Happy Election Day! Don't forget to VOTE!

Keeping with the theme, I would like to highlight a few videos that have been floating around the internet that show young people engaging in the election and using Project NML skills to boot! (shout out to Nick for showing me two of the links!)

Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

Students at Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, GA were recently highlighted on CNN for their remix of the hip-hop star TI's song "Whatever You Like." The students' song, "You Can Vote However You Like," appropriates the background track and melody from the original, but changes the lyrics into a debate between the McCain and Obama camps.

Here's the original performance on CNN:



You can watch an interview with the students here.

Hillary and Flourish and Nick

Our new first years will be writing their own blog entries before too long, but I wanted to provide a general introduction to them to our community. So I asked them the basic question: "In a nutshell, what made you want to work for NML?" Hillary: When I met Kelly I knew I wanted to work here. [Both laugh.] Seriously though, I read the NML White Paper and I really saw applications for it with young people, especially the young people I was working with. They were interested in new skills beyond video that I too wanted to learn more about. NML was doing really practical, tangible things that I know would complement my academic work. Flourish: I had been working for FAWC Inc and HP [Harry Potter] Education Fannon - they put on conferences that are half fan and half academic to focus on educational uses of the Harry Potter books. I was really excited to come here to work on fan fiction and on how teachers can use fanworks in general to support education. Isn't the goal of all classes to make you fan of that subject? Like in an English class, the goal is to make you a fan of literature. For example, what is James Joyce other than Ulysses fan fiction? Fan fiction authors do all sorts of things to their favorite stories, like moving people to other time periods or places - like Pride and Prejudice in Seattle. Nick: I'm interested in exploring new ways to interact with media for children. I have a background in sound mixing, and a lot of the language of NML borrows heavily from the realm of audio production. I'm interested in seeing how perspectives from that world might expand the way people conceive of new media literacy, deeper than just the basic borrowing of the terms remixing and sampling. Maybe we could do something based on experimental composition mixes from the 70s like fluxes - all about expanding what musical compositions are, but I'm going to blog about it myself ☺