I just stumbled across this excellent anti-cyberbullying ad from the US Adcouncil and had to share:
It’s simple, straight-forward and extremely effective. Show your kids.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot this semester has been the way my teaching does - or doesn’t - encourage my students to develop that elusive, highly ambiguous but universally sought-after quality of creativity. I’ve been running two units - Digital Media, which is a relatively large second year unit (about 140 students) with a fairly hefty hands-on component; and a far smaller honours unit called Creative Selves which is specifically about exploring the way creativity is thought about, situated and can ultimately be harnessed in the world of work (or, at least, the world outside of formal education).
Even though creativity is often associated with the romantic ideal of the lone creative genius, one of the contradictions I’ve been quite aware of, and something that has come up in both units, is that both individual and group creativity is often meaningfully enhanced and provoked when students are thinking about the audience that might ultimately view/experience/interact with their creative work. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise since over the last 4 years I’ve often encouraged (and occasionally mandated) that students blog their work for just that reason. In so many cases, when the potential audience for a work - written, audio, video or whatever else - stops being just the marker or examiner and starts being a potentially global community, students tend to push themselves to work that little bit harder. Occasionally one or two students have suggested this is unnecessarily stressful, but 99% of the time when students are faced with the large potential audience that the internet provides, they step up to the challenge. There are other clear advantages of getting students to create in the public sphere, too, such as those outlined by Jason Mittell:
One of my pet peeves about teaching is that often you get wonderful student work that is, by design, written for an audience of one, and has no lingering presence beyond the semester. By asking students to blog, share, and otherwise publish their work, it both raises the bar for their own sense of engaging a community with their ideas, as well as offers an opportunity for faculty to publicize their excellent work.
Mittell has written a series of posts showcasing some of the impressive work students have made as part of his Media Technology course this past semester. They range from podcasts which interrogate something specific about audio, to video-games based shorts (sort of machinima, but not in the Red Vs Blue sense - more videos which mix and match game footage in different ways to highlight a particular critical or creative point). One assignment I particularly liked was the use of video remixes, or mashups, which included one student effort which remixed current blockbuster trailers - and a ubiquitous iPhone ad - to create an overhyped trailer for technological convergence itself:
Another student collaboration I’ve come across recently is Shake Girl, The Graphic Novel. This graphic novel was a collaboration between 17 Stanford creative writing, art and design students who’ve produced a moving and provocative story which ultimately ends up being a heart-wrenching tale highlighting the terrible phenomenon of acid attacks on women in Cambodia. This is no two-dimensional moral rant, though: it’s a thoroughly engaging story, with sophisticated characterisation which envelops the reader in the story only to shock them with the protagonist’s fate. In their About section, one note rang particularly true for me, regarding the challenges but also the substantial rewards which come from successful creative collaborations between students:
The process of collaboration - we think all of our students will agree - was both one of the most frustrating and exciting experiences of our lives. A lot of the first in the first two weeks, much of the second in the last four. Those of us writing the script seemed to trip over one another in the early stages. We wrote, researched, rewrote, tossed drafts aside, argued, yelled sometimes, tossed our hands up in the air, and then started over. The illustrators waited patiently, until patience ran out, and we were finally left with this mission statement: 1. We want to get this project completed, and 2. We want to make everyone moderately happy.
And with that, we made the jump to light speed. How many late-night hours did we draw, redraw, rewrite, design, redesign, and mostly… really enjoy each others company, efforts, and camaraderie?
All I can say is that Shake Girl definitely highlights an impressively successful student collaboration! [Via BBoing]
This graphic novel also reminds me on one idea for a small-scale creative project I’ve always wanted to do especially with a large first-year class. Many of you will recall the fabulous Theory.org.uk Theorist Trading Cards, which were essentially bubblegum cards featuring well-known cultural theorists. In a large first-year class where new theorists, ideas and concepts are introduced for the first time, I suspect that if students generated their own cards as part of tutorial presentations, this would be a great way to creatively get them reading and thinking about the main features, and differences, between the writers and works they encounter. As an added bonus, these trading cards could be collated online and serve, to some extent, as useful prompts when students are revising for exams.
For a few more examples of engaging creative work, Siva Vaidhyanathan has posted two nifty videos created by students in his Introduction to Digital Media course: Restricted Knowledge? University Bandwidth Regulation and Facebook World.
Along a similar line, this week my Digital Media students are presenting a pitch, outlining an idea for a short video which will critically explore some aspect of digital culture loosely based on arguments about either convergence or citizen journalism, so I hope I’ll be able to post a few of the results in a few weeks time.
Until then, I wanted to end this post by pointing to the very cool and very virally popular video Apple Mac Music Video by Dennis Liu. While not really student work (Lui has just finished formal education, but has been working professionally for a while; read an interview here) this is video is inspirational. It’s a brilliant reminder that under the hood of an Apple Mac (or even a decent PC) is more than enough power to make some truly inspiring and amazing creative work …
Those researchers and report-writers at Pew have released a short but important paper ‘Teens and Online Stranger Contact’. The details:
Fully 32% of online teens have been contacted by someone with no connection to them or any of their friends, and 7% of online teens say they have felt scared or uncomfortable as a result of contact by an online stranger. Several behaviors are associated with high levels of online stranger contact, including social networking profile ownership, posting photos online and using social networking sites to flirt. Although several factors are linked with increased levels of stranger contact in general, gender is the only variable with a consistent association with contact that is scary or uncomfortable–girls are much more likely to report scary or uncomfortable contact than boys.
It’s well worth thinking about, especially in terms of how we educate young people. Also notable that gender remains an important factor. Read the full report here.
Michael Wesch and his 200 students in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007 collaborated in exploring what exactly a student does these days. Their results make a fascinating video and a timely reminder of the way (some) student experiences are changing:
Some of the noteworthy results from 133 of the students survey included:
Given how many times Wesch’s first video, ‘The Machine is Us/ing Us’, has been used to discuss Web 2.0, I suspect this video may very well find itself as part of the conversations we have in rethinking student engagement in the twenty-first century.
Sometimes I find it hard to get the time to explain certain concepts - RSS, for example - which both have enough information and avoid boring to death those who already know things. Thankfully, those folk over at CommonCraft do really, really good introductory explanations of Web2.0-type tools. Here’s their take on social bookmarking:
After that you’ll also want to check out RSS in Plain English; Wikis in Plain English; Google Docs in Plain English; and Social Networking in Plain English. Watch the show for future useful episodes. I’m sure these clips will find some use in my teaching! 
Insight #3: If ePortfolios and other forms of electronic presence are going to be (or are) a core part of the way graduates ‘sell’ themselves to employers, then identity management needs to be taught at all levels of education. Identity management includes those aspects of identity which we intend employers to see, and those we don’t want seen. If a basic search online for someone’s full name reveals drunken party pictures on Flickr or YouTube clips of bullying antics in their youth, then that is just as likely to be viewed by employers as the intended ePortfolios or other material. Identity management clearly is something of a challenge, especially as many educators aren’t fully aware of how much students can put online (or how to temper that), but the Internet never forgets and we need students to be able to understand that for all sorts of reasons, and future employability is clearly one of them.
Insight #4:The unconference model only works when all the participants have a strong sense of what they are intending to pull apart or critique in advance. If half of a conference is populated by people trying to get a basic understanding of something – in this case Web 2.0 – then the unconference model of primarily relying on informed participants leading all the conference sessions themselves, directed by their conversations and thinking, to the exclusion of traditional papers or presentations, is doomed to disappoint a lot of people attending that form of conference. (This, incidentally, is not a personal gripe, but a clearly articulated sense from a number of my fellow conference delegates).
I’m at the Learning Futures Symposium today and tomorrow. I’m not blogging summaries of sessions because, to be fair, that’s often quite dull. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to take the conference discussions to springboard some observations or thoughts that occurred during these interactions…
Insight #1: There is a reasonable amount of critical distance in terms of the ‘digital natives/digital immigrants’ rhetoric, but the same critical perspective doesn’t stretch to critiquing the idea of ‘web 2.0’. Whereas ideas which supposedly encompass an entire generation are easy enough to pull apart, many educators seem wary of software and claims made about software as they acutely feel that this is one of the few areas in which students know more about this area than they do. I suspect that if the same educators were dipping their toes in a little more they’d realise something commonsensical which seems to have entirely escaped these kind of conversations: that while there are many types of web 2.0 software, there are generic skills to be found in using these tools and platforms. The reason that people can move from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook so easily, for example, is that at a basic level there is a lot of similarity between the way these platforms operate and the skills needed to use them. Sure, the rate of new names of software can be overwhelming, but if we remember that a large section of the skills learnt using one social software platform are viable for the next, super-duper, upcoming must-have web 2.0 tool are transferable, that makes taking the time to learn and teach them a whole lot more important and palatable. And social software platforms are just one example; skills in blogging, using wikis and many other forms of ‘web 2.0’ tools are similarly transferable and, at some level, generic. Perhaps we should be focusing more on what those skills are.
Insight #2: Often the people in the driving position for educational policy aren’t confident to make decisions about ICT – nor should they be!
JD Lasica points to an interesting new report from the US National School Boards Association entitled Creating & Connecting /Research and Guidelines on Online Social - and Educational - Networking. The report focusing on ‘tweens’ and teens, and has some really important notes about the role of social networking in forming learning communities and even casual connections between online presence and learning.
As this graph shows, more than half US tweens and teens have discussed education in online social networking:
Likewise, many tweens and teens are not just discussing and downloading, but also creating, uploading and participating in creative projects:
Again we are reminded that education in the twenty-first century has to think about the digital literacies of students and how to allow those literacies to develop in our curricula.
I just watched Kathryn Greenhill’s presentation about introducing Second Life via Murdoch Library. Clearly the potential for Second Life in tertiary education and digital literacy is impressive, even if there are some serious obstacles to overcome. Kathryn’s presentation illuminates a very sensible and reassuring way to introduce SL to staff and students, so if you’re thinking of heading down that path, take a look:
Despite the increasing number of Creative Commons licensed images out there, many students still seem to resort to a single service like Google’s Image Search since it’s still the easiest way to find images (copyright be damned). I’ve always hoped to find a tool which makes it just as easy to search for images which are freely reusable, via CC (or other) licenses, so I was delighted when I stumbled upon the Picture Sandbox.
The Picture Sandbox lets you search Flickr (and other services), easily restricting searches to any CC license type, as well as a number of other limiting parameters such as data taken, or user. As this screenshot shows, all of these options areon the frontpage as drop-down boxes, making the service very easy to use:
Simply entering ‘Venice’ (for example) into the search window, brings up pages and pages of photos which students could use in projects and media creations, with simple attribution, and then be able to re-use in the future as part of ePortfolios or the like:
This is a fabulously simple tool so I hope it finds its way into media classes across the entire educational spectrum!
Update: If the Sandbox Flickr search doesn’t work (which seems to happen occassionally) try FlickrCC.
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