Well, now I have. And I'm linking to my most recent post, which begins as follows:
This is one of my favorite quotes in the universe:
"There won't be schools in the future.... I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum-- all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible with the presence of the computer... But this will happen only in communities of children who have access to computers on a sufficient scale."--Seymour Papert
At Project New Media Literacies, we're collaborating with Harvard's GoodPlay Project on an ethics casebook to address the special ethical issues that arise in the online world. GoodPlay has identified five different ethical areas, but at the moment, we are working on activities that explore credibility and how it is assessed and developed online.
So, the first thing we have to think about is what makes the online world different from the offline world? More specifically, what differences are there that change the way credibility works? One possible answer: the online world is hyper-networked.
By Peter Gutierrez on October 16, 2008 12:13 PM
|Permalink
...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.
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.
By Peter Gutierrez on October 6, 2008 10:21 PM
|Permalink
A couple of weeks ago I discussed Son of Rambowin 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).
By Peter Gutierrez on September 18, 2008 8:30 PM
|Permalink
Here's a news bulletin for 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.
By Jenna McWilliams on September 4, 2008 11:22 AM
|Permalink
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.
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.
By Lana Swartz on March 14, 2008 2:07 PM
|Permalink
Last semester, our collaboration with Harvard University's Project GoodPlay focused on examining issues of ownership and authorship and developing activities that got young people thinking about these issues in terms of ethics. I've been thinking a lot lately about how the ethics of intellectual property relates to fashion.
