Tomorrow I’ll spend all day at RIT helping the OPL prepare for Imagine:RIT. The festival is shaping up to be a LOT bigger than last year. Some folks are predicting as many as 25,000 people to visit RIT that day. The OPL will be running the Social Networking Game again and also the Innovation News (http://opl.rit.edu/inews & follow on twitter at RITiNews). And if all goes well tomorrow we’ll also be doing custom Rochester guidebooks with content from the RocWiki.
research and writings at the crossroads of journalism, cultural anthropology, technology, and reading.
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I just realized that I’m halfway through the sixth week of the spring Semester at Cornell! And over at RIT, they are in winter finals — which means that spring quarter is around the corner. And with spring comes the countdown to the Imagine RIT innovation festival. The next few months of my life will be beyond busy. Which really isn’t any sort of shift.
As to what I’ve been spending my time on (beyond school work) — the answer is video editing. I brought a Kodak Zi6 HD Digital Video Camera with me to the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference to experiment with its capabilities (aside: I’m planning to use it (or something like it) for my own research. And, for a ~$150 investment, I’ve been really impressed. I plan on reviewing it as a tool for qualitative research sometime in the near future.). So while at TOC I shot video of various demo products and also got a few interviews with people there. So I’ve also I had to dust off my (limited) Adobe Premiere skills to get them ready for sharing on the web. All of this has been a great, if slightly time consuming, experience. It’s solidified the fact that I will definitely have a media component to my PhD research.
You can check out the videos on the OPL’s news page and on our Vimeo page. The one that will most likely cause the most stir will be Tim O’Reilly talking about Open Publishing:
Tim O’Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.
Tools of Change has been amazing for both my RIT side and my Cornell side. Our presentation went really well. And our students have made a great impression on the folks — and for a teacher, there’s nothing better than that. I’ve also made a number of excellent contacts for my Journalism research.
I also got a draft copy of Cory Doctorow’s new book! Woot!
I’m blogging details of the conference at the OPL site. Lots of stuff will go up tonight, but if you’re interested, check out: <a href=”http://opl.rit.edu” />http://opl.rit.edu</a>
It’s difficult for me to believe that we just finished week 6 at RIT. This has been the most intense quarter yet. In part that’s because it’s my last. Teaching one class for only the second time has contributed as well. But most of that time has been taken up trying to come up with ways to bring sustainable change to the School of Print.
Coming up with ideas has not been hard. It’s the doing and nurturing parts that take all the time.
One effort we’ve undertaken is to start a blog for the School. SPMEtcetera soft-launched earlier in the quarter. Our hope is to create a destination where the industry, alumni, and prospective and current students can discover all the neat things that are going on at SPM. The great part, from a sustainability perspective, is that all the writing is being done by student employees. We’ll make an official announcement about the blog later this week.
The other big project is the Open Publishing Lab. There will be a lot more about that soon. The good news is that over two years of planning will (hopefully) be coming to fruition in less than 14 days. We just need our teams to make it to May 3 and the innovation festival and then we’ll have a lot to talk about and show.
Julian Dibbell is going to be speaking at RIT this Wednesday. Julian, an associate editor at Wired, is an awesome guy and someone whose been involved in, and writing about, cyberculture for years. His latest work, Play Money, is an exploration of the various economic systems that have developed in various virtual spaces. At RIT he’ll be speaking on “Ludocapitalism – A few ways of making real money from a virtual economy, and what they mean.”
I first met while at the University of Chicago. Julian’s input was really helpful for me while writing my thesis. We touched base again late last year at the American Anthropological Association Conference. Again, I got a lot out of the conversation. So if you’ve got the chance, come out and hear him speak.
Here are the official details:
- Topic: Ludocapitalism – A few ways of making real money from a virtual economy, and what they mean
- Time: 7:30pm (the talk will be followed by open q&a time from 8:30-9)
- Location: Liberal Arts (Bld 6), Room A205