Summer is here!

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It was such a jammed packed school year that we are finally catchin gour breath at the EMC. Not to say that we still don't have a lot going on but there is more time to spend on each project and to get out and play!

Many of us just coompleted the Governor's Institute of Vermont in Information Technology. Eight faculty members, ten Champlain college students as Resident Advisors((RAs)one of whom also took on a teaching load!),and 40 teens from through out Vermont! It was an awesome experience with us learning as much as we taught.

Other projects going on at the EMC are with the Vermont State Archeologist Giovanna Peebles on a "virtual museum", finalizing the Cystic Fibrosis game (now in testing, and IBM project in virtual worlds, mapping of Burlington in Google Earth with the college and soon the City of Burlington, and iPhone app with Elliott Masie for his Fall Learning 2009 conference.

What is going into hiatus - or maybe not is the UN game project to end violence against women. Funding from the UN ended July 1 but will resume in January. Especially cool is that the project became part of the Secretary General's UNite Campaign so will now be available for country funding under that banner. So last night we all celebrated with an old-fashioned grill complete with sparklers, a firepit, volleyball and of course DDR!

Till the UN funds come through again, we are in a people-to-people fundraising campaign of our own to keep the creativity and progress going in the meantime. Check out these links to learn more or get involved:
Project Website: http://emergentmediacenter.com/unvaw/
VAW Blog: http://emc-gamestakeonvaw.blogspot.com/

Here's our video to explain the project recently post to YouTube (thank you Ray and team!):

Time to Celebrate

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Wow it is hard to believe but a year ago Sarah and Ray were newly hired at the EMC. We were not in the Champlain Mill. We did not know Michel. We were not working with Peter Bingham on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to create games for patients with CF. We were not working with the marvelous crew at Population Media Center and Aminata and Leyla at the UNFPA on the game to address Violence Against Women. Heather Kelley was not with us. And Megan Frenzen was not at Champlain! South Africa was a distant place with people we did not know. Ken was not working with us. We had not worked with Paul, Tom, and Paul at IBM. There was no Teletrust or "Disaster Master". We were searching for funds to work on the Info Lit games and did not know Andy! 

Wow! We have a to celebrate—the efforts of hard working Champlain faculty, staff and administrators. The incredible creativity and work of 114 Champlain students! The commitment of all our partners, who now are our friends. And celebrate we shall! Please join us  Thursday, April 30, 2009 5:00 PM-9:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) for a party in the Mill—games, art creation, pizza, and I hear a disco ball. I am especially looking forward to sharing the video magic of our video blog crew! Come join us!

The sad piece is that Champlain graduation is May 9th and we will miss those students we will be losing!!!! Come celebrate what they have brought to us all!

Night caller

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Pardon me if this post is due to flights of fancy resulting from a mere four hours of sleep (ah weather and air flight!)...or perhaps to thoughts tossing in my head like bright fall leaves in a windstorm:  Red Burns—her life discoveries critically shaping "computational media"; our soon-to-be graduating seniors—we will miss these key individuals who in growing have shaped the EMC and us alongside them; a summer suddenly blossoming with new, future focused projects; and the puzzle pieces of learning being positioned for a new Masters based within the EMC. All these ramblings swirl around the question of wisdom and wealth: how we come to possess it and where does it lead? 

Then propelled out of the darkening forest under the power of a 4 foot wingspan, wise Athena alights upon a pine that keeps guard over my backyard pond! Or is she perhaps the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, purveyor of wealth and generosity? 

Is she not one and the same—wisdom and wealth? Or does this owl symbolize our graduates on their journeys (is it coincidental that Spring owls are most easily sighted and in Spring graduates fully fly the nest)? Or as a dusk-to-night visitor, is the owl a metaphor for the sorting of our dreams, of our selves? Whoo? Or as a night caller is she a portent of where our technological dreams may lead us? What the day lit future will reveal? 

Thoreau writes in Walden

 "I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and underdeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have."

I dreamed...

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It has been quite a while since I last posted. Partly this has been due to the fact that SO much has been going on, partly due to the pressure of insuring the EMC finds financial stability, partly to insuring that the students, project teams and partners are supported in non-financial terms, partly to insuring that projects  in-house deliver and are completed, partly to seeking funding to support said projects to completion...this all on top of normal operating and faculty responsibilities.

This is what I have not been able to report on—the students have produced enormous results: 

• Innovation Congress successful and we will be doing a variation of it at the VHA conference in May in San Antonio, 
• the Masie Learning 2008 team blew away all expectations with Teletrust, 
• CIMIT RIPS—solidly done and delivered, 
• America's Army—the online community commented that they may have been some of the best maps to come out of the line recently, 
• IBM project presented a concept so awesome I can't wait to see it on my desktop and now the project is going into Stage 2 funding, 
• UNFPA Violence Against Women—presented at MIGS, a digital concept successfully presented and Stage 2 received funds to extend development through to July, 
• Cystic Fibrosis game project—concepts to be released for testing in a month, 
• Burlington 3D—models excepted into Google Earth and funding extended through the summer (fly in and check out the models around campus), 
• and then there's all the other cool projects happening—the video blogs, the wiki, and now Twitter (see our roll on the right)!
  

But what I have also not been able to report on is our community! We've grown to over 114 students involved in varying ways in varying projects. We've grown in so many other ways as well.

Yet we have so much further to reach and to make happen. I'm writing once again from JFK. Today I was extremely fortunate to meet with a woman who blows me away and if we can create half what she has done, the world could be that much richer. President Finney introduced us via email, as she was a former colleague of his at NYU. 30 years ago despite the challenges that beset visionaries dreams, Red Burns began I.T.P. at Tisch . Meeting her, I felt as if I was meeting a sister soul. Perhaps today more than ever we need to share her vision—a dream of a collectively created future. Red sees humanity first and technology second—as an enabler, a connector, not as a vehicle for separation and disassociation. 

One last dream I wish to share comes from Wes Knee's blog. He begins "Last night I dreamed of Africa...". Perhaps this is how humanity calls out to those who have the ends to enable change—through our dreams. A call to share. Personally I can not dream of a better purpose for a teacher than to enable her students to follow these dreams.

EMC on VPR Monday, February 23rd

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Listen Monday, February 23rd for Ann DeMarle and students, Lauren Nishikawa and Wesley Knee as they talk with Jane Lindholm on Vermont Public Radio. 

If you miss the broadcast or would like to hear it again listen at http://www.vpr.net/episode/45488/ by clicking on "Listen" in the side bar. 

Excerpt below from VPR website:

Vermont Edition 12 noon-1 p.m. Weekdays on VPR 

E-Games: New Image, New Roles in 21st Century Culture
Monday February 23, 2009

Video games have become more than just a way for aimless kids to waste their time. New research shows that playing e-games can actually foster civic engagement and moral and ethical decision making among youth. Gaming is also a $9.5 billion dollar industry in the U.S. alone. And game design and programming have become the third most popular major at Vermont's Champlain College, a pioneer in academic study in the gaming field.
We'll talk with Ann DeMarle, the founder and director of Champlain's Emergent Media Center, about e-games and the work her students are doing. And we'll talk with two of those students, Lauren Nishikawa and Wesley Knee, about the role they see for e-games in 21st Century culture.
We'd also like to hear what you think about video and electronic games. Are they a corrupting force, as some critics have claimed? Or can they play an important part in preparing young (and not-so-young) citizens for positive roles in 21st Century society? You can e-mail us at vermontedition@vpr.net.

The EMC's first official LAN Party!

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What do you get when you combine:

• 40+ Students...
  
• 7 Large Pizza's from Papa Franks in Winooski...
  
• 96 cans of soda, 4 pounds of candy, 100 mini bags of chips, 36 bottles of water, 72 cookies...
• The Emergent Media Center Lab computers loaded with the America's Army Game...
• America's Army Game Schwag...
• ...And 2 Champlain College Student maps that have been released through America's Army Game website?

A HUGE LAN Party celebration! :o)

Screen Shot of "District" AA Map

Screen Shot of "Canyon" AA Map

This was a big deal for the two teams who invested 2500+ hours in creating two, well-designed, official America's Army Maps which were released on Thursday, December 11th! Even prior to that, there was information floating around from America's Army that got forums buzzing with interest. Some of the students followed the forums and game servers around the globe playing their maps and by the next day, there were 9 servers playing "District" and 16 playing "Canyon". During this post (two days later), 23 servers are playing "District" and 29 are playing "Canyon". May not sound like a lot, but these maps are gaining ground in TWO days! All Thursday and Friday, I had both teams intermittently informing me about their news updates via the web... It was as if I accidentally subscribed to a cool RSS news feed: I was getting updates every half hour!

I couldn't help, but be proud of them for accomplishing what they did. The party was to honor the hours and accomplishment all of them made. It wasn't an easy task that they took on, but it definitely is now a rewarding one. In fact, we played the two maps beyond the two hours originally planned for the party. We went from 5pm to 1am in the early morning! Best yet, no student playing ever got bored playing the maps.

On a personal level, I know what it's like to have someone admire your work, but I don't think I could imagine how they've been feeling, all week and through today, at this type of scale.

Talking about admiration, apparently someone posted a YouTube video with a fly-through of the student's map just yesterday and at this time of me typing this post; it had a total of 95 hits.

And to give those reading this post some more content found on the web (Google brings up 9,000+ hits), here are just a few other spots about both maps:

• America's Army Game Intel
  
• America's Army Game Official Forums' News
• IGN Entertainment Games Article
• Champlain College's News Article
  
• ArmyOps Tracker - Serverlist for Canyon
• ArmyOps Tracker - Serverlist for District

I'm looking forward to another couple of sessions playing these maps in the future. Even more so, I'm looking forward to what these students, and others at the EMC, will accomplish next...