This just in from the esteemed Wayne Ashley.
Looks very cool.

“Share, Share Widely”: A Conference on New Media Education

Friday, May 6th, 11am – 8pm
The Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th street)
New York City

http://conference.newmediaeducation.org — website

Join us for an intensive one day conference about new
media education. Connect with new media researchers
and educators, present, discuss, and exchange syllabi
or other public domain materials in a temporary gift
economy zone. Bring your USB memory key and laptop.

The conference will be podcast.
http://podcast.newmediaeducation.org

After-Party
Friday, May 6th, 9pm

The Thing
459 W. 19th St
(between 9th and 10th Ave)
New York, NY
10011

“Share, Share Widely” is organized by the Institute
for Distributed Creativity (iDC) in collaboration with
the Office of the Associate Provostfor Instructional
Technology and the New Media Lab, The Graduate Center,
City University of New York.

Please RSVP to idc [@] distributedcreativity.org

Participants:

Josephine Anstey (SUNY at Buffalo), Joline Blais
(University of Maine), Beatriz DaCosta (UC Irvine),
Ben Chang (School of the Arts Institute Chicago),
Alison Colman (Ohio University School of Art), Mary
Flanagan
Hunter College, CUNY), Pattie Belle
Hastings(Quinnipiac University), Tiffany Holmes
(School of the Arts Institute of Chicago), Jon Ippolito(Guggenheim Museum and University of Maine), Natalie Jeremijenko (UC
San Diego), Hana Iverson (Temple University), Molly
Krause (Berkman Center for Internet and Society,
Harvard University), Patrick Lichty (Intelligent Agent Magazine), Martin Lucas (Hunter College, CUNY), Colleen Macklin (ParsonsSchool of Design), Dave Pape (SUNY at Buffalo), Daniel Perlin (Interactive Telecommunication Program), Andrea Polli (Hunter College, CUNY),Douglas Repetto (Columbia University), Stephanie Rothenberg (SUNY at Buffalo), ChrisSalter (Concordia University, Montreal), Brooke Singer (SUNY at Purchase),Liz Slagus (Eyebeam), Thomas Slomka (SUNY at Buffalo), Mark Tribe

(Columbia University), McKenzie Wark (New School),
Ricardo Miranda Zuniga (The College of New Jersey).

Respondents:

Stanley Aronowitz (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Timothy Druckrey (Media Critic, NYC, and MICA)
Trebor Scholz (SUNY at Buffalo)

Concept/Production:
Trebor Scholz (Institute for Distributed Creativity)

Remote Contributors (see Media Blog):
Saul Albert (University of Openess), Richard Barbrook (Westminster University, London), Susan Collins (Slade School, London), Eugene I. Dairianathan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Brian Goldfarb (UC San Diego), Alex Halavais (SUNY at Buffalo), Jeff Knowlton (UC San Diego), Paul Benedict Lincoln (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore),Geert Lovink (Hogeschool van Amsterdam/ University of Amsterdam),
Nathan Martin (Carnegie Mellon University), Kevin
McCauley (City Varsity, University of Cape
Town/University of Stellenbosch, South Africa),
Jason Noland (University of Toronto), Ricardo Rosas
(Comum Lab, Sao Paulo, Brazil), Joel Slayton (San Jose
State University), Paul Vanouse (SUNY at Buffalo)

Interviews Leading Up To Conference:

(as part of WebCamTalk 1.0)
Megan Boler (University of Toronto), Joline Blais
(University of Maine), Axel Bruns (Queensland
University of Technology), Lily Diaz (University
of Art and Design, Helsinki), Elizabeth Goodman (San
Francisco Art Institute), William Grishold (UC San
Diego), Lisa Gye (Swinburne University), John
Hopkins (Neoscenes.net), Jon Ippolito (Guggenheim
Museum, University of Maine), Adriene Jenik (UC San
Diego), Molly Krause (Harvard University),Patrick
Lichty (Intelligent Agent Magazine), Wolfgang Münch
(LASALLE_SIA,Singapore), Anna Munster (University of
New South Wales, Sydney), Eduardo Navas (UC San
Diego), Randall Packer (American University,
Washington),
Simon Penny (UC Irvine), Warren Sack (UC Santa Cruz),
Christoph Spehr(Berlin), Ricardo Miranda Zuniga (The
College of New Jersey)

http://newmediaeducation.org — WebCamTalk 1.0 http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ — iDC List Archives

Conference Advisory Committee:

Stephen Brier (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Timothy Druckrey (Media Critic, NYC)
Richard Maxwell (Queens College, CUNY)

Acknowledgments:
Many thanks to Nikolina Knezevic (visiting scholar at
New School University, intern at the Institute for
Distributed Creativity).

Introduction:
Over the past ten years new-media art programs have
been started at universities. Departments are shaped,
many positions in this field open up and student
interest is massive. In China, India, Indonesia,
Singapore and Thailand enormous developments will take
place in the next few years in “new media” art
education. At the same time technologists, artists
and
educators acknowledge a crisis mode: from Germany to
Canada, Finland, Ireland, Australia, Taiwan and
Singapore to the United States and beyond. But so
far, at least in the United States there has been
surprisingly little public debate about education in
new-media art.

Many educators point to a widespread tension between
vocational training and a solid critical education.
There is no stable “new media industry” for which a
static skill set would prepare the graduate for his or
her professional future in today’s post-dotcom era.
Between Futurist narratives of progress with all their techno-optimism and the technophobia often encountered in more traditional narratives– how do we educate students to be equally familiar with technical concepts, theory, history, and art?

How can new media theory be activated as a wake-up
call for students leading to radical change? Which
educational structure proves more effective: cross-disciplinary, theme-based research groups or media-based departments? Does the current new media art curriculum allow for play, failure, and experiment? How can we introduce free software into the new media
classroom when businesses still hardly make use of
open source or free software? How can we break out of
the self-contained university lab? What are examples
of
meaningful connections between media production in the university and cultural institutions as well as technology businesses? How can we introduce politics into the new media lab?

Between imagined flat hierarchies and the traditional
models of top-down education, participants will give
examples based on their experiences that offer a
middle-ground between these extremes. Further
questions address anti-intellectualism in the
classroom and the high demands on educators in this
area in which technology and theory have few
precedents and change
rapidly. In response to this– several distributed
learning tools will be presented that link up
new-media educators to share code, theory, and art in
real time.

-Vocational training versus solid critical education

-Open Source Software, open access, open content,
technologies of sharing

-Edblogging, blogsperiments

-Creation of meaningful connections between art,
theory, technology, and history

-Education of politics, politics in education

-Shaping of core curriculum without fear of
experiments and failure

-Distributed learning tools: empowering for the
knowledge commons (organizing academic knowledge and
connecting new media educators)

-Intellectual property issues in academia

-Diversity in the new media art classroom

-Use of wifi devices to connect people on campus and
in the classroom

-Uses of social software in the classroom (wikis, and
weblogs, voice overIP, del.icio.us, IM, and Flickr)

-Battles over the wireless commons

-Models for connecting university labs with outside institutions and non-profit organizations.

A network of new media educators will be formed as
result of this conference.

————————————————-
Institute for Distributed Creativity http://distributedcreativity.org/

The Graduate Center, CUNY
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/