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....

BigChampagne

eric garland is talking now about diy video distribution. he defines diy video as video that is:
user created
user appropriated
user distributed

he is affiliated with bigchampagne, a media measurement company. as they write on their website: "In short, we collect information about how and where people enjoy popular music, movies and other stuff, and then we analyze the information to tell you what titles are most popular, who's interested, and why."

there's a chart online that talks about the 53% growth of computers with bittorrent client installed between 5/2005 and 9/2007. in a nutshell, people are downloading a crapload of episodes of 'lost' and 'grey's anatomy' - you know who you are, so 'fess up!

regular users of diy distribution networks - at least 1x weekly - is up to 60 million people, nationwide.

continuing on the thread of how (some) videos spread virally, garland references the widely circulated yes we can video, which apparently had no actual distribution strategy outside of will.i.am sending it out to "a few people." having received the video in my email last week, i can attest to its virality. this takes 'six degrees' to a whole new level...

michael wesch - getting viral

people watching one of wesch's videos

wesch, the creator of the viral web 2.0 video, is talking now about how the digital ethnography of youtube he is currently engaged in, got started.

how does one actually study/research something so fleeting, so expanding, so growing?

right now, we're watching this video. see it.

other concepts that get trippy on youtube:
community
audience
reading
writing
participation
learning
authenticity
themes
media
medium
modality
literacies
communication
participant observation
...

whilst david buckingham talks on the subject of video...

i'm sitting in the back row and have a lovely view of the backs of people's heads, and the faces of their laptop screens. just in front of me, a man is participating in the summit in second life while he physically sits in/at the summit in 'first' life. clikety clacks echo throughout the room, as buckingham is proffering an overview some key themes and perspectives related to video - which he suggests is a media form unlike any other, perhaps especially given it's amateurish potential? - and frames his current exploration of video camera usage.

db notes that he is moving "towards a social theory of technology, cultural practice – how do we understand the place of the amateur; creativity and learning – how technologies are used in social and historical settings." really: what’s happening here?

that's a curious question, but one that i like to go back to regardless of the topic. that is, quite simply, what's going on?

greetings from 24/7 diy video summit!

it's beautiful outside - a breezy 70 degrees. and i'm blogging from the 24/7 diy video summit at usc. lots of fun people here, including and beyond the invited speakers. michele knobel is sitting with me in the back row, and also in the room, korina jocson - one of our authors from the book (shameless plug), and stephanie schmier - a tc grad student whose dissertation is currently in progress and is going to be fabulous!

the first panel has just begun - i'll post more on that as the day progresses. in the meantime, here's some immediately relevant info for those who can't be here corporeally:

live streaming conference video: http://iml.usc.edu/diy/local

conference second life: http://slurl.com/secondlife/IML/60/128/52

politics, poverty, and the digital divide

read more here.

(thoughts on 'growing up online' still to come...)

co-opting 'critical literacy'

i was an undergraduate student when i applied to work at a literacy conference sponsored by the national center on adult literacy. paulo freire was scheduled to be the plenary speaker during dinner one evening. at the time, i didn't know who freire was, and it would be a few more years before i would read pedagogy of the oppressed. my invitation to this dinner was part of the renumeration for stuffing folders, directing foot traffic, and manning the registration desk over the course of the conference. in the moment, it was merely one of several odd jobs i had during those undergrad years. since then, however, i've come to appreciate the significance and serendipity of such an unlikely occurrence. freire passed away just two years later, in 1997.

freire's legacy is vast, and has had profound impacts on our understandings and approaches to education and educational theory. ira shor, donald macedo, and others have written with and about freire in the area of critical pedagogy and liberatory education. the possibilities of education to be transformative have also been taken up by scholars who focus their attention on the contested terrain of literacy, among them lesley bartlett, colin lankshear, allan luke, margaret hagood, and stephanie jones. freire, himself, penned the oft-cited work (with donald macedo) literacy: reading the word and the world, where he famously argues that an understanding of the world in which one lives always precedes the act of decoding alphabetic print.

given the nuanced and multidimensional terrain that has come to be known as 'critical literacy,' i was particularly perturbed when i read the following headline that reduces such complexity to a couple of discrete skills:

Adolescent Literacy Targeted with "Critical Literacy" Series: Making Inferences and Figurative Language

in short, walch publishing has launched a series that builds on the growing sense of panic surrounding the literacy of adolescents, and describes the 2-book critical literacy series this way:

Target students' skills in understanding, analyzing, and applying figurative language and connection ideas!

Effective instruction in adolescent literacy does not rely on one strategy alone. Vocabulary acquisition, metacognition, writing, and reading comprehension are just a few. Most struggling readers can, and do, read. Their difficulty is not articulating the printed text. The challenge to this reader is an inability to understand and process the ideas expressed by the words. This is the rationale for providing a series of resources that includes direct, explicit instruction in skills that are critical to literacy.

critical literacy, it seems, can be distilled into a conflation of simplistic 'critical thinking skills' and the annoyingly persistent autonomous definition of literacy. where is there space in such curricula for transformative inquiry (critiques of freire's notions of education as liberatory, notwithstanding)? the publishers assert that "the challenge to [the] reader is an inability to understand and process the ideas expressed by the word." my friend and colleague jeanine staples would have much to say about the dynamic relationship between the ideas and words of adolescents. she examines the salience of the spoken word within the intellectual rigor of adolescents' critical reading and writing practices; their critical literacies are resonant with multiple modes of expression, and the word - spoken, read, and written - is in constant and thoughtful negotiation. the chasm continues to grow, it seems, between studies of adolescents' nuanced and critical literacies and the curriculum factory that can't keep up with the demand being created by mass adolescent literacy hysteria. perhaps it's the very full moon beckoning outside my living room window, but my research-curriculum 'disconnect' tentacles are quite sensitive this evening. the walch series proves that there continues to be a market and funding available for packaged solutions; is there a way, i wonder, to better bridge the two, if only to avoid repeating the catastrophic misnaming that has occurred above.

note: if anyone has additional information about this series, or its possible impact in influencing adolescent literacy curricula, i'd be much obliged to hear it.

in anticipation: frontline's "Growing Up Online"

tomorrow night, tuesday, 1.22.2008, the pbs program frontline will debut it's newest documentary focused on youth: "Growing Up Online." based on the description on the website, the program promises to raise and address a range of interesting questions and issues currently circulating about the ways that youth are living their lives with/in the internet. i'm particularly interested to see how they explore and portray youth who have never known life without the existence of the internet.

the new york times featured a story about the doc and its contents: The Rough-and-Tumble Online Universe Traversed by Young Cybernauts
the piece concludes ion this way:

By the end of “Online,” Greg Bukata, for one, has quit the Internet, if only temporarily. He is seen graduating from Chatham High School, with plans to attend the United States Coast Guard Academy, where Internet use is prohibited for several weeks.

“It’ll be hard, but I need to disconnect,” he says. “I need to just pull the plug on this Internet life for a little bit and see what it’s like.”

i preemptively worry that stories of the "dangers" of the internet and a protectionist narrative will dominate "Online", despite the claim that the program will investigate "the risks, realities and misconceptions of teenage self-expression on the World Wide Web." either way, i'll be watching - available on tv and online.

watch a preview:

nctear 2008 - schedule posted

nctear mid-winter conference, 2008

looks like a great lineup! wish i could make it... hope someone takes good notes and is kind enough to share them with me :)

recent tech news that i'm excited about and intrigued by...

Polaroid back to its roots with tiny printer

'One Laptop' a hit in Peruvian village

though, personally, im still waiting for the day when i tap my right temple and have it function like my mouse; and when i can see my own personal "menu" beam out in front of me to be able to perform such functions as a search of my brain for that author or song title that is on the proverbial tip of the tongue... (although i still find bluetooth headsets hard to get used to)
until then, i'll find great joy as things continue to get smaller and smaller and more accessible.

goodbye 2007; hello ongoing misunderstanding of literacy...

according to jack miller, president of central connecticut state university, the level literateness across the nation's cities can be measured by focusing on "six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources." he has made the results of this annual study, begun in 2003, available for public consumption; a story that is no doubt the focus of public curiosity and, in the case of minneapolis, chest thumping.

as someone who believes in and engages a broader view of literacy than is found within the bounded terms listed above, i find myself at once amused and exhausted. can all of the work being conducted under the auspices of new literacies be for naught? can the virtual "miles" of literate engagement being enacted and performed across online and offline spaces be reduced miller's "internet" variable that he describes thusly:

1. Number of library Internet connection per 10,000 library service population
2. Number of Internet book orders per capita
3. Number of unique visitors per capita to a city’s internet version newspaper
4. Number of webpage views per capita to a city’s internet version newspaper

further distressing is the characterization of miller's results in an article in USA Today:

Miller's findings echo those in a National Endowment for the Arts report last month. The NEA focused on reading for pleasure, but both the NEA and Miller conclude that even as more Americans are earning high school and college degrees, reading is declining.

so, despite the plethora of evidence - empirical and otherwise - that we, as a national and international population, are engaging in immeasurably more multimodal and multiliterate communicative practices, the public perception is actually moving in the opposite direction. im reminded of one emphasis that was resonant at the anthro meetings in d.c. regarding the urgent call for educational researchers to enter the public policy debates and discourses. im starting to feel the urgency, and recall a similar plea made to senior scholars at nctear 2007 to take time to write editorials, sit on curriculum committees, and (eek!) participate in developing better and more accurate forms of assessment when it comes to making sense of the varied and complicated ways that youth are making sense of the worlds they navigate and negotiate daily.

of course, this could all just be rantings of someone whose two 'home' cities are not represented in miller's top 10...

happy new year :)

initial success and drug sentencing - the forecast is still grey for teens...

a couple of news stories caught my eye today. the first has to do with the mandatory sentencing of drug offenses. namely, the supreme court ruled that judges may employ judicial discretion "to reduce the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine powder." this alleviates the inequitable treatment between crack and cocaine arrests 'on paper,' however, as noted by ny times writer adam liptak, "if history is any guide, judges will continue to use their sentencing power relatively sparingly," quoting "law specialists." his commentary continues:

"Now that the Supreme Court has again emphasized that federal trial judges have the discretion to move outside the guidelines, further departures are rather likely. But the size of that may not be huge, said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. “The really interesting question,” Professor Berman said, “is whether we get a more significant gravitation away from the guidelines."

what does this mean for how youth get sentenced? and what discretion judges use in swinging their gavels in the direction of educational and treatment programs over detention and jail placements?

i can only hope these same judges, who are sure to hear about this ruling, don't also read another news story from today:
Your initials may spell success
yes, that's right: this article details the results of a series of psych studies that report how "'name-letter effect' influences performance in different situations."
a few tasty tidbits from this article:

"Basically what [they] found was that people tend to favor the letters in their own name, and in particular, they have a fondness for their initials," said Joseph Simmons of Yale University, co-author of the new studies.

"People tend to gravitate toward life outcomes that resemble their names," Simmons explained. "So for example, we know now that people named Jack are more likely to move to Jacksonville as compared to people named Phil, who are more likely to move to Philadelphia."

In a separate study, Simmons and Nelson compared students' initials with their GPAs and found that students who had "C" or "D" as an initial had lower GPAs than students who had "A" or "B" as an initial. People with "C" or "D" initials don't want to do badly, Simmons explained, but on some unconscious level doing poorly is "just ever so slightly not as bad, and so they're ever so slightly less motivated to avoid it."

with all of this information in the ether, we can only hope that it gets filtered thoughtfully, and motivates responsible action. what responsible means is a topic for new post...

Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility - in print!

our book is in print! almost three years to the day since marc and i solicited submissions for our edited volume, which we hoped would transgress the dichotomous tone of media in/and education conversations that we kept bumping up against in our readings on the subject. even in that brief period of time much has changed in how we conceive of and engage media technologies and media texts. in this collection, we feature the work of six colleagues whose work holds resonance for current conversations about the relationships between youth and media, and who push open our conceptions of media and media engagement. we're also excited to see another vision realized - that of having respondents for each chapter who initiate what we hope will be an ongoing conversation for some time to come. among them, one of our wonderful series editors, michele knobel who, along with colin lankshear, our other series editor, were the best cheerleaders we could ask for!

cycles

we could argue that everything in life, in large part, has a cycle, a rhythm, a predictable heartbeat... and when that momentum is disrupted or derailed, the chain reaction can have unimaginable consequences for which we are left unprepared. in ethnographic work, relationships and local knowledge are the lifeblood of the experience. this is even more true when the work is participatory in nature, and involves multiple people with multiple perspectives, interests, intentions, and histories. so when this rhythm, this lifeblood is thinned, or halted, or cut off for even an instant, the impact is significant...

recently, i was sharing some of my experiences doing participatory research with youth with a class of graduate students in a qualitative methods class. i talked about the various projects i've been involved with over the last decade and what "participatory" has meant across those contexts. and more specifically, how i establish rapport with the youth who are involved with my research. i hadn't really articulated these aspects of my work before, and was excited to have the chance to reflect on these
here's some of what i came up with:
- a pedagogy of play
- multiple modes of participation
- researcher vulnerability
- willingness to let the focus of inquiry evolve and change

i wrote a bit about this in the handbook chapter that's coming out soon, and i'm working on expanding these aspects in a methods piece i'm writing about participatory research in a digital age. i'll also be using this space to tease out these ideas in the near future. for now, i must return to the final stages of a paper that is long overdue to our discussant in prep for the anthro meetings this week...!