There’s been so many great videos this weekend – hats off to the DIY curatorial team for really putting together a great show!  It’s been great fun to see the videos usually seen in tiny little windows on the big screen.  A few videos particularly stood out to me, and not too surprisingly, many of them made by young vidders.

Chongalicious:  a great spoof on the song “Fergalicious”

Slip of the Toungue:  A girl at a bus stop responds to the question ‘what is your ethnic makeup?’

Black Doll White Doll – a strong and sad discussion of race by talented young girls.  Pre-schoolers still choose the white doll.

In My Language – an incredibly original, eloquent and powerful vlog by an autistic woman.  Watch it.

Ballad of Black Mesa  –  this piece that will blow away most of the videos on MTV.  The program describes it as “Half-Life 2 meets iPod commercial meets stomp.”

Bush vs. Zombies – George Bush addresses the zombie threat.

Mad as Hell – walking manifesto about work, life, and vlogging

Bomb, Bomb, Bomb.  Bomb, bomb Iran – scary. funny. scary.  watch this if you’re even thinking about voting for John McCain.

George Bush don’t like Black People – very cool remix about Katrina

The summit will be putting many of the videos screened up on their site soon.   Be sure to check them out!

– Miriam Simun

We’ve spent much of the past 150 years working to achieve full literacy across the globe.  Information has historically been widely disseminated via the written word:  so, much knowledge required the ability to read,  or have someone who’s judgment you trust relay that information to you.  More important still, if you wanted to produce information, you needed to know how to write.  Crucially, ‘knowing how to write’ means more than just knowing the letters or spellings of words – it’s knowing how to tell a story, one that people will listen to.

In today’s world, information is spread through different means.  Most often, this is video:  TV a main source of news in the US.  Video is very different from text – there are many more elements, more complexities, more tools needed, and some may argue that it is more powerful in conveying message – but in the end, just like writing, it’s about telling stories.  Also just like writing, in order to enter into the conversation and be heard, individuals need to be literate – now, media literate.  Henry Jenkins highlights that beyond access to technologies, we all – and particularly the young people – must learn to be media literate.  How do you tell an effective story, one that will be watched and listened to, with video?  How do you tell your story?

KECT – Los Angeles Community TV –  is doing just this, teaching high school students how to tell their stories and represent their neighborhood.  Mass media images of Los Angeles tend to focus on either the glitz of Hollywood or the violence in the inner city.  Juan Davis explained how KECT set out to show a different LA LA, first by telling stories of a communities and individuals, and next by empowering communities and individuals to tell their own story.   The stories we see on KECT portray a true, positive alternative vision of LA communities.  What do you do when your voice and the your stories are missing from the media? 

Do it yourself. 

 – Miriam Simun

I’m at the DIY video summit at USC, watching some fantastic videos and listening to some great people speak. Today’s panels have discussed state of research, state of art, and the intellectual property dilemma.

The first day  centered around two sets of questions. This post deals with the first set:

what is DIY video? why is it important to study?  what method do we use? and what do we want to know?

What is DIY video?

 DIY video is a mass movement (David Buckingham), it is a culture and a community (Michael Wesch), it is a form of participatory culture (Henry Jenkins), it is widening the public sphere (Yochai Benkler) and it is a product capturing consumer attention (Eric Garland). 

 Some points of contention:

• Is DIY by definition amateur work?  DB comments that much of citizen journalism, particularly the best of it, is done by amateurs looking to become professional.  Are we moving to the ‘pro-am?’  Mimi Ito has found otherwise, that amateur vidders are motivated by becoming ‘locally’ famous – recognized by ‘people that matter.’

•  Is DIY content intrinsically critical of the establishment?  Alexandra Juhasz points out the term ‘DIY’ comes from 1970s and 80s American Punks self-publishing movement, one that was overtly anti-establishment in its message.  Does DIY video lose political power if the content is not politica?  Or is DIY video already political in that is other than mass media?  I would argue for the latter…the issues of triviality (and even stupidity) that Juhasz brings up found on YouTube among the most popular videos..the issue to me seems more about why are these the most popularly viewed videos?  That’s largely why they are being created, and that’s where the issue lies.

 
why is DIY Video important to study?  what do we want to know?

 DB:  To understand if, how and when it is a tool for empowerment.  To understand how people learn skills, and what motivates them to learn.

 MW:  To understand what kind of culture and community is emerging, will emerge and can emerge

 EG:  People are watching it – it is current and future of entertainment.

 HJ:  To understand how to create ‘a world where everyday citizens can take media in their own hands and create media, good, bad and indifferent.’

 YB:  To understand how to create legal, social and technical platforms that facilitate the cultural pushback that is DIY video – to empower users to create and pushback, widening the public sphere.

 Thenmozhi Soundarajan:  To create media justice, and give disenfranchised a voice.

Sam Gregory:  To understand how to use video to motivate political action.

Alexandra Juhasz:  To see what we can learn.  (Not much, Juhasz claims)

Juan Devis: To learn how to best empower people to tell their story.

What methods do we want to use?

 David Buckingham weaves together a theoretical context through which to understand DIY video, bringing thought together from

–         media creating as social and cultural practice

–         space and role of the amateur

–         participatory culture

–         creativity in the everyday

–         learning  and communities of practice

Buckingham further points to the importance of looking at the different subcultures of DIY video (such as skateboarders, video diarists, and citizen journalists) in their own right – and the danger in understanding them as a collective political movement – as politically, they function in different ways. This is really important in keeping the questions of Soundarajan and Gregory, of how we turn DIY video into concrete political action:  understanding the DIY video movement to be political as a whole hides the differences in different types and cultures of DIY video that are important for us to acknowledge and be aware of as we start to think about questions like “how do we use video to motivate action?”  We need to understand how discrete cultures of DIY video function politically in order to make the most of the possibilities.

 Michael Welsch, together with his students, adopted an anthropological approach through the use of participant-observation.  Entering the world you YouTube by posting videos themselves, students experience first hand the negotiation of identity and the distance between audience and creator. 

 Eric Garland reminded us of the importance not only of examining creativity, but also dissemination.  The viral nature of dissemination of video via internet changes the power of the medium.

 Henry Jenkins traces the history of media, understanding how culture travels and morphs as it moves among different media formats, DIY, mass, and in between.

A few points really stood out to me:

•  Can we separate the mode of the message from content?  Juhasz points to the loss of ‘anti-establishment’ message in much of YouTube content – or at least in the popular content.  But what about the mode?  Do content which mimick the mass media have no cultural/political value?  Or does DIY video not constitute anti-establishment in itself, in that it is not mass media?  Benkler points out the although Wikipedia started as something that was simply mimicking Britannica, through collaboration it evolved into something Britannica could never have imagined.

In thinking about method David Buckingham made a comment that really resonated:  the method of study must depend on what you seek to learn.  DIY video can be an interesting lens to look at bigger issues, such as communities and social networks, identity and representation, or creativity and agency.  It seems important to understand DIY video as it functions in terms of [insert chosen subject of inquiry here (community/agency/identity/public discourse)] rather than in and of itself.  This will enable us to see the true power of the medium.

– Miriam Simun

I’m listening to Fred von Lohmann of the EFF right now. He’s talking about how the changes in copyright law changes the type of creativity we see. Here’s one example of fair use that Disney would love to challenge.

Meanwhile, the Youth Media: YouTube-sized: Youth Personas, Protests, Paranoias and Pleasures is playing downstairs. Check it out in Second Life!

More soon.

-Miriam Simun

What do you do when you want to learn to play an instrument, but your school music room doesn’t have the funds to buy them? Well, if you’re a digital native, the answer is easy: make a creative plea on YouTube.

Yusuf and Batuhan, two boys from Van, an rural part of Turkey, wanted to raise funds to improve the music room at their school. And so, they decided to ask using the instruments they had – one desk and two voices – and post their song to YouTube.

Not only are Yusef and Batuhan talented musicians, but they’re also two very smart kids. In effort to get as much attention as possible, they decided to rap and drum – surprising the country at what two rural Van boys can do (it would be ordinary to see boys from Istanbul doing such a performance). Not only do Yusef and Batuhan rap and drum, and do it well, but they rap about math!

The math song video made these two Van boys so famous, they were invited to appear on a program with a famous Turkish TV host.

In this video Batuhan and Yusef perform an anti-drinking and anti-smoking song. At the end, one of the boys makes a (very) public plea to his father to quit smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and they top it all off by a request for musical instruments for their school.

Yusef and Batuhan, two digital natives from rural Turkey, show us the power of growing up in a world with lowered barriers to creativity and participation, and with a different understanding of one’s relationship in and to the world . Batuhan and Yusef have a voice they know will be heard – and they take full advantage of this.

Want to raise money for your school? Do something creative and unique, post it for the world to see, and find yourself on TV.

(thanks to Zeynep Ton and Karim Lakhani for their help on this one!)

– Miriam Simun

The Internet is out there. It’s not going away anytime soon. So how do educators adapt their teaching methods to address this reality? And what are the consequences for those who ignore it?

At the Digital Natives project, we’re constantly confronting these questions. Technology, it’s clear, is a tool—not an impediment, necessarily, but likewise not a cure-all. Just as paper and pencil are handy for writing but not as handy for 3-D modeling, chat rooms, blogs, and Wikipedia are useful for some aspects of education and not for others. This much we know. But the rest, the good answers and best practices, are still somewhat up in the air. Since we’re always seeking good examples to follow, I was delighted today to read teacher Ben Chun’s post on engaging his students in a group discussion through an innovative classroom technology, Moodle.

Mr. Chun’s greatest insight, in my opinion, was to use the right tool for the right topic. The classroom discussion he facilitated revolved around PBS’s Frontline Documentary, Growing Up Online, and was therefore immediately relevant both to his students’ lives and to the medium used for the discussion. The medium, Moodle, is a sort of group commenting tool designed for educational interaction. Although I have not used it myself, I imagine that Moodle is especially suited for educational interaction because it provides a structured, facilitated environment that still engages students without being as free-form as something like Facebook or MySpace.

The students’ reactions to the documentary are fascinating for their own sake, and worth a close read. But in terms of the teaching method itself, Mr. Chun’s strategy reminded me of an indelible quotation from Mark Prensky’s article on wired students and education, “Engage Me or Enrage Me”:

All the students we teach have something in their lives that’s really engaging—something that they do and that they are good at, something that has an engaging, creative component to it. Some may download songs; some may rap, lipsync, or sing karaoke; some may play video games; some may mix songs; some may make movies; and some may do the extreme sports that are possible with twenty-first-century equipment and materials. But they all do something engaging.

As Prensky rightly points out, this is a reality not to be shunned, but to be celebrated. And while students’ external engagement provides a challenge for twenty-first century teachers, Mr. Chun’s classroom experience shows that it also provides an opportunity. Every student can contribute to a conversation that matters. Mr. Chun’s closing words sum this up especially well:

So, beyond all the endless talk about technology and schools and new forms of literacy, here we have a case where digital video, downloaded from the web, discussed on a blog, shown on an in-class LCD projector, and followed by an online classroom discussion all conspired to arrive in the place we should have started and known the whole time (apologies to Eliot): Asking students to write about their lives and their experiences and issues that affect them directly.

For young students today, the Internet isn’t an occasional matter. It’s the place where they’re living out large fractions of their lives. The experiences they have there are just as real as those they have on the playground or in the lunchroom. When educators access students’ reactions to those experiences, they tap into and legitimize a channel that already captures the bulk of students’ attention.

So no, the Internet and other disruptive technologies aren’t going away anytime soon. But fortunately, neither are smart, creative educators like Ben Chun. And that is a reality worth celebrating.

with thanks to danah boyd for the link

Until recently, MySpace had a serious security flaw that allowed photos of users whose profiles were set to private to be viewed by anyone. Two weeks ago, user called DMaul uploaded a 17 GB file of more than 500,000 private Myspace photos available for download on torrent sites. The file was the 9th most downloaded file on torrent sites that week.

According to Wired, the file quickly lost popularity after people realized it was a random collection of typical photos — weddings, babies, birthday parties. DMaul has come forward to explain his actions, saying “I think the greatest motivator was simply to prove that it could be done. It is ridiculous to think that there is privacy on public websites. These types of situations are more education than anything.” So DMaul’s actions indeed had no malicious intent, and they should by taken for their educational value.

The real kicker is that the security flaw was known on various message boards for months before it was fixed. What’s even more disconcerting is how this flaw was exploited. A thread on the discussion forum Sohh.com back in October consisted of a self-described “pedo army” sharing the private galleries of 15 and 16-year-old girls. There have even been YouTube videos and commercial websites touting this flaw. It was only after Wired broke the story that MySpace finally fixed the hole. I’m also surprised that despite a fair amount of coverage in the blogosphere, the story hasn’t made it into the mainstream news either.

MySpace has so far refused to comment on the situation, so it’s hard to say whether MySpace was unaware of the situation or was aware and didn’t act on it. Either way, the blame should lie with MySpace for flouting the privacy of its users for so long. While most teens are perfectly aware of the dangers of leaving their profiles open, there is the expectation that profiles set to private will indeed be private. Is this expectation rational in today’s world? Surely the millions of people who do their banking or shopping online would think so. Social networking sites should be taking the privacy of its users more seriously, especially when minors are concerned. It has been suggested that sites like MySpace need to create special task forces that will prowl the Internet looking for security flaws as they arise. When users have done their part to protect their privacy, MySpace should do its part too.

Hundreds of thousands of Columbians are expected to march today in 185 cities across the globe in protest of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and their use of kidnapping as a weapon. How did such a mass movement get started?  Facebook.

The Christian Science Monitor reports,

“We expected the idea to resound with a lot of people but not so much and not so quickly,” says Oscar Morales, who started the Facebook group against the FARC…

Morales started the Facebook Group “UN MILLON DE VOCES CONTRA LAS FARC” on the 4th of January 2008 – it now has 265,833 members.  While  the low barrier to participation in joining a Facebook group may call into question the power such action truly holds, today’s march proves that in some cases, a click of the mouse may be the first step in becoming truly politically engaged.  The protest also depicts just how powerful a tool social networking sites such as Facebook can be in organizing political action.

Also of note is language of choice – as Facebook users go global, how do languages play out?  Currently, one must have some knowledge of English to sign up and work the features of the site – limiting the international user base to more educated segment of society.  Efforts are underway to make Facebook available in other languages: acknowledging the power of the crowd, Facebook has turned to their users to translate the site into other languages.

– Miriam Simun

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