Last week, Henry, Erin, Kelly, Deb (who is back as a staff researcher), and I had our very first meeting to talk about our new Teachers' Strategy Guide project, which will be all about mapping...A map of the internet circa 2003 showing the connections between different internet routers, from the Opte Project.

Randall Munroe's 2007 map of the internet, from xkcd.

Because the meeting was so interesting and I'm so excited about this project, I thought I'd blog about it. You know how much we NMLers like to keep everyone updated on our projects at every phase. Sometimes watching things unfold is the coolest part!

How can one media be seen to influence another? This week, I'm looking at this issue for our Teachers' Strategy Guide for the unit "Adaptations and Translations." This unit focuses particularly on the transmedia properties of both Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, and a modern theatrical remix of this story, "Moby Dick: Then and Now" created by the Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket, RI. In general, the NML skills (as discussed in our NML whitepaper) we are focusing on in this unit are appropriation and transmedia navigation.

As a graduate research assistant for ProjectNML this semester, I've mostly been working on our Teachers' Strategy Guide. This guide, which focuses on teaching literature within a participatory culture framework, has definitely challenged the ways I think about engaging with a text.  From reading chapters to making dramatic adaptations, this guide tries to outline different approaches to teaching, engaging and using texts.