NML and PLAY!

** This is a re-post from NML's blog on Sept 27, 2011 by Vanessa Vartabedian, PLAY! Coordinator of Project New Media Literacies **

 Project NML has been involved in some exciting new endeavors since our move to the University of Southern California last year. As a part of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, the new media literacy play (the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving) has become central to our current work in the field of digital media and learning. After partnering with the non-profit RFK Legacy in Action (RFK-LA) last fall, we began piloting a series of programs at the new Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles under the umbrella of PLAY!, which in addition to being an nml, is also an acronym for 'participatory learning and you'!

NML’s guiding principal for a participant-centric approach to learning maintains providing ample opportunities for gaining expertise in the new media literacy skills and competencies. However, since branching out from working with individual educators and schools into the larger realm of professional development (starting with our early adopters program with the NH Dept. of Education in 2009), we've recognized the value of giving teachers permission to play the role of “participant-learner” (as opposed to "expert") before asking them to try new approaches with their students. By examining the ways educators took-up this challenge, our team was able to identify five characteristics of participatory learning that have come to frame our current research for PLAY!. Please take a moment to click on the link above to read more about them.

To get a sense of the direction we are taking with our current work on the ground, I will outline the programs we are piloting with the Los Angeles Unified School District below, which explore participatory learning practices, new models of professional development and the Playground tool.
PLAY! Projects
Our pilot PLAY! project, Explore Locally, Excel Digitally (ELED), was an after-school program for students that deeply explored themes around identity and community. Utilizing practices around mapping and other visualization tools, lessons culminated in digital representations of students’ perceptions on these themes. Since we know learning extends beyond the walls of classrooms and after-school programs to home, community and world – the program aimed to provide experiences that held a holistic view of the learner, and allowed for students to be full agents in their learning.
This past summer we ran a professional development called The Summer Sandbox. During these two week-long sessions, students from the ELED program modeled what they had learned for teachers and joined them as co-learners throughout the week. During these sessions we introduced a prototype for our new online collaborative learning tool, called the Playground. 
The Playground is an open-content, open-knowledge online system that encourages both adults and youth alike to discover, learn and teach each other. You will be able to use this transmedia platform to develop and take online "challenges", much like the Learning Library, only with improved capability for assessment, reflection, and a higher level participation. We are currently testing it with local educators and students and will announce when it is ready for a larger audience next spring.
As of now, we are in phase two of the PLAY! PD called Playing Outside the Box, where teachers will implement what they started during the Summer Sandbox and design a plan for sustainability. Students from RFK Community Schools will continue working with teachers in after-school settings for a series of workshops developed by our partnering organizations here in LA.
As you can see, we've been a bit busy but we're having fun because I work with an amazing team! Please take a few moments to visit our PLAY! wiki for more detailed information about these projects, and access new curriculum and resources.

USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Overview 2011

I've been busy this school year helping to launch the Annenberg Innovation Lab as Creative Director. Check out what this lab is all about!

USC Annenberg Innovation Lab Overview 2011

View more presentations from Erin Reilly.

2011 Horizon Report is out!

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/2011HorizonReport/223122

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years. The areas of emerging technology cited for 2011 are:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

My current projects I'm involved in focus on future of eBooks, mobile learning afterschool program, and transparent learning analytics within a new platform being developed with Microsoft! How awesome is that! Stay tuned...

CRUNCH on THIS: Future of Journalism

I recently attended CRUNCH on THIS: Future of Journalism event held on January 14th. The purpose of this event was to identify new media tools and strategies that are available to journalists, and to determine how these tools can be applied in practical but innovative ways. Gabriel Kahn, Roberto Suro and Dana Chinn posed three challenges to the participants. I thought I'd share them with you here as they warrant additional exploration and discussion.

Three Challenges

1. Curation (Gabriel Kahn)

In the past, the newspaper was the sole determiner and responsible to curate and edit the news we consume. With the advent of self-organizing aggregation type tools, such as Google and Yahoo news, the need for additional ways to curate information has increased. Wikipedia and Twitter have become easily recognizable groups as sources for news. Additional sites, such as Digg, Instapaper, Flipboard, Pearltrees, Storify, theatlanticwire, and BBCmobile show that the public seeks immediate, inclusive warehouses of information that they can access, tag, and store for their own uses. Many of these platforms encourage the community to not only rate what news is credible but to be make connections across different news topics. The major question facing the Innovation Lab is how to manage the amount of information available so that it is easily consumable.

2. Data Mining (Roberto Suro)

The question posed is: How can we organize, compress and analyze information quickly? IBM has created an extensive data mining platform and partnered with the Innovation Lab to develop projects to explore how to 1) capture data, 2) filter, analyze and categorize it, and 3) create a dictionary of data that can be used in exploring visualizations, a visual narrative that helps us make sense of large quantities of data and new ways to identify patterns and emerging trends. The information is filtered from spreadsheets called Big Tables that link all references and cache the information to build a visual narrative. Many of the data sets are aggregated from sites that foster audience participation like Twitter and Wikipedia.

The challenge here is to identify, as an audience, what we need to know, what new ways we can tell our stories, and how our audience will feel about the stories we are to tell (see www.wefeelfine.org, www.nesmap.jp, and www.informationisbeautiful.net for examples of data that has been captured through visualizations).

3. How to Connect with Your Audience (Dana Chinn)

The rules of social media require 1) listening, 2) engaging, and 3) measuring your audience’s engagement, loyalty, influence, and action. For example, let us assume that you run a member-based organization that has set a goal of increasing membership among 20-30 year olds by 10 % within 12 months. Through Facebook and Twitter, the organization can map the metrics of increased youth membership and receive immediate feedback on any issue associated with membership among this group. Other resources to analyze authentic participation include www.KLOUT.com and www.newsnumbers.com.

The challenge here is to identify what actions indicate audience engagement. Do the daily stats from Facebook or Twitter really measure what we want to know? Numbers can be deceiving if you do not know what to look for or how to assess the right metrics. Suppose we want to know how engaged our members are in our print and digital publications. It is not enough to identify the number of hits on the NewsBlog, Facebook and Twitter; we need to examine the daily stats in terms of a) number of users, 2) the number of likes noted by the users, and 3) the number of comments presented by the users and the division of those comments into separate categories. To check on if numbers are telling the correct story, questions to consider include:

• Are the comments mostly from the same person?
• Do they focus on one or two topics only?
• How can we really know the influencers of our publications without harvesting and filtering the most usable information so that we can use it as a tool for strategic planning?

How does this information relate to you?

These are a few examples of ways to reach the widest possible audience using tools that will gather, categorize, and validate information. Social media tools, beyond Facebook and Twitter, are readily available for us to mine data about our audience and apply it in ways that further your goals and viable applications for researching the needs of your members to help build community. Check them out and learn how to apply them for mining data and presenting yourself or your organization in ways that will stimulate audience engagement.

Seminar in Media & Design Studies 11/11/10 Notes

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002 (Laila)
Written in 2002... it's a book project
Talks about the materiality of language ...so the way the book is printed is impt to it. It has rough cover, glossy sheets
experiment of the book... Kate came up with a persona in order to do an autobiography ...serves the role that the autobiography would play. It's an intellectual autobiography. Felt confined in the chemistry lab ...all these hours and rules, wanted to find out the meaning. Went back to a degree in literature ...she's housed as a literary critic. Stories / vignettes of learning the politics of a place, in a department. Think there are rules in place to prevent issues, however there's always a culture, depends on the people in the department
Using eco-tomes ...the place where we have to get along (fissures, trying to work together)

Read her post-human book in the past
Thought I'd like My Mother is a Computer but liked WRiting Machines alot more, b/c the way its written.
Story of Kay... she's an academic. We find out that Aserteth (student) ...have advised that impt text in the field. She is very interdisciplinary. She looks at 3 texts, framed through the narrative voice of Kay. All hypertext literatures...
1) Lexia to perplexia
2) Humorant
3) House of Leaves

Kay Hills to humanities as Bruno Latour is to social science. Kay's moment is to find that which is simulated or signified as a pre-reference (Post-bart, post-seceur). Words are pre-material and we need to think about
We have a signified and something that we are signifying ...beyond deconstructing that, we need to think of text as being simulated from nothing.
Her mistake was concentrating on the navigation to see the words, instead of the work embedded the narrative in a topical environment. The word was interwoven with the world... layered images, simulated documents. Focus on the words along, she missed the point of the piece. An integrated piece of all components became signifying practices.
** By making text the only domain of signification, before you read it, the form already signifies what meaning is possible ** ...it's about the materiality of the way the text comes to us and the signifying influence of the form itself. (this is in the next book)

It's not just the construction of matter, but the matter of construction to human beings. How else do we find meaning, its not always through the word.

The word
The text
The document

What is the semiotic and performative discourse to the text. Expand textuality beyond the printed page.
Kay addresses the theory in this way... the theorists are interwoven in the fictional narrative of this woman Kay and how she learns about academia.

She pulls out in this autobiography:
* the importance of medium specificity analysis (think about Jenkins 7 principles of transmedia)

Three key pieces / conditions / things to look at when looking at electronic texts:

1. Materiality of language itself = It is authored ...author what "book-ness" is. This is what gets authored over and over again. [Whether it is designing your own application or taking one that exists ie: twitter and enacting, using it in new ways]
   
2. Recursivity language of techno-texts [the role of practice in text-making], This is about practicing theory. Your moving between things, the feedback loop to make better meaning. The relationship between theory and practice, not in one place or the other.
   
3. The need of looking at a medium specificity analysis = know the affordances of the text
   

Interesting conversation on the text ...is the database a text?

Book is designed by Anne Burdick ...a book that is a collaboration between a designer and a writer

Hayles, N. Kathering. My Mother Was a Computer (Laila)
Written in 2005
Computational perspectives and more traditional perspectives ... a way to synergize a theory that respects both.
Technogies of Engendered Bodies talk about it. Woman who did computational work use to be called computers.
Brings together the computational with the natural.
Bring the 2 worlds together in conversations.
Talks about mothers reading their children stories and when we grow up they are replaced by other stimuli

The Making of the Discreet - intermediation and relates to technologies driving the regime of computation. Code is the language system of speech and writing.
Intermediation -- co-evolution, electronic literature is exploring human and non-human, that we are in relationship with technologies... make meaning, age of computing might make this more predominant or more evident.
ie: what kind of subject am i musing in front of the installation. (standing at the presence of a student that has gone beyond you. A child that does something that surprises us.)
Distributed cognition ...jointly articulated activities. i think therefore i connect... human and non-human ...processes that you de-code or ones that you don't even have to de-code.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Laila shares her poetry.

Node Job

it's been a long time, it's been a really long time

since the site of you watermarked on my chest and

fragments of touch embedded in the nodes of my body.

the culture of movement needs lubricant from a whisper of our love

it's been a long time, a really long time

since i extended into you.

she screamed rape at a glance,

and felt whipped by my tongue

remains just like before

when today followed yesterday and tomorrow was fantasy

i leave the scent on my fingers to linger

like a reminder of the experience

made me

and we are the summation of our experiences;

and the people we've touched

leave imprints of their scent on our skin

forever

mediated by cultural logic

and the basic text just extends

into worlds like silly putty

unreal in my fingertips

i kneed your breath

into my imagination of you.

-Laila Shereen Sakr

Los Angeles, 11/09/10

Use poetry to respond to theory. how can you use a poetic performance as my methodology.
Diego - a way to analyze.. take sexual words to make theoretical argument

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alan Sokol ...Sokol Hoax
...point that the poeople of post-modernism theory didn't know what they were talking about. Don't adopt metaphors that you don't understand... especially when coming from another discipline. We've been burned by not understanding... then neither discipline is served.
...what are those non-scientists doing.

Ralph Abraham (father of fractal theory)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reflexive Practices as Transformative Research

1. Self-reflexive practice
1. Personal interest (cross-generational digital media & learning)
2. Creative insight (cyphibian theory, hybrid models ...video, images, audio not as an observer but as a participant itself)
3. Discipline knowledge (constructivism [Piaget], social constructivism [Vygotsky], constructionism [Papert], participatory culture [Jenkins])
2. Reflect on information gathered or conceptual strategies
3. Dialogue ..what is its significant meaning
4. Question content and context

10/28/10 Notes for Seminar in Media & Design Studies

ASSIGNMENTS:
1) One page Methodology

2) Research Practices in Media Studies Programs

• Go back to thinking about methodology (initial paragraph, visual representation)
• Think about my methodology in relation to the question of Arts-based practice as transformative research (page 110)
• For panel, would be more multimodal ...piece of interactive experience
• Notion of my own research practice, coming out of a creative practice, exemplary for transformative research
• Action Item: Read Ch 4 in Arts Practice as Research
• Methodological stance on a set of practices, demonstrate what we mean by practice as research, research as transformative (how does your practice inform research)
• ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Media Art) http://www.neme.org/main/1060/isea-2011 and CAA (College Art Association) http://conference.collegeart.org/2012/

Virtual Window by Anne Friedberg
Presentation by Gabe and Discussion with class
http://thevirtualwindow.net/

• overview of visuality, how it develops through practice, schools of practice
• Alberti ...visual idea of perspective drawing & painting ...practical philosophical school up to computer, tv, mobile screens being post-perspectival
• Central metaphors grounded in frames, windows & screens ...tracing development over time from renaissance through to today
• replaced books with screens ...all of my input through my devices.
• for a couple of weeks, didn't read traditionally for a while. Stepped into reading this book with those ideas in mind.
• First sat down to read book ...videotaped myself. What does reading look like?
  
• Relationship between books and screens. relationship between printed page and the screen can become a page. In the introduction but not throughout
  
• Think alot about what's not in the book -- a real compiltation of the book, it interesting moment when this book was released, everything exploded ...questions, extensions, further lines of inquiry could happen to now. She finished reading the book in 2004, released in 2006 (pre-youtube or on the edge)
• One youtube icon in interactive part but not in the book
• Virtual mobility within cinematic frame ...virtual mobility of the cinematic viewer
• Images & Ideas of mobile framing, recording playback, consumption, devices that carry around
• context given by professor and then learn to read for that goal
• sift, scan, extract info really easily -- visual, verbal, textual learner
• found i could read for about 2-3 hours, more i read, the easier it got
• always take notes by hand ...whatever scrap is around

The Practice of Everyday Life is a book by Michel de Certeau
Chapter on Reading as Poaching

• A misunderstanding of reading
• An image of ourselves reading, sitting at a table reading a bound book, but we read in all sorts of ways
• The readers body is a wild orchestration of ticks, manners, shifts that are evoked by the reading of the book. We don't read in a state of quiestence.
• Is reading in an absence of ubiquity? When one enters and leaves as one wishes...

Interactive Extension on Virtual Window ...great after you read the book

Book is loosely chronological along different themes. Each chapter went back and forth along a different inquiry.
Mining and interpreting the metaphor of the window
Historicity of these things ...looking not just the technical development (Alberti in Renaissance period, he invokes the window of the metaphor but also as a practical point in perspective & drawing) You paint as a look out on the world, paint the window as where you're seeing
Frame of a painting ...frame a view
Window -- imagine a line that you'd replace with an opaque substance to draw on, as a tool from 3d to 2d space
Create a virtual imagined space that shares a connection

Moving from single viewer perspective to multiple perspectives
From window, she goes to the frame
link camera obscura as a perspective tool (though this camera was there before perspective drawing)
early example of virtual movement. Within projection of camera obscura -- it as own device for moving, perspective ...linked what the cinema would become, fixed, immobile frame, virtual mobility, image moves but you as spectator does not move
Apparatus theorists -- focus on unique quality of cinema apparatus

Suturist Theorists -- http://poeticstoday.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/2/277

Sequential multiple perspective, temporal multiple perspective -- The window

Ch 3
Material history of glass
how windows changed over time
as glass became bigger, more transparent, stronger -- than windows changed. Able to see how visuality changed over periods and time
Make buildings completely out of glass, architecture is framing the world, viewing devices that connect it to cinema, cubist paintings

Ch 4 - Architecture of Screening Places
dynamic space of movie palace is to distract u from the edge of the frame
edge never moves, its fixed and immobile... it kills the experience of mobility and movement that is happening at the center of the frame

Courbousier framed windows horizontally not vertically -- viewer of the world
arguments / discussions on cinematic and tv aspect ratios. There was a time when aspect ratio was not set
Orientation of aspect ratio come up. Eisenstein wanted vertical, horizontal frame ...argument of cinema and television
cinemascope
Talk about pillow talk (movie) -- how it divides up the frame, multiple frames, multiple persectives are contained simultaneously in mainstream films

Ch 5
Sequence and stackability
deeper fleshing out of multiple criticisms
1968 exhibition, 1st video monitor connected to a computer
could have focused on the computer screen as multiple perspectives

President Obama on campus
Recording, experiencing them through the screen, posting them on FB and reliving them with friends. I wanted to see him with my own eyes. We're doing what Anne Friedberg tried to pre-sage...

Vertical framing to happen ...what type of videos would look like? how will that be viewed?
pocket of our pants dictate the size of the iPhone, or our hand...
illustation of when things converge

Are these practices contribute to globally, industrial marketplace?
Made bigger through digital practices ...recording, remixing, sharing
Market is changing that, effecting it... take strength and comfort in that
find room for intervention, invention of imagine the future

Transformative works that reflects on my real world
Big commercial can be used for creative, artistic expression

mobility and immobility
agency ...doesn't extend to talk about them
spectator of being immobile and frame as static is impt to Anne

what's going to happen originated, shifted, used
do u notice if your seeing a digital projection or 35 mm production ...existential connection to the image. Existential link back to the original...
bodriardin

a word pins down a meaning
space for interpretation that happens in your mind ...reading the words

Wondering what is at stake?
** memes aren't history
** diy culture ...history is memes
what history are you giving up and not?
what is that form that you will take, do in the world that will be in perpetuity ...leave a mark in the world of thinking

Anne: own obsolescence is quicker than our deathbed

Vice versus focus ...

Launch of PBS Kids Go! Webonauts Internet Academy

This past year, I had the privilege of working with PBS Kids Go! as educational advisor to their new media literacy game. Webonauts Internet Academy encourages young children to reflect on privacy, credibility and what it means to be an ethical participant in a community. I had a chance to sit down with Abby Jenkins, PBS Online Community Manager, to reflect on the development of the game and how this fits into the PBS Kids Go! experience.

Knowing that PBS KIDS had an original game on media literacy, what sparked you to want to develop a new one? And how is this new game, Webonauts Internet Academy, different than the other?

Today’s media landscape is much different than it was ten years ago, when PBS KIDS first launched a game on web safety. Since that time, the media kids are exposed to have become increasingly social. For that reason, a focus on digital citizenship was important because kids’ social interactions and presentation of self are increasingly blurred by “online” and “offline” interactions. The Webonauts Internet Academy game is part of the new PBS KIDS GO! Digital Citizenship Initiative to help kids and parents navigate today’s digital landscape.

With this new initiative, PBS also supports parents and educators by offering discussion guides and other resources to help foster discussions about online safety and good digital citizenship with children.

Creatively, the Webonauts Internet Academy is new world we created, where kids take on the role of the Webnonaut and complete a series of missions. There’s a cast of characters that includes the Bamdudes, who are the best cookie makers in the galaxy, and a mysterious enemy called the Great Static who is set on stealing the Bamdude’s secret recipe. While entertaining kids, it is designed to teach kids about online privacy, how to deal with bullying and how to distinguish credible sources online.

How does Webonauts Internet Academy play into the entire PBS KIDS GO! experience?

Like other games on pbskidsgo.org, we want to put kids in the driver’s seat. We carefully develop game mechanics and content that are age appropriate. We also know that kids now expect to be able to customize their experiences online to reflect their interests and personality. At pbskidsgo.org, kids can customize and shape the content in many ways, including the creation and sharing of video mashups, modding games (to modify or make changes to games), creating a playlist of favorite videos, customizing the look of their Secret Box, and more. Webonauts is reflective of the PBS KIDS GO! experience in that it offers kids the opportunity to shape their experience through the creation of their suit. On pbskidsgo.org, we step kids through the account creation process and provide help with creating username and passwords. After setting up an account, kids can save their customized Webonauts suit in their “Secret Box,” which is a customized place for saving creations and points from across pbskidsgo.org with the option to share it with friends.

PBS KIDS GO! also has content that focuses on other aspects of media literacy. The site, Don’t Buy It, focuses on helping kids identify and understand advertising http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/. And for parents, PBS Parents Guide to Children and Media offers tips on how parents can use media to support their childs development and other strategies for raising children in the digital age.

What are the key media literacy themes you wanted to get across in the Webonauts Internet Academy game? And why did you find these concepts most relevant for kids to learn?

Designed for kids 6-9 years old, the game consists of a series of 12 scenario-based missions around three themes: privacy, credibility and citizenship. As we set about thinking what topics to address, these three themes emerged. Developmentally, kids are discovering who they are as individuals and are starting to make some of their own decisions both in screen mediated environments and offline. Many of these decisions involve understanding what information is ok to share publicly and how that information gets shared, sifting through vast amounts of information to find answers to questions, and learning what it means to be part of a community.
We took a scaffolded approach to each of theme, with game scenarios that introduce a topic and then build on the concept throughout the game.

In-game missions address the importance of protecting passwords and maintaining privacy settings, teach how to differentiate between credible and non-credible sources of information, and how to react to bullying, among other topics. When all missions are completed, kids become full-fledged Webonauts and earn their certificate, which they can print and share at home.

People are always eager to learn the process of how a game like this is developed. Can you tell us how many people were involved in developing Webonauts Internet Academy? How long did it take to create the game? What are some of the skills of the team that makes Webonauts Internet Academy a success?

Game development involves the work of many people working closely together. The core PBS Kids production team included two designers, two content leads, one educational advisor (thanks, Erin!), an advisor for parent and teacher content, a team of Flash developers, and our design intern. You can see who produced the game here http://pbskids.org/webonauts/about/credits.html

This game was developed over a period of about six months. Because it involves such a variety of skills and areas of expertise, it really could only have been produced as a team effort.


And if I were to want to one day work for a company like PBS KIDS GO!, what are some of the skills I would need to have?

The team that makes up PBS KIDS Interactive is a group that’s passionate about making the most educational and best designed interactive games for kids. Besides being committed to PBS’ mission to deliver the highest quality educational media, you would need experience developing media for kids—whether as an educator, developer, designer, or producer. Plus, you need to like playing games and have fun!


In developing Webonauts, what was one thing you learned in the process? Did you learn something new about media literacy that you didn't know about before? And if so, what have you done with this new information?

In researching for this project we learned that there is still surprisingly very little media literacy material out there for kids 6-9 years old, so we saw this as an opportunity to do something new and fill a gap for addressing this topic for this age group. We also learned that it’s important to also provide support material to engage the whole family and classroom teachers, since the true effectiveness in addressing issues related to privacy, credibility and citizenship involves an ongoing dialogue between kids and grownups. Webonauts Internet Academy can be a conversation point to address these important issues and also to empower kids as informed decision makers.

And we also confirmed that game development is totally challenging!

Abby Jenkins is Online Community Manager for pbskidsgo.org. She joined PBS KIDS Interactive in 2005, and has worked with producers on many award winning television program sites and web original projects.