New Media Literacies Blog

On the Participatory Model of Reading

Today, my friends, I want to discuss the possibility of using Drawball as an analogy for the participatory model of reading.

An Afternoon With Jonathan Harris-- Part 1

An Afternoon with Jonathan Harris at his Brooklyn studio.

(The content of this interview will be available in video chapters on Project New Media Literacies Learning Library)

Earlier this month, Clement and I went to New York City to interview Jonathan Harris. A New York based artist, who combines elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling to explore and explain human world through designing systems.

Objects that Comprise One's Life

A couple of weeks ago, I had something happen to me which made me consider (yet again!) how much our relationship with new media has shaped our real-world (or non digital) lives.  As a graduate student with Comparative Media Studies at MIT, I had been preparing my thesis (the culmination of almost two years of research in school) for final submission for graduation in June 2008.  Like my other compatriots at CMS, I had basically been living in front of my laptop for months: writing new sections of my chapters, making last minute revisions, and formatting all my citations and footnotes.  However, unbeknownst to me, my computer was hatching its own devious plan - one which was unaligned with my goals of finishing the thesis and thus graduating from MIT.  A year previous, I had faced down a "screen of death" (according to Wikipedia) on the very same laptop.  I was left computer-less at the exact time when I needed it the most, finals week.  I had found myself not only without computing tools, but also without my precious data (I was writing papers and making an educational website at the time).  For the most part, I had to reconstruct what I was doing from printed pages, my memory, or scattered hand-scribbled notes.  Thought it was difficult, I ended up scraping by - relying on several desktop computers, burned CDs and flash drives along the way to help me finish the term.

"Ya Gotta Hear Saget Tell It": The Ethics of Identity Play

I've been thinking lately about identity play. I'm focused on this right now because of Project NML's collaboration with Project Zero's GoodPlay Project on an ethics casebook focusing on the five ethical categories GoodPlay outlines in its white paper. This month, we've been talking about identity. A recent brainstorm session got me thinking about the assumptions we (read: Americans) make about the relationship between the identities we take on and our sense of who we are.

Get to know your "Friends"

I'm a member of Facebook ...and the other day, someone I didn't know requested me to be his friend.  My first reaction is "Who is this person?" ...so I go to his profile to check him out.  I realize we have three friends in common - all people I work with.  So, I send him a message, saying I see we have mutual friends and ask him if we've ever met before.  The reply is "Unfortunately, we haven't met in person but I don't think this should matter if we can communicate online. :)"

I think of myself pretty aware and up on today's social media experience... but I personally want to have some reason / connection to be "friends" rather than a simple, we're just going to talk online.  I find my experience online as an extension of who I am and what I do offline... so it matters. And for those of you who don't know, you can set your profile so that people can message you without being friends.  Why not get to know the person first...

Create Your Own Social Networking Site

My Mind Keeps Getting Blown

As we continue to work on developing NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide, we are lucky to be surrounded by geniuses who continually push us to ask, and try to answer, several Big and Difficult Questions about the guide. A recent question, posed to us Veronica Boix-Mansilla, a Principal Investigator at Project Zero:

What is the added value of shifting from a traditional model of reading to a participatory model?

A silver lining...

Not long ago, James Twitchell, a professor at my alma mater, admitted to plagiarism.  It was weird for me, because Twitchell's work had been one of my earliest introductions to the study of consumer culture as a legitimate academic endeavor and one of the inspirations that set me down the path to CMS. It's also weird because one of the people he plagiarized was Grant McCracken, an anthropologist and CMS affiliate whom I admire greatly, whose work was one of the reasons why I wound up at CMS.

I've been following the blogosphere's reaction pretty closely... This situation is rough, depressing, and more than awkward. I am trying to find the silver lining, though, by trying to look at this as what we (formally) at the front of a classroom refer to as a "teaching moment." What follows is a hopefully productive bit of observation about the citations and blogging.

Interviewing and Learning with Henry

Finally I understand it clearly. I can know say I have a fundamental understanding of what the New Media Literacy project is after having a very informative interview with the principal Investigator Henry Jenkins. We had a very interesting lengthy interview, which I will post up in audio format, but due to its length I will also post highlights of the interview in a transcribed version.

Henry Chat1.mp3
Henry Chat 2.mp3
What is your name and what is your role in NML?
I am Henry Jenkins. I guess I'm principal Investigator, which means that I'm supposed to do the vision thing. I helped to spark the effort and helped to identify some of the socials skills and cultural competencies we were working towards. I work closely with every member of the team and I'm part of the brainstorming intellectual development around the materials we are working with. But mainly the most important role is I'm chief propagandist and missionary for NML. I go out and give talks, I write on the blog, I write articles my job is to get what we do here at MIT is visible the larger community where its going to make a difference.

Creative Sampling, Creative Sharing: Samples for the Children of the World.

Last week I found out on the Internet a great resource for all of you interested in sampling and making music, sound art and sound collages without violating copyright laws. "Samples for the Children of the World," a huge collection (up to 10 GB) of new and original samples (sound recordings) has been released under the Creative Commons license by a group of students, professors and alumni from The Berklee College of Music. Although the samples are originally donated to support the One Laptop Per Child project, the Creative Commons license that all these samples have makes them available to everybody. The only condition for sampling them is to attribute the work in the manner specified by the author. 

As DJ C says in the DJ Culture video exemplar we produced last year here in NML, "Sampling in music is when you take a piece of pre-recorded music and you then use it, as an element, to make a new piece of music."  Musicians and sound artists use these pieces of recorded sound as the building blocks of their works.  Nowadays, the music production technology is based on this practice. The sampler is actually one of the standard instruments for music studios and for live performances both as hardware and software. You store recorded sounds inside a sampler and then you play them, change them, and trigger them as the notes of a grand piano. Imagine that, any recorded sound can become a note in a keyboard or in a drum machine.

The problem with sampling is of course copyright, the property of the sounds. Sounds belong to the people who hold the copyright of them.  As DJ C says, "A big dilemma with this electronic music culture is that when you are sampling music that you don't own the rights to, because someone else is the copyright holder of that music, then you are putting yourself in danger of being sued." Since the final decades of the last century, many musicians and sound artist have been fighting for a more free culture concerning the sharing of sounds.

In the 80s, Negativeland and John Oswald made a big buzzzzzzzzz in the margins of popular music and goose-bumped the music industry with their quite subversive works. The speech "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative" presented by Oswald to the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in 1985 stands as a digital sampling manifesto. Of course, both Negativeland and John Oswald were sued. Closer to the main stream media and the trends of popular music are many examples of sampling practices, from hip hop to ambient, from house to drum and bass, sampling is everywhere.

In the 21st century copyright is changing and thanks to the creation of the Creative Commons licenses, sound recordings can be shared with others. Actually, any kind of creative work can be shared. Pictures, poems, novels, songs and videos could be remixed and copied if they have these licenses. Making collages, remixes, cut-ups and mashups wont be anymore an infringement of copyright if one uses works that have Creative Commons licenses such as Atribution or Sampling Plus. We can share these works (copy, distribute, transmit) and we can remix them (adapt them, make something new from them). Of course, there are also public domain works and royalty free songs that are available for sampling and remixing (you can find these kind of works in the internet archive and in pdinfo).

The giant library of sounds that the people from The Berklee College of Music have released under the Attribution 3.0 license is not an isolated island in the culture of sharing and sampling. A quick look at CCMixter (the Creative Commons website that supports audio sampling, sharing, remixing and cutting-up) reveals several projects that are worth looking for all the children and creative people who wants to sample and remix audio. I definitely recommend checking the freesoundproject and as well the Wired CD. The first one, a expanding collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds; the second, an album released by Wired magazine, Creative Commons, and sixteen artist (including Matmos, Thievery Corporation and the Beastie Boys).