Globally Engaged, Digitally Enabled

Noah Wittman and Rick Jaffe to lead Social Media and Networking session from 1:15 to 3:30 pm on Thursday, June 9, at the New Media Consoritum conference in Monterey, California.

Title: Globally Engaged, Digitally Enabled:  Harnessing Web-based technologies for Service Learning and Scholarly Networking

Session Description:  How can new web-based technologies be leveraged to support learning, collaboration and scholarly networking? The presenters team with students and practitioners in the Global Poverty and Practice minor at the University of California, Berkeley to provide an online environment that goes beyond traditional learning management systems. As the minor reinvents the classroom in a globally connected society, this project explores the possibilities of the emerging network form for engaged scholarship among educators and students.

Conference Website:
http://www.nmc.org/node/6356

More Info About Project:
http://okapi.wordpress.com/projects/blum-social-networking-platform/

New Collaboration with Blum Center for Developing Economies

We are working the the Blum Center for Developing Economies to develop  a web-based platform for reflective learning, project collaboration, and social networking for scholars and practitioners associated with the Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) minor at the University of California, Berkeley.  The goal of our platform is to enhance and extend the reach and impact of the GPP curriculum by providing a student-empowering online environment more closely fitted to the needs of the minor than the traditional top-down, instructor-centered learning management system.

The GPP minor is transforming undergraduate curriculum to support service learning, social entrepreneurship, and most importantly, the opportunity for learners to creatively and critically reflect upon their experience.  Students in the program engage with global poverty through hands-on projects in developing regions of the world and in their local communities.  The GPP Minor’s approach helps students better understand their place in the world, their role as global citizens, and the contribution they can make in grappling with poverty and inequalities whether they become development practitioners, lawyers, architects or engineers.

Implemented using free and open-source software, our platform provides student portfolio tools and a social networking and communications hub that stays with the students as they progress through their undergraduate education and out into the world.  Features include Facebook-like social networking, blogs and wiki-like writing tools, file storage and sharing, discussion and messaging channels, and access to personal collections and communications maintained on web-based services (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Twitter) across the Internet.  Mzuri connects students with an interactive network of peers, mentors, and colleagues essential to supporting their development and reflection.  It creates an intellectual commons for continued connection after graduation, which will allow alumni to serve as mentors to the students who succeed them in the minor.

The GPP minor is reinventing the classroom in an increasingly globally networked society.  Our platform explores, with educators and students, both the limits and possibilities of the emerging network form for engaged scholarship.  Our platform addresses not just the technological but the social, cultural, pedagogical and political dimensions of this transformation; it represents not just a one-time tool development effort but a commitment to fostering and sustaining a community of scholars and practitioners.

Link to Working Prototype:

http://gppminor.dreamhosters.com/hub/

Project Website:
http://okapi.wordpress.com/projects/blum-social-networking-platform/

Ars Synthetica Prototype Launches

http://www.ars-synthetica.net

We are pleased to announce the launch of a working prototype (beta release) of Ars Synthetica, a web-based multimedia forum for engaging specialists and non-specialists in an informed, ethical, and democratic dialogue on the emerging field of synthetic biology.

Anthropology professor Paul Rabinow introduces Ars Synthetica to his colleagues.

Ars Synthetica is a collaboration between Open Knowledge and the Public Interest, the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory, and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, QB3, UCSF, Prairie View A&M). The site is designed to provide multiple participatory channels for exploring questions about ethics, security, and how cutting-edge research in the biosciences is organized, governed, funded, and expanded. How will synthetic biology shape and be shaped by medicine, energy, and environmental needs? Whose business is ethics? What are the limits to what we can design? These are the kinds of questions that Ars Synthetica poses to expert and lay communities alike. Our goal is to actively resist the polemics that often characterize public discourse about new science and technology. We seek the fertile grounds for discourse between the hype of revolution on the one side and fears of “playing God” on the other. The outcome will not provide absolute or final answers, but  enable a diverse range of participant responses, perspectives, and concerns.

Ars Synthetica will feature many student projects, such as this multimedia piece by Marlee Tichenor

We are releasing the site  as a public beta, while the Ars Synthetica team develops site content, expands participation and gathers feedback before the next round of development. During the Spring ‘09 semester, students in Professor Rabinow’s graduate and undergraduate courses will be preparing content for Ars Synthetica.

Features of Ars Synthetica:

Pathways
Provide a means of representing and giving form to nonlinear connections among the many elements of the Ars Synthetica site. We anticipate developing and allowing our community to develop multiple nonlinear pathways through Ars Synthetica.

Problems, Truth Claims & Debates
Ars Synthetica features Problems, Truth Claims and Debates, designed to engage visitors in reflection and dialogue around emerging issues in the life sciences.  Whose business is ethics? Are there limits to what we can design? Are biologists playing God? Ars Synthetica users can contribute to existing  Problems, Truth Claims and Debates or contribute new ones.

Archive
The Archive contains abstracts and full publications related to synthetic biology, including scientific journal articles and popular press publications.

Contribute
Allows visitors to upload their own multimedia products, including  research papers and multimedia works. Once uploaded, others can comment on the works of others.

Blog
The blog aggregates posts from multiple authors and blogs, including On the Assembly of Things, Vital Systems Security, Biopower and the Contemporary, and Synbio and the Technocrat, and the student-run iGEM blog.

Platform
The Website is built using Omeka, open-source software for museum exhibits and collections. The site uses a custom version of our OKAPI exhibit template for Omeka.

Web 2.0
The site is distributed  across the web, leveraging multiple technologies and services, including  MediaWiki, YouTube, Blip.tv, Flickr, Scribd, and Vuvox.

Ars Synthetica: Designs for Human Practice
Explore this publication, authored by Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, to learn more about the ideas underlying this project.

Public Understanding of Research Program
This project was developed under OKAPI’s Public Understanding of Research Program.

Welcome President Obama!

Sproul Plaza, University of California, Berkeley, January 20, 2009

OKAPI welcomes a new era of transparency and accountability in government.  The recently-launched whitehouse.gov will prioritize communication, transparency and participation.

Ars Synthetica Demonstration

“On the Anthropology of the Contemporary”
Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Wednesday December 10th
2:00 – 3:30pm, 221 Kroeber Hall
University of California, Berkeley 

This Wednesday, Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley will demonstrate the Ars Synthetica Website as part of his Anthropology of the Contemporary lecture. 

Ars Synthetica is a web-based multimedia forum for engaging specialists and non-specialists in an informed, ethical, and democratic dialogue on the emerging field of synthetic biology as well as issues of new forms of design and construction more generally. Its goal is to provide multiple participatory channels for exploring questions about how cutting-edge research in the biosciences is organized, governed, funded, and expanded. Our goal is develop a pedagogical tool that provides a platform for teaching, research, and critical discussion. Leveraging existing open source platforms, which we will interface and modify, Ars Synthetica will facilitate engagement with such critical questions as: How will synthetic biology shape and be shaped by medicine, energy, and environmental needs? Whose business is ethics? What are the limits to what we can design?

Learn More About Ars Synthetica:
http://okapi.wordpress.com/projects/ars-synthetica/

Working Prototype:
http://www.ars-synthetica.net

Beyond EText: Remediated Places Final Draft

The final draft of “Senses of Places: Remediations from text to digital performance” by Ruth Tringham, Michael Ashley and Steve Mills has been posted on the Remediated Places blog. This article has been prepared for the upcoming (December 2007) electronic version of Visual Anthropology Review

Web Exhibition Nominated for 2007 MUSE Award

 

Extremophiles in Kamchatka, an online exhibition produced by OKAPI program manager Noah Wittman, was recently nominated by the American Association of Museums for a 2007 MUSE Award

Extremophiles in Kamchatka
http://www.exploratorium.edu/kamchatka/

 

 

 

Archaeoblender and ccHost

We recently selected ccHost software to support multimedia publishing and remixing as part of the Scholar’s Box project. Developed by a team at the Creative Commons, ccHost is open-source software for facilitating sharing and remixing of multimedia content in much the same way that blogs and rss feeds do for text. The Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that promotes flexible copyright licensing for authors and artists.

ccHost is the engine behind ccMixter, an online community for sharing and remixing music. To get a sense of how this online community functions, we suggest visiting the recent remix contest with Mali recording artist Vieux Farka Touré. Contestants remixed numerous vocal and instrumental tracks provided by Farka Touré with spectacular results.

Our vision is to employ ccHost for remixing the social sciences. Archaeoblender (our working title) will allow faculty, students, K-12 educators and the public to upload and share their own multimedia content or remixes, including works derrived from the more than 50,000 photos and videos from archaeological excavations that we will be publishing later this year. We believe that Archaeoblender will be a useful and empowering platform for sharing student multimedia projects, lesson plans, presentations and other multimedia resources that currently have no home.

Right now, we are working with ccHost lead developer Victor Stone to define requirements and plan for next stage of project development. Archaeoblender will launch on June 30, 2007.

Now Accepting Contributions to Curiosity Box

We are now actively soliciting contributions to The Curiosity Box, an online exhibition featuring the prized research and teaching resources of UC Berkeley scholars. The Curiosity Box is an OKAPI research project exploring issues around open licensing and resource sharing. We hope to engage and learn from campus scholars in sharing their work with the public. By focusing on a single contribution, we aim to sidestep what scholars cannot or do not want to share.

During this initial phase (March through May 2007), we ask participating UC Berkeley scholars to share a prized research or teaching resource under public domain or Creative Commons non-commercial attribution licensing, which specifies that others may re-use the resource for non-commercial purposes if they credit the author/creator.

We welcome and encourage the submission of a broad range of content and multimedia formats. We are not targeting journal articles, although they are welcome if eligible. We would be especially delighted to publish resources and information that exist nowhere else except in the minds and personal hard drives of campus scholars. We will provide comprehensive data capture and digitization services for each participant.

Following are examples of content we would welcome:

• An electron micrograph image of a new microbial species
• A mathematical proof
• The audio and score of an original piece of music
• A favorite lesson plan on plate tectonics
• Code for an advanced sorting algorithm
• Infrared aerial photography
• Architectural plans
• A mnemonic for basic economic principles
• A time-lapse sequence of traffic patterns
• A photo and transcription of a cuneiform tablet
• A “wacky” article that no one else would publish

What would you like to share? If you are UC Berkeley faculty or a postdoctoral campus scholar and would like to participate, please contact Noah Wittman at wittman [at] berkeley [dot] edu.

Dr. Julian Richards, workshop Wednesday 14 February

As part of Dr. Julian Richards’ visit to the SF Bay Area, he will give a workshop open to the public.

TIME: Wed 14 Feb, 2-5pm. PLACE: 2251 College Building, room 101

Workshop Title: “Best practices in the digital recording, archiving, preservation and diseemination of archaeological research”

This workshop is designed to get us thinking about the stewardship of digital heritage resources as actively as we think about the stewardship of the physical heritage resources themselves. We will discuss comprehensive workflows that integrate best practices of standards in digital preservation with the diverse standards of practice for documenting cultural heritage (especially those deemed “archaeological”) sites.

The workshop will be run as a “master-class”. Students will have prepared a plan of how they will digitally document, archive, preserve, and share the data from their proposed projects, according to the requirements now stipulated in the NSF Guidelines to Project Proposals, and other government funding bodies:

The workshop will be divided into three parts:
Part 1: Given the ephemeral nature of digital content, and the intractable potential costs for their preservation long-term, we will discuss the decision-making principles involved in formulating a strategy for digitally documenting an archaeological project and for preserving that digital record. What technological solutions are of lowest risk and highest impact for heritage documentation? We will point to real-world standards in practice that are effective.

Part 2: Frameworks for defining the digital universe of digital technologies and practices already in use in heritage recording and archiving. While best practices and standards are useful when followed, the majority of legacy information for cultural heritage is squirreled away in hard drives, outdated software applications and outmoded methodologies. In this part we will also discuss making transparent the process of decision-making by documenting the steps in archaeological fieldwork and digital informatics – from photography, lab work, scanning, modeling, etc. Documenting documentation is rarely done to a sufficient level, for it is time consuming and the perceived, present value is minimal.

Part 3: Sharing our Digital Heritage. We will end our discussion with some time dedicated to digital dissemination, from Powerpoint and email to weblogs and websites. In the Web 2.0 world, how can we leverage the fast changing power of sharing and social networking while also being cognizant of the fragile and ephemeral nature of the form?

For the “master-class” students of Anthro 229b (and others who might want to prepare for the workshop) we suggest the following preliminary reading:

Explore thoroughly the Archaeological Data Service website, especially the best practices documents. Look at the document “Digital Archives from Excavation and Fieldwork: Guide to Good Practice 2nd Edition”

Reading :
Richards, J.D. 2001 Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Cottam: linking digital publication and archive. Internet Archaeology 10.
Richards, J.D 2002 Digital Preservation and Access. European Journal of Archaeology 5(3):343-366.
Richards, J.D 2006 Archaeology, e-publication and the semantic web. Antiquity 80:970-979.
Ashley, M. 2002 Real Webs and Virtual Excavations: A role for digital media recording in archaeological site management. Paper presented at the UNESCO World Heritage Center Virtual Congress, Mexico City.
Lock, G. 2003 Using Computers in Archaeology. Routledge, New York.ch 6-7
We will also discuss a new unpublished report by Plog, S., R. Leventhal, W. Martin, J. King and F. Neiman 2007 The Need for a Center for Digital Archaeology, pp. 1-32.