When A Stumble Goes Viral


Fail flickr photo by clasesdeperiodismo shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

My son was running an event he had not run before at his high school indoor track meet the other day. We were cheering him on — he’s fast — when he took a turn and began to stumble. He fell to the track but then muscled his way back to his feet and crossed the finish line, unhurt but very frustrated.

The next day, he told us that a friend on the track team had been shooting video of his race, caught the stumble, and had remixed the footage for Tik Tok. My son said he was fine with it. The video clip does not show my son’s face or any other identifying features. It’s shot from the back. Strangely, the friend edited the video to indicate to the audience in the opening frame it was him (the friend) in the video. Maybe this was to protect my son’s privacy.

“It has over 120,000 views,” my son told us that first night, the day after the race, showing us the clip on Tik Tok. Yesterday, the second day, I asked about it. “It has over 250,000 views and 5,000 likes,” he told me.

He’s proud of this Tik Tok trending, but I’m not so sure about it.

First of all, there’s the “asking permission” factor in this whole story, where the friend posted the video and only then later showed it to my son. No one should be asked afterwards, even if the track meet was in a public space. That’s just wrong.

Second, there’s this fascination with views and likes that drives me batty, as if that were social capital that has tangible value (it really doesn’t, unless you are creating a company that needs eyeballs for advertising and exposure). I’ve written about this before, quite a bit, and noted how this aspect of social media is really a way for the companies to sell advertising and to track user data.

Third, this whole notion that Fail Videos are what can get the most of our collective attention bothers me to no end, that we mock the stumbles of others for entertainment. I realize that Nice Videos don’t have the same impact on our brain — sort of how we notice and remember only the bad in the world, not the good. But to see that part of our shared humanity on display so vividly, and with such popularity, is a particularly negative reflection on who we are, as a people.

My son is unconcerned with all of this. (Note: I have scanned through the Tik Tik trending videos the last few days — while I have viewed some questionable content and some strange things, and yes, some amusing clips, I have not seen the video of my son’s track fail on the public trending page.)

While I’m proud that he is so resilient – that the frustration on the track did not spill over to seeing his mistake play out on social media — I still wish he and his whole generation would shake loose the notions of viral videos being something worth striving for. It may be like shouting in the void, but we have to keep our warning voices loud anyway.

Someday, they’ll hear us.

Peace (gone viral),
Kevin

Further Defining Digital Literacies: The Ethics of Information Creation

Defining Digital Literacies NCTE ethics

I’m slowly reading and digesting, and appreciating, the National Council of Teachers of English revised definition of Literacy in a Digital Age, and I am appreciating the depth of the inquiry.

The theme I am exploring today is all about the ethics behind creating, posting and sharing content, and the moral obligations of the writers and artists and makers who feed word and art into those network spaces. What an important topic, and one, too long ignored.

As a teacher, I often have conversations with my young students about what they are sharing and why. This year, it’s Tik Tok. Last year, it was Instagram. Before that, it was Music.ly (which became Tik Tok, in the strange recursive nature of the technology world).  Before that, it was Vine. You get the point. Most of my students readily admit that they hit “send” or “post” without thinking twice about what they are sending forward, and to whom, doing it on a whim.

All of us, adults and children alike, have transformed into this vast snake of forward motion, it seems, and it is right in this corridor of shadows and thoughtless sharing, that fake news and hidden-meaning-memes and other nefarious things flourish and prosper, creating a cloud of negativity and darkness in the networks we all use, together.

We see this most visibly with Facebook, but also with other social networking spaces, where the system of “likes” and “shares” has social value, not the quality of information or reflective practice. When all that matters for visibility is the number of thumbs ups or stars, all that matters is for content that hits emotional nerves to be what one sends out to the world.

These guiding questions of this section of Digital Literacies are helpful to consider, and provide a guide on what topics to revisit regularly with our students:

  • Do learners share information in ways that consider all sources?
  • Do learners consider the contributors and authenticity of all sources?
  • Do learners practice the safe and legal use of technology?
  • Do learners create products that are both informative and ethical?
  • Do learners avoid accessing another computer’s system, software, or data files without permission?
  • Do learners engage in discursive practices in online social systems with others without deliberately or inadvertently demeaning individuals and/or groups?
  • Do learners attend to the acceptable use policies of organizations and institutions?
  • Do learners attend to the terms of service and/or terms of use of digital software and tools?
  • Do learners read, review, and understand the terms of service/use that they agree to as they utilize these tools?
  • Do learners respect the intellectual property of others and only utilize materials they are licensed to access, remix, and/or share?
  • Do learners respect and follow the copyright information and appropriate licenses given to digital content as they work online?

In fact, this strand could be an entire semester course on ethical writing in an online world. What if that were required for all high school students, everywhere? Would we start to finally see a shift towards the positive?

It seems to me that we have, without much thought about the consequences, bought into what social networks have told us is social capital — the likes and the shares. (Which for these businesses, is advertising data, which becomes money and profit) We, the writers and creators, need to push back, hard, on this playbook, to make visible the kinds of responsible, supportive, creative endeavors we know the promise of technology may hold.

And if a network does not bend to the will of the users, then it is time to abandon that network and find another place to connect. One thing we can say about young users is they are not afraid to jump ship when one platform no longer meets their needs (the counter to this is, they don’t often think clearly about the new ship they’ve joined). A sense of agency — that users ultimately decide what platforms will prosper and which ones will fail — is an important lesson to teach all young people growing up in close proximity of digital spaces.

This work begins now, in our classrooms, and in our homes.

Peace (flourishes in the light),
Kevin

Celebrating Storyboarding for Video Game Design

Hero's Journey Video Game StoryboardsWe’re in the starting phases of our Hero’s Journey Video Game Design Project right now, and as students hash out the story they are going to tell in the form of a video game, they have to brainstorm the “story-frame” and sketch out the levels of their games. The storyboards will become maps for the design, done in Gamestar Mechanic.

I love this part of the project because their thinking becomes most visible to me, and allows us to have conversations about story and game play, and how those might intersect.

Hero's Journey Story-frame

Peace (map it out),
Kevin

 

Snow Day Poem Day


25. What a view! A six-inch snowfall! flickr photo by Carol (vanhookc) shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

We got the no-school call early yesterday morning as a storm rolled in …. so a poem about the superstitions/techniques that kids still use the night before the possible winter storms …

Spoons
under pillows
Prayers
to the skies
Pajamas
on backwards
Flush a toilet
full of ice

Don’t ask us
how these things
make what you
wish to become true –

just keep on sleeping in –

Today’s
a Snow Day
for you

Peace (play),
Kevin

Slice of Life: No Guitar … No Problem

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)

It’s often during in-between moments — the lull of the evening — where I will grab my acoustic guitar and just play for a bit as a way to step aside from the day. A sort of acoustic reprieve. Sometimes, new songs emerge from these burst of playing sessions. Mostly, not. Usually, it’s just a chance to play.

I had this inspiration to maybe try to write another holiday song because I had challenged my teenage son to make a holiday song, as he is an accomplished beat-maker with Logic, and he just laughed me off. I went upstairs to get my guitar … only to suddenly remember that I had left my guitar in my classroom at school. I have been doing some guitar playing with a student who is writing his own holiday song that he wants to perform in front of classmates.

Hmmm.

I still had this melody and idea of bells jangling around in my head, so I queued up an online music production platform I use quite a bit — Soundtrap — and plugged in my small MIDI keyboard, and then began to compose the holiday song. It’s built off the echoes of the main Jingle Bells riff, and I had quite fun laying in sounds. The song structure is pretty simple: melody-break-melody.

After finishing the track, I decided I wanted to make the audio track into a video version, so I searched around for some copyright-free video of snow falling — I wanted the visuals to be simple but moving — and then used iMovie to quickly pull the audio and video together.

So, you know, happy holidays and all that …

Peace (play it forward),
Kevin

The Meanest Place on the Internet (YouTube’s Toxicity Problem)

Whenever I talk to my sixth graders about decorum and trolling in online spaces, one platform consistently rises to the surface as their prime example of the “meanest place on the Internet”: YouTube video channels and, more specifically, the comment section of videos. No other platform even comes close for them. Year after year, YouTube is the place most kids point to as the meanest, nastiest place on the Internet. They share their surprise and disgust at what people will write, and get away with, and how commenters will openly attack others, including the most vulnerable video makers.

As YouTube is the place my young students spend the most amount of their online time — for some, the time spent can be a few hours a day — it always strikes me as frustrating that they are both exposed to potentially great videos (and there certainly are great videos on YouTube, for any kind of interest and topic and niche learning) in combination with humanity acting so plainly bad, it makes me embarrassed on our collective behalf.

Maybe YouTube (aka Google) is finally understanding this.

Along with the changes to its platform to make it in federal compliance for young viewers (all YouTube channel operations must now designate their channel for an audience of children or not, which mandates certain settings for video uploads), YouTube seems to be making more visible its efforts to root out the negativity.

We know that the comment section is an important place for fans to engage with creators and each other. At the same time, we heard feedback that comments are often where creators and viewers encounter harassment. – from YouTube Blog

YouTube folks claim in a new post that they are now beefing up the way comments are filtered and giving more flexibility to YouTube creators, as well as setting forth more algorithms to catch toxic comments before they even reach the comment bin. (See Comment Settings for YouTube, too)

There is a link to a Transparency Report, that shows how many videos have been removed and some other data, too, that is sort of fascinating to look at. For example, it seems to indicate that 500 million comments have been removed from July through September alone. Sheesh.

Well, we’ll see if it all works to make YouTube a more positive place while still protecting free speech (I acknowledge this is a juggling act, but, figure it out, people). My students will tell me if it’s working or not, I am sure.

Peace (everywhere),
Kevin

Independent Book-Based Board Game Design Activity

Book Board Game DesignTwo main activities are taking place in my classroom right now — we’re in the midst of a unit of independent reading (choice books with plenty of quiet reading time) and the start of our Game Design Unit. Merging those two ideas together (along with a much larger Video Game Design project), students are in the midst of designing a board game based on the book they are reading.

They won’t be building the actual game (I’ve framed it as they have been hired as game designer and someone else would be building the game itself) but are working on how a story might unfold as a game (this is how their video game project is situated — story as game/game as story). The requirements are the visuals of a game board, directions on how to play and instructions on how the game is either won or completed.

Already, some interesting projects are trickling with, with some neat ideas about how characters or plot or setting might become the central focus of a game that honors the story and maybe riffs off it in another direction. In the collage, the upper left is my mentor text — using a story I am nearly finishing, titled A Drop of Hope, which I have been thoroughly enjoying.

While every game is different, the mechanics of game design — strategy, game play, visual design — all will be central to our larger game project based off the Hero’s Journey template.

Peace (roll the dice and make your move),
Kevin

 

Further Defining Digital Literacies: Bias, Privilege, Modalities and Learning

Defining Digital Literacies NCTE culture

I’m slowly reading and digesting, and appreciating, the National Council of Teachers of English revised definition of Literacy in a Digital Age, and I am appreciating the depth of the inquiry.

The theme of this strand — Promote culturally sustaining communication and recognize the bias and privilege present in the interactions — seems to be resonating everywhere in education circles and that’s as it should be. Given that much of the US teacher population is white and middle class, but that much of the student population in 0ur classrooms is diverse and getting more diverse as the population shifts, we educators need to do more to think about bias, and identity, and cultural crossroads for communication practices with our students.

Look at these questions posed in this part of the definition:

  • Do learners have opportunities to raise questions about bias and privilege when consuming, curating, and creating texts?
  • Do learners have strategies for interrupting discourse that marginalizes people based on race, culture, sexuality, language, gender, and ability?
  • Do learners have opportunities to identify and discuss how to detect and report fake news/deliberately misleading and false information or information that promotes hate speech and violence?
  • Do learners create texts across modalities for a variety of audiences and consider how diverse groups would respond?
  • Do learners have opportunities to collaborate with people/learners from communities that hold different views/ideas/values/beliefs, life experiences, racial, ethnic, and cultural identities, and economic security to address social issues that impact all of our lives?

These are important queries, and difficult at times to make happen. It really requires educators to work with others, to gather the right resources, to know what questions need to be asked (of themselves, of their students, of their communities), to push back on norms.

We grapple and work with variations of these questions quite a bit in the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. All of our projects and initiatives are viewed through the lens of culture, access, equity and social justice, and one of our leadership committees is dedicated to these very topics, helping facilitators think through workshops and seminars and teaching practice.

I find it interesting that the Media Literacy/Fake News element was put into here — at first, it felt rather forced, as if the topic was an orphan looking for a home. But then, as I pondered it, I began to see the rationale, of how fake news and text distortion plays a role in how we view “others” and how it can break down the bridge between cultures and language and diverse thought.

Further, I was thinking about the concepts of connecting multiple modalities and multiple ways of writing to cultural representations and literacies — to help learners be aware of how culture impacts our ways and access of literacies, and how that might play out in digital spaces. This concept intrigues me, and I don’t think I know enough about this to comment much further. For example, the reference to “sign systems” is not clear to me right now.

But the language of the definition has planted a seed of inquiry in my mind:

How do digital platforms both limit cultural expressions through technological design and how do users find workarounds to use platforms for cultural and linguistic, and modality, interactions anyway?

Finally, I was thinking of the point about “disrupting” practices, and connected that to the work being by Marginal Syllabus last year and now this year with its LEARN project, bringing in texts and authors on topics very much connected to this strand for conversations in the margins of those texts with the Hypothesis tool.

This month, the focus is on a piece about using the novel of Miles Morales, the black Spiderman, to talk about race and education, and varying the kinds of stories and texts that we bring into our classroom. (Come join in)

Peace (thinking),
Kevin

MusicMaking: She Makes a Choice (Path and Prayers)

It’s been disheartening to watch as more and more states seek to limit women’s access to health care, all in hopes that a test case will reach the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade. It irks me to no end that these conservative leaders want to destroy lives under the guise of compassion, and use their religion as a curtain to hide behind. And who’s left with few choices and little support? The women. The women always are left paying the price.

I wrote this particular song some times ago both as a protest and to experiment with writing and producing a song nearly entirely on my iPad with the Garageband App.

Peace (and choice),
Kevin