New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

One Magic Leap For Mankind: Is this visual platform the magic bullet to remote learning?

The pedagogical shift from classrooms to chatrooms, exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic, has changed education—for better and worse. This blog post seeks to explore some of these issues and how Magic Leap 1, which is a wearable head-mounted AR...

By Paul Bugeja on 10/21/20 Comments Off

The UvA Research Hub

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is a non-campus-based university embracing the motto: “the city is our campus”. The various UvA faculties are scattered across Amsterdam. Consequently, students and researchers from different disciplines rarely meet each other. A study by...

By Dominique Verschragen on 10/17/14 Comments Off

Training Wheels

As one of the cultural capitals of Europe, thousands of international students (2,000 at the University of Amsterdam alone), new residents and tourists convene in Amsterdam every year. Unfortunately, not everyone who comes to Amsterdam has the typical Dutch...

By Auke Akkerman on 10/17/14 Comments Off

8tracks and web-radios: the contemporary music consumption is personal and social

Since the growth of the Internet and its collection of interactive platforms and social networks, the cultural industry has turned a critical corner. This statement is especially true for the music industry in term of music creation and consumption,...

By V Weydert on 10/31/13 Comments Off

Ideas worth spreading… Is the TED Blog worthwhile?

TED.com is best known for its videos of talks given by experts and up-and-comers in the fields of Technology, Education and Design. Since its inception as a global set of conferences, the TED brand has branched off into many...

By Susan Clandillon on 10/10/13 Comments Off

MOOCs: nothing more than the latest craze… or are they?

“Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” – Thomas L. Friedman (May 15, 2012) 2012 was a year of many events and breakthroughs. The global economic crisis continued to be pervasive, the release...

By Rebecca Cachia on 09/10/13 Comments Off

Citizen Journalism in Egypt: The Newsfeed of the Revolution

What does it need to launch a successful media outlet? Probably a good deal of start-up capital, a team of editors, a business plan and some advertising clients. Cairo’s Rassd News Network started with two things: a Facebook page...

By Mathias Schuh on 10/05/12 2

Fleet Commander Neusa talks about EVE Online

In her 2010 TED speech Jane McGonigal states that on average we invest 3 billion hours weekly playing online games. Also, Nick Yee (2006, 70) estimates that the MMORPG player spends on average 22 hours a week playing the...

By Andrei Florian on 11/01/11 Comments Off

Gaming can save the world – A gamer’s perspective (interview)

Could it? I may have exaggerated Jane McGonigal’s thoughts on gaming’s potential possibilities, but her optimism and enthusiasm may well agree with the title. McGonigal talks of gaming’s collaborative potential, that if harnessed correctly, could lead to better and...

By Christopher Mead on 10/31/11 Comments Off

Book Review: Crowdsourcing, How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.

What do YouTube, Wikipedia, IMDB, Tripadvisor, Linux, iStockphoto and Firefox all have in common? They exist through the collective efforts of millions of ordinary users like you and me. The strategy behind the success of these websites is crowdsourcing:...

By Leander Roet on 09/18/11 1

A “lazy” Wikipedia. An active community. An interesting story: Following the campaign for the development of the Greek-language Wikipedia, Part I

In the first 10 years of its existence, Wikipedia, this unusual “experiment” as it used to be called, has evolved into the world’s greatest reference source. Far more than that however, Wikipedia’s most surprising achievement is that it turned...

By Ilektra Pavlaki on 05/11/11 3

Why Twitter can be the Next Big Thing in Scientific Collaboration

Introduction Imagine yourself in the following situation: You, a scientist pur sang, are busy researching and analyzing A and you are having doubts about the values in the model, suspecting a technical error. Without hesitation, you compose a tweet...

By Sander Jansma on 05/02/11 8

Visualizing Scientific Research Collaboration: A Review of the Beauchesne-Map

Introduction In recent years there has been an increase in interest for international scientific collaboration (Luukkonen, 1993, Ponds, 2008), but the phenomenon is anything but recent: the first signs of it where seen in the nineteenth century (Luukkonen, 1993:...

By Sander Jansma on 04/14/11 2

Live blogging @ Picnic10

Today i'm present at Picnic'10 and i'm really excited to be here. I will be live blogging today via the 'Masters of Media' blog and also on...

By Elias van Hees on 09/22/10 Comments Off

Book Review: “Abstract Hacktivism” by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås

Every social or cultural change in which we view the world is debatable. Everyone has his or her own opinions on how the world is perceived and which parts are important in that. That is fine, that is interesting,...

By Frank Molenaar on 09/20/10 Comments Off

The Wilderness Downtown: When New Media and Music Reinforce Each Other

Musicians are struggling, as they have always been. It seems to have to be part of the deal in one way or another. In the past decade or so however, things have gotten increasingly difficult for artists as the...

By Rosanne Sliuzas on 09/07/10 3

Collective writing: How literature is changed by the new medium

There are many variants of social networking sites. Some of them are based on an analog medium. The use of the Internet and the computer has resulted in that the digital medium differs from the analog medium. Examples of...

By Suzanne Schram on 10/04/09 Comments Off

PICNIC ’08 – Itay Talgam Interview

This is an excerpt of an interview with Israeli conductor Itay Talgam done by Markus Huendgen during Picnic ‘08. Talgam illustrates how conducting an orchestra can be a metaphor for the collaboration of people in general.

By marie-anne soyez on 09/29/08 4

PICNIC 08 – Conducting Creativity by Itay Talgam

Through different examples of conducting an orchestra Itay Talgam, highly acclaimed Israeli conductor and founder of the Maestro program, explores some of the aspects that are related to the practice of collaboration. In his presentation he addresses...

By Stephan Barmentloo on 09/25/08 3

EVE Online: Work or Play?

Where does play end, and work start? In the online world of the MMORPG EVE Online, this threshold might be blinded by the dazzling glitter of the stars, but it is just as easy to pass. Within this hypercapitalistic...

By Raoul Siepers on 11/04/07 Comments Off

An analysis of a vj collaboration; “A Collaborating Cooperation or a Cooperating Collaboration?”

Different definitions, or interpretations if you will, have been linked to words like 'collaboration' and 'cooperation'. One example of this is a part of 'The Art of Free Cooperation' (2007). In the chapter 'Collaboration on...

By Minke Kampman on 10/24/07 Comments Off

Cyberbullying or Collaborative Violence?

Media and communication technology has provided us with tools to enable and facilitate collaboration without physical participation or geographical constraints. When it comes to the impact of new media on childhood and youth, there has always been much discussion...

By Qilan Zhao on 10/22/07 Comments Off

Online collaboration scales

In talking about collaboration on the web, the first thing I did was running the term ‘collaboration’ through the WikiScanner, in order to find out to what extent online collaboration was used to create the article on collaboration on...

By Tjerk Timan on 10/22/07 Comments Off

Cooperation and feeling of unity

Online multiplayer games tend to encourage communication and cooperation. Constance SteinKuehler, from the University of Wisconsin, has found that these types of games are ‘sites for socially and materially distributed cognition, complex problem solving, identity work, individual and collaborative...

By Fleur Dujardin on 10/21/07 3