I was in Berkeley at the New Media Conference over the weekend. The soiree was jointly run by the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and USC's Annenberg School of Communication. I've got copious trip notes which I plan on distilling and posting as a bit of a blog coming out party.
The theme of the conference was roughly "how the 'net generation gets its news", however most of the presentations focused on what youth can do/have done with digital technology. I need to chew on this bon mot for a bit, but maybe the biggest takeaway is that the classroom is the primary place where youth actually "get news". This is where society trains them that there is a concept of "news" and what their expectations of it should be. I'll leave it at that because this needs more thought.
The highlights for me were John Seely Brown's keynote (covered in detail by Mary Hodder), and Will Wright's 8 minutes on how Maxis now thinks about games. Wright handed me a disc with slides of his talk, which I'll see if it's okay to post. JSB also promised to ship his.