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Learning Online in the Second Grade: Teacher Linda Yollis
May 20, 2013 - 7:15pm
Blogging, commenting thoughtfully on others’ blogs, staying safe online, creating a positive digital footprint, using audio and video to connect with students in other parts of the world, creating and publishing video – at what grade level should students be introduced to these essential digital literacies? How about the second grade? Linda Yollis, a teacher in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, remembers the classroom in which she started teaching in the 1980s: “Learning was confined to the four walls of the classroom, was entirely paper-based, worksheet-driven, and I was the audience for most of the written work in this classroom; parents found out what was going on by reading the newsletter that I would send out and maybe by looking at the graded projects their children took home. All of the learning took place between eight and three. I had a very closed classroom. That all changed in 2008 when I started blogging. Having a class blog has flattened the walls of this classroom. Now we have an online space where students, parents, and other classrooms all over the world can come together in an online learning community.”
Mrs. Yollis not only teaches her second-graders to blog (some of whom came into her class with blogging experience from Mrs. Levy’s first grade blog), she teaches them – and her students make videos to teach others – about raising the level of online discourse through quality blog comments. Take a look at Mrs. Yollis’ introduction to blog commenting and ask yourself whether the online commons could become a much better place in a few years if more second graders were introduced to online discourse in this way. She even introduced a rubric for blog comments that eight year olds can understand: “A one-point comment is a general comment that doesn't add very much to the post. Example: I like your blog. Please visit mine! A two-point comment adds something to the comment conversation. A commenter might compliment the writer in a specific way or add new information. Another idea is to make a connection. Maybe the post reminds you of an experience that you've had. Share that connection! Try to end your comment with a relevant question. That way, an interesting conversation can develop.”
If you think this kind of higher-level thinking and digital skills are unrealistic goals for such young students, you can judge for yourself by inspecting the results: Here is the teacher’s blog post about making “reasonable estimates” and the comment dialogue among her students that followed, in which each student challenged others to try an estimate. Of course, nobody expects second graders to be expert typists. I asked Mrs. Yollis, who told me that she encouraged students to dictate to her in class or to parents at home: “I tell parents to let grammatical and spelling errors stand so I can direct students in correcting them.”
Before 2008, contact with parents was through their students’ grades, written comments on their work, and a newsletter. Now, parents and grandparents participate in “family blogging month.” Mrs. Yollis models the kind of sharing she asks of her students, making videos about the benefits of blogging with young children and publishing what she learns and finds on her educational blogging wiki. I couldn’t wait to talk with her. Watch this short video interview to experience her enthusiasm – and expertise – directly.
Learning Online in the Second Grade: Linda Yollis from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
Banner image credit: Photo by Shayna, Mrs. Yollis' Classroom Blog
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
A Student-driven, Afterschool Technology Club: When Reality and Policy Collide
May 17, 2013 - 10:55am
Taking advantage of the online world's ability to help youth develop knowledge, expertise, skills and important new literacies involves risks, but how much? Some researchers and authors such as Lenore Skenazy, Sonia Livingstone, and Lynn Schofield Clark have reasoned that a number of policies and strategies, which are intended to protect youth, are actually misguided and may be making youth’s learning experiences even more limiting.
Jacqueline Vickery, an assistant professor in the department of Radio-Television-Film University of North Texas, studies the discourse around risk and digital media and how it fuels moral panics and influences policy. By observing how students’ technology use is shaped by these policies, she aims to shift the dialogue away from discussions that perpetuate fear and anxiety to conversations focused more on the empowering ways teens are using technology in their everyday lives.
Vickery spent an entire school year working with 18 students from a low-income public school in Austin, collecting their opinions on school and technology in order to better understand how different learning environments impact their atti
tudes towards digital media use. Vickery, who earned a PhD in Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, presented her findings to a group of junior scholars at the DML Summer Research Associates Institute in Boston.
In the video below, Vickery describes how peer support played a major role in the functioning of the afterschool space. Often times, students who were not media production savvy joined the club at the suggestion of a friend, and in the process, they discovered that they had a budding interest in film, photography, or media. Below are some highlights, but the entire video unpacks Vickery’s argument that in order to enact appropriate school reform, policymakers need to fully comprehend the wants and needs of both students and educators.
It’s definitely a student-driven space. The teacher is there to help when he needs to help, but the kids have a lot of agency in deciding what they want to work on.
I think the formal classroom doesn't always provide opportunities to teach each other. The stakes are high. The teacher is at the front. It’s just a different environment.
Policy would benefit a lot from listening to teachers in our school – listening to students and listening to researchers to understand what are the day-to-day experiences, what are the frustrations they are actually facing. Predators are not their number one problem at this school, but actually understanding how they are using technology in these incredibly beneficial ways and the ways in which policies are shutting down these opportunities.
We’re at this very interesting moment in which some of the ways teens are engaging with different technologies have such a learning potential and schools would really benefit from bringing it in to validate teens’ interests and figure out how we can actually use this to teach and for kids to learn.
Jacqueline Vickery - DML Summer Institute 2012 from DML Research Hub on Vimeo
Production credit: Marc Bacarro
Banner image credit: bionicteaching http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/3787535446/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Avenging 'Making' For All: Challenging Iron Man
May 13, 2013 - 1:05pm
With Iron Man 3 raking in millions and marking the official start of summer blockbusters, it is thrilling to recognize that moviegoers are largely staring at a screen enraptured with Hollywood’s most successful maker.
As such, I have good news and bad news for the maker movement.
First the good news: to state the obvious, the movie’s hero, Tony Stark, has an uncannily familiar special power – he’s a tinkerer.
Without diving into the plot too deeply, it is fair to say that the reason Tony Stark can save the world is because he’s a really good maker. He assembles products that better the world around him and inspire young people. And based on his kinship with a young, precocious boy in the film, Stark is clearly a role model for tinkerers around the world.
Further, Tony Stark depicts how making and geeking out are part of who he is. Making keeps him up at night and, even when fancy robots are recharging or classily blown up, Stark’s perpetually tinkering, exploring, and making awesome things based on his own restless intellect.
Through Iron Man 3, Hollywood is helping further the message that it’s cool and sexy to make.
So that’s the good news. Educators should be embracing this aspect of the Iron Man franchise.
Iron Man’s Representation Problem
And then there’s the bad news. The bad news isn’t something new or something overly surprising. But it’s still bad news and we should probably – as a field – think about how we address it: the bad news is that Iron Man does a really good job of excluding the vast majority of viewers. Let me state some of the facts:
Tony Stark is white.
Tony Stark is male.
Tony Stark is incredibly rich.
Tony Stark is heterosexual.
So while this film embraces making as a pathway for saving the world, it does so in limited ways. A somewhat critical look at the film makes it hard to see how more diverse audiences can interpret messages to make and innovate when otherwise marginalized characters are…well, marginalized. What implicit messages are found when Tony Stark is not only the sole successful maker in the series, but the film also problematizes others? Women in the film are conniving, inconsistent, and clumsy. The only black man in the film relies on Stark’s technological savvy to save him. Ben Kingsley, as the Mandarin, is some sort of ethnic “Other” that is both menacing and a drunken floozy.
The problematic politics of representation in films (and games and books etc.) are nothing new. Really, is anyone surprised that Tony Stark is white? However, if we’re going to launch making into classrooms, afterschool programs, and fund educational initiatives based on premises of making, the issue of this disparity is key. I’m sure I am not alone in seeing a not very distant connection between the kinds of making depicted in Iron Man and the kinds depicted by Caine’s Arcade in “real life.”
The Other Tony Stark and the Other Kind of Making
Last month, Wu Tang Clan member Ghostface Killah released his album Twelve Reasons to Die. It’s the rapper’s 10th album and tells the story of one of his many aliases: Tony Stark. For Ghostface Killah, the Marvel comic book hero has played an important role in his childhood and in his own music; Ghostface’s first solo album, all the way back in 1996, was called Ironman. And while I appreciate the way Iron Man has made an impact on someone like Ghostface Killah, I think his new album is a particular example of the power of fan culture and fan fiction. Over the 12 songs on his new album, Stark’s narrative is vastly rewritten and is interwoven with traditional Mafioso storylines.
In a very different way, Ghostface Killah is just as adept a maker as his childhood hero. He assembles, creates, and empowers.
My colleague Cindy O’Donnell-Allen helped me kick off this post when she sent me a text after leaving the theater last week: “Remember: Ironman as maker.” In work with the Colorado State University Writing Project, Cindy and I are considering who and what may be left out of today’s maker movement. In addition to getting more diversity within these spaces, we are also interested in ways making can incorporate writing as a disposition of making. As Ghostface helps remind all of us, writing is making. And just as a screwdriver can be the secret weapon for someone like Tony Stark’s process of making, so too can a pen and paper for Ghostface’s.
Banner image credit: Susan NYC http://www.flickr.com/photos/en321/2122878328/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Design Thinking and Diversity: A Professional Development Case Study
May 10, 2013 - 7:00pm
What do a New York public school, the Howard County Public School system in Maryland, and a small private K-8 school in California all have in common? Each is re-conceptualizing the standard school curriculum by using design thinking, a learning approach that is collaborative, action-based, and experimental, as a way to meet the needs of today’s learners. Design thinking can be a powerful tool for developing higher-order skills such as complex problem solving, creativity and critical thinking. But it can also be an unfamiliar and intangible concept for teachers to grasp, making professional development and pre-service training all the more important in preparing educators for employing design thinking strategies in their classrooms.
Dimension Charter School (a pseudonym) in Northern California has also been experimenting with this methodology as a way stimulate student learning. Aaminah Norris, a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education, observed the school’s professional development exercises and classroom “design challenges” for more than 14 months. During her time at the school, Norris explored the connections between design thinking and diversity by observing the ways in which teachers were trained to use design thinking to create an inclusive school environment. Norris presented her findings to a group of junior scholars and mentors at the 2012 DML Research Associates Summer Institute. In the video below, Norris discusses the teachers’ experiences with the design thinking exercises and how they struggled to apply it to their own disciplines and their original understandings of teaching. Below are a few excerpts, but the whole video illustrates design thinking’s potential to foster student engagement when teachers and youth undergo the same learning experiences.
It’s a site where equity, inclusion and diversity is very important, and they weave it throughout all of the professional development activities, so it got me to put all of these pieces together. They're not fitting together neatly, but I am enjoying the messiness of it.
Humanities teachers are trying to figure out, “how does this work within my discipline?” What they tend to do is bring in stuff -- they will show a video or a PowerPoint and will teach the kids how to do their own PowerPoint presentations -- but there’s very limited interaction with it. It’s very didactic.
I’m really curious to dive deeper into it. I don't want to just say, “design thinking is the solution to everything.” This is why I am researching this to actually find out what is here and what it can actually do. Where can it be tweaked? I feel that with any methodology you can do some transformation and make it better.
I’m hoping that over these different iterations that I have seen, the teachers and the students will hone this design methodology to best fit their school space.
Aaminah Norris - DML Summer Institute 2012 from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
Production credit: Marc Bacarro
Banner image credit: Courtesy of Aaminah Norris
For more information on this research, please visit www.aaminahnorris.com
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
How to Use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool: Adrianne Wadewitz
May 6, 2013 - 3:35pm
Wikipedia is often not thought of as a platform for pedagogy, since so many teachers explicitly tell their students to steer clear of the site as a source of information. However, as a site for learner-driven inquiry and informal education, it is without question the chief reference point for many discussions from matters of general knowledge to areas of arcane expertise.
Adrianne Wadewitz would like to provide more explicit instruction about not only reading Wikipedia but also writing Wikipedia in the classroom context. She has helped write a helpful brochure from the Wikimedia Foundation on “How to Use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool” to provide more opportunities for classrooms to engage with the popular collectively authored online reference work. Wadewitz has authored the bulk of several large Wikipedia entries based on credibility that she earned contributing her labor to smaller edits over the years and advises others to learn the craft of collaborative editing before tackling major writing projects. 
Wadewitz has provided workshops about effective Wikipedia interventions at more than a dozen institutions in recent years. She sat down for an interview shortly after leading the Global Women Wikipedia Write-In at UCLA, which she described as an important event as a model for everyday civic engagement as “a type of writing into history and into the current record what we value in our world.” (More information about the event is here at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
When asked to identify the most common mistakes instructors make when assigning students to contribute to Wikipedia, Wadewitz argued that “the biggest one is not understanding that the encyclopedia is made up of editors.” While an “old-fashioned” reference work like Britannica can be approached naively as “just entries that you go to and read” without serious consequences, “the essence of Wikipedia is the community,” which means respecting “its efforts” and understanding how “a global group of editors” might “work collaboratively” and “to think about it ahead of time.”
Wadewitz described a wide range of successful prompts for teachers and instructors. She characterized the most common assignment given to students as “to research a topic and write an article – for example in a neuroscience class.” Such assignments might replace a conventional research paper. However, although many of the norms about writing and editing already in place in a traditional classroom setting are transferable to Wikipedia, significant adaptations are usually necessary, and instructors need to allot enough time for the task as a capstone assignment meriting sustained attention.
Such assignments aren’t limited to college students, according to Wadewitz. “We’ve had high school teachers do Wikipedia projects. The ones I’ve seen are in the sciences, such as researching a particular insect or bird.” These assignments benefit from the fact that there is a “strong structure” existing for such entries, and students can “go out and take pictures” and collect information about habitat, diet, or reproduction from other sources. Such assignments model “how you learn biology” and can “make them little scientists.” Furthermore, learning about the scientific literature describing a particular animal is often manageable for students as young as the 10th grade and generally requires less expertise than a topic like DNA biochemistry.
Wadewitz also described assignments that ask students to “read an article and figure out what is missing,” since the “most common error” in Wikipedia articles is “that they are incomplete.” She recommended going to the talk page of the article to find out if editors have already identified potential shortcomings for future work.
In addition to figuring out what kind of information should be in the article, Wadewitz argued that “copyediting typos” and “fixing spelling mistakes” was hardly a trivial matter. For example, although sentence level work might sound insignificant, “making all the pronouns in an article gender-neutral” might be “a very important change to make.” Furthermore, as Wadewitz pointed out, “there is nothing like copyediting to make you a better writer, and there is nothing like practice to improve writing.” She describes how “even 10-13 year olds will write every day on Wikipedia” and make substantive contributions about movies and videogames.
Wadewitz observed that “multimedia is one of the places where people can contribute the most by Wikipedia.” Because all images must either be covered by a Creative Commons share-alike license or be in the public domain, it can be difficult to locate usable primary sources “in the world of the web.” This requires helpful editors to create images, maps, or diagrams, such as those of the human body. Such content “would need to be created by users and donated,” which can be tricky when such illustrating know-how is not common. Similarly, “recordings of music under copyright unless people donate them.” (Rights regarding composition and rights regarding performance can make musical licensing very tricky, of course). In particular, she noted how useful it can be to have “videos illustrating dance steps,” because “a little video clip that someone has donated makes the dance moves much clearer.” Compared to commercial reference works, Wadewitz said Wikipedia was “poor on the multimedia side since it can’t license content” in the way profit-earning sites can.
When asked to identify common mistakes made on the side of instructors, she pointed out that “not taking enough time to design an assignment” could be a fatal error committed by novices, particularly those who are excited by the potential for participatory learning. Diving right in and learning by trial and error “works for a lot of technology,” but “with Wikipedia you are engaging with a lot of people on the other end,” so you need to articulate feasible learning goals that respect existing community practices.
Although a brief Wikipedia article might seem to be easier than “a twenty-page research paper” to compose, it is actually “extremely difficult for students to write an article” in its entirety, even if the instructor generates “a timeline for students and tells them exactly what is expected of them,” since “there are many skills to learn, much preparation required, and everybody’s learning.” She warned that students know more about composing in familiar genres such as the academic essay and often don’t recognize conventions in Wikipedia articles.
(With my own Wikipedia assignment for UC San Diego first-year students, I only ask students to create an article appropriate to Wikipedia rather than have them edit “live” on the site. I find that just locating appropriate Wikipedia articles to link to can be challenging, even with a classroom practice lesson on working with hyperlinks as a warm-up. As an alternative, instructors can have writers practice in a Wikipedia sandbox site where their novice status is less likely to raise the ire of more experienced editors).
Wikipedia and Women
In arranging these recent “Wikistorming” events on different campuses, Wadewitz specifically has been advocating for Wikipedia edits that target feminist concerns. As she explained, “the point of doing feminist outreach is you need to find not only women but also feminists. Right now only 10 percent of editors are women, but just because we recruit more women doesn’t mean we recruit more feminists.” In considering who gets “written out of history” she wants to encourage active questioning of “the structures of knowledge.” She reminded readers that feminists can be male or female as they offer “new perspectives” rather than merely “replicate the structures of the past.” Specialized databases behind paywalls may make this information available to scholars, but the common knowledge that drives many Wikipedia searches isn’t well served if information isn’t free.
Such activism poses a potential problem for Wikipedia’s dictum about “no original research,” but Wadewitz argues that Wikipedia templates and conventions are capacious enough to cite new kinds of sources and to incorporate new information to build a better global reference work than existing print sources. She admitted, however, that “every edit is political,” because “you can’t put in every piece of information and you can’t use every source.” For example, her entry on the female rock climber Lynne Hill included a section about gender politics, and she arranged Hill’s story about being discriminated against with a whole section devoted to the topic, “because I study gender and think about it in this way.” Her entries on Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen “would have looked different” if generated by another scholar, but she asserted that her approach was actually more consistent with the Wikipedia philosophy governing men’s entries by going beyond biography to address the contributions made by these women’s work as writers. In a recent blog post she described the work being done and yet to be done to address the gender gap in more detail.
Many people have only become recently aware of these issues because of the recent Op-Ed piece in The New York Times that blasted the site for taking notable female authors out of the listings for “America Novelists” to consign them to “American Women Novelists” and making the “American Novelists” page effectively all male. Wadewitz emphasized the fact that “Wikipedians were actually being reasonable” by deliberating about the issue and reaching a gender neutral solution with almost unanimous agreement, although she does not regret the fact that the snafu “generated immense press interest in the problem of gender on Wikipedia.”
You can see photo documentation from one of Wadewitz’s Wikistorming events here.
Banner image credit: AJ Strout. The image includes, from left to right, Ari Schlesinger, Hana Wuerker, Susie Ferrell, and Sophy Cohen taking part in a Wikipedia editing session led by Adrianne Wadewitz.
Secondary image credit: Adrianne Wadewitz.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Philadelphia: A Case Study on the Importance of Internet Access in Public Spaces
May 3, 2013 - 1:30pm
We live in a world today where broadband access is becoming increasingly necessary for attaining jobs, expanding innovation and remaining globally competitive. Even in an iconic city like Philadelphia many residents are struggling to gain basic access to technology. Based on findings from a 2011 poll from the Pew Internet and American Life Project and Knight Foundation, 41 percent of Philadelphia households lack access to the Internet. Some experts have argued that this number could be as high as 55 percent. According to a report released last year by IBM and the city of Philadelphia, it is estimated that by 2030, 600,000 Philadelphians will still be lacking the appropriate technical skills needed in order to meaningfully participate in a networked society. The city has attempted to address these digital access issues in the home through several local initiatives, but Internet use in community spaces can also be a telling measure of broadband adoption as evidenced by the success of the Free Library of Philadelphia Hot Spots program.
Colin Rhinesmith was the lead researcher on the two-year Hot Spots program, which focused on providing access to technology and library services to underserved Philadelphia neighborhoods. Rhinesmith studied what effects this public engagement model had on community member’s everyday experiences with technology. He presented his findings to a group of junior scholars and mentors at the 2012 DML Summer Research Associates Institute in Boston.
During the evaluation process, Rhinesmith discovered that comfort was an essential factor in community broadband adoption. He describes this idea of comfort as one that includes safety, trust, support, and respect. Below are just a few highlights from the interview, but the entire video explores how these findings, which focus on community use of technology in collaborative spaces, can help inform future strategies around federally funded broadband adoption programs.
One of the things that emerged was that a sense of comfort was really, really important…The data really spoke to me by saying no, actually, it’s the gateway to all of it: to access to technology, to gaining skills, to having opportunities, to building a sense of community.
A number of people said that they were hesitant in using the space – there’s hesitancy because there were a lot of places in the community that were here today and gone tomorrow.
People need access to one another. That’s the thing I was really impressed about. These spaces brought together people in a neighborhood. They had seen these people before, but when they are brought together in this space that is supported by the local library, people realized in these focus groups that they had similar interests.
It’s clear that these spaces build community. There’s plenty of evidence to show that. But again, now, how do we continue funding these spaces, and how do we do research in that space to learn more?
As long as the technology changes, there will always be a need for these physical places in a community where people need access to understanding the changes in technology, but also how it impacts their lives.
Production credit: Marc Bacarro
Image credit: Free Library of Philadelphia Hot Spots
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
What Comes After Election Monitoring? Citizen Monitoring of Infrastructure
April 29, 2013 - 8:20pm
I was recently in Senegal at a board meeting for Open Society Foundation, meeting organizations the foundation supports around the continent. Two projects in particular stuck in my mind. One is Y’en a Marre (“Fed Up”), a Senegalese activist organization led by hiphop artists and journalists, who worked to register voters and oust long-time president Abdoulaye Wade. (I wrote about them last week here, and on Wikipedia).
The other is a project run by Open Society Foundation West Africa – OSIWA – with support from partners in Senegal, Liberia, Nigeria and the UK. It’s an election “situation room”, a civil society election monitoring effort that focuses less on declaring elections “free and fair” than on reacting quickly to possible violence, mobilizing community leaders as peacemakers. OSIWA’s method has been used in Nigeria and Liberia, as well as in the Senegalese election where Y’en A Marre was such a powerful actor, as portrayed in the documentary above.
Elections are a moment where civil society often shines. Holding elections has become a major priority for governments, bilateral aid organizations and civil society organizations, and there’s been a good deal of creativity around monitoring elections using parallel vote tabulation and social media monitoring.
But elections don’t always equal development, or even a democratic process. Economist Paul Collier notes that elections in very poor nations often spark violence, and sees evidence that 41% of elections are marred by significant fraud. Elections work, Collier tells us, when governments are evaluated on their performance, not on their propensity for patronage. Citizens need to watch whether governments keep their promises, and oust those that don’t measure up. (See MorsiMeter, developed to monitor the first 100 days of Morsi’s presidency of Egypt).
One question colleagues and I had for the remarkable activists at Y’en A Marre was what they were planning to do now that Wade had been ousted and Macky Sall elected. The bloggers and journalists I spoke to had a number of answers that centered on ensuring the Sall government benefits the rural poor and helping Senegal reduce dependence on international food suppliers. While it’s great to see activists thinking about macroeconomics, it was also clear that the intense focus of the movement – ousting a president who’d overstayed his constitutional mandate – had significantly dissipated, and that new foci hadn’t generated the same energy amongst the hundreds of community leaders who make up the Y’en A Marre movement.
I was thinking about this question – what do election-focused movements do once an election is over? – when I stumbled on this paper from colleagues and friends at Columbia’s Earth Institute. The Columbia team document a system they’ve built for government-hired enumerators in Nigeria, who are using mobile phones equipped with cameras and GPS to conduct a census of the nation’s essential infrastructure: boreholes (wells), schools, health clinics, etc. The teams rapidly mapped over a quarter million points of data, one of the larger extant sets of information on the Nigerian government’s efforts at service delivery.
As the Columbia authors explain, mapping using mobile phones is less a clever gimmick than a technical necessity – make a map with paper surveys and you’re transferring long GPS coordinates by hand. A simple application that stores a GPS reading, a picture and a human report allows for a large set of “human sensors” to rapidly build a data set.
People involved with the Columbia project have worked on version of this idea that are more expressive – Matt Berg (who took over some of the Geekcorps work I’d helped start in Mali) worked with a nonprofit in Kolkata to help children map trash and public health issues in their neighborhoods, overlaying data on maps they’d drawn by hand of their home communities. And other projects have focused on helping communities map their infrastructures and needs through a combination of digital and analog means, notably Map Kibera, which has worked to create accurate maps of one of Nairobi’s largest slums.
It strikes me that a major opportunity for groups like Y’en A Marre to remain active between elections is to take on a role as citizen monitors. If the key to a successful democracy is a government that delivers services and is elected based on its performance, then documenting whether campaign promises get met is a critical step towards responsive government. In most African nations where I’ve worked, campaign promises center primarily on building infrastructures: “Name me to Parliament and I will ensure we’ll have 20 new primary schools and clean water in every village.” Citizens need to be able to verify those claims. Even in developed nations, those are hard claims to verify – ProPublica memorably turned to crowdsourcing to determine whether US federal stimulus money was being put to work, or sitting in local government coffers. (Most of it was put to work quite quickly). If it’s hard to understand the local impacts of federal spending in the US, it’s really hard in nations that have a weak press, a culture of government secrecy or little ability to collect on the ground data.
I’d like to find ways to help groups like Y’en A Marre, Enough is Enough and others collect and share data, creating open data sets useful to activists, journalists, governments and the development community. The same data could help governments document their successes, journalists monitor government spending and activists demand equitable resource distribution in their communities. I can imagine projects that incorporate low-cost CO sensors that talk to phone to monitor vehicular and cooking stove pollution; projects that invite people to document their favorite and least favorite parts of their cities and villages; projects that enlist broad cooperation by compensating participants for their time with mobile phone minutes, as Esoko does to collect agricultural market information. Other monitoring projects could focus on rapid response. My friend Tunde Ladner of Wangonet began a project in Lagos that encouraged people to report dangerous construction underway, a critical dataset that would demand quick response to protect against building collapse.
I’m thinking about putting some of Center for Civic Media’s resources towards exploring this idea, probably first in Nairobi with friends at Ushahidi and the iHub. If you have ideas about partners, about questions to explore, pushback on the concept of citizen monitoring, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Banner image credit: William Haman (aka Ewns) http://www.flickr.com/photos/william-hamon/1863367722/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Teachers, Youth, and Social Media: Experiments
April 26, 2013 - 6:50pm
While young people are often adept at navigating networked spaces for social purposes in their everyday lives, it is less clear what role schools and teachers should play in that process. In what ways can educators support, mentor, and scaffold youth’s navigation of online spaces to foster rich learning experiences and ethical communication practices?
Amy Stornaiuolo, an assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, explored this topic from 2008-2011 while serving as the research coordinator for a large-scale design research project that studied how youth around the world communicated on a private social network called space2cre8. In her dissertation project, Stornaiuolo studied how teachers in Australia, Norway, United States, South Africa and India worked with students who created and shared multimedia projects with one another in hopes of better understanding the pedagogical implications of social networking. Stornaiuolo presented her findings to a group of junior scholars and mentors at the 2012 Summer Research Associates Institute.
In the video below, Stornaiuolo describes the challenges that arose in adapting social networking to an educational setting, especially when young people were interacting with others whom they had never met before. As teachers collaboratively figured out how to integrate social media into their existing pedagogies, they were able to guide students in connecting with each other by authoring multimodal compositions, coordinating written and spoken language with images, music, and other symbol systems to great effect. To Stornaiuolo’s surprise, the students made a concentrated effort to be considerate communicators across the social network platform, and her research examined the role of teachers in fostering these hospitable communicative efforts. Below are a few excerpts, but Stornaiuolo’s full interview takes a close look at how new composition practices are reshaping young people’s relationships to writing.
The teachers needed to take a more facilitative role where they actually got in and worked with the students and tried to develop critical digital literacy practices around the network. But they didn't feel comfortable doing that, and it really linked to their belief that social networking and these kinds of social practices…really were things that were separate from that traditional academic work.
Until the teachers stepped in and actually started creating opportunities and helping students think about the ways that they might participate on the social network in an educationally turned manner, nothing really happened on there. It ended up becoming a central tension throughout the whole project and really manifested in the lack of interaction on the network.
How can we think about extending our theories of what it means to compose in ways that are not necessarily words in these networked contexts where audiences can now comment back and shape the way things are framed?
Amy Stornaiuolo - DML Summer Institute 2012 from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
Video production credit: Marc Bacarro
Banner image credit: Gates Foundation
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gatesfoundation/6093017647/in/set-72157627445705497/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
In Pursuit of In(ter)dependent Learning: Kio Stark
April 22, 2013 - 6:35pm
Humans are by far the most skilled social learners of this planet’s millions of species. We’re biologically equipped to pay attention to and learn from each other, and we’ve devised cultural tools such as speech and writing to augment our biologically endowed cognitive capabilities. We’ve created institutions to equip our young people to benefit from and contribute to civilization. Unfortunately, as is often the case with powerful inventions, schooling has its drawbacks – foremost among them the dulling of many young people’s hunger for independent learning. I’ve thought about these issues ever since I was identified as a troublemaker by my first grade teacher for my inability to sit still and listen to her drone on about knowledge I had already sought out on my own.
Don’t get me wrong. Public education has helped lift billions of people out of ignorance and poverty. My mother was a public school teacher. I’ve been a university lecturer for the past eight years. And my daughter managed to navigate sixteen years of schooling without damaging her eagerness to learn. But one important change has erupted in recent decades, enabled by the advent of digital media and networks, that alters the traditional power equation between holders and seekers of knowledge: schools no longer hold the monopoly on learning. When I want to learn how to do something, I can find a video, an Instructable, a blog post, a peer-learning platform. Schooling is still essential for many – perhaps for most – but for independent learners, tools we didn’t dream of a generation ago are available through the nearest web-connected device.
Every teacher reading this, and many more people, are already thinking of the obvious rebuttal – that media access and hunger for knowledge aren’t all there is to effective learning. Teachers direct learning, correct errors, answer questions, pose problems, inspire effort, set up collaboration, and encourage exploration. The alphabet isn’t all you need to be literate. At some point, most of us learn to read. Usually in a school. Almost always from a teacher. There’s a methodology to learning. Fortunately, a cornucopia of learning methodologies are also available to those who know how to find and crap-detect them.
I was thinking about these issues a lot toward the end of 2011, while I was composing the UC Regents’ Lecture in which I proposed the initiation of a volunteer-driven effort to create a free online handbook for independent learners. At that time, I was excited to encounter Kio Stark’s Kickstarter campaign for a book she wanted to finish, Don’t Go Back to School, “a handbook based on over 80 interviews with people who have successfully taught themselves a wide variety of skills and subjects outside of school.” The Kickstarter campaign was launched Nov. 11, 2011, funding ended successfully on Dec. 15, 2011, and the book is available as of this month.
In our brief video interview, I talked with Stark about what she learned from independent (more properly, we should probably call them “interdependent”) learners like “Cory Doctorow about learning to be a working writer, Dan Sinker about learning to code, Quinn Norton about learning neurology and psychology.” I suspect that Anya Kamenetz, Kio Stark, and the Peeragogy Project are forerunners of an entire nascent genre about how to learn anything outside of formal schooling.
In Pursuit of In(ter)dependent Learning: Kio Stark from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
Banner image credit: EWagner79 http://www.flickr.com/photos/65258022@N06/6908048618/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
An Ecosystem for Mentorship: A New Vision for College Communities
April 18, 2013 - 4:05pm
On a recent college visit, I was pleased to find a great model for an entire ecosystem of mentorship. Colorado Christian University (CCU) students/faculty had been touting their solid community, and for all I can tell, it appears legit by design.
The campus is small, 1200-1500, and somewhat affluent (at least the tuition calls for much money). But I believe their layered, overlapping and differentiated means for everyone being known by someone, begs neither small size nor large expense.
A brief description:
1:150; 8-5; 5 days/wk: Their life direction program is a center providing a one-stop for all needs a student might have. It’s housed/staffed from 8-5 everyday. For most staff, this is their only responsibility. Each staff facilitates the same – approximately 150 – students for all four years the students are there. Kids can drop in to the center whenever they need to.
1:50?; on call: Whenever they aren't in class, academic mentors are pretty much on call. It really appears to be much like a family atmosphere, where off hours you find everyone hanging around the campus…like they might around the house. I'm not sure what this ratio might be, but I am assuming less than 1 to 150, since the average class size is around 15. So kids can make an appointment whenever they need to. Academic mentors stay with the same student for all four years as well.
Whole community; twice/wk: They have whole community gatherings twice a week. This is required, but from what I could tell, it was a highlight for everyone.
1:20; 24/7: Dorm-like apartments are grouped by what they call stairwells. There are 20 students to one upperclassman. This is pretty much a 24/7 on-call situation. Most appeared to gather at least 3-4 times a week for formal/informal events. One of the freshman classes is taken with this group along with a stairwell of the opposite sex. So they pretty much live together, but also take a course together that first year.
1:1; 24/7: They have a couple security people who ride around the campus 24/7 at the students’ beck and call. One of the first things students get is their cell phone numbers.
2 get-aways: They go on at least two weekend retreats a year.
I love the many levels, and the many different kinds of connection, that are available.
The school's president, upon his arrival, (I can’t remember what year he arrived), took down the doors of his office and put in big glass doors. He walks the campus often, for casual conversation, often asking what book a person is reading.
He also says that they are seeking out homeschool/unschool students because they are proving to be highly self-directed.
_______________________________
Perhaps even more key is the prior to attending piece:
I also believe that their (CCU’s – and probably many others) structured connections prior to attending is huge. Perhaps it could replace ACT/SAT, diploma, … even portfolio, et al, by helping kids find out if they really want to go somewhere. [So, boldly suggesting it's more about fittingness than fitting/getting in]. It's about helping kids/people find it out in a more timely and humane way, specifically, by connecting them to a current/live student, as mentor.
Over the last four years, we have come across kids wishing they could experiment with/visit /live-in – with no risk (perhaps audit) a university/college they are interested in – so that the uni is not such a mystery. We’ve had kids think they wanted to go one place, no doubt in their minds. We get them in, then shortly thereafter, once they actually see what is there, they change their minds. They realize it wasn’t what they imagined. What if that mystery didn’t exist, at least not to the extent it does now. What if the kids who actually apply/enroll are already embedded in the system enough to know?
[Thinking EMOOCs here, millions enroll, only thousands finish. That should tell us something. We need more options for people to check things out without having to pay first, without punishment of some withdrawal stigma. If we are clever, that will actually cost less than we are spending now – people/money/time/energy/resources – to get people into the places that are the best fit for them. If we can get past the competition mentality and think more in terms of public education – being – what's best for all people because if all people are their best, communities flourish].
Imagine there being no entry evaluation, just the kind of structured connections like CCU already has in place.
i.e.: So you want to go to CCU/uni – here is a person(s) – students/counselors – assigned to you. There are several Facebook pages, multiple ways to have connection with a live student who will honestly answer your questions and invite you to come check it out.
No longer are the ginormous admissions staffs doing what they’ve been doing – taking in thousands of applications, thousands of which have 4.0’s, perfect ACT scores, deliberating between them, selecting their max, but then many are still not a good fit, as seen in the need for remedial courses, freshman dropout rate, et al. Perhaps the reason many are still not a good fit is mostly because the kid, having been through a system that praises 4.0’s and high test scores, doesn’t know what he/she wants, doesn’t know how to figure out what he/she wants, and has only heard that college is the place to be. Then perhaps the kids finds out how similar it is to the last 12 years.
This system of structured connections prior to could be a huge resource to universities/colleges with a mission of making the world a better place – turning over control issues, value issues, getting-in issues, and considering their spaces as spaces of experimentation. A very chaordic structure of breathtaking efficiency/resiliency/humanity. De-centralizing the university.
_______________________________
Surely something like this could be worked out in a city – to make sure everyone is known by someone. The beauty, it would offer more potential for attachment than today’s system. And because it’s based more on availability – being on call – than seat time, it would free more people (young and old) to spend more time developing not only richer/deeper relationships, but more time doing/being what matters.
Potential visuals of options for the rest of the day – city as uni/school. Affording the time and space (physical & mental) we all need/crave.
[Imagine – if this little/ginormous idea not only helps with college/uni entrance, but it ends up curing our obsession/dilemma with the getting-in, the proving proof, the sticking-to-it-ness, the sustainability.. the happiness.. the planet...]
Banner and secondary image credit: Courtesy of monika hardy
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Writing for Interaction, Part 2
April 16, 2013 - 10:40am
Media and literary theorists have argued for some time that reading is an inherently interactive process. To give only one example, the history of reading is mostly a history of bodily performance: reading to an audience or group, or reading out loud to oneself. It was only in the Middle Ages that reading silently to oneself became an accepted norm in the west. Since that time, reading out loud has continued to be a popular practice, and much writing, like poetry, is specifically designed to take advantage of this form of interaction. This can be seen in writing that emphasizes literary effects like alliteration that are particularly evident when spoken aloud.
As our reading has become increasingly digital, opportunities for interaction have increased. Traditional forms of interacting with a text, such as note taking, have become social, networked practices, while entirely new practices are emerging. While readers have always been able to read a text in whatever order they choose, the hypertext nature of electronic reading has opened up new possibilities for non-linear storytelling, giving readers opportunities to find multiple paths through a text or other media. With the increasing use of mobile devices in the U.S., it has become possible to create books and other media that are such as location-aware, changing their behavior based on where the reader is.
Given all this, what does writing for interaction look like? That is, how can writers take advantage of the forms of interaction made possible by digital technologies?
Writing for interaction resists closure. I don't mean this in the sense that interactive writing does not contain narrative arcs or arrive at specific conclusions. Rather, writing for interaction opens possibilities for new stories or layers of interaction beyond a singular narrative. It is an invitation to continue a conversation about a topic. While such writing may have a strong point of view, its purpose is to allow for multiple responses to the text, for readers to arrive at conclusions or catharsis through the process of reading suggested by the text. This type of writing could take multiple forms. On the Web it is typified by the feedback loops of blog comments. In ebooks and videogames, it can take the form of social networks that expand on character or facilitate discussion.
Writing for interaction surrenders control. Following on the last point, authors should expect readers to make or create something new with their writing. This could take the form of a text that alters with the reader's movement in space, or allows for remix or reader responses. This process doesn't mean that authors should surrender their work to others in all cases. Instead, they should recognize that writing exists in an environment of making and sharing, and they should encourage this when appropriate.
One final note. The Web tends to generate an unpleasant form of this interaction, writing that is specifically intended to generate emotions like anger or outrage, because such reactions fuel the kind of viral response that the Web monetizes particularly well. The goal of writing for interaction is creating a productive experience for readers, not simply antagonizing them. While our term for this behavior—trolling—is new, the behavior itself is old, existing for as long as it has been profitable to incite an audience. This is where educators can play a key role in the emergence of digital, interactive writing; namely, by teaching students how to write in these environments in an ethical manner.
Banner image credit: MillyNeT http://www.flickr.com/photos/millynet/98031764/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Children and Computers in Paraguay: Studying What Works and What Doesn't
April 11, 2013 - 3:00pm
Can technology really transform education in developing countries? That was the goal of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child, but since its founding in 2005, the organization has been the subject of debate as many in the education sector have questioned its utopian vision and its ability to fulfill its promises.
In 2010, Morgan Ames, a PhD candidate in Stanford's Department of Communication, spent six months examining these debates by conducting ethnographic fieldwork with Paraguay Educa, a local non-governmental organization (NGO) responsible for leading the deployment of 9,000 laptops in Paraguay starting in 2009. Ames presented her research findings to a group of junior scholars and mentors at the 2012 Summer Research Associates Institute.
In the video below, Ames talks about the hopes and potentials of the OLPC program and the realities of the learning that took place. Even with Paraguay Educa’s ongoing teacher training, Ames observed that the majority of students used the ‘XO’ laptops for media consumption purposes – watching movies or listening to music – while only a handful were inspired to produce creative projects using built-in education programs such as Scratch, eToys, and Turtle Art. Ames notes that parental support at home was a crucial component in shaping a child’s motivation and educational interests. According to Ames, support in the form of full-time teacher trainers also made a significant difference in use of the laptops in the second half of the program.
Below are a few key takeaways from the video, but the entire interview gives a personal look into the challenges NGOs, which often have to set lofty goals to attract funder support, undergo when undertaking these deployments.
There were definitely kids who were more adept – who were really passionate about a particular program. They would even label themselves “scratcheros” and “etyoseras,” and it became an important identity because they became local experts that people could go to.
When I went home with them and I interviewed their parents, I found out that in all cases their parents were already very oriented towards education. In many cases their parents didn't know much about computers in particular, but they were very good at identifying things that were educational vs. not educational...They would steer their kids towards thinking critically about things – towards asking questions.
If you don't have something helping guide you through how to do really interesting things with this new machine, I think it is really hard to discover on one’s own. I think this is one thing that a lot of NGOs and a lot of discourse around education in general underemphasize because there is a lot of focus on the exceptional students.
In Paraguay, One Laptop Per Child has definitely been an incremental improvement, but it is incremental. If social change were easy, we’d see it happening all over the place all of the time. It’s difficult to change these institutions.
Morgan Ames - DML Summer Institute 2012 from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
Video production credit: Marc Bacarro
Banner image credit: Courtesy of Morgan Ames
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Why Organizations Large and Small Should Align with Mozilla's Web Literacy Standard
April 8, 2013 - 5:10pm
At Mozilla we don't like silos. We believe in innovating upon open standards and in ensuring that the Web remains an open platform. That's why our Firefox web browser exists. It's why we're working on Firefox OS. And it's why we're delighted to have recently launched v1.0 of the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). In a previous post I introduced our latest work engaging the community around a new, open learning standard for Web Literacy. In this post I want to elaborate on that and explain how the standard might work in practice.
One of the great things about the OBI is that it's a platform for innovation. It allows work that previously would have gone on in well-intentioned silos to be joined up and unleashed across the entire Web.
At the moment there are many people doing wonderful work all over the world helping people not only elegantly consume but actually write and contribute towards parts of the Web. These Webmaker-makers, or mentors, face three main problems: a lack of commonality in approach; much duplication of effort; and learners being presented with a somewhat haphazard model of learning.
This is why we at Mozilla have been working since the beginning of the year on a new, open learning standard for Web Literacy using the OBI to solve this threefold problem. At the core of this are two main concepts: aligning with the Web Literacy standard, and badge validation. You can find out more about the latter by reading and commenting on a working paper by my colleague Erin Knight.
Very briefly, aligning with the standard looks something like this:
Organizations, be they big or small, focused on formal or informal learning, can choose to align with all or part of the Web Literacy Standard. So if (using an example from the badge validation paper) Eve's Company is a small non-profit focusing on privacy, then they can align specifically with that element of Web Literacy standard.
Eve's Company could use their expertise to create new badges aligned with sub-sections of the 'Privacy' element of the Web Literacy standard. Or they could use badges created by other organizations (including Mozilla). The metadata in these badges would point towards the relevant URLs of the Standard, much as each part of the Common Core standards features its own unique URL.
Instead of merely providing stand-alone learning activities, Eve's Company adds value for both themselves as an organization and for learners by issuing and aligning with the Web Literacy standard:
- Eve's Company no longer feels as much pressure to create content in areas outside of their expertise
- The work of Eve's Company has wider currency (through the OBI) and is more discoverable
- Learners gain more options in terms of the places they can level-up in their Web Literacy skills
The kind of badges that Eve's Company creates may very well be different from badges created by other organizations also aligning with the 'Privacy' element of the Web Literacy Standard. This is a positive step as it allows for diversity in learners' learning pathways and caters to their needs. A sample learning pathway may look like this:
Another new part of the metadata now available with Open Badges is a 'tag'. This means that Eve's Company can differentiate themselves from others aligning with the standard by (for example) adding 'non-profit' and 'empowerment' tags to aid discoverability for learners.
Ultimately, as Erin points out in the badge validation paper, third parties will be able to endorse badges aligned with standards like Web Literacy. In the example with Eve's Company, Mozilla (or another privacy-focused organization) might recognize the quality and popularity of the badges they issue and offer to endorse them. As a result these badges will not only be technically validated through the OBI but feature a level of pedagogic and social validation through their alignment with the standard.
No matter what size organization you represent we would love you to get involved in helping define and iterate this new, open learning standard for Web Literacy. Here's how you can get involved:
- Before April 26th: Join us on our weekly Community Calls and discussion group as we seek to get a draft version of the standard ready for April 26th. Explore whether your organization might want to align with the Web Literacy standard.
- By October: Help us iterate the standard and play-test it in various contexts. We're aiming to launch v1.0 of the standard at the Mozilla Festival in London at the end of October.
The landing page for all of the work that we're doing around the Web Literacy standard on the Mozilla wiki is http://mzl.la/weblitstd. Do join in if you can. :-)
Image credit: Sample learning pathway image courtesy of my colleague Carla Casilli
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
How Does Globalization Shape Education Reform?
April 5, 2013 - 2:05pm
“We're living in a 21st century knowledge economy, but our schools, our homes, and our culture are still based around 20th century expectations,” said then-Senator Barack Obama in a 2005 speech to the American Library Association. In the past decade, there’s been increased discussion amongst education stakeholders in regards to new openings for education reform around the global economy’s transition to this singular postindustrial era of which Obama spoke.
But according to Daniel Araya, a Research Fellow in Learning and Innovation with the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (I-CHASS) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), education reform is actually rooted in several overlapping and contradictory models of the knowledge economy. Araya’s dissertation focuses on this idea that policy makers must take into account multiple knowledge economies (e.g., the green economy, the network economy, the creative economy, and the expanding “smart” economy) before they can begin to tackle education reform for the 21st century.
In the video below, Araya, who presented his research at the 2012 Research Associates Summer Institute, discusses the U.S.’s decline as a global hegemonic power and how this shift, along with education policy’s lack of a solid understanding of continuing economic changes, will affect future reform.
Intuitively, I resonate with the idea that globalization has a strong sort of magnetic pull on policy makers, but on a local level people don't see that because they are responding to whatever the issue of the day is and what their constituents require.
If you look at the foundation of education on a mass level – mass industrial education – they are interdependent with factories and industrial systems, so what we would call mass education today is very much the outcome of the industrial process…Could we go beyond it so that we could have an education system that supports more than just factory workers or human capital?
Speculating in any one direction is a gamble. I’m making the argument that no matter where you put your money, as a nation-state, it’s a gamble. There’s too much hubris in the argument that the knowledge economy is where we’re headed and that there’s no alterative to that. It’s not just naïve, but it’s exaggerated.
In China in particular, the concern is, “We’re not creative enough; we need to do more,” and in the United States the question is, “How can we maintain our creativity in order to go forward into a postindustrial future?” There’s this friction between how loose the education system should be and how anchored it should be to a testing regime, essentially an assessment system.
Daniel Araya - DML Summer Institute 2012 from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
Video production credit: Marc Bacarro
Banner image credit: sakechaud http://www.flickr.com/photos/sakechaud/3191723058/
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Interview: T. Mills Kelly on 'Lying About the Past' and Media Literacy
April 2, 2013 - 2:20pm
Professor T. Mills Kelly is a historian at George Mason University in Washington, D.C. In 2012, he and students of his course, 'Lying About the Past', became headline news after it was uncovered that they had created “false facts” about fictional events and posted them online in blogs, videos and Wikipedia entries.
Professor Kelly believes this method of working-through is true to the learning objectives of the course and, moreover, that it is the best way to instill a deep understanding of practical ethics. Yet he was lambasted for unethical use of the Internet by fellow academics (some of whom had themselves fallen for the hoaxes) and Web developers – including Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales.
Here, Professor Kelly explains his intentions in devising the original course, how students have become more media literate since that time, and why he believes his university has not approved the course for future syllabi.
What was Lying About the Past?
Lying About the Past was a course I developed designed to teach students greater skepticism about online historical sources (and historical sources in general). The organizing theme of the course was the history of historical hoaxes because I wanted the students to see just how easy (and at the same time how complicated) it was to perpetrate a historical hoax, how easy it was to be fooled by a hoaxer, and at the same time, to have fun while learning about the past.
What was your objective in teaching Lying About the Past?
I wanted my students to learn to think critically about the sources they were using in their own research, especially online sources. I wanted them to become just as skeptical about what they were encountering as professional historians are. Teaching students this sort of skepticism is something history educators wrestle with all the time, because students (and the general public) tend to set a pretty low standard when it comes to deciding whether a historical source is one they should trust or not.
At the same time, I wanted my students to have fun. I'm a very popular instructor and so I think it's fair to say that my students enjoy themselves in my classes. But they weren't having fun, by which I mean they weren't laughing, they weren't taking a playful approach to the serious work we were doing, and so on. I don't think fun and serious purpose are antithetical – just look at the workplace environments created by very successful companies such as Google.
How did it exceed your expectations?
The course, which I've now taught twice, exceeded my expectations in two ways.
First, it really worked when it came to teaching skepticism even as we were having fun. I can't imagine any student who took one or the other iterations of this course ever accepting at first glance any online historical source as being valid. I think they will all continue to be very skeptical about what they are reading or viewing for a very long time.
The other way the course exceeded my expectations – and this was something I had not anticipated – was that we spent the entire semester discussing and debating the ethics of the historical profession. After all, what we were doing in the course – creating historical hoaxes and turning it loose online for two weeks – skated out onto thin ethical ice. As a result, the ethics of the historical profession were central to our work the entire semester. In the vast majority of history courses, ethics only comes up early in the semester when the professor admonishes his/her students about plagiarism, after which ethics never come up again. That historians spend so little time thinking about the ethics of our profession is evident in the fact that the Library of Congress holds only a few books devoted to the ethics of the professional historian.
Why do you think this method of teaching/structure was so effective?
Central to the teaching of this course was turning my students loose to exercise their creative impulses. Recent research on how young people use digital media indicates that for the rising generation of students, the digital realm is a space of creation (where they make things) as well as a space of extraction (where they go to obtain things). By asking my students to create something, in this case a historical hoax, and then giving them the room to create that thing and put it out into the public domain, I was meeting them where they already live. Because they thought there was just a chance they might fool someone with their hoax, they worked incredibly hard to perfect the hoaxes they were creating. At the same time, because the course challenged them to think critically about ethics, they were doing something they simply don't do in other history courses and the difficulties our work posed forced them to think in ways they generally haven't. And, of course, because they were having fun, they came to class every day excited, engaged, and ready to work hard.
How do you respond to the criticism that the benefit of instilling critical thinking of a very small number of people (your students) doesn’t outweigh the cost of "polluting" (as Jimmy Wales described it) the content of the Web for an audience of potential millions?
First of all, I think it's an exaggeration to claim that my students "polluted" the content of the Web. The three hoaxes that they perpetrated were about such obscure topics that had my course not been written about in various media outlets, almost no one would have ever encountered the results of my students' work. So to say that they were somehow polluting the sanctity of the Internet is to claim a much greater importance for their work than is actually warranted.
And that's the way the students wanted it. They wanted their hoaxes to be about obscure, innocuous topics for the very reason that, in our discussions of ethics, they recognized that there were lines they didn't want to cross and one of the important lines was to make sure they were hoaxing about something that just didn't matter.
Second, I think the question plays into a fallacious notion of the Internet as somehow pristine. As we all know, it is riddled with misleading or just downright false content. So, I think that teaching close to 50 students how to be critical consumers of that content, in the ways that I did, was well worth the effort.
The public response is well-known. But less known is how your colleagues and university responded. What was their response? Why?
I think it's fair to say that my course made a number of my colleagues, both here at George Mason and elsewhere, very uncomfortable. And I get that. The course made me uncomfortable. As a historian I've devoted my career to getting things right and so to teach students how to get things intentionally wrong felt wrong to me at many levels, as I'm sure it did to many of my colleagues.
Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in convincing my colleagues here at Mason that what I was doing in the ways I was doing it had sufficient pedagogical merit that I should be allowed to continue. Instead, our undergraduate committee rejected my proposal to have the course included as a formal course in our catalog (I'd taught it twice under a special topics number). The only way they would have accepted the course was if I agreed that my students would not turn their hoaxes loose online. To my way of thinking, that would reduce the central motivating force of the class – the need to do excellent work because that work would be public – into yet another abstract classroom exercise. I was unwilling, for good or ill, to accede to that demand, so I won't be teaching the course any longer.
It's an interesting decision to me for a very specific reason related to the status of teaching versus research in our universities. This is because what my colleagues' decision says is that when it comes to teaching methods, a department can dictate which methods a scholar can or cannot use. I can't imagine that many scholars would tolerate a similar decision about their research methods.
Which elements of Lying About the Past will you incorporate into future syllabi? These can be specific elements, or conceptual content.
The elements of this course that will survive are: playfulness, creativity in the digital space, and a critical examination of historical ethics. I already have the next course sketched out and I will be calling it "Improving the Past."
The past is, as we know, a messy place that could use some cleaning up, if only to make it easier to teach about. My students in this future course will take historical sources and "improve" them in various ways using digital techniques and will then present those improved version online – not with the intent to hoax anyone, but rather, to generate a conversation about the nature of sources, what it means to do violence to sources (think Stalin's removal of Trotsky from all photographs in the official histories of the revolution in Russia) and what it means to teach about the past through imperfect sources.
Just so no one will be taken in by the improved sources my students create, they will be presented in a way that pairs them with the original so that viewers can easily compare the two.
Which will you discard because of the criticism you received from the wider Web community?
I won't be making any changes because of criticism I received from the wider Web community. While I was very interested in the conversation that erupted across the Internet last May about my course, there was nothing in that discussion that caused me to reconsider anything that I or my students had done.
You taught the course twice, four years apart. The "hoax" was discovered far more quickly the second time around. Does this suggest people are becoming more critical of online content, or did your students simply tread into an expert community, which was naturally more dogmatic than the general Web browser?
It's worth remembering that only one of the two hoaxes my students created was called out by the community they tried to hoax (serial killer enthusiasts on Reddit). The other hoax lasted the full two weeks and was then simply exposed by its creators. A dataset of three hoaxes isn't really enough evidence to draw any definitive conclusions, so I'll simply speculate that what happened with the serial killer hoax was, as you suggest, a case of the students choosing an expert community that was better able to ferret out that their work was a hoax.
Banner image credit: http://lisaquinn565.wordpress.com/
T Mills Kelly appears in the first program of the latest series of BBC Radio 4’s Digital Human, ‘Mischief’. It is available as a podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/dh
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Beyond “The Crisis in Civics”
March 28, 2013 - 7:15pm
Two weeks ago, I gave the opening keynote at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Chicago. The conference, which explores how digital media is and could be changing education and learning, focused on the theme of “Democratic Futures: Mobilizing Voices and Remixing Youth Participation.” In the spirit of the theme, my talk examined how digital media is changing how we participate in the civic life of our communities and the world as a whole, and how we might teach a new digital civics.
This is an issue I’ve been thinking through since coming to the Center for Civic Media at MIT. My friends at the Knight Foundation and the founders of the Center – Henry Jenkins, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Mitch Resnick – believed our capacity to participate in governance and work for change is expanded and shifted through tools and techniques newly at our disposal. While there’s good reasons to believe this is true – digital tools make it easier to share your views with large groups of people, to find like-minded people to work with on change, and to raise attention and money – there are also reasons for skepticism that new paths to participation will have the power and impact of older, more established forms of civic participation. I don’t have the answer to the question of whether digital civics is all that different from older models, or whether it’s more effective, but I’ve been trying to introduce language that makes it easier to have these debates.
What follows below isn’t a straight crib of my talk – Erhardt Graeff and Matt Stempeck did a good job of transcribing the talk in this blog post (and if you have the time or inclination, the video of the presentation is here.) Instead, it’s a combination of “what I meant to say” and how I’m thinking through these issues after several helpful conversations about people’s reactions to the talk.
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(The first six paragraphs below appear in an earlier blog post. Full slides for the talk are here.)
In late January 2012, Austin Oberbillig and Evan Ricks, students at Olympia High School in Olympia, Washington made a video called “Lunch Scholars.” The video was meant to be a high school version of “Jaywalking,” a sketch Jay Leno has done for twenty years, where he asks people on the street near his Hollywood studio simple questions – Who was the first U.S. President? – and compiles the funniest answers into video segments for his show. Austin and Evan did the same thing, shooting four hours of footage and editing into just under five minutes, featuring the funniest responses.
And then something interesting happened. The video, posted on Vimeo, later reposted on YouTube, began garnering hundreds of comments, mostly negative. A columnist for The Huffington Post used the video to frame her argument that American students were poorly prepared to compete in a global economy. Conservative pundit Glenn Beck devoted a segment of his radio show bemoaning the state of civic knowledge in American schools and suggesting a government conspiracy to ensure ignorance about civics within the American public education system.
As the video received national attention, the creators came under pressure from school administrators who were concerned about their school’s reputation for academic excellence. Olympia High School is one of the highest ranked high schools in Washington state in terms of SAT scores, AP classes and is defending champion in the state’s “knowledge bowl.” The school’s high prestige made some commentators on the video even angrier – “If students in one of the top 5% performing high schools in Washington State are unable to name the U.S. Vice President, give the number of U.S. states, or correctly identify the American war of independence, what are the educational standards like in the other 95% of Washington schools?” The students who made the video say they came under pressure from the school administration to remove it from the web, and that students met with the ACLU to discuss their rights to publish this video online, though elected not to pursue action against the administration.
I found the Lunch Scholars video when searching for answer to a deceptively complex question: Are American schools doing a good job of teaching civics? The group that believes there is a crisis in civics education is far broader than Glenn Beck devotees. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cites recent national exam results as evidence that we have “a crisis on our hands when it comes to civics education,” a crisis she hopes to address through a set of free, online games about civics. Others sounding a civics crisis alarm note a decline in the number of elementary and high school courses on civics, the fact that civics is rarely part of the state-based assessment testing, and that those students who are tested generally perform poorly on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests on civics, the test O’Connor cited as evidence of our crisis.
So it’s somewhat surprising to discover that, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, students haven’t meaningfully shifted in civic knowledge between 1998 and 2010. (Fourth graders have shown a marked increase in civic knowledge, while eighth and twelfth grades show no major change). It’s likely that what young Americans know about civic life hasn’t shifted meaningfully for the past half-century. For their book, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters, Professor Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter examined decades of data about Americans' knowledge of politics and discovered that overall knowledge has changed very little from WWII to the present. What has changed is how that knowledge is distributed in society – high school graduates in the 1990s were at approximately the same level of knowledge as high school dropouts of the late 1940s, and college graduates at the same level as high school graduates five decades earlier. But because so many more Americans go to college than half a century ago, the average level of civic knowledge is as high (or low). If civics is in crisis, it’s a long crisis, not a sudden development.
There’s a case to be made that youth civic engagement has risen sharply since the mid-1990s, when Delli Carpini and Keeter published their research. Youth voter turnout was above 50% in 2008, up from under 40% in 1996, though young people vote at much lower rates than older people – 51% of people under 30 voted in 2008, as compared to 67% of people over 30. Political engagement amongst college freshmen, as measured by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, reached a 40-year peak in 2008, with 89.5% reporting they had engaged in political discussions.
Rather than concluding that civics is in crisis, it’s worth considering that the practice of civics may be changing shape. We may be used to teaching that is inaccessible and unpersuasive to students at best, and disempowering and conformist at worst. We need to understand the new shapes civics is taking so we can teach people to engage in ways that allow them to effectively assert agency, to bring about the changes, large and small, they want to see in the world.
Like many Americans born in the 1970s, my civics education included Schoolhouse Rock, which featured 10 America Rock segments in its initial run, including the memorable “I’m Just a Bill,” a three-minute explanation of the complex process by which Congressional bills become laws. Much of what I learned about civics in elementary and high school echoed the general tone of Schoolhouse Rock, a simplified version of a system that would admit my limited participation once I became an adult: I could share my concerns with my representative (who I would help elect) and she might author a bill, which could become a law.
Passing laws in Congress is an important part of the American system of government, but it’s a lousy way to introduce young people to civic engagement. For one thing, Congress doesn’t pass a whole lot of laws these days – the 112th Congress, described as the least productive in a half-century, passed 61 bills of 3914 proposed. (Shep Melnick has the best counterargument I’ve read to the idea that the 112th Congress was badly broken, but I remain unpersuaded.) While excellent books like Bob Graham’s America: The Owner’s Manual include stories of young people who’ve had major impacts on legislative processes, for many people, civic engagement is going to unfold far outside the legislative realm.
We tend to teach a version of civics that would have been familiar to 19th century Americans. Aspects of that 19th century model still apply, but we rarely teach the 20th century model of campaigning that governs our electoral processes, or the 21st century forms of participation that may transform governance and engagement. The mismatch between a 19th century understanding and a 21st century reality may help explain widespread distrust and dissatisfaction with government (I’m grateful to Oscar Salazar of CitiVox for the idea of mismatching expectations in American government over the centuries).
Representative democracy rests on the idea that a small number of representatives can meet, face-to-face, and deliberate their way towards solutions, representing the perspectives of their constituents but being open to persuasion through argument and compromise. At the outset of the American experiment, the nation’s founders argued at length about the size of congressional districts, wanting a balance between a number of representatives who could meaningfully debate with one another, and districts small enough to allow representatives to “possess a proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents,” in the words of James Madison in Federalist #55. Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, a long-time advocate for expanding the size of Congress, points out that George Washington’s sole intervention during the constitutional convention was to argue for districts that included 30,000 citizens, not the more massive 40,000 proposed.
Congress hasn’t expanded the total number of districts since 1913, except to add seats for Alaska and Hawaii, and the average representative now speaks for 709,000 people. While it was possible – perhaps even likely – that voters had a personal relationship with their representatives, it’s much less likely now. This, in turn, challenges the logic of representative democracy, raising questions of whether representatives know the opinions of those they represent, and whether those represented trust their representatives.
The shift towards larger districts has been accompanied by a shift towards broadcast democracy, where representatives campaign via newspapers, radio and television, and where broadcast media in turn provides information to representatives about the preferences of their constituents. These broadcast channels amplify a limited number of voices to very large audiences, and with the rise of nationwide cable news networks, they likely have contributed to a shift in which politicians address voters nationally, not just the voters in their communities. Representatives who are out of step with the broader mood of their party are likely to receive criticism from around the nation and will suffer financially when they run for local office, as party money and money from outside donors is likely to be withheld.
In the process, moderates have completely disappeared from the Senate, according to the National Journal, which ranks politicians on ideology based on their voting record and finds that no Republicans are more liberal than any Democrats, or any Democrats more conservative than Republicans. That’s a stark change from a few decades back, when New England Republicans were often more liberal than Southern Democrats. Those liberal Republicans were able to get elected in a state like Massachusetts because many voters found a mix of fiscal pragmatism and compassionate social policy to be an appealing mix. But that mix doesn’t work when audiences are national – Mitt Romney, who was elected governor as a progressive republican was forced to declare himself “severely conservative” when running for the presidency.
The 20th century has seen both the de-regionalization and homogenization of politics and the rise of political specialists who understand how to work the mechanisms of broadcast democracy. Lobbyists have grown powerful offering the vast sums of money necessary to finance television campaigns. Pollsters and media consultants manage the process of determining voter perspectives and communicating messages locally and nationally. While the recent trend in campaigning is towards hyper-targeting, as explored in Sasha Isenberg’s “The Victory Lab,” the technical innovations in identifying and mobilizing the few conservative voters in liberal Cincinnati in the hopes of winning office in Ohio are hardly victories for increased agency – broadcast democracy often treats voters as a mass entity, and targeting treats them as smaller masses, not as independent actors in an ongoing conversation with their representatives to build and shape policy.
With the rise of social media in the 21st century, media has become more personal and less homogenous, leading to concerns that individuals are occupying filter bubbles or echo chambers that make it harder for people to empathize and find common ground with those who hold different opinions. Social media has helped people find micropublics, circles of friends who share an interest or a common history and tend to be highly responsive to each other’s posts, updates and online sharings. People are becoming used to creating “content” of all sorts, and receiving feedback on this content, whether it’s a post about their personal life or their political beliefs.
The U.S. government is slowly adapting to this new reality. We the People is an odd mashup of pre-digital political technology – the petition – with the micropublic, where 100,000 people can join together and demand a response on an issue they are passionate about. In this model, there’s the possibility of creating a community that debates and develops a response to an issue, but that capacity is more latent than realized, as Catherine d’Ignazio reports in her blog post on a White House civic hackathon.
In the meantime, other groups working for social change are acutely aware of the dynamics of social media. Invisible Children’s KONY2012 campaign was flawed in many ways, but it showed a deep understanding of how to use social media to mobilize a massive wave of attention, collecting 100 million views of a 30-minute film in six days. Millions of teenagers used social media to voice their awareness of the issue and to pressure friends, parents and teachers into watching the video and bringing the issue onto their agenda. While criticism of the campaign has noted that Joseph Kony is still at large, Michael Poffenberger of The Resolve made the argument at a conference at MIT in June 2012 that the campaign was wildly successful, inasmuch as President Obama has committed to keeping military advisors in Uganda, and in that military and diplomatic officials in Washington D.C. are acutely aware that there’s a constituency demanding Kony’s capture and prosecution.
If this analysis is right, and we have 21st century voters responding to 20th century campaigns to elect representatives to a 19th century system of governance, it’s not hard to understand widespread dissatisfaction with U.S. government institutions, or why many attempts at social change focus on working outside, not within, these institutions. A common thread between four popular and visible recent political movements – the Tea Party, Occupy, Anonymous and Wikileaks – is acute frustration with the workings of the government and a desire to seek change outside of sanctioned mechanisms. The Tea Party sees government’s ambition as a form of hubris and elects people likely to slow and stall government. Occupy famously resisted calls to issue a set of concrete demands, arguing that their practical experiments in collective decision-making offered an alternative to a government system many saw as irretrievably broken. Wikileaks sees transparency as a way of weeding out corruption in government, which it sees as endemic, and may see government’s overreactions to secrecy as a way to topple corrupt institutions – see Aaron Bady’s analysis of a Julian Assange manuscript that outlines this reading. Anonymous focuses much of its attention on institutions outside of governments – the companies responsible for the “financial blockade” on Wikileaks, the Church of Scientology – and uses tools that manipulate media, not traditional government power.
(I am radically oversimplifying all these movements, and my one-line descriptions may not match your understanding of the movements’ motivations, tactics or values. In my defense, three of the four are explicitly decentralized movements, which can be very hard to pin down. And this is one slide in a 60-slide talk…)
I’d like to find language that helps us explore movements like Occupy and Anonymous, as well as less well known, but fascinating groups like The Harry Potter Alliance, a group that uses youth culture to organize campaigns against rightable wrongs in the world, or the DREAM activists, who are pushing for immigration reform using personal narratives and “coming out” stories about identifying as undocumented and unafraid. Towards that end, I’ve started thinking of civic engagement in terms of a two-dimensional matrix.
The two axes of this matrix move from “thin” to “thick,” and from “symbolic” to “impactful.” This second axis, in particular, is badly named. As I was giving the talk, it became clear that I’d biased my language towards engagement that was in the bottom right quadrant – thick and impactful – and that I was giving the other ends of the axes short shrift. “Voice” would be a better term than “symbolic,” using the term as Albert Hirschman does in “Exit, Voice and Loyalty,” and my colleague Ed Schiappa has suggested “expressive – instrumental” as fairer and more helpful set of labels. I’ve not decided what terms I prefer yet, so I’ll use the slides as written, with the disclaimer that I know these terms aren’t the right ones.
By “thin” engagement, I mean actions that require little thought on your part: sign a petition, give a contribution. In a campaign that uses thin engagement, the campaign’s organizers know what they want you to do and simply need you to show up and do it. In thick engagement, the campaigners ask you for your creativity, your strategic sensibilities, your ability to make media, research, deliberate or find solutions – the campaigners know they want to do something, but they ask you what you think they should do.
Engagement that’s symbolic, or based around voice, is intended primarily to show your support for, opposition to or identity with a cause – there’s little expectation that your voice will lead directly to change, but there’s reason to believe it can change the climate in which that change could occur. By identifying as undocumented and unafraid, DREAMers are trying to make it easier for other undocumented youth to take political action and not be held back by fear of arrest. Through public visibility, not just at marches and demonstrations, but in communities and workplaces, gay and lesbian people have contributed to Americans’ increasing support for equal rights.
On the other side of the spectrum, engagement that is instrumental or focused on a specific impact and outcome seeks change through passing laws, through influencing authorities to change their minds, by building new institutions and infrastructures, or through other paths to a tangible, specific outcome. On this side of the spectrum, engagement tends to lead towards measurable outcomes: bills passed, meals served at a homeless shelter, corporate policy changed by a boycott.
The upper left corner of the matrix, engagement that is thin and symbolic, is a quarter that’s widely criticized. Evgeny Morozov’s critique of slacktivism as activism that has no impact other than to make participants feel like they did something is an applicable critique to some of what unfolds in this space. This is a form of activism easy to ridicule offline as well as online – Xeni Jardin, a breast cancer survivor, has mounted a #pinknausea campaign to counter the “activism through consumption” that characterizes breast cancer awareness month. That said, it’s possible for engagement that is thin and symbolic to have effects: the Million Hoodie March for Trayvon was chiefly a symbolic and attention-gathering act, but it likely had significant impact on bringing Trayvon Martin’s killer to justice. (As you’ll see, the dichotomies proposed on these axes are always complicated and less than absolute).
(NB: Evgeny’s first book, “The Net Delusion," is more about slacktivism than his new book, pictured above, but why not plug the new book? And the cover illustrates this form of engagement well).
We need some types of engagement to be thin. You shouldn’t need to be creative and committed to cast a vote – a voting system that requires thick engagement is likely one that’s limiting and discriminatory. And while there are smart, passionate cases for not voting, like the one Quinn Norton offered in 2012, voting is often impactful, both in terms of electing representatives and in terms of documenting shifts in demographics and attitudes. It’s hard to imagine the Republican party shifting stances on immigration without evidence of Latino voters turning out in large numbers in the 2012 election.
One possible reading of the Occupy movement is as engagement that was thick, but mostly symbolic. It’s hard to deny that Occupiers were creative, dedicated, and participated in inventive and original forms of protest and organizing. Criticisms focused on whether occupying did anything, or whether a movement that opted out of engaging with conventional politics could have impact beyond raising awareness and voicing dissent.
Supporters of Occupy have pointed to campaigns where the movement was engaged in ways that were thick and impactful, like Occupy Sandy, where members of the movement raised funds and provided key supplies and services to victims of the hurricane. It’s easy to see whom these efforts have benefitted, and that the creative solutions designed by Occupiers make clear that they were not following a pre-determined script of thin engagement.
Many of the examples I can find for engagement that’s thick and impactful are deeply embedded in communities, and often includes examples of building new institutions or infrastructures to meet community needs. It’s often difficult to scale this form of engagement beyond these communities – it’s not clear that Occupy Sandy could be replicated to address similar crises across the world.
I’m interested in participating in civic engagement that is thick, impactful and at scale. As someone who’s worked in the social change space for the past fifteen years (Geekcorps, Global Voices, Ushahidi, Open Society Foundation, etc.), I’m sensitive to the idea that a great deal of activism has little measurable impact on the world. While I think many of the hopes early internet adopters had for the internet as a space for engagement that was radically participatory were overblown, I think the ability to author, remix and share content with potentially global audiences is important and argues for the internet as a space that enables thick engagement. The ability to rapidly form groups and to reach audiences beyond the local suggests that it’s easier to work at scale with the advent of the consumer internet.
All that said, it’s clear that my biases are impacting my ability to think about this space in a way that’s clear and comprehensive. Friends danah boyd and Cathy Cohen have both suggested that I’m underestimating the importance and impact of voice, and as you’ll see further on, I’m still wrestling with how symbolic/voice activism can be a form of measurable change.
My reason for starting to think about this matrix was a study I’m carrying out with support from the MacArthur Foundation’s Youth and Participatory Politics initiative. My students, my colleagues and I are working with digital activists from around the world to document their projects and understand what strategies and techniques are working in what countries. Our work began with a deep dive into Mary Joyce and Phil Howard’s Global Digital Activism Data Set – we expected to find a lot of initiatives of the basic form: “I was upset about this issue so I created a Facebook group,” activism that was thin and mostly symbolic.
We ended up finding a much wider range of strategies in use. Kirtii.org is building tools that allow auto rickshaw riders in Bangalore to report when they are ripped off by rigged meters and corrupt drivers, and is working with the city’s authorities to ensure reports lead to change. Rynda.org is a Russian project born out of volunteer responses to Russia 2010 wildfires – Muscovites use Rynda.org to provide peer support to one another during moments of need, picking up someone nearby whose car has broken down, or providing shelter to someone locked out of their apartment. The 5000 kyat SIM card campaign in Myanmar is closest to a “found a Facebook group” form of activism, but it’s notable in that it’s a widespread campaign in a country long known for a closed political climate.
Talking with these activists, we made an interesting discovery: our friends drew a sharp distinction between the work that we were doing and “being political.” We asked our friends when they’d “become political,” and most insisted that their work wasn’t political, explaining their goal wasn’t to elect individuals or influence legislation. They saw themselves as engaged in change, as activists, but not as involved in politics.
To try to find a way to talk about activism and politics using the same language, my students and I have started thinking about civic engagement in terms of levers of change. Most successful campaigns try to manipulate multiple levers of change simultaneously, but successful campaigns tend to be acutely aware of what levers they are moving.
Campaigners for equality for gays and lesbians are trying to move a legislative lever when they propose legislation for marriage equality at the state or federal level. There’s a tendency in social change organizations to see legislative change as the gold standard for progress, and there’s a good reason for this: win marriage equality at the federal level, and the entire apparatus of government supports that decision, ensuring compliance with the law through the executive and judicial branches. But, as noted previously, legislative levers can be very hard for individuals and for new groups to move, and focusing solely on the legislative lever misses other promising opportunities for change.
Authority is often a more accessible lever for activists to move. When Chick-fil-A’s president Dan Cathy revealed that he gives millions of dollars to support groups that work against gay rights, pro-equality supporters organized a boycott of the chain. The boycott generated an enormous amount of attention, including a counter-boycott in which former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee encouraged conservative Christians to buy a sandwich to support the chain. Ultimately, the boycott succeeded in persuading Cathy to stop donating to anti-gay groups, according to a recent audit of the 990 forms of anti-gay organizations. Authority-based strategies are popular in countries where the legislative process is broken or captured (the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia and Egypt were focused on moving the authority lever, perhaps in a way that was shortsighted, as ousting one authority may lead to one that’s as compromised), or when governments have little control over an entity (lightly regulated businesses in the U.S.). It’s capable of impressive change at times – a quiet campaign by city of Cambridge, MA employees to call attention to the federal tax implications of marriages unrecognized by the federal government led city officials to equalize the cost of health benefits for gay and lesbian employees and their partners.
Many online campaigns focus on public opinion as a lever of change. Around an issue like equality for gay and lesbian people, public opinion is a profoundly important lever – ultimately, we don’t just want gays and lesbians to be able to marry, but we want equal treatment for gay and straight people. Legislation doesn’t necessarily change minds, and true equality for gays and lesbians in the U.S. may have as much to do with Ellen DeGeneres and TV shows like Will and Grace as with passing laws. What’s challenging about this lever is that it takes a very, very long time to change public opinion, and our tools for measuring this sort of change are inexact at best.
(It’s not clear to me whether symbolic/expressive/voice-based engagement should be viewed as attempting to manipulate the lever of public opinion…in which case, my symbolic/impact or expressive/instrumental axis is really and truly broken. I’ve been working on this problem with Danielle Allen for some months now, and I can show cases where raising one’s voice is a way to try to sway public opinion, and ones where it’s a personal act of affiliation and identity).
Sometimes it’s too long to wait for laws to be passed, for authorities to change their minds, or for public will to swing in your favor. While we wait for equality for gays and lesbians, organizations like PFLAG and The Trevor Project are building support services for GLBTQ teens, hoping to prevent bullying of gay youth and address the problem of high suicide rates amongst gay youth. I’ve started thinking of this lever in which communities build the infrastructures they need as DIY, and it’s a powerful lever for change, even if it is very hard to bring to scale.
Thinking of change in terms of levers makes it easier to analyze the different techniques of engagement used by social and political movements. A petition, either online or offline, is primarily designed to persuade an authority to make a change – petitioning to change public opinion is a pretty indirect and ineffective approach. DDoS – overwhelming a computer server with traffic to cause it to crash, a technique popularized by the group Anonymous – is in part an attempt to influence an authority. But while Anonymous’ attacks on PayPal or Bank of America may have caught the attention of those company’s CEOs (at least their CIOs), it was primarily a way of influencing public opinion, as media outlets flocked to cover the “hacker” attacks and explain the ideology behind them.
A great deal of attention gets paid to activism that uses techniques like marches or sit-ins to move an authority lever. This form of activism is often celebrated as more “authentic” than other forms, both due to the historical ties to American’s civil rights movement, and to Gandhi’s protests against the British colonial government in India, and because such protests put participants at risk of harm or arrest. But this is rarely the space in which young, net-centric activists are working. They use media techniques to try and shape public opinion. This makes sense, in that media tools are the ones they are most familiar with, and because it allows them to build campaigns that are testable and trackable, allowing them to see their content spread. But it’s difficult to track the impact of these campaigns as public opinion tends to change slowly, and is hard to measure.
If our goal is to help students of digital civics make their engagements more thick and impactful (and I concede, again, that there are good arguments in defense of engagement that’s primarily about voice), we need to teach civics in terms of levers of power. We need to understand whom we are trying to persuade and why we believe they are able to enact the change we seek. Once we understand what levers we’re trying to move and who we seek to persuade, we can track our successes and learn from our failures.
But moving towards engagement that’s thick and participatory requires that we think about the needs and motivations of our actors, not just those they are trying to influence. Mimi Ito and collaborators offer a helpful direction with Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out, a set of ideas that so neatly explain interest-driven, participatory learning that they are often shorthanded as “HOMAGO” in the digital media and learning community. Young people find out about opportunities for civic engagement through hanging out with friends and figuring out what peers are passionate about. They mess around, sometimes creating and sharing media, as they explore a subject, and sometimes take a deep dive, geeking out and learning about a topic in intense detail.
The phenomenon of geeking out offers a possible solution to one of the thorniest problems of thin civic participation: the ladder of engagement. Political campaigners and activists are taught to help new recruits to a movement to climb this ladder from simple to more complex forms of engagement. A voter who’s willing to buy a bumper sticker might be willing to put up a lawn sign. The voter who puts up a lawn sign might staff a phone bank and then campaign door-to-door. Not everyone will climb the ladder, but those who do become leaders within a movement, setting the strategy for the next set brought into the pipeline.
Ladders of engagement work well for many forms of thin civic engagement – if you know you need 100 volunteers for a phonebank, recruiting 500 to put up lawn signs is a good way to identify potential participants. But the Kony2012 experience shows where the approach can do wrong. People watched the video, shared the video, bought the bracelets and postering kits and prepared to organize teams to put up posters in their communities. But Invisible Children didn’t do a very good job of helping their recruits deepen their knowledge of northern Uganda or the organization’s strategy for change, so when questions were raised about whether Joseph Kony was in Uganda, or whether an organization primarily focused on making promotional films was the appropriate way to seek justice in Uganda, recruits to the movement had little knowledge to fall back on.
In helping people move from thin to thick civic engagement, we need to help people deepen their knowledge and understanding while climbing a ladder of engagement. A different Kony2012 campaign might have worked to ensure those who’d joined the movement learned about the history of the Lord's Resistance Army and explored the different campaigns that have worked in post-conflict northern Uganda. Rather than reacting with anger or panic when a groundswell criticized Invisible Children’s analysis or strategy, new activists who’d worked on deepening their understanding might have incorporated the criticism into a more nuanced, complicated understanding of the Ugandan conflict and its aftermath. Some of the people who watched the Kony2012 video might have climbed a very different ladder of engagement, learning about Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, learning about U.S. and Ugandan organizations working on conflict recovery, questioning efficacy of different approaches and working with Ugandan organizations as well as with IC, possibly becoming movement leaders either with IC or in partnership with Ugandan groups.
Moving from thin to thick engagement involves teaching digital literacies, helping people understand how to make sense of opinionated media designed to promote specific agendas and how to triangulate between these different perspectives. That’s the sort of reading Dan Gillmor argues we all need to get better at in his book Mediactive, but it’s especially critical for people who want to move beyond taking the steps prescribed by a movement leader or political strategist and towards proposing novel solutions to problems.
If moving from symbolic to impactful requires understanding levers of change, and moving from thick to thin involves deepening knowledge, moving from small to large scale may involve thinking through issues of control. If Occupy Sandy is an exemplar of crisis response at a local scale, and the Red Cross at an international scale, it’s worth considering how the two organizations manage themselves. To work at scale, the Red Cross works hard to make opening a chapter a fairly thin and routine process. This requires careful control, which can manifest in amusing ways. Looking for an American Red Cross logo to illustrate this talk, I found myself on ARC’s Brand Standards page, filling out a complex form to get a downloadable logo. I cheated, and grabbed one from their website instead.
By centralizing and formalizing processes, the American Red Cross is likely sacrificing some of the creativity that thick engagement offers, and may be turning off people who are rooted in remix and media creation culture. For a contrast, consider Planned Parenthood’s reaction to threats of defunding by the Susan G. Komen foundation. Planned Parenthood invited supporters to campaign online on their behalf, and Deanna Zandt responded by starting a Tumblr called “Planned Parenthood Saved Me." The tumblr collected thousands of stories of people for whom Planned Parenthood provided key support, both around issues of family planning and around other health problems. The stories on Tumblr led to media coverage and to broader support for Planned Parenthood, which increased pressure on Susan G. Komen’s leadership to reverse their defunding decision. Planned Parenthood relinquished some control over what supporters did on their behalf, and was rewarded with engagement that was thick, impactful and at scale.
Understanding civic engagement in terms of the framework I’m proposing is going to be a long process, starting with a debate over whether this is an appropriate frame. Colleagues at MacArthur’s Youth and Participatory Politics project are engaged in descriptive work, understanding what forms of digital civic engagement are being used by groups like DREAM Activists, Invisible Children, Rynda.org and others. The work I’m doing with Yochai Benkler at MIT and Harvard around Media Cloud is evaluative work, trying to understand how online campaigns against SOPA/PIPA succeeded in influencing bill sponsors to change their positions and withdraw legislation. As Media Cloud and related projects grow, we’re getting better at understanding what campaigns do and don’t move attention online and lead to media coverage offline, but there is vast work to do in understanding how to best evaluate civic engagement that doesn’t use moving media as a primary technique.
Ultimately, we’d like to be able to offer normative suggestions on what forms of digital civics are most engaging and participatory. If I were a properly cautious scholar, I would resist the temptation to offer those suggestions at this early stage. Fortunately, I’m more activist than scholar, and that temptation is irresistible, as I’d like to see people working on the causes I care about be as successful as possible.
If we want civic participation that is thick, impactful and scaleable:
- We need to get beyond distinctions between politics and activism and think about agency – our goal is to help people bring about the change they want to see in the world.
- We can’t just develop new digital tactics – we need to think about levers of change and understand whom we’re hoping to impact and why we believe they can help us make change.
- We need to help people climb ladders of engagement while broadening their understanding of issues, so they can build their own ladders for others to climb.
- We need to understand that thick participation at scale means devolving control away from the center and trusting that the people we are inviting into our movements will shape them going forwards.
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Thanks for reading a very long post. I’ve gotten very helpful reactions and pushback to this talk in person and via digital means – hope you’ll continue that trend in the comments, in linked posts or by contacting me directly.
First graph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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