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Media & Technology Studies Education at UBC

The Media & Technology Studies Education at UBC blog has been moved: Click for MTSE blog

Uselessness and Pain

pasta and vinegar reports on the uselessness of robotic pets.

Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning reports on a virtual version of The Milgram Experiment.

Internet Researcher 8.0: Let’s play

This conference would be of your interest since it is going to be held in Vancouver, the deadline is too soon though.

Internet Researcher 8.0: Let’s play
October 17 – 20, 2007

The annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers is one of the premier opportunities for scholars and researchers of all things Internet, as well as related new media technologies and practices. It is a forum to meet, present research, network and share ideas in a cooperative, multidisciplinary environment.

Let’s Play, the 8th annual Internet Research meeting, will be held this October in Vancouver, Canada.

for more information… 

Sherry Turkle finds human-machine love unsettling

Does anyone else think that this came out of nowhere?

In the face of techno-doomsday punditry, Sherry Turkle has long been a proponent of the positive. In her books, “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit” and “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,” Turkle has explored the relationship between human and machine and found much to ponder and even praise.

But now the director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self has a confession: “I have finally met technology that upsets and concerns me.”

For more information, check out the MIT news office report (which mentions AIBO) and Dr. Turkle’s article, A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship.

The Emotion Machine

From International Herald Tribune:

Life and love in the age of artificial intelligence

Marvin Minsky, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for feats that range from inventing the ultrahigh-resolution confocal microscope to helping found the field of artificial intelligence, which aims to create computers that mimic the human mind.

After 20 years of publishing silence, he has just come out with a new book. Called “The Emotion Machine,” it argues that, contrary to popular conception, emotions aren’t distinct from rational thought; rather, they are simply another way of thinking, one that computers could perform. He spoke with Carey Goldberg, a reporter for the Boston Globe.

When Jill Jacks In…: Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings

CENTRE FOR WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES

2006 LECTURE SERIES
presents:
Wednesday, Nov 15, 2006 12:00 pm
Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies
1896 East Mall

Mary Bryson
Associate Professor and Director, Graduate Programs
ECPS, Faculty of Education, UBC

When Jill Jacks In…: Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings

This talk features research that counters and complicates decontextualized, celebratory accounts of queer subjects and cyberspace and situates media practices in the quotidian locations of everyday life. The author explores the significance of communicative media for queer women, with a particular focus on the negotiation of complex identifications, communities, social networks, and knowledge practices. Arguments concerning queer virtualities attend to: (im)mobilities across multiple offline and online contexts, complex geographies of un/belonging, a paradoxical relation of intense suturing to, and disavowal of, mediation, as well as the problematic of a politics of recognition, and of visibility, at work in all sites of subjectification and sociality.

BIOGRAPHY:

Mary Bryson is Associate Professor and Director, Graduate Programs, ECPS, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. Her primary interest is in sociocultural scholarship concerning technology, equity, and pedagogically transgressive uses of digital tools. Mary has numerous publications on theoretical treatments of gender and technology, queer theory, and equity in education, including “Radical Inventions” (SUNY Press). In 2000, Bryson was a recipient of the Canadian Pioneer in New Technologies and Media award. Mary’s current SSHRC research, Queer Women on the Net, is focused on new media, identity, and discursive
employments of network formation, community and agency. (http://www.queerville.ca).

Stallman and GPLv3

Daniel Lyons from Forbes weighs in on GPLv3 in this article. The article also includes colorful descriptions of Stallman, such as:

But then, Richard Stallman rarely is pragmatic–and in some ways he is downright bizarre. He is corpulent and slovenly, with long, scraggly hair, strands of which he has been known to pluck out and toss into a bowl of soup he is eating.

NMC Online Conference on Digital Media – October 24-25, 2006

nmc logo
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006fall_online_conf/index.shtml

This online conference is informed by the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, a two-year project in which the NMC is helping to explore the impact of digital media on our lives in a variety of ways, and encouraging dialog among experts, visionaries, and thought leaders from around the globe. This unique event will expand that dialog beyond the project and reach out to an international audience.

The conference is designed to extend the examination of this phenomenon now underway among leading writers and researchers in the MacArthur-sponsored project to a broader audience, and further explore both the positive and negative aspects of technology on learning, social interaction, self-expression, and more.

Digital media, for this event, is interpreted broadly as anything from the traditional uses of the medium for creating and sharing rich content to the explosion of blogs for self expression, and increasingly, real time interpretation of news and breaking events. Also included is the notion of shared content via sites like Flickr, YouTube, and blip.tv, social sites like FaceBook and MySpace, and more powerful content and media search tools.

The October-November 2006 issue of Innovate: Open Source

The October-November 2006 issue of Innovate focuses on the potential of open source software and related trends to transform educational practice.

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Pictures on Inter-Univ. Seminar Day

seminar1.jpg

Scarfe 310 | 09192006

SITE 2007

Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education
                         International Conference

March 26-30, 2007  *  San Antonio, Texas

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

** Submissions Due: Oct. 25, 2006 **

http://site.aace.org/conf/call.htm

“Mr. Dawson, where’s the Internet?”: Linux in high school

On the ZDNet education blog, there’s been an interesting series of articles about one teacher’s experience with a Linux lab:

Back to Windows? March 23, 2006
Will Vista kill Linux for Ed Tech? September 14, 2006
Who is killing desktop Linux? September 19, 2006
Not your father’s Linux September 22, 2006

DiGRA 2007, “Situated Play”: Call for Papers

The Third Digital Games Research Association International Conference (DiGRA 2007)
“Situated Play”: Second Circular and Call for Papers
September 24 – 28, 2007
Tokyo, Japan
http://www.digra.org/digra_conference/2007tokyo/digra2007cfp/

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Let’s get together

Hi everyone in UBC TSED grad program 🙂

 

I would like to propose to apply to Ed-Media conference to present as a group. It is in Vancouver and we do not need to have travel expenses. Two years ago, I had an experience presenting at Ed-media in research group of 4 grad students under Samia’s supervision. It was a lot of fun! More interesting than presenting alone (and, hopefully less work for each of us considering our busy schedules 🙂 !)

I think we might make a paper sharing the results/ideas on our different research topic under one theme of learning with digital technologies in multiple ways. Or, else – let’s share the ideas on the possible paper.

 

Lana

IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE WEB BASED COMMUNITIES 2007

Web Based Communities 2007 Conference

February 18-20, 2007 – SALAMANCA, SPAIN

                                              

http://www.webcommunities-conf.org/

Submission: 9 October 2006
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VIFF: Android 207

The Vancouver International Film Festival is on and will be showing Android 207. (It is also available on YouTube.) The description is:

An android, trapped inside a vast and complex maze, exhibits confusion and frustration. Human, all too human.

Talk on Video Games @ UBC

The Evolution of the Triad: Art, Technology and Commerce in Video Games

IAR Conference Room, C.K. Choi Building, UBC (1855 West Mall, Vancouver)
4.30pm-6.00pm, Friday 29th September,
Yuko Aoyama (Geography, Clark University, USA)

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JCACS: Virtual Curriculum

From JCACS:

Virtual Curriculum: Digital Games as Technologies of Aesthetic Experience and Potential Spaces

CHLOË BRUSHWOOD ROSE
York University

In this paper, I am interested in the following question: What can we learn in the strange spaces of digital games? This is not the same as asking what digital games can teach us or what we learn from digital games. Rather, I am interested in thinking about what it is we learn as we play digital games. This question of learning has less to do with the content of the game—although that is an important question too—and more to do with what the experience of the game allows us to think or not think and to be or place and time of the digital game offer us?

PDF

Inter-University Seminar: Hanyang University & the UBC

E-learning R&D Teams from Hanyang University and the University of British Columbia will meet for a seminar to address various topics and issues of the fields of new media, instructional design & educational technology, and human performance technology. The primary purpose is to develop graduate students’ professional potential through a variety of presentations and discussions. This inter-University seminar will provide opportunities for sharing research ideas and extending students’ awareness of new media, instructional design & educational technology, and human performance technology.

Date: 19 September 2006
Time: 8:30-2:15

Scarfe 310

See the detailed schedule and abstracts: Hanyang-UBCSeminar.pdf
For downloading handouts: bk21_handout.pdf

Video Games and Stereotypes

From the Department of Sociology:

Student researcher finds video games rife with stereotypes
http://www.arts.ubc.ca/index.php?id=397&backPID=4&tt_news=1658