NMC Campus Observer

Virtual Citizenship / New Technologies Symposium

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Nov 27, 2007 01:15pm

You are invited this Friday to participate in a live event hosted by Wayne State University, with the entire agenda being streamed via live video into Second Life to NMC Campus. Join us on Teaching 2 for the Virtual Citizenship + New Technologies > Symposium.

The symposium is a joint effort of Wayne State’s Center for the Study of Citizenship, its Office for Teaching and Learning, and its Honors Program, and the DeRoy Lecture series to study the intersection between new information technologies and the practice of citizenship. The symposium will launch a broader research, teaching, and service project that can help us understand what citizenship means in the 21st century and can help our students, staff and faculty use emerging communication and information technologies to become better citizens. We seek to understand how the notions of community membership and the exercise of power are affected by newly pervasive technologies such as (but certainly not limited to) text-messaging, Facebook, del.icio.us, Second Life (as well as devices and applications that do not exist at present but that will be household names by next year, or next week) and how these same technologies may be employed in the interests of social justice and civic engagement.

Speakers include:

• Russell Dalton, Professor of Political Science at the University of California Irvine, whose recent study called The Good Citizen looks at the attitudes and behaviors of young people
• Fred Stutzman, graduate researcher at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, whose research and active blog outline both the theoretical and practical aspects of social network software and its role in academic and political life.
• Wendy Chun, Associate Professor of Media and Modern Culture at Brown University, who will be talking about “Imagined Networks”.
• Vernor Vinge, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at San Diego State University and award-winning science fiction writer, whose recent Rainbows End is insightful in its thinking about how ubiquitous computing might affect everyday life.

When: Friday, November 30, 6:00am - 1:30pm (PST) check your local time See the full agenda schedule (note: times are EST)
Where: NMC Campus, Teaching 2 (135,124,22)

Story filed under: Campus Headlines, What's Happening

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