October 2008 Archives

Poster Power in the 21st Century

Every day I'm reminded that it's election season for reasons that have nothing to do with national polling widgets, primetime infomercials, or lawn stanchions.

I know it because when I walk through the elementary school where I teach once a week I see handmade election posters covering the walls of the hallways and stairwells. The fifth graders running for Student Council President and the like demonstrate a variety of talents and literacies in these works. Some feature stick-figures and word balloons, others photos run from a desktop printer, and some just the typical block-letter slogans. A few even sport the shockingly neat lettering of an adult, which perhaps means that having your parents do the work for you should count as a special kind of literacy itself. At home, too, my own fourth- and first-grader have caught the spirit and taken to hanging 8 1/2 x 11 "posters" throughout the house urging me to vote for various toys (my favorite makes the ambiguous boast, "He's Not Average!").

Kids Online: Balancing safety and fun!

I had the good fortune of meeting online community expert Joi Podgorny at one of Anastasia Goodstein's YPulse Tween Mashups and have continued to discuss our interest in exploring best practices within online communities.

Now Joi joins Kaliya Hamlin and Denise Tayloe in hosting an (un)conference to address critical issues around Kids Online particularly how safety and fun are balanced.   They are bringing a diverse range of people interested in this issue and leave the day with a list of core best practices and next steps as an industry.  Those who attend will help create the agenda the day of the event.  The goal is for a full day of intensive conversation and help lay the foundation of industry collaboration.

"Dancing along with and in resistance to a culture": An Introduction to NML's First Teachers' Strategy Guide

Project NML has completed its first teachers' strategy guide, called Reading in a Participatory Culture, and we're field testing it at several schools. Though the curriculum itself is not quite ready for prime time--we'll most likely give the whole thing a pretty significant overhaul after we see the results of implementation--I wanted to show you just the introduction to the guide.

Out with the New, In with the Old: Revisiting Graffiti as a Medium

...via A Book Review, An Interview, and the Usual Ramblings

Tell the truth: is graffiti what comes to mind first when you think about new media and new literacies?

For most of us, that's probably not a question worth answering, perhaps one that's barely worth asking in the first place. Beyond marginalized--socially, economically, and academically--graffiti doesn't just suffer from a bad rep, its practitioners actually often see that as a point of pride. Cementing its exclusion from both K-12 and the academy these days is the fact that on the surface there are few media as low-tech and ephemeral, and whose community is so intentionally inaccessible to outsiders.

Enter Cedar Lewisohn's Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, a much-needed survey of the medium that's not only eye-opening but mind-opening as well.

Teaching for Creative Learning

I recently moderated a blog discussion with Phillip Cunio for Mitchel Resnick's Teaching For Creative Learning class. Together we summarized NML white paper and came up with questions that we thought were relevant to concerns of Mitch's group, Life Long Kindergarten, in relation to education and specifically in response to the tool that they developed to encourage programming among children. Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories and share it on the web. It is designed to help children (ages 8 and up) to develop 21st century learning skills.

"Inter" Means Between

Here at Project NML, we are very interested in how new creative works often spread across a variety of media types. The new media landscape is full of stories that exist in books, TV, and social networking sites. We call the ability to deal with these changing modes of communication "Transmedia Navigation." But even before widespread digital communication made the nearly effortless flow of information across media possible, artists were experimenting with ways to break out of the limits of traditional media.

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