Raiders of the lost European Media Culture

One of the objectives of the MC2020 project is to identify and make demos of prospective European interactive media culture. Below is my brief of the assignment given to team 4 preparing now on-line the MC2020 workshop to begin in three weeks in Tampere.

Team 4 online assignment: Identify examples of present interactive European media culture

1. Backgound: our pitch to European Union
Our proposal to EU Erasmus programme included a promise to make research and demos of interactive media culture 2020. We wrote:
“The Eurovision Song Contest and other contests arranged by European Broadcast Union and television formats like Euronews and Eurosport are established broadcasting centered Media Culture actors.
But where is the European vision of 21st Century Interactive Transmedia and Cross Media for young audiences who are not pleased with reception, but urge to participate and create?
Convergence and Divergence are the megatrends in media culture. Old and new media formats converge but at the same time media consumption is diverging from television and Internet to smart phones, tablets, public huge interactive screens and multimedia players. Through Social Media, audiences do not merely receive broadcasts, but interact with them and create new contents.
Where are the European platforms and formats of the new Media Culture Scene? Our project aims at finding some answers to this challenge by inviting students and lecturers possessing different knowledge and skills to create mixed media contents which reflect the richness and diversity of new European Media Culture for various devices at our workshops.”

2. This assignment: research of the present interactive European Media Culture
You have three weeks time to produce a one page document making a review and analyse of the present European interactive media scene.
Yes, I know it would be easier to make a three or five page paper, but you must try to serve the other project participants well and write a focused and compact report.
The workshop will then start creating concepts of Media Culture 2020 and the best of them will be created to working demos in our last workshop in Liepaja in October-November this year.

3. Something to start with
Just to offer some aid to start with the assignment I list here some examples of what could be present interactive media culture.

a) TV and Movies
The Spiral was in my opinion a very good attempt to meet the criteria for interactive European Media Culture. Both the tv-series and the game became quite popular in the six countries involved. Do you know or can you find similar examples?
The series: http://www.thespiraltheseries.com/
The game: http://www.thespiral.eu/
Something quite different - could this develop to something more?
Eurochannel: http://www.eurochannel.com/

b) Media Art
I always say artists are most international and at the cutting edge of applying new technologies. Is it possible I am right? Study these and above all find more:
European Media Art Network http://www.emare.eu/
Interartive http://interartive.org/
European Media Art Festival: http://www.emaf.de/english/start.html

c) Games
Some weeks ago my grandson Henri (4 years) taught my wife a new funny thing on her iPad and now I'm afraid to stay an Angry Bird widow for the rest of my life.
Gamification is one of the really big trends. It is a global trend. Is there room for European game culture? (After all, Rovio and Supercell are Finnish = European ;-)
European Games Developer Federation http://www.egdf.eu/
European Games Award http://www.european-games-award.com/

d) Others
You can find other examples to ponder and analyse, like:
Surprising Europe http://surprisingeurope.com/

4. Deadline
You should start working on the Google Document I have created for you in the Team 4 folder. You better start now, the one page document must be finished before you start your travel to Tampere. So Friday April 12th the deadline is!

Good luck!

MC2020 logo competition

Before the actual MC2020 workshop the students work on-line in mixed teams. One of the assignments was to design a logo for our project. The deadline was yesterday. Here you can find the nominations of the teams, there will be a vote to find the winner soon.

Team 3 nomination

Team 4 nomination

Team 5 nomination

Team 2 nomination p. 1

Team 2 nomination p. 2

Team 2 nomination p. 3

Feel welcome to make comments!

Why wiki is the right tool for collaborative documents and learning?

The Media Culture 2020 project proposal was written on a wiki document, and now five student teams work on wiki documents to prepare the actual workshop. What is so special about wikis?

Social Media offers many new platforms for collaborative learning like wikis and blogs. They are easy to use and maintain, the teacher can focus on supporting the students instead of focusing on the maintenance of the platform.

According to the creator of the first wiki software, Ward Cunningham, a wiki is "the simplest on-line database that could possibly work."

The most popular and well-known wiki is the Wikipedia. A wiki is used and edited using a common web browser. A wiki is used to collaboratively create, edit and maintain documents. It is a very good tool for shared knowledge building and learning.

Collaborative online work guidelines before wiki era

The old way of managing creation of a collaborative document is that the coordinator sends a draft to the team as an email attachment. And what happens then?

The usual scenario: Kerttu and Giovanni send their own versions with some changes and additions to everybody as attachments while Helmut and Susan send some proposals in email messages. Pekka and Vaclav give their input too. Pekka makes his alternative to the original text while Vaclav formulates in another way the same paragraph, but adding to the proposal Susan made. Finally no one knows who has proposed what and there is no final version, just confusion.

This is the way to work in the 21st century:

When collaborative documents are prepared on a wiki, there is only one version, which is always up to date and includes all corrections. Wiki software store the history of the pages which is also a very useful feature.
The coordinator edits the final version and everything is ready for moving forward.

Wiki in learning
The traditional method for a group of students who are supposed to write a learning diary, a report or an article is to  write it solo and send to teacher. End of story.

The pros are:
- It is easy for the teacher to assess and grade

The cons are:- The teacher is the only person reading the output of the student
- The student will not process further the ideas after finalising the assignment (unless the teacher gives feedback and starts a dialogue with the student. Teachers seldom have time for this)


For a group of students writing a learning diary, a report or an article, it is a good idea to use a wiki document. The students see what the other students write about the subjects and discussion, and debate will occur.

The pros are:
- The student will not only fill the formal requirement of the assignment, but (s)he will be involved in an intellectual discussion, which always is a learning process
- The student will enjoy many observations made by other students and learn much more
- The teacher will have to review only one document and (s)he learns much more

The cons are:

- The teacher will have to monitor the discussion and work a little bit more to grade assignments.

Why haven't we done this before?
There are many reasons, but I see two main developments that has made use of collaborative on-line tools possible.
The technical reason is that the net is faster, there are high quality wiki software available, and more and more people can access the contents not only with desktop PC:s but with different mobile devices.
The political reason is the urge of revolution in education; to move from teacher centred standardised test oriented education to student centred, learning focused education.

The second online lecture by James Field

The students of MC2020 in five countries and five universities have been busy with two assignments; the deadlines of the logo competition and comments on the draft programme of the workshop in Tampere April 16-28 are approaching.
The online classes will soon be busy. Today we saw the second interactive on-line lecture.

James Field in action. The presentation was recorded and will be available
on the MC2020 video channel.

James Field (University of Lincoln, UK) gave the presentation:
"The Art of Digital Interface Design
Introductions to the application of methods and principles in digital interface design including: visual hierarchy, organisation and grid systems for static and fluid layouts."

The class at TAMK in Tampere. 

The first online lecture by Lenno Verhoog

The 50 participants of the Media Culture 2020 project work on three layers during the six week online pre-workshop activities; there are the five teams of each participating university that work locally and the five mixed online teams with participants from all five universities. The third layer is online courses and demonstrations for all MC2020 community members who can fit them in their schedule.

Lenno's shared screen on top, below it from left to right: TAMK, Lenno's
screen, the class in Vic and the class at Utrecht School of Arts.

The streamed online lectures are recorded and stored on the MC2020 Vimeo channel for everybody to see when they have time.

The first lecture was screened today. Lenno Verhoog from Utrecht School of Arts gave a presentation on Visual Design to orientate the students for their first team assignment: designing a logo for the project.

The class at TAMK

There will also courses run on blogs and wiki-documents.

All participants were happy with the first show; both the quality of the presentation and the technical quality of the screening.

24 Hours In - Example of a collaborative, mixed media project

Recently, Richard Vickers and myself presented our participatory documentary project entitled 24-hours.in (www.24-hours.in <http://www.24-hours.in> ) to our final year Media Projection students.

In the spirit of collaborative working, especially with the partner institutions of MC2020, we would like to share the lecture here with you all as a PDF document with notes. The videos embedded in the presentation can be accessed via the link in the notes.

Project synopsis:

This research project explores new opportunities for participation, collaboration and the potential democratisation of documentary production. 

Utilising user-generated video captured on mobile phones and smart devices, the project is participatory whereby the audience contribute documentary videos, around the theme of 24 hours in a city or location. 

With reference to Dziga Vertov’s seminal 1929 documentary film ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, the aim is for the videos to document the cities, the people that live there and their daily lives. The aim of the project is to have an open and collaborative platform that anyone can contribute to. 

Building on Vertovian concepts, the project explores the potential that the ubiquitous camera phone may offer to revisit Vertov’s aspirations for the democratisation not just of technology but also of creativity.

Presentation PDF