In a June 22nd event in Second Life, the MacArthur Foundation announced the beginning of a year-long exploration of the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds.

The exploration will take the form of a series of conversations, real-world conferences on these issues, and competitive grants, all accessible from the virtual world.

The highlights of the June 22nd event were a conversation between Phillip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, and MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton, and the announcement of a $550,000 grant to the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy to lead the effort.

GIS use in the classroom is extending beyond geology, geography, and archaeology into other less-science based disciplines.

The Bowdoin News archives from March of this year contains an interesting article describing professor Patrick Rael's "The Civil War Era" class. Students used GIS to process US Census Bureau information from the 1790s, mapping out the election that gave Abraham Lincoln the presidency. From the article:

"Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology - a software system that allows users to convert data into detailed maps - his students mapped out voting and demographic information from the period to visualize the impact of social forces, such as early industrialization and slavery, on voting behavior....Rael's project demonstrates the possibilities of GIS-based scholarship and teaching in the humanities, a growing trend among colleges and universities....GIS is crossing disciplines and is being used in areas such as healthcare, law enforcement, environmental research, sociology, and land planning."

Our friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book have been busy. With the support of the MacArthur Foundation and the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC, they have just launched Making MediaCommons, a planning site where the MediaCommons project will begin to develop in public.

The  site consists of three simple parts:

1) A weblog where founding editors Avi Santo (Old Dominion University) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College) will think out loud and work with the emerging community to develop the full MediaCommons vision.

2) A call for "papers"--scholarly projects that engagingly explore some aspect of media history, theory, or culture through an adventurous use of the broad palette of technologies provided by the digital network. These will be the first round of texts published by MediaCommons at the time of its launch.

3) In Media Res--an experimental feature where each week a different scholar will present a short contemporary media clip accompanied by a 100-150 word commentary, alongside which a community discussion can take place. In Media Res is presented as just one of the many possible critical activities that MediaCommons could eventually host. With this feature, they are also making a stand on "fair use," asserting the right to quote from the media for scholarly, critical and pedagogical purposes. Currently on the site, you'll find videos curated by Henry Jenkins of MIT, Jason Mittell of Middlebury College and Horace Newcomb of the University of Georgia (and the founder of the Peabody Awards). An open invitation has been issued for more curators.

Out of this site, the real MediaCommons will eventually emerge. The launch is planned for 2007, as early as Spring and as late as Fall, depending on community response.  Already there are some quite interesting conversations taking place within, including a fascinating exchange about YouTube's potentially-stifling role in the emerging landscape of media criticism.
 

The Japanese virtual world Meet Me has been released.  It's the same basic idea as Second Life with some key differences that should be very beneficial for teachers of Japanese

• There are rules governing behavior.  It's not the wild west you'll find in Second Life.
• It's intended only for a Japanese audience, so you can be reasonably sure people you meet in the environment are Japanese.
  
• It's a virtual representation of Tokyo and could easily be used as an example of Japanese modern culture.

The download is free, though you do have to register with your email address.  Also, for XP you have to make a change in the Control Panel to read the Japanese characters in the environment. Go to Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Advanced Tab >  then for the drop down list set "Select a language for non-unicode languages” to Japanese.  Thanks to Takeshi Sengiku at Gettysburg for find this.

Microsoft has released LiveStation in for private testing. It's similar to Joost in that they use p2p technology to deliver a full screen TV experience; however, they claim they're not competitors. As the name implies, Microsoft is looking to focus on live TV whereas Joost is an on-demand service. However, it is certainly not hard to imagine each being extended to do the opposite.

How much longer until we see campuses getting rid of satellite TV services, either for the campus or just the language centers? I don't have a test account for LiveStation yet, so I couldn't measure the bandwidth. Joost was a rather heavy user at 600kbs, but as compression technology continues to improve (and with bandwidth becoming cheaper), it may not be long.

 

NCTE--The National Council of Teachers of English--has assembled an excellent set of resources to help educators think about literacy as going well beyond print texts, encompassing how texts are produced and how multimodal forms of representation convey meaning. According to the introduction to the site, "NCTE is taking the lead in defining how emergent technologies are used to teach language, literacies and critical thinking skills as well as how ethical considerations can guide the use of various technologies."

The site includes some "research-based policy statements" that some may find surprising: