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Immerse at IMRC: 2013 capstones help unveil cutting-edge new media facility

May 022013

Capstone Announcement 2013 hea The 2013 New Media Night opens tonight from 6-8pm at the University of Maine to celebrate the unveiling of a new center for whiz-bang art and innovation.

Funded by a $3.9M bond in 2009, IMRC (pronounced “immerse”) is chock full of cutting-edge toys, from 3d printers and laser engravers to 360-degree projections and moveable walls.

This opening show is the 8th annual New Media Night, where our best students exhibit their visions of the future. This year’s crop ranges from walk-in immersive videogames to autonomous shadows to social networks for gardeners and boulder climbers.

Medici Meets Student Housing: A Public Spaces Interview with Alexander Tarr

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Mar 162013

Typical Los Angeles “food desert” photo along Figueroa Corridor. Getty Images/David McNew

Walking through the Figueroa Corridor in South Central, Los Angeles, it is difficult to overlook the wave of urban developments. If you haven’t visited the area, you may have already seen it through popularized photos of fast food chains between Jefferson Blvd and Adams Blvd used as an icon for “food deserts.” These so-called deserts are short on healthy food options and high on fatty foods, and the commercial zoning of the Figueroa Corridor coupled by a large mix-used inner-city/university population has lead to a proliferation of prefabricated options. Though the restaurants are iconic of the area, due to a number of factors including the expansion of nearby University of Southern California, the re-emergence of Downtown LA as a cultural and economic center, and the relatively cheap land value of strip-malls, the northwest end of South Central is losing its fast food chains in favor of multi-story housing facilities. Re-enforcing the trend away from the strip-mall towards a more fashionable aesthetic is the style of the new developments: marble-looking columns meet archways at entrances, statues line the walkways, and brick is mixed with stucco.
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To appease copyright, $180 Art History textbook published with all blank illustrations

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Sep 202012

As reported in numerous outlets today, publishers at the Ontario College of Art and Design realized their art history book would have cost $800 if they secured the rights to every image. So they chose the nuclear option, replacing each illustration with a white square and instructions to look the photos up online.

Not to worry! This approach should work fine for artworks like Kasimir Malevich’s White On White, or Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings or Erased De Kooning Drawing.

U-Me New Media chooses HTML5 as Baseline Programming Language

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Jul 282012

Ruby, Objective-C, Lua, Python…so many languages, so little time. After the UMaine New Media Department decided to teach code across the curriculum, its faculty needed to choose baseline language with an easy learning curve and broad applicability. Their choice? HTML5.

iPad as textbook: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Jan 302012

This month’s debut of Apple’s digital textbook venture met with mixed reactions. Who’s right?

Designers wanted to work on wind and wellness

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Oct 142011

if you are interested in any of these jobs, contact these folks directly or via New Media Department chair Larry Latour or Jon Ippolito.

iPads for kindergarten in, color-coded badges out

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Oct 132011

Vintage Grilled Cheese Ipad hea A California high school aborts an “incentive” program that would give lower-scoring students different colored ids and a separate lunch line. Kindergarteners in Auburn, Maine, meanwhile, are handed iPads along with their jars of paste.

Scholars, curators, and hackers gather for Digital Humanities Week 2011

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Sep 252011

Technology is usually associated with scientists, but now that artsy academics have tasted the power of digital media, the digital humanities are going full tilt. Featuring everything from best-selling Kindle authors to sociologists of Twitter, this week-long on-ramp takes tweed-jacketed academics from 0 to 60 onto the information superhighway.

Why no one wants to watch your video

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Sep 182011

Just because your phone captures video doesn’t make you Steven Spielberg. Wired offers a few pointers on how to shoot videos that don’t suck.

Version Control and its Various Approaches Explained

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Sep 062011

John Bell and I have pointed out that version control — systems widely used in software development for logging the incremental versions of an application as its being developed — would have benefits for all creative production if adopted by other?disciplines:

Part archive, part message board, and part management tool, sites like SourceForge.net meld project development with open access and documentation. Version control software like git and subversion facilitates asynchronous collaborations between contributors by standardizing how their work integrates. If the creative community documents their work in as structured a manner as coders have, and with the same eye toward future integration with the work of others, it will be a boon to those trying to preserve and build upon the cultural artifacts created today.

But as this article by The Daily WTF founder Alex Papadimoulis points out, the are many types of version control systems representing different philosophies. For there to be a boon, picking the right one for each discipline?(or knowing which one not to use)?is critical. ?For example, systems specific to code creation might not be the best for storing essays.

But source code – though just a bunch of text files – is a special kind of data: it represents a codebase, or the living blueprint for an application that’s maintained by a team of developers. It’s this key distinction that makes source control a special case of revision control, and why we need an additional dimension for managing changes in source code.

At the same time, Alex’s article does a great job of explaining the technical aspects of version control system. For anyone interest in GitHub, but having trouble understanding its Forks and Repos, this is a great primer.

A fork copies a three-dimensional repository, creating two equal but distinct repositories. A commit performed against one repository has no impact on the other, which means the codebases contained within will become more and more different, and eventually evolve into different applications altogether.

Full text at http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Source-Control-Done-Right.aspx

Amazon rents digital textbooks

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Sep 012011

Why lose $20 reselling that engineering book or Shakespeare reader, when you can pay Amazon $5 and keep your notes in the cloud when you’re done?

Amazon Lets Students Rent Digital Textbooks http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/18/1654246/Amazon-Lets-Students-Rent-Digital-Textbooks

“Amazon has unveiled a new digital textbook rental service, allowing students to choose how long they’d like access to an eBook-version of a textbook via their Kindle or app — with the retailer claiming savings as high as 80%. Kindle Textbook Rental will let students use a text for between 30 and 360 days, adding extra days as they need to. Any notes or highlighted text will be saved via the Amazon Cloud for students to reference after the book is ‘returned.’ Amazon said tens of thousands of books would be available to rent for the next school year.”

While iPads have been getting the headlines, there are plenty more e-readers to choose from.

Study This: E-Textbook Readers Compared

The iPad was supposed to wipe out standalone e-readers, but they’re still here, and they’re a big deal on campus.

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/koZon8SFfJA/

Academia meets Wikileaks: when plagiarism is activism

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Jul 232011

Two days after Aaron Swartz is accused of downloading a huge swath of academic journal articles from the paywalled site JSTOR, another activist has posted a similar trove to the notorious Web site Pirate Bay. What happens when academics espouse plagiarism?

Stanford Adopts JavaScript for CS101

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Jul 182011

JavaScript’s rise to prominence continues as it becomes the new introductory language for Computer Science at Stanford.

Get your hands dirty with permaculture field days

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Apr 202011

09orono lgh Perma may 03 ill Want to try a helping of edible landscape? Mosey over to LongGreenHouse this Friday and Wednesday for a permaculture field day.

Apple cofounder wants you to come to Capstone Night 2011

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Apr 162011

Well, not exactly–but Steve “Woz” Wozniak did recently argue that American education should focus more on sustained long-term projects. The UMaine New Media department is doing its part by showcasing senior capstones at the Collins Center for the Arts on Tuesday 19 April from 7 to 9pm.

Press on this year’s capstones:

http://newmedia.umaine.edu/feature.php?id=957

A complete list:

http://nmdprojects.net/student_work/capstone_2011/

The word from Woz:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/04/08/1927218/The-Dying-DVR-Box-and-Woz-Wisdom?utm_source=rss1.0&utm_medium=feed via Byline

“At SNW in Santa Clara this past week, a diverse group of techies shared insights into their industries….Steve Wozniak attacked the American education system, saying students should be graded on a single, long-term project rather than a short learning/testing cycle. ‘In school, intelligence is a measurement,’ he said. ‘If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you’re intelligent.’”

Thinking outside the box--with your education

Innovate, News No Responses »

Feb 082011

A prominent educator claims today’s college students are learning in silos, specializing too much to see the Big Picture. (Via NMD alumnus Will Seyffer)

How to get more book for the buck

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Feb 032011

If you haven’t already bought this term’d textbooks, here are a dozen sites ready to sell them cheap.

http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=868bf541f0ff969aa049c14b9bdf7534 via Byline A look at the long list of Web sites that help college students find the cheapest textbooks available.

How to hold onto student discounts after graduating

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Jan 312011

Job prospects dim? You’re not the only one depressed.

http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f4a965f158ec7e3398ca9b2a1b604026

Freshmen are reporting record levels of stress in an annual survey involving more than 200,000 students.

You can still profit from your college experience by following these “tips for getting student discounts long after graduation.”

http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4eaf5fe9306cce3c1f6d0345167c8719 via Byline

Older Entries

Immerse at IMRC: 2013 capstones help unveil cutting-edge new media facility

Medici Meets Student Housing: A Public Spaces Interview with Alexander Tarr

iPad as textbook: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Designers wanted to work on wind and wellness

iPads for kindergarten in, color-coded badges out

Why no one wants to watch your video

Version Control and its Various Approaches Explained

Amazon rents digital textbooks

Stanford Adopts JavaScript for CS101

Apple cofounder wants you to come to Capstone Night 2011

Thinking outside the box--with your education

How to get more book for the buck

How to hold onto student discounts after graduating

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