Year of the PodHall
Cat in the Stack
Cathy Davidson's HASTAC blog on the interface of anything.
The In|Formation Year is officially over. Long Live the In|Formation Year----and may we never undertake anything THAT challenging again. Collaboration, many to many, wisdom of crowds . . . all that (and it just isn't easy putting together a synchronized, coordinated, well orchestrated and yet spontaneous year of programming across dozens of institutions with different funding levels, missions, cultures, technology expertise, and so on). That we succeeded is amazing---and a tribute to lots of people who worked so so hard (Jonathan, are you listening? How about you Mark, Brett, Jason?
Erin? Suzy? Irena? Baha? Phil, Casey, are you taking time off from your new life in grad school to read HASTAC blogs---thanks to you for getting the ball rolling last June). It all went far better than anyone who was inclined to bet on it would have predicted. We originally planned to live webcast the whole deal and we abandoned that by month 5 because so-called cyberinfrastructure barely exists (as folks said) from one UC campus to another, never mind across the nation. In Canada, sure, we probably could have done it. In England, Australia, lots of places, actuallty. But in the US, we decided on live events webcast from the site, and then archiving the events here on the site for any-time-you-want viewing, expos facto. Everyone was great about it when we offered a mid-course redo of our gameplan for the year. That's what innovation is. Backing, starting over, trying something new, seeing if it works better, then sticking with it or trying something else again.
We had events all year long--courses, workshops, demonstrations, grant applications, new technology development, expos, seminars, you name it. We had the first ever grad conference in New Media (a year ago) to kick it off, and then the CI-HASS workshop at CalIt2, and then the amazing two-week long SECT futureS of Thinking Seminar run by David and Anne Balsamo, and then a whole curriculum of courses and seminars with one public event a month, all distributed among eighty different centers, instititutes, universities, libraries, civic centers, supercomputing centers, grid centers. The first International HASTAC Conference--Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface--at Duke was a huge success, and we are pretty exhausted from all of it. Now taking the first weekend off all year, the first breather, and it is great, but also fun to look back and contemplate it all. The highlights are viewable on the HASTAC site. Click on the upper left hand box and go to videocasts/webcasts of all the year's highlights. It's pretty amazing. You could build a whole course around those. And, if you do, let us know, or have your students keep their own blogs on this site. It's all possible.
Soon we'll announce the plans for 07-08 . . . oh so many. Big, really BIG, ones to be announced in August (stay tuned: if you are registered to the site, you'll hear about it first by email---otherwise, keep watching the home pages.)
And, we're going to do a very scaled down version of the In|Formation Year, to be announced soon, where anyone can host a townhall anywhere, on any topic of urgent interest to our new technological age, and we will be happy to advertise it and post a podcast later on this site. If you are interested, leave a comment and we'll be in touch and work out the details. It's an all open participation In|Formation Year, PodHalls, PodCasts, you come up with a title and we'll use it. Send us your podcasts!
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