A group of researchers at InterMedia attended 25 - 27 April 2005 a research seminar at the Center for Activity Theory and Development Work Research, University of Helsinki. The seminar was a collaborative effort together with the Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research, University of Birmingham. Key contributers to the seminar were: Ritva Engeström, Anne Edwards, Harry Daniels, David Middleton, Srikant Sarangi. The mutual concern and focus of the seminar was how to study and develop inter-professional collaboration and responsive interagency in order to support families, children and young adults at social risk. Trond E. Hauge, Cecilie F. Jahreie, Hege-Rene Åsand Hansen and Thomas de Lange from InterMedia participated.
Background paper from Ritva Engestöm (2005): Discursive hybridity and shared responsibility: Opening the new practices of multidisciplinary collaboration.

‘Digital storytelling on life and faith’ er tittelen på et paper til Childhoods2005 som Knut Lundby har fått akseptert sammen med Birgit Hertzberg Kaare ved Institutt for medier og kommunikasjon og Eli Lea i Flimmer Film. Paperet viser til forsøk med “digitale trosfortellinger” i den norske trosopplæringsreformen. I sesjonen om ‘digital storytelling’ lørdag 2. juli har også professor Glynda Hull fra UC Berkeley en presentasjon. Dette inngår i gruppen om Media and Technology under konferansen i Oslo.

The first Nordic Design Research Conference will be held in Copenhagen from May 29-31st in 2005. This is an important interdisciplinary venue for design related research. InterMedia has had a full paper accepted: Morrison, A. Deacon, A. & Stadler J. ‘Designs for learning about film spectatorship’. Andrew Morrison has developed the paper in conjunction with two colleagues Andrew Deacon and Jane Stadler from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa as part of the ICT-UCT project betweeen InterMedia and the Centre for Educational Technology. The paper is now being refined following review. With a focus on multimodality the paper is also an outcome of the MULTIMO project at InterMedia; it’s also an example of one of the projects on international collaboration in which InterMedia engages.

Jan Dolonen in collaboration with Weiqin Chen and Lars Rønning from Department of Information Science at University of Bergen has got a poster accepted at the CSCL 2005 conference in Taiwan. The poster describes the development and testing of a tool supporting social interaction in learning Object Oriented Programming. The poster has been written as a part of the COOL project.

Even Westvang and Andrew Morrison visited the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town on our joint project (ICT-UCT) into assisting Humanities staff to use ICTs in their teaching and research. We worked on the project website. Even gave an in-house seminar on web development. Andrew gave a research seminar to the Centre for Higher Education Development on mediating research online. Andrew also worked with Andrew Deacon on two refereed research articles, one for a conference and one for an online journal. These refer to collaboration with the Centre for Film and Media at UCT. The ICT-UCT project is funded by the Norway-South Africa programme at the NFR. We have a string of papers in development so we hope to keep you informed about them here as well as in the InterMedia and CET project websites. The picture here shows an electric fence surrounding a new elite housing area opposite Table Mountain. In contrast, our project is aimed at breaking down barriers between teaching and learning with technologies. Andrew attended two fascinating sessions with staff from Social Work and from the African Gender Institute both of whom are using CET’s own learning environment called Connect to motivate student discussion about content, process and collaboration online. Hundreds of students are now using Connect!

Synne Skjulstad and Andrew Morrison have had an article on dynamic interfaces accepted by Computers and Composition. Due out soon! This has been a long process or finding out how to write about co-designing the BallectroWeb at InterMedia. This web focuses on video and project based research reporting and wasdeveloped Flash and XML.

Anders Mørch, Jan Dolonen and Jan Eirik Nævdal have developed and integrated software agents with two educational groupware systems (TeamWave Workplace and FLE), using evolutionary prototyping and empirical-based design as development techniques. The resulting prototypes of pedagogical agents (CoPAS, SA-Agent and RuleEditor) provide learners and teachers with increasingly domain-specific support for distributed collaborative learning activities. Employing the evolutionary approach has enabled us to build and evaluate early prototypes of complex systems with cost-effective techniques and involving users in this process helped us to constrain the design space and direct further development. CoPAS is a simulation experiment carried out with the Wizard of Oz technique, SA-Agent is a pedagogical agent integrated with an open-source learning environment, and RuleEditor is a customizer for the SA-Agent. The agents collect statistical information on user activity and analyze that information based on principles of collaboration and knowledge building. The results are presented as advice in the user interface of the learning environments to promote students’ reflection on their collaboration and knowledge-building activities. If instructors disagree about the phrasing of the advice or the frequency of intervention, they can change it using the RuleEditor agent customizer. For access to online version of paper click here

Our paper exploring how students create understandings of given tasks in relation to both a highly structured and an open-ended learning environment is now available in ‘The International Journal of Educational Research’. In this paper Ingvill Rasmussen, Ingeborg Krange and Sten Ludvigsen analyse how students’ understanding of tasks evolves through their activities in relation to the representations inscribed in two technology rich learning environments. The outcome demonstrates that even in the highly structured environments students spend a lot of effort constructing understanding of the given task.

As part of our MULTIMO project we are developing the Docudancing blog with Per Roar Thorsnes from KHiO. Per Roar is investigating the roles of documentary in choreographjy and making three related dance works as well as the Docudancing blog. We’re researching and writing this up together. This is very much a process site so please do let us have your posts.

Over the last summer I followed the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn as it was reported online. I was interested to use this as a trajectory for an article on multimodal discourses entitled ‘Inside the Rings of Saturn’. Prof. Gail Hawisher invited me to contribute to a special issue of Computers and Composition on the work of Gunther Kress. I developed the article as part of the MULTIMO project at InterMedia into multimodal discourse. It’s now been published online via ScienceDirect (to which UiO subscribes).

Part of the research trip was to explore museums in Japan and Australia. We visited several museums - both in Tokyo and in Melbourne and Sydney and found quit different types and ways of managing museums. Quit a trip - surfing several continents and timee zones!!

I will first tell about the museums we visited in Tokyo.

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

where the exhibition callled “Mission frontier. Deep space of our perception” showed research from several research centres. Like the project “Visible Human”, from National center of Atmosperic Research (NCAR), visualizing the human body in 3D visualizations; “a four-dimensional imaging system that freely allows viewing of the complex structure of the body and the various biological functions of a living human being”. And the project “Imaginary numbers” by the scientist and artist Keiko Kimoto, showing the visualisations of mathematical formula.

“Mission frontier” seemed to be a cooperation between
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and National Museum of emerging science and innovation, MeSci. Mesci also stands for Me and Science to signal that museums are the place where people and science meet.

The collaborative character off the exhibition made it an interesting potpurri over the theme deep space of perception; both in character and in ways of mediating the exhibition showed artifacts in traditional ways - and by way of visual storytelling based on photographs.

The MORI art Museum at the newly finished centre at Roppongi hills

also presented several smaller exhibitions; “Georg Jensen 100 years silver design and danish art” an exhibition which we did not prioritize — since we have so much of George Jensens silver at home and ” Colors. Viktor and Rolf and KCI” - an fashion exhibition of the two dutch designers Viktor and Rolf mixed with famous dresses and coats from famous designers from different periodes.

Also the art exhibition by Ozawa Tsuoshi “Answer with yes or no” was characterized by its multimodality in both mediause and esthetique mediation.

The Australlian museums of natural sciences and technology also had this multimodal and bricolage- like mediation with a mix of both traditional artifacts and more inteactive and playful mediations.

Melbourne museum with its wonderful big and new building gave us a quite new meaning of traditional exhibition of artifacts ; adding sounds that gave the artifacts some of their original context and putting the artifacts either into a clear narrative thread true the exhibition — or into a question-answering.

Melbourne Museum contains a mind and body gallery, sciense and life, evolution, forest, a childrens gallery and Bunjilaka; Museums Victoria Aboriginal Centre (Bunjilaka means creation place in the Wurunjeri and Boonwurung language - the traditional owners of Melbourne and surrounding suburbs .

digital biennale

Australian Centre of the moving image

National Gallery of Victoria (NGV Federation Square); Color Power, australian indigeneous art post 1984