New Media Education and Its Discontents

Conference, Friday, May 6th, 2005

The Graduate Center, City University of New York

This conference is organized by the Institute for Distributed Creativity
in collaboration with The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Elebash Recital Hall

The Graduate Center

City University of New York

365 Fifth Avenue, New York City

Join us for an intensive one-day conference about new media education.
Connect with other new media researchers and educators, present and discuss
urgent topics in new media education, exchange syllabi or swap resources.
The conference will be podcast and live blogged. Bring your USB memory key
and laptop.Many educators point to a widespread tension between vocational training and
a critical solid education. There is no stable "new media industry" for
which a static skill set would prepare the graduate for his or her
professional future in today's post-dotcom era. Between Futurist narratives
of progress with all their techno-optimism and the technophobia often
encountered in more traditional narratives — how do we educate students to
be equally familiar with technical concepts, theory, history, and art?

How can new media theory be activated as a wake-up call for students leading
to radical change? Which educational structure proves more effective:
cross-disciplinary, theme-based research groups or media-based departments?
Does the current new media art curriculum allow for play, failure, and
experiment? How can we introduce free software into the new media classroom
when businesses still hardly make use of open source or free software? How
can we break out of the self-contained university lab?

Developed out of the WebCamTalk 1.0 speaker series this conference will
introduce concrete examples of meaningful connections between media
production in the university and cultural institutions as well as technology
businesses. Guest speakers will also address ways in which they introduce
politics into the new media lab.

Between imagined flat hierarchies and the traditional models of top-down
education, participants will give examples based on their experiences that
offer a middle-ground between these extremes. Further questions address
anti-intellectualism in the classroom and the high demands on educators in
this area in which technology and theory have hardly any precedence and
change rapidly. In response to this — several distributed learning tools
will be presented that link up new-media educators to share code, theory,
and art in real time.

Possible Topics:

-Vocational training versus solid critical education

-Creation of meaningful connections between art, theory, technology,
and history

-Education of politics, politics in education

-Shaping core curriculum

-Educational blogs

-Distributed learning tools: empowering students for the knowledge commons
(organizing academic knowledge and connecting new media educators)

-Intellectual property issues in academia

-Use of wireless computational devices to connect people on campus and in
the classroom

-Uses of social software in the classroom
(wikis, and weblogs, voice over IP, IM, social bookmarks)

-Battles over the wireless commons

-Models for connecting university lab with outside institutions and
non-profit organizations.

We are looking for proposals for presentations and demonstrations.
Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes. Demonstrations of open source
or free software should not exceed 10 minutes. Collaborative presentations
are encouraged. Suggest a format for your presentation that would maximize
dialogue and exchange.

conference.newmediaeducation.org

Please mail submissions for consideration by March 21 to Trebor Scholz:
idc [at] distributedcreativity.org

Send a short summary of your presentation (500 words), a brief biography,
name, affiliation, email address. Feel free to include media material with
your proposal. Texts presented at the conference will be considered for
publication in a planned book.

Please do not hesitate to contact Trebor Scholz at
idc [@] distributedcreativity.org if you have any questions.

Conference Committee:

Stephen Brier (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Timothy Druckrey (Media Critic, NYC)

Richard Maxwell (Queens College, CUNY)

Trebor Scholz (Institute for Distributed Creativity, SUNY at Buffalo)

Post-Conference PARTY:

9pm

The Thing.

459 W. 19th St

New York, NY 10011