Horizon Report : 2008 Australia - New Zealand Edition.

Just released in a new series of regional and sector-based Horizon Reports is Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand Edition.

The new series is a product of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education around the globe.

The project drew on an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable leaders and practitioners in Australia and New Zealand business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC community itself.

The Horizon Project's Australia-New Zealand Advisory Board probed current trends and challenges in post compulsory education as they uniquely are expressed in Australia and New Zealand, explored possible topics for the Report, and over several rounds of rankings and dialog, selected the final technologies.

The Horizon Report: 2008 Australia-New Zealand Edition (304K, 32 pp) is available now. The report is free, and has been released with a Creative Commons license to facilitate its use, easy duplication, and broad distribution.

HLT Staff: I have a printed copy on my desk!

Te Papa - Wow !!

Te Papa have just launched an amazing new interactive space. Called Our Space. It features 2 main components.

The first is an interactive floormap called (appropriately) The Map. In the Our Space media bank there are thousands of images of turangawaewae - places all round New Zealand where people are proud to stand. These appear on the mirrored media walls around the Map, triggered as you move across the glass floor. Each time you step on a trigger, a new image of that region appears.

The second new installation, is called The Wall. To 'play' you select media from the loading stations and send them to the wall. There are thousands of images and videos from around NZ to choose from, or you can load your own, or even create media on the spot by recording videos and photos in the station’s web-cam or creating text messages with the touch screen keyboard.

Your media appears instantly, floating high on the Wall. Then you take a wireless remote and choose an image: move it, stretch it, paint it, animate it, crop it, join it to other images. You can even nick other peoples media!

Mash up your media to remix NZ, as you see it. Cameras take snapshots every minute of the wall. You can view the wall online and even print off your bit by locating the wall image by timestamp. It is very cool.

Akoha : virtual / real world game

Akoha is a new reality-based game that uses mobile, web and real-world missions to create a new form of game play.

The idea for Akoha came from a series of discussions after the founders attended the TED Conference in Monterey, where the theme was “Ideas Big Enough to Change the World,” and the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where friends were discussing "movies that can make a difference." Their conversations about game design, social change and Internet trends led co-founders Austin Hill and Alex Eberts to ask the question, "What if playing a game could make the world a better place?"

On April 28, 2008, Akoha announced it had received $1.9 million in financing from angel investors. The very coolest thing of all is that while the game is in Beta stage (its very new - was launched at the Techcrunch Conference 2008) the organisers have adopted a school project with Room to Read. After the completion of 25,000 missions, they will sponsor a Room to Read school in Nepal, building the library and equipping it with books, games and posters.

Click here to learn how the game is played .. and don't be surprised if I buy you an icecream sometime!

Paul Gerhardt at NDF 08

I love the National Digital Forum. It is the most important event in my professional development calender and always fills me up again for the coming year with inspirational and thought provoking speakers.

Unfortunately I missed day 1, but made it to day 2 which opened with Dr Paul Gerhardt as the keynote speaker for the day. Dr Gerhardt leads the UK's Creative Archive Licence Group - a consortium of public and commercial broadcasters and archives developing a shared public access strategy. He was joint director of the BBC Creative Archive. Click here to learn more about the Archives for Creativity.

These are the key 'makes you think' things I noted down:

• Transformative use rather than 'mashup' - a much better term,“These films are about us - they are ours” - response of people who appeared in the BBC documentary made in the 60s which was 'revisited' or used a base for the film: “BBC in the East End – Updated” by Chris Dorley-Brown,
• Digital content expanding rapidly: 6 months of Youtube saw the volumn of digital content created equal to 60 years of BBC production,
• The total digital content is on track to double every 11 hours by 2010,
• it won’t be very many years before all the AV content ever made will be available online.

This staggering stuff! We are on the edge of an explosion of digital content - not just words but audio, still and moving pictures, and informal community content and formal, institutional content too. The opportunities for transformative use are boundless.. what fun!

As usual I came away with a list of things to do:

• Read: “Towards a theory of digital library” by Aharon Auram and Yoram Eshet.
• Research: Creative Archive Licence derived from CC licence.
• Find: A good beyond the basics tutorial on editing video from the bbc site.

Cell phones : the next big thing in libraries?

While in Auckland last week I gave up trying to find an internet machine in order to check my emails.

The hostel had internet to the room - but I needed a cat 5 cable (I don't make a point of carrying around network media...) There were numerous internet cafes - down the hill, seedy looking and $10 an hour - and while I could have gone to the cafe next to Auckland Library and used their free internet connection the coffee was crap and I would have had to lug my Dell Vostro around all day (a weight lifting exercise of some merit and there was that hill to consider ....)

Then I remembered my cellphone - hooray for pocket computers! It is just so dam easy and quick and convenient to check my emails that way. Wish I'd remembered my internet capable cellphone while I was in Singapore: had to pay $NZ40 for the first hour of internet access in the hotel!

After a hideous experience a few years back when my desktop got hammered by a virus I now use my computer as an access point only. In addition to saving all my work to the network server I have also shifted my bookmarks to delicious, post links I want to remember to this blog, and have copies of all emails, from all 5 of my email accounts, sent to my gmail account. This means I can not only work at any desk in the workplace, but I can get my emails from anywhere - including while lying in bed in a student hostel.

I was chatting to Wendy at work a week or so ago about a report I had been reading about the phenomenal uptake of cell phones especially in Africa. There is a whole continent apparently skipping the wired world and going straight to wireless. Here in Horowhenua we find growing numbers of people are not bothering with a landline and using cellphones only .... noticeable in Shannon initially but becoming more frequent. I observed that I think cell phones will be the next big thing for libraries; we need to think all the different ways that we could be utilizing that technology, a communication device in the pockets of most people over 13 and under 65.

I found an interesting report from Nielsen Mobile : Critical Mass - The Worldwide State of the Mobile Web.

Key findings:

• 15.6 percent of mobile subscribers in the US, 12.9 percent in the UK and 11.9 percent in Italy actively use the mobile Internet. In New Zealand the figure is 1.6%.


• In the US , mobile internet use has reached a critical mass as an advertising medium: 40 million.


• In the US, there is almost an even split with the same % aged over 35 as under 35.


• and there are approximately as many teenagers using the mobile Internet as there are persons over the age of 55 (5.1 million persons age 13–17 and 4.4 aged 55 and older).


• The mobile Internet audience is not overly concentrated in high-income households.


• 82 percent of iPhone users access the mobile Internet, making them five times as likely to do so as the average mobile consumer. Remember iphones are still very new and expensive, and due to their strong brand their use will mushroom. (ipod generation)
  


• Mobile Internet users do not visit nearly the same number of individual sites as Internet users do over the PC. PC Internet users visit more than 100 sites on average vs 6.4 for mobile.


• Email, weather, news, maps and search predominant uses.

Critical mass is when a sufficient mass has formed to sustain a chain reaction. The researchers suggest that mobile Internet is today at a point of seeing rapid growth in consumer adoption
and, in turn, mobile Internet marketing.

So how are we as libraries going to prepare for this trend which will hit NZ? How can we maximise the value of having almost everyone having a pocket receiving device, GPS, audio-video and still image recording device in their pockets?

Memory Maker : digital remix tool

As part of the 'Coming Home' activities being led by Digital NZ, a video mixing tool has been launched.

The 11th of November 2008 is the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice between the allies and Germany, marking the end of the First World War. From November 2008 through to March 2009, New Zealand is commemorating this anniversary and the 'Coming Home' of our soldiers.

The Memory Maker enables the remix of photographs, graphics, film clips, and music from the years following the First World War. Videos can then be shared with friends and family. The Memory Maker is hosted by the Auckland Museum, with members of the National Digital Forum and others providing the unique content - including Kete Horowhenua. More >>

The Memory Maker is an excellent example of the ease with which community contributed informal content gathered up with Kete can be harvested and repurposed.

Cuba Street Memories

Delighted to see that Wellington City Libraries have got their Kete up and running: Cuba Street Memories.

To find out more read the press article or the WCL blog post.