Project New Media Literacies

On the Participatory Model of Reading

2008-06-26T14:48:54Z

Today, my friends, I want to discuss the possibility of using Drawball as an analogy for the participatory model of reading.

]]> A few months ago, CMS graduate student Steve Schultze wrote a blog post describing the Drawball. He writes:

Drawball is...an intriguing view into the web. When you arrive at the site, you see a large circle with what looks like hundreds of small and large sketches. It's really just a huge virtual graffiti wall. Anyone can draw on it (but you have to know how to solve the puzzle, and you only get a little bit of ink). Apparently, thousands of people have been drawing on this ball for about two years. People are constantly covering up others' work, or adding to drawings that already exist. It's impossible to ever say what's on drawball because it's always changing! Different groups have united to collectively draw pictures that express their national pride, show their artistry, or advocate for political causes. Drawball even has a "hall of fame" that shows some truly amazing drawings and animates their progress.

As we continue to work on our Teachers' Strategy Guide for Reading in a Participatory Culture, I've started to see Drawball as a fascinating analogy for the kind of participation we hope kids will engage in as they work with a literary text. Traditionally, students tend to feel that all of the knowledge about a book like Moby-Dick is already established and complete--that there are scholars who have the book figured out, and that students' job is only to learn what others have decided is important to know.

What if we change that dynamic? What if we show students that the knowledge base that has been built around a text is only the beginning--that a culture is continually building on its understanding of and connections to a text? A lot of this knowledge-building happens through remixing and adaptation of the text, through allusion to key ideas in various types of media. Every new product, every new idea that takes up the threads of Moby-Dick (which, as others have pointed out, itself took up threads of narratives that came before it) builds on that knowledge base, even if it's just a tiny bit.

And what if we show students that they're allowed to join in on this knowledge-building? What if they are given permission to create something that remixes a piece of Moby-Dick? What if we ask them to talk about the book's meaning to them, in their context, thereby adding to our cultural takeup of the book's ideas?

It's such an empowering idea, this participatory model of reading. Such a thrilling way to engage with a literary text.

An Afternoon With Jonathan Harris-- Part 1

2008-06-25T15:16:35Z

An Afternoon with Jonathan Harris at his Brooklyn studio.

(The content of this interview will be available in video chapters on Project New Media Literacies Learning Library)

Earlier this month, Clement and I went to New York City to interview Jonathan Harris. A New York based artist, who combines elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling to explore and explain human world through designing systems.

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When asking Jonathan, about his work, he says that he does weird work that does not really fit into any genre. He is often compared to graphic designers, computer science people, visual artists and anthropologists. While his work borrows from all these categories, it's not entirely any of them. He prefers to refer to his work as storytelling.

Jonathan explains to us his work process. He usually starts with a theme or a topic that he wants to explore which are usually a very simple idea or a simple question. That question could be something like, "What does the soul of internet look like?" or " if we were to make new constellation in today's night sky, how would we decide what they would be? " or "What are the ways that people search for love?". He starts with a question and then tries to find a way to gather a lot of information that can help him answer that question empirically. It sometimes involve writing computer programs or him traveling to other parts of the world to collect information. But the first step for him is always collecting information. Once he gathers information, he looks at the information that he gathered and tries to see if there is any patterns that can come out of it.

He sometimes writes computer softwares to assist him in that process of searching for these patterns. Once he has analyzed the information, he starts thinking about the best way to represent it visually. Jonathan insists that there should be a close connection between the way something looks and what the thing is. That's also why all of his works have different aesthetics to them. They are each designed to be native to the type of data that is being talked about.

Clement and I were interested to hear Jonathan's definition of Visualization, One of the skills that we, at project NML, find significant for the kids to learn.

Jonathan believes that data visualization is a buzz word that you can hear all the time. When he was younger, he was very obsessed with data visualization for its own sake. He made a number of projects that purely visualized data. "In fact, there was no meaning to it or no story to it. It was just about showing the data", Jonathan says. For example, he made a project in 2002-03, called word count, which simply takes the 88,000 most frequently used english words and displays them side by side as a very long sentence, where all the words are scaled based on their frequency.

"That's a very fun, playful thing to look at, and a lot of people like it, but for me it's not really that interesting because there is no story there, there is no secret that is being revealed. It's just eye candy basically. It's designed with no content." (Jonathan Harris)

Jonathan insists that most of the time people just get a data set and they visualize it in a beautiful way. They are worshiping the cult of aesthetics without actually worrying about the meaning behind it. It's very important to have both. You really need to have great content with a great message and also you need to have great design to present that content in a beautiful way. Jonathan sees data visualization as one tool in your tool box out of many many tools.

"I think about it now, as I am older, I think of data visualization as just another tool that I can use to help tell stories really beautifully. You have to have the story to begin with." (Jonathan Harris)

There is a lot of ways that people tell stories (Movies, novels,radio,photography and theatre). Jonathan believes that people are always striving to find new and better ways to tell stories that take advantage of the new technologies. For a long time there was no such thing as film. Then film came along. And it soon became a beautiful medium where people had become total virtuosous using this medium to tell stories. Jonathan believes that nobody has reached that level with the web yet. It's kind of in the awkward adolescence. No one has really figured out how to tell stories beautifully online. And that's something that he is very interested in doing. That's also why Jonathan believes that there are always new ways for storytelling that emerge and some of

them stick around and others don't stick around but the good ones will become apparent over time.

To be continued...

"Jonathan Harris has made projects about human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity and language and also documented an Alaskan Eskimo Whale Hunt. He was commissioned by Yahoo! to build the world's largest time capsule, and by MoMA to build an interactive installation about online dating. He studied computer science at Princeton University, and was awarded a 2004 Fabrica fellowship. The winner of three Webby Awards, his work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, Print, ID Magazine, and the State of Vermont, has been featured by CNN, BBC, NPR, Reuters, Metropolis, The New York Times, USA Today, and Wired, and has been exhibited at Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), and MoMA (New York). He has given lectures all over the world, including at Google, Princeton and Stanford Universities, the TED Conference, and on Bhutanese television. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York."

Continue reading An Afternoon With Jonathan Harris-- Part 1

Objects that Comprise One's Life

2008-06-24T17:07:41Z

A couple of weeks ago, I had something happen to me which made me consider (yet again!) how much our relationship with new media has shaped our real-world (or non digital) lives. As a graduate student with Comparative Media Studies at MIT, I had been preparing my thesis (the culmination of almost two years of research in school) for final submission for graduation in June 2008. Like my other compatriots at CMS, I had basically been living in front of my laptop for months: writing new sections of my chapters, making last minute revisions, and formatting all my citations and footnotes. However, unbeknownst to me, my computer was hatching its own devious plan - one which was unaligned with my goals of finishing the thesis and thus graduating from MIT. A year previous, I had faced down a "screen of death" (according to Wikipedia) on the very same laptop. I was left computer-less at the exact time when I needed it the most, finals week. I had found myself not only without computing tools, but also without my precious data (I was writing papers and making an educational website at the time). For the most part, I had to reconstruct what I was doing from printed pages, my memory, or scattered hand-scribbled notes. Thought it was difficult, I ended up scraping by - relying on several desktop computers, burned CDs and flash drives along the way to help me finish the term.

]]> This time however I did not think of myself as that lucky - when my computer (logicboard) died, it seemed unreasonable to scrape together my notes and start anew - after all, I had been working with a document that I had been revising for weeks and weeks. Basic ideas are one thing, but recovering citations and source information is quite another. Yet, even though I was bracing myself for extreme disaster, it never seemed to come. Miraculously - with all my Google Doc usage, emailing out, saving my information on remote sites - I found that I not only had one good copy of my thesis, but several copies, saved and transfered at different points of revision. I found that my other files like photographs and videos (which normally I would have been upset about losing) were also strangely distributed across the web through sites like YouTube and Facebook. While I had previously thought of my life as being contained in one place, it was suddenly shown to me as a vast network for links and uploads.

This got me thinking... what are the materials that comprise one's life? It might be silly to think that computer files are so integral to one's sense of self, but remember about 15 or so years ago, when people used to say that they'd most likely save their photo albums and letters (behind family members and pets, of course) from their house if it was burning down? In that previous age, we used to think of physical objects as the keys to unlock our memories and experience. Today, teenagers take more photos than ever (using digital cameras and cell phones alike), but do these 'objects' hold the same value? The digitalization of these formerly tangible objects has certainly devalued them for me - while I'm photographed today more than ever, I also tend to look at these photographs less than before. For some reason, my laptop folder full of digital photos (most of them passed onto me through the Internet using sites like Facebook and Ofoto) are less precious to me than the old box of paper photos sitting on my top shelf, or the leather-bound family albums tucked away in my parents' living room. Somehow those photos feel like 'mine,' whereas the other photos of me that crop up on Facebook or elsewhere seem like public property - it's like comparing your own copy of your favorite novel to a copy of that same book at the library - or maybe even its pages as can be seen on Project Gutenberg or Google Books. In general, my experience with my computer has made me see first-hand how our personal notions of property and ownership are changing as a result of our increasingly networked and digital world. Older notions of 'mine' and 'yours' don't really seem as applicable today or as easy to define as they did previously.

Because we are a research group dedicated to these ideas of new "skills and cultural competencies" which are needed to fully engage in the digital participatory world, it seems reasonable to consider the perspective from which we are defining these things. While I used to consider photographs, videos and texts as "private property," now they seem to be (at least to me and perhaps those students younger than me) just the materials that comprise the Internet, available for public use. While this concept has been extensively discussed in its legal dimensions in the press, I wonder about how we at Project NML will begin to deal with it on a personal, cultural level. Will a string of texts between high school sweethearts ever hold the same weight in the future as a box full of love letters that you find in your parents' attic? Or does the ease of erasure and circulation of texts and information give rise to a new way of thinking about these artifacts of the past? Who knows? The only thing is - as I move forward in trying to define essential concepts of ownership, authorship, appropriation and remixing (for the Project NML Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture), I hope to remember that my ideas about these terms are strongly formed by my hybrid experience of the digital/tangible world, and that I should remain sensitive to the fact that ideas around these are continually being shaped and re-shaped by teens in the digital world today.

"Ya Gotta Hear Saget Tell It": The Ethics of Identity Play

2008-06-13T16:16:21Z

I've been thinking lately about identity play. I'm focused on this right now because of Project NML's collaboration with Project Zero's GoodPlay Project on an ethics casebook focusing on the five ethical categories GoodPlay outlines in its white paper. This month, we've been talking about identity. A recent brainstorm session got me thinking about the assumptions we (read: Americans) make about the relationship between the identities we take on and our sense of who we are.

]]> A fundamentally American idea, born of the Modernist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is that the self can contain more than one different identity. The idea was picked up in literature most notably by Walt Whitman, who wrote in "Song of Myself":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Scandalous! thought the reading public. A coherent sense of self that incorporates and accepts contradictions? How can it be?

A century or so later, this idea has been so widely accepted in America that we no longer even really question its truth or validity. Of course we take on different identities depending on context. And of course our goal is to integrate these identities into one fundamental and complete sense of who we are.

I'll use myself as an example. When I started working for ProjectNML, I struggled to figure out what it meant to work within an economy of ideas--a highly academic, highly intellectual environment. I was trying to get, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, a "feel for the game." This was a new identity, one with which I was unfamiliar. As I learned the rules and got a feel for this game, my sense of who I was shifted to include this new identity: "Curriculum Specialist with Project New Media Literacies."

But this idea that there is, deep down, a "true self" that is shaped by identity play--that's a social construct, and one that contemporary thinkers have questioned again and again. We can think of "self" as heavily, heavily situated--the "Jenna McWilliams" who writes and talks about identity play in her role as NML's Curriculum Specialist is not the same as the "Jenna McWilliams" who always shows up to meetings 10 minutes early, carrying a yellow legal pad and a blue pen. There's the "Jenna McWilliams" who is known to her family as the firstborn of a set of identical twins. There's the "Jenna McWilliams" who is viciously cutthroat when playing Scrabulous on Facebook. And then there's the "Jenna McWilliams" who will take almost any opportunity, in almost any social setting, to tell the joke that starts out, "A guy walks into a talent agent's office and says, 'Have I got an act for you!'" And so on and so on and so on.

I like to think that all of these different identities come together to make the "me" that walks the sidewalks and streets of Cambridge, Mass. But the fact is that none of these identities are closer to or farther away from the "true" me--I'm no more the person who likes blue humor than I am the person on Facebook or the person who blogs about identity. It's all housed, it's true, inside the shell that other people recognize as Jenna McWilliams, but calling myself a single, integrated whole is only arbitrary and useful--not necessarily accurate. (In fact, if I want to go all cross-eyed, I can think about the identity of "Jenna McWilliams" who thinks of herself as a coherent whole, who contains the multitudes to which Whitman refers.)

One of the perils of identity play articulated by the GoodPlay Project is the risk of a fragmented sense of self. When adolescents take on a wide range of widely varying identities, the danger is that they may not have the opportunity to learn who they "really" are. But this peril also seems to hold a great deal of promise, as GoodPlay also highlights. By trying out contradictory identities in a variety of low stakes environments, adolescents learn a flexibility and adaptability about how they define themselves. They learn how to figure out the unspoken rules of what Jim Gee has labeled "affinity spaces"--sites, physical or virtual, where conduct is contextual, governed by tacit norms, and learned through immersion in these environments. If guided well, these kids may grow up to be flexible, adaptable adults whose sense of self is less coherent than that of any previous generation--but who may use this fragmentation to adapt to an unfixed, constantly shifting set of sociocultural norms.

Get to know your "Friends"

2008-06-09T00:28:48Z

I'm a member of Facebook ...and the other day, someone I didn't know requested me to be his friend. My first reaction is "Who is this person?" ...so I go to his profile to check him out. I realize we have three friends in common - all people I work with. So, I send him a message, saying I see we have mutual friends and ask him if we've ever met before. The reply is "Unfortunately, we haven't met in person but I don't think this should matter if we can communicate online. :)"

I think of myself pretty aware and up on today's social media experience... but I personally want to have some reason / connection to be "friends" rather than a simple, we're just going to talk online. I find my experience online as an extension of who I am and what I do offline... so it matters. And for those of you who don't know, you can set your profile so that people can message you without being friends. Why not get to know the person first...
]]> Today's online world is full of niches, and I for one fit into many niches, moving from one space to the next. And in each one, I have a group of friends that I hang with. We hang out in these spaces because we have a similar interest... but these larger spaces, like MySpace or Facebook is like the mall or park where you go to be seen, see others and meet your friends and even get to know friends of friends. However, in the offline world, I have instantaneous feedback to see you, your body language, your reactions... Here, I'm introduced by a friend or I find out you're a friend of a friend. How are these senses transferring to an online space?

But is being a "friend" online really a niche ...shouldn't there be more to it than just being a friend of a friend? Shouldn't I find out how well my friend knows this friend and what's the connection?

If I jump at the chance of allowing anyone to be my "friend", then how will I ever really know anyone and will EVERYONE know all about me? And if I did allow people who I've only met online to enter my space ...I would really need to manage my online self much more closely than I currently do.

I understand that technology has improved and I now have many privacy options available to me. I can share with...

The entire Facebook network
All the groups I belong to or pick and choose which group
Just my "friends"
My "friends" and "friends of my friends",

...As well as pick and choose and make my own private list of "friends within my friends". A lot of options but do I have time to manage this!? And how am I going to remember who's in and who's out!

If I take that stance, I really shouldn't be participating. But overall, I love what these networks have offered to me ...a space to meet those who have similar interests and learn new things. So to me, there is no option... I'm going to be a participant in today's ever-increasing information-driven world, and therefore I need to manage my public self. I hope you'll join me too.

Click on the image thumbnail to explore all the options you have on just Facebook's social network. Take the time to make your own choices as to who, when and what you want to disclose.

So if you're new to the network or you jumped in feet first and never thought about it ...either way -- perhaps it's now time to think about it and explore your options.

To learn more about privacy, sign up to test the four Privacy Activities created by NML and Harvard's GoodPlay Project.

Create Your Own Social Networking Site

2008-06-04T13:37:58Z

I started exploring Ning website after we launched a new social networking site for our own project NML. Founded in October 2004, Ning was created to give everyone the opportunity to create their own social networks for anything. Today, it powers the largest number of social networks on the internet. You should try and explore this website. It gives your all the features that you might need and it allows you to customize almost everything. If you don't have a lot of time to design every aspect of your social networking site, you can use the templates that are offered on Ning. Ning absorbed diverse groups of people, from artists to to musicians, athletes, bloggers, video channels, journalists, students, educators, parents, craft hobbyists, alumni, and interest groups.

Why create your own social networks, while there are so many of them out there?

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Here are some of the reasons that you could find on Ning website in regards to this question:

Interact with your fans

Raise awareness

Exchange parenting tips

Connect with event attendees

Brag about your wheels

Make your "wedsite"

Create community with customers

Unite athletes & sports fans

Share tricks of the trade

Discover new recipes and cuisine

Appreciate independent artists

Build your career

Make your pet happy

Keep in touch with classmates

Find new travel destinations

Meet your neighbors

Inspire & educate

Share insight & find support

Imagine that you could create a social network for a classroom. You can modify the templates and post everything you might need to share with your students. You can create class forums and discussion boards for everyone to participate. You can even post videos and slides that you might need to use during class lectures.

Here are some interesting features that you might want to know about. On Ning platform you can make your group limited to the people you wish to invite. This way no one else can have access to your information. You can also send group emails and messages. This might be more fun and interesting for the students than the online blackboards that school provides them with. In addition this will motivate your students to bring back to the participatory culture.

explore Ning: http://www.ning.com/

My Mind Keeps Getting Blown

2008-06-04T01:41:35Z

As we continue to work on developing NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide, we are lucky to be surrounded by geniuses who continually push us to ask, and try to answer, several Big and Difficult Questions about the guide. A recent question, posed to us Veronica Boix-Mansilla, a Principal Investigator at Project Zero:

What is the added value of shifting from a traditional model of reading to a participatory model?

]]> A Big and Difficult Question, indeed. It's one we'll work to answer as we pilot the guide next year with our collaborating educators. For now, I've been grappling with this question alongside my cohorts in crime, the inimitable Henry Jenkins and Wyn Kelley, and with the exquisitely talented Katie Clinton and Deb Lui, co-developers of the guide. If you'll permit me just a moment to gush: I couldn't ask to be surrounded by more intelligent and inquisitive colleagues. They're thrilled to wrestle with these questions, though so far we haven't produced answers so much as more questions:

What do we mean when we talk about a "participatory model of reading"?

What is the traditional model of reading, and how (and why) did that become the dominant model in classrooms?

How has membership in a participatory culture shaped how kids read outside of the classroom?

How can integrating those practices into the traditional classroom setting enhance or shift students' comprehension of a literary text?

What is the value of this enhancement or shift, and why is it valuable?

These questions start to hint at a larger issue our project is working to address: The Participation Gap outlined in our White Paper. At its core, this guide is intended to provide some strategies for addressing that concern in a classroom setting, by encouraging students to engage, in an interdisciplinary and participatory manner, with a canonical text.

The questions we're asking aren't easy to answer, and the concerns we're trying to address aren't easy to resolve. If they were, of course, there wouldn't be much of a point to talking about them in the first place.

A silver lining...

2008-05-09T23:10:58Z

Not long ago, James Twitchell, a professor at my alma mater, admitted to plagiarism. It was weird for me, because Twitchell's work had been one of my earliest introductions to the study of consumer culture as a legitimate academic endeavor and one of the inspirations that set me down the path to CMS. It's also weird because one of the people he plagiarized was Grant McCracken, an anthropologist and CMS affiliate whom I admire greatly, whose work was one of the reasons why I wound up at CMS.

I've been following the blogosphere's reaction pretty closely... This situation is rough, depressing, and more than awkward. I am trying to find the silver lining, though, by trying to look at this as what we (formally) at the front of a classroom refer to as a "teaching moment." What follows is a hopefully productive bit of observation about the citations and blogging.
]]> Alice Robison wrote to our department in response. I

I think this speaks to a larger cultural issue that's becoming more and more important to those of us in academia and especially those of us who are interested in things like free culture, remixing, re-appropriating, etc. Plagiarism is less often the result of deliberate cheating (lots of research on this if you're interested) and more often the result of a lack of revision coupled with a lack of direct instruction on incorporating sources.

Alice also emphasized how hard it is write a proper paraphrase and pointed us in the direction of a great resource.

Really, it seems, it's about learning the rules. If I had-- with a little framing, attribution, and Alice's permission, just used the entire text her e-mail as a blog post, that probably would have been okay. But, if I were in a class and done the same as a response paper, it would not have been okay-- not plagiarism, exactly, but just relying too heavily on the ideas of another for that context.

Twitchell's act offends us because he should have known what is acceptable in academic writing and what isn't. If we believe that his faulty note-taking skills are to blame, he should have had better systems in place since his whole livelihood depends on his ability to participate in a formal conversation-in-writing? That is what scholarship is, essentially.

In my heightened state of attention to both academic blogs and citations, I noticed that academics have not settled on a uniform method of sourcing information in blogs. While most academics are content to use hyperlinks (the internet's own home-grown citation system) or indented quotes, Grant is careful to include a light but formal bibliography at the end of each post, even citing his own blog when he refers back to previous posts. Is a hyperlink enough? Should we include citations as well? What about if we site and not link? What are the standards this medium?

The reason for this lack of standardization, I think, has to do with the fact that no one is really sure what academic blogging is supposed to be. In her discussion of academic blogging, Rochelle Rodrigo contrasts Henry's blog to Stephen King's columns at the back of Entertainment Weekly thus:

Henry Jenkins is blogging; and those blogs are easier reads than his scholarly articles and books. But I still can't watch The Tudors and read Jenkins' blog. I can, however, read Uncle Stevie (Stephen King's "The Pop of King" column in Entertainment Weekly), along with various technology blogs that keep me up on cool new techie-tools and toys I might incorporate into my teaching (LifeHacker, ReadWriteWeb, and Web Worker Daily to name a few).

Certainly, Grant's post are shorter than Henry's, and perhaps even more Tudors-able, but they are more traditional in their citation methods. So, what is an academic blog supposed to be? Should we be able to read an academic blog while watching TV? What kinds of methods are we supposed to be using? How formal should the writing and the style standards be?

But really, academic blogging is just an example. What other emerging forms of writing and other ways of assembling ideas in arguments do we need to develop ethical and professional standards for? How might they impact what we teach when teach writing, using sources, and revision?

Oh and somewhat tangentially-- Isn't it interesting that the internet, the very thing that so many have decried as the pleasure island of cut-and-paste plagiarism, was the means through which Twitchell was "outed"? Roy Rivenburg, a freelance writer, was googling key terms looking for an old story of his when he came across familiar bits in Twitchell's book.

Interviewing and Learning with Henry

2008-05-04T16:43:38Z

Finally I understand it clearly. I can know say I have a fundamental understanding of what the New Media Literacy project is after having a very informative interview with the principal Investigator Henry Jenkins. We had a very interesting lengthy interview, which I will post up in audio format, but due to its length I will also post highlights of the interview in a transcribed version.

Henry Chat1.mp3
Henry Chat 2.mp3
What is your name and what is your role in NML?
I am Henry Jenkins. I guess I'm principal Investigator, which means that I'm supposed to do the vision thing. I helped to spark the effort and helped to identify some of the socials skills and cultural competencies we were working towards. I work closely with every member of the team and I'm part of the brainstorming intellectual development around the materials we are working with. But mainly the most important role is I'm chief propagandist and missionary for NML. I go out and give talks, I write on the blog, I write articles my job is to get what we do here at MIT is visible the larger community where its going to make a difference.

]]> What is The New Media Literacies project?
The new media literacy project starts from the premise that we are living in a participatory culture, that we are living in a moment in time in which more and more people are producing and sharing media with each other. Traditional notions of literacy and print would have said you wouldn't call someone literate if they could read but they couldn't write. So we shouldn't accept at the present moment the idea that one is media literate if you simply know how to consume media critically and don't know how to participate in the culture around you. So what we tried to do was identify what it takes to be a full participant in this society. We identified the list of 11 social skills and cultural competencies, which are fundamental to being a participant. Being a participant not through school or through work but as a citizen and as a creative individual. And what we set out to do was to develop curriculum materials to help people acquire those skills. Recognizing at the present time we are struggling not just the digital divine, which is access to technology but also the participating gap, which is about access to those skills and competencies. You could theoretically have access to technology and not feel empowered to use them, not now how to navigate through space, not know how to put your ideas in a form other people are going to care about and you'll essentially be shut down. The challenge is to make sure every kid in America has access to the skills they need to be able to fully take advantage of the world of flicker and youtube and Facebook and all of these other technologies and from there to think about what it is to be a citizen and to be a creative artist to be an everyday person in the world where we are not just media consumers but we are media participants.

What do you think is the most challenging part of this project?
I think the challenge is the American education system is so resistant to change. If you look at the technology in most classrooms its more or less the same technology of classrooms a hundred years ago. If you look at how we use the technology its more or less the same way of teaching that goes back a thousand years. Yet the society around schools have changed radically during that time and the tendency is for schools to be nostalgic and to continue to teach things the same way and to prepare kids for the world that was and not yet even the world that is let alone the world that will be. That process of looking backwards the conservative force of education is one of the biggest challenges we have to confront because we are in a moment of time which is fundamentally transformative are in a period of profound and prolonged media change that affects every aspect of our society. If it isn't affecting how we teach and what we teach in some pretty fundamental ways then the schools are going to get more and more out of whack. It would be like going through the emergence of printing presses and not think that maybe textbooks might be a good idea.

What do you think contributes most to some kids having an advantage of new media technologies over other kids?
I think what we are seeing now is kids are acquiring skills of new media through play, through participation on online communities, through their recreational lives and their social lives. The kids who have access to technologies outside of school, outside of the library as a continuous part of their everyday life as something they just do have a different relationship to those skills and competencies. Those kids who don't it's just like you have 10 minutes on a school computer and no ability to upload, no ability to download, mandatory filters, potential mandatory restrictions on social software and blogging technology, its just get in and get out and get the information. You're not allowed to play with it, experiment with it, live with it, it doesn't become part of your sense of your self and your everyday life and those are the kids who are left behind in the participation gap.

Creative Sampling, Creative Sharing: Samples for the Children of the World.

2008-04-29T15:33:00Z

Last week I found out on the Internet a great resource for all of you interested in sampling and making music, sound art and sound collages without violating copyright laws. "Samples for the Children of the World," a huge collection (up to 10 GB) of new and original samples (sound recordings) has been released under the Creative Commons license by a group of students, professors and alumni from The Berklee College of Music. Although the samples are originally donated to support the One Laptop Per Child project, the Creative Commons license that all these samples have makes them available to everybody. The only condition for sampling them is to attribute the work in the manner specified by the author.

As DJ C says in the DJ Culture video exemplar we produced last year here in NML, "Sampling in music is when you take a piece of pre-recorded music and you then use it, as an element, to make a new piece of music." Musicians and sound artists use these pieces of recorded sound as the building blocks of their works. Nowadays, the music production technology is based on this practice. The sampler is actually one of the standard instruments for music studios and for live performances both as hardware and software. You store recorded sounds inside a sampler and then you play them, change them, and trigger them as the notes of a grand piano. Imagine that, any recorded sound can become a note in a keyboard or in a drum machine.

The problem with sampling is of course copyright, the property of the sounds. Sounds belong to the people who hold the copyright of them. As DJ C says, "A big dilemma with this electronic music culture is that when you are sampling music that you don't own the rights to, because someone else is the copyright holder of that music, then you are putting yourself in danger of being sued." Since the final decades of the last century, many musicians and sound artist have been fighting for a more free culture concerning the sharing of sounds.

In the 80s, Negativeland and John Oswald made a big buzzzzzzzzz in the margins of popular music and goose-bumped the music industry with their quite subversive works. The speech "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative" presented by Oswald to the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985 stands as a digital sampling manifesto. Of course, both Negativeland and John Oswald were sued. Closer to the main stream media and the trends of popular music are many examples of sampling practices, from hip hop to ambient, from house to drum and bass, sampling is everywhere.

In the 21st century copyright is changing and thanks to the creation of the Creative Commons licenses, sound recordings can be shared with others. Actually, any kind of creative work can be shared. Pictures, poems, novels, songs and videos could be remixed and copied if they have these licenses. Making collages, remixes, cut-ups and mashups wont be anymore an infringement of copyright if one uses works that have Creative Commons licenses such as Atribution or Sampling Plus. We can share these works (copy, distribute, transmit) and we can remix them (adapt them, make something new from them). Of course, there are also public domain works and royalty free songs that are available for sampling and remixing (you can find these kind of works in the internet archive and in pdinfo).

The giant library of sounds that the people from The Berklee College of Music have released under the Attribution 3.0 license is not an isolated island in the culture of sharing and sampling. A quick look at CCMixter (the Creative Commons website that supports audio sampling, sharing, remixing and cutting-up) reveals several projects that are worth looking for all the children and creative people who wants to sample and remix audio. I definitely recommend checking the freesoundproject and as well the Wired CD. The first one, a expanding collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds; the second, an album released by Wired magazine, Creative Commons, and sixteen artist (including Matmos, Thievery Corporation and the Beastie Boys).

Academic Resources from Howard Rheingold

2008-04-23T16:14:32Z

As an academic advisor to Project NML, one of the things I do is try to keep my finger on the pulse of the research happening in the areas of media and literacy studies.

When I stumbled upon Howard Rheingold's syllabus for his graduate course on virtual communities and social media, I was excited. Many know Rheingold's work as the author of the book Smart Mobs, but he's also a terrific scholar and teacher at UC-Berkeley's School of Information. As he describes it, his course is directed toward graduate students, enabling them "to understand the kinds of analyses applied by different disciplines to questions about community, to apply methodologies of different disciplines to contemporary questions about media, technology, sociality, and society in a variety of settings, and to establish both theoretical and experiential foundations for making personal decisions and judgments regarding the relationship between mediated communication and human community."

I think his online resources are useful for anyone interested in this area, however, and I'd encourage folks to take a look at his resources for Participatory Media Literacies. It's absolutely incredible how many tools, sites, and sources of information are listed there. Truly a wealth of information! Thanks to Howard and his students for compiling it.

Online Privacy

2008-04-20T21:07:43Z

Earlier this month I looked through my childhood diary after so many years. I thought that I had an explicit idea of who I was and what major things shaped my identity. But surprisingly I came across memories that I had forgotten completely. Some of these memories gave me a better idea of why I am doing what I am doing at the age of twenty-six.

]]> There are memories that I could associate myself with, even before reading my diary but some of them I particularly or even deliberately erased from my brain. I think of my diary book as an external organ that holds information of my past. If I lose my diary book, it would feel as though I lose some parts of my life.

My childhood dairy holds my identity in a chronological order. I am actually very reluctant to show this to other people. It's a very private thing.

Even as a child I was concerned about privacy of my thoughts. Although my diary had a lock, I used aliases for the people that I fell in love with. I knew that my parents did not have the capacity to tolerate my love to other men. So I came up with women's names that I used among my friends when referring to men. When I read my diary this time, I realized that I could not recognize some of these aliases. I even called my friends to figure out whom I had such strong feelings for. But they seemed to have forgotten long before me. When I turned Fifteen, I developed a code language to write about the things that had to be inaccessible forever from everyone. My code language consisted of symbols and lines that were not found on keyboards. At the time it didn't occur to me that one day I might want to keep my diaries online.

I sometimes wonder how things would be if I were a teenager today. Would I write everything on a blog? How could I deal with the issue of privacy in computation? And how would I develop a code language that was inaccessible to everyone? I wonder how it is for the youth today. How much of the youth online dairies contain unforgivable lies about themselves? How much they have to pretend to be someone they are not?

Digital media technology has made it possible for teens to share more about themselves to more people than ever before. It has also made it harder for teens to control what personal information gets shared with others. Today, it is more likely to find lies and unreal news on people's blog. The simple reason is that we are expected to protect ourselves.

The shift from a private communication channel such as my journal and the public space of the blog have very large implications for the process by which contemporary youth construct their identities. And in the end, as Henry Jenkins pointed out to me, one wonders whether using a code in a diary to protect your secrets is the same as constructing fictions in a blog to mask aspects of your life.

In her article, Why Youth Love Social Network Sites, danah boyd defines an invisible audience online:

While we can visually detect most people who can overhear our speech in unmediated spaces, it is virtually impossible to ascertain all those who might run across our expressions in networked publics. This is complicated, [...] since our expression may be heard at a different time and place from when and where we originally spoke.*

* boyd, danah. Why Youth Love Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. University of California, Berkeley, School of information

Reading in a Participatory Culture: Teachers' Strategy Guide Update

2008-04-17T15:30:43Z

Take a look at this quote from Colin Martindale, in an article called "Biological Bases of Creativity":

"It would seem that creative productions always consist of novel combinations of pre-existing mental elements.... To create, then, involves the realization of an analogy between previously unassociated mental elements."

I love this quote because it emphasizes the role of appropriation in the creative process. It's something we're thinking about a lot as we develop our first teachers' strategy guide, called "Reading in a Participatory Culture."

]]> You can read more about our work on this guide in this blogpost by Research Assistant Deb Lui and in this post by Henry Jenkins, ProjectNML's Principal Investigator, about why we chose to work with Moby-Dick as our sample text for this guide.

Fundamentally, our guide will ask students to tap into participatory practices--the innovative , imaginative, and production-oriented activities enabled by our digital culture--in order to engage creatively with a canonical literary text.

The goal of this emphasis on creativity is to help students to come to a deep and personal understanding of the text, as well as to develop a working understanding of what it means to both read and write in a participatory culture.

We're thinking hard about the practicalities of introducing a creative, project-based curriculum into the high school English classroom--including considerations of meeting state education standards and working with quantifiable final products for assessment purposes, as well as the intricacies of evaluating students' progress toward understanding the elements of literature. I'll be writing more about these aspects of our work in future posts. For now, I want to show you our most current visualization of the guide itself:

We're conceiving of a central unit, called "Reading in a Participatory Culture," as the element that lays out our overarching conceptual frameworks. Key points of this central unit include the following:

In a participatory culture, reading and writing are not separate activities but heavily interrelated and linked together as a creative practice.
Kids' immersion in digital media has made it more important than ever for them to find ways to navigate and interpret the various texts that surround them every day; they're learning this skill largely without guidance from a formal mentor.
When we engage with a text, either online or offline, it's not always the case that we work to develop a thorough and deep and complete understanding of the text; we may work discontinuously with a text, or we may enter it with a much more limited or specific purpose in mind.
Many of the tactics young people use when working with digital technologies can be applied to the reading of a canonical text--and these tactics may result in a new, possibly better, at least different, understanding of the text than a student may develop by more traditional methods of reading literature.
Texts such as Moby-Dick lend themselves nicely to the practices outlined above, and Moby-Dick in particular is a digressive, dense, and layered text that encourages and requires active, participatory engagement.

Each of the five units surrounding the central theme emphasizes a more specific aspect of working with a literary text, and more information on these units will follow. For now, Deb Lui posted a terrific description of the unit called "Adaptations and Translations" here.

NML Blog - Update - Teachers' Strategy Guide

2008-04-14T05:37:09Z

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. ]]> You might ask... what does she mean specifically by transmedia? In this case, I mean the ways in which the story was adapted and translated (hence the title of this unit) across different forms of media for both works of art. In general, Moby-Dick is considered a hybrid, discontinuous text, in which Herman Melville wrote multiple kinds of prose: philosophical musings, adventure narratives, theatrical dialogue, scientific descriptions, etc. Melville was inspired not only by different textual sources (such as the Bible, Milton's Paradise Lost, science journals, etc.) but also different artistic and media forms. Examples of this might include Melville's use of Quakerian sermons, Shakespearean dialogue, and panoramic visual description within the text of the novel. In many cases, it is not only the material products of these that Melville refers to (i.e. literally, a panoramic drawing of the ocean), but the different kinds of experience and way of creating meaning as associated with these different forms of media (i.e. a "panoramic" way of understanding and thus describing the ocean which involves a greater degree of reflection and attention to the surrounding details).

Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the director of "Moby Dick: Then and Now," also employs different modes of media and artistic expression. As evidenced by the performance, Pitts-Wiley was inspired by a diverse range of artistic and media forms including rap music, traditional Christian hymns, architecture, step dancing, theatrical lighting, and digital visual project. Not only did he include these media forms in his play, but he also let the characteristics of each of these inform his storytelling. One example of this might be his particular uses of rap (instead of regular dramatic dialogue) in order to heighten the sense of urgency during particular moments in the play.

The main goal of the unit plan, therefore, is to highlight this hybrid approach to creation, where techniques, tools and effects from one media can be applied in another. Students should learn to recognize this process within works of art as well as practice this transferring method themselves Because of our focus on new media literacies here at ProjectNML, it becomes important for us to focus on how this learning objective relates back to contemporary new media practices. Any examination of 'old' media that inspired Melville (including urban sketches, panoramic paintings, scrapbooks, or scrimshaw) should show students that media can be considered beyond their technology, material or tools. Hopefully, this unit plan should give them a model through which to think more deeply about their own media use.

Feedback on elements for LL

2008-04-10T20:47:10Z

Hey, Anna and the rest of the NML team,
I'm attaching several docs to this blog for feedback. The more Russ and I brainstormed the info architecture, the separation between user (ie member who registers an account - w/ NML staff as alpha testers) and visitor became more apparent. For the purposes of the LL group, these docs represent the data flow for a user- anyone who interacts, participates, and manipulates the LL will need to create an account.

I completely agree with starting from a skill because it is a logical launch point for any element, and the more we brainstormed the more it allowed for some sense of structure but also kept it fluid. Here is a flowchart to show basic info flow:

flowchart_nml0408.pdf

Below is a VERY rough LL interface but don't look at it for visual or graphical appeal. It was more to give you a sense of how elements can interact with each other but with tying to a particular skill keeping in context the non-linear/nodal search features you wanted. The 'nodes' themselves could be much more graphically themed, or iconic. The idea is really that the search is less 'random' but doesn't feel that way to the user. This same interface will be used for both a 'visitor' who wants to explore the site, as well as the member, the main difference is that the member will be able to participate with the elements (or destination pages) they select from the search.

It looks like we are moving away from the concept of a structured module and more a more exploratory way for teens to experience the LL.

Next are a couple of wireframes for a Member Profile. The first is a general page, and the second shows an example of what would appear prompted by the Search Skills option.

wireframe_memberprofile.pdf
wireframe_memberprofile_search.pdf

Below is the element paper mock-up using "Blog" as an example. It doesn't have to be overcomplicated but each element will need its own page with instructions to the user. The 1st page has the questions and requirements for each element based on our last conversation, 2nd and 3rd page should be more helpful in organizing content around an element. This doc only reflects the option for element "Blog".

PH1-CMS_Elements0408.pdf

Below are the wireframes for the Create an Element page...

wireframe_elements.pdf

wireframe_elements_blog.pdf

I also had the idea of scaling knowledge around the four c's so that students see this as a process...

Step 1 - Connect: It all starts with a connection! Register to be a member...

Step 2 - Communicate: Post your opinions on someone's elements [can think of a better word later..]

Step 3 - Create: Develop your own elements, remix from existing elements, etc...
[Russ wanted me to break this into two sub-sections - a) Create elements, and b) Create activities for the more advanced, or perhaps for the in-classroom settings ie adult-supervised. Neither of us felt a teen would create offline activities on their own, but that could be something to run by a focus group.]

Step 4: Collaborate: Share with the community!
[This is where we can talk further about integrating a user's created element with social networks, or creating widgets, etc.]

Russ and I are brainstorming the tech pieces and will have more on that soon. We, and I suppose like you all, are still mulling over the "Activities"- meaning where to house them, who gets to create them, why they would, and how that gets displayed.