here are my notes from the sessions i attended on the final day of DML2010 - again, sincere apologies for the brevity - i spent the latter half of the day on the flight from San Diego to San Francisco.
the first session i attended was a panel chaired by Richard Scullin, and which comprised Derek Lomas, Eric Klopfer, Jared Lamenzo and Colleen Macklin. the session was entitled 'Diversifying Mobiles: Participatory Learnings'. Eric suggested augmented reality as one possibly effective means to address socio-scientific issues; Jared shared his work helping children in urban areas not only better appreciate local fauna, but also take an active part in adopting the appropriate epistemic frame in contributing to (in a crowdsourced way) larger research thrusts in habitat conservation. during the Q&A, one thing that caught my attention was the suggestion that flagging as a means / proxy for more active top-down moderation in online communities.
the second session i attended was a panel chaired by Jonathan Alexander, and which comprised Elizabeth Losh and Alexandra Juhasz. the session was entitled 'Queer You(th) Tube'. an interesting phrase was the kairos of coming out. Alexandra provoked a lively debate when she presented a critique on the role of YouTube (and similar services) on societal understandings on the tensions between naivete and irony. i found it personally helpful to frame the discussion which ensued between "queer as societally perturbative" and "queer as community".
the final session i was able to attend at the inaugural DML conference was a panel chaired by Maurizio Forte, and which comprised Ruzena Bajcsi, Nicolo Dell'unto, Paola Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco, Fabrizio Galeazzi, Chris Johanson, David Kirsch, Nicola Lercari, Thomas Levy and Susan Schreibman. the session was entitled 'Virtual Collaborative Environments for Cultural Heritage'. alas, i was only able to attend this session in part, because i had to catch the flight to SFO. something new i learned from Chris was that the Wonderland virtual environment (now no longer officially supported by Sun) is polygon-based, unlike SL's prim-based system. from David, i learned about Marvin Minsky's ideas of Frames. essentially, David helped me / us understand that projection could be thought of as an intermedium structural coupling between enaction ("what you see depends on perceptual actions you can perform") and imagination. his argument - if i understood him correctly - was that when operating in virtual environments, tangible physical objects serve to enhance our projective ability, and thereby our imagination.
[update: papers and presentation files from the conference are now available online :-) ]
best title slide... ever
