Diversity without cacophony Group discussions on controversial subjects can open students to more viewpoints, but they can also result in the usual suspects—sometimes the most thoughtful students, but often just the loudmouths—dominating the conversation. So I was intrigued when Greg Nelson and Rotem Landesman, my collaborators on a course that examines in-depth the impact of …
What’s the connection among happiness, women’s empowerment, and sustainable living? This week a UMaine course in permaculture hosted a lively discussion on this question with the director of an award-winning documentary.
Text generators like ChatGPT have dominated my conversations with educators about AI in the past year. Despite their emergence a year before chatbots, text-to-image generators like DALL-E or Midjourney typically come up only in generic conversations about plagiarism or bias. This is understandable, both because writing has been central to so many disciplines and because …
Why you should generate AI images in your classroom Read More »
This fall an unusual four-month experiment pitted generative AI against conventional digital tools in eight separate creative tasks. Fifty students wrote, coded, designed, modeled, and recorded creations with and without AI, then judged the results.
Still Water faculty and colleagues have an answer for educators confused about how to cope with the rapid rise of ChatGPT and its ilk.
UMaine’s Digital Curation program is thrilled to host a free public webinar with “free-range archivist” Jason Scott on Wednesday 5 May at 2pm EDT as part of its regular teleconference series. Anyone interested in attending can register for free.
News stories in the Bangor Daily News and the Portland CBS station profiled New Media seniors and their creative applications designed to help people cope with COVID-19.
 Knowing how to make mobile apps in 2020 is like knowing how to make a website in 2000: a skill much in demand but known by few. Now anyone hoping to learn to create apps for iOS or Android can take advantage of a free suite of interactive tutorials from the University of Maine’s New …
New Media student projects are more than term papers to be chucked when the semester’s over. Many enjoy a renewed life after graduation, as demonstrated by recent TV and news articles on outdoor-oriented ventures from the 2015 capstone course taught by Still Water Co-Director Joline Blais. From drone classes for high school students to mobile …
Joline Blais’ students take to the woods and the air Read More »
It’s hard to articulate ecological values with a vocabulary inherited from the industrial age. The Lexicon of Sustainability, an exhibition co-curated by Dan Dixon and Still Water’s Joline Blais, aims to change that.
