Upcoming Conference

In early July, a paper I co-wrote will be presented at Design & Complexity, a conference hosted by the Design Research Society.

The paper, Interactive Tools and Online Communities that Support Media Literacy, will be presented by Assistant Professor Gretchen Rinnert who was the co-author.

I know this is going to be a great conference. Hopefully, there will be some twitter, or other web, updates throughout the conference.

The paper will be published and I will post that information as soon as I have it.

Spotlight

Very excited and honored to be featured in the MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning. They got our titles wrong, but I hope that will be fixed soon.

Here is the feature:
Toward a New Ecosystem of Learning: Reflections on the Digital Media and Learning Conference

Links for MeCCSA 2010 Conference Attendees

Direct links to the projects shown during the presentation given by me (Trust It?) and Gretchen Caldwell Rinnert (Video Book).

Trust It?


Video Book

Upcoming events

Gretchen Rinnert and I are in the process of co-writing a paper, Interactive Tools and Online Communities that Support Media Literacy. Our abstract has been very well received thus far, with acceptance to the MeCCSA 2010 Conference in London (January 6) which will explore "Media, Communication, Policy and Practice."

As well as The Society for Applied Learning Technology's conference (March 3) New Learning Technologies

We are hoping that one of these conferences will manifest an opportunity for publication.

Upcoming events

October 7th I will be presenting my research, Teen Independent Learning Online: Visual Literacy Tools for Assessing Credibility, to an Interaction Design class taught by Professor Rebecca Tegtmeyer at Michigan State University. I look forward to presenting my explorations regarding credibility in the online environment as well as asking the students some questioning regarding their own online research habits and perspectives.

November 5th I will also be presenting Teen Independent Learning Online: Visual Literacy Tools for Assessing Credibility, at the International Digital Media and Art Association’s 7th annual conference. I'm looking forward to the iDMa conference -- the keynote speaker is Tom Kelley of IDEO.

Intercom Research Exchange

Today I will be presenting at the 2nd annual College of Design Research Exchange, Intercom.



It will be my second time to present in the Pecha Kucha format.
I made my presentation into a movie, so you can see what I am showing. I didn't include a voice over, b/c that would just be too weird. ha.

Pecha Kucha: Thesis from marty on Vimeo.

Graduate Research Symposium

This Wednesday, I will be presenting my thesis at the University wide Graduate Research Symposium. Here is the poster that I created for the symposium.

Graduate Research Symposium

I will be presenting my thesis at the 2009 Graduate Student Research Symposium on March 18th. The abstract for the symposium was due today and I will share my poster presentation as it is completed.

abstract:
Online tools that assist high school students in determining credibility when researching online.

According to research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University, teens tend to rely on the look and feel of the presentation of information online to determine the content’s credibility. As design technology has become more available, average users can create content and websites that look just as “professional” or "trustworthy" as traditional expert sources. This issue of side-by-sideness becomes problematic as teens look to the web as a source for research and information, not just a social activity.

Many teens utilize the Internet for academic research because they desire the multiple perspectives it can provide. My current investigation seeks to develop online tools that assist high school students in critically sorting through the complexity of the visual presentation of online information. How can online collective research teach students to analyze, interpret and judge visual language and attribute it to the source and the credibility of information?

Researchers Shawn Tseng and B.J. Fogg state four types of credibility assessment used in the online environment: experienced (relationship over time), reputed (third party recommendations), presumed (cultural or media based assumptions) and surface (look and feel of information). One of the goals of my investigation is to incorporate these assessments into the design of online environments.

This investigation seeks to explore ways in which high school students can be prepared to critique the multiple perspectives that the Internet provides. While this project focuses on high school students, the development process ensures transferability to other age groups and scenarios.

mica photos

This is a little late, but I wanted to post some photos from the AIGA Education conference that I attended. We had a large group from NC State that presented: Me (grad), Rebecca Tegtmeyer (grad), Alberto Rigau (grad), Silas Munro (designer in residence), Denise Gonzales Crisp (prof), and Deborah Littlejohn (phd). I think we all did an excellent job of contributing some interesting ideas to the conference. It's always nice to step outside of our own circle of discussion to see what other educators and students are up to around the country. I was pretty impressed with the presentations overall. Particularly, Scott Stowell from Open Design, the design director for Good Magazine.

As I have previously mentioned, Rebecca and I presented on the MFA panel. Our goal was to demonstrate how NC State focuses on designing the conditions for experiences vs isolated artifacts. It was also important for us to show how all of the research, mapping, reading and writing informs our form making process. This is not to imply that all research happens and then we make things, rather it is an ebb and flow relationship and a lot of thinking through making.
(ALL PHOTOS BY ALBERTO RIGAU)

Symposium Friday

Our symposium is over and we are reflecting this week on everything that took place. We had a great turnout of graduate students from other schools; MICA, Cranbrook, Bowling Green, CalArts and Art Center. It was great to get to know them and find out a little about other graduate programs.

Flickr set

Friday night we began the Symposium by exploring the "Continuum of Control", where we positioned Designer Control at one end of the spectrum and User Control at the other end. Each graduate student picked at point on the spectrum to represent. I was way over on the User Control side with Punk Zines.
















We had examples ranging from the ultra-modernist Massimo Vinelli to Starbucks customizable gift cards to user generated content in fan films, like Troops.

John Bielenberg from Project M gave a really interesting talk about Project M, Rural Studio, and "thinking wrong."

We finished off the night with a collaborative light-writing exercise conducted by myself, Alberto, and Gretchen. We each approached this project from three perspectives. I was interested in a collaborative experience using analog and digital tools. I'm fascinated with how these different tools interact with each other and how users interact with them. I will have a video to post soon.