Central Texas' Future

This is a blog for the members of the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society. It's purpose is to exchange and develop ideas about the future of Central Texas, especially Austin.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Web 3.0 & Beyond: “There” is “Here” & the “Future” is “Now

The Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society will hold its next monthly meeting on Tuesday, April 15, 2008. It will be held at the J.J. Pickle Research Center of the University of Texas, at 6:00 p.m. The J.J. Pickle Research Campus (formerly the Balcones Research Center) is located in northwest Austin at the corner of Braker Lane and Burnet Road. A J.J. Pickle Research Campus (PRC) map and building list is available for visitors to the PRC (http://wwwhost.cc.utexas.edu/maps/prc/). Directions to the TACC can be found at: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/general/visitor/.


Dr. Leslie Jarmon will speak on " Web 3.0 & Beyond: “There” is “Here” & the “Future” is “Now””

Building on earlier talks, including Jay Boisseau’s talk on super-computing and Kavita Patel’s talk on Web 2.0 and social networking, Dr. Jarmon’s talk features what she has dubbed Web 3.0, the world of 3-D virtual learning environments. Gartner, Inc., a technology-related research and consulting firm, estimates that by 2012, 80 percent of active Internet users, including Fortune 500 enterprises, will have a “second life” in some form of 3-D virtual world environment, and these virtual worlds are expected to have a large impact on teaching and learning in the very near future.

We will take a closer look at Second Life (SL), currently the most popular platform albeit an early iteration of the rapidly expanding development of 3-D virtual worlds. Massive user-constructed content and infinite scale in a 3-D space freed from many of the laws of physics are some of their special features. These features provide opportunities for engagement in social interactions with people from various fields across geographical distances, and they foster experiential learning. The sense of “social presence” is becoming more critical, and some of the powerful impacts of working in 3-D virtual worlds are only beginning to be identified. Role play, improvisation, and other action-based activities are already used in SL to foster experiential learning in training emergency personnel and nurses (e.g., Ann Meyers Medical Center), for interacting with reflexive architecture, and for learning to play virtual musical instruments with the avatar orchestra metaverse (AOM). The U.S. Federal government is already investing several billion research dollars through multiple agencies to develop and apply 3-D virtual worlds for a myriad of training and research purposes. We will focus on two on-going research and educational projects in Second Life: (1) the Educators Coop (www.educatorscoop.org), and (2) the Alley Flats Initiative. Guest experts within Second Life will also be joining us from their virtual work spaces.

Attendance is limited to 48. Because we must specify the number of people for dinner, you must register by Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at noon.

You can register and prepay at: www.centexwfs.org/index_Register.htm

Or, send a check to CenTexWFS, PO Box 26947, Austin, TX 78755-0947.

Price: $20 for members, $25 for non-members.

Dr. Leslie Jarmon is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin with the Office of Graduate Studies' Professional Development & Community Engagement Program, where she has designed and taught graduate courses since 1998. Her Graduate Studies courses include:

*Exploring Multicultural Communication: Communicating Across Disciplinary Cultures in Second Life
*Community Engagement: Project Management and Consulting Projects
*A Systematic Approach to Academic and Professional Writing

Dr. Jarmon is a leader in the university’s entry into 3-D virtual world environments, specifically Second Life (SL). Her avatar’s name is Bluewave Ogee, and she has presented at numerous conferences in or about Second Life, including Best Practices in Education in SL (May 2007), the American Sociological Association (August 2007), the New Media Consortium Symposium on Creativity (August 2007), and the American Educational Research Association (2008). Her current research focuses on 3-D virtual world environments as new sites for collaboration and the creation of communities of learners, on an international scale. She is a co-founder of the Educators Coop in Second Life, an experimental residential community of interdisciplinary educators, researchers, and librarians from around the world.

Dr. Jarmon is perhaps best known for creating the world's first multimedia digital dissertation to be accepted entirely on CD-ROM (“An Ecology of Embodied Interaction: Turn-Taking and Interactional Syntax in Face-to-Face Encounters.” - 1996, UT). After teaching as an Assistant Professor of Communication at Indiana University in Bloomington, Dr. Jarmon was invited back to join the faculty of the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin where she designed research models for collaboration with IT corporations sponsoring student research with the Science, Technology, and Society Program and with the McCombs School of Business Plus Program. She was the coordinator and chief designer for the first large-scale Civic Forum on the Societal Implications of Nanotechnology, and she was principal designer of the “nano scenario” civic engagement model. Dr. Jarmon was instrumental in creating research partnerships between The University of Texas, the World Congress on Information Technology 2006 (WCIT), and leading private sector information technology companies.

Her other interests focus particularly on technology and education and applications of low cost technologies in service to developing countries. In the past, Dr. Jarmon served as an inaugural National Research Fellow with the U.S. Corporation for National Service where she conducted research on private-public sector partnerships with the national Welfare-to-Work Program. Her research led to extensive use across the country of AmeriCorps-VISTA volunteers working with micro-lending organizations and other grassroots community economic development entities. She also served as the Regional Coordinator of the Micro-Enterprise Development Initiative for Latin America and the Caribbean with the United States Peace Corps. Dr. Jarmon served two tours of duty as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Costa Rica and Ecuador in the 1980s.

For more information about the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society, visit www.centexwfs.org.

For more information about the World Future Society, visit www.wfs.org.
Derek Woodgate, Presidentdwoodgate@futures-lab.com
512.472.2628
www.centexwfs.org

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Defense, Media & the Budget

The Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society will hold it's next monthly meeting on Tuesday, February 19, 2007. It will be held at the meeting room of Marie Callender's, 9503 Research Blvd. # 400., Austin, TX 78759 ( 512.349.7151 ) from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Laura Faulkner will speak on "Defense, the Media and Emotion: Identifying Future Shifts in Funding"

Attendance fee is $20 per person, for members, $25 for nonmembers, cash or checks only at the door. (Make checks payable to CenTexWFS.) Credit cards accepted online. The fee includes a meal but is charged for attendance.

The meeting room is at the back of the restaurant on the right.

Seating will be limited so please reserve your place and prepay at :

www.centexwfs.org/index_Register.htm

Agenda: Networking, Announcements, Meal, Speaker, Discussion

Defense budgets go up and down fairly predictably according to currentdefense circumstance. But within those fairly stable, predictablebudgets, the types and amounts of things funded vary wildly fromyear-to-year, and from beginning of fiscal year "planned" spending incontrast to and end-of-fiscal year “spend all the dollars we have leftover” spending. As a matter of fact, those end-of-fiscal year decisionsmay be the most telling of all: they are the gut instinct,non-thought- out, emotional decisions, often unconstrained by leadershipabove the sponsor-in-charge of disbursing those funds—few political stringsare attached to those funds. Dr. Faulkner examines the future of thesecycles through the lense of her expertise in human psychology, toward arecognition of what changes and what stays the same.

Laura Faulkner, Ph.D., fascination and passion is human behavior, asevidenced by more than 25 years of human sciences study, degrees insociology, anthropology and psychology, and a career in human-computerinteraction (HCI).Dr. Faulkner is currently a Senior Product Manager for AWARE Software,Inc., performing HCI applied research, and managing datamodeling/ontology,training, documentation and translation, related to software andrequirements engineering.

For the previous eleven years, Dr. Faulkner was with the Applied Research Laboratories (ARL:UT), The University of Texasat Austin (UT-Austin). As a Program Manager and Principal Investigator shecompleted multiple Department of Defense and industry projects, learningthe intriguing pathways of defense funding. Among other things, her workpioneered a team facilitation and collaboration initiative to stand up theInformation Operations Technology Alliance. Dr. Faulkner continues as aninvited instructor for UT-Austin's Software Quality Institute, and hasserved on the Human Systems committee of the international organization,the defense-centric Interservice/ Industry Simulation, Training, andEducation Conference.

For more information about the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society, visit http://www.centexwfs.org/.

For more information about the World Future Society, visit http://www.wfs.org/.