Flipbooks

I found this really neat website through one of my other classes:
http://www.flip.com

You can make your own flip book.  Before I checked out the site, my concept of a flip book was a little rectangular booklet with pictures in it that seem to be animated when you flip through it really fast.  These are not those.  They're online scrapbooks, and they're really neat.  I've never had the patience for scrapbooking, but making a flipbook is fun and easy.

You can sign into your photobucket and facebook accounts and access your photos there when you're making a flipbook, so you don't have to bother uploading pictures to a new website- something that can be long and tedious, especially when you have a lot of pictures, which I think most of the young people using flip.com do.

You can browse flipbooks that people have already made here:
http://www.flip.com/flipbooks

Here's one I made:
http://www.flip.com/people/flipbooks/429942

(It lets you embed your flipbooks, but the video automatically starts and there's sound and I don't want someone's speakers to suddenly start singing if they're in the middle of class or something.)

A Fairy Use Tale

In light of this week's discussion about and readings on copyright, I wanted to post this video on fair use:



It's one of my favorite videos on YouTube.

Wanna Mashup?

I saw an ad for the Kids Choice Awards (Nickelodeon) on Comedy Central yesterday afternoon with a video of Jack Black singing "Back in Black." At the end of the commercial, kids were encouraged to log on to Nickelodeon's website and Mashup the video. So I did. In order to save and share it, I had to create a profile (they didn't have a problem with my birthdate making me much older than their target audience). You can either mashup my video (which is really terrible - I actually had a little trouble getting to do what I wanted because it was so basic), or you can create a new one.

There are other mashups available to create as well, which I'm pretty sure Carol directed us to earlier in the semester. I just thought it was an interesting advertising tool to get kids on Nick's site and get them to know when this show would be on. On top of that, they can share their Mashups with all their friends and give Nick plenty more free advertising. Genius!

Media Literacy & Teenage Entrepreneurs

Stories and interviews with 10 kids who've been blogging, starting internet companies, inventing new ways to do solar heating...

Meet the Whiz Kids: 10 Overachievers Under 21
by Dan Tynan, PC World (March 9, 2008)

These kids are all pretty awesome, but I love the last line, from Catherine Cook:

"When you're a teenager, it's virtually risk-free to start a business: You're still dependent on your parents, so really there are no major risks," says Cook. "Even if you fail, you'll still have a really really great college admissions essay, so just do it already."

Programming: The New Literacy

Marc Prensky (the guy who popularized the phrases "digital natives" and "digital immigrants") has loads of provocative items on his website. Here's a link to a new article of his from Edutopia (an online forum sponsored through the generosity of filmmaker George Lucas):

Programming: The New Literacy

So, what do you think? Is programming where we're headed next?

Music in message, new media

I'm looking forward to our discussion on music tomorrow. Every time I've ever had a discussion in class about music, it turned out to be really interesting. Music and audio seem to be really amazing ways to spread cultural messages, as our various short samples for this week show. No matter what the message is, if it's accompanied by music, it'll most likely be more successful. I thought juxtaposing Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes with Radio Disney was really interesting, since in a number of ways they are opposites. One is a grassroots critique of the effects of the industry buyout of a musical genre, the other is a musical story written by the industry itself. One is a genre that originated in African American culture and is sharply aware of race and class, the other portrays itself as generally white and largely ignores race and class issues. Yet they both appropriate music to attract a larger audience.

I also wanted to point to the interesting ways that new media have affected the distribution methods of musical content. The point made in Hip Hop about the fact that record labels today don't want to sell positive, inspirational, revolutionary rap music got me thinking about more underground labels. While they can't get their music onto MTV or Clear Channel for the most part, many of them do have a very large audience through the Internet. And they often distribute free content, perhaps partially as an eff you to the money-mongering music industry. So although they may not get a spot on TV, more people get a chance to hear their stories now than ever before. (We'll see if this changes as big companies figure out ways to buy up the Internet too.)

Digital Literacy and Wikipedia (of course)

A timely article on why it is important that we teach students new literacies is at Science Progress. An excerpt:

And this is why digital literacy is so crucial for educational institutions: we do a fundamental disservice to our students if we continue to propagate old methods of knowledge creation and archivization without also teaching them how these structures are changing, and, more importantly, how they will relate to knowledge creation and dissemination in a fundamentally different way. No longer is an encyclopedia a static collection of facts and figures (although some of its features might be relatively so); it is an organic entity. To educational and policy institutions which, for a substantial portion of history, have maintained control over static codex centered archives—think not only academic libraries, but national ones as well—the shift to an organic structure which they no longer control or solely influence represents a crisis indeed. But to train students in old literacy seems to me to be fundamentally the wrong approach. As Howard Rheingold suggests in Smart Mobs, in the future individuals will be divided between “those who know how to use new media to band together [and] those who don’t.”

There is great material here, including the concept of "collaborative literacy" and that of Wikipedia and other technologies like being "organic." These concepts are connected here, both explicitly and implicitly, to questions of power and authority, which I have long thought were at the heart of why so many people resist and panic about things like Wikipedia. In my former life I was a college professor, teaching composition and introductory film theory. Both topics required introducing students to the forms of literacy and, more importantly, to the critical interpretive skills required to be fully literate. I was invited to give a workshop on information literacy to faculty at a university where I was an adjunct, and it was fascinating to listen to faculty complain about Wikipedia as this non-authoritative text and yet they were hard-pressed to explain where the authority (power) of something like the Encyclopedia Brittanica came from originally, or to account for errors in that text. More to the point, I always asked why professors prohibit students from using Wikepedia in their research papers--my question was, "Shouldn't we be disallowing all encyclopedias as sources in a college research paper?" Students at this level should have been taught or guided beyond encyclopedias and other reference sources--advanced research entails an entirely different set of skills and literacies. But most faculty that I have worked with hold on to the idea of an ideal authority like Brittanica without questioning their attachment.

The article also makes the great point, that has never occurred to me, that most Wikipedia users are tech-savvy and tend to have science and/or engineering backgrounds, and that in the sciences and related fields there is more acceptance of Wikipedia and most of the entries in that field are highly sophisticated. This makes me sad--will the humanities be left behind just because of some resistance to new technologies and new literacies? Or will the sciences and humanities drift farther apart rather than developing their related topics and literacies--Da Vinci was a scientist and an artist, and I often wonder if he would have been able to bridge the gaps that are becoming more apparent with the development of new technologies and the skills necessary to use them smartly and creatively . . .

"Doing" Photography and Visual Literacy

If all I have to draw on is the article for this week, visual literacy seems to be about the interpretation of visual representations of reality. Like Becky Schaller, I'm still struggling with this definition and wondering exactly how intuitive it is to understand the world visually. The words at the end about aesthetics are especially troubling to me – it says "visual expression is the product of highly complex intelligence, of which we have pitiful little understanding."

But is it, really? What happens when we look at the process of creation instead of its products - do we always find "highly complex intelligence"? Visual artists differ, not all "see" in the same way and some do not see at all. What do we do with our interpretation of images that are produced by machines? My computer could not write this posting for me or anything else that would "communicate" meaning. But it could easily be set up to take images without any direct intentionality and those images might still communicate meaning.

I'll try to parse this out a bit - I understand the world in a certain way as a photographer, as an "artist," that I think they would define as very visually literate. But I do not consider myself a "visionary" person. My brother is an illustrator and can "see" things in his mind in ways I never could. Where does the imagination fit in this? Is it another form of visual literacy? Or is it an individual trait, a "learning style," his personality? Is it a "higher level" of aesthetic ability, like writing poetry requires a "higher" understanding of language than writing for this blog?

What can be learned and what is innate? By pursuing photography and honing my drafting skills, my eyes have been trained, at least a little bit, to see the elements that we use in our western art forms. Looking at a movie, a website, or a scene in front of me I can see sight lines, contrast, perspective, lighting, proportion, curves, and sometimes the potential "punctum" of a photograph. I can't use the zone system, but I have a rough understanding of tonal contrast and can sense when my composition just entered "the rule of thirds." These are things that can be learned by taking experience apart, by focusing attention on a separate pieces of reality to abstract out the relationships into flat lines and shades within a limited border.

But is that visual literacy? To know how to decode and encode reality according to the representative media we're used to using? All my photography and drawing classes never helped me begin to previsualize things the way my brother does. What if my photography was not based on seeing at all? After all, the camera doesn't need my eyes to take a picture. There are no rules that say a good photograph must be in focus or carefully composed to work and communicate meaning. When I think about taking photos, there are many things that are not strictly visual. Knowing how to catch the right moment in a conversation when a person's characteristic expressions appear (not my gift, unfortunately), a sense of light, of motion – some of these are things that your whole body can feel or your eye cannot actually perceive and separate – it is a form of instinct. But is it visual?

Thinking about artists and sight, this exhibit niggles at my mind: Beyond Sight: A multi-sensory exhibition of photographs by the blind and visually impaired What can I learn from looking at their photographs about the difference between sight and experience and visual literacy? I'm frankly still not quite sure. It "feels" more honest to me, that somehow if I examine the photos I will understand their experience of life in a way that words cannot convey. Where did they hold the camera? Why did they choose to point it there? What did they feel as they pointed it there? Is it reasonable for me to expect any of these things to be communicated in these photos?

As an "artist" myself, the experience and choices of the other person holding the camera or picking up the pencil or moving the pixels is something I can't help looking for as I examine a created work. For instance, the reading this week irritated me to no end because it was a text about visual literacy but the page layout is hideous. A book on sight should offer a graceful, intuitive design of the text and spacing so that it is easy for us to absorb the content. Reading is a visual experience, but this experience was mediated by a computer's layout instead of careful kerning and spacing and a font designed for easy visual transitions between letters. The human element was missing and I could tell, because book layout matters to me. (nerdy, yes)

Several years ago I was traveling in Britain and had a chance meeting with a woman who saw me writing a paper and liked the font I'd chosen to use (Garamond, for anyone who likes typography). Her odd comment led to a conversation about her experience in the older printing industry with traditional book design and the changes she saw as everything was computerized. Font weights changed, spacing on the page wasn't as carefully designed for the person holding the document, scanning the page. We take these "technologies" of print for granted, but careful thought can go into them (see here for a historical overview).

What do we lose as we are presented with automated images, or even just the prepackaged formulas of mass media representations? How are we separated from the world we could be experiencing firsthand or seeing more clearly with better design? When it all relies on generalized formulas or machinery, how do we struggle to understand the choices being made?

I'll end with a visual illustration. In a discussion on flickr, someone asked if photography was doomed because of the ubiquity of automated digital cameras. If everything is recorded, if Google Streetview captures every corner of my city, does that mean I don't need to take any more photos in my neighborhood?

Here are my photos of the corner high school from Monday night:


A Google Streetview image of the same location from this Summer:


What differences do you see between these images? Does it matter in terms of visual literacy, or only for the “subjective aesthetics” that the article derides at the end?

Another take on social networking for kids

I just found this story about Kerpoof, a website for kids designed to act as both a "social networking" site and a multimedia tool set.

It's an intriguing idea - unlike MySpace or Facebook, the "networks" are groups that require passwords to join, keeping the connections private and much more secure. The idea seems similar to Ning, a social networking site where anyone can set up their own "network" based on a shared interest or other connection. The difference here seems to be the extra level of privacy controls so kids, teachers, and/or parents can be careful who kids connect with online.

According to techcrunch's Mark Henderson,

"Kerpoof is working on making it possible for kids to collaborate over movies and stories, too, and on adding support for games and social puzzles later in the year. A type of virtual currency will be coming soon as well."

Evidently the plan is to transition into a subscription-based fee service in the future, but for now it's totally free. People working with kids may want to get a good look at it now before they have to pay for it.

If you are just starting to check out social networking sites, the Library 2.0 Ning group may be something you want to look into - it's a group setup just for people interested in figuring out new services and features libraries can develop using recent technology and media trends.