Project Deliverables Memestreme Red Centre Way

Project Deliverable 1
Construct, for the delivery of a geo-referencing focused series of workshops at certificate level 4: Training plan, assessment rubric and evidence of M-Standards collaboration with the AFLF:  Learning Objects Repository Network [LORN]

• For this part of the project, the brief from Associate Professor Bill Wade, the CDU Project Manager is to document content and competencies that may be added to the Certificate IV Training Package in Interactive Multimedia, and to devise Rubrics for such content and competencies whereby the nature and quality of completed student work can be analysed and recorded. Due to the current paucity of geolocatively orientated content in this area we will be looking closely at the use and application of geolocative technologies and techniques in the education domain, and more specifically as it may be applied in the above training package. 
• Work with the AFLF's 'Standards Expert Group' to explore the principles, practice and procedure of embedding geolocative information into files other than photographic. After the relatively easy task of adding geolocative coordinates into the EXIF portion of a jpg file one can drop that photo onto, say, google earth and it will attach itself to that specific location. We will be researching what is needed to extend this capacity into the realms of Audio, Text, Animation and Video file formats.

Project Deliverable 2
Demonstrate a sample Augmented Reality application that geo-references the Red Centre Way and a [to be] specified Top End topographic region. The interface and functionality of this program will be centred around the needs of an English speaking tourist.

Project Deliverable 3
Demonstrate a sample Augmented Reality application that geo-references the Red Centre Way and a [to be] specified Top End topographic region. The interface and functionality of this program, and the associated media capturing equipment, will be designed to productively augment the data capture capacity of a field operative working in geographically remote regions.


ANY suggestions, comments or insights regarding current research or emerging practice that you know of would be sincerely welcomed at this email address:

Replace the " -at- " with " @ "
memestreme-at-gmail.com

IMP's

Interactive Meme Pedagogies.

I would like to float the idea of using a partially prepared meme as the starting point for a student to commence work on say a Cert IV multimedia project. It works like this:

[1] A student, or group are given the keys to a blog [username and password] that has a selection of prepared multimedia residing in it.

[2] Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to breath some digital life into this meme.

[3] Both the trainer and the trainee develop assessment rubrics for the moderation [marking] of this work.

This model is not "Learn This", it's "Lets see how you can grow/evolve/mutate/steer this given meme."

In the "Chimeric Memes" blog I present a meme to you as an example of how I would, at this time, present the meme theme to a student, as a piece of work for Cert IV Interactive Multimedia. And I want you to imagine how such a learning object could flourish in the memestreme.

Life [being talked about, replicated, transacted etc] and Death [being ignored] in the Metaverse.  I think it was Oscar Wilde who said 'There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.'

We need to have a look at this Meme concept 

That being said, I would now like to briefly explore the concept of Memes; what they are and how we may fuse them into current pedagogical approaches.

Universal Darwinism

If there's something thats copied, with variation, and its selected for, then you MUST get design appearing out of Knowhere... you can't stop it!

Susan Blackmore emphasized the word "must" in this sentence

The principle applies to anything that is copied with variation and selection.

Richard Dawkins in his 1976 best seller "The Selfish Gene" applied this to the construct of 'Language', an inaugural cultural meme if ever there was one.

Any information that is varied and selected will produce design.

Look around you, we copy so much from one another, Oscar Wilde said that "imitation is the most sincere form of flattery". It's also, ipso facto, self-selecting - with chinese whisper like variation.

I want to bring it across to students interacting with a memestreme.

i.e. Here's seeds of multimedia about Simpsons gap that I have placed in a blog.  here's the username and password.  Go and grow it...imitate it, expand on it, induce others to critique it.

Ancient Greek mimeme, shortened to meme; "That which is imitated."

Developing Rubrics for Memes

Now its relatively easy to imagine competencies related to creating 'mashups' and deploying multimedia content to blog stremes.  In essence these competencies form the 'Lingua Franca' of the Internet.  To interact with any degree of sufficiency on the Net one needs to be able to splash media from one place to another and to generate ones own multimedia and splash it around as you see fit, or as far as your skills let you see fit.

Recalling from the previous post that a student could be given the keys to a blog, [username and password] and asked to "Go and grow that meme".

The meme I present in my next post "Chimeric Memes" is as a model for this pedagogical approach. It is basically a primer:  What's in a meme Dorris?  It discusses and describes this entity known as meme, and attempting to live more, it asks for your [1] attention, [2] consideration, and [3] redistribution. The more it is intereacted with the more 'life' it will burn and earn.

For the purposes of the 2009 Emerging Technologies project though, the memes I intend to present to students as 'self contained learning vestibules' will all be Points On A Landscape. Rather than ask a student to grow a blog about a thing we require the student to go and grow a meme about a place; a geo-referenced place.

The Red Centre Way has 11 primary points along its 400 odd Km loop. As well as georeferencing these 11 points the project will also supply some sample Augmented Reality content for each of these points. 

So; when a user is at Simpsons Gap there is some media made available to augment their physical experience of being located at Simpsons Gap... Streaming this kind of content around though is not a 'one size fits all' model. The visiting Dutch Geologist, the professionally dominant Japanese wife [leading the hubby and two kids around] and the 11 year old boy scout on an interstate trip will all require differing content if the meme is to successfully Augment their physical visit.
Ultimately there will be a precisely tagged pool of media content that is available to be drawn up on the fly to suit a users demographic. Variable Demographic Targeting, similar to the ads conversing with Tom Cruise in the subway on the set of "The Minority Report".

Speculation aside, given this divergent demographic, one way we could add potential engagement succor to the concept of growing a meme is to allow the student to describe their own target demographic and grow the meme from that particular unique perspective.


For example: I'm going to write about Simpsons Gap in the WWII epoch, as the wife of a soldier, We've just had a picnic there and an American Pilot we met there told us that Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor...

I'm a male 19 year old successful Indigenous ringer on horseback in 1932, on my way to Town after a months work at  Undoolya Station, I might get into Town about 2 hours before the Indigenous curfew comes down at 6PM...

I've just helicoptered into the Gap to contemplate the vagaries of planting a wind farm near here, my native tongue is Mandarin and I would like some info about land boundaries, mineral deposits, water catchments and the top 3 construction businesses in the Town...

I'm a tree-hugger from South Park Colarado, I want to do the 'Mount Sonder at sunrise' portion of the Larapinta trail walk, rock climb on Mount Conner and find out if there's an Irish Pub in town...


In situations like this, where a student has exercised creative construction latitude, then in this pedagogy, they may also contribute to the construction of a Rubric that can be used to assess the piece of work.  The Lecturer would have their own Institutionally developed Rubric weighted at say 60% and the student has the option of being marked totally by this rubric, or by putting in the extra yards and developing a meme-rubric indicating personally derived criteria to apply in examining the meme, [40%].


Lets consider our humble meme.  Like a virus its neither living or dead, it needs traffic to survive. Its basic nature is inert unless folk are using and reusing its content.
I am just developing this approach and I want to float some ideas about how to assess and appraise the evolutionary work a student may have brought to a given meme.

I have the notion that the amount of traffic a student meme blog generates is one factor.

A meme can be considered as a self contained packet of cultural information.

Chimeric Memes

Chimera

[Biology] 'A DNA molecule with sequences derived from two or more different organisms, formed by laboratory manipulation'.

Virus Neither dead nor alive. On its own it has just the capacity to sit there. It basically has two life streams, it can exist in a Symbiotic arrangement with a genestreme whereby the host and the virus get along famously. As a Parasite it beomes detrimental to the system it inhabits. [and there is the case of viruses just sitting there by the billions in our "Junk DNA" doing nothing currently discernible.]  But the point is, it is not at that moment metabolising anything. 

In all cases though the virus can be potentially immortal by existing in a condition in which it has the potential to replicate and or evolve.


The meaning of life, the metaverse and everything

There are 3 fundamental biological requirements for a thing to be described as alive.

[1] Containment All the packets, all the codes, all the cellular machinery needs to be contained in some type of vehicle. A cell, a strand of DNA, a strand of RNA, an ameoba, a viral packet.

[2] Metabolism This entity needs to be able to metabolise nutrient so that it has the capacity to sustain itself

[3] Hereditary It finally has to be capable of being acted upon by the forces of evolution. Whether it changes or not is another question.

As a hypothesis I argue that a multimedia meme, lets say a 'seed' aggregation of geo-referenced multimedia relating to Simpsons Gap, can be considered as a chimeric meme, [an evolving packet of cultural information] and that Mainstream marking and assessment techniques could be adjusted to allow students the heuristic advantages this style of growth orientated, collaborative learning allows.  A meme can be considered [culturally,cognitively and digitally ] alive and capable of replication and evolution. 

• Containment; it’s housed in a blog, say, and capable of being transported [and transformed/evolved] through a cultural system [Internet] via Web 2.0.
• Capable of metabolism [interacting constructively with existent information from it’s user and their readers], replication [copied to and used in other web 2.0 platforms].
• And subject to [cultural] evolutionary forces [the 'seed', via its user and her audience, has the capacity to attract and repulse other information, transforming itself in the process.]  

Given suitable creative student interaction with the content it can become a useful, and therefore ‘evolving' packet of cultural information. Just like some of the clips on youtube that go viral, and spawn spinoffs.

Taste-Full

Now just as a example, a first try for me really, here's how I'd go about inducing someone into my discussion on the life and times of a meme.  

First I'll provide some short 'Taste' as like an executive summary, then provide deeper information should the reader feel so motivated in the form of "Full", access to the entirety of the seed.

What’s in a meme Dorris?

Listen to this 1 min excerpt from Robyn Williams of ABC Radio National as he describes a meme that went viral in his high school days in England:

TASTE

Two loose Chimney Flue's Latrec!








FULL

Now here is the podcast in its full 30 minutes play time

FULLERMEME 1 Susan Blackmore Video

Sue Blackmore on Memes and Temes.[video coming soon, heres the link to ted.com]

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html

FULLERMEME 2- Textual Description of a Meme

About Memes

The term meme (it's pronounced like dream or cream) was coined by Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. As examples he suggested “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches”.

Memes are habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information that is copied from person to person. Memes, like genes, are replicators. That is, they are information that is copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods, and they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes.

The word “meme” has recently been included in the Oxford English Dictionary where it is defined as follows  “meme (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened from mimeme ... that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”.

According to memetics, our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on memes, just as organisms are designed by natural selection acting on genes. A central question for memetics is therefore ‘why has this meme survived?’. Some succeed because they are genuinely useful to us, while others use a variety of tricks to get themselves copied. From the point of view of the “selfish memes” all that matters is replication, regardless of the effect on either us or our genes.

Some memes are almost entirely exploitative, or viral, in nature, including chain letters and e-mail viruses. These consist of a “copy-me” instruction backed up with threats and promises. Religions have a similar structure and this is why Dawkins refers to them as ‘viruses of the mind’. Many religions threaten hell and damnation, promise heaven or salvation, and insist that their followers pass on their beliefs to others. This ensures the survival of the memeplex. Other viral memes include alternative therapies that don’t work, and new age fads and cults. Relatively harmless memes include children’s games, urban legends and popular songs, all of which can spread like infections.

At the other end of the spectrum memes survive because of their value to us. The most valuable of memeplexes include all of the arts and sports, transport and communications systems, political and monetary systems, literature and science.

Memetics has been used to provide new explanations of human evolution, including theories of altruism, the origins of language and consciousness, and the evolution of the large human brain. The Internet can be seen as a vast realm of memes, growing rapidly by the process of memetic evolution and not under human control.

The field of memetics is still a new and controversial science, with many critics, and many difficulties to be resolved.


FULLERMEME 3- Science Fiction

'SNOWCRASH'  Neal Stephenson  Publication date, June 1992.

Hiro Protagonist; freelance hacker who helped cut the code for the 'Metaverse' which is basically a 'Second Life' app. He's in the metaverse on his way into the virtual bar of 'The Black Sun' and fortunately decides against accepting and watching the 'Snowcrash' virus...[like watching snow on the screen of an old cathode ray TV] which turns folk into religious zealots, of a 'religion' fashioned by a media tycoon.  The 'Hypercard', is/was a really clever old Mac program, which back in the 90's allowed one to dump all sorts of multimedia into a single file, a perfect repository to drop one of our current memes into.

Hiro realizes that the guy has noticed him and is staring back, looking him up and down, paying particular attention to the swords. A grin spreads across the black-and-white guy's face. It is a satisfied grin. A grin of recognition. The grin of a man who knows something Hiro doesn't. The black-and-white guy has been standing with his arms folded across his chest, like a man who is bored, who's been waiting for something, and now his arms drop to his sides, swing loosely at the shoulders, like an athlete limbering up. He steps as close as he can and leans forward; he's so tall that the only thing behind him is empty black sky, torn with the glowing vapor trails of passing animercials.

"Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?"

A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.

Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting that information. It's probably nothing.

The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can't sell drugs in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at something.

The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash before. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.

But a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug.

The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has an utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense. Hiro's trying to read some clues in the guy's face, but the closer he looks, the more his shifty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into jittering, hard-edged pixels. It's like putting his nose against the glass of a busted TV. It makes his teeth hurt.

"Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?"

"You want to try some Snow Crash?"

He has a crisp accent that Hiro can't quite place. His audio is as bad as his video. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. He must be goggled in from a public terminal alongside some freeway. "I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?"

"It's a drug, asshole," the guy says. "What do you think?"

"Wait a minute. This is a new one on me," Hiro says. "You honestly think I'm going to give you some money here? And then what do I do, wait for you to mail me the stuff?"

"I said try, not buy," the guy says. "You don't have to give me any money. Free sample. And you don't have to wait for no mail. You can have it now." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard.

It looks like a business card. The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. It is used in the Metaverse to represent a chunk of data. It might be text, audio, video, a still image, or any other information that can be represented digitally.

Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete biography, read by the player himself, in stereo digital sound; and a complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you look up the numbers you want.

A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information. For all Hiro knows, this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of Congress, or every episode of Hawaii Five-O that was ever filmed, or the complete recordings of Jimi Hendrix, or the 1950 Census.

Or -- more likely -- a wide variety of nasty computer viruses. If Hiro reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy's system into Hiro's computer. Hiro, naturally, wouldn't touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck.

And it doesn't make sense anyway. "That's a hypercard. I thought you said Snow Crash was a drug," Hiro says, now totally nonplussed.

"It is," the guy says. "Try it."

"Does it fuck up your brain?" Hiro says. "Or your computer?"

"Both. Neither. What's the difference?"

Hiro finally realizes that he has just wasted sixty seconds of his life having a meaningless conversation with a paranoid schizophrenic. He turns around and goes into The Black Sun.

AND LATER

Hiro Protagonist talks to a ‘Gargoyle’ who explains how a meme virus works…

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

"You're the guy who's working with Juanita, right?" Hiro says.

"Or she's working with me. Or something like that"

"She said she wanted me to meet you."

For several seconds Lagos is frozen. He's ransacking more data. Hiro wants to throw a bucket of water on him.

"Makes sense," he says. "You're as familiar with the Metaverse as anyone. Freelance hacker -- that's exactly right"

"Exactly right for what? No one wants freelance hackers anymore."

"The corporate assembly-line hackers are suckers for infection. They're going to go down by the thousands, just like Sennacherib's army before the walls of Jerusalem," Lagos says.

"Infection? Sennacherib?"

"And you can defend yourself in Reality, too -- that'll be good if you ever go up against Raven. Remember, his knives are as sharp as a molecule. They'll go through a bulletproof jacket like lingerie."

"Raven?"

"You'll probably see him tonight. Don't mess with him."

"Okay," Hiro says. "I'll look out for him."

"That's not what I said," Lagos says. "I said, don't mess with him."

"Why not?"

"It's a dangerous world," Lagos says. "Getting more dangerous all the time. So we don't want to upset the balance of terror. Just think about the Cold War."

"Yup." All Hiro wants to do now is walk away and never see this guy again, but he won't wind up the conversation.

"You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too."

"Deep structures?"

"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"

"Sure."

"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them -- the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells -- your bioware selfmodifies -- the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable -- all hackers are vulnerable -- to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."

"What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"

"Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap lately? Like, in the Metaverse?"

Interesting. "Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this Brandy came up to my friend --"

"A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?"

Hiro walks away, the same way he walks away from psychotic street people who follow him down the street.

"It tells you that evil is a virus!" Lagos calls after him. "Don't let the nam-shub into your operating system!"

Juanita's working with this alien?

Blunt Force Trauma play for a solid hour, segueing from one song into the next with no chink or crevice in the wall of noise. All a part of the aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro can hear the exaltation of the crowd. It's a blast of high-pitched noise that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.

Meme Rubrics Revisited.

As we have seen in the previous 3 posts there exists beneficial heuristic reasons for setting up, at least some learning, to be centered around a learners engagement with a given Meme.

10-Palm Valley

This blog entry demonstrates how this beta version of google blogger can georeference blogs onto a landscape.

Click the Palm Valley link below to auto open google earth zoomong in to that wonderful Red Cabbage Palm laden oasis in Central Australia.

The History of the Internet

Here's a nice 5 min cartoon that shows the history of the internet that puts the key Internet date at 1957.

I like because it uses a rudimentary set of moving symbols and crisp audio commentary to competently describe the evolution of the Internet.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Collaboration squared and an impending 'Singularity' -R

In 1984 I had hungrily devoured every word of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' trilogy and contemplated what a "mass consensual hallucination" AKA cyberspace [he invented this word], would become to look like.

"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."
William Gibson;'Nueromancer' and 'Burning Chrome.

I witnessed a real collaboration/communication driven paradigm shift in the 90's at a college I was working at back then. Email was made available to the entire staff base in one fell swoop. Over that next year as staff got used to the presence of it all one could see that the way of doing business [and friends and jokes] had changed irrevocably.

It was hard to think back then that in another 15 years or so we would be on the cusp of omnipresent ubiquitous computing. What was unforeseen I feel was the rate and pace of change, exponential.

So there are two themes I wish to talk about here, and mainly I must confess, to just marvel at human ingenuity. In broader therms though I see exploration of these topics as giving a more rounded approach to and understanding of hi-tech evolution.

The first being Collaboration and I feel Howard Rheingold [The rise and rise of collaboration], speaking at www.ted.com gives a really good presentation on how it's set to change our lives irrevocably, again. And its worth noting that as this blog goes to press 5/6/09 that Google Wave has just become public, leveraged collaboration notched up once again.



The second part of this blog:

[1] Science Fiction [though I prefer Speculative Fiction], and Science Fact. Both call up a future that may exist by attempting prescience based on their understanding of life, the universe and everything. So have a listen to the podcast, Janice McAdam and watch the vodcast, Ray Kurzweil and I hope you enjoy synthesizing these memes.

In the Red Corner is Ray Kurzweil, scientist, futurist and all round nice guy who provides a compelling case for fruition of his imagined event "Singularity", and man if it comes it will be a ripper. In the Blue Corner Janice McAdam from Sydney has degrees in physics and children's literature and calls herself a 'lapsed physicist'. Today she talks about the genre of science fiction as a prediction into the future.

Janice McAdam from ABC radio national podcast;


Ray Kurzweil sourced from ted.com


Download Janice McAdam; Can Science Fiction predict the future?
http://www.ourmedia.org/media/science-fiction-prediction-future-0
Download Ray Kurzweil

Download Howard Rheingold; The Rise and Rise of Collaboration.
http://ourmedia.org/node/185773
Or go and search directly at www.ted.com

Download Ray Kurzweil; How technology's accelerating power will transform us
http://ourmedia.org/node/204307

Workshop [free] Software Resources -R

Freeware
Irfanview Picture editor and plugins [Windows]
http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm

Download and install the latest Irfanview[4.23] plugins with EXIF capacity.
http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm

Audacity audio editor [Windows and Mac, Linux?]
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

GPSPhotoLinker - 1.6.1 [Mac only]
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24820



Microsoft PhotoStory
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/PhotoStory/default.mspx

Copyright and Copy left Issues. -R

In a project such as ours where we need to mix and meld different multimedia streams into themed 'mashups', one of the main antagonists to creativity is having to dance across various copyright legalities. A perturbance for individual bloggers and an absolute minefield for educational institutions. When an axe falls it can be very heavy...

'Information wants to be free' of course, but how do we realistically dialogue with issues of Patent Rights and Intellectual Property. Historically it can be argued that patent rights have done more to restrain innovation than industrial espionage. The Wright Brothers for example patented the bloody aeroplane! As a consequence no aeronautics happened apart from what the Bros did. Come WW1 and the President cancelled the entire patent system for aeronautical R&D. The contemporary consequence being that the likes of Boeing, Lockheed Martin etc rose to positions of global prominence. This is a fascinating lecture.

Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures, Melbourne 29 December 2007

"Are we missing out on the full benefits of science and technology because of outdated ideas about copyright and patenting? Could the key to feeding the world be locked up in a company fridge somewhere? Open-source software has transformed the internet, underpinning the phenomenal growth of Google, Ebay and YouTube. What can science learn from this revolution? In our rush to protect intellectual property, have we damaged our capacity to deliver solutions for the critical issues of the 21st century?
In this lecture, John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons at Harvard Law School, will describe how existing social and legal infrastructures are choking science, and how we can create new ways to share research. Brian Fitzgerald, Head of the Law School at Queensland University of Technology, will discuss the success of open source in the information technology world, and the lessons for other fields of science." [source abc.net.au/rn]



To download the file stremed above please visit ourmedia.org at:
http://www.ourmedia.org/media/alfred-deakin-innovation-lectures-melbourne-2007

The Numerati -R

Alphabet soup gives way to binary soup.

So far we've looked at how the info soup, which we are dumplings in,  has morphed along with its supporting technologies to become more human/personally centered, ubiquitous and user friendly.

Advertisers, employers, teachers and so on can 'push' pertinent content to a users stationary or mobile location.

I remember watching some show about 5 years ago when this guy was saying that 50% of the jobs that will exist in 10 years time have not been invented yet. 

The explosion in online activity and networking has seen a corresponding explosion in data collection and analysis. But according to Steve Baker, a senior writer for BusinessWeek, it's only in very recent times that we've started to see the development of an elite class of people who've begun to take data management – and sometimes manipulation – to an entirely new level. He calls them the Numerati.

 People and organisations have been collecting data for millennia, how many of us there are, and why we vote the way we do, what we like to eat, all of that sort of thing.

Computers of course have made it possible to gather that data on a once-unimaginable scale. Though as any good pollster will tell you, having data and knowing how to use it are two very different things.

Now the explosion in online activity and networking has seen a corresponding explosion in data collection and analysis. 

[Source ABC radio national's Future tense - streme the podcast below or download from ABC/rn :http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2009/2578378.htm]

Listen to the podcast below for an interesting take on how, who and why.


And to further explain and describe the trend have a look at the www.ted.com video from Jonathon Harris in 2007, we're seeing commercial examples of Harris's 'Universe' program in the mainstream now.
Jonathon Harris and "The Web's Secret Stories" from that wonderful site www.ted.com.

Its from platforms such as Harris's 'Univese' program [see video] that we can see aspects of what is termed the 'Semantic Web' emerging, here massive data sets are agglomerated and manipulated in real time.

The Changing face of advertising. - R

Now we've looked at how the global print media is nervously adjusting to emerging procedures and products lets have a look at advertising.  One way or another the majority of media we consume is supported by advertising.  Like the print media producers we looked at in the previous blog the Advertising industry are  positioning themselves to take ADvantage of the internet and mobile computing.

In the radio and TV era the model was saturation. Listen to or watch this station and we will saturate your personal attention with our sponsors ads.  Sure we can hit the 'mute' button on the TV or pre-record the video so that we can fast-forward through the ads, conversely  heaps of us don't feel violated sitting in front of a program that feeds 15 mins per hour of repetitive pulp at us.  Kids seemingly zone out when the ads are on yet appear to have deep affinity with the Golden Arches whenever we drive by...

Anyway the very nature of advertising is in the process of flux, we are changing from a one size fits all saturation model [Exposure to] to the paradigm of Interaction with. In the podcast below Professor Veron refers to these ads as 'telescopic'.  If the tag line is interesting we can click to go deeper.  Each click, each step is essentially a logic gate that is drawing us down ever closer to an actual product or service on offer that we might be interested in paying for. 

The process is similar to the way you are corralled into the Department you need when you phone say  Telstra about your broadband service.  Each question you answer ["press one if you are a residential customer"] gets you closer to the actual part you wish to Interact with, without having to bother humans. 

And as Digital Radio is launched around Australia in July 09 listeners will have some basic control of and therefore interaction with the digital radio stream they are 'interacting' with. On a digital radio service songs can, for example, be paused or rewound.

Download this audio resource at ourmedia.org:
http://www.ourmedia.org/media/changing-face-advertising

Read all about it! - R

Welcome along.

Our 'memestreme' project hangs in that relatively new camp of IT studies: 'New Media' NM. 

Some of the workshop content we are constructing to augment the uptake of skills, knowledge and attitudes needed to operate in this sphere include the history of NM's evolution, its Global 'state of play', what's in the pipeline now... and excitingly, a bit of SF- speculative fiction on how we may look and feel as residents in that amorphous and resoulutely emerging future Matrix. 

Right now with the advent of mobile computing and ubiquitous interconnectivity we are awash with new prototypes for a human 'being' and a human 'doing'. Follow the memestreme blog as we explore current NM adopted standards, nascent wannabes and possible futures.  

News.

Have you ever wondered why TV and radio news is there on every comm channel you may hone in on... and it's basically free?  TV soaps, documentaries, movies, cartoons etc are bought by the station, repackaged to include advertising and on-sold to you and I. News just hangs there, basically free.

This is about to change and one area where we can see tremors of uncertainty, as new News gathering and redistribution practices percolate to the user defined pedestal of 'best practice', is in that 19th century bastion of redistributed intel; the Newspaper. Lets start here.

The entire edifice that is the News Print behemoth is trying desperately to make out the writing on the wall. [Watch the video Saving Newspapers: The Musical, hot off the press from a gaggle of young reporters in a mainstream Boston news copy room] Newspaper sales are steady... downwards, and in these economically depressed times the incidence of classified advertising has plummeted to new lows further eroding  user generated profits. Like General Motors, News Papers per se are desperate to re-invent themselves and there are some really interesting approaches happening, including some that would ultimately have us reading News from a position of Informed Consensual arrangement. Read all about it!

Have a go at this ABC/rn podcast "Read all about it!", there are 3 explorations of how you and I may be moving from the current 'one size fits all' News model [all the News we see fit to print] to a model of News based personalization driven by informed collaboration/consumption and brought about by the wonders of internet based interconnectedness.

Download file copy at ourmedia.org:
http://ourmedia.org/node/198411

Links to orgs discussed in the Audio blog:

Spot.Us

The Printed Blog

EveryBlock