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last updated: Mar 25 2008
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Timeliness of DIIA Technology Initiatives Evident at SXSW Interactive Festival

Unless you’re one of DIIA’s specialists in multimedia, instructional technology, or information and Web design, you may only think of music or film when you think of Austin’s annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. But for DIIA’s techies, the SXSW Interactive Festival— just concluded last week— was music to the ears, packing five days with exhibits, panels, book readings, conversations, and presentations addressing the latest trends in online resources, Web design and production, and interactive technology.

The festival agenda featured many topics reflecting the relevance of initiatives at DIIA, where work continues with emerging technologies and in the instructional use of digital multimedia and virtual worlds. The virtual world environment of Second Life, for example, received considerable attention, with several sessions offered:

  • The Making of Second Life
  • Second Lives: A Journey through Virtual Worlds
  • The Second Life Herald
  • Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life
  • Marketing to Real People in Second Life

Video production also received considerable attention:

  • Video Production for the Web and Mobile Devices
  • Interactive Media Trends—Are You On Top of It?
  • Cooking Up Accessible Video for the Web
  • What User-Generated Video Means to Word of Mouth Advertising
  • Crunching and Streaming: Online Video Distribution Challenge and Opportunity
  • New Generation Education: Bringing the New Web to Campus

You can use the SXSW Video Player (requires Flash Player 9) to access programming from the festival, and over the next few months keynotes and panels will be released as well.

If it’s fitting that the SXSW music and film festivals call Austin home, it’s no less fitting that the interactive festival does too. Around here, projects involving instructional use of interactive technologies—such as DIIA’s Digital Media Services and Second Life initiatives and faculty instructional technology initiatives supported by DIIA through ~FAST Tex and the annual IITAP Awards—have become business as usual.