On 2 May 2010, Joline Blais gives a Permaculture walkthrough and workshop for University of Maine students at the Belfast CoHousing & Ecovillage, Belfast, Maine. Students in Emily Markides PAX class see a real ecovillage under construction and find out how its members balance practicality and idealism from BCHE member Blais and Radical Simplicity author Jim Merkal, who also attended the event.
Shown: BCHE’s zero-energy prototype house, built by G●OLogic.
Tags: Belfast, class, education, GreenHouse, sustainability, University of Maine
Waterfall Arts presents Still Water Co-Director Joline Blais talking about her work in ecology, the New Commons, and cross-cultural networking on Monday 26 April at 7pm.
Tags: art, Belfast, GreenHouse, LongHouse, network, New Media, presentation, sharing, Still Water, sustainability
On March 30, 2010, Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito present “Beyond Facebook: From Cliques to Kinship” as part of the University of Maine’s Women in the Curriculum and Women’s Studies Program.
Tags: education, LongHouse, network, orono, presentation, privacy, sharing, society, Still Water, University of Maine
A network analysis of The Pool will be featured at the Leonardo satellite symposium on Arts | Humanities | Complex Networks at the NetSci2010 conference on 10 May in Boston. This conference, held at the lab founded by renowned network theorist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scientists, artists, and scholars to examine old and new media through the lens of network theory.
Tags: event, network, presentation, science, sharing, software, Still Water, The Pool
Still Water is pleased to announce the publication of 60: Innovators Shaping Our Creative Future, a landmark book on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of renowned art and design publishing house Thames & Hudson. Still Water co-directors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito penned the new media section of this book, which profiles five of the most innovative creators on the planet today.
These visionaries take the lessons learned from experiments in online communities and apply them to real-world problems, whether making cities sustainable, holding corporations accountable, or re-imagining laws that govern the flow of information. Included among these innovators are Maine’s own Miigam’agan and gkisedtanamoogk, Wabanaki elders who are building bridges between their ancestors’ lifeways and the 21st century.
“Every now and again along comes a book that acts as a cultural bookmark … Thames & Hudson’s new doorstopper Sixty is just such a book” — Grafik Magazine
“A collection of incredible, truly inspiring work from all over the world.” — The Design Files.
“Showcases the most creative minds in fashion, architecture, photography, green technology and science.” — New Scientist
“Fascinating insights into global projects that may predict future directions are presented here in an informative and visually appealing format.” — Library Journal
Tags: art, New Media, publication, Still Water
A new University of Maine class in Life Art (NMD430/520) explores the boundaries of artistic collaboration by encouraging students to co-create with entire ecosystems of humans and other critters.
Life artists may :
Student projects may draw from indigenous culture, digital culture, and/or permaculture, and will be featured in an exhibition at the end of the term. The course takes place at the Hutchinson Center in Belfast, Maine and is organized by Joline Blais in collaboration with Waterfall Arts and Unity College.
This New Media class is open to graduate students, qualified undergraduates, and members of the community. For more information, contact Joline Blais.
Tags: art, Belfast, class, GreenHouse, LongHouse, New Media, Still Water, sustainability, University of Maine, Wabanaki
The Pool, an online collaborative environment created by Still Water, has earned a headline story in Wired magazine, a feature in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and a demonstration at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. Yet with the exception of a semester-long experiment with students from UC-Berkeley in 2003, until this year The Pool’s audience has been almost exclusively students at the University of Maine.
This term, however, The Pool has become a lot more crowded, as students from two classes at the University of California at Santa Cruz join three U-Me classes in using this unusual software to bounce ideas off each other and receive feedback across the two campuses.
Athough divided across the east and west coast, the 250 students will be united by a common interface and timeline as they contribute intents, sketch approaches, build approaches, and offer feedback across classes and time zones. University of Maine professors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito will present a preliminary report of the testbed’s results at a conference organized by UC-Santa Cruz, The Art of Collaboration, on 23 October 2009.
More on the U-Me New Media Web site.
Tags: art, class, network, New Media, presentation, sharing, Still Water, The Pool, University of Maine
ThoughtMesh developers Craig Dietrich and John Bell have just launched a sophisticated reviewing system internal to the ThoughtMesh open publication platform.
Unlike the relatively uncontrolled comments at a site like YouTube, ThoughtMesh’s reviews are subject to a rigorous trust metric. Each reviewer must claim a level of expertise before rating an article, and the software holds them accountable in a way that even the rigorous method of peer reviewers for academic journals do not achieve.
As might be expected, a review by someone claiming expertise will have more effect on the overall rating of the essay than by someone who claims none. However, those who claim expertise have to live up to it. If an academic makes exaggerated claims and is then trashed by her peers, her credibility will plummet faster than if she claimed no expertise in the first place.
You can see a sample discussion by clicking on the “peer review” tab of Robin Boast’s paper “Open Objects Initiative: A Critique of Openness.”
The release of this peer review feature is good timing, given MIT’s recent publication of the University of Maine’s new criteria for 21st-century academics.
Tags: education, evaluation, network, research, sharing, Still Water
Still Water’s living-learning center on Chapel Street, LongGreenHouse, has been exploring the intersection between Native culture and Permaculture with students from many walks of life. In July thirty students from the university’s Upward Bound program attended Joline Blais’ workshops on greenhouses and plant guilds.
Meanwhile kids from LongGreenHouse’s Wassookeag school have been busy too: in April they made dreamcatchers with Penobscot elder Charlene Francis; in July they visited the Black Bear Food Guild; in September they built a geodesic dome with Intermedia MFA student Bill Giordano. The BBFG’s July newsletter described the Wassookeag students as “intelligent, thoughtful, and incredibly enjoyable”; they “had a zeal for learning that was really amazing.”
More at http://wassookeag.org
Tags: GreenHouse, indigenous, LongHouse, orono, outdoor, permaculture, sustainability, universityofmaine, Wabanaki, Wassookeag
More people than ever will be able to access and contribute to academic research and development, thanks to tools built by Still Water faculty and Fellows to help creative thinkers share their work.
Recently showcased at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and soon to appear in Leonardo magazine, Still Water networks like ThoughtMesh and The Pool may change the way creative and scholarly research is recognized by universities across the world.
More at the University of Maine’s New Media Web site.
Tags: art, education, law, network, New Media, presentation, sharing, software, Still Water
