Category Archives: Digiwrimo

Audio Letter 1: Dear Henry Jenkins

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After finishing up Chapter 4 in Participatory Culture in a Networked Era as part of a slow-read with Digital Writing Month folks, I felt this impulse to respond in voice to the three writers as they talked through complex issues of learning and literacy.That led to the idea of three “audio letters” to the writers — Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito and danah boyd — and the first is here, to Henry.

henryquote

I took a quote from the chapter and built my response around the ideas in the quote. I’ll share out my audio letters to Mimi and danah in the next two days.

Peace (thinking),
Kevin

Digital Access and Equity: What if THEY is all of US?

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What if they is us?

I am in the midst of reading Participatory Culture in a Networked Era with the Digital Writing Month community and thoroughly enjoying the format (discussions among Ito, boyd and Jenkins) and the topics, which connect nicely to my own diving into Connected Learning.

Chapter Three of the book centers on access and equity issues (under the academic guise of “genres” — at least, in my mind) and as I was reading, this comic began to form in my mind. It’s a bit metaphorically simple: the locked door and no access to the inside from those on the outside.

But it was tagline that seemed most important to me: What if they is all of us?

What if we (us teachers, us adults, us) are the ones closing that door on different elements of our population? What if we are doing it inadvertently? What if we don’t even know the door has been closed? Who’s waiting out there, wondering?

And then, of course, the ancillary question: how do we break that door open wide so no one feels left out? Pass me that sledgehammer won’t you?

access issue

Peace (in the think),
Kevin

Entry Points in the Interaction Universe

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participatory culture mapping

There has not been a whole ton of interacting itself for our slow-read book talk on Participatory Culture in a Networked Era. Folks are still getting the book, or recovering from the holidays, or just plain ol’ busy in their lives. But that hasn’t stopped Terry Elliott and myself (mostly Terry) from trying to encourage open participation along many different sites and technology platforms.

Mostly, this is because no single experience captures the kinds of participatory activity we envision for a book talk. But also, this is because exploration and dispersion of ideas is part of the experience itself. We don’t want ideas confined to one space.

The chart above is my attempt to keep track of it all, and I am sure I have missed bits of it. I know, and I hope, there are discussions unfolding outside our field of vision. There be dragons …

But there is the danger of too much dispersion of interaction, too, and the worry is that all will be lost in the haze of connections. Or, that someone entering now will think, I’ve missed it all and don’t know where to begin. We can say “there is no fixed beginning point” all we want, but we need to show that and keep the invitations open. Terry is working on a place where links to all of these discussions can be had for anyone just entering the discussions or interested in what’s going on.

What I realized as I was putting the chart together is that it is not easy to keep something like a slow-read book talk moving forward over weeks and months time. Momentum gets lost rather quickly. Maybe our aim to build a participatory culture experience around a book about participatory culture ideas won’t quite work. If all of the energy falls to the organizers, is it truly participatory? Don’t know. Prob not. What you get then is a small book group or conversation, not a participatory experience.

It’s worth trying, though. It’s always worth trying.

Me? I aim to keep reading and reflecting on it all, as best as I can. I am finding the book useful and the authors interesting, and I look forward to what others are noting and observing.

You’re invited, too. Of course, you are invited.

We’re on Twitter with the #digiwrimo hashtag. And in the Digital Writing Month Google Plus community. Folks are annotating with the Kindle app in Amazon. Goodreads is another place for notes and reactions (here are my notes). Blogs are another means of book talk writing. Heck, send notes as smoke signals. We’ll find a way to see them and connect.

Peace (in the chart),
Kevin

Book Talk: Youth Culture, Youth Practices

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Participatory Culture slowread – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

The second chapter of Participatory Culture in a Networked Era is a fascinating discussion and inquiry in ways in which youths use technology and digital media on their own terms, and I appreciate that Ito, boyd and Jenkins tear into the notion of a Digital Immigrant/Digital Native divide. I hope we can all agree by now that such a dichotomy is too simplistic to be of any value.

I went back to my highlighted notes and pulled out some quotes that I like from the three researchers in their discussions, and put them into Haiku Deck for a visual tour of the chapter.

Peace (in the think),
Kevin

 

All Join Hands: A Global Musical Collaboration

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All Join Hands musicians

I am fortunate. I have friends who are willing to collaborate with me, and it doesn’t matter where on the globe they live. We connect and create, regardless of time zones and languages. This was once again made clear to me over the past two weeks when I recorded a song that I had written a few years ago, moved it into Soundtrap, and began inviting folks to sing along with me on the chorus.

The song — All Join Hands — is a response to the violence in the world, a pushing back against discord. An acknowledgement that we need to help those in need, and that we all have an obligation to each other. We all need to join hands.

All Join Hands music tracks

The chorus goes:

All join hands and light the candle
We are one tonight
Peace and love and faith inside us
We are one tonight

So, out went the invites, asking for voices, and in came the amazing array of sounds as Ron, Sarah, Maha A., and Wendy all lent me a gift that we wove together for this version of the song.

Thank you, friends. Thank you for taking the time to sing with me. Thank you for honoring the lyrics with your voices and passions and melodies. Thank you for connecting with me, again, and reminding me of the power of those connections.

Thank you.

And I am excited that my other close friend and regular collaborator, Bonnie Kaplan, may use this song as part of the soundtrack for her annual Digital Storytelling collaborative project, in which she invites folks to send her images on a theme. This year’s theme is “Joy.”

Peace (and love and faith inside us),
Kevin

 

Found Poem: Toward a Collective Ownership of Stories

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Defining participatory culture

We’re just launching our #DigiWriMo slow-read of the new book — Participatory Culture in a Networked Era — by eminent scholars Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito and danah boyd. Terry Elliott has set forth a few collaborative annotation options for people to feed into as a way to demonstrate participatory culture as a shared reading experience.

I hope we begin to examine how technology platforms promote and/or hinder participatory involvement.

After reading the first section — which is, as the rest of the book, mostly in the form of a transcribed/edited conversation between the boyd, Ito and Jenkins — I was struck by a number of phrases and ideas. My highlighter (I am reading paper copy of book) had been busy, and as I looked over my notes, I began to see a found poem taking shape.

The phrase “Toward a collective ownership of stories” keep ringing around in my mind. This phrase resonated with me and all of the collaborative projects that we undertake in places like #DigiWrimo or #CLMOOC or #Rhizo(add year) or whatever. While the platforms of technology open up possibilities, it is always the people that make the collaborations happen. We tell stories, together. I am making connections between that work/play and what the three writers here are talking about when it comes to participatory culture.

Those words in the text became the anchor point for a found poem. I had this vision of doing it as a podcast, and trying to get many people to read that line “Toward a collective ownership of stories” together, as a chorus. I might still try that, but I have been swamped and I know others are, too.

Found Poem from Participatory Culture in a Networked Era

You are invited to slow-read this book with us, too. This slow-reading idea means we are not in any rush. The discussions will probably unfold over a few weeks, right into and through the new year. People will get their books when they can. Semesters need to end. The holidays need to pass. We’re starting but there is no real starting point.

Come along with us.

Some of what we will do will be in our DigiWriMo Google Community. Some will be via the Twitter hashtag of #digiwrimo. Some will be at your blog. Or my blog. Some may unfold in Facebook. Some will take place who knows where. That’s good. That’s fine. We like that. Disperse your ideas in ways that help you move forward.

Peace (and participate),
Kevin

 

Comic Response: On the Issue of Poverty and Possibility

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On Poverty: A Response to Daniel

My friend, Daniel, has long been part of my various online networks, and his work around youths and poverty and violence prevention have informed many a discussion. 

As he writes on his blog:

My aim is to help communities create and sustain strategies that make more and better non-school tutor/mentor programs available to inner-city youth in high-poverty neighborhoods of Chicago and other cities. I’m Daniel Bassill. I have led volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago since 1975. Learn more about me at http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/dan-bassill.

Last week, he posed a question to his social networks. Daniel asked us to respond with different kinds of media to this query:

“What Will it Take to Assure that all Youth Born or Living in High Poverty are Starting Jobs and Careers by Age 25?”

Daniel often uses mapping to show how data might inform interventions for young people. I went with a comic to respond to him. This both added another element and also restrained my response. I didn’t want to make a multi-page comic, so my three answers are in the middle.

Later, Daniel noted that I had not talked about after-school programs in my comic response, and he is right. While I think those activities are important, I find that the best way to reach the most kids is right in school itself, and I often worry about money and grants allocated for after-school programming take away from needed resources in the schools. I don’t discount the impact after-school programs can have, however.

Feel free to add your ideas to the conversation, in any media that helps you make your point.

Peace (everywhere, all the time),
Kevin

#DigiWrimo Video Quote Collection: On Teaching Multimodalities

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Every day during November’s Digital Writing Month, I shared out what I thought was an interesting or pertinent quote from Frank Serafini’s book, Reading the Visual. I realized by the end of the month that I had this folder with 30 quote/images and so I decided to push them into Animoto as way to gather them and share them out all together in a single video file.

Here it is:

Peace (in the multimodalities of writing),
Kevin

We’re Slow Reading “Participatory Culture in a Networked Era”

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We would love to keep the conversations going with Digital Writing Month, even though the so-called “month” is over. So, we are inviting friends (and you are a friend, so you can join in, too, even if you did not take part in DigiWriMo) to read this new book by Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito and danah boyd: Participatory Culture in a Networked Era as a way to stay connected and explore a fascinating topic with some talented researchers/writers.

We’ll be starting some discussions over our existing DigiWriMo Google Plus space, but I suspect things will spill over into other platforms as we move along. In fact, I would hope so. I am only part of the way into the first chapter, and already, the three have made it clear that we should never talk about platforms being “participatory” — it is the culture of the community that can be considered participatory.

So we hope that members of the group will become leaders of the book talk as we move ahead. As such, we will likely platform jump through the book ….

Please, join us. We’d love to have you in the mix.

The DigiWriMo Google Plus Community Space is here.

Peace (in the book),
Kevin

 

Interactive Historical Fiction: Play/Read Student Projects

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I’ve been writing about our Interactive Fiction Project for Digital Writing Month, and most of my students are now done or nearly finished. Here are a few of their stories that you can “play/read” to get a sense of what we have been up in the past 10 days or so. We were working on these stories in conjunction to lessons around Early Civilizations in the Social Studies class.

Storm by Elizabeth

Ancient People by Wil

Early Humans by Sara

Neanderthal by Ryan

The Wait by Ella

Peace (in your path),
Kevin