bwalters's blog

It is with great pleasure that I announce the launch of the new Franklin Center iTunes Welcome Page. [ alternate link is http://itunes.duke.edu ] At the present time, Franklin Center produced events are now being featured in several sections on Apple's main iTunes site (chosen by Apple from content produced by over 40 Universities) .

Today (June 22, 2007) the President of the Macarthur Foundation, Jonathan Fanton, and CEO of Linden Lab (of Secondlife) Philip Rosedale held a public discussion of philanthropy and civic engagement in Secondlife.

South by Southwest is a conference most people think of as a gathering of musicians and bands and the various denizens of the hipster music scene. However, it is also a well-known film festival and a revived interactive festival. Following the dot com bust the interactive portion of the festival was near death; companies no longer were willing to pay their employees to go to a conference/ party and small businesses were all but done and thus the whole industry sort of shrunk. However, as most of us now know, the dot com world is anything but a trend, instead it is the future, it is the now, and SXSW Interactive is it’s shining example of innovation and creative energy in one place for 5 quick days.
Academic concerns were the focus of a number of panels at the festival, with varied topics dealing with publishing, youth internet culture, the impact of wikipedia, and more.

danah boyd interviewed her mentor Henry Jenkins in a panel entitled Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins with the adoration of one who truly had learned a lot in her studies with him and was adept at maintaining the flow of questioning even after one of his incredibly long pronouncements on fandom, convergence culture, or the transformation of pop culture over the last twenty years. jenkins now finds himself at the vanguard of an intellectual movement studying the transformation of what was fringe culture into the mainstream and it’s democratic potential for positive social change. While not being convinced that the investments in new media do not bring their perils, he nevertheless calls for the continuos participation of fans (and thus users) in the build-up of the greatest parts of the web and their nascent potential for transformative action in the real world (although where this has yet occurred he didn’t state).

Living in Spatial Reality
The GIS and mapping panel provided a small overview of spatial technologies. The panelists hoped for a visually-defined landscape of the web, something that we’ve been mostly living without until recently, attempting to adapt our minds to the concept of virtual spaces and containers where our “stuff” (and some ways the world as a whole) is: friends, files, photos, and more. This angle of investigation is similar to work revolving around interface.

The first day of panels was quite fascinating. Educators had the stage for panels dealing with problems and technologies in higher education, students & children, and scholarly production and publishing. How is public life different now for teens? What do internet technologies mean for students today? Schools need to radically change in order to prepare kids for college and life. (Citizenship was not discussed nor was the commercial nature of many of these online social networks). While educators were on some of the panels, many of them were composed of consultants or company representatives.

Adults are always trying to understand kids, and yet the answer is always just around the corner. The panels all carried a similar theme in the belief that supporting thoughtful changes in our education and social systems (not just investing in teachers but also guidance counselors, social workers and the like) are more important than limiting technology access in addressing critical issues in our society.