New Media Literacies Blog

More Thoughts on the Convergence of Fandom and Criticism

A couple of weeks ago I discussed Son of Rambow in this space as an obvious, and exhilarating, example of young fans creating new media works out of their passion for existing ones. Nowadays we'd be calling this process fanfic, fanart, or fanvid, whether it appropriates content directly (mash-ups, sampling) or indirectly (reusing ideas or characters in newly created media). Often such works are undertaken as loving, or twisted, re-imaginings of favorite tropes. (An aside: my favorite movie mash-up these days, probably because the release of Quantum of Solace is around the corner, but also because it vividly illustrates how even "authorized" James Bond iterations/incarnations are themselves responses to all the others that preceded them, is here.



Set in the 1980s, Son of Rambow epitomizes the kind of backyard-filmmaking that has always existed and probably always will; the only thing that seems to change is the technology involved and the age of those who can therefore participate. (Image © 2008 by PARAMOUNT VANTAGE, a Division of PARAMOUNT PICTURES. All Rights Reserved.)

VIP Online Film Festival - Participatory Youth Media

Before coming to CMS and NML, I was a youth media educator in several schools in New York City. Before that, I worked with an awesome organization called Listen Up!. They've been working to network and strengthen the youth media field for around 10 years now. One of their newest contributions to the field is the Very Important Producer Online Film Festival. Unlike a traditional film festival, everything takes place online and the majority of the awards are judged by the viewers. It is a great example of the participatory culture we champion here at NML. Below is an interview with the Creative Director, Austin Haeberle, about what VIP2008 is and what makes it unique from other film festivals.

Oct 2 - 17, 2008: Participate in Testing Ground's Live Blog

What Does "Library" Mean?

Recently, I was discussing media use patterns with Erin Reilly, the research director on Project NML. One of the things we started talking about was what a modern library user does.

I'm sure that many people use libraries in many different ways, but for me, a library mostly functions as an aesthetic space. I like to go to beautiful and monumental libraries because they inspire me and make me think about how noble the pursuit of knowledge is.

The Library of Congress foyer, by sandcastlematt.

Why We Love TechTV

MIT's TechTV has become a much-loved and irreplaceable local hosting service for NML's videos.  During the summer, as Jenna McWilliams and her team worked to finish the first in a series of innovative multimedia teachers' guides, they were uploading new videos up on TechTV daily.   These videos are now available for educators and learners at the 7 school locations where the Guide is being piloted.  As I lead the hyper-productive Learning Library (LL) team, we are using TechTV as a resource daily as well.  As I finish editing videos, I upload them and send the links to the LL team, who then view them and consider using them in multimedia learning challenges that teach the new media literacy skills.

Top 5 Reasons We Love TechTV:

"Son of Fandom": Criticism?

Anyone who works in youth media--if you missed Son of Rambow during its brief theatrical run earlier this year, I urge you to catch it in its DVD incarnation, which was released at the end of August.

While broadly speaking the premise of this 1980s-era comedy is nothing new--misfit school kids team up to produce a work of popular entertainment--and it certainly doesn't feature "new media," Son of Rambow is nonetheless notable on several levels. That's because writer-director Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) has mined his own experiences as a teen video auteur to produce a work that's not only authentic-feeling down to its core, but also speaks to the vital relationship between being a fan and being a creator that informs so much student work in so many media today. Inspired by the original Stallone vehicle First Blood (1982), two English schoolboys produce (and eventually "market") their own highly unauthorized sequel. Along the way, issues of content appropriation (of story, situation, and character) and the ethics of collaboration itself are touched upon, even if only implicitly. Also interesting is the portrayal of how, in bygone times, student media production was an activity that stood, as if by definition, as antithetical to the K-12 environment; in one key scene a flying dog (don't ask) shatters a schoolhouse window and interrupts a teacher who's busy trimming his nose hair: if there's a more perfect metaphor for academia's self-absorption being shattered by the boldness of student creativity, I'm unaware of it. In other words, let's all be glad that Son of Rambow is a period piece in more ways than one.

Map-tacular!

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!

Continue reading Map-tacular!.

Situating the NML skills in SCRATCH

Last July I attended to the SCRATCH@MIT conference that took place at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. People from all over the world met during three days to share their experiences as players, users, teachers, developers, researchers, and fans of this new programming language and online community created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group. It was very interesting to see how a worldwide community that usually interacts on the internet can meet in a geographical location to participate in hands-on workshops, listen to diverse presentations, and discuss about what are children and youth learning when they create and play with SCRATCH.

Before I tell you more about how the NML social skills and cultural competencies can be situated in SCRATCH, let me explain more clearly what SCRATCH is. First of all, it is a programming language made for helping children and youth create and design interactive projects and learn how to program with out having to deal with complicated syntax. Instead of writing code using many symbols and parenthesis --as you do when programming in C++, java, or python-- you can just snap and drag visual blocks in SCRATCH as if you were playing with LEGO and create projects such as games, maps and animations. Therefore, programming becomes more playful and fun with SCRATCH and allows kids and teens to think creatively and solve design problems. (The program works in Mac and Windows, is in many languages, and can be download it from: http://scratch.mit.edu/download)

Second, SCRATCH is an online community where all the members publish, remix, and share their projects, discuss and learn about their experiences in forums, and build networks of friends and collaborators. In other words, the SCRATCH online community is an "affinity space" like the ones described by James Paul Gee, in which people learn (informally) through participation. The community has grown very fast and after one year of being online has reached 149,286 registered members and nowadays displays 200,273 projects --the 15% of these projects are remixes of other ones.

As we can see, both at the community and the programming levels SCRATCH can be connected with the research and frameworks that Project NML is developing. SCRATCH is a technology of communication that is allowing children and youth to think creatively, to actively participate, communicate, and to informally learn. The presentation "Situating the NML skills in SCRATCH," (download the slides in pdf format) showed how the new social skills and cultural competencies can be learned while participating in the online community and while creating projects with the programming language. For instance, the "play" skill is learned while you build, debug, or tinker a SCRATCH project; the "appropriation" skill is learned when you remix a project that has been made by another user or when you sample images or sounds in your designs; and the "networking" skill is learned when you make friends in the online community, comment on their projects, and exchange ideas and critiques. In addition, the presentation showcased two NML learning activities that use SCRATCH as the basic tool to create a fan video (Manny Manny) and community interactive maps (Lawrence maps).

Meet the New NML Graduate Students

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 ☺

Considering Educational Research? What You Need to Know

I've been suffering lately from Drop-In-The-Bucket Syndrome, a disorder common among educational researchers. Symptoms include the following: A sense of fatigue, malaise, or feeling overwhelmed; slight to extreme insomnia, often accompanied by extremely vivid nightmares; and a slight to extreme case of vertigo, often characterized by the sensation of having moved forward when in fact one has barely moved at all.