Sue Thomas

Slides and links for British Computer Society talk 2.12.08

Thanks to all those who attended my talk last night, and thanks to the BCS for my commemorative blue-sky coffee mug! Here as promised are slides plus a list of links to the videos and websites I discussed:

• Medieval Helpdesk
• Howard Rheingold A (re)slice of life online, part one: Introduction
• Transliteracy Research Blog
• Michael Wesch The Machine is Us/ing Us  (for university teachers I also recommend Wesch's chilling A Vision of Students Today)
• Chris Meade Digital Livings
• Noon Quilt
• A Million Penguins
• Staying Single
• Anietie Isong
• Streams, rivers, torrents and clouds @Amplified08 (CreativeCoffee Club)
• Inanimate Alice

Talk for the British Computer Society, Leicester. Tuesday 2 December 08

I’m very honoured to have been invited to speak to the British Computer Society in Leicester and I’m  looking forward to an interesting discussion. It starts at 7pm, with a free buffet at 6.30pm. Open to all.

Collaborative Creative Writing New Ways of Reading – New Ways of Writing
Creative writing, indeed the very nature of text itself, is changing.  No longer bound by print, there are many opportunities for writers to experiment with new kinds of media, different voices and experimental platforms, both independently and in collaboration with other writers or other fields and disciplines.  The online MA in Creative Writing and New Media works with writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing.  Studying together online, these students from around the world came together in virtual space to debate the challenges of new media and look at new ways of transdisciplinary collaboration such as their 2007 collaboration with Penguin Books on the now-notorious Million Penguins Wiki Novel. 

Amplified08 Thursday 27 November 2008

It must be a year ago that Toby Moores @sleepydog and I sat in a bar in Leicester while he rolled out huge pieces of paper across the table to show me his plan for a 'network of networks', radiating out from CreativeCoffee Club, a Leicester/London based group which we set up in Autumn 2007 in partnership with David Terrar @dt and Shani Lee @shanitomorrow (and joined more recently by @sizemore).  A year ago it seemed like a grand vision which would probably be too complicated to ever materialise but Toby is nothing if not dogged and this week his idea is coming to fruition with the first event.  Amplified08 will happen at the offices of NESTA in Central London on Thursday 27 November 08 and it looks to be full capacity with 200 people.

Blurb from the blog:

Essentially, Amplified08 is an opportunity to bring together those who meet in various UK social media, technology production and mobile media and related fields to come together to share your ideas and projects, to discover new ways of working together, and to break through the generation of silos among social media communities.

We also have a lot of interest from groups who still come together virtually via Twitter and the like who will now have the chance to chew ideas over, face-to-face for the first time. We’re also welcoming groups and individuals who are quite new to social media but want to learn while adding to the experience. Importantly we’re reaching out first and foremost to practitioners who are already full of ideas and opinions.

There's a programme wiki here  and much of the event will be streamed through Twitter using the hashtag #amp08.

forthcoming: When Geeks Go Camping: finding California in cyberspace

I've had enquiries asking when this article will be available. It will be published in the February 2009 issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies but unfortunately you have to subscribe to get access. It's the first full piece I've written for this project, and it examines the evolution of nature metaphors in computing and cyberspace via some examples of the influence of Californian outdoor life on computer culture in Silicon Valley and beyond.

I presented it in September at DRHA08 and will also give a talk on it at the University of California Santa Barbara on 24th February 2009.