Growing the New Technopolis

we’ve said hello!

check out www.sandboxnetwork.org

we’re looking good for version 4.0.

From Technopolis to Sandbox….and then?

Hello to all and congrats to Doug for the UNC iTunes U launch. 

Also, to Mike for his great work and outreach.

We now have 57 judges from around the country, including 4 from overseas: singapore, fiji, scotland and south africa.

We’ll be shifting over into the judging phase in a week or so.

Stay tuned for more details…

bob

Several things have come down the pipes lately that seem post-worthy, so I thought I’d try to list them in one fell swoop.

- The Carolina portal at iTunesU, for which Doug was mainly responsible for getting going, launched recently. Here’s an article in The Daily Tar Heel about the launch. The content itself can be accessed by pointing your browser to http://itunes.unc.edu.

This is also exciting for me because my department, Communication Studies, will have its own channel for student and faculty content. Good stuff!

- Bob came over to UNC on the day of the launch and he and I met with staff members at UNC’s service learning organization APPLES about getting them involved with Bob’s Digital Media Sandbox Consortium. Bob was very eloquent about the need for digital fluency in service-learning, and the APPLES crew was excited about the possibilities (that was my take on it, anyway). We made plans to get them involved in the podcasting tournament. Then, this week, I had a good meeting with their Associate Director to talk about how they could more sustainably integrate podcasting into their service-learning efforts.

- Finally, a little own-horn-tooting: I have had a paper accepted to the Community Informatics & Development Informatics Conference in Prato, Italy. I am collaborating with the Academic Director of the City of Knowledge at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil. If anyone cares to read the first draft (written for a community development class last semester) and offer feedback – well, I just don’t know what I’d do for you. It’s on my website here. It concerns the use of digital storytelling for community and economic development. And, uh, if you have a couple grand’s worth of staff development grants to fly me over there, that’d be nice too!

I’ve been feeling over-worked lately (isn’t it summertime?!), but this is all great news and evidence that some of our hard work is paying off!

What could you use powerful computers to do in the humanities fields? That’s exactly what the National Endowment for the Humanities wants to know. They’ve recently announced some great-looking opportunities to explore such possibilities. And if you’re worried about writing a grant for a supercomputing endeavor, how about this:

We don’t expect that you’ve necessarily worked out all the details — you may simply be at a stage where basic research and experimentation is in order. We will work with you to help find the most suitable NEH grant opportunity and make suggestions on how to turn your draft into a full-blown proposal.

If I only had something that needed super-computing…

The Corporation for National and Community Service is trying to get rid of $2.3M!

The details are here. Due date is May 7, 2008.

Taking a moment to count the blessing here in Nashville, TN. Mid-day on a Tuesday. Mid April.

Here’s to a beautiful, fulfilling Spring to the GNT team of Doug and Mike and everyone else.

We are about to begin harvesting the media for the Podcast Tournament. This is a relatively new project in a dynamic and emergent field. Some of what’s to come has been foreseen and anticipated, while we undoubtedly will encounter unexpected challenges that will test the mettle.

A lot of what we do is done on faith: A kind of if we build it they will come kind of DIY approach. We have extended our growth into two new states. Every day new partners for the journey emerge and engage. In some ways, GNT is a kind of patriotic affirmation. A way to create the good news (intentionally) as an option to having to settle for the bad news. Keeping this position viable without lapsing in sentimentality or the maudlin is a challenge and why poetry is so hard to do well.

In this work, I have learned so much about what is possible. About resources appearing when one least expects them. About looking past personal and professional disappointments and adapting to innovations that never seem to stop morphing.

About how much we know and how much we don’t know.

How can we evolve our individual and collective thinking and doing to serve the greater good of all involved?

And how do you measure that?

This just in from the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2901/new-school-for-new-media-at-depaul-u

If you’re looking for a blog to add to your reader, some of the most useful resources I’ve seen lately have come from Educause Connect, where they like to “transform education through information technology.”

Not too long ago they posted a presentation about a project going on down Tobacco Road at Duke called “Integrating Community History, Technology, and Service Learning: The Digital Durham Project.”

This presentation focuses on a collaborative local history project between Duke University undergraduates and Durham eighth graders. Through their research seminar, Duke students conduct original research in local archives and then mentor eighth graders in how to use technology, particularly the Digital Durham website http://digitaldurham.duke.edu

I love that the project involves eighth graders. One thing I’d like to spend more time thinking about is: how early should digital literacy efforts begin and what do good adolescent curricula look like? I’d venture to guess that right now most kids are learning digital skills on their own, with their friends, or with their parents long before anything is introduced formally at school.

Another great aspect of Digital Durham is that, according to Director Trudi Abel, it is a “highly replicable project.” In her presentation, she says:

My hope is that the Digital Durham project can serve as a model for how to digitize historical materials into a community history research experience for undergraduate students as well as public school students and teachers.

I believe replicability will have a large role in bringing digital literacy-oriented service-learning projects to mainstream education and higher learning institutions. People will want to see something that works and be able to have a model they can replicate. I know at least one other model: www.tnsandbox.com

Superb Surpise

Tell all the truth

but tell it slant

success in circuit lies.

Too bright for our infirm delight

the truth’s superb surprise

as lightning to the children eased

with explanation kind

the truth must dazzle gradually

or everyone go blind.

 -Emily Dickinson

Sometime poetry is the only way to get it said. So thanks and praise be that we have it to use. On the most basic level we have between us as community–language–it is all about the code. A sometimes mythic (and always meta-!)  combination between what we say and how we say it. Jazz to the Music. Poetry to the Word.

Play through the changes.

I just came across a Flash-based tool called PrimaryAccess, a slideshow application similar to VoiceThread. According to its website, “PrimaryAccess is a web-based tool that offers teachers and students frictionless access to digital images and materials that enable them to construct compelling personal narratives.” It was developed by Bill Ferster at the Virginia Center for Digital History. You can watch an introduction to it here.

There are a few things I really like about it:
- Unlike VoiceThread or Microsoft’s Photo Story, it’s open source.
- It provides a good introduction for students to the idea of using primary (media) documents for scholarship. Students use historical photos from a database that are already annotated with APA citation.
- It has an integrated “idea map” for planning movies. Mind-mapping is a new passion of mine. Non-linear approaches to project-planning offer students a flexible tool for getting their ideas together (vs traditional outlining or storyboarding, say).

In Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins et al say:

…we do not want to see media literacy treated as an add-on subject. Rather, we should see it as a paradigm shift, one which, like multiculturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject. Media change is impacting every aspect of our contemporary experience and as a consequence, every school discipline needs to take responsibility for helping students to master the skills and knowledge they need to function in a hypermediated environment.

PrimaryAccess seems to hold great potential for working towards that goal in history curricula. What better way to learn history than contextualized through the primary photographical documents of an era?

Mike