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Harry Potter: The Exhibition, or what Location Entertainment Adds to a Transmedia Franchise

Interning at NML

Hi, I'm Lieke, an NML intern from the Netherlands for two weeks. Erin asked me if I'd write a blog about my experiences so I'm doing that right now.

The week started with meeting everyone who was at NML and GAMBIT on Monday. I stayed at GAMBIT so I could play with the Learning Library to find out what everyone would be talking about on the conference on Saturday. The rest of the week I helped with putting papers into the folders, making signs to show where the workshops and restrooms would be, and listening to the presentations of the NML-team.

On Friday I was supposed to meet the other teens who would be at the conference - the Global Kids - but their bus got delayed. Instead we went to dinner with a couple of researchers from Indiana who work with NML to a little African restaurant where we had some good conversations. Most people left early because Saturday was going to be a long day.

Youth and the Election

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.

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.

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?

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.

Sneak Peek: Katie Salen @ Institute of Play

NML resident cinematographer Talieh Rohani has been busy this summer with several shoots for the Learning Library. Now we're working to create videos that will function as introductions to our learning challenges, each of which focuses on one of the new media literacy skills. Here's the beginning of a short video that I'm editing featuring Katie Salen, an assistant professor at the Parsons School of Design in the Design and Technology Program and the executive director of The Institute of Play. Once completed, this and other sequences will be used in Learning Library challenges that explore play as the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem solving.

Click To Play

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

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).

inspiration for graffiti writers

Just finished touching up this video for a presentation Henry is doing soon - he was looking for something to show how creative inspiration can range from "high art" to popular culture. There is also an interesting part of the interview with Tats Cru where Nicer talks about graffiti emerging from the art of calligraphy - I left it out here because we were trying to keep this clip pretty short.

Make it a Map

I'm servin up another order for Jenna McWilliams - she wants to work this video into an activity about discontinuous texts, so she needed it handy online. It's not quite done yet because I still need to add a few images to cover some jump cuts. It features Dean Haspiel talking about the inspiration behind Nick Bertozzi's comic book Boswash, which we consider a somewhat discontinuous text. At the very least, it doesn't read like a traditional, linear book.  We're really excited about another activity that we will be offering with this video (when it is published in our Learning Library), because Nick has given us permission to use the images from Boswash - we'll be offering every image in Boswash as an individual image file.  You'll be able to move them around, working with the narrative structure to tell your own story.