« February 2009 | Main | April 2009 »
Find more videos like this on Global Kids' Playing for Keeps
This is a video of the youth participating in the Playing for Keeps program at the NY Public Library Teen Central. The youth attended the second workshop of the program, which focuses on games and values.
To find out more about this program, please visit our playing4keeps.org website.
Last Saturday I had the honor of presenting at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference about the work of Global Kids and some of the lessons we have been learning about how to best use virtual worlds for education and learning. The multi-day conference took place in Second Life, appropriately enough given the hundreds of educational projects going on in that platform, but was meant to more broadly cover "educational best practices" from virtual environments writ large.
The title of my presentation was "'Aha!' Moments from Global Kids and RezEd.org." In brief, I talked about how Global Kids and our social network for virtual educators RezEd.org have approached the idea of "best practices" in education and then presented five recent lessons that we've learned about virtual education. You can watch video of my presentation from the new Treet.TV website.
Thanks so much to the VWBPE organizers for inviting me to speak and SLCN.tv for broadcasting my talk to the web. Head to Treet.tv to see more great presentations from VWBPE 2009.
This year the U.S. in the World: Int'l Law and Foreign Policy Program will take place from July 13th -31st at the Council on Foreign Relations. I've attached the program brochure along with the application packet.
Students eligible to apply should be rising juniors and seniors in 2009-2010 (i.e. current sophomors and juniors).
All documents, including application, can also be accessed at: www.globalkids.org/?id=52
For more information on U.S. in the World: International Law and U.S. Foreign Policy, please contact Eddie Mandhry at Global Kids at (212) 226-0130 or usintheworld@globalkids.org.
Global Kids was featured in a recent post on the site Media Rights focusing on the diverse uses of machinima. Below is the section discussing our work under education.
Machinima and EducationMeet Global Kids, a New York-based nationally recognized leader in utilizing digital media to promote global awareness and youth civic leadership. Global Kids draws participants from twelve high schools for its after school virtual video project where students produce machinima in Teen Second Life, a sister site to Second Life that restricts access to users 13-15-years-old.
Students meet at the start of the school year to discuss global issues and travel to virtual international locations that would otherwise be cost prohibitive.
Rik Panganiban, Online Leadership Program Associate, says, “For example when discussing possible scripts students can start in a bazaar in Cairo.
“They have to think about what assets (sets and props) they will need to do that. They have to do research to learn what would be the right outfit, what sounds would we hear, what language would be spoken.”
Panganiban says in this collaborative environment the traditional top-down education model of teacher-to-student dynamic is replaced with peer-to-peer learning.
“This (creating machinima) is different than turning in a paper about education and racism that will be consumed by a teacher and given a letter grade only.”
Global Kids machinima has been screened their work online and by various festivals including, two films screening in the 2008 We the Peoples Film Festival in London.
To read the full article, click here.
Episode 29 - (WORLD) The twenty ninth RezEd monthly podcast, produced by MediaSnackers with Global Kids.
Featuring an interview with Ted Tagami, vice president for business development for Smallworlds plus a roundtable discussion with representatives from four countries (Brazil, France, Turkey and Japan) discussing how they use virtual worlds.
Show Notes:
0.00—0.24 intro
0.25—2.51 RezEd news with Rik and Amira at Global Kids (any news or events can be submitted here)
2.52—4.57 intro/overview of Smallworlds
4.58—6.07 merging of the 'social graph' into a virtual world
6.08—7.51 use of the platforms
7.52—9.25 who the platform is for
9.26—10.26 community and application
10.27—11.52 visibility
11.53—12.15 outro/thanks
13.07—14.17 intro/overview of participants
14.18—15.19 Brazil use of virtual worlds
15.20—16.54 France
16.55—20.22 Turkey
20.23—22.12 Japan
22.13—22.31 thanks (in all the languages)
22.32—25.19 Rik and Amira detailing the upcoming events for the RezEd community (any news or events can be submitted here)
25.20—25.27 outro
Subscribe Now!
Subscribe to RezEd.org Podcast Series
To subscribe directly through iTunes:
This is about text messaging, text messaging is used all the time in the world people have received message, sent message a lot of time. Its an example of someone either successfully traveling across a diverse communities or respecting multiple perspectives by giving information to people that didn't know and sharing with others.
Click for full comic..
Negotiation is an important skill because it help you get great deals. Negotiation involves in creative thinking, it helps you achieve different goal. If you don't how to negotiate people might use you.
Okay today we created comic strips on the norms{unwritten and written rules}that we do or know of. Mine was about the way we act at work and at home. Im not quite finish but its a good start. My character is professional at work where she is hassled all day. Then when she goes home she's able to do want she wants.
Hope you guys like it...I'll put the finish one later.
Muahz...Yoshi
Click for full comic..
Hey!
I'm back and today I'm blogging about the project we did for negotiation.
We had to make our own comic about norms in today's society at Bitstrips,com. The link to mine is below! feel free to leave a comment..
Click for full size.
You see in England as well as most European countries its the norm to leave your shoes on when you go into a house.
It gives the impression that you are uncivilized. if you don't.
Negotiation is an important skill to have because it helps you become more aware of how to act without offending people and breaking norms in society.
To act without being aware of what norms you are breaking is bad as you never know what kind of trouble you can get in for ignoring the norms of the people around you.
Click for full size.
This is a comic that I made about cultural mis-steps. I made it about the etiquette in Japan. In this comic strip, I have a foreign person that is late to a business meeting and his boss is angry with him. In Japan, being late to work, school, and any other type of activity is considered very rude. So coming early is a daily norm for the Japanese people. In my opinion, negotiation is a very important skill because when it comes to negotiating, you can work out compromises or bargains with others.
People should spend time getting better at negotiation because a lot of the situations that turn violent in today's society could be solved with that skill alone. It benefits both sides of the problem. If we don't get better at negotiation, then there will be a lot more problems that will end badly for society. Learning to get better at negotiation will help improve our adaptation to different cultures and norms.
Click for full size.
It was a little hard at first to think of a common faux pas but I decided to go with a faux pas the happens on dates. In my comic a couple (we'll call them Kenny and Nicole) on their first date is having a nice meal and getting to know each other, the date is going well and their really hitting it off until Nicole licks her plate!! A big "no no" when dining out...I'm guilty of subconsciously enjoying a meal to the point where I may lick the plate, but that only happens in the privacy of my room, that doesn't make it better or less disgusting but it's completely different to do something like that in public!! Licking the plate while on a date at a restaurant is a complete turn off!!
Negotiation is a very important skill..unless you want to look like a complete fool. When ever you step outside your comfort zone or away from your culture ( which is everyday living in NYC) you have to know the norms of your surroundings. Not only are you learning new things about different cultures, you also dont have to worry about feeling embarrassed or awkward around new or different people. The way I see it is its better to learn and understand norms and faux pas because you can better navigate in life, and if you choose not to ( which is fine..we do live in America) thats cool too...just don't be shocked if you don't have friends or a job. Jut take the time to understand your surroundings and observe how things work before you jump in.
Click for full image.
My comic is about a employee who does not know how to greet his boss which often happens in life. Sometime we bring our personal life into places where it shouldn't be. Normally you would negotiation by greeting people so that you can think highly of you and you can treat them the same way.
Negotiation is an important skill because it helps us to get the things we want out of life. Negotiation applies to the real world because in life there gonna be times when you have to give up little things to do things that you might not wanna do and you don't want to come off as rude .We should be better at this because we cant always do what we want to do and the earlier we learn this the better off we will be. If we don't learn this then we will be unhappy and always wanting things to go our way even tho we cant. The only way you can be better at it is to learn as much as you can.
I did more research online (http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/trafficking.html), and I found that much of child exploitation is domestic. Some of the youths runaway and rebel, and then they become targets of sexual exploitation. It was disturbing how sex tourism is linked with sexual exploitation, and that these are grown adults with professional jobs who seek this kind of inhumanity.
Tomorrow, March 20, Global Kids will be streaming from (and participating in) the National Service-Learning Conference in Nashville, TN for the third straight year. The conference is an inspiring gathering of over 2,700 students, teachers, youth-workers and volunteers focused on service learning. For more info on the conference, please see the conference website.
For those who can't make it to Nashville, Global Kids will be streaming several sessions from the NSLC live to the Plush Nonprofit Commons Amphitheater (click here to teleport ).
The complete schedule is as follows:
7 - 8:30am PST: Plenary Session Exciting entertainment and inspiring keynote speeches from Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, the Executive Director of Community Service Volunteers, the UK’s largest volunteering and training charity and Dr. James Hildreth, Director of the Center for AIDS Health Disparities, Meharry Medical College11:45am - 1:15pm PST: Global Kids Workshop: Virtual Worlds for Real World Service Learning - Intro for Educators
Learn about service-learning projects in virtual worlds such as Second Life and Habbo Hotel. You will gain a deeper understanding how virtual worlds can create more meaningful learning and service in your community.1:30 - 3pm PST: Global Kids Workshop: Global Kids Workshop: Online Tools for Offline Action - How Generation MySpace Can Change The World
Join Global Kids to check out a variety of cool tools for your service-learning projects both online and offline. Discover how you can use Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, and others to make a positive difference locally and globally.
I'm pleased to announce the opening of registration for Focus on Digital Media! Focus is a set of online dialogues which we ran first in 2007 to bring youth voices to the societal changes that digital media is bringing. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we got from the teens involved was that they were navigating the online world almost entirely without adults. We figured that the two groups probably need to be talking a bit more. So, our second, cross-generational version of Focus will have parents, teens and teachers exploring the promise and perils of life online for three weeks, from April 13th to May 4th.
We're partnering with Common Sense Media and the GoodPlay Project at Harvard's Project Zero to bring you an experience where you'll be able to explore core issues about the online world, like privacy, identity and credibility, and also bring up the any other issues that are real for you in your digital life.
Think you want to participate? Sign up now to get your spot!
Want to spread the word to teens? Forward this blog post along, or post our flyer in community centers!
Are you an educator that wants to bring your class into the discussion? Check out our teacher's lounge, with classroom curriculum and outreach materials.
THE FACTS
I haven't been to VVP for about 2 weeks now, but now I am back. I've been informed that my peers have chosen a character for the human trafficking movie project, and the plot is coming along very well. We divided into four groups. The Second Life (looking up settings, props and costumes) group, Victims' group, Traffickers group, and something else I forgot...
So far, I love where this is going. The plot came out better than I thought. The police or investigators found a dairy of a victim who is no where to be found, and that's all I'm sharing.
Below is the story that was in NML's latest e-newsletter, from researcher Flourish Klink observing Global Kids' Media Masters program and the student's of Prospect Heights Campus working to create their school's Wikipedia entry.
In Brooklyn, New York, in the first school in the United States to need metal detectors to keep its students safe, some students in an after-school classroom are preparing to make an impact on their world. Most of them use Wikipedia already, but now they've written their own Wikipedia entry - one that's about their high school. They've thought about its troubled history, they've used their New Media Literacy skills to their fullest, and they've pooled their thoughts in chat rooms and co-edited online documents. All that's left to do is put it up online and let other Wikipedians help make it even better. Some of the students say that now they're more likely to edit other Wikipedia pages themselves, correcting them when they see errors. But they're all just a little nervous, excited to see their work go live.It takes some time before anyone's brave enough, but finally one student comes up and clicks "save page." Now Wikipedia has an entry about "Prospect Heights Campus." None of the students alone could have gathered the information necessary; none of the students alone could have brought the project to fruition. Together, they made it happen - and now they are all a little more empowered, a little more prepared to extend those collaboration skills into the world outside the classroom.
To read the Prospect Heights Campus wikipedia entry, click here.
Below are my notes with some background from the first Wakatta design charette, supported by some relevant Calvin and Hobbes strips my son asked me to read the following day:
On Thursday and Friday, March 12th and 13th, I was invited to participate in a design charette held at the New School (if you don’t know what a charette is, don’t worry - just read on). The university building supporting the event, once a popular department store, is slated to be knocked down any day. This was a perfect metaphor for the goal of the event - work with two dozen or so other learning institutions around New York City, such as museums, libraries, after school programs, etc., to explore how learning in our city could be transformed if we built a cross-institutional, youth-centered network using digital media.
The project, named Wakatta (“I get it” in Japanese) issued the following challenge to the illustrious participants in the room:
More specifically, our first of two days together was designed to address the following challenge:
It is an exciting proposition and proved to be a fascinating two days. Even more exciting, we knew we were doing more than just batting around ideas that would be shoved in a drawer and forgotten at the end of the day. MacArthur’s eyes are on the group and its process, with a budget no doubt somewhere ready to fund a solid idea, should one eventually emerge. When Global Kids first received funds from the Foundation’s once-new Digital Media and Learning Initiative, our support was rare in that it forced us (to our delight) to connect with other grantees. It seems MacArthur is in a new phase and developed enough solid work that it’s time to support more of its grantees to collaborate, Wakatta being just one example. That is a good sign.
The room was split into three, my assigned working group composed of individuals from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, The Queens Hall of Science, The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and the upcoming African American Art Museum and formerly of the Museum of Natural History. The room was full of other museums, non-profits, and libraries as well. Smart, fun folks.
Before the meeting a sample set of ideas was sent around, to get the juices flowing. That led me to enter the gathering with the following key questions for such a network:
My goals for the network, or guiding questions, included:
Our first brainstorm was around ideas for the network. I thought we generated quite a few rough good ideas, including the following:
Clay Shirky came to speak to use about his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Amongst other things, he told us about a college student who got in trouble when he made a Facebook study group. The school said it was against the rules, as it was a form of media. The student said it was not against the rules, as a study group could happen in person or online. Shirky said what Facebook is most like is neither of the two but… Facebook! This reminded me of my recent blog post No Respect: Devaluing the Consequentiality of Online Communities so I asked him to comment. His response was quite interesting.
Clay said we can not get those who don’t understand the value of the online affordances without their experiencing it first. They have to play the games. They have to get on Facebook. And if they won’t, he essentially said, we have no choice but to wait for them to get out of power or we have to go behind their backs and just do what needs to get done.
I was most interested in what he has learned from his students, most of which have been born after 1990, for whom the Web and the Internet are as integral to their lives as telephones were to my generation. He criticized as unfortunate those, like himself, who spoke of cyberspace in the 1990s as a separate and idealized places for human interaction for causing much of this confusion. For his students today there is no cyberspace. It’s just their life. And someday, not so far out, it will be seen as no different than the telephone - just a regular part of our lives and how we communicate and work.
My group combined a number of our ideas and learned that one of the other two groups had a similar idea. Together we created a conceptual prototype which we then presented to 18 or so youth who came to critique. The youth were excellent - a diverse group of sharp thinkers who wanted to help us do right by them.
Gonzalo, from the other group, and I led our presentation. Before I conclude I wanted to share the questions we asked the youth at the outset, and a few of the answers I recall us writing on the board:
1) Who decides what you learn? (e.g. teacher, the DOE, the government, my mom, myself, librarians, football coach)
2) Where does this happen? (e.g. school, home, libraries)
3) What are you not allowed to learn in these places (e.g. architecture, skateboarding, how to fight)? Why?
4) What do you do about it (e.g. teach myself, go on the internet)?
5) What if we supported you to be in charge of WHAT you learn, WHERE you learn, and HOW you learn? What would you need from us? (e.g. to be listened to)
Next month our group will gather and further refine our ideas; in June, I suspect a youth charette will be attended by youth from across our institutions.
Very interesting. Worth watching.
To divide up the story and movie making process, the VVP teens split up into four groups. The Victim group researches, tells and writes the story of the victim. The Trafficker and the Justice group do the same for either the traffickers or justice people. My group is the Second Life group. We have to gather anything we need in Second Life to make the movie and also create the scenery and characters. I picked to be in the Second Life group because Second Life is fun and I want to learn more about it.
Our game Ayiti: the Cost of Life was featured in the March online interactive edition of the magazine More 2 Girls. It appears on pages 34-35 of their interactive magazine.
You can download and view the article on their site and even play the game directly through the magazine at www.more2girls.org.
Currently at VVP, we are working on our topic of human trafficking for our machinima final project. I found out that human trafficking even goes on in Craigslist! I never even heard of this topic until I came to VVP and now that I know of it, it really does get to me sometimes. I think its horrible and people, especially young girls shouldn't go through it. Me and the GK kids are really interested and concerned and I think that this final project is going to be a great and I hope it gets noticed more.
We are starting to work on our topic for the machinima. The topic is sex trafficking. I believe that sex trafficking is destroying our country little by little and people do not recognize that the problem is right in their backyards. This is disappointing because many people around this country know that kids have been kidnapped and can be used for something like sex trafficking. They could be across the country or even around the world. Human trafficking makes me sick
Episode 28 - In this episode Jim Bower, Founder and CEO of Numedeon talks on the 10th anniversary of Whyville.net.
Show Notes:
0:00 - 0:20: Introduction to podcast
0:21 - 1:35: Introductions
1:36 - 11:30: 10 years of Whyville
11:31 - 16:10: The beginning of Whyville
16:11 - 21:45: Whyville as compared to initial virtual worlds
21:46 - 21:57: Concluding remarks and thanks
21:58 - 22:14: Outro
Subscribe Now!
Subscribe to RezEd.org Podcast Series
To subscribe directly through iTunes:
Hi once again it has been a while since i last put up a blog but this time it is really interesting. It is about people who take over and deny people of there human rights. I have been researching about the Lack Of Trials For Prisoners At Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and i have been shocked by what i have found. So many rights have been taken away from the prisoners there. Although they might have commit a crime they should be given a bit of freedom and what they have been doing is not right .
The human rights that i think is being taken away are :
-Everyone has the right to live in freedom and safety
-Everyone has the right not to be hurt or treated cruelly.
-Everyone has the right to a fair trial
-Everyone has the right to be presumed innocent until prove guilty
Along with some others but some one really needs to do something about what the prisoners are going through its not fair to be treated to fairly.
below is some pictures of what the prisoners are treated like
http://www.cubaheadlines.com/files/cubaheadlines.com/imagenes/guantanamo%20prison_flight.%20jpg.jpg
http://chawedrosin.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/guantanamo.jpg
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/09Qp8yM3OBaAS/610x.jpg
Hope you find my story of interesting .
Hello once again as it has be quite some time since I have last blogged.
This one is for the "Talk about it" part of my transmedia navigation badge.
Those in media masters were expected to choose a human rights situation and find different forms of media to put on our google map.
The one I chose was the Jonestown Massacre in Georgetown. I chose this because I knew the story well as I had heard it before and because I knew that there would be many different types of media pertaining to this particular topic.
You can see it here, just look at the markers in Guyana:
View Larger Map
The human rights ignored in the case of the Jonestown Massacre are:
* The right not to be harmed or treated cruelly.
* The right to seek asylum.
* The right to liberty and freedom.
Please bear in mind that these rights were denied by Jim Jones and his closest followers.
I chose human trafficking because I find it to be an interesting topic that I personally saw on tv for some time. I had also picked human trafficking because I think it should be shown as not an international problem but a problem also close to home.
The current movie we have planned to create is about human sex trafficking. I think this is a huge problem that currently stains our society. It effects many teens and adults who are close to my age. For example, we witnessed some stories about victims of sex trafficking. Many of these were in very odd locations to think about. While the mainstream person might think that trafficking takes place only in third world countries, they're wrong. Trafficking takes place in a variety of locations, including some locations in the US itself! For many people, including me, it is a shock to find out that these terrible actions are taking place so close to home. I think people should be informed so that eventually, we can have a higher awareness of this currently large problem we face.
I want the final movie to be on child-sex trafficking because I think more people should be aware that it is the second largest crime in the world. When I ask people, "Do you know what it means to be trafficked?", the usual reply I get is "No". I want the usual reply to be "Yes! I know what that means and I want to help to make a difference."
I want the final movie to be on child sex trafficking because I think this hurts people in so many ways that leave people scared in so many ways..I feel if us teens say something, people might listen to us... this is what I think.
I want to do a movie on child sex trafficking because I don't think people know of the horrors of trafficking into sex. The average, apathetic person might think a prostitute might go into the "industry" because of her own choice; they are looked down upon because of this. They don't know that sometimes, those women don't have a choice in the matter, and that if they had a choice, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Also, I think not enough people are aware of this problem. They are too obsessed with AIDS in Africa or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I didn't want to do a movie on something like poverty or genocide because everyone already knows about those problems. They would think that our video was just one of a million, which is so not true! Mostly, I want them to know that there's more than one side to every story.
I want us to show a human trafficking story because human trafficking is no cinderella story. People actually die from this. I think too many people want to make these stories happy and meaningful. In reality though, sometimes the only ending is a cold death. I want people to understand this by showing them the truth. The unbelievable undeniable truth.
I don't think there's been much light spread on this matter. Darfur and global warming are subjects that are spoken about a lot, and I'm sure that there are plenty of videos made on this subject. Today in VVP, I read a testimony by a girl named "L", who fell in love with a man who was ten years older than her, who put the idea of moving away in her head. They both illegally moved to a nearby country, where she was prostituted to make enough money for the two of them to live stably. She later began to regret her actions when one of her clients was a family friend from back home in Albania. She decided to move back home to her parents where she was always loved. I think more people should be aware of the severity of human trafficking. It is the second largest crime committed in the world. Not many people know that it happens right under our noses.
I want the final movie to be on child sex trafficking because I want children to be safe from this type of stuff. Children don't need that to happen to them. They are young and people shouldn't treat them that way. It hurts people in many ways. It's so sad and depressing and nasty. I want to stop this from happening. Free the kids, you should love them not hurt them. Kids are kids and they have rights. :(
I want the final movie to be on child sex trafficking because lots of kids my age are being forced or lured into this. I have seen a lot of documentaries on child sex trafficking in Cambodia especially. I think a lot of people engage in child sex trafficking because they don't know it's illegal. I think if teens speak out against this more people would start listening and start to care. Also people aren't sure of what exactly is child sex trafficking. It's something more people should be aware of.
I want the final movie to be on child trafficking because many people are being affected by sex slavery in our very own backyards. I believe that it is absolutely wrong to have someone who does not do anything wrong or needs the money be forced into doing something that should be saved for marriage. Our body is supposed to be a temple and no one who does not earn that position should enter it. Not under any circumstance whether it is for money or a threat. I'd rather fight my way out of the situation rather than give in to being a victim of human trafficking. Sometimes I wonder if there are men being sold into sex slavery because I have never heard of it yet, and I do think we should look into it instead of insisting that a man is the predator and us women are the victims.
-Tawana McNair
From February 25-27, I had the opportunity to go to the WebWise conference in Washington DC, an annual gathering of 300-some professionals from libraries and museums to discuss how to keep their cultural institutions relevant in the digital age. It was great getting to hear from some of the leading museums and libraries in America (The Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the US Holocaust Museum, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc) about how they are struggling, debating and at times innovating in this space.
My overall sense was that this is still very much an untested frontier for these often conservative and stodgy institutions. Most projects I encountered were in the initial planning or pilot phase. But there is also a lot of excitement in the air among these librarians, museum directors, curators, IT experts and web developers about the potential for digital technologies to help reinvent their institutions and reach new audiences with their content and knowledge.
More detailed notes after the jump...
Global Kids was asked to be there by MacArthur to represent our work in Second Life during an informal reception on the evening of February 25. They had a really swank set up with large flatscreen monitors connected to laptops and speakers, which made it super easy and fun to demo our work. I was basically logged into Second Life the whole time, showing several dozen people around Foundations Island. Several folks already knew about SL and asked detailed questions about our projects and services. I got a lot of attention from my new 3D SpaceNavigator device that makes zooming around in SL a breeze. (Not a paid endorsement.)
Later that evening I hosted a dinner table discussion along with Akili Lee of Digital Youth Network that was attended by several other library and museum folks who were interested in our work. That included a children's museum in Indiana, a major art museum in NY, an arts and design museum in Miami, and a NY city public school librarian. We talked about the challenges of digitizing our holdings and making them available to a broader public, and how to integrate games and virtual worlds into your exhibits and programs.
During the breaks, several innovative museum and library projects funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (a US government agency) presented their work in the exhibition space. I was particularly impressed by the Civil Rights Digital Library, a fairly comprehensive online database of educational materials around the civil rights era in the US, including 30 hours of rare video footage.
The main sessions were dominated by presentations by major national cultural institutions about how they are thinking about digital media. Some notable ones:
There was a very informative session on privacy and intellectual property concerns. This reminded me that we have an enormous responsibility to our youth to help them be savvy about what information they share about themselves and how they understand copyright and IP issues. Our Media Masters program at Global Kids is addressing a lot of these core concerns, but I would love to see this extended further to more of our youth around the city and around the world,
Probably the most helpful session was the last one on "Chasing the Edge and Maintaining the Core." Skillfully chaired by Ben Stokes of the MacArthur Foundation, it featured David Ferriero of the New York Public Library, Troy Livingston of the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC and Patrick Whitney of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Ben moderated the session with rapid-fire questions he threw at the panelists, interspersed with questions and commentary from the crowd in an organic and wide ranging discussion of the challenges of fostering innovation while also maintaining essential services at your institution.
David of the NY Public Library gave a great overview of how the library system in New York has struggled with integrating digital media. He admitted that they are a very conservative institution and that they don't have a problem with "too much edginess." They are managing the transition with a "digital experience group" composed of a range of individuals from different departments.
David gave a great anecdote about their challenges: They organized a gaming event in Astor Hall of the main library, where 1,000 teens, parents, caregivers were playing digital games. Getting to that point was horrible because it was so different from what they have done before. They had senior curators on the edge shaking their heads. But a New York Times reporter was there and wrote a glowing story about what the library was doing.
Troy of the Durham Museum of Life and Science said his goal was to make the museum "more permeable" and to push the boundary on who can participate. He noted that for science museums the "edge" is older youth and adults; most of their traffic comes from younger children and families.But he is fortunate to have a board that gets that "edge" technologies and approaches are vital to the future of the institution.
Patrick Whitney gave a more broad overview of how museums and libraries were designed. He noted that if Henry Ford were alive today, there were only a few things he would recognize: public schools, museums and libraries, and not much else.
Finally there was a discussion about developing new funding models for these edge technologies and applications. People discussed the "NPR model" of membership, advertising, the "iTunes Model" of offering small pieces of content for small amounts of money, public-private partnerships (aka the Google Digitization Project) and monetizing social networks like the Brooklyn Museum is doing.
One of my favorite quotes from the conference was from the coolest person I met there, Nina Simon, a museum specialist who writes the amazing Museum 2.0 blog:
I believe that museums and libraries can become physical analogs to social networks around particular objects. We are losing to Starbucks for no good reason.
My main takeaway from the event is that cultural institutions need to become better at meeting their audiences where they are at. That means for me:
All in all, a stimulating and enjoyable event that I was honored to be a part of.
We are absolutely solid on this topic. Today VVP watched some videos on human trafficking. Do you know that these victims don't have to be foreigners to be trafficked? Nor do they have to be poor or forced to do these labors. Not all victims are beat up and some of these victims could be as young as twelve! These victims could look like just ordinary people! I bet there is so much more about human trafficking that I don't know about, but I'm willing to spread the word about it. I know our movie will inspire many and raise awareness to all.
OLP’s staff reflections for February are up!
A quick overview of what OLP thought about for this month: Rik gives an overview of his b-boying, global arts for social change experience, Barry talks about why online communities don't get the respect they deserve, Rafi talks about scaling OLP programs, Shawna discusses the need to change the outlook on global issues, Amira gives a summary of an OLP program that is ending, Krista talks about her recent work at GK and Tabitha shares a special outing with the youth from one of her programs.
Read the reflections below for a more in-depth description:
As always, thanks for reading! Hopefully the groundhog was wrong and Spring comes soon…
Two of my recent past projects have been to create a website, where participants in our OLP programs can communicate with our staff and each other, get information and download resources about the program they are participating in, as well as upload their own creative content to the site. When Barry [our fearless leader of OLP] came to me to ask me to do this, I have to admit I was not that excited about the project, mainly because I had never done anything like this before and was not sure I could actually complete the request. It turned out to be stellar.
Though I did not create either of the websites from scratch, but used a platform that already existed, the websites do in fact have the necessary information; they allow the users to upload their work, glean the information they need to actively participate in the programs and are pleasing to the eye. After I gave the basic skeletal layout for the website, my colleagues filled in the content with the program information. I have to say I am impressed with myself! It is definitely a skill that I would not have otherwise gained, as I have always put “creating websites” into a box that I thought I would never open.
All of this being said, as mentioned, the websites are being used to help harness a network amongst the website users, each having a different purpose: one is for a service learning project, the other website is for teaching social issues through gaming. Creating a social network is something that GK has had some experience with through RezEd.org, where there are currently more than 1,600 members!
I have seen, and more importantly, learned a lot through working with all of these networks. It is interesting to see how one simple website can link so many different people together around a shared issue. And what is even more interesting is seeing those same users learn from each other, as well as from the resources on the website, through this online community about various topics. In addition to more highly visible social networking sites that have popped up on the digital horizon, the websites that I created, can be used as a tool that educators utilize in helping student learn a new issue or topic. It is pretty amazing to see how these new digital media tools are being used as a learning aide.
I am also involved in a community development group based out of my neighborhood in Brooklyn, that I plan to use my new-found skills to create a website that would help get our project “live”. I am still slightly amazed that it took me this long to open this “creating a website” box. Working in a digitally-focused, social issue environment, has definitely given me more tools within my reach – and the best part is, GK has also done this for so many of our GK Leaders.
The Dream. It Do It. Initiative came to an end last Friday, after 18 months of exploration into the ways in which virtual worlds could be used in supporting young people around social entrepreneurship. The program was very much a process as we continued to adapt and shift the Initiative to better reach different populations of youth. The consistency remained in the core Dream it. Do it. model, as we sought to support young people with a intensive workshop series and up to $1000 USD for youth to identify issues they cared about and ultimately develop projects that would create change around them.
For me, the highlight of the 18 months was our partnership with the dedicated individuals at a jail serving juveniles in the U.S. Both the volunteer librarians and the young people exemplify what is possible through partnership and collaboration. In what I think was the most significant way to utilize new technology for social good, young people who were in great part physically discouraged from society were able to access resources, interact and learn from one another, and ultimately gain agency while incarcerated.
The level of participation and enthusiasm of these young people in many ways exceeded that of the other hundreds of young people we have been working with in school sites and after school programs. More importantly, was their ability to question great phenomena around them and take on complex issues in their community. These young men who called themselves the Icebergs (because they are so cool) acknowledged the deepest roots of issues in their community, identifying social inequity, the relationship between opportunity and class, and identified not only the drugs in their town, but the drug dealer as being problematic for the world they were seeking to change.
The group was incredibly talented and delegated roles in the group based on their talents and skills. Their vigor came through in their poetry and music, as they disentangled complex ideas in very precise ways. It became clear in our weekly meetings that they understood that all youth could be active, engaged, citizens now. They were in many ways more conscious and appreciative of the idea of citizenry and contribution than most of the young people that had participated in the program. In many ways these outstanding young men challenged the notion that incarcerated people had to be less participatory or have their empowerment put on hold until they were released. In a country that remains too far away from the type of restorative justice it needs, this program signified an opening in jail walls. On our Wednesday mornings our Icebergs could just be themselves and take meaningful steps towards the kind of world that they wanted to be a part of again some day.
Tabitha shares on camera about VVP's first field trip and how a social-outing can make a difference for VVP students.
During the past few weeks in the Virtual Video Project, we have been busily working to pick a global issue that will be the central theme of this year's machinima. As the list has narrowed from twenty issues to one final one, I began to wonder does "global issue" inherently mean something negative by use of the word 'issue'. Through numerous skits and stories to develop an understanding of the issues in play, there was a stronger emphasis on the problem related to the theme rather than the solution. I question whether it is easier to engage with the problem than with the issue, or whether the problem and steps toward a solution, are a step-by-step process. My concern is that by use of the word 'issue', synonymous with 'problem' or 'question', we are creating an inherently depressing story.
This then leads me to ask what is the impact on the individual, who is developing their own understanding of civic engagement and role as a global citizen, when they are confronted by repeatedly negative situations developing in the world around them. For some, it will spark a passion that will not allow them to sit back and let a form of atrocity or tragedy occur, becoming something of an empowering development as a young person civically engaged in today's world. But for others, does the experience become disenfranchising to the point that, when confronted with problems in today's world that have seen their share of attempts to help and stop the issue at hand, does the gut reaction then become to back away and stand by in a more passive role? To me, there is a fine line between emphasis on problems in order to empower and emphasis on problems that ultimately just becomes depressing enough to put one's civic engagement on hiatus.
The question then is how do you walk that line?
One of the ideas that's been on my mind recently is the importance of developing educational programs through a process of implementation and iteration. This is a somewhat intuitive concept, but has been raised for me recently as I engage in program and curriculum design in the Media Masters program, and as I watch as we begin training New York Public Library educators to implement our Playing 4 Keeps gaming program, the first online program at GK that we're scaling.
With Media Masters, an experimental pilot program that we're partnering with MIT's Project New Media Literacies to conduct, every piece of curriculum and the entire program design is brand new. In each project we engage in, we're taking guesses (educated, of course, but still guesses) as to whether something will work. Will students be interested in creating a wikipedia pages themselves? How long should a process like that take? How do we motivate participants to work collaboratively? And then we try it out, see what happens, circle back around and talk about how it worked. That implementation informs the way that we design and put into practice new projects that work off of similar principles.
I should also mention here that in this sort of incubation and development, and indeed in any youth program implementation, a critical part of the process is actually being in dialogue with the youth involved to see what they're actually interested in and what they'd like to see happen. (I wrote about this idea in my last post).
In Playing 4 Keeps, we incubated the program for three years, focusing on the core idea of having youth learn about serious issues and game design through the process of producing social issue oriented games. Each year, this core idea was implemented and then iterated upon, and we got to a place where we felt we knew enough about how this work can be conducted that we designed a model that could be replicated by others.
In the most basic sense, this process is the scientific method at work. Create a hypothesis, test it, refine it, test it again, refine more, and then see if it applies beyond a laboratory setting, in the wild, if you will. I'm excited to see that we're getting the opportunity to see how some of our work will play out beyond our organization, to see what the results of the years of implementation and iteration have wrought, and also seeing this as another opportunity to watch and refine the way we do our work.
