We enjoyed sharing insights at SXSW Interactive 2014 on this question — How is smartphone use pixelating reality, blowing it up and turning it into shiftable bits of data so we are making different decisions with its Time and Place?
We are in a massive change in social and personal behavior, catalyzed by the increasing penetration of smartphones. We have had digital cameras and cell phones for many years. The intriguing shift stems from both (a) casual photography with no lag time to distribute and immediate connectivity, and (b) instant connecting with small screens wherever we go.
What has shifted? This direction of thought looks at how this affects our Here and Now, as well as the question of being Together.
How are we Present if we are always checking in to other information and places?
Are we shifting our energies to auto-documenting our activities through pictures and other actions to the detriment of the activity and connections that we are experiencing live?
You can enjoy two elements of the presentation below…
First, this video outlines some of the questions we examined:
Second, here’s the SlideShare of the presentation from SXSW, without any audio.
We enjoyed our adventures at CES 2014. Dr. Johnson came hold with a nasty convention cold, and now that she is almost human again, we thought we would share the human-adjacent technologies about robots, eye tracking, 3D printing, telepresence, quad copters, cars, and other things that go bump in the night from future and present technology trends.
To MOOC or not to MOOC? That has been the question in the minds of many educational institutions’ leadership since early to mid-2012. Should we produce our classes on video and share them with a variety of partners to learn from these experiences? (more…)
Digital Hollywood has been a semi-annual ritual for us for more than five years. Our president, Dr. Gigi Johnson, moderated a panel to a packed room on “The Facebook Factor,” with the following introductory slides on the size and scale of Facebook in the United States:
Back in August 2013, SXSW started its crowdsourced panel picking process for 2014. Each year, thousands of people pitch great ideas to be voted on in a big crowdsourced process. According to a recent email, 700 people pitched SXSWedu (education) panels for that conference. More than 3,000 pitched for SXSW Interactive. Who knows how many pitched for SXSW Music. A person can only pitch one for each.
We submitted 3 pitches around innovation: educational, social media, and interpersonal:
Pitch: MOOCs (Massively Open Online Classes) have dominated the educational trade press in both 2012 and 2013, stirring both enthusiasm and anxiety. This session will look at their impact on higher education planning, economics, and “the rest of us.” What have we learned from MOOCs? How can universities use these learnings to create our own environments for the next decade? This session will frame ways to have concrete and beneficial discussions about learnings from these broadly MOOC-labeled experiences in our blended university environments. Questions can arise beyond the economics of learning at scale, focusing on the learning science, design, and differences in qualities, as well as the real learning outcomes. With this lens, we also can examine what “works” in the 700-person lecture hall and in more intimate distributed learning platforms.
Pitch: Many of us carry smartphones wherever we go. Increasingly, we are leaning on them as active and passive gathering devices of data and images. Google Glass and other recording devices bring the question further front and center—how is our recording and perpetually digitally checking in affecting our everyday lives? How are those check-ins and recordings shifting our being “present” in our shared Now and Here? Are we increasingly taking the opportunity to be digitally Elsewhere and not Present?
This ties into my Udemy course and my UCLA Music course as well, plus benefits from work this summer in helping relaunch a long-time software product.
Pitch: The digital world for musicians continues to change dramatically. We can self-market and create communities directly with listeners and also can thrive in online communities with influencers and other musicians around the world. Digital has transformed not just the way we get the word out, but also how we create and collaborate. Internet marketing has morphed into Internet community crowdsourcing of rich relationships—a very different world for musicians and musical organizations. How can you – a busy musician and/or support team – use the resources of social media to use your time, energy, and money well to create your long-term audience and profitable Super Fans?
We enjoyed sharing the following slide presentation with the Professional Development Workshop at AOM 2013 in Orlando, Florida within an overall session called “Translating Scholarship into Practice: How Can Scholarly Research Be Translated Into Practice?” It also can be found at Prezi.com at this link.
