it's baaack....

that's right - the 7th annual media that matters film festival is now online. they put it best:
"An image captures a feeling, a story shares a message, a movie becomes a movement. Media That Matters brings you 16 inspiring shorts by filmmakers committed to changing the world."

check it out!

unity (through) hope (might equal) peace

i took these photos outside of truce, a youth development and media organization located in harlem and part of the harlem children's zone. they have an excellent public arts project going on right now and are developing a garden and several more of these fence messages. the others read:
build love
build power
build hope
[build unity]
build peace

the message is hopeful, thoughtful, and curious. which comes first? i've listed the phrases as they appeared from left to right on the fences on either side of the truce building. i'm eager to see the project and the messages unfold, particularly as they are youth directed and youth produced. more pics to follow.

(note: my camera and the sunlight were not too sympatico on this particular afternoon, so i'm aiming to shoot the fences again.)

it's a bird, it's a plane...

it's another piece of digital technology banned from schools!

what?

the ipod (and other digital media players)

why?

b/c it has the potential to be an instrument of cheating.

seriously?

seriously.

at least seriously according to the principal at mountain view high school in idaho. the article also notes:
"The practice is not limited to the United States: St. Mary's College, a high school in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, banned cell phones and digital medial players this year, while the University of Tasmania in Australia prohibits iPods, electronic dictionaries, CD players and spell-checking devices."

wouldn't it be lovely if we could be ahead of the curve on this one and think creatively about what assessment means in an age of instantaneous information acquisition and dissemination? at a dissertation hearing this morning, a committee member posed the question of assessment this way:
how can we assess what kids are doing (and learning) in this digital age?

to that i would add the following:
what are we assessing? and what does it mean to assess?
who is assessing what?
what do tests and other measures actually test and measure?
who is being evaluated when a student's performance on an instrument is measured?

codes are published for quicker advancement through levels of video games. we learn shortcuts for making simple things simpler. you can buy precut, pre-marinated, pre-cooked vegetables at the super market and live a completely heat-n-eat lifestyle. we live in an age of the spanx revolution, SAT tutoring franchises, and professional editors. where do we draw the cheating line? and who draws it? i'm not wholly anti-test or timed assessments. they're clearly helpful for olympic training and i was certainly the beneficiary of numerous 1st place "wins" on timed multiplication tables (the external motivation that always worked on me was the promise of leaving the classroom with a library pass or a resource room getaway - that made cramming for fierce competition with my fellow 3rd graders seem like a small price to pay). still, i wonder whether we sacrifice real meaning making and engagement with texts for the sake of time and curriculum coverage. at the dissertation hearing today, the issue of "real deadlines" in the "real world" came up, and naturally we all agreed that sometimes all of us must negotiate multiple timelines - and timescales - in our everyday lives. but are multiple choice tests or other "easily cheatable" tests the answer? the *only* answer?

and is it just coincidence that if we switch the 't' and the 'ch' teaching becomes cheating, and vice versa?

tech culture and cultural techs

an article in cnn.com's technology section caught my eye this morning:
Social-networking sites link Hispanic youth (posted 4.27.07)

in brief, the article explores the growth of social networking sites aimed at a spanish speaking, self-identified as latin and/or hispanic audience such as elhood.com and vostu. according to the article, "ElHood is sort of a bilingual MySpace promoting the latest in Latin music, and for Miami-based [Indie rocker Eric] Monterrosa, it has become a personal and professional lifeline. It is also the latest in a wave of Hispanic social-networking sites building links across the U.S., Latin America and Spain, all hoping to capture coveted advertising dollars."

other excerpts from the article that have me thinking and wondering about the intersections (and working definitions) of technology, culture, and youth:

• "About 56 percent of Hispanics in the United States use the Internet, compared with 71 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 60 percent of non-Hispanic blacks, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But the number of Hispanics online jumps to 67 percent among 18- to 27-year-olds -- the group most likely to visit social-networking sites and one coveted by advertisers."

• Another site, Vostu.com, presents itself as an alternative to Facebook.com, where students post profiles of themselves visible to a mini-network of their college or high school classmates. ... Dan Kafie, the 24-year-old Honduran native who co-founded Vostu, believes his site can compete with the larger ones because it's specially tailored to the needs of a relatively small but affluent group. ... "There's similar types of sites, but they don't capture the cultural subtleties," Kafie said. "We thought there's an opportunity."

• But are technology, culture and language enough to draw people away from MySpace, Facebook or Google Inc.'s YouTube?

• "More young people come to this country and don't have a family," Monterrosa said. "They are here to strive or to study and they need contacts. They don't have money to go to shows or clubs, but they can reach out to people who also like the same things," he said. As for those in Latin America, they can connect with music and youth scenes that are difficult to find outside the big cities.

• "The youth, they want it to be fast. They want it to be hip, and they want to see themselves in it -- but not just themselves,"

fictive kinship

when the identity of the shooter in the virginia tech killings was revealed, a couple of the young men who are enrolled in a digital media class i co-teach made the following statements:
"i'm glad he wasn't black."
"the new york times probably wouldn't have printed it if he had been, anyway."
both young men are african american and had just made claims about the ny times being a newspaper for white people, unlike the daily news, which, in their opinion, had stories that mattered to them: "to black people."

elaine richardson, during a colloquium delivered at teacher's college this week, spoke of fictive kinship when responding to a question about her talk, in which she explored african american young women's engagement with hip hop lyrics and video imagery. she noted that despite diverse opinions that may exist within a minority or marginalized group of people, there tends to be, in some of those communities, a sense of wanting to protect someone who looks like you from those who don't look like you; similarly, when someone who looks like you does something you wish they didn't, you feel the pain on behalf of everyone who looks like you. thus, the young women that richardson talked about expressed critique in response to the images represented nelly's "tip drill" song and video, while at the same time finding messages of empowerment and accommodating this text.

the limits of my own fictive kinship were tested this past week when the country in which i was born and where many of my relatives still live made me cringe with a mix of embarrassment and frustration. should people be displaying awkward public affection in the manner that richard gere performed on stage at a fundraiser last week? probably not - i say this not for reasons of "morality," but rather because the whole mess looked more like a poorly choreographed sequence from dancing with the stars than a playful "star"-to-"star" kiss on the order of brody-on-berry at the '03 oscars.

these are moments of self-definition borne out of public performances in which ethnicity and race take center stage. as an adolescent, i don't recall feeling excluded from the literature i was reading or the television i was watching - a claim i sometimes i take up in my classes in response to how young people engage with such texts. however, i was keenly aware of when "people who looked like me" did something that mortified and disappointed me:
- watching the funeral of indira gandhi and knowing that she was gunned down by her own bodyguards
- watching earth, a film by deepa mehta
- reading the karma of brown folk, by vijay prashad

...

recently in class we listened to a youth radio podcast by ayesha walker, a young woman reflecting on the v-tech shootings. the last lines of her piece are as follows:
"Here, our tragedy is so embedded in the city that it doesn't make the headlines. It's just what we're known for."

is there room to change what "we" are known for? and what informs the ways in which young people make sense of themselves? what leaves lasting impressions? and which are the moments, words, images, and interactions that last a lifetime?

online findings and sitings

check out this series of very excellent interactive multimedia stories: inanimate alice
(thanks for the link, angela!)



the birth of wiki-man - see also other words-to-music by verytasteful.com



also, my favorite wiki hosting service, pbwiki, is now ad-free for educational wikis!!

arresting developments

a few weeks ago, a 7 year old boy was arrested for being in possession of a banned dirt bike - it was motorized and that's not allowed in baltimore, where the boy lives.

it's bad enough (horrific, actually) that we're suspending kids as young as 4 for "improper touching" - remember the hug-gone-bad story? - but can't we (and by we, i mean law enforcement, lawmakers, adults in positions of power) find ways other than physical and verbal intimidation to communicate with elementary school age children?

in the spirit of multiple perspectives and sources, i leave you to read the following re: the bike story and ask you to think about what is being educated to the young boy at the center of it all:

Arrest of 7-Year-Old Draws Condemnation

HANDCUFFS, TOO: Baltimore police arrest 7-year-old bike rider

Groups clash over child’s arrest

with words like this, who can sleep?

Where the FUCK did you learn to drive? Jerkoff!
Words spoken by a baseball cap wearing, ruddy complexioned, Bluetooth headsetted driver of a navy blue SUV to my turbaned cab driver in response to the bopping and weaving the cabbie was guilty of as he tried to jot down a phone number of a car for sale while driving at high speeds down the West Side Highway, all the while as I clutched the Mac I was transporting for use in our digital media class.

You’ll never have to lift anything heavy with all these men around in here.
Words spoken by a female staff member at the alternative to incarceration program where I conduct fieldwork and occasionally teach classes as I walked in with my arms full of the cardboard box containing the Mac I had risked my life for just a few minutes earlier.

It’s not me, but it’s me, you know? You'll see...
Words spoken by a graduate of the above noted program after giving me his Myspace url.

JESUS is my boss
Words embroidered into the navy blue cap worn by a man who looked at me strangely as I was recording field notes into my digital voice recorder as I headed home from fieldwork on the subway.

adding to my list of favorite blogs...

drop that knowledge - authored by youth radio's education director and senior producer lissa soep. if you haven't already done so, check out the youth radio website, subscribe to their podcasts, and visit dtk frequently to engage in conversation with an emerging leader in youth media discourse and dialogue.

more numbers and sense

Experts: Testing companies "buckling" under weight of NCLB

a few choice passages:

"A handful of companies create, print and score most of the tests in the U.S. and they're struggling with a workload that has exploded since President Bush signed the education reform package in 2002."

"The number of students tested has risen sharply since the No Child Left Behind Act took effect. Illinois, for example, used to test only third, fifth and eighth graders but now tests students in third through eighth grades."

"To meet NCLB requirements, states administered 45 million reading and math exams during spring 2006. At the end of the 2007-2008 school year, they will give about 56 million tests because they must add a science exam at the elementary, middle and high school levels."

"From 2002 to 2008, states will spend between $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion to develop, score and report NCLB-required tests, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office."

after reading these numbers, 1 second of funding doesn't sound so bad, hmm???

school = tests

How/When did standardized tests become synonymous with public schooling? Why aren’t we doing more than critiquing and questioning them? What would that “more” look like? I am reminded of an exchange that occurred following Jay Lemke’s presentation during one of the plenary sessions at this year’s NCTEAR conference. Someone requested/challenged him to write an op-ed to the New York Times saying (in 500 words or less) the essence contained in the talk he had just given about transmedia franchises and transmedia semiotics found in adolescent’s worlds that are turning our understandings of literacy/ies inside out. Lemke talked about the complexity of meaning making in an age when story is not found in printed text alone; ““eating candy such as bertie botts (from Harry Potter),” he claimed, “is literacy if it is integrated into transmedia meaning effect.” Mimi Ito, in an earlier talk, shared several examples of amateur anime music videos (AMVs) that reflected the nuance and range of multimedia composition and storytelling that anime fans are engaged in, all the while challenging notions of literacy, composing, communication, plagiarism, homage, imagination, narrative, and learning. This post isn’t about lemke’s or ito’s talks, but rather about the role that they and others in the field of language and literacies studies might play in changing the tide of schooled literacy practices and policies, which have largely taken the form of rote learning, scripted and formulaic templates, and an unending sequence of tests and measures.

Today I came across the DiversityData Project currently ongoing at Harvard’s School of Public Health. From the website:
“The DiversityData project identifies metropolitan area indicators of diversity, opportunity, quality of life and health for various racial and ethnic population groups. This Website is now available to a wide variety of potential users interested in describing, profiling and ranking U.S. metros in terms of quality of life. The indicators provide a scorecard on diversity and opportunity, and allow researchers, policymakers and community advocates to compare metro areas and to help them advocate for policy action and social change.”

Among the indicators are education, crime, housing opportunities, and economic opportunities. The project has also issued its first report based on these data that focuses on the impact of urban schooling on children: Children Left Behind: How Metropolitan Areas Are Failing America's Children. The report includes findings about the best and worst metropolitan areas for children, broken down by race, and bases these assessments on a combination of factors. What struck me were a few lines near the very end of the report, in a section that offers suggestions for improvement based on “models that work” in the areas of 1) early childhood development; 2) housing choice, mobility, and neighborhood improvement; and 3) education. Of the latter, on page 37 of the report, they wrote the following:

“In order to reduce racial/ethnic educational achievement gaps, some innovative schools have adopted new approaches. One of the most influential school models is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) for inner-city public schools, shown by independent evaluations to boost performance on standardized tests in multiple schools throughout the country. While observers warn that there is no single answer to the gulf dividing race and class, these programs appear to help by emphasizing strong principals with the power to remove unproductive teachers, extensive teacher training, team building, evaluation and retraining, and frequent testing.” (my emphasis)

...

how's that editorial coming along, jay??

fun with photoshop

oh the fun to be had with a little image, a little software, and just the right amount of imagination:
picture of the day

another online film festival

just recently discovered the Independent Lens online film festival, full of all kinds of shorts and longer shorts.

i landed on that site while exploring this one - Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes.

the umbrella site for Independent Lens, a weekly series that airs on PBS. From the website: "Each episode introduces new documentaries and dramas made by independent thinkers: filmmakers who are taking creative risks, calling their own shots and finding untold stories in unexpected places."

untold stories
unexpected places

...

looking up and down and turning around

i looked up today and for the first time noticed that atop a house in my neighborhood is a beautiful rooftop deck. this is significant because i have lived in my house for six and a half years and know my neighborhood well - or so i thought. but today, while walking back from the grocery store, i thought to look up at an intersection where apparently i had never looked up before. so i spent the rest of the walk home looking up and noticing other things (some of which shouldn't be seen by the random passer-by...) and looking only slightly like a lost tourist and made it safely home with only a brief slip-n-slide on a patch of ice that hadn't quite melted away. i looked up. this one act, this one shift of line of sight, opened up new information and the story of my neighborhood has been expanded.

as a kid i was told to look right, left, and right again before crossing the street. i was told to watch my back, look straight ahead, don't look down (which always made me look down). as a child, when i was much smaller than the rest of the people in my house, i was told to look up but after i could navigate through every day activities on my own, i guess i forgot to look up as often as i look left, right, back, front, and down.

as qualitative researchers, we are taught to interview, collect artifacts, be participant observers and prepare fieldnotes, conduct focus groups... what haven't we thought to do? what situations can we create or put ourselves in that might render new insights into the questions that keep us up at night (or is that me?)? after reading the wonderful growing up with television, by joellen fisherkeller, a couple of students in my tv & youth class wondered how significant three case studies could be in the vast landscape of research related to the role/impact of tv in the lives of youth. i used to answer that query by advocating the richness and texture that comes from deep inquiry into phenomena, made possible through the use of ethnography, case studies and the like. but now i find myself asking a question in response: (how) can we afford to keep asking the same questions and using the same instruments/methods/positionalities/roles...? especially when the stories that are out in the ether are in desperate need of rewriting.

hopefully this will all make more sense in 9.5 hours at which time i co-present the first of two papers this weekend. maybe it will be ok if i just look up and present with my back to the audience...

"wassup rockers" and other questions of youth portrayal(s) in 15 minutes or less

i have seen kids. i have seen bully. having done so, it's fair to say that i have a complicated relationship with larry clark's portrayals of youth. but it's a recent film of clark's - wassup rockers - that has me intrigued, not so much for the film itself - i haven't yet seen it, but it's at the top of my netflix queue - but for the reviews about the film from netflix users. specifically, the differences viewers see between this recent youth pic and the others that clark has become known for, are interesting to say the least. whether viewers liked the film or not, they all more or less agree that wassup has fewer and tamer sex scenes, lots of images of kids just "sitting around" or skateboarding, and that the dialogue is sometimes lacking and certainly unexpected. having not actually seen the movie yet, i can't comment on the accuracy of these comments. i did, however, find the reasoning for viewers' like or dislike of the film quite intriguing. that is, while several individuals noted the toned down presence of jarring portrayals of teenage sexuality in this clark film, they all did not agree on the number of stars (1 to 5) they gave the movie.

...all of which got me thinking about what portrayals of youth we find palatable... believable... appropriately scintillating or adequately exploitive. i'm not ascribing any of these labels onto this or any other specific film, but raising the question to portrayals of youth - and their identities, social and cultural practices, literacies, etc. - in general. i am particularly keen on these imaginings as i prepare to share data about a new research project for the first time this weekend. with audience comes responsibility, and sometimes the stories we tell - that we solicit, interpret, repackage and restory - can have a lasting affect, like the frozen images that deborah appleman cautions us against in her chapter full of critical self-reflection ("are you makin' me famous or makin' me a fool": responsibility and respect in representation). so what will be our mission this weekend, as we cloak ourselves in the language of methodology and literacy theory? how will we engage the lives and performances of our research participants as more than data examples? how do we resist the danger of frozen representations when we have 15 minutes to share two years of work? and convey relationships that evolved slowly, over time, across experiences? how do we share texts and at the same time convey the stories behind the texts? and is there a way or space available that is better suited to work that is grounded in the pursuit of youth-full stories, new knowledge, and textured representations than the 15 minute paper presentation/short film/photo essay/reality tv series...?

photo essay

Incarceration: American Style

an excerpt:
ILLINOIS—At Stateville Correctional Center, the buildings are based on Jeremy Bentham's 1787 design for the panopticon prison house. The round house is the last remaining panopticon cell house. It's used for segregating inmates from the general prison population and for holding inmates who are awaiting trial or transfer, 2002.

myspace s.o.s.

when i logged onto my myspace account yesterday, i was dismayed - nay, heartsick - that all the messages in my inbox from a fellow myspacer were GONE! this person's profile has been deleted, which meant that all of our myspace message correspondence is gone, as well. so i offer this as a warning to those who may be relying on that messaging function as a source of data or who want to keep a record of some kind: cut and paste into a more stable format!

and, assuming that everyone already knows all of this, b/c i am somewhat of a ms neophyte, i ask: help! does anyone know how to retrieve these lost messages? is it doable? and why, oh, why do i not heed the call to back up my work - in whatever format it may exist?

complicating multimodality | vital signs

this posting was saved as a draft back in early november, 2006. i revive it here as i sit with too many thoughts to sort out for a new post...
cheers to a productive and thoughtful '07.
...

last thursday a participant was waiting in the hallway while we wrapped our digital media class made a comment that i've had on my mind ever since. he was standing in the doorway, with headphones half in his ear and half not, wearing a baseball cap and bouncing and moving to the beat of whatever music he was listening to. addressing one of the young men working on a laptop in our class, he asked whether he (the laptop user) was "on camera," then laughed. i looked up, smiled, and he continued by saying that no one was going to get him on camera. then, looking in my direction, he asked me the name of the class. i told him. then he, with his hand occasionally tapping the top of the door frame said that he wouldn't ever have his picture taken. he didn't have any pictures of anybody, and no one has any of him. he concluded by saying that the only time he had ever gotten his picture taken was in jail.

...

i have started sleeping with an assortment of documentary technologies around me, including a digital voice recorder ready to record the odd 2 a.m. fieldnote, and, of course, my computer. recently, it occured to me that the constant fading in, fading out of the light on the screen release latch on my mac was almost like its heartbeat. as it faded/breathed in and out, it reminded me that it was merely sleeping. and that i shouldn't worry, b/c it wasn't shut down or (gasp!) dead as i had feared several weeks earlier when the beating of the light ceased to exist.
so, as i have come to seek comfort in the lightbeat of my laptop, i start to wonder about other vital signs. what are the indications we look for as we look for signs of life... progress... movement... decay...

streets and classrooms as insitutions

earlier this week, i had a conversation with a young man who is preparing to graduate from his current court-appointed placement. one glitch: he has to be signed up at another program before the current program will grant his release. thinking that such support would be beneficial, especially as he has declared his intentions to pursue his education (GED, and beyond), i asked him why the prospect of another program had upset him. he responded by saying that he had experienced some unfavorable run-ins with some of the program staff and that he had, effectively, "checked out" a few weeks ago. he was ready, he said, to just have time to be; "not another program!"

what he said next was what has stayed with me over the last several days. when asked what he meant by staff run-ins, this young man responded by saying that the same interaction would never take place in the streets, and that no one at the program would talk to him the way they did - referring to being asked to remove his hat, pay attention, etc. implicitly, he was referring to the ways that institutions cloak adults' interactions with children and youth. i know - i, too, have masked myself behind that cloak from time to time.

today, i read about an egregious example of that institutional cloak. in short, a four year old preschooler was accused of sexually harrassing his teacher. yes, a four year old.
read more here
see more here

blogging from aaa, 2006

a couple of indigenous media program sites i learned about today, while hanging out inside a san jose hotel instead of enjoying the warmish-cool weather:

Chiapas Media Project

Video nas Aldeias

fascinating projects, and really amazing documentaries.