New Media Consortium Symposium on the Future October 27-29

Professor Jan Baum and Bridget Sullivan attended the New Media Consortium Symposium on the Future October 27-29. The conference is the fourteenth in the NMC’s Series of Virtual Symposia and was held in Hakone. The conference explored "actual and potential applications of technology that could impact issues of global importance over the next five years and beyond."(nmc.org)

The presentations and sessions where all held in the new Hakone environment. "The Hakone Project is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and Linden Lab to create a new platform for the creation and operation of virtual environments for use by educators of all levels, from pre-K through graduate school. This new environment comes complete with all the power and potential of Second Life®, but with none of the constraints that have troubled many educational adopters." (nmc.org)

Apparently the new Hakone area is on a server hosted by NMC behind their firewall and completely controlled by them, with the assistance of Linden Labs of course. The client used for connecting with the environment strongly resembled the standard SL client, making the transition to the new environment easy. Linden Labs and NMC are due to announce the details of this project this fall.

The presentations where of high quality. All are archived on the NMC website as audio recordings. I especially enjoyed the second day keynote speaker Beth Kanter. Her talk, The Networked Nonprofit showed us how network weavers are using social networks to enhance the reach of non-profit enterprises. Kanter read to us from Robert Frosts’s “The Wall” to illustrate concepts of and open and closed networks, and transparency. So many great ideas about the potential power and usefulness of social networking.

The Hakone Project area will be used again for the next NMC virtual symposium to be held in spring 2010. Maybe we'll see you there!