Sue Thomas

Talk for the British Computer Society, Leicester. Tuesday 2 December 08

I’m very honoured to have been invited to speak to the British Computer Society in Leicester and I’m  looking forward to an interesting discussion. It starts at 7pm, with a free buffet at 6.30pm. Open to all.

Collaborative Creative Writing New Ways of Reading – New Ways of Writing
Creative writing, indeed the very nature of text itself, is changing.  No longer bound by print, there are many opportunities for writers to experiment with new kinds of media, different voices and experimental platforms, both independently and in collaboration with other writers or other fields and disciplines.  The online MA in Creative Writing and New Media works with writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing.  Studying together online, these students from around the world came together in virtual space to debate the challenges of new media and look at new ways of transdisciplinary collaboration such as their 2007 collaboration with Penguin Books on the now-notorious Million Penguins Wiki Novel. 

Amplified08 Thursday 27 November 2008

It must be a year ago that Toby Moores @sleepydog and I sat in a bar in Leicester while he rolled out huge pieces of paper across the table to show me his plan for a 'network of networks', radiating out from CreativeCoffee Club, a Leicester/London based group which we set up in Autumn 2007 in partnership with David Terrar @dt and Shani Lee @shanitomorrow (and joined more recently by @sizemore).  A year ago it seemed like a grand vision which would probably be too complicated to ever materialise but Toby is nothing if not dogged and this week his idea is coming to fruition with the first event.  Amplified08 will happen at the offices of NESTA in Central London on Thursday 27 November 08 and it looks to be full capacity with 200 people.

Blurb from the blog:

Essentially, Amplified08 is an opportunity to bring together those who meet in various UK social media, technology production and mobile media and related fields to come together to share your ideas and projects, to discover new ways of working together, and to break through the generation of silos among social media communities.

We also have a lot of interest from groups who still come together virtually via Twitter and the like who will now have the chance to chew ideas over, face-to-face for the first time. We’re also welcoming groups and individuals who are quite new to social media but want to learn while adding to the experience. Importantly we’re reaching out first and foremost to practitioners who are already full of ideas and opinions.

There's a programme wiki here  and much of the event will be streamed through Twitter using the hashtag #amp08.