"real cost of prisons project" - comics

in what amounts to a happy accident, i learned about about these graphic novels that are a project of the real cost of prisons project. each offers another dimension of insight into the social and financial economics involved in the prison industry. they are available as pdf (by clicking on the links) and also in bound comic format. the titles:

Prison Town: Paying the Price
By Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore

Prisoners of the War on Drugs
By Sabrina Jones, Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens

Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children
By Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack, and Lois Ahrens

see the site for more info on the comics, excellent 1-pager flyers (like the one below - click to see image full size), and more on the project.

from flyer:
national average cost to imprison a person for one year: $ 29,041
national average cost of one year of community college: $1,518

come to church, get a gun

i read a story today, linked from cnn's homepage, about a youth conference being held at a church. the event, itself, is not news per se. the fact that there was to be a gun giveaway was, however, news indeed. to be precise, a semiautomatic assault rifle was dangled as additional enticement to increase participation. (read more here)
this is particularly unsettling given the persistence of gun violence that many communities continue to experience.


the story of 10-year-old nujood ali presents another perspective on religion and violence. nujood lives in yemen and was married off to a man in his 30s by her parents. her story became news not because of her newly acquired status as a child bride, but because she walked herself into a courthouse and politely asked for a divorce. from the la times article:

"Her impoverished parents had married her off to a man more than three times her age, who beat her and forced her to have sex, she explained. When she told her father and mother that she wanted out of the marriage, they refused to help. So an aunt provided her with bus money to travel to court and seek a divorce."

(see her story here)

the youth at the conference and nujood and the many other child brides around the world are receiving an education all their own. with its own standards, evaluations, assumptions, and expectations. oh my...

multimodality & learning conference

i'm here in london attending the multimodality and learning conference, and having a fabulous time! not only b/c the weather is lovely and everyone says 'cheers' :), but also b/c getting out the national context with which i'm familiar and engaging with a range of international discourses about multimodality and about learning

the conference was kicked off with a kick ass talk by charles goodwin, whose conceptualization of human communication as being constituted simultaneously by language (the linguistic stuff), embodied action (how the body reveals engagement in the communication), and engagement with the surrounding structures (or how the environment is consequential to the communication). then today, gunther kress followed up with another keynote in which he proposed a social semiotic theory of learning - two concepts (semiotics and learning) which, as he put it, are not common bedfellows. pushing against (or maybe past) a traditionally psychological model of learning, gunther suggests that when we research learning - or propose to research learning - we might not really be doing that at all. that in fact, we might actually be looking at environments or conditions of learning. makes me think about connections to varenne's recent work on retheorizing education...

i'm loving the explicit talk of power in these presentations about multimodality - something we either seem to shy away from or dichotomize in the states. i'm not sure why that is... also a rich interrogation and exploration of multimodality: pedagogically, theoretically, methodologically; and it relates to literacies, language and identity, meanings across space and time, and math and science.

there's LOTS more but i'm out of battery and forgot both my charger and converter, so this will have to do for now.

school on film: "entre les murs"

a french film about a teacher, teaching, learning, and students... the film portrays "real-life teachers and students" - the description of the format reminds me of bubble.

the trailer for "entre les murs" (english title: "the class")

school 2.0?

colin and michele are giving their keynote at the learning 2.0 conference, being held today at montclair and co-org'd by dana & michele. their talk is focused on the "twoness" of "learn 2.0" and they've begun with a review of the leap from web 1.0 to web 2.0 - highlighting the participatory nature of this shift, and raising the issue (esp with relevance to sites built of collective knowledge like wikipedia, etc.) of truth... and later, credit (as in, whose idea is it?)... and the significance of

so the issue of school 2.0 - as it connects with learn 2.0 - comes up. michele is talking now and wondering about how our teaching practices must change in a web 2.0 world. namely, how do create spaces for collaboration - true collaboration? and not the kind found in lit circles where someone is the artist, the recorder, the this that and the other thing...

relatedly, i wonder: what is the relationship between learn 2.0 and school 2.0?? which is funny b/c i've thought more about the institution of school in the past 24 hours than i have all semester. hmmm....

for example, they teach a course in which students, in teams, have to engage in the following:
- learn how to program a robot
- document the group's learning in this experience (using video, audio, print)
- analyze the data they have produced and collected
- prepare a scholarly paper/presentation
- present said paper/presentation at a full-on conference
all within the space of a few weeks, one of which they are sequestered at a lodge.

they, of course, explained this project much more eloquently - i'm especially excited about the teasing out of the ideas of collaboration, collective knowledge, truth... and what these ideas look like when they are actually embodied in daily practice.

"it doesn't matter if one person wrote it, or if ten people write it - the result is the same in terms of human benefit." --c. lankshear

re: the above project - participants learn to be researchers by being researchers, not students learning about research. the doing, being, embodying of learn(ing) 2.0 - not a pipe dream; a reality we can't/shouldn't ignore.

writing creatively

i made a pact with a young man today to engage in a form of daily public writing. for me, this means posting to my blog on a more regular basis than i have been doing. we agreed to start with writing for 10 minutes a day. he and i embarked on a creative writing journey last week - i'd like to think that we are co-learners and co-teachers in this experience as we revisit his previous writings together. with each piece of writing he shares with me, i not only learn more about him - as an author, son, brother, student - but also reflect on my own writing self at his age, 17-going-on-18. i, too, had reams and piles and folders filled with papers and notebooks, all covered in my discursive meanderings, scribbles, drawings, reminders, and the like. like him, i, too, often carried all of it with me at all times - in my case, my words felt too fragile to be left lying around for the untrained eye to devour and misunderstand. my personal journal, which i brazenly did keep out in the open, was written in a cryptic french - that is, i wrote in the passive tense and as abstractly as possible, so even if someone was fluent in the language, they would still struggle to make meaning of my entries - as if to dare the trespasser to penetrate my teenage sensibilities.

another young man at the same program has developed a practice of collecting his thoughts in scraps of paper and, more recently, as immediate recordings and messages that he records for himself using his cell phone. when he wants to compose something - lyrics for a song, for example - he knows just which scrap of paper to look for that contains the magical phrase that will unlock the subsequent text.

as i am surrounded almost every day by poets, beat makers, screen writers, essayists, and lyricists, i find myself once again curious about the chaos and crisis that we - educators, researchers, policy makers - impose onto discussions about the practice and craft of writing in the lives of young people today. youth are not writing less - they are writing more and in many more ways and for many more purposes. the questions we should be asking are:
- what do new composing spaces look like?
- how might be we rethink composing pedagogies?
- what kinds of spaces do we provide for multiple forms of writing and composing, more broadly?
- who is shaping/creating/informing the composing space?

it's finally (almost) here! the 8th annual media that matters film festival!

each year, for the past few years - which is as long as i've been aware of it - and always at the same time - early april - i start asking everyone i know if the media that matters film festival date has been announced. when is the screening? when will the films be posted? did i miss it? and to those i've asked - sometimes, often, more than once - i apologize . but invite you, now, to rejoice with me the arrival of the announcement of the 8th annual media that matters film festival. after the screening at the ifc center, the films will be available on the mtm festival website, and join the illustrious collection of the previous years' compilations.
can't wait :)

HER special issue: Adolescent Literacy

check out the latest issue of harvard ed review that focuses on adolescent literacy. table of contents below.

Spring 2008

Introduction :
Why Adolescent Literacy Matters Now
Jacy Ippolito, Jennifer L. Steele, and Jennifer F. Samson

Adolescent Literacy :
Putting the Crisis in Context
Vicki A. Jacobs

Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents :
Rethinking Content-Area Literacy
Timothy Shanahan and Cynthia Shanahan

Redefining Content-Area Literacy Teacher Education :
Finding My Voice through Collaboration
Roni Jo Draper

Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Adolescents :
What We Know about the Promise, What We Don’t Know about the Potential
Mark W. Conley

The Complex World of Adolescent Literacy :
Myths, Motivations, and Mysteries
Elizabeth Birr Moje, Melanie Overby, Nicole Tysvaer, and Karen Morris

Toward a More Anatomically Complete Model of Literacy Instruction :
A Focus on African American Male Adolescents and Texts
Alfred W. Tatum

Implementing a Structured Reading Program in an Afterschool Setting :
Problems and Potential Solutions
Ardice Hartry, Robert Fitzgerald, and Kristie Porter

State Literacy Plans :
Incorporating Adolescent Literacy
Catherine Snow, Twakia Martin, and Ilene Berman

Beyond Writing Next :
A Discussion of Writing Research and Instructional Uncertainty
David Coker and William E. Lewis

Conference on the Visual Study of Education (VISE) @ SUNY Albany

accepting photo submissions now - encourage your students/youth/children with whom you work to submit their work for presentation/publication at the fall conference.

more info here: VISE 2008

"that's a very serious marker"

media by/about youth @ philly film festival

The Bloodlines Video Diary Project
For the 2005-06 school year, Temple University professor Eugene Martin -- in conjunction with Temple’s Media Education Lab -- gave two Philadelphia 8th graders cameras to create video diaries about their school, family and neighborhood life. Ebony is a 14-year-old from North Philadelphia who goes to St. Malachy School, and Dennis is a 13-year-old from Kensington who attends Community Education Partners School. The footage they created is interspersed with interviews with their families and teachers and other footage taken by Martin and his crew. The result is an intimate and fascinating glimpse into the lives of two pretty average kids, including their families, schools and day-to-day emotions and desires." --excerpted from program description

click here for more on philadelphia film festival 2008

new adventures in digital storytelling

story box
from the website description of their story maker:
"StoryMaker is a simple tool for creating digital stories. Using audio, pictures and text you can create storyboards, slideshows and much much more."

just saw it - excited to check it out...!

in the meantime, also checking out the growing list of digital stories that folks are posting on the main page, such as 'grab a granny'

21st century literacies

ncte recently adopted a new definition of what it means to be literate *today* - that is, in a world where "literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable." so someone please explain to me why, when this large professional organization - one that embraces the always stimulating ncteAR meetings, whose themes continue to push our thinking about literacies, etc... - is still without the oomph needed to really challenge what gets assessed in the name of literacy across many of our classrooms...*today*?

i thought about this as some teachers i was talking with struggled to make sense of their students performance on assessments that they were mandated to deliver; what didn't make sense was the incongruence between in-class performance and "the score," a trope with which educators are all too familiar.

from the ncte website (with occasional commentary from yours truly):
(click on link for the complete definition)

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology (someone tell me how a timed test or fill in bubbles will provide any kind of assessment of technology proficiency? i won't even mention the need to reconceptualize technology/ies as more than mere tools...!)
  
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally (so when robert leans over to elia to talk through a question he has about the passage he is reading, he shouldn't be reprimanded, correct? or do you only get points for the testable kind of collaboration?)
  
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes (no, i don't advocate unexamined replacement of "all things school" with social networking profiles, but what might it mean to assume that youth are already engaging in transnational and global practices, communication, and information sharing, packaged in myriad ways?)
  
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information (i dare anyone older than 25 to talk to anyone younger than 25 and not witness multiple streams of simultaneous information! all being managed, assessed, engaged, organized with seamless transition)
  
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts (not to belabor the social networking spaces point, but there are some seriously complicated kinds of multimedia text production, analysis, critique happening all the time. youtube, and the unlikely sense of hard-to-deny-community is another example.)
  
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments (not only is this not something that an easily scored test can measure, but issues of ethics are constantly being discoursed - to borrow david bloome's use of the verb form of this familiar notion - in the communities, spaces, and networks that youth inhabit. lissa soep's work with youth radio is just one example of many that illustrates the level of complexity in young people's thinking surrounding what to story, how to story, and what it means to make someone's story public in particular kinds of ways - e.g., radio, podcast, etc.)
  

many of us feel the possibility of november 5th, 2008 may bring; but while waiting for sea change, i hope we don't squander daily opportunities to support the literacies of adolescents, which, when unsupported, can sometimes have dire consequences for youth who, for so long, have been told that their very beings are subversive, unwelcome, and in need of remediation...

wikiworld

just read about an exciting sounding book on everydayliteracies:
wikiworld: political economy and the promise of participatory media - a newly published book by juha suroanta & tere vadén, available here

haven't read it yet, but immediately raises more questions about book publishing, their use of "copyleft" instead of "copyright", and what kind of wiki, wacky, wonderful world we're living in and heading toward.

here's the toc:

Introduction
1. A Critical Paradigm of Education
2. Digital Literacy and Political Economy
3. Radical Monopolies: Schools, Computer Softwares and Social Media
4. The World Divided in Two
5. Edutopias and the Promise of Active Citizenship
6. From Social Media to Socialist Media
Conclusion
References

sassy schlepping in style

talk about mobile culture informing fashion (as if we didn't know this already...):

Wear your tech gear, don't schlep it
Fashion follows function as clothing morphs with mobile society

so what? - implications of emerging literacies for classrooms

the kind folks at the tc library organized a book talk focused on our recently published volume, and i was excited that two of the book's contributors - kelly wissman and michele knobel - were able to join me this afternoon. i wasn't quite sure what to expect or how to prepare: how exactly does one "do" a book talk; and what does it look like for an edited volume such as ours? as it turns out, such an event is much like some of my most favorite conference presentations and seminars: generative, participatory, and stimulating. i'm left wondering about what it might mean to take up some of the issues we raised in this volume in the context of web 2.0 technologies and the pervasiveness media distribution and user-generated content.

the afternoon went something like this:
i talked about how the book, as a project, evolved from coffee shop conversation between me and marc, to an opportunity to continue collaborating with friends and colleagues after graduate school, which involved securing a book contract with an accessible publisher and with the enthusiastic support of our series editors, and then inviting and following up with twelve respondents (two for each of six empirically-driven chapters), and finally (insert about a zillion editorial and formatting steps here) was sent off to fantasy-publication-land and came back as a bounded text. but it was all worth it, because the conversation about media and education was sorely lacking in texture. that is, as the chapters in the book reflect, media is more than television, radio, news, and magazine; technology goes beyond computers; and learning is not only what we can measure.
as we write in the intro,

"In this book, we have brought together a collection of studies that not only engage media explicitly but show the range and variation of what media is, how media technologies and media texts can be engaged in teaching/learning spaces, and the challenges raised amidst the possibilities that new media and the emerging multimodal landscape hold for education." (p. 7)

and

"As the chapters in this volume will show, learning occurs across contexts and through engagement with varied texts, resources, and roles. Beyond merely addressing learning as it is defined through statewide standards or other performance measures, these chapters raise questions about what is learned, for what purposes, and through what means. The authors consider the new relationships, identities, texts, and discourses that emerge as teaching/learning sites themselves. They recognize that “[t]he burden is on us, adults, to carve out ‘spaces,’ to inspire a sense of the ‘not yet,’ to reinvent schools and communities that are engaging for young people” (Fine, 1997, pp.214—215), and that are reflective of who young people are." (p. 7-8)

kelly then read from her chapter, in which she has written about photography as a social practice, extending the social practice metaphor from new literacy studies. drawing on her work with adolescent girls within the context of a photography and literacy elective course she taught in an urban high school, she writes,

"Unlike dominant models of photography instruction that conceive of photography as a set of discrete, technical skills to be mastered, I consider photography as a medium of seeing that is shaped by the social context, by identity, and by experience. Envisioning photography as a social practice recognizes that the images produced are not simply a transparent recording of reality; rather, the images encapsulate a particular framing of that reality that is highly intentional and unique to the individual photographer. Envisioning photography as a social practice also entails considering the social context in which images are produced and received and considering the shaping influence of those contexts on the images and interpretations of those images. To envision photography as a social practice also means to envision photographers as social beings with historical legacies, emergent identities, and social commitments, all of which can inform the production of the images." (p. 14)

these readings and musing gave way to a discussion about the nature of learning, the role of pedagogy, and the possibilities and constraints of embarking on the kind of work that is written about within the pages of our book in public school classrooms today. the data reported in the book was collected pre-web 2.0 era, which can be largely signified by a split in the ready access to mobile technologies - e.g., pre-handheld connectivity and post. i have lamented in the past that even the so-called "net gen" is reluctant to let go of deeply entrenched ideas about schooling - roles, relationships, teaching, learning; college-age youth who walk the walk of digital natives, but whose talking and walking when they enter classrooms reveals a split personality. how long can this walk-n-talk divide continue? that is, at what point will we stop having conversations about whether or not to wire classrooms? (and, as michele and/or colin notes, why wire when you can airport?)

still, the "so what?" remains. marjorie siegel, also in attendance, pushed us to consider why and how the wonderful kinds of learning, media engagement, reflexivity, and creativity in which the youth in the edited volume were engaged has implications for teachers. much like the recent movement toward a more public anthropology initiated by the council on anthropology and education, the impact on/for classrooms is a question/challenge that more of us (esp. literacies researchers) should embrace (and not shy away from, as i am prone to do...!). to that end, here are a couple of thoughts on the question of "so what?":
- the out-of-school literate lives of youth are rich, textured, and spaces full of new insights about learning
- the availability of multiple modes (of expression, communication, inquiry) affords new narratives and new ways of being
- the presence of new modalities for communication can shift the dynamics of power in teaching and learning relationships toward the elusive "with" pedagogical stance - e.g., teaching and learning with youth, with media...
- if we understand education to be situated in everyday interactions (see Varenne, 2007), then we can understand the creative practices of youth to be hallmarks of rigorous and thoughtful planning, preparation, assessment and achievement by youth as they engage in their education everyday. such spaces are rare within the
- (some) creative spaces turn schooling on its head by transforming the physical geography (the stuff that's around, location, how structures are situated in relation to each other) as well as the spatial dynamics (how objects are used, roles established) (see some creative workspaces)

the list is getting long and the hour is getting late and i suspect that this is just the beginning of a series of musings. so, on a hopeful note, i'll end this with a link to someone else's thoughts on seeeeeriously cool workplaces.

if you watch nothing else, watch this

seriously.

kiwi!

vidding highlights

this morning began with a screening and genealogical tour of vidding. this screening was curated by laura shapiro, who is a vidder herself. from the media res website, here's a brief description: "Vidding is a form of grass-roots filmmaking in which footage, most frequently from television shows or movies, is edited to music."

and here's a video by the california crew, some of the earliest vidders, who offer a metaview of vidding in a vid.

"pressure" - a metavid by the california crew

the screening moved through approximately twenty or so vids, each reflecting a different moment in vidding history. moving from the use of two vcrs and stopwatches, as reflected in the "pressure" metavid, to vids that digitized material available on vhs tapes, to current practices of completely digitized processes. one of the products of the latter is the following vid, which brings together two of my favorite pieces of media: house and dps.

If We Shadows Have Offended...


enjoy!!!

currently, we're in a screening of AMVs...

youtube-isized

ok, first some catching up from the second part of day 1 (yesterday). i spent the afternoon in a screening of youtube clips curated by a youth media program, youthlab. below are a few that caught my attention and made guffaw and chortle and go hmmmm....

internet people:


someone did a version with the flash clips replaced by the original clips from whence they hail: Internet People! - Real Clips Version


chongalicious

done to the tune of fergie's fergilicious. also check them out on
wikipedia - at one point, they were the most requested tune on miami radio.

police brutality - go skateboarding day: cop vs skaters

this just left me speechless. see also angry teacher - the students got suspended and the teacher was encouraged to take an anger management class.

video.activism.learning.action

there's a session going on now called "state of the art" in which at least two of the last three speakers have engaged with the realm of activism and human rights in conjunction with video. thenmozhi soundarajan, of third world majority, shared video produced when twm first began seven years ago. and shared some insights from teaching youth and participants who were used to "not being seen, but still needing to be heard" - asking the question what does real media equity look like?

sam gregory, of the org witness, is talking now. the org partners with human rights orgs to help them create video in service of their campaigns. they've launched the hub, a video distribution site and, as gregory argues, an important alternative to the oft-used youtube. he asks the following questions about video, human rights, action (paraphrased):
- what are the expectations of privacy in a ‘facebook era’?
- while we continue to emphasize transparency and deemphasize privacy, who benefits? Who pays the price?
- informed consent?
- How does remix culture relate to human rights?
e.g., we laugh at W when he is remixed, but not at Burmese victim, sweatshop worker?
- how do we motivate action?

the hub is intended to take seriously the need to contextualize diy video and mobilize action in response. to which he notes: "it isn’t voice if nobody seems be listening"

hmmm....