I am offering today's post as part of the ongoing conversation I've been having throughout the semester about transmedia storytelling practices. Below you will find the first of two installments written by HyeRyoung OK, a recently minted USC PhD, who I have met through my work with a new MacArthur Foundation Research Hub on Youth, New Media, and Public Participation. She has done some groundbreaking research on the deployment of transmedia practices in Korean television, projects which have gotten very little attention on this side of the world, but which have a lot to offer as an alternative model for how mobile technologies and public space can be deployed as part of a transmedia strategy.

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television
by HyeRyoung Ok

By now we all know that the mobile phone is not simply a phone anymore. Since its introduction, the mobile phone has evolved into something that constantly broadens and transforms its boundary. Indeed, it is one of the most convergent media devices available that materializes the paradigm of media convergence. In most countries where mobile technology is widely adopted, the mobile phone is rapidly becoming a new outlet for traditional media industries responding to the "visions of wireless phones becoming hand-held entertainment centers." Yet the mobile phone's entry into the existing media environment is not a natural and homogeneous process. Continuing, disrupting, and mixing existing media practices to a newer form, rather, it came to terms with conventional media in heterogeneous ways depending on the socio-culturally specific contexts.

Then, here comes the story of the mobile phone in Korea, the country recently known as "IT powerhouse" where the adventure of the mobile phone ever continues. The mobile phone in Korea is literally a focal point where technical, industrial, and cultural innovations to explore the 'newer' forms of media service converge (see my blog posts on general review of Korean IT practices). What is particularly unique about Korean mobile culture is the continuing emphasis on the potential of mobile phones as 'screen' media. It is not surprising phenomenon considering the weight of 'screen' related - all dimensions of hardware and software - industries in Korean society. I would like to illustrate how the mobile screen is positioned in the flux of these transmedia experiments across new and old media in a culturally specific way through the case of Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, an entertainment program on channel MBC in Korea.

Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, is an interesting case that shows how the media content is designed to be produced/consumed based on the principle of "connecting" multiple forms of screens: mobile screen, television screen, and outdoor LED screen. Click Click Ranger is one of three sections in the popular Sunday prime time entertainment show, titled !: Exclamation Mark which was broadcast from December 2004 to August 2005 on channel MBC - one of three major television networks in Korea. In Click Click Ranger, the mobile screen is used in two significant ways: mobile phone imaging for moving image production and mobile TV for moving image circulation. Although it was short-lived, this show set up a model for employing mobile phone technology thematically as well as formally into the television program format and inspired other shows in competing networks. As a prototype, Click Click Ranger raises several interesting issues on the relation between new media technology, the existing media conventions, and culture. Taking Click Click Ranger as a starting point, let's begin to explore how Korean television mediates the mobile screen as part of the larger outdoor screen culture and thus complicates the issue of 'convergence of spaces.

Click Click Ranger (aka Mobile Ranger): Capture Korea's Today

Click Click Ranger's catchphrase of "Capture Korea's today" literally and symbolically sums up the goal and the structure of the show: To report the present realities of Korea. In terms of content, Click Click Ranger presents several short video clips of anonymous do-gooders and misbehaviors on the street in a fashion similar to citizen reports. These clips are captured and sent by random citizens and "mobile rangers," a group of pre-selected young college students and volunteers (in total, 100 members). Technically, mobile rangers and anonymous participants capture videos on the street and send clips 'in real time' to the studio while the program is being pre-recorded. It is reported that ninety percent of participants use a mobile phone camera and send clips through the wireless internet on their mobile phone. Most interestingly, Click Click Ranger adopts a multi-screen format of display that tackles the paradigm of media convergence by manipulating the 'flow' of content across media (Jenkins, 2007). The clips captured by mobile phone camera and selected for showing on regular television are simultaneously broadcast on a large LED screen installed over Seoul City Hall Plaza. In fact, the program itself is shot on the rooftop of the city hall building, where two MCs run the show as if they were news reporters as is illustrated in the picture above. Hence, what the viewers on a regular television set at home actually watch are alternating shots between the outdoor screen display, the MCs, and small video clips in quick-time movie format. Later on, the program re-runs on Mobile TV, particularly on the channel BLUE of Satellite DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) service on the following Monday. Following this path, the clips of Click Click Ranger finish their journey from the street to multiple screens encompassing all hot spots ('hot screens') in the current mediascape of Korea as diagram below illustrates.

Creating the Public: Private Imaging and Public Exhibition

To the savvy viewers, who got used to all sorts of strategies to utilize the mobile phone for the television show by now, early attempt of Click Click Ranger may not look so fresh. What makes this show unique is the way in which it attempts to employ the mobile phone, an icon of personal media, in the service of constructing the 'public space' within a commercial entertainment. As a matter of fact, from the beginning, ! : Exclamation Mark has built a reputation for being a 'public value concerned entertainment' program. Previous and current sub-sections of the show have adopted 'human documentary' or 'news report' format in which show hosts visit and follow various people, with the goal of promoting the 'good civilian life and consciousness' in the fashion of a public service campaign. So far, its campaigns have been successful in generating issues in public discourse and have had real consequences in social life in Korea. Some of its famous campaigns include: "Let's read books," "Let's obey the traffic sign," "Let's eat Breakfast," "Street Lessons," "Open your Eyes (Donation/Transference of cornea for the blind)," "Asia Asia (Illegal worker's home visiting project)" and so on.

Partially, the show's strategy to foreground public good within entertainment content reflects the unique hybrid characteristic of its network, MBC: MBC is private but at the same time closer to a public broadcasting network. It runs as a private company but is in fact indirectly owned by the government (by KBS, a major public network) and under the direct control of the Commission of Television Broadcasting. This dominant discourse of the program not only circumscribes the content of the clips in Click Click Ranger but also affects its program format. Typical clips of Click Click Ranger would feature various incidents such as violation of minor civil laws, misdemeanors, or good samaritans who help weak, elderly people at the subway station and so on. In each episode, if the best citizen is chosen among the good samaritans, the show's host calls up the mobile ranger on the scene and runs to there to give the samaritan a reward-a golden badge.
(To be continued)

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

One of the great joys of our present moment is waking up to some delightful gift -- a compelling bit of media content -- sent to you by friends, family, or in this case, a former student (Eric Schmiedl). Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the ways that YouTube has brought back many aspects of the vaudeville aesthetic that I discussed in my first book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic:

The video below is a great example -- an advertisement produced in New Zealand for Vodephone which offers us a spectacular technological performance, one which calls attention to the emerging properties of our media environment in several ways.

First, of course, the video demonstrates some of the expressive potentials of mobile phones, not to mention the prospects of using digital media to coordinate signals within a complex structure. This is a compelling example of technological virtuosity. My first response was to go "Wow" and in our modern age, "wowness" is a hard earned quality. Here's what I wrote about it in my recent book, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture::

Consider the singular beauty of the word 'Wow.' Think about the pleasure in forming that perfectly symmetrical phrase on your tongue. IOmagine the particular enthusiasm it expresses -- the sense of wonderment, astonishment, absolute engagement. A 'Wow' in something that has to be earned, and in the modern age we distribute standing ovations far too often when we are just being polite, but we have become too jaded to give a wow. The term takes on a certain irony, as if it can only be uttered in quotation marks.

This immediate, visceral response makes this the kind of content you want to "spread" to others in your social network. Eric forwarded it to me; I'm posting it on my blog and sending it out through my Twitter feed; and perhaps you will like it well enough that you will pass it along further. This is at the heart of what we are calling "spreadable media." And trust me, the folks at Vodephone are not going to be heartbroken at our circulation of their commercial message. They no doubt think this video has gone "viral" -- It didn't, god forbid. But a bunch of us did decide, for our own reasons, to keep it in constant and varied circulation.

One of the ways that Vodephone has found to extend our engagement with this video has been to create a "Making Of" segment which is in many ways just as fascinating as the original. That's the great thing about technological virtuosity -- we can admire it even when the magician invites us behind the red velvet curtain and shows us how he does his tricks. I am reminded of what the French media theorists Christian Metz wrote about "trucage" or what we Americans call "special effects." That they are "artifaces" that are not so much hidden as proclaimed. When we all watch Avatar in a few weeks, we are not going to simply be immersed into the world of the film; we are going to stand back and gasp at the spectacular breakthroughs in special effects which have been publicized around the making of the film. And this fascination with how they did it will in no way diminish, may in fact increase the emotional impact of what we are seeing.

This being the age of participatory culture and interactive media, Vodephone takes this a step further on the webpage they've constructed around this advertisement, which allows us to take the basic building blocks behind this spot and remix them towards our own ends. This thus completes the process of technological amazement -- allowing us to experience first hand the delights of expressing ourselves through ringtones.

When I first saw the Vodephone spot, though, I was reminded of a much earlier moment of technological virtuosity and the vaudeville aesthetic. Take a look and you will see why.

Ernie Kovacs was a spectacular visual comedian who worked in the early days of American television. Kovacs exploited for comic effect our heightened awareness of the visual properties of this new and emerging medium. Television was not yet ambient; we had not yet started to take the visuals (which, after all, are what separated television from radio) for granted. Kovacs counts on us not being able to take our eyes off the screen.

So, why do both of these artists draw upon Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1880 composition, 1812 Overture, as the basis for their spectacular performance. I suspect there are many reasons, starting with the fact that the 1812 Overture embodies the high art status we ascribe to classical music. New media seeking to gain recognition often signal their cultural ambitions by drawing on works which we already respect from older media traditions. They do Shakespeare or Mozart or Tchaikovsky. Second, these works at the same time poke fun at the cultural hierarchies they seek to transcend -- there's something really profoundly silly about the ways they are performing or illustrating the 1812 Overture in these segment. And finally, at least in the case of the Vodephone ad, they respect the complexity of this particular composition as a way of demonstrating their own mastery over the new technologies involved. The Vodephone ad would not be nearly as absorbing or engaging if the phones were playing Chopsticks or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

So, if you want to learn more about our concept of spreadable media, check out the webinar which I will be conducting with Sam Ford and Joshua Green on Friday 6 November (from 12-1 pm EST). Registration is free!

Moving from "Sticky" to "Spreadable": The Antidote to "Viral Marketing" and the Broadcast Mentality

Based on years of researching how and why people spread news, popular culture, and marketing content online through the Convergence Culture Consortium for the past several years , our speakers are currently working on a book entitled Spreadable Media. This Webinar will look at what "spreadable media" means, why the concept of "stickiness" is inadequate for measuring success for brands and content producers online and ultimately why marketers and producers should spend more time creating "spreadable material" for audiences than trying to perfect "viral marketing." In this one-hour session, the speakers will share the ideas and strategy behind "spreadable media" and a variety of examples of best--and worst--practices online for both B2B and B2C campaigns.

This panel will address:

-- The concept of "stickiness" and why it cannot solely be used as a way to measure success online;
-- How and why viral marketing does not accurately describe how content spreads online;
-- Why a "broadcast mentality" does not work in a social media space;
-- The strategy companies should undertake when creating material for audiences to potentially spread online;
-- Companies that have learned difficult lessons and/or gotten the idea of "spreadable media" right;
-- Trends in popular culture/entertainment one which brands should keep a close eye;
-- How "spreadable media" might apply to B2B audiences.

A new study challenges previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of internet and cell phone use.

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types.

This is a little long (almost 20 minutes) and takes a little bandwidth-- but it's both informative and entertaining 

New comic strip site moves into the education market with BitStripsforSchools

It has been almost two years since we did our four-part feature on the use of comic books in the classroom. At that time we discussed the comics movement in light of the increased emphasis in the educational setting on student engagement and enhanced learning, two elements that spoke directly to the issue of teachers capturing the attention of their students.

Specifically, when it came to struggling young readers, it was clear that one way hook and thus engage students was to turn to the world of comics. While the initial reaction of some was that teachers were lowering their educational standards and reinforcing lazy reading habits, many others, understanding that teaching begins with getting student attention, decided to give comics a try.

For those educators still on the fence, we followed our initial post with an excellent interview with Chris Wilson of The Graphic Classroom. Most importantly, Chris clearly articulated how the graphic format could be used to enhance any reading program, not just those who struggled with the reading process.

Making Comic Strips

Teachers already using such the comics format no doubt understand how the creation of comic strips by students can become a teaching tool for reluctant writers as well.

Given what we had learned, we were extremely intrigued with a new web site called BitstripsforSchools.com. Just as one might expect, it is computer software that allows students to create their own comic book characters and story lines or strips.

Like Chris who grew up with an interest in graphic novels, Jacob Blackstock, the CEO of BitStrips Inc., always had an interest in drawing his own comics.

In fact, Jacob acknowledges that on the one hand he often got into trouble for drawing comics instead of paying attention while in class, but that on the other would get high marks for handing in comics as schoolwork.

With his site BitStrips, Jacob appears to have resolved this longstanding paradox. Having started, and stopped the university academic scene a number of times, Jacob had to teach himself classical animation, a step that helped him create his own 14-minute cartoon.

But the process of drawing the same character over 15,000 times (3 years worth of work) had him thinking of easier ways to repeat a creative process that could become tedious at times. With the help of David Kennedy, Shahan Panth, Jesse Brown, Dorian Baldwin and Tom Smahel, the group would create Bitstrips and offer just such a path for other would-be cartoonists.

Over the past ten days we posed a number of questions to the CEO of Bitstrips Inc. Below, as is our practice at OpenEducation, we offer his Q & A verbatim for our readers.

Can you give our readers a brief history of how Bitstrips came to be?

Bitstrips Inc. is a six-man team from Toronto, most of whom have been friends since high school. Collectively, we’ve been making comics, cartoons, and interactive games all our lives. After years of drawing the same things over and over again (animation and illustration can be tedious work), we found ourselves looking for a way to speed up the creation process – to minimize the time it takes to bring an idea to life in a shareable form. This quest led to the development of our Comic Builder, which we strived to make the easiest, most fun, and fastest way to make great-looking comics using a computer. As we reached this goal, we realized that the Comic Builder had a greater purpose than just speeding up the process:

Now anyone could make their own comics, regardless of their drawing ability. The uniquely evocative language of comics had always been reserved for a select few who possessed the skills and the patience to create them; now this language could be used by everyone, and could perhaps even become a new mode of everyday communication, like online video, blogs and twitter. Seeing this potential, we set out to build a new kind of website – and after about two years of toil, paid for out of our own pockets, Bitstrips.com was born.

In March of 2008 Bitstrips.com was launched at the SXSW interactive festival in Austin, Texas, where it was the hit of the show. We suddenly found ourselves fostering a rapidly growing, incredibly creative community of dedicated users, churning out massive quantities of comics on a daily basis. And to our surprise, we discovered that many of our users were educators, who were using the site as a teaching tool. This, in conjunction with recent studies that point to comics as a solution for developing student literacy, led us to consider the development of a new educational version of Bitstrips, tailored for use in the classroom.

We approached the Ontario Ministry of Education with a demo version of BitstripsforSchools, and they agreed to help us run a pilot program in a handful of classrooms. The pilot was a huge success, with teachers excited by the educational power of comic creation, and students inspired by the sheer fun of it all. We licensed the service to the Ministry for use across the province, and just about a month ago it finally launched – not just in Ontario, but also available anywhere in the world via an online self-serve option.

Since then the response has been overwhelming, with increasingly phenomenal usage. In our first month, we’ve had over 50,000 student accounts created. Currently the students are producing more than 6000 comics every day, and this number is increasing rapidly. And, most importantly, the teachers are thrilled to see just how engaged their students are while using Bitstrips.

Can you explain the differences between the two sites, particularly the attributes that are unique to the BitstripsforSchools site?

BitstripsforSchools.com contains all the technology from Bitstrips.com, but with added security and administration features designed specifically for the school setting. Unlike Bitstrips.com, which is an entertainment site open to the public, BitstripsforSchools enables teachers to create virtual classrooms, which are essentially walled gardens that have no links to the wider web. These classrooms are just for students, and the teacher is in control. Administrative functionality allows teachers to monitor all activity within the class, and moderate content before it’s shared with the class.

Another unique aspect of BitstripsforSchools is that it gives teachers the ability to create specialized activities, and even share them with other teachers. This makes the site much more versatile and applicable to specific curricula. For example, if the class is reading a certain book, the teacher can create an activity that involves adapting a scene from the book into comic form. Any subject, from language to social studies to science, can be turned into an engaging comic-creation activity. And, as these activities are shared between teachers via the Activity Library, BitstripsforSchools will become exponentially more useful – teachers can search for activities by grade and subject, and add comments or ratings to assist other teachers in finding what they need.

Can you talk a little bit about the creativity available to students on the site – while basic character traits are available, it appears that students can customize each of their characters? And what attributes are available should they try to ‘cartoon’ themselves?

One of the key ideas behind Bitstrips is that it’s not just about making comics – it’s about making comics that star YOU and your friends. This makes the experience more personal, fun and engaging. So, when developing the character builder, we tried to make it as flexible as possible, so that it’s easy to create an appealing, recognizable caricature of yourself or anyone you know.

There is currently a wide selection of facial features to choose from – eyes, ears, noses, hairstyles, etc… with regular updates planned throughout the year. But it’s not just about choosing the right set of eyes – you can also re-size them and move them around on the head – and we’ve found that it’s this fine-tuning of proportions that can really help capture the likeness of the person you’re recreating.

One of the special features we’ve added to BitstripsforSchools is a class picture that lives on your homepage. As each student creates his or her character (also known as avatars), it automatically appears in the group shot. So, when a teacher creates a Bitstrips classroom, they get to watch this scene fill itself up with cartoon versions of the whole class, which is a lot of fun for everyone.

Can you describe the types of emotions and actions available for characters? Is this fairly limited at this time?

One of the best things about building characters on Bitstrips is that there’s so much you can do with them. These characters are not just simple designs, they’re actually very expressive little puppets that can convey a lot of nuanced information without even using a word balloon.

We’ve got eight basic emotions to choose from, but those can be altered with independent eyelid, mouth and pupil controls, to generate a nearly infinite range of expressions. The body is also very adjustable, with a wide selection of poses in various categories (talking, walking, sitting, etc). And, even though it’s a two-dimensional design, you can rotate the character to view it from multiple angles.

So, from a single character design, there are truly endless possibilities when it comes to facial expressions and body language – which plays a big part in the unique way that comics can visually communicate thoughts and feelings.

How about the strips – is there a limit to the number of frames available or can a student create a story length cartoon?

A comic can have up to eight rows, with as many panels per row as the action will allow (usually no more than four). Generally this seems to be more than sufficient – though, for those students with more epic inclinations, they can build longer stories by creating multiple chapters. On Bitstrips.com we’ve had users create ongoing series with hundreds of episodes.

Talk a little bit about the art library currently available (characters, scenes and props). And what is in the works for expanding this library?

In addition to the characters, there is an art library containing a growing selection of props, furniture, backgrounds, and special effects. We like to think of the items in the library not as clip art, but rather as ‘smart art’ – that is, any given object may have multiple viewing angles as well as different states. For example, we have a banana that can be peeled, drawers that open and close, and water that transforms from a drop to a puddle. Discovering these extra states (and finding uses for them) has proven to be a fun part of exploring the library for our users.

The art library also contains full scenes, which combine backgrounds, props and furniture to make it faster and easier to create your comic. We’re working on new batches of artwork and plan on releasing regular updates throughout the year. We get lots of requests for specific items to be added to the library, and we try to make sure that the most commonly requested bits go to the top of our list of new things to design. Currently we’re working on some major updates that should really add to the fun – new clothing, animals, musical instruments, and more…

Your site notes that students can email their comics home, print them out, or paste them into other applications. What are some of the other common applications students can use?

For those who want to work beyond the confines of the comic strip format, graphics from Bitstrips can be copied and pasted into other image editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop. We’ve seen people copying their characters into posters, calendars, Powerpoint presentations, profile pics for blogs and Twitter accounts – you name it. Some industrious folks have even created flipbook animations on Youtube by exporting individual panels as frames. We’re constantly amazed to see Bitstrips art pop up in the least expected places.

What are some of the not so obvious, indirect learnings that Bitstrips can offer students?

There’s been a huge amount of emphasis lately on the power of comics as a tool for enhancing student engagement and literacy. We’ve also seen teachers use it for other subjects – art, social studies, even math.

Meanwhile, whatever the subject being studied, there is always the underlying fact that BitstripsforSchools is a social media application, and I think learning to use social media in a constructive way is very important for today’s students. While using Bitstrips, students will find themselves indirectly learning about appropriate online behavior, digital collaboration, and other essential skills for navigating the increasingly complex world of the web.

One real key aspect of comics is its ability to help students who are English as Second Language Learners. Are there other languages currently available for teachers?

BitstripsforSchools is currently available in English and French (we are a Canadian company, after all). It is very likely that in the near future we will add more versions of the site in different languages. We’ve already got users in every corner of the globe, and since the teachers write the activities and their students write the comics, there’s really nothing stopping anyone from using the tools in any language. But, as demand increases, we will certainly add more support (ie properly translated interface, activities and documentation) for other languages.

Educators are always concerned with Internet safety – talk a little bit about what filters/precautions you have in place?

While developing the site, we were very aware that safety would be a prime concern for teachers, and thus it’s been a major factor in how we set things up. Our guiding principle is that the teacher is in control. When a teacher opens an account, they create a ‘virtual classroom’ that is essentially a walled garden with no links to the wider internet. Students can still access this classroom from their home computers, but there’s no way for anyone outside the class to access it, and no way for the students to stumble upon any content that hasn’t been reviewed by their teacher.

We have a number of moderation controls, designed to help teachers track and deal with all the activity within the class. They can choose to have all comics sent to them for review before approving them to be shared with the other students. Students can flag comics or comments as inappropriate, at which point they are rendered invisible to the rest of the class and brought to the teacher’s attention. Comics containing profanities are flagged automatically.

Can you briefly go over the pricing structure and what comes with each pricing level? Can teachers sign off and on easily (so as to have access for one, two or three month periods should they choose)? And do you foresee a time when there might be a very basic option available to schools for free?

We offer subscriptions on either a monthly or annual basis. For a single-classroom account, which supports up to 40 students, it’s $9.95 per month, or $87 for a full year. Teachers with more than one class can also get a multi-classroom account, which supports up to 6 classrooms, for $29.95 per month or $265 for a year. All accounts come with free updates and upgrades, and unlimited comics and activities.

We also offer volume discount rates for school accounts and district accounts, such as our license for the Ontario Ministry of Education. School reps can easily get in touch with us via the site to determine the pricing.

It’s possible that some day we might be able to figure out a more basic version that could be freely available – but we still have a lot of work to do before we can afford to develop something like that. In the meantime, any teacher can try the full-featured service for free by signing up for a 14-day trial account. All paid accounts also include the free trial for the first two weeks.

Can you provide teachers a couple of contacts that are currently using BitstripsforSchools should new potential users want to pursue specific questions about the site and its application?

For a contact outside our company, I’d point people to the blog of Doug Peterson, who is a Computers in the Classroom Consultant here in Ontario, and is also part of the OSAPAC committee that recommended the license to the Ministry. He’s been a great evangelist for Bitstrips, and has posted some great articles on his blog, like this one.

Meanwhile, any potential users with specific questions should feel free to get in touch with us directly anytime by emailing us at info@bitstripsforschools.com. We’re always very happy to talk with educators about the service – direct communication with teachers has been a huge part of the site’s development since day one.

I’ve written about this before, but here we go again…

In educational research there is a long and storied history of people conducting studies along the lines of “is video-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “is text-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “”is video-based instruction more effective than text-based instruction?,” etc. This pointless family of research has a name, the “No Significant Difference Phenomenon,” and even has it’s own website: http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/. From the website:

This website has been designed to serve as a companion piece to Thomas L. Russell’s book, “The No Significant Difference Phenomenon” (2001, IDECC, fifth edition). Mr. Russell’s book is a fully indexed, comprehensive research bibliography of 355 research reports, summaries and papers that document no significant differences (NSD) in student outcomes between alternate modes of education delivery…. The primary purpose of the NSD website is to expand on the offerings from the book by providing access to appropriate studies published or discovered after the release of the book.

Hundreds of “horse race” studies comparing alternate modes of education delivery show us that nothing interesting happens in these studies. Indeed, careful forethought will demonstrate that we should expect to find nothing interesting in these kinds of studies. And yet eager graduate students and younger faculty continue to conduct them.

Unfortunately, I’m hearing more and more people talk about a new generation of media comparison studies – “License Comparison Studies.” These absolutely pointless studies would ask questions like “do CC BY-NC-SA licensed materials teach more effectively than traditionally copyrighted and licensed materials?” or “do CC BY-SA licensed materials teach more effectively than CC By-NC-SA materials?” Again, careful forethought will demonstrate that we should expect to find nothing interesting in these kinds of studies. Please, if you’re in a position to discourage these kinds of studies, save all of us the trouble and embarrassment by steering your students and colleagues in another direction.

I was part of an interesting discussion on Twitter Friday night and I wanted to share it here, as well as add a few final thoughts. Participants that I reference are Bud Hunt, Brian Crosby, Dean Shareski, Anne Van Meter, Barbara Barreda, and Karen Fasimpaur. Thanks to all of you for helping me think through these ideas.

The discussion started with a tweet from Bud Hunt where he shared some of what his school district is doing with Twitter. Here’s part of the tweet trail (I’m sure there were comments from other folks as well, but these are the ones I remembered and grabbed).





































I just want to add a few concluding thoughts. First, full disclosure, Bud called me on his way home from work and we talked for a while about this.

Second, I wasn’t arguing against what Bud’s district is doing. In fact, I really, really like what they’re doing, I was just trying to explore the ramifications and think through some of the issues.

Third, I wanted to “finish” my part of the discussion with Karen that was interrupted by my having to go make dinner. This is what I would’ve tweeted next (is this then a set of retroactive tweets?):

• @kfasimpaur It’s not so much the linking that I see as the problem.
• It’s the creation and the encouragement.
• By creating the Twitter list, @budtheteacher’s district has created something *new*, not just linked to something.
• I think the act of creation does imply some type of “ownership” and “responsibility”
• And when they publicize it & encourage folks both to add themselves to the list & to follow, that also blurs the lines.
• So, say a student in Bud’s district joins the Twitter list. Then he tweets that he’s . . .
• . . . planning on hurting himself or others. Is there some kind of monitoring in place? . . .
• . . . Should there be? Or say he tweets something offensive, then what?
• The fact the district has a disclaimer http://blogs.stvrain.k12.co.us/twitter/opt-in/ that they . . .
• . . . “reserve the right to determine the membership of the SVVSD’s Twitter Lists” implies some ownership . . .
• . . . and that some quasi-monitoring might be going on.
• So, again, I support what his district is doing and love the transparency and the community.
• But I do think it’s really complicated and there are many things we still need to think through.

Now, I actually might have tweeted something different because there probably would’ve been some replies in there that would have altered my thinking, but you get the idea.

Transparency and community building by teachers, schools and districts is something I very much support, and I think what St. Vrain is doing is very compelling and very interesting, but I also think it’s uncharted territory and there are some pretty complicated issues involved. This is a really important conversation to have, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Every week in English Nine Honors, students are given a set of ten SAT preparatory vocabulary words. Last week’s words were Bleak, Blight, Boycott, Brash, Bravado, Blithe, Brusque, Bombastic, Boisterous, and Boorish. They are expected to know and use these words appropriately by the end of the week. One exciting part of getting a new set of words to learn, besides of course learning new words, is our Wednesday vocabulary activity. Students have created bumper stickers, pick up lines, written letters of complaint and recommendation. However, none are as clever as when they are asked to create a country western song about Wonder Woman (yes, the lady with the golden lasso and bracelets). In their groups of four to five, after completing their fantastic composition and practicing for a few moments, the next step was for the students to record their “original” work in Audacity. After saving their recording, students were to export the files into an MP3 format and voila! We have Wonder Woman Gone Country!

While none of these may be destined to win a Grammy, take a listen and see if you can pick out the vocab words. Also, take our poll and vote for your favorite version...


Period 2:

SBJ song
SBJ lyrics

SGKM song
SGKM lyrics

KNA song
KNA lyrics

DG song
DG lyrics

NZ song
NZ lyrics

EA song
EA lyrics

GJLJ song
GJLJ lyrics

MEZN song
MEZN lyrics

MLTTKR song
MLTTKR lyrics

Period 5:

AJ song
AJ lyrics

AMKEM song
AMKEM lyrics

BJKSM song
BJKSM lyrics

BRM song
BRM lyrics

CKJEC song
CKJEC lyrics

ENDJ song
ENDJ lyrics

KTSABC song
KTSABC lyrics

Be sure to check out the sections below which also introduce you to groups and recordings that have been created in LearnCentral that are noteworthy.  Look for them below the events!


Public Events


The time of the events below will show up automatically in your time zone when you registered in LearnCentral and when you have chosen your time zone in your profile.  Remember that event recordings are posted and available after the events if you aren't able to attend them live.


We hope you'll consider hosting your own public webinars using the LearnCentral public room--instructions are available by joining the "Host Your Own Webinar" group on the main announcement tab (http://www.learncentral.org/group/3432/host-your-own-webinars).
 

Monday, November 2nd, 12pm Pacific Standard Time (US):  Caroline Hall leads a Middle School Partal 2:  Math and Science Pathways (MSP2) live session "Let There Be Light! 
Teaching EMS at the Middle Level."   LearnCentral Link:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/32433.  This rescheduled event will have taken place when you see this list, but there will be a recording link listed on the event page shortly.


Monday, November 2nd, 2:30pm Pacific Standard Time (US):  Michael Horn and Katherine Mackey of Innosight Institute discuss their recently released education case study that details the rise of the Florida Virtual School.  LearnCentral Link:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/34325


Wednesday, November 4th, 8:30am Pacific Standard Time (US):  Elluminate's
Shannon Autrey holds a "Bright Ideas" meeting to celebrate a year of Bright Ideas for using Elluminate!  The feature showcase is "Explore Objectsd" and will be followed by an opportunity to hear and share solutions, inspirational stories, and to share your own Bright Ideas!  LearnCentral Link:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/24292


Wednesday, November 4th, 5pm Pacific Standard Time (US):  Maria Droujkova and the Math 2.0 group in LearnCentral look at the Curriki community with Joshua Marks.  LearnCentral Link:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/28913


Thursday, November 5th, 1pm Pacific Standard Time (US):  Deirdre Bonnycastle hosts Dr.
Kalyani Premkumar who will discuss Concept Mapping, providing evidence and examples on how useful they have been in a medical school.  LearnCentral Link:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/19931

Thursday, November 5th, 4:30pm Pacific Standard Time (US):  Karen Richardson from the Virginia Society for Technology in Education hosts special guests Pam Moran,
Superintendent of Albemarle County Virginia Schools, and a teacher to discuss how to balance the demands of standards, technology, and project-based learning.  LearnCentral Link:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/31907

Saturday, November 7th,  9am Pacific Standard Time (US):  Steve Hargadon (that's me) joins Kim Caise for the weekly Classroom 2.0 LIVE series.  Our topic:  Social Networking in Education, based on a newly-released white paper I've written and looking at the powerful and positive value of "educational networking," especially for teacher professional development.  LearnCentral Link:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/23022



Coming Up Next Week:

• November 9th, Monday:  An interview with the Not School folks in the UK and Michigan
• November 10th, Tuesday:  Henry Jenkins from MIT Media Labs
• November 11th, Wednesday:  Richard Halverson and Allan Collins on their book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology
• November 11th, Wednesday:  The Classroom 2.0 LIVE Beginners Series
  
• November 12th, Thursday:  Lary Cuban discusses technology and education
• November 12th, Thursday:  MSP2 Session on "Laboratory Safety:  What's Your Responsibility?"

Noteworthy Groups

LearnCentral lets you create groups, with their own discussions forums, events, and portfolios.  Here are some groups that you might find of
interest.


K12 iTunes U:  http://www.learncentral.org/group/34020/k12-itunes-u.  "Focused on the Apple's iTunes U free online content for K-12 educators spearheaded by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA)"
World Languages:  http://www.learncentral.org/group/16712/world-languages.  Created by Benjamin Stewart.  "A group for those interested in the teaching and learning of world languages."
Elluminate Moderators Forum:  http://www.learncentral.org/group/32846/elluminate-moderators-forum.  Created by Amanda Reed.  "A group for anyone who has attended Elluminate training or is learning to use Elluminate Live! for online learning and collaboration."


This Past Week's Noteworthy Recordings


LearnCentral public events are all recorded, and we're hoping to build a great library of events for you to have at your disposal.  Recording links are in the "Post-Event" field at the bottom of the event listing pages.  (If you hold apublic event and want the recording listed here, be sure to remember to post the recording link after the show!)


"New Features in Diigo 4" with Maggie Tsai on Classroom 2.0 LIVE!:  http://www.learncentral.org/node/23021


Thanks for your attention, and see you online!

Part of the FutureofEducation.com interview series.


Date: Monday, November 2nd, 2009
Time: 2:30pm Pacific / 5:30pm Eastern / 10:30pm GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event.

In this live and interactive interview with Michael Horn and Katherine Mackey of Innosight Institute we discuss their recently released education case study that details the rise of the Florida Virtual School. From its humble origins in a $200,000 grant and 77 students in 1998, the Florida Virtual School has grown exponentially to serve over 70,000 students in over 154,000 enrollments in the most recent school year thanks to a series of policy and design decisions. Michael Horn writes: "As we seek to understand the power of disruption to transform the education system into a more student-centric one, understanding Florida Virtual School's disruptive growth and drawing the right lessons from it are vital."

Download the full case study here: http://www.innosightinstitute.org/media-room/publications/education-publications/florida-virtual-school/

Michael B. Horn is the co-founder and Executive Director, Education of Innosight Institute, a not-for-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector. He is the coauthor of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (McGraw-Hill: June 2008) with Harvard Business School Professor and bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis W. Johnson, president of the Citistates Group. BusinessWeek named the book one of the 10 Best Innovation & Design Books of 2008, Strategy + Business awarded it the best human capital book of 2008, Newsweek named it as the 14th book on its list of “Fifty Books for Our Times,” and the National Chamber Foundation named it first among its 10 “Books that Drive the Debate 2009.”

Disrupting Class uses the theories of disruptive innovation to identify the root causes of schools’ struggles and suggests a path forward to customize an education for every child in the way she learns. Horn has been a featured keynote speaker at many conferences including the Virtual School Symposium and Microsoft’s School of the Future World Summit.

Prior to this, Horn worked at America Online during its aol.com re-launch, and before that he served as David Gergen’s research assistant, where he tracked and wrote about politics and public policy. Horn has written articles for numerous publications, including Education Week, Forbes, the Boston Globe, and U.S. News & World Report. In addition, he has contributed research for Charles Ellis’ book, Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox (Wiley, 2006) and Barbara Kellerman’s Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

Horn earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and an AB from Yale University, where he graduated with distinction in History.

Katherine Mackey is a Research Fellow in Innosight Institute’s Education Practice. Prior to joining Innosight Institute in September 2008, she was an eleventh-grade English teacher at Highland High School, a public high school in Utah. She worked previously as a designer at Houghton Mifflin Children’s Books. She is the co-author of a strategic five-year Academic Master Plan for Salt Lake Community College and has assisted with the formation and writing of professional development packets for the Utah State Office of Education. She has also worked as an intern for Senator Orrin G. Hatch for two summers.

Mackey holds a BA in English and French from Wellesley College and an MA in Education from Harvard University.

Today, I am running the second part of the English language translation of an interview I did last year with Maxime Cervulle for Poli, a French magazine of media and cultural theory. Last time, the focus was on cultural politics and cybercitizenship. In this part, I turn my attention more fully to issues around Web 2.0. Enjoy and as always, let me know what you think.

In the current context, user-generated content faces new forms of media concentration, and new types of worrying alliances between governmental power and media conglomerates (for example in the Italian and French political context). Is this a paradoxical situation, or does "participatory culture" sometimes serve as a smoke screen for new economic and political configurations?

At the current moment, participatory culture, user-generated content, web 2.0, refer to a range of different corporate and grassroots practices, some of which are more tightly controlled than others. Certainly, as writers like Tzianna Terranova have suggested, user-generated content can become another word for "free labor", allowing for the outsourcing of expressive activity at considerable cost to those working in the creative industries. Certainly, as Trebor Sholtz and others have suggested, social networks seek to lock down our information, making it harder for us to port our data from space to space. As John Campbell has suggested, many of these sites invite us to train privacy for access to powerful tools for producing and circulating media content, engaging in various forms of surveilance which may or may not be acknowledged to the users.

As I have suggested, a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. Indeed, sites like YouTube, which rely on user-moderation, often operate on majoritarian premises which place very little value on access to minority perspectives and in some cases, may be less diverse at their most visible levels than forms of public broadcasting which have a strong mandate for broad representation. So, we really do need to look all of these gift horses in the mouth and try to understand the paradoxes and contradictions of web 2.0 culture.

That said, the sheer proliferation of tools has made it much easier for grassroots communications to route around official censorship, whether corporate or governmental. For example, Huma Yusuf has studied the ways that a range of different media channels -- YouTube, SMS, Facebook, Flickr, among them -- were deployed by activists and citizen journalists to get word out about what was happening in Pakistan during the 2007-2008 state of national emergency. She argues that no sooner did the government seek to close off one channel, then activists rerouted towards a different platform. And when activists were
stiffled at the geographically local level, they were able to tap the participation of a larger diasporic community which remain strongly connected to Pakistan through these various participatory power.

The trick, in other words, is to see participatory culture as having some real potentials for grassroots empowerment even as we maintain a healthy skepticism towards
specific web 2.0 practices which restrain rather than enable meaningful participation.

Many of the European writers about web 2.0 raise important concerns that we all need to factor into our analysis, but they are also, in my opinion, too quick to dismiss any claims that these tools and platforms can be used to effect meaningful social, cultural, and political change. The evidence is all around us that even in their most corrupted forms, they offer significant new
opportunities for activism, for cultural experimentation, and for new kinds of knowledge production. This is at the heart of what some people are describing as Networked Publics. It's easy to characterize my perspective as utopian, which often occurs in European responses to my work, yet if this is the case, I am not a blind utopian. For me, a recognition of the progressive potentials of these technologies and practices provides a basis for critiquing the abuses and manipulations which block such a deployment.

Does the recent turn to "creative industries" (in cultural studies as well as in public policy ­ see UNESCO for example) mark an obsolescence of the notion of "cultural industries"? How does this new notion might help us map new terrains in the relationship between culture, economy and society?

The term, "culture industries," is so closely associated with the Frankfort School tradition that I'm afraid that it locks us into old theoretical models of how the entertainment industry operates. There is some danger that the term, "creative industries," may similarly be coopted, especially as it gets deployed through public policy advocates, into a particular neo-Liberal inflection which may blind us to some of the critical issues I've raised above.

Yet, in the short run, it seems to me that the emergence of a new vocabulary allows us to ask some important questions about shifts in the patterns of cultural production and distribution, changes in the way information gets produced and deployed, and the degree to which our whole economic system may be shifting from commodity capitalism to a service economy to a creative economy, which has significant implications for culture and for education.

As we've seen, the power relations created around mass media, which formed the basis for many of our cultural theories, have been altered through the expansion of social networks and the increased visibility and centrality of participatory culture.This is not to say that commercial interests do not exert a strong influence over the communication environment. Of course, they do, but their power is no where near as totalizing as those classical accounts would suggest. This is not to say that these commercial interests do not seek to shape the hearts and minds of their consumers, but they are adopting rather different models of persuasion which depend upon our active participation and which are subject to our collective critique.

So, the most powerful reason to shift from talking about "culture industries" to 'creative industries" is to signal that we need to question and challenge old assumptions and rethink old theories as we deal with some fundamental changes in the way media gets produced,circulated, and consumed in this era of convergence culture.

What do you mean by "creative economy"? Are you refering to the concept of "cognitive capitalism" ?

I was not familiar with the phrase, "cognitive capitalism," but I took the logical next step in an era of collective intelligence: I looked it up on Wikipedia, where there happens to be a particularly good summary of its core ideas. Here's part of what Wikipedia says: "The production of wealth is no longer based solely and exclusively on material production but is based increasingly on immaterial elements, in other words on raw materials that are intangible and difficult to measure and quantify, deriving directly from employment of the relational, affective and cerebral faculties of human beings." The Wikipedia entry stresses that these "immaterial elements" are getting translated into "intellectual property" and are thus generating rents through copyright protections. So, based on this definition, then I would say there's a close relationship between the two concepts.

The "cognitive capitalist" model seems to adopt a largely critical stance on these developments, where-as most of those who use "creative economy" are celebrating the shifts. Both are describing a series of moves from commodity and industrial based modes of production towards a service based economy towards an economy based on brands and intellectual property. And there's no question that the struggles over intellectual property will be the core conflicts which will shape our cultural and political lives for the coming decades. The good news is that we are seeing considerable activism emerging around issues of fair use, net neutrality, privacy, and control over personal information and these groups are gaining some ground in institutional change and much more ground in terms of actual cultural practice. The general public today embraces a model of intellectual property which differs fundamentally with the stated goals and
interests of the corporate sector, as they are increasingly taking media into their own hands, and that is forcing legal and economic changes that have to acknowledge, incorporate, and respect the emerging power of participatory culture.

So, if the intellectual property industries represent a form of "cognitive capitalism," might we argue that Wikipedia itself represents a kind of "cognitive socialism?" After all, the content of the site is freely given by those who choose to participate; participates seek no material rewards but
rather are sharing knowledge for the common good; I was able to access that information without paying rents; and I was just able to deploy it in responding to your question. And that's precisely the challenge I would pose to the most critical accounts of these trends.

There is something different taking place here in social organization and political behavior in a world where information can become a source of power and wealth, where social networks allow for new forms of collaborations between groups and individuals, where information can circulate with little to no direct costs, and where much information is being provided for free from groups which are not motivated primarily on a commercial basis. Certainly, we need to be very aware of how commercial interests may feed upon and exploit this grassroots effort at the production of information. But we also need to recognize the alternative economy which is represented by the growth of these new social networks.

In some current work, I've been looking closely at Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift which talks about the ways that commodity capitalism intersects with the gift economy. I'm finding this as a very helpful starting point for understanding the tensions which are now defining our economic and legal systems. Many of the groups which have emerged on or moved to the web have historically operated not only according to different values than commodity culture but they have explicitly argued against making profits from the circulation of their work. This is certainly true of the female-centered fan culture which was the focus of my book, Textual Poachers, several decades ago. And the movement to the web has enabled them to lower costs of production and circulation even more, transforming their cultural goods into gifts which are freely bestowed on anyone who is interested. We can't romanticize this new "gift economy." We have to understands the strengths and limitations of its models. But we can't
ignore it as a counterforce on "cognitive capitalism" if we are to develop a full understanding of the new information landscape.

The model of "cognitive capitalism," at least as represented through Wikipedia, seems incomplete if it emphasizes only the mechanisms by which capitalism is reproducing itself in an era where intellectual property is king, and does not confront the alternative systems of production and distribution which are emerging from participatory culture. So, the wikipedia definition, based on the writings of Ed Emery, continues: "The subjection of the worker within the production process is no longer imposed in disciplinary fashion by direct command (foremen etc); most of the time it is introjected and developed through forms of conditioning and social control. Individualised contractual relations are the order of the day, and this tends to introduce individual competitiveness into people's working behaviours." Yet, we can also argue that
a networked society has enabled new forms of informal, noncommercialized collaboration and cooperation in which information is freely shared for the benefit of all.

Even as this new stage of capitalism you're refering to could completely remap power relations and economic opportunities in new and imprevisible ways, it also implies that unequal access to technologies, computation power or high-speed connection might result in unequal economic developments. What kind of "access politics" should be deployed?

I make a distinction between the digital divide, which has to do with access to the technology, and the participation gap, which has to do with access to skills, knowledge, and cultural/social capital. In many ways, the first is a problem which can be and is being addressed through the provision of access to networked computers via schools and public libraries. The second, on the other hand, is a much more difficult problem to confront.

The Participation Gap is an educational issue: how do we insure that every citizen has access to the social skills and cultural competencies required to be a full participant in the new media landscape? It is also a cultural issue: how do we insure that all have a sense of "empowerment" or "entitlement" which insures that they feel comfortable entering into these emerging networked
publics? And in some ways, it is an economic one, having as much to do with the distribution of time as it does with the distribution of wealth and power, though it is hard to separate the three. So, certain classes of people, because of the restructuring of work, have more flexible or disposable time through which they can interface with networked publics, while others have lives
structured by routinized labor and the demands to struggle to support their families which makes it much harder for them to enter the rhythmns and flows of digital communications.

The participation gap refers to all of these obstacles to full participation. In my case, the work I am doing with the MacArthur Foundation around new media literacies is intended to represent a model for the kinds of "access politics" required to confront the participation gap. It starts from the recognition that the informal forms of participation and social networking which are part of the
lives of many American young people are not available to all. These sites of informal learning are the new "hidden curriculum." Historically, educators note, those kids who have access to encyclopedias and opera records, dinner table conversations about politics and trips to the art museum, performed better, and were perceived to perform better, in schools than those young
people who lacked these experiences. These informal, domestic activities shaped their cultural capital as they entered institutional learning. Similarly, research shows that such kids are much more likely to go to public art institutions even if you lower economic barriers than those kids who lack this kind of cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu's work is a great illustration of the relationship between education and these forms of cultural distinction and discrimination. So, we are trying to develop resources which help broaden access to the kinds of skills, competencies, and self perceptions which emerge through these informal online activities. We are doing so as part of a network of researchers, across a range of disciplines and institutions, working with
the MacArthur Foundation, to reshape the core institutions that impact young people's lives in response to the shifts in the cultural and informational environs.

Do new modes of knowledge production made possible by web 2.0 actually change the politics of knowledge? Can "collective intelligence" become a counter-hegemonic sphere or does it tends to reproduce -as you underlined with YouTube- majoritarian premises?

The first thing I'd stress is that the technologies in and of themselves guarantee nothing. What matters are the social practices, cultural norms, and institutions which emerge around these technologies. Too much early digital theory talked about the democratizing impact of new media without recognizing that those tools and platforms can be deployed towards many ends as they get inserted into different political, economic, and social contexts.

We can argue that there are a range of different models of collective intelligence shaping the digital realm at the present time. We might distinguish broadly between three different models: 1)An aggregative model which assumes that we can collect data based on the autonomous and anonymous decisions of "the crowd" and use it to gain insights into their collective behavior. This is the model which shapes Digg and to some degree, YouTube. 2)a curatorial model where grassroots intermediaries seek to represent their various constituencies and bring together information that they think is valuable. This is the model which shapes the blogosphere. 3)a deliberative model where many different voices come together, define problems, vet information, and find solutions which would be impossible for any individual to achieve. This is the model shaping Wikipedia or even more powerfully alternate universe games.

Of the three, the deliberative model offers the most democratic potentials, especially when it is tempered by ethical and political commitments to diversity. This is the model which Pierre Levy describes in his book, Collective Intelligence. Levy's account stresses the affirmative value placed on diversity in such a culture. The more diverse the community, the broader range of possible information and insights can inform the deliberative process.

So, the Wikipedians talk about "systemic bias" to reflect the kinds of gaps or excesses in their information which comes from the predominance of geeks and the limited participation of some other groups in their authoring community. Some topics get extensive treatment while others get neglected as long as some groups are over-represented and others under-represented in the process. Yet, Wikipedia's norms as a community stress the importance of insuring that as many
different points of view get represented. The group seeks to lower obstacles to more diverse participation and to make room for those viewpoints which might otherwise get silenced. This was seen as a way out of "edit wars" which would stall the project, but it also has the effect of creating a possitive value on broader representation and inclusiveness.

No such mechanism exists in YouTube, say, which does adopt a more majoritarian model. It isn't that minority perspectives can't be found on YouTube: the platform can be used by many groups who circulate its contents in their own communities through the curatorial processes of blogs and social network sites. But there's nothing that places a positive value on insuring that this diversity gains visibility at the highest levels on the site: you can come to Youtube and
not be exposed to views or content which operates outside the dominant perspectives of its user base (though keep in mind that those perspectives may or may not align with those which govern "mainstream" mass media and so YouTube may still represent a challenge to old style hegemony.)

We are at a moment where a lot of social experimentation is taking place around collective intelligence. We have lots of models to chose from and there's some key work for media scholars and theorists to be reflecting on the social mechanics and technical affordances of different sites to see which may best promote the democratization of knowledge production. There's plenty of room for healthy skepticism in this process as well as I hope, some space for the utopian imagination. But, we get nowhere if the theorists adopt a purely cynical and critical perspective, seeing it all as more of the same, as capitalism in new bottles, and thus failing to make meaningful distinctions between different social and cultural practices that are emerging in cyberspace.

Orton-Gillingham techniques have been in use since the 1930s. The Orton-Gillingham methodology utilizes phonetics and emphasizes visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles. Instruction begins by focusing on the structure of language and gradually moves towards reading. The program provides students with immediate feedback and a predictable sequence that integrates reading, writing, and spelling.

The Orton-Gillingham method is language-based and success-oriented. The student is directly taught reading, handwriting, and written expression as one logical body of knowledge. Learners move step by step from simple to more complex material in a sequential, logical manner that enables students to master important literacy skills. This comprehensive approach to reading instruction is claimed to benefit all students.

Features of the Approach

Language-based: The Orton-Gillingham approach is based on a technique of studying and teaching language, understanding the nature of human language, the mechanisms involved in learning, and the language-learning processes in individuals.

Multisensory: Orton-Gillingham teaching sessions are action-oriented and involve constant interaction between the teacher and the student and the simultaneous use of multiple sensory input channels reinforcing each other for optimal learning. Using auditory, visual, and kinesthetic elements, all language skills taught are reinforced by having the student listen, speak, read and write. For example, a dyslexic learner is taught to see the letter A, say its name and sound and write it in the air – all at the same time. The approach requires intense instruction with ample practice. The use of multiple input channels is thought to enhance memory storage and retrieval by providing multiple "triggers" for memory.

Structured, Sequential, and Cumulative: The Orton-Gillingham teacher introduces the elements of the language systematically. Sound-symbol associations along with linguistic rules and generalizations are introduced in a linguistically logical, understandable order. Students begin by reading and writing sounds in isolation. Then they blend the sounds into syllables and words. Students learn the elements of language--consonants, vowels, digraphs, blends, and diphthongs—in an orderly fashion. They then proceed to advanced structural elements such as syllable types, roots, and affixes. As students learn new material, they continue to review old material to the level of automaticity. The teacher addresses vocabulary, sentence structure, composition, and reading comprehension in a similar structured, sequential, and cumulative manner.

Cognitive: Students learn about the history of the English language and study the many generalizations and rules that govern its structure. They also learn how best they can learn and apply the language knowledge necessary for achieving reading and writing competencies.

Flexible: Orton-Gillingham teaching is diagnostic and prescriptive in nature. Teachers try to ensure the learner is not simply recognising a pattern and applying it without understanding. When confusion of a previously taught rule is discovered, it is re-taught from the beginning.

Research Support

Despite the long-term and widely established use of Orton-Gillingham techniques, the Florida Center for Reading Research reported in 2006 that it was unable to identify any empirical studies examining the efficacy of the approach specifically as described in Orton-Gillingham training materials. Thus there was no direct research evidence to determine its effectiveness, although there are a variety of studies of derivative methods that incorporate aspects of Orton-Gillingham in combination with other techniques.

An overview of all reported studies of Orton-Gillingham derivative methods, such as Alphabetic Phonics or Project Read, revealed only a dozen studies with inconsistent results and a variety of methodological flaws. In a detailed report in the Journal of Special Education, the authors reported that despite widespread use in a variety of settings for more than 5 decades, “OG instruction has yet to be comprehensively studied and reported in peer-reviewed journals.” They concluded, “the research is currently inadequate, both in number of studies and in the quality of the research methodology, to support that OG interventions are scientifically based.”

Practical Applications

For remedial reading, if a child is dyslexic, you want her to have instruction that focuses on decoding, such as Orton-Gillingham or Wilson Reading (there are others, too).  This may be different from the instruction offered in a remedial reading class; it depends upon your district.  Don't insist on a particular brand name of instruction (i.e. Orton-Gillingham); it's the focus of the teaching that is important.

Picture: Raggamuffin Parade, Hoboken, NJ 2009

Raggamuffin: A homeless or poverty-stricken child. Usually refers to those kids you see in movies set in the 1800's, with those gloves that are cut off at the finger-tips and that wear those beret-like caps. 

This is a great example of a teacher using technology to have some fun with his students in his pre-Halloween class. It was made for a Nature of Math class at Biola University by Matthew Weathers, October 28, 2009.

Great job, Matthew.

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Earlier this fall, the French cultural theory magazine, Poli, ran an extensive interview with me conducted by Maxime Cervulle. The interview explored a range of topics surrounding the cultural politics of participatory culture and web 2.0, specifically addressing concerns raised by European intellectuals about some of the themes I explored in Convergence Culture. I saw it as an opportunity to identify points of contact as well as differences in how we thought about digital media and political/economic change. The readership of this interview was academic so the language deployed may be a bit more high-flying than I usually would run in this blog. But I felt it would be valuable to distribute an English language translation of the exchange. By prior arrangements with the magazine's editors, I've waited several months since it's appearance in France and am now sharing it with you. Many of the themes are ones which have surfaced on this blog before but some of the topics were new to me and opened up some interesting lines of thinking. The interview came back to my mind this past week because of a series of exchanges with USC students about the relationship between work in cultural studies, such as my own, which was influenced by the work of John Fiske, my graduate mentor, and work in political economy, which has tended to be far more critical of developments in digital media.

When you first published Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture in 1992, the active audience you analyzed through the figure of the fan seemed to be quite a marginal phenomenon. With the development of interactive cultures, participative audiences seem now to have taken center stage. How does this 20 years reconfiguration of media audiences change the way we think the relationship between culture and audience?

When I began my career, some cultural and media scholars were prepared to acknowledge an "active," "resistant" or "participatory" audience as a theoretical possibility. When I first began to document fan practices, it was assumed that this was a "minority" practice, that fans were "exceptional" readers. Increasingly, in the era of YouTube and FaceBook, it becomes clearer that many more people than even I imagined might want to actively engage with media content, appropriating and reshaping it to better reflect their personal and shared interests.

Today, it is meaningless to write about the changing media scape without paying close attention to various forms of audience participation and the various business models which have emerged under the banner of "web 2.0" to capitalize on the desire of consumers to play a more visible and active role in shaping the production and circulation of media content. It is inconceivable to study YouTube without understanding the behavior of media consumers in a way that previous generations of film scholars might have dealt with cinema exclusively through the analysis of auteurs.

It doesn't mean that media creators and media industries don't matter. Of course,
they do and they exert much more power than the more wide-eyed cyberenthusiasts might acknowledge. Contrary to what you may have heard, we do not yet and probably never will live in a world without gatekeepers. We need to be paying close attention to the mechanisms by which media industries frame some kinds of audience participation as acceptable and others as unacceptable, even as they claim to expand the power of consumers and diversify the contents of our culture. We need to be attentive to the limits of participation even as we are excited about the broadening franchise which consumers do enjoy in this new convergence culture.

The fans I described in Textual Poachers were in many ways the shock troops of
this cultural transformation: they lived in virtual communities decades before the rest of us; they knew how to tap collective intelligence long before the general population had ever heard of this context; they were remixing video and circulating it amongst themselves decades before Youtube; they were writing their own stories and sharing them with each other before anyone termed the phrase "user-generated content."

And it is significant that much of this early fan practice was done by women who are increasingly being written out of the history of digital media. Fan women played an important role in helping their friends make the transition into the new media scape and they modeled what a more participatory culture might look like when it meant patching two vcrs together. We should not forget that history even as we are fascinating with the broadening of participation that is being enabled by the lowering costs and ease of use embodied in the latest digital platforms.


How can we move from consumer participation to citizen participation, from a participatory culture to a participatory democracy? Are the two connected?

I am just now launching a new project to explore this issue more closely, so I can only paint in broad outlines here. I am interested in better understanding the mechanisms within fan communities that enable and sustain participation and in particular, the ways fan communities educate their members in order to prepare them to take collective action. So, for example, I think there's a lot we can learn about new forms of activism by understanding how fan communities launch letter-writing campaigns to keep their favorite programs on the air or to defend their appropriations of intellectual property in the face of threats from studio lawyers.

From there, we might look at some recently launched organizations which self-consciously fuse together the identities of fan and citizen. I am thinking about groups like the HP Alliance, which has mobilized Harry Potter fans in the global human rights movement, or The
Organization for Transformative Works, which has brought together fan professionals to develop a
more rigorous defense of Fair Use, or Global Kids which is using Second Life as a platform for kids to educate each other about issues impacting youth around the world.

Such organizations tap the playful fantasies and popular metaphors and grassroots infrastructure of the fan community and turn it towards the goal of transforming the society. In some cases, they are relying on a politics of volunteerism, sometimes governmental advocacy, but in every case, they have lowered the threshold for participation and engagement with political change. I am interested in how popular culture may offer a different set of metaphors for thinking about the political processes. Those of us who are academics forget how exclusionary and specialized much of political discourse can be. You really can't understand this policy wonk talk unless you are already initiated into the language of politics and governance.

So, these groups are modeling a new kind of political language. They are also sites where average people are acquiring core skills at social networking, media production, collaborative problem solving, which are being turned to political causes.

What do you think of the use by political leaders, such as Barrack Obama in the U.S, of the rhetoric of "citizen participation" and/or "citizen expertise"?

The Obama campaign is a powerful example of how politics might play out in convergence culture. For one thing, the Obama campaign understood the need to spread its message across every available media platform. They not only worked with established media -- television networks, newspapers -- but they also experimented with the use of games systems, mobile phones, social networks, and YouTube as vehicles through which they could reach out and connect with voters. They saw campaigning not as the one-time delivery of a pitch but the building of a long-term network which linked the voters to each other to form a community of support. They embraced popular appropriations and remixing of Obama's image so that people felt a great sense of possession over this man and his message. They adopted a "we" language which was highly compatible with their supporters lived experiences of social networks and collective intelligence.

In many ways, the Obama campaign was less a political movement and more a fandom. And that's why the McCain people so actively sought to pathologize the emotional investments which Obama's supporters made in the candidate and the campaign. There were a number of commercials ridiculing the candidate as a "celebrity" and his supporters as "fans," suggesting that they were spooked by the "enthusiasm gap" between the two candidates -- justly so, as it turns out, because Obama was drawing record crowds at his campaign stops and this translated into an extraordinarily diverse and far-reaching base of support. I am certain we are going to see similar tactics emerge in countries all over the world, because the Obama campaign so perfectly tapped the affordances and "structure of feeling" of the new participatory culture.

Since you are speaking of the "fan base" of Obama, and of the way he was sometimes seen as a "celebrity", I'd like to ask you how you understand the political and cultural meaning of celebrity culture ? Can "celebrities" still be understood as a "mode of displacement" - as Richard Dyer argued in Stars - displacing politics to the "private" sphere, and displacing collective issues to a singular experience ; or is there a new relationship to celebrity
emerging ?

Richard Dyer's work on Stars was enormously important in opening up a whole new model for the analysis of motion pictures, one which recognized that stars were a central organizing principle of the Hollywood entertainment system and that the meanings of stars needed to be constructed intertextually -- across a range of different texts and media. I've learned a tremendous amount from his work.

But it's also worth keeping mind he is describing how stars functioned in a very particular information environment. He's describing a time when the meanings of stars were largely if not entirely articulated top down through mainstream media -- either through the studio's publicity mechanisms or through the scandel sheets which existed in parallel and sometimes in opposition to the studios. The stars, themselves, were under contracts which severely restricted their ability to exert their own voices through the public sphere and which thus gave them very little say in how the public perceived them. And the public might construct alternative fantasies around these stars, as we now know through, for example, Dyer's account of how the gay community took up Judy Garland, but those meanings could not be easily spread from local communities to a larger public.

All of this has changed. Today's celebrities are, for better and for worse, free agents who have their own publicity machines which help to shape their images. Many of them follow older patterns with an emphasis on their private lives and much of the news media focuses on the same kinds of romantic, sexual, and substance abuse scandals that titilated readers decades ago. But other stars are speaking out about political issues, endorsing candidates, lobbying for legislation, and supporting activist efforts. We might, for example, cite the example of the Will.i.am video produced for Obama in response to his "Yes We Can" theme as work that emerged from celebrities working together and using their power of publicity to increase public awareness of civic concerns. Or we might point to the role which hip hop performers like Chuck D, Kanye West, or Russell Simmons have played in rallying opposition to the Bush administration. Even a celebrity who might seem totally apolitical and focused purely on the private sphere may be pulled into political debates, as occurred when Paris Hilton produced her own video responding to McCain's comparison between her and Obama. The video was partially humorous but it also gave her a platform to speak out about global warming.

At the same time, the public has a much greater ability to appropriate, remix, transform, and recirculate celebrity images than ever before, mobilizing them towards alternative fantasies or politics. Because celebrities are widely known, appropriations of their images circulate more widely and swiftly than more conventional kinds of political messages. Because they are mythic, larger than life figures, their meaning is always up for grabs. This phenomenon is not unique to the United States: film stars in India often cross over from Bollywood into politics, carrying with them mythic associations from their best known film roles, while in Mexico, Lucha Libre wrestlers can become powerful spokespeople for the underclass.

Earlier this fall, the French cultural theory magazine, Poli, ran an extensive interview with me conducted by Maxime Cervulle. The interview explored a range of topics surrounding the cultural politics of participatory culture and web 2.0, specifically addressing concerns raised... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

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The Visual Resources Association (VRA) has just released a White Paper on the management and use of image resources: Advocating for Visual Resources Management in Educational and Cultural Institutions.

The paper encourages "holistic thinking" about meeting institutional and individual image user needs in educational/cultural institutions. It identifies six strategic areas for future planning: multiple image sources; integrating personal and institutional collections; social computing and collaborative projects; life-cycle continuum of image assets and their description; rights and copyright compliance; and visual literacy.

The paper points out that VR managers are now increasingly aligned with IT, rights management, and course management issues and policies as they build institution-wide resources. The recent elimination of some key VR positions is of great concern to this group and appears very short-sighted. VRA President Allan Kohl sums it up: "When more academic disciplines are using images as primary teaching resources, and visual literacy is increasingly understood as being central to learning, it is more important than ever to support the building of shared collections to reduce redundancy, facilitate resource sharing, increase efficiencies, and minimize costs."

On a positive note, the VRA White Paper describes several successful administrative scenarios that offer flexible options for building shared image collections and providing support for their users at both educational and cultural institutions.  

Lately, I've been getting all sorts of emails from folks applying to grad school who are seeking advice. I noticed that I was starting to say the same thing over and over again so I thought maybe it'd be better off to write some of it down in a more... zephoria zephoria-blog@zephoria.org academia

Lately, I've been getting all sorts of emails from folks applying to grad school who are seeking advice. I noticed that I was starting to say the same thing over and over again so I thought maybe it'd be better off to write some of it down in a more publicly consumable way. So here goes...

Choosing the Right Grad School

If there are faculty or students out there reading this, I'd love your comments and suggestions too. I know that we all have different advice we give to potential grad students so I know that this isn't the end-all-be-all. Please feel free to comment, send links to your own advice columns, or just tell me that I'm wrong. There are loads of potential students out there lost and confused so hopefully this'll help in some small way.

Also, make sure that you read PhD Comics for a good laugh and Eszter Hargittai's Ph.Do column for some sound advice on being a PhD student.

(Note: I've created a separate page because I plan on updating this as my thoughts on the matter change.)

gradschool PhD advice

Fourth-graders' math skills have seen no improvement over the last two years, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released this week. Scores for eighth-graders did improve slightly but not significantly. As a result, United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that more needs to be done both to close the achievement gap and improve the overall performance of America's students.

The report, also known as "The Nation's Report Card: Mathematics 2009," studied 168,000 fourth-graders and 161,000 eighth-graders who took part in the assessment, which covered a range of mathematics topics, from algebra and geometry to number properties and operations, measurement, and data analysis, probability, and statistics.

Fourth-Grade Achievement Flat : This year's report showed that for the first time since 1996, fourth-graders made absolutely no progress in math achievement compared with the previous report period (2007). For both years, average scores were 240. (There had been a slowing trend in achievement gains leading up to 2009's results. The gain from 2000 to 2003 was nine points; the gain from 2003 to 2005 was three points; and the gain from 2005 to 2007 was just two points on the fourth-graders' average scores in mathematics.
The results were identical for fourth-graders when grouped by performance level. There was no change from 2007 to 2009 for students who performed at or above proficient level or at or above basic level.
"Today's results are evidence that we must better equip our schools to improve the knowledge and skills of America's students in mathematics" said Secretary Duncan in a statement released to coincide with the report Wednesday. "Our students have made real gains in math over the past two decades, but for the first time since NAEP's mathematics test started in 1990, student achievement in fourth grade has not improved. More must be done to narrow the troubling achievement gap that has persisted in mathematics, and to ensure that America's students make greater gains toward becoming competitive with their peers in other countries."

Eighth-Grade Scores Increase Slightly : Meanwhile, in the eighth grade, test results continued the slow upward trend that began between 1996 and 2000, when scores increased from 270 to 273. Between 2000 and 2003, they increased another five points; between 2003 and 205, they rose just one point; between 2005 and 2007, they increase another two points; and between 2007 and 2009, the rose two points again, topping out at an average score of 283.
The results were similar among the two different performance groups. Those achieving at or above basic level saw their scores increase slightly, as did those performing at or above proficient level.

Duncan said that the overall results call for reform in the way math is taught in K-12 schools. "None of us should be satisfied. We need reforms that will accelerate student achievement. Our students need to graduate high school ready to succeed in college and the workplace. These NAEP results are a call to action to reform the teaching and learning of mathematics and other related subjects in order to prepare our students to compete in the global economy."

Further information about the 2009 math results can be found at NAEP's site here. A complete copy of the full report can be downloaded in PDF form here.