[iDC] Local Interventions and Mobility Shifts

[Jessica F. Lingel]

Hello Mobility Shifts and idc-ers,
I'm writing on behalf of my Mobility Shifts panel, consisting of David Gagnon, Nathan Graham, Germaine Halegoua and myself, Jessa Lingel.  Our panel is on Saturday (at 3pm) and deals with tools and technologies for DIY archives, activism and education.  We wanted to extend our shared interest in creating accessible tools for archiving interactions and conversations beyond our panel, so we created a YouTube based game intended to provoke discussion from the conference. 
Our YouTube video explains the objective here (www.youtube.com/user/localinterventions) but we wanted to share on the idclist as well.  Each day of the conference, we will upload a question to our Local Interventions YouTube channel, as well as the Local Interventions website: http://www.digitalborn.org/archives/34.  Our first question is drawn from Henry Jenkins' idc post earlier today, which addresses questions of how educators can bring technology into the classroom when burdened by restrictive institutional policies on media, how libraries can offer students digital literacy without adequate staff or funding.  In short, our first question is largely a pragmatic one:
-What obstacles have you faced in your work as an educator, academic and/or activist in terms of media policies?  What has proven successful in overcoming these obstacles?
We invite you to treat each question as a challenge to interview other conference attendees (or people who are just interested in the conference topics) about the questions we post, take videos and upload those videos to the channel.  Our short term objective is to foster dialogue based on content that emerges from Mobility Shifts, but we also have the long term aim of creating a digital archive of the conversations that take place as a result of meetings, panels, sessions and Q&As. To upload videos, send them to this e-mail (4uhg08wkjvkp at m.youtube.com - we know it's not easy to remember, so just type it out once and add it to your smart phone address book.).  You can also use the Twitter hashtag: #localinterventions to send in questions and comments. 
There will be a prize for the user who uploads the most videos, but really the motivation should be to contribute to a lasting digital artifact that documents Mobility Shifts as a site of interaction, discussion and play.
Let us know if you have questions, please join us in our online game, and see you at the conference!
Jessa

Jessa Lingel
PhD Candidate
School of Communication and Information
Rutgers University
http://jessalingel.tumblr.com/


-----Original Message-----

> Date: Mon Oct 03 17:47:39 EDT 2011
> From: "Henry Jenkins" <hgjenkins3 at gmail.com>
> Subject: [iDC] We've Wired the Classroom -- Now What!
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> 
> As we get ready for the Mobility Shifts conference, I have been asked to see
> if I can provoke a conversation among attendees.
> 
> Here's what I have on my mind today:
> 
> For some time, those of us who work closely with educators observe a core
> paradox. The work of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative have
> focused attention on games-based, mobile, networked, connected,
> participatory, affinity space, geeked-out modes of learning (Hope I got all
> of the buzz words in there) and there's a great deal of research and
> experimentation exploring the value of these approaches. But the story on
> the ground looks very different with schools installing networked computers
> and then, in effect, disabling all of the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms
> from being deployed by teachers and students. So, federal funding comes
> attached with restrictions on access to social media and with the
> requirement of filtering software which makes it hard to use much of the web
> for instruction. Many teachers are blocked from using YouTube and other
> video sharing platforms. In Los Angeles, there are work arounds which allow
> the teacher to punch in a code and authorize the use of YouTube, but it has
> to be punched in for each clip and has to be done very quickly before the
> clip is accessed, so you can not even line up all of the clips you need for
> a particular class period at the start of the period. Teachers are
> discouraging their students from using Wikipedia, because they have not been
> trained in how the online project works. And of course, our hopes that
> librarians might become information coaches for their students have been
> complicated by the fact that whole school districts have fired all of their
> librarians or forced them back into being mostly full time classroom
> teachers. So, we are gaining ground conceptually and losing it on the level
> of policy. So, what are we, as a community of researchers, theorists, and
> educators, going to do about this? What are our prospects for a meaningful
> collective response to what is a set of policy decisions, partially made at
> a Federal level and tied to funding, partially at very local levels and thus
> highly fragmented?
> 
> Talk among yourselves.