Ever since the movie "Iron Man" opened, the popularity of this picture I took last summer in France has ballooned, thanks to people who are searching Google and Flickr for images with the keywords "iron" and "man" and "mask."

Apologies to the fans. I know it's not what you were looking for. But if it's any consolation, this was awesomely hilarious to see on the chateau tour.

After many months of thinking, learning, writing, talking, designing, testing, thinking more, rewriting, and learning new stuff again, the public beta of Youth Media Exchange is live!

YMEX.org is a new online social network, developed by TIG, Global Kids, and Asia Society, where young people can share, create, and learn about digital media for social change. It's full of resources to learn about both digital media production and global issues, and it's ready and waiting for YOU to come check it out, share your media, and get your voice heard.

There's much more to be said about the process, as well as what's still to come. But as we know, if I wait to write a well crafted post, it will never get done, so for now, just check it out: http://www.ymex.org and let us know what you think!

The deluges of rain, snow, and American Airlines cancellations from April 9-12 were no deterrents to a great few days at the National Service Learning Conference in Minneapolis. I still haven’t broken my recent streak of traveling to bad weather (San Antonio, I have my eye on you…) but the NSLC was worth it nonetheless.

A couple months ago, a fellow frequent-conference-exhibitor had tried to warn me about the NSLC, a conference, in their opinion, with a totally dead exhibit hall. In MY opinion, an empty exhibit hall is a sign of a GOOD conference! Not only was I glad to see that the NSLC has such a compelling agenda that people actually went to the workshops, but the booth saw plenty of traffic during breakfast, lunch, and other breaks.

I met a professor from Argentina who coordinates a network of thousands of schools there involved in service learning (Damian, I’ll be putting you two in touch!), made new contacts at organizations looking for online tools to connect the young people in their programs, and shared resources with several hundred teachers and students who are highly active in service learning projects in their schools and communities.

And, when things were a little slow, I took the opportunity to check out all the other great groups who were there to share resources with the young people and educators involved in service learning. I’m still not all the way through the stack of materials I picked up, but here’s a sample:

At the Free Tibet booth, I signed a petition and had an inspiring conversation with a student activist (who is a Tibetan refugee born in India, now living and studying in Saint Paul – he told me Minnesota has the second largest Tibetan community in the US) about Tibet, China, and the Olympics.

At the Peace Corps booth, I learned more about how they connect volunteers in the field to classrooms in the US, and met a staffer who thinks very highly of the TIG Guide to Action, and recommended that their whole network use it in planning events for Global Youth Service Day. It means a lot to have the endorsement of a leading service organization.

The folks from the Shinnyo-En Foundation were handing out t-shirts and DVDs to promote their new Six Billion Paths to Peace initiative, and I talked to a program officer for a while to understand what the campaign is about, since I missed out on the gala that the rest of the GYAN crew attended in New York in March (while I was still recovering from the flu) :)

There was no one at the Project Learning Tree booth, but I was intrigued by this sign, in thinking about our own sustainability practices when it comes to outreach and marketing:



It was also great to meet leaders from Youth Service America and put faces to names I’ve heard around the GYAN office in planning for GYSD.

There were three sessions I managed to attend – both keynotes (awesome move on NSLC’s part to close the exhibit hall during the keynotes!), as well as a panel on youth media.

Pedro Noguera, as much respect as I have for his work, gave a surprisingly generic keynote compared to other times I’ve heard him speak. He made some great points about how unacceptable and sorry the state of our education system is, but with this crowd, he might have been preaching to the choir. Then again, almost every keynote I’ve ever heard pales in comparison to the inspiration and energy and awe that I gained from hearing Archbishop Desmond Tutu deliver the keynote on Friday. How can you beat a Nobel Peace Prize Winner and spiritual leader telling a knock-knock joke in reference to the Bible?



In all seriousness though, having spent a lot of time thinking about the distinctions between service and activism, Desmond Tutu’s keynote gave a refreshing bit of historical perspective. I’ve struggled with the way service and activism (both of which fall under the umbrella of civic engagement) are often separated from one another, particularly service as a “safe” or non-political term, one used to describe what students do unto other, less-fortunate people, while activism gets pigeon-holed as a more radical thing that happens separately from learning. In limiting what each term means, we also misunderstand and underestimate the importance they play in enabling young people as social changemakers, whether in school or out. Archbishop Tutu reminded us that young people have always been changemakers and activists – from the Bible (it was a young person, David, who stood up to Goliath) to the students who led the civil rights movement, protested against South African apartheid, and now speak out against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Finally, the youth media panel was perhaps a bit long, but I learned about some cool projects:

- thefoshow.com – Run out of the high school for performing arts in Minneapolis, it’s the only commercial radio station in US completely run and produced by high school students.

- Strive Media – print and video production (Gumbo Teen Magazine) out of Minneapolis

- Beyond Green – the latest project from Listen Up!

- Teen International Media Exchange (TIME) – program using media to explore seven global issues, based at Media Academy at Cleveland HS in Los Angeles

I was really honored to meet Sidibay, a young person I’ve heard a lot about through our mutual friends at iEARN Canada, who presented his award-winning documentary about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

The importance of global perspectives and connections in service learning really seems to be on the rise within the NSLC community, so it was great to participate in that conversation as it expands, and hope we’ll be back next year!

Knowing that having a site as multilingual as TIG is unusual, it was cool to happen upon a panel at SXSW about website internationalization and localization. While the moderator had a few annoying moments (mostly making a big deal about how many in the audience raised their hands to the question "do you live in a country where English is the primary language?" - this should not be surprising at a conference with mostly American attendees), overall there were quite a few tips that I think we can learn a lot from.


-being bilingual does not make you a translator

-translators are often not technology people, so they don’t know the right technical language to translate interface words (“apply”, “enter”, “submit”)

-context is everything – if the translator can’t see the language in context, they will get it wrong

-have a translator on board at the wireframing stage, so that person can point out contextual and cultural issues

-localization isn’t just replacing the words in one language into another, it’s also about giving appropriate cultural and social context

-translation needs to deal not just with literal words, but also with concepts that don’t translate from one culture/language to another

-Social networking sites don’t choose their users, users choose the site – snses grow because users tell their friends, and want to find people like themselves. If a site has a high concentration of users in a particular culture, it sometimes turns users from other countries off because they don’t understand why the site seems so saturated with members and content from another country (this happened with Orkut – Americans complained that it was too Brazilian! So Orkut responded by giving users the option of only connecting with other people who speak the same language as them)

-most sites view internationalization efforts as moving to a language other than English

-Community driven translation is NOT the norm - one of panelists asked if anyone was allowing their online community to do the translation for them – only two of us raised our hands (probably 75-100 in the room)

-use icon based representation with mouse-over where possible, to reduce multilingual formatting issues (words being longer in diff languages) – but beware the problem with an icon/image having different cultural meanings

-sometimes you try to localize so much that you end up with something that is “just ok” in a lot of languages, and “not so great” in a few – instead of trying to rebrand and make the site almost its own stand alone in different locations

Cool sites to check out:
-One of the speakers was from Worldwide Lexicon project – really cool open source translation and localization tools, ability to develop multilingual web apps, Simple Localization System (SLS - php library), and multilingual blogging/publishing tools – with a wiki approach to translating web content.

-dotsub – community subtitling and translation tool

-publishing industry becoming unbundled from old fashioned vertical integration and will be replaced by companies that just do one element of the business

-Budapest Open Access Declaration – scholarly articles (in medicine, science, and engineering) should be open licensed and available for everyone – NIH now mandates that publications resulting from projects it funds must be open access

-now there is a call for a similar movement - Capetown Open Education Declaration (Shuttleworth Foundation, OSI) – main premise is that all publicly funded education materials should have open access

-changing role of people in producing knowledge – mixed roles of “teacher” and “student” and “expert” etc.
-changing role of content and how we classify information
-changing role of context – textbooks lack context and personalization, digital content allows customized learning experience

Jason Fried is the founder of 37signals.com – an innovative technology company that has made some simple and awesome web-based productivity apps, like basecamp and campfire. He gave an amazing talk about productivity and collaboration ("Stuff we've learned") – this is a list of advice I’d kind of like to memorize.

-red flag words: need, can’t, easy, only, fast

-“be successful and make money by helping other people be successful and make money” – people are more willing to pay for things that help them – spot chain reactions and be the catalyst for making them happen

-minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players – e.g., build tools that provide just the simple solutions of what people need (vs. the products that are overkill for most people “nonconsumers”)

-question your work regularly – remember that you don’t know everything:
Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Will this change behavior?
Is there an easier way?
What’s the opportunity cost?
Is it really worth it?

-it’s really important to ask what you can’t do because you’re taking on something else?

-many sites don’t just suffer from bad design, they suffer from bad copy that don’t make sense to anyone – PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORDS YOU USE TO CONVEY MESSAGES TO USERS. Words that need fixing are a much cheaper problem to solve than technical ones.

-err on the side of simple – start with the easy way of doing things and see if it satisfies what you wanted to do

-get three things done in one week, instead of one thing done in 3 weeks – “the longer it takes to develop something, the less likely you are to launch it”

-resist the urge to try to do more the next time around

-invest in what doesn’t change – what are the core things about the business that are important now and will still be important ten years from now?

-“what’s your cookbook?” – Celebrity chefs as a metaphor (they don’t try to keep their recipes a secret out of fear that people will open copy-cat restaurants). Figure out what expertise you can share, and share it – don’t be afraid that people will overtake and steal your business – your business is sharing what you build.

-interruption kills productivity – having people around you who interrupt you makes you not get stuff done. Try to combat this with passive communication (wikis, IM, email, etc) – these tools let the other person hear from you when you’re ready, not when they think you’re ready

-be open, honest, public, and responsive – people would much rather hear the truth, even in crisis.

-break problems down to the atomic level – “when you make tiny decisions you can’t make big mistakes”

-everything you do should matter – don’t do stuff that doesn’t matter!

-hire by looking for people who are honest/have good character, curious (most important), and do interesting things outside of work

-use what you build, and then you will know when it works

I'm finally getting my notes from SXSW posted. I took a lot of them, and came home and promptly got really sick. But they will all appear here in good time.



The opening keynote on Saturday was a conversation between Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You) and Henry Jenkins (professor at MIT, Comparative Media Studies Program). As a chronic conference-goer, I find myself hearing the same people keynoting over and over again, saying the same things over and over, and often saying essentially the same things as one another. It was refreshing that, despite having read the work of both speakers, and having heard each speak at other events, I actually learned some new things and had a chance to rethink some previous ideas.

That said, there were some points I was glad to hear repeated, since the audience at SXSW is not dominated by educators. We need people in other sectors to rally behind the need for empirical evidence and educational assessment models that support new media literacies, and to challenge the current reality that schools measure autonomous, not collective, learning. Also:
-high school students are one of the most highly underestimated groups online, but the challenge is – can we free young people up to write about what’s happening in their community? (not punish them, censor them, restrict their first amendment rights)
How do we give students the tools to use the time, creativity, and idealism they have, so they can be active community participants?

-if 50-60% of young people are creating content online, what is causing the other 40% not to create? Social, cultural, and economic disempowerment? Lack of ethical guidance from adult mentors?

-if America is failing in the world, it’s because workplaces and schools are failing to empower workers and students to realize their full potential – they start with the premise that we’re all idiots, not that we are all knowledgeable with expertise and creativity to share.

On politics, Jenkins made some interesting points about Obama’s “yes we can” as a metaphor for new kinds of social/civic engagement, by using language that describes a process of participation, collecting knowledge and distributing it to make change. He also argues that the criticism of Obama borrowing pieces of a speech from Deval Patrick holds less water if you look at it through the new lens of collective learning, knowledge, and participation. And, we should be asking what a culture of democracy truly looks like.

Other thought provoking ideas:
-the deep level of fan/consumer engagement with tv shows like Lost and The Wire, and the pop culture communities that have grown up around them, often come out of people not having enough intellectual and creative stimulation in the workplace.

-thinking about collective intelligence as Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” (pooling knowledge and averaging out an answer) vs. the deliberative sharing of knowledge from different points of view and reaching a consensus (dependent on individual expertise, diversity of the community, and respect for all perspectives brought to the table). Jenkins aligned these approaches with YouTube (what moves up is the dominant/majority/popular perspective) vs. Wikipedia (a space with mechanisms for inclusion of diverse perspectives).

-it’s important to question the usage of the language of addiction related to online activity and gaming (many “addicts” are actually depressed and the addiction is manifesting itself through gaming; also Chinese gov’t using “addiction” as reason to restrict young people’s access to the internet)

-progressives need to have a context for where progress is coming from in order to encourage the movement to continue growing (this sounds like what Chris Lehman often says about the current technology in education movement)

Cool sites they mentioned:
- Harry Potter Alliance– global network of young people trying to change the world, inspired by Harry Potter as a young person who transformed his world:

- Outside.In – Johnson’s project, building out geographic infrastructure of the web and fostering people using the internet for very local community participation. Their about-to-launch tool is On My Radar (“like a geo-twitter,” commented Kate). Speaks to a need for civic media tools for local experts to participate and share knowledge without having to go through traditional media structures to communicate

Finally, some dissertation-ey thoughts about new media literacies. Because of YMEX I’ve had Jenkins’ framework on the brain for quite a while, but one component I would like to spend more time unpacking – is where these new media literacies intersect with the sociolinguistic concept of codeswitching. If young people are developing the ability to learn and access information across a range of modalities (what Jenkins calls transmedia navigation), can it also be argued that they are learning to communicate in a range of linguistic codes that these new media require? How well do they codeswitch between the linguistic norms of each – from text messaging to online social networking sites to the f2f classroom, etc.? How might educators interact better with their students if they understood their ways of communicating through the lens of codeswitching? I’ve been thinking particularly about how Ben Rampton’s work on codeswitching and youth could be applied…

And, apparently not everyone at SXSW was hearing repeat speakers. As I walked out, I heard a guy behind me say to his friend, “It was cool, but I didn’t know who he was exactly…I thought it was Henry James.”

Right.

I was never one of those kids who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up (in fact, I'm still not entirely sure...). But it's a privilege to me that I had friends who knew exactly what they wanted to be, and blazed paths in pursuit of those goals, so I knew what it can look like to get from point A to point B, and onwards to C, D, and F. To be sure, I was also graced with examples from adult role models, but it was especially meaningful to see my peers make their way and to learn from them, and now, have the chance to be proud of them.

One of my best friends from high school is now an actor in one of Chicago's most successful and fresh young theatre companies, and she refused to settle for anything less than her dreams, no matter who told her that she would have to wait tables, or that she better major in something practical, just in case. The pictures of my sister sitting at a typewriter at age two seem now to be the perfect symbol of her life path to becoming a newspaper reporter, covering the politics beat. Neither are easy goals to attain, but I'm lucky to know firsthand what it takes to get there.

The person who is perhaps my oldest friend in life - we started school together at age seven and graduated from high school together ten years later - is now a scientist, completing her PhD and contributing to research that is deepening our understanding of ocean sustainability and climate change. My memories of her as far back as middle school include her dreams of being a marine biologist, and I've had the opportunity to see that dream grow into a reality, through many years of formal education, fieldwork, muddy boots, and the most admirable tenacity, even in circumstances under which most of us might give up. Knowing her all these years did little to improve my own scientific abilities, but it taught me what it looks like to do hard work, to be a researcher, and now, to care more about the application of scientific knowledge to the social issues about which I already care very deeply.

For all the talk about preparing students for the world of work, as important as it is to define skill sets and ready them for the global economy, it often seems that we leave out from the conversation what those pathways really look like. There is outstanding work being done to define specific pathways to global citizenship and to digital citizenship, but are we also showing students what it looks like to identify their passions and pursue their own goals? It seems like we're afraid to let students see, "this is what it looks like to be a scientist" and how you can get there, because we're caught up in a belief (or fear?) that jobs will change too fast, as if the economy of the future does not allow for goals or dreams. Knowing that those pathways exist is important, even for the ones who haven't figured out what their dreams might be, and regardless of what they ultimately pursue. Young people should have a realistic (and media literate) understanding of the pathway to the least attainable goals - like being an NBA superstar or the next American Idol, and they should have the same awareness of more common professional journeys, and of those pathways that change at every turn. We should be situating the necessary skills, knowledge, and capacities in these real world pathways - we'll never engage students in those frameworks in the abstract. And, they should know that each of these involves failure, and most of them involve failing multiple times. We're definitely too scared to let students in on that secret, even though learning from failure is likely the most important piece we can model for them.

Just when I think irony has finally been pushed off a cliff to its death (often while people watching in certain areas of my neighborhood in Brooklyn), my faith is renewed.

This morning I set out to read a New York Times article about the convergence of casual games and social networks, as seen in the success of games like Scrabulous, and the enormous potential that has for generating advertising revenue. No sooner had I clicked on the title, which included the phrase "a net to snare social networkers" in it, than was I assaulted by an OpinionMart popup survey asking me to give it all up right then and there.

It's not a bad article, by the way, but since I still can't figure out if this is intentional irony or not, I'm resisting the urge to help the Times with their potential link baiting strategy on this one.

Calling all educators - have you used – or do you plan to use – Ayiti: The Cost of Life game in your classroom?
We’d love to know - participate in this survey from our partners at Global Kids!

If you think technology can help people learn, make your voice heard!

The New York Times would like to believe that laptops are a barrier to learning because they don't directly contribute to a 19th or 20th century definition of "achievement".

But those of us who have experienced learning with technology know that computers aren't the answer themselves, nor are they the sole problem when students "fail" to learn. Education is at a critical moment and needs holistic change - in the ways we teach, we learn, and the tools and resources we involve in the process.

The reporter interviewed educational technology advocates for this article, but ultimately chose not to include their perspective in her story.

If you are a teacher or student who feels that technology has had a positive impact on learning, please share your story!

You can
-leave a comment here
-post your own blog entry
-weigh in on the TIG discussion board
-enter the Take Your Classroom Global! contest

those of us who endlessly debate and define the future of education and the skills that students will need in the 21st century...we express concern about how students will fare in the global economy, how they will face the challenges of the future, whether they will have the literacies needed to manuever this new information society. But we rarely, if ever, talk about how to prepare students to address the challenges of violence and be part of building a culture of peace. And all too often, we try to isolate students from the world into which we will send them and protect them within the "reality" inside the four walls of a school, which often are not really safe at all.

What are we doing to make schools safe places where the learning process is not disrupted by violence, whether routine or unfathomable? Why do we continue to fail to equip students with the ability to understand the reality of violence and the skills to transform conflict? What changes can we make, and what new skills and values can we teach, to make our students both problem-solvers and peacemakers?

Tonight, more than usual, i'm falling short on answers and trying to just live the questions.

the first OLPC deployment - Nigeria.

I'm not sure if this picture is making me smile ear to ear because of the future of learning it represents for students all over the world (not just in the OLPC pilot countries), or

because the laptops appear already to be a source of wonder and engagement and curiosity for the kids (exactly what powerful learning tools should do!), or

because I can only begin to imagine what kids here in the US will learn from being connected to co-creators and collaborators in Nigeria and elsewhere, and what problems they will solve and new innovations they will develop together...

...but it's the first time in a while that a picture in the news has made me smile.


http://news.com.com/2300-1041_3-6175025-8.html?tag=ne.gall.pg

Buried beneath the "news from Washington" about presidential hopefuls, the future of the Iraq War, and the Scooter Libby trial, is the perpetually unbelievable (truthfully, all too believable) state of DC Public Schools. Here are excerpts from a high school student who attends one of the several schools that have gone without heat this past week:

"Things have been crazy since last Monday when we had to leave our school because of flooding and loss of heat....Last Thursday, we were so cold that the principal put us in the library, and we kept warm by opening the curtains and letting the sun warm us up. Students and teachers kept their jackets on the whole day....We were shoved into classes with students that we had never seen and without our regular teachers. We also did not have any textbooks or supplies. The teachers were doing their best to teach us, but most of us were not learning anything in these classes."

To read more student voices from this ridiculous situation:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/14/AR2007021400645_3.html


And, what they lack in heat DC schools apparently make up for in lead:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/14/AR2007021401678.html

My rough notes from Professor James Paul Gee's keynote. I'll come back and synthesize later :)


the old literacy gap -- too many kids don't read as well as they could

the applications gap -- even children who do well in school and can pass tests can't apply their knowledge in the real world

the new tech-savvy gap -- new technology in schools doesn't automatically minimize the gap.

the new knowledge gap -- knowing how to use the new technology. what you do with technology matters.

the innovation crisis -- kids need to learn innovation and creativity.

all of these gaps need to be addressed holistically. and games are one way to do this and to better situate learning and literacy.

empathy for a complex system. simulations are what scientists use to learn and conduct research, but games are even better because players are inside their simulations and have an immersive perspective on that world (which scientists generally don't have when they conduct simulations). However, studies show that scientists think as though they are.

**typical of my inability to focus, I stopped paying attention because I got wrapped up reading comments on a gamer site about how to succeed at playing Ayiti

back to Gee's talk.

games put performance before competence, meaning that you're allowed to try something even if you haven't developed full knowledge of it (unlike traditional schooling)

World of Warcraft -- example of a "cross-functional team" where every team member has deep expertise in one area, but also need to understand other team member's functions to integrate all the skills. "understand your expertise from other people's perspective"

School doesn't develop these soft skills very well, but work expects them.

generational assumption -- if i can't understand the book, i can't use the tool. older people always want to read the manual first, even though often now the manual won't make sense if you haven't used the tool/played the game yet.

kids often don't do well in school because they have no context for the complex academic language -- the language in school is not situated in the world in which kids live. and the kids aren't given the opportunity to experience the subject matter in a way that gives meaning to the words used to describe it. (If you DO geology, you will get the language of geology).

assessment in games works because it starts with the concrete and is then abstracted. "tracking what you've done AFTER you've done it"

games are motivating BECAUSE they involve learning. Learning and mastery of something is deeply rewarding for us as people. They also foster failure that produces learning, which is not how failure in school is structured!

research shows that kids love competition in games but hate competition in school. Possibly because in games, competition is a source of collaboration.

the interactivity and inquiry that games allow are another reason that they are engaging -- people like problem solving spaces :)

games as opportunities for customization and production -- you can make the game as much as you play it. And making the game allows kids to learn about the underlying structure (more inquiry)

games allow identity construction -- "new learning creates new identity" -- so games are a way for learning to be applied through identity, and to use identity as a way of making choices and understanding our perspectives.

Good games allow us to make big choices. So does good curriculum.

Games are pleasantly frustrating, like many of the other good things in life.

Cycle of expertise -- practice until absolute mastery. Then apply in a situation where it doesn't solve the problem. Now practice that until you're sick of it. And over and over.
(This could be the basis, in the future, of kids being part of curriculum development.)

**This reminds me of playing the violin and cello as a little kid. My mom used to always say that practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes practice. Only perfect practice makes perfect. I can hear her saying "I told you so" all the way from Virginia.