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.

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.

Just finished this video - well, it's still kind of a rough cut. It has no music, and I want to add some more pop-up bubbles and titles. Jenna asked me to cut a clip for her - she need a video about discontinuous reading for an activity she's developing.

In order to document our process as we develop the Learning Library, we are going to be using our blog to share information, materials, and correspondence with our web development partner Platform Shoes Forum (PSF).

Right now, we are working on the content management system that we need to build for the Learning Library.  PSF created an initial document that described how that system might work.  PSF had a lot of questions for us to answer, and I have revised the document, trying to field all the questions.  I'm going to share that revised document with Vini tomorrow, but I also created some visual aids to support the document.

To see these and my correspondence with Vini, keep reading...

Engaging educators and learners in today's participatory culture is the central goal of Project New Media Literacies (NML).  This Fall, NML modified the current exemplar video library to reflect more strongly the theoretical framework laid out in our influential white paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:  Media Education for the 21st Century".  This included tagging all the videos and learning activities to fit within the participatory culture framework centered around 4 C's ...how do we create, connect, communicate and collaborate.

The Exemplar Library that was once documentary videos highlighting best practices of participatory culture is now an integration of learning activities embedded into multimedia material.  In addition to videos, the Exemplar Library now has animated data visualization, flash movies, and other motion media as launching points.  The learning activities are a combination of online activities that teens can do on their own to group activities that can happen both in and out of the classroom.  This new informal approach to learning through the Exemplar Library encourages teens from passive viewing into interactive participation... and we saw just that in our first focus group of the semester.

As a graduate research assistant for ProjectNML this semester, I've mostly been working on our Teachers' Strategy Guide. This guide, which focuses on teaching literature within a participatory culture framework, has definitely challenged the ways I think about engaging with a text.  From reading chapters to making dramatic adaptations, this guide tries to outline different approaches to teaching, engaging and using texts. 

I've been thinking a lot about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick lately, and not just arbitrarily. A big piece of my job here at NML is to head up development of a teacher's strategy guide for use in the high school English classroom. The guide emphasizes the new media literacy skill of appropriation--the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content--and uses Moby-Dick as the sample text and a theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley called Moby-Dick: Then and Now as an example of a contemporary appropriation and adaptation of the novel.

Before I came to NML, I had long lived among the multitudes who for many reasons--actually, for me it was mainly out of guilt and the heavy weight of cultural duty--keep a copy of Moby-Dick on a bookshelf with the really truly honest intention of getting through it some day. My guilt was compounded by my personal history as first an English major and then a student-writer in an MFA program. Every time I looked over at that fat little book sitting plumply on my bookshelf, I got just a little miserable all over again.  But then I thought, you know, it's a very long novel. And hard. And word on the street is that it's kind of...boring. But then I joined NML and started in on this teacher's guide and I figured, okay, it's time to end the shame. And I took a deep breath and I jumped in.

"We are in the early stages of a fundamental transformation in how we create, share and view dynamic visual media. This transformation is enabling a new media ecology that can support widespread amateur video creation, and peer-to-peer and many-to-many distribution to audiences both large and small. Although it is clear that there is tremendous demand for user-generated and bottom-up forms of digital video, it remains unclear how best to support these creative projects, what the implications are for artistic practice and how to build bridges between old and new media."- 24/7 Conference Coordinators

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.

More inside...

Today, while driving, I heard on the radio a person being asked where she would go in a time machine...

Welcome back blog readers I had a great interview with Jenna, while making me fall out of my seat with laughter, I learned how important it is to have a teacher point of view for this NML project.

I think it's interesting that Kidus wants to know what we'd all do with a million dollars at NML. I'm hoping to do an interview with him, so I won't spoil by listing my answer here.

This has been a test of Kelly Leahy's blog posting ability.

Here's another new video from NML! This one explores how comic book artists use collaboration to strengthen their work. Does sharing work and process create inspiration or tension? frustration or collective intelligence? Check out what Dean Haspiel, Nick Bertozzi, and Mickey Duzyj have to say on the matter.

(I wanted the video to kind of look like the pages of a comic book...but now that I'm looking at it again, I am wondering if I've virtually decapitated one of our favorite artists!? You be the judge...)

Last Thursday was our second annual Comparative Media Studies Research Fair.  It takes months to prepare, with all the research projects planning how best to present their concepts and materials.  We use this fair to reach out to the MIT community at large, and hope that we can offer faculty and students a clear understanding of the richly varied research that happens at CMS.

Last year, it was at our research fair that we first met Kelly Leahy, who is now an invaluable member of our team.

We're working on re-editing some of the NML video material, in order to create some video clips that are very focused on certain aspects of participatory culture.  "Reaching Your Audience" features comic book artists talking about how they distribute their work.  Blogs allow them to share work in progress and get feedback that might then shape the creative process.