digital lyceum

Last Friday, November 30, we assembled a great group of people at Emerson College to discuss the future of the Digital Lyceum project. The group includedDavid Bogen, Rebecca Nesson, Bill Seaman, Joshua Green, Drew Harry, Helen Thorington, Jo-Anne Green, Phil Long and Paul Stacey.   The day began with extended introductions from all the participants, which actually served to introduce the major discussion points to which we returned throughout the day. Those included: the intellectual work of barroom chatter, virtual people as active participants, and social interaction as spatial design. We concluded that there is a lot of experimentation taking place in the implementation of network technology in the live event (our conversation tended to focus on the conference or symposium), but little in the way of research. There is a need for some kind of relatively systematic document and analysis of this work. Do audiences gain anything from the technological addition? Does it change the nature of the event or the way knowledge is acquired? The day-long conversation, even though it meandered a bit through various topics, gave us some focus for the short-term goals of this project. As I understand them now, they are as follows:

• Create a site (blog, wiki) for people or institutions working on the production of mixed reality events to share experiences and learn from others.
• Design guidelines and train RAs to execute a qualitative study on ‘mixed reality’ events.
• Host open source tools for people to use in their own events (these will be freely available on the condition that they let our research team study their use).

That gives us more than enough to do over the next several months. We will continue to use this blog to report on project development and the interesting work of others.