Who We Are

The Emergent Media Center is an academic center whose mission is to educate and inspire next generation media creators and leaders by addressing and creating solutions to the "wicked problems" facing our collective future. Through a collaborative, exploratory design cycle, the EMC transforms education, processes, and media while enlightening our college community, our partners, and our global community.  

The Emergent Media Center, working with industry, public institutions, and non-profits, creates a laboratory/studio environment for discovering concepts, processes, and applications in games and emergent media.  At the heart of this are two key objectives:

1. To enable Champlain students to become thoughtful leaders in areas of technology, media , and learning.

2. To help define the future of immersive mediums and technologies.

Guiding Principles:

Game and social networking technologies are in their infancy and will be used for applications reaching far beyond entertainment - there is much to discover.

1. Discoveries are made by "flipping" a problem - bringing together diverse thinking is an effective method to do so.
2. Students possess inherent aptitude in technology, media and horizontal communication due to "lifelong" influence of the web and computers.
3. Youth are capable of accomplishing great things - they are society's explorers and warriors.
4. Champlain is unique - able to bridge disciplines and create innovative, entrepreneurial learning structures.
5. Faculty share knowledge and methods of in-depth exploration.
6. Non-profits are looking for emergent media and games to solve meaningful problems.
7. Industry possesses on-the-ground expertise but little time or manpower to dedicate to research long-term possibilities with not yet proven financial value.
8. Emergent industries need skilled, smart employees.
9. Innovation makes industry competitive.

In a collaborative and competitive environment (students, faculty, businesses and non-profits teaming as partners) future content and technologies can be built.