Part 2: Technology Day at FIT — Presentations & Roundtables
Part 2 (scroll down for the first post about TechDay)
I am gathering the powerpoints and other materials from the presentations and roundtables. Elaine Polvinen has posted a summary of her presentation here — with a powerful call to educators:
If fashion education does not initiate the type of quick response solution (that students are taught with regards to the real world) to the unprecedented transformational technology shift that is taking place over to 3D, they run the serious risk of becoming redundant and obsolete and could actually be the driving force for industry to develop private training institutes.
Here’s Mary Ellen Gordon’s powerpoint. Many thanks to Mary Ellen for generously sharing with us the brand new research done by Market Truths.
dressing-for-two-_-what-avatars-and-their-humans-are-buying-and-wearing
Here is Janine’s powerpoint:
And here is a site with the links Raymond Yee used in his talk.
Will the other presenters/roundtable leaders please use the “comments” feature to post a quick summary of the discussions at your tables or a summary of your presentation — with relevant links? Powerpoints can be sent to me.
My roundtable group did an exercise to analyze digital technology trends in media and business and discussed how the university can compete in the new environment. It attracted participants such as Pam Patterson, Senior Instructional Technologist from Yale, Daniel Beery, Associate Director, Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, Columbia University, Kathy Neely, FIT, Chris Helm, Enterprise Center FIT, and two students.
Anyone can try this ‘concept bridge’ exercise to stimulate thinking about the statement below.
STATEMENT:
Digital technology has led to a ‘way of being’ that is fundamentally different from pre-desktop culture. Two articles excerpted from WIRED magazine and a list of popular digital tools are used in an exercise to imagine the NEXT university, one which combines location-based learning with a digital way of being.
Technology Day @ FIT 4.25.08
Daria Dorosh Roundtable discussion & workshop
Create a concept bridge:
1. Identify and underline any words or short phrases that feel important in the following text.
From: Why $0.00 is the Future of Business by Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail. His next book, FREE, will be published in 2009 by Hyperion.
“The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, “value-added” subscriptions, and direct ecommerce.
THE ECONOMICS OF ABUNDANCE
Enabled by the miracle of abundance, digital economics has turned traditional economics upside down. Read your college textbook and it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under scarcity.”
…in the digital realm,…Two of the main scarcity functions of traditional economics — the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution — are rushing headlong to zip.
The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.
FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING
…we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly. Today it’s digital technologies, … that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we’re only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you’re going to get.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZkeCIW75CU
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
From: Manufacture and Sell Anything — in Minutes by Ian Mount
“…Ponoko is a year-old on-demand manufacturing service in New Zealand. Designers upload their blueprints to Ponoko’s servers; when a customer places an order, Ponoko’s laser cutters automatically trim wood and plastic to create the product on the spot.
With nothing more than a design, amateurs can manufacture jewelry, robots, … furniture — anything. No warehouses. No minimum orders. And no money down.
…Zazzle, of Redwood City, California, offers a dizzying array of user-designed products from posters to tennis shoes. StyleShake, a custom-clothing site in London, received 25,000 dress designs in its first three months. Spreadshirt, founded in Leipzig, Germany, hosts 500,000 individual T-shirt shops. “These companies significantly lower the threshold for someone to bring anything to market,” says Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. “There’s an industrial-age bias that you need volume to support a factory; but with this, much-more-creative low-volume businesses become viable.” Large brands are starting to see the appeal of manufacturing-as-a-service, too. Lexus recently used Blurb, an on-demand publisher, to print 1,800 copies of a book promoting the automaker’s green practices.
…On-demand manufacturing (is)… leading to a world where products are always available, nothing ever gets discontinued, and the virtual shelves are always stocked.” http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-04/bz_instapreneur
2. Next to each word, write any adjectives that you associate with the following tools.
Email:
Internet:
Cell phone:
iPod:
Digital camera:
Inkjet printer:
Wikipedia:
YouTube:
Google:
Then….
Apply the concept bridge:
3. Consider the adjectives and phrases you have singled out, and use them to describe a University built upon the concepts you have extracted from the text.