MIT5 Media in transition
I know it’s Wednesday, and I should have been blogging the event as it happened. However, that didn’t happen. Instead of specific sessions, I am going to give my overall impressions of the conference. Several days ago, Henry Jenkins requested feedback on his blog, although he is several thoughts past that by now. I am slow and I am going to embrace my slowness and revive this blog at my own, several-days-past-relevant pace.
First, the plenary sessions were phenomenal. Great speakers, with their messages kept very short and long q & a sessions. The topics were provocative and apropos. The plenary session that tied it all together for me was late in the day on Saturday and had a message that we need to take Fair Use back in academic institutions. The Center for Social Media at American University, if I understood correctly, has been working with documentary film makers to create a set of accepted Fair Use practices that their insurers will also stand behind. They are starting a similar process with media literacy educators to craft discipline specific fair use practices. This was the message that my own presentation needed at the end–and I am glad to have found something I was looking for at this conference. Definitely check out the podcasts of the plenary sessions.
I really enjoyed the model of having panel speakers each give their presentation (which usually meant reading a paper) and then the audience could participate in discussion. Most of the sessions I went to really did leave enough time for a rich discussion. I was disappointed by the number of papers read verbatim (as opposed to actually presenting), but I know that is a reflection of discipline-specific practice. I understand that the reading of a paper reveals the richness of the text in question, but I can read–when I’m watching a presentation, I expect a different kind of explanation. What’s interesting is that this practice of reading papers was disconnected from the plenary sessions, where the speakers did not read from papers at all.
Another interesting aspect of the conference was that it was simulcast in Second Life. It was referred to in one of the first plenary session and I filed that information away. Some people in the overflow room were simultaneously watching the video feed of the conference and hanging out in SL. On Sunday morning, I did not have the opportunity to go back into Cambridge. On a whim, I decided to see if they were still broadcasting the last session in SL. It took me a bit of searching the blogosphere to figure out where to go (it wasn’t advertised on the MIT5 site), but once I got registered with the group I needed to, I zipped over the closing plenary session. There were a number of people watching with me, including colleagues from Australia and Greece who had been experiencing the entire conference from their geographically disparate locations. It caused me to step back from a minute and reflect that the conference that I had been attending was in fact experienced in a completely different way by a completely different community.