Christian Sandvig will present the Department of Communication Colloquium – “Networked Television Beyond Television Networks: The Policy Problems of Internet Video Distribution”.
The talk will be held at Lincoln Hall on Friday, April 17, 2:30 p.m.

Abstract: We are in an exciting transitional moment for anyone interested in television–such as the 98.9% of Americans who watch it. Despite larger screens, new formats, digital broadcasts, and a variety of alternative platforms and technologies, the audience for network television is in decline (dropping 10% last year). Yet screen time with video remains strong, it is just increasingly on a device fed by (or occasionally replaced by) computation and served by the Internet in some form. Consider only one example of this Internet encroachment: Web-based video watched on a computer (Hulu, YouTube). About half of all Internet users in the US have tried it, nearly 1 in 6 adults watch on a daily or weekly basis, and almost 1 in 3 young people do. As of December, more than 1 in 6 searches performed on the Internet are seeking video, almost all on YouTube. Other Internet encroachments and combinations abound, with varying success so far (Netflix/360, AppleTV, Mobile TV, and so on).

About the Speaker: Christian Sandvig is Associate Professor in Communication, Media Studies, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and an affiliate of the Illinois Center for Wireless Systems. In 2002 he was named “next-generation leader in technology policy” by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006 he received the NSF CAREER award in Human-Centered Computing.

iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg will give a talk Playing Well with Others in a Creative Era from 12-1 pm in Lecture room C60, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, on Friday, 17 April 2009.

Abstract. Cross-, inter-, and transdisciplinary education and research are all the rage, but the reasons for their ascendence and the conceptual and organizational hurdles to successful execution are rarely critically examined.  This talk considers the rise of work across disciplinary boundaries since World War 2, and the missed revolutions that have transformed organizations outside the academy.  Economic and technological forces underlying the missed revolutions are also examined, and these lead to a discussion the growing body of literature that recognizes the present as a time that values creativity over mere improvement or enhancement.  The talk continues with a discussion of the ways in which the separation between what C. P. Snow called The Two Cultures are increasingly untenable, suggesting that the language used to defend the cold war paradigm of technology–language that includes terms such as “rigorous” and “the basics”–is itself a barrier to working across disciplines, that terms such as “soft” and “not rigorous” are a form of name calling, and that technologists have done themselves and their students a disservice by disregarding the missing basics of a proper technological education.  These missing basics are identified as a missing link to successful interdisciplinary research, and a number of organizational innovations to successful discipline crossing are discussed, including pairwork and mesolevel dot connectors.