacobs and novelist Wu Ming 1; 10th annual CMS Media Spectacle returns; Neil Gaiman to present Julius Schwartz lecture; Purple Blurb announces Spring lineup
Project Updates
C3 examines what happens on YouTube; the Education Arcade imagines the future of educational gaming; GAMBIT welcomes Doris Rusch and Jesper Juul; HyperStudio develops resources for exploring history and historiography; Project NML modifies its exemplar library; C4FCM research takes shape
More
Poetry by Nick Montfort; faculty and alumni updates; Neeti Gupta deep-dives into real-world CMS
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Other issues of our newsletter are available for download from the In Medias Res page in the News section of this website.
Project Good Luck invites you to join us for our first international blogger breakfast.
Come talk about the issues that concern you. Make new friends!
Time Friday 8-9pm (Cambridge)
Address Lounge of Tan Hall 550 Memorial Drive, Cambridge
Join our discussion with Chinese Students through MSN IMS. Please email team researchers Jin Liwen <liwenjin(at)MIT.EDU> or Shi Song <shisong_73(at)yahoo.com> if you would like to participate.
Goal:
Our goal is to get to known new friends and learn more about each other. Also we hope to study the media communication tools and the style of conversation on MSN IMS.
See Project GoodLuck for more information
The newsletter gets a new look thanks to CMS graduate student Geoffrey Long '07; the breaking news is that CMS will spearhead the new Singapore-MIT gaming lab; also, New Media Literacies receives second-phase funding from the MacArthur Foundation; the Convergence Culture Consortium's Project Good Luck visits China; and Education Arcade's Learning Games to Go develops the puzzle game Labyrinth.
Download the full-color PDF
Read our back issues
In collaboration with game design luminaries Jane McGonigal (42 Entertainment) and Ian Bogost (Watercooler Games), MIT's Comparative Media Studies program will be sponsoring the Boston-Cambridge premiere of the new public street-game, Cruel 2 B Kind.
When? October 31, 2006 / 6:30 - 8:30 PM
Where? Several blocks near Harvard Square
What? A free game of benevolent assassins, complete with prizes and costume contest!
...What? For more information, go to cruelgame.com!
How? Sign up online, right here.
Continue reading "CMS Sponsors Local Premiere of "Cruel 2 B Kind"" »
A spotlight on the web.mit.edu revolving frontpage, as well as within the MIT news office, MIT has announced a joint-project with Singapore to explore and work within the videogame industry. CMS Directors Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio will both co-direct and serve as Principal Investigators in this project.
The SMIGL initiative will enable students and researchers from Singapore to collaborate with MIT researchers and game industry professionals in international research projects. Beyond technology development, SMIGL will also conduct research on the artistic, creative, business and social aspects of games. The new initiative will also provide Singapore game researchers and professionals with access to cutting-edge technologies, the latest conceptual developments and links to international game development and research communities.
See the MIT news office to read the full article.
We are proud to announce that we are now publishing our Colloquia Series in audio podcast form! Set your podcast client or feed reader to http://cms.mit.edu/news/podcast.xml to listen in. We're also listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, Podcast.net, and PodcastDirectory.com.
Our latest podcast featured Scott McCloud and has recently been mentioned on Henry's blog and on BoingBoing.
After years of writing articles and blog posts for everyone else, Professor Henry Jenkins has finally launched his own blog, Confessions of an Academic/Fan, in preparation for the release of his forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
With frequent updates which already touch on everything from the logic of the Long Tail to the summer's Snakes on a Plane phenomenon, Henry's blog is already becoming a must-read in media and game discussion circles around the world.
The blog will be redesigned later in the summer with a more distinctive appearance, but content is content, so go take a look.
CMS Undergraduate Coordinator Gene Fierro sends along the following report from the CMS Media Spectacle 2006:
Last night, a great crowd turned out for the CMS Media Spectacle in honor of Chris Pomiecko, the former program administrator here at CMS. The Media Spectacle was held at Stata and was a huge success both in the quality of submissions and in audience response. Cathy Pomiecko, Chris' sister and his mother were in attendance, and Cathy served as one of the judges. The other judges were Professor Junot Diaz, Dr. Laura Ceia-Minjares, Dr. Doris Rusch, Dr. Joern Ahrens, and myself. The event was filmed and aired on MIT cable.
There were two awards given last night, one for the best undergraduate submission (The Chris Pomiecko Award) and another for the best graduate submission.
The winning undergraduate submission was A Piece of Cake, by Anna Wexler (Brain & Cog Sci) and Nadja Oertelt (Brain & Cog Sci), who were awarded the Chris Pomiecko Prize for their work. Both Anna and Nadja were unable to attend as they are in the Cambridge-MIT Program. Cake is a very funny film with monotone dialogue showing a very mismatched date.
The winning graduate film submission was Amnion, by Rajesh Kottamasu (Urban Planning). Amnion was an ambitious experimental film set within a womb, where a pair of twins was recreated using a light table and fabric. A voice-over narrative chronicles the experiences they would share in their lifetimes.
CMS congratulates the winners on their excellent work, and everyone who attended for coming together to make the Media Spectacle 2006 a memorable experience.
We hope to make streaming versions of the award-winning videos available here on the CMS website in the next few weeks, so check back soon!
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!
Professor Beth Coleman has passed along the following announcement (and request) for all members of the CMS Community:
This week was the kick off show for Minority Report (CMS.876) "100 Years of Radical Music" on MIT radio station WMBR (88.1). The students who are taking the course that coincides with the show are developing radio programs as part of their course work and also learning some basic skills about sound, recording, broadcast, and mix culture.
I want to invite students and faculty from our extended CMS community to
participate, as they would like:
- Send me an MP3 to include in a show.
- Send me a full mix.
- Send me some trivia about the history of recording technologies or electronic music.
If you would like to participate in the radio broadcast training, please e-mail me in advance.
Special guest mix contributors to the show include:
- Cory Doctorow
- High Priest (airborn audio/anti-pop consortium)
- MC Verb (soundlab)
- Oculart
- Dr. Joe Paradiso
...and more to come
You can listen online at http://wmbr.org/?p=sched
CMS is proud to announce:
Tea with Claudia Hart
Claudia Hart is an artist, curator and critic, working in the contemporary context since 1988. She creates virtual paintings that take the form of 3D imagery integrated into photography, animated loops, and interactive screen-based installations. At MIT, she will talk about the different roles she has taken on in her career and her views on the themes of popularity, populism and interactivity in the digital arts.
Take a look at her website, get excited and join us!
http://www.claudiahart.com/
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006
5:00 - 7:00pm, 14E-417
Tea and cookies will be served.
CMS Professor Beth Coleman will be participating in an upcoming ARTspace panel entitled "Can We Fall In Love With A Machine?", as part of the larger College Art Association Conference. ARTspace is a conference within the Conference, tailored to the interests and needs of practicing artists but open to all. It includes a large-audience session space and a section devoted to the video lounge. Other participants in the panel include Sherry Turkle (MIT-STS) and Claudia Hart (Sarah Lawrence and Pratt Institute).
The panel will convene from 9:30 AM to noon on Saturday, February 25, at the Hynes Convention Center. It is free and open to the public, so anyone can come without registering for the conference. Speakers do not have to be members to present in the session.
More details about the panel are available here.
The CMS program is currently soliciting applications for two new postdoctoral teaching and research fellowships: one focused on media education and designed to help support the work of the Education Arcade and the New Media Literacies Project; the second focused on creative industries and globalization and linked to the new Convergence Culture Consortium. The post-docs will also be teaching courses designed to broaden the CMS curriculum into areas that are increasingly central to the program's research efforts. The fellowship program is also designed to encourage the academic growth of promising media studies scholars with recent Ph.D. degrees. Support for the new postdoctoral program has come from an anonymous donor and from the Dean of Humanities.
CMS is looking for films, videos, video podcasts and mobisodes produced by MIT and Wellesley students, faculty, staff and affiliates for its 2006 Media Spectacle.
The deadline for submission is April 10.
Screenings will begin at 7 pm on Wednesday, April 26 in 32-123 (the Stata Center). All formats, styles, lengths and subjects are acceptable. Works-in-progress are welcomed.
The Chris Pomiecko Prize will be awarded to the most outstanding undergraduate media submission. The prize is named for the CMS administrator who died in a car accident last year.
To submit a work, send title, format, description and running time to Gene Fierro at generoso@mit.edu or contact CMS at 617.253.3599.
Beginning this term, webcasts of all Communication Forum talks will be made available by MIT World, which provides free on-demand video of significant public events at MIT.
"The Communications Forum is a welcome addition to our video collection," said Laurie Everett, MIT World's project manager, about the arrangement. "These scholarly discussions help MIT World stay true to its mission to present a wide range of ideas and topics to a global audience of learners."
The MIT Communications Forum, founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool who taught in the Department of Political Science, has sponsored talks on all aspects of communications for more than 25 years. An article about the Forum and CMS appeared in the fall 2005 issue of In Medias Res.
"The rapid expansion of broadband and wireless technology makes these webcasts feasible and significant. The collaboration strengthens both the Forum and MIT World," said Literature Professor and Forum Director David Thorburn.
This spring, the Forum will sponsor a conversation between former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and Thorburn; and three linked forums on the state of TV – the economics of television, the changing face of television news and a discussion with David Milch, creator of HBO's Deadwood.
The Forum will continue to make audio recordings of its talks available from web.mit.edu/comm-forum about 48 hours following live events. Webcasts will be available from MIT World approximately a month following live events.
MIT World currently hosts nine Forum events. To browse titles, go to mitword.mit.edu and under "Video Finder" select "MIT Communications Forum" from the "All Hosts" dropdown menu.
Special students and visiting scholars from Kainan University, Taiwan, will join the MIT community beginning in January 2006.
The Asian visitors will be part of a collaboration between Kainan and CMS and the MIT Communications Forum. The partnership aims to fortify and extend the multicultural interests of both the Forum and CMS by adding a Taiwanese perspective to ongoing teaching, scholarship and public forums centered on Asian media and cultures.
David Thorburn, director of the Communications Forum, conceived the partnership during a visit to Taiwan in March, where he gave lectures on new media and met Michael Tang, president of Kainan University. He returned to Taiwan in August to sign a Memorandum of Understanding between MIT and the Taiwan institution.
The collaboration will bring four students and two Kainan faculty members to MIT each year. The CMS program will form the core of the students' curriculum, though they will also be eligible to enroll in other MIT subjects appropriate to their interests. The Kainan faculty visitors will participate in the visiting scholars' program; some will speak at CMS colloquiums and appear as guests in classes.
The collaboration will be supervised by a governing board consisting of Thorburn, Tang, Henry Jenkins, director of CMS, and Jing Wang, head of Foreign Lnguages and Literatures at MIT.
Emma Teng, associate professor of FL&L, will serve as faculty advisor to the Kainan students. Teng is the author of Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895, and teaches the popular CMS course 21F. 030, East Asian Cultures: From Zen to Pop. Teng's father is a native of Taiwan.
The collaboration also supports an annual conference in Taiwan where MIT scholars will be featured.
From the MIT News Office:
MEDIA STUDIES WEB SITE
Students, faculty and staff from the Comparative Media Studies program, with contributions from friends and colleagues around the world, have created Reconstructions, a website devoted to reflections on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and Pennsylvania tragedies and aftermath.
"We had been discussing the role of media theory during a time of crisis in my theory class and a student asked whether there was any way that they --individually or as a community--could make a difference in the current discussions of this tragedy," said Professor Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies (CMS). "Inspired by that question, I called a town meeting of any person from CMS who was interested in participating in some kind of project which might help promote rational discussion and mutual understanding during a time charged with enormous emotions and risks."
The web site, created during marathon sessions over the weekend, may be accessed here.
New Models for Teaching and Learning Grow Up with Generation.org
MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies Launches Efforts to Explore the Future of Educational Media
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, 27 August 2001
CONTACT: Alex Chisholm, MIT Comparative Media Studies
Phone: 617-253-6447; E-mail: alex@mit.edu
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- As a new generation of students heads
"back to school" -- from pre-kindergarten through
college -- broader uses of interactive technologies such
as web-based applications, DVDs, video and computer games
are becoming increasingly integral to teachining and learning.
Researchers in MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies
today announced plans to launch three new efforts that integrate
classroom experience with web-based instruction, create
digital media archives for teaching humanities subjects,
and expand definitions of educational media to include "games-to-teach."
NEW COURSE: MEDIA,
EDUCATION, AND THE MARKETPLACE
The first venture is "Media, Education, and the Marketplace,"
a new course that explores how emerging forms of interactive
media fundamentally transform the learning process. Fuji
Xerox is providing platform and technical support for this
new couse, which integrates both classroom lectures and
on-line learning and provides a first-hand example of how
the potential of new interactive and telecommunications
media are being harnessed to support teaching and learning.
"This is one of our first attempts at integrating
theory and practice in teaching a course on educational
media," said Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, who designed
the course following his own experiences in developing several
educational media properties. "With the arrival
of broadband and other delivery platforms, educators will
have at their fingertips a broader set of tools to teach.
Our goal is to develop that toolkit," Miyagawa added.
Through Miyagawa's 14-week course, students will explore
effective media design, educational theory, and existing
and anticipated methods for distribution, as well as the
business concepts behind such issues. Star
Festival, a multimedia curriculum that encourages
users to explore issues of cultural and ethnic identity,
serves as the primary case studey for the term. Developed
by Miyagawa over the past five years, Star Festival was
adopted in 2000 by the Boston Public Schools as its first
"interactive textbook" for district-wide use.
George Takei, Liutenant Sulu from STAR TREK, narrates the
media-rich poject based on the young life of Miyagawa.
On-line lectures by business leaders, educational theorists,
and media scholars will supplement students' exploration
of Star Festival and classroom discussions. Anticipated
guest and on-line speakers include:
-- Bonnie Bracy, Advisor on Education and Digital Divide,
Clinton Administration; Lucas Fellow
-- Henry Jenkins, Director of MIT's Program in Comparative
Media Studies
-- Steve Lerman, Director of MIT's Center for Educational
Computing Initiatives
-- Robert Metcalfe, Venture Capitalist; Founder of 3Com
-- Livia Polanyi, Senior Researcher at FX Palo Alto Laboratory,
Inc.
-- John Vaille, Internet2 K-12 Team in California
-- Toby Woll, Director of e-Learning at Sloan School of
Management
By the end of the term, students will develop a project
that shows an understanding of the types of business models
that facilitate educational technology in the classroom.
And, many students will become part of an on-going e-learning
project in Sloan School of Management, CMS, and other groups
at MIT.
"We're bringing together world-class thinkers and
practioners with MIT-quality students who've grown up in
an intensely rich mediascape," said Miyagawa.
"We expect the projects to chart a course for future
work in developing and producing those all-important 'killer
apps' in educational media."
NEW PROJECT: META-MEDIA
Digital technologies allow educators to create more robust
tools for teaching by integrating a wide variety of media
in a single archive. The Meta-Media Project aims to
create such media-rich archives so students can explore
broader notions of specific subject areas across media and
over time through "expanded texts." Created
by Peter Donaldson, professor of literature and director
of the Meta-Media Project, the Shakespeare Electronic Archive
was one of the first explorations in integrating images,
audio, and video clips for use in humanities education.
"We want to take what we've learned in the past few
years and apply that to the development of a larger suite
of mini-archives for use in humanities education,"
said Donaldson. "Shakespeare was a good starting
point because his work has been represented in all media
that's existed for more than 400 years."
Donaldson and other researchers, including Dr. Kurt Fendt,
who developed the language and culture teaching archive
'Berliner sehen,' will collaborate with other MIT faculty
in literature, writing and humanistic studies, foreign languages
and literature, anthropology, music, and comparative media
studies to develop archives for use at the secondary school
and undergraduate levels. Although the first projects
have yet to be identified, researchers are considering a
broad range of topics, including:
-- The Evolution of the Declaration of Independence
-- The Detective across Media
-- Chaplin, Montage and the Poetic Image
-- Billy Budd: Manuscripts and Film
-- Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Theater and Film
-- Marlowe's Edward II, Texts, Film and History
-- Utopian Visions of the Future City
-- Teaching Hong Kong Cinema
-- Interfaces for Communication
-- Tools for Teaching Writing
-- Fundamentals of Music Composition
-- Photography
-- Theories of Evolution
"We plan to look at not just what information and
media go into a subject area, but how to exploit the potentials
of interactivity and expand both pedagogies and models for
collaboration," Donaldson added. He and his colleagues
hope to have the first modules deployed in classes at MIT
as early as this fall and spring.
The Meta-Media Project is funded in part by a grant from
the Alex and Brit d'Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in
MIT Education.
NEW PROJECT: GAMES-TO-TEACH
The third major initiative involves an interdisciplinary
collaboration of faculty, staff, and students across the
humanities, sciences, and engineering that will develop
a series of conceptual prototypes for "games-to-teach"
science and engineering subjects at the advanced high school
and introductory college level. As part of Microsoft
i-Campus, a five-year research alliance between MIT and
Microsoft, the Games-to-Teach Project intends to explore
best practices in game design and production, current educational
theory, and emerging technological platforms and to apply
such understanding to new models for presenting and exploring
educational content in computer and video games.
"Until now we've seen so-called 'edutainment' that
has all of the entertainment value of a bad lecture and
the educational value of a bad game," said Henry Jenkins,
director of Comparative Media Studies and principal investigator
on the project. "Our goal is to reverse that
polarity by combining MIT-quality science and engineering
subjects with state-of-the-art game design."
Jenkins and his colleagues believe computer and video games
are emerging as a powerful new teaching medium that enables
robust interactivity, providing for new pedagogical models
and stronger collaborations across disciplines. Pointing
to an industry that this year will report domestic sales
totals that are roughly equivalent to Hollywood's take at
the box office and a battery of new creative products, Jenkins
sees an industry that has finally begun to understand its
basic building blocks and is now stretching out on new directions,
experimenting with new forms, and diversifying audiences.
"Teachers need to take notice of such industry changes
and explore ways to leverage this new medium in their teaching
strategies, thus allowing for new learning exeriences among
a broad range of student abilities and media literacies,"
Jenkins said.
Through weekly lab seminars and creative development workshops,
Jenkins and his team plan to explore the "best practices"
of interactive teaching tools, define corresponding pedagogical
models, and begin to test assumptions through the development
of a dozen conceptual prototypes that will focus on subjects
from biology to physics, from mechanical engineering to
chemical engineering, and from applied mathematics to materials
science.
"As humanists at one of the world's leading technological
institutions, we're in a unique position to think about
the intersection of science and culture," said Jenkins.
"The challenge of the Games-to-Teach Project will be
to create science and engineering content in a compelling
narrative form that students want to engage with, where
they want to explore, and where they can experiment with
new ideas."
Jenkins hopes the conceptual prototypes developed within
the project provide the games industry and government agencies
with the blueprints for exploring full-scale development,
production, and release of "games to teach" in
coming years.
COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES
Comparative Media Studies is the humanistic and social scientific
examination of media technologies and their cultural, social,
aesthetic, political, ethical, legal, and economic implications.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students in
the program are trained to think critically about the unique
properties of different media and about the shared properties
and functions of media more generally. More than 30
faculty from a wide variety of disciplines in the School
of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences aim to teach the
next generation of leaders in industry, journalism, government,
the arts, and the academy to think across media and investigate
issues central to the role of media in today's world: current
research topics include, interactivity, narrative, and hypertextuality;
childhood and adolescence in a mediated culture; informed
citizenry and cultures of democarcy; and, media in transition.
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