Presentation as Zombie Movie

Jim Groom: The end from Antonio Vantaggiato on Vimeo.

Thanks to the great Antonio Vantaggiato, I finally have video for the presentation I gave in Puerto Rico on September 3rd at the Simposio Nueva Web. I blogged about it a couple of months back here, and while I must have delivered over a hundred “presentations” over the last couple of years, I think this one was for me the most enjoyable to date because it was all pretty much extemporaneous. I was simply talking about stuff I liked—namely zombie movies—a tongue and cheek delivery that is not unlike a b-grade zombie movie itself. And while it was rather flippant about the dark and apocalyptic future of higher ed, I had a lot of fun giving a very rough and imperfect history of the dramatic international events that punctuate the last 10 years of the web—and which in many ways have gotten us here.

It strikes me that the transformation we are currently living through is just as much tearing us asunder as it is “augmenting human intelligence”—two sides of the same coin. For this presentation I choose to focus on that darker side a more hopeful side of the web, mixed in with some horror. (Note: on a re-watch it turns out I wasn’t nearly as apocalyptic as I remembered. Oddly, I was rather hopeful—I guess that springs eternal.)

Also, one parting note, if you can understand Spanish, I highly recommend you check out both Dolores Reig and Mario Núñez’s presentations as well, they were superb, and the analogies they both use to frame their discussions and make their points are ones I will be borrowing from well into the future