Fake News about Fake News

Fake News about Fake News

(created via Mozilla’s XRay Goggles Remix tool)

I’m not on Facebook, so I don’t know the extent of the “fake news” filtering into feeds there during the US presidential election. But I have seen more than a few articles in which Mark Zuckerberg is defending the algorithms that might have allowed some made-up news to come into the system, and worries that such items might have influenced voting.

I could not resist taking one of Zuckerberg’s denials and popping it into Mozilla’s XRay Goggles for a bit of a remix myself. Yep. Fake news about fake news. In mine, he owns up to Facebook’s role and admits that Facebook itself is behind the fake news (it’s not true, as far as I can tell … just to be upfront).

Still, even if some of what he defending is true — that the automated system still allows items with no veracity and tilted political bents into millions of people’s feeds — the issue of fake news in feeds has larger ramifications about how a social networking site can play a role in elections, and … perhaps even more importantly … it raises the question: why aren’t more people getting news from multiple and reputable sources?

Good lord.

Who relies on Facebook for all of their news? I know. I know. Many people do. It reminds me of the need for us, as teachers, to double down on teaching media literacy, and rhetorical moves, and determining the surface truth and the deeper slants of everything we read, whether it is the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Facebook or your local newspaper (do you still get your local newspaper? Is there still a local newspaper to get? My old journalism hackles get raised here. I hope you still have a local newspaper).

Check out this report from Pew Research, which indicates that almost two-thirds of Americans get our news from social media. What? And that report is from the summer. Who wants to bet that the number went up during the election?

About 6-in-10 Americans get news from social media

Peace (but check the source),
Kevin

#2NextPrez Make Cycle: Remixing Campaign Posters with Thimble

Thimble: NextPrez

The first teacher-centered Make Cycle for Letters to the Next President 2.0 is ongoing this week, and I have been dipping into some of the tools being suggested. One of the ways to create a message is to use Mozilla’s Thimble remix site. Thimble is a web-based platform for building websites and allowing for remix opportunities.

I grabbed the template from the Make Cycle and tinkered with the wording (but kept the same image). If you hit the remix button, you can remix mine as another iteration. So, for example, my friend Michael created a poster that was a message about more localized politics in Arizona, and I remixed it with a larger message.

2NextPrez Thimble Remixes

I like Thimble but wish you could easily embed or share the image of the page, once the coding is all set. Instead, you have to take screenshot or share the link out.

Here’s another one, from the Political Quote concept. I found a quote from Obama about the nature of change:

2NextPrez Thimble Remixes

And from the Letters to President site:

Click on “Remix” to get started and notice there is an online tutorial within each activity to walk you through step-by-step:

Want to take it another step further? You can speak back by make your own version of the news with this Hack the News Activity.

Peace (remix it and make it better),
Kevin

Exploring Mobile Webmaker: i am small on the screen

Merely ... A Webmaker experiment

Mozilla’s pivot to mobile makes sense from its worldwide view and mission of connecting people around the world and giving them tools to “make the web.”  Most people in global communities use mobile devices, not desktop computers.

While I personally mourn the loss of Popcorn Maker (oh, I miss it terribly, and all of its remix media possibilities) and celebrate the new and improved Thimble tool (with file uploads and multiple page possibilities), I was sort of left out the mobile app experiment because I did not have an Android phone.

Now I do (long story, another day), and I went about exploring the free Webmaker App this weekend to see what Mozilla has been up to as it focuses in on mobile technology. I know the app is only the beginning (or so I think, as it seems in beta) and it wasn’t bad.

Nothing overly impressive yet, either, as far as I can tell, but I was able to make a website poem within minutes, and once I got myself situated, I found it fairly easy to use. I could see the threshold for using this app to be very low for most people. You can make the web within minutes.

View i am small on the screen

I purposely did not include any images or graphics with my small poem, as I was trying to keep the design simple, with words and links to side stanzas broken off from the main trunk of the poem. Basically, the editing mode gives you branches to create multiple pages and buttons as links to those pages. The downside is that viewing of the finished project is best done in the app itself. On the web, the poem looks scrunched up, at best.

But maybe that claustrophobic effect is effective for a poem whose theme is the smallness of the web. I’m going to nod my head and say, that was my purpose as a writer all along. (You believe me, right?) The poem became digital within the constraints of the technology.

What will you make?

Peace (here),
Kevin

Word Drop and Broken Verse: Further ReMEDIAtion of a Poem

I’m continuing to push a single poem in multiple directions with this Make Cycle in Making Learning Connected MOOC on the issue of remediation — a term that is getting some pushback here and there in various spaces.

One of my good friends, Sarah, took my poem, and as she said, broke it.

That got me thinking …

This time, I went into Mozilla Webmaker’s Thimble tool. I used a kinetic text remix in an effort to do a sort of “reverse blackout poem,” in which words drop from the poem, leaving behind a second poem.

You can check out my Thimble project here, but it works best in Firefox (for me, it won’t work in Chrome).

Here are some screenshots, in case you are curious:

First, what the code page looks like:

Thimble-ized Poem

Next, the poem in its original form:

Thimble-ized Poem

Finally, after hitting the “transform this poem” button:

Thimble-ized Poem

What is cool about Thimble and other Webmaker tools is that you can remix. Just click the remix button on the poem in Thimble and make your own.

And one more further remediation of the poem for today. I don’t think this worked as well as some of the other experiments. I created a comic version of the poem. What I struggled with was the representation of ideas within the allotted four frames that used the possibilities of a comic to tell the story of the poem. It just … didn’t work.

Comic remediation

I’ll finish up tomorrow with two more versions of the poem as the Make Cycle moves into reflection stage.

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin

A Requiem for Popcorn Maker

Sigh.

popcorn1

Another remix tool getting carted away. Mozilla recently announced changes to its whole Webmaker suite of tools, as they shift from web-based activities to mobile-based activities, and as a result, Mozilla is shutting down Popcorn Maker, an innovative and valuable remixing tool for video and media. Sure, it has always been a bit quirky, but Popcorn Maker has been a site that I have used with students and with teachers, to introduce to the concept of remix as a shift in literacies.

Sigh.

So, with the deadline approaching for pulling the plug on popcorn, I had to make one more project: A Requiem for Popcorn Maker. It maybe my last bit of Popcorn.

Interesting aside: In 2012, my oldest son took part in a free filmmaking camp at our public access television, where they were piloting the first iteration of Popcorn Maker with youths, to see how it would be used and test it out on a real group of filmmakers. I remembering thinking, what is this? You take video from the web and remix it and share it? I was hooked before I even started working with Popcorn.

Peace (remix it!),
Kevin

 

Rhizo15: Even When You Know What It Is, You Don’t Know What It Is

I was sharing Jabberwocky with my students last week. They are sixth graders and most had never heard nor read the poem, although a few remembered the name a bit from the last Alice in Wonderland movie (with Johnny Depp). After I read the poem, and then get students to read the poem, and after we talk about it from the writing and narrative stance, I show them The Muppets version.

What stuck with me was the line that Scooter says at the start, along the lines of “Even when you know what it is, you don’t know what it is ” as the Rhizomatic Learning event kicks off this week, and lots of folks are wondering about syllabus and stuff. Dave Cormier sent out a nice note this week, saying that the questions and uncertainty are what will drive the activities.

Thus, a remix of the Muppets for Rhizo15:

Feel free to remix the video yourself. See that remix button. Click it. See what happens. Go forth into the unknown and be creative. Make something new.

Peace (in the share),
Kevin

Digital Poetry: A Poem Under Remix

Here I am, still working with a single poem, from draft to finish and beyond. This is not how I usually write. I am a quick, “I am done” kind of writer, who moves on to new things once the last thing is completed. I don’t suffer from attention deficit (I don’t think) but I am always in search of the next writing piece that will kick in that moment of creative excitement.

Working on the same poem for days on end … not my cup of tea. I am a little tired of this walk through the woods to get to the beach …

But here I am, moving into a remix stage of my piece about walking through the woods on the way to the ocean, a poem of place about Maine. I want to share two versions here, both of which use Webmaker’s Thimble site, and both are a little different in nature and experience.

Walk to the Beach remix

First, this remixed poem layers the text into four stanzas, with images for each stanza that shift when you hover the mouse over them. It’s not that dramatic a remix, to be frank, but I love the look and feel of this (which I remixed from a former poem from last year, which used a template that I remixed ….)

Head to the poem

Walk to the Beach remix

Second, I was thinking about how I could use the Blackout Poem idea (of using a sharpie to remove words from a text, leaving only a poem) and I wanted to do it with Thimble. I remixed yet another remix poem, in which the push of the button “drops” text out of view, leaving designated words behind. In this case, I tried to make a new poem living inside of the old poem.

(Note: This worked fine for me in Firefox but not in Chrome or Safari. Sorry. It has to do with the javascript being used in the code, I think.)

 Head to the poem

Peace (in the remix),
Kevin

Playing with the ParaPara Animation Tool

Check this out:

I stumbled into an open source, online animation tool that is simple to use and pretty nifty way to teach animation to kids. ParaPara is a Japanese animation tool that allows for simple animation (and apparently, there is a way to collaborate with others … looking into that feature …) Mozilla’s Webmaker hosts a tutorial on how to use it, with links to the ParaPara site.

Once you make your animation, it kicks out a link and then an embed code, so that you can embed like I did with my Happy Friend animation that I created in just a few minutes.

What are you waiting for? Get making!

Making Animation with ParaPara

Peace (in the frame),
Kevin

PS –

Slice of Life: Mix and Remix (and Remix again?)

(Each day in March, a whole bunch of educators are writing Slices of Life — capturing the small moments. It is facilitated by Two Writing Teachers. You write, too.)

Write, Share, Give

Sometimes, opportunity presents itself. Yesterday morning, I was checking out the Twitter hasthag for #walkmyworld (a series of media-centric activities around the theme of identity and creation — see more here) when I noticed that Shawna had posted a digital poem. Of course, I was curious. And she was looking for feedback. I went there, at her blog site, to see what she had been up to.

It was a lovely rendition of a Georgia Heard poem about school and conformity and “straight lines” that we expect our students to fall into when they come into school, instead of the crazy zig-zag of life outside of school. I’m not philosophically opposed to imposing order on the day – and plenty of kids need that consistency, given the chaos of their lives at home. But Shawna did such a nice job.

Take a look.

I left her a comment (including a request to share out the “how she did it” at her blog) and then decided to go one step further — I decided to honor her poem by remixing it, via Webmaker Popcorn Maker. If you have not used Popcorn, it allows you to layer in various media and do other interesting things with online video. The remix does not affect the original. It only borrows it. Remix is a way to honor the original, and in this case, I was hoping to add a layer of my own art to Shawn’s art.

Check it out.

And of course, one of the beauties of Popcorn is the ability to remix the remix. So, why not give it a try? You can either click on the “remix” button at the top right of my Popcorn Project, or you can just click here and get started (no account needed to play around with the remix.)

See what you can make. And then maybe write about it.

Peace (in the share),
Kevin