Colin Rhinesmith

I just finished a two-session blogging class last night at CCTV. It was a small class of three, but the size allowed us to really dive into topics that participants were most curious about. We started last week’s class with an overview of why someone might blog. I focused on blogging as a conversation to point out the fact that blog posts are really just the start of what can be extended conversations.

Most participants were interested in learning how to upload pictures to their blog. There was also interest in videoblogging and podcasting, which we covered in last night’s class. During the first class, everyone created a blog using Blogger.com. But after a week of using their Blogger blogs, they were interested in trying out Wordpress.com. Participants liked using Wordpress much better. They felt that it was easier to navigate and the theme options were much better.

So, I set up a Wordpress.com blog along with the class. It is a great tool for highlighting a number of easy ways to use text, photos, video, and audio on your blog. We also spent a good deal of time reviewing wordpress widgets and other layout options.

It was a great class and a lot of fun. I’m teaching a class on Web 2.0 next Monday, which I’m also really looking forward to.

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I thought I’d use this post to share some of the work that I’m currently involved in. I find that these periodic updates also help me to get my head around it all, particularly as the semester winds down.

Grad School

This semester at Emerson College, I’m taking one class, I’m involved in a directed study and I’ve started my year-long thesis project. Here are some updates:

Hub2: As I’ve noted previously, I’m involved in a course at Emerson College that is exploring civic engagement through the design and social use of virtual platforms. Hub2 is the umbrella program, that currently involves students enrolled in a day class (that I’m in) and a night course. I’ve blogged a bunch about our group project in SL here and also on my blog at Emerson College. Soon, I’ll be starting a research paper around issues involved in the course

Fair Use, Media and Education in the Digital Age: This directed study seeks to learn more about the challenges facing educators and students in sharing online access to copyrighted material. So far, I’ve explored a number of philosophical, political, and legal issues related to this ongoing balancing act between copyright holders and educators. I’m currently structuring ideas for my research paper due at the end of this semester.

Community Media in Transition: While I’m very lucky that I enjoy all of my courses at Emerson, my grad thesis is perhaps the most exciting part of my work this semester. I’ve refined the topic a bit. I began a study recently that seeks to understand the role of the community media center for those involved in this form of local media practice. The purpose is to challenge the notion that the community media center (Public Access TV) is no longer necessary because of the Internet. I’m grateful to those in access who have contributed to my thinking on this topic.

Paid Research and Digital Media Production

The Digital Lyceum: Also at Emerson College this semester, I am supporting two faculty members for a NEH grant-funded project to research mixed-reality event production in the humanities. The Digital Lyceum, seeks to develop best practices and to propose a sustainable model for producing these with the purpose of contributing to humanities scholarship.

Citizen Media Law Podcast: We’re off and running with our new podcast at the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. I’ve had a lot of fun working on this project. We’re still experimenting with the format and look forward to seeing how it progresses.

Volunteer Service

Action Coalition for Media Education: The new ACME website launched this fall and we’ve been pushing our fundraiser at the site. There’s lots of activity there, including blogging from board members and others. I’m excited that we’ve been able to license our media education materials under a Creative Commons Attribution Nonommercial 3.0 Unported license.

Cambridge Community Television: I’ve been working with others in the Membership, Outreach and Advisory Committee on a report about our recent web survey of CCTV members. The survey was very successful and I thank everyone in the committee for their hard work.

For these reasons above, I haven’t had a lot of time to blog here. But, I look forward to being more active on this site as I head towards the home stretch in December. I’m also looking forward to my Television Culture and Communication Ethics and Diversity courses next semester, along with completing my grad thesis. A busy year and lots to be thankful for.

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“Upgrage! Boston” photo by Digital Lyceum

As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a project at Emerson College to research best practices and propose a sustainable model for creating and facilitating “mixed reality” lecture-style events. We’re interested in connecting with others who have experience in this area, particularly those at colleges and universities who are using these technologies either in the classroom or for on-campus humanities events.

Here are some of the questions we are asking,

“How are universities using this technology to foster the group authoring of events? Is it being used at conferences? Is it being used in the classroom? Are people using simple text back channels, or more involved systems like Second Life or There.com. What is the future of this practice? And by documenting what is going on, can we help shape that future?”

To learn more visit Augmented Place.

[Disclosure: I’m working as a paid research assistant on this project]

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I just (for some reason) noticed that both the library at Emerson College, recently renamed after Dr. Shoo Iwasaki, the “internationally known environmentalist from Japan,” and the Media Services Center have blogs. This is great.

On the library blog, you can find a list of book recommendations, magazine/journal recommendations, and learn about art exhibitions featuring the work of Emerson College professors and others.

Over on the Media Services blog, Deja_Vu, Emerson students can find recommendations from their media collection and learn about featured films related to celebrations on campus.

It would be great if Deja Vu started to use tags like the Library blog does. This would helpful for searching the site based on topic areas. But, kudos to them for being open to using a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. It would be great if the library blog started to use a CC license, as well.

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The following is my response to a reading assignment and how it might be applied towards our group project in Second Life:

Taylor’s book talks about the social transfer of skills and knowledge in-between virtual and real worlds and the eroding boundaries between each. She makes problematic the ideas of “work” and “play” in order to create a new framework for evaluating our social participation in virtual spaces and its impact on our “everyday lives,” and vice versa. For example, through her discussions about gender and race, she makes explicit the ways in which we can use virtual spaces to acknowledge how these notions “circulate and the meanings they hold” in order to approach our social and institutional practices more critically (113).

For our group project, we are approaching our re-building/re-imagining of Govt. Center based on the idea of collaboration. In class last week, our group talked in Second Life about what collaboration in SL means and how it might be applied to our building process. In her chapter on “Productive Players and Remapping Ownership” Taylor writes

Given the intense ways users are living and embodying themselves in these virtual environments, we need to develop more complex ideas about the life of digital cultural artifacts, joint ownership, and the autonomy of user experience. (147)

Similarly, there is an opportunity for our group to use this project as a way “to develop more complex ideas” about collaboration in real life using Second Life as a platform. After reading this passage, I realized that while our goal is to build, it should also focus on how we can experiment with new forms of collaboration that might not be possible in real life. With the blurring between virtual and real, and work and play, as Taylor’s book suggests, we might then later think about how our methods can be applied to real life participatory group processes, particularly in the context of civic engagement.

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In reviewing T. L. Taylor’s Play Between Worlds for a reading response assignment, I started to think about the language we use to talk about social web tools. Our choice of words can have an enormous impact on whether or not people choose to adopt new technologies. As in any form of persuasive argument, framing is key.

If we focus on the tools first, and not the potential social benefits, we miss an opportunity. But if we instead focus on the potential social benefits first, and the tools second, people might be more willing to explore these new technologies. For example, if we say that “people are finding jobs on Linkedin” and not, “Linkedin is a social networking tool” people, particularly those looking for work, might be more willing to explore Linkedin if they had not previously.

An article in today’s Chronicle online, titled “Educators Are Split About the Viability of Second Life” reports that the New Media Consortium asked educators to respond to the following question, “What is the future of Second Life?” However, if the question was asked this way, “What is the future of education in virtual worlds?” The survey results might have been different. Even for those unfamiliar with virtual worlds, the question implies that learning is taking place there.

I took this for granted last semester during a discussion about Jared Lanier’s Digital Maoism. But as I read more online and hear more people talking about their reactions to new technologies, it reminds that, again, that in any form of persuasion, framing is key.

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I just learned from Sam Mayfield (via the ACME listserve) that a group from Public Access Television in Vermont at the Center for Media and Democracy are going to Africa this fall to work with folks at Coastal Television in Cape Coast Ghana. Check out this short video about their trip and help support their efforts by giving a donation at Sam Land. Here are the details from Sam:

“A small delegation from Ch.17/ Center for Media and Democracy in Burlington, Vermont is going to Africa in November to visit the first and only Community Access Television station in Ghana. The Access Station, Coastal Television, has been on the air since May. This is the first form of independent community access television to exist in Ghana.

We are raising money for this trip. Currently they have the bare essential equipment needed to broadcast, produce a program, and capture community events.

It would be incredible to show up with headphones, microphones, tape stock, or even a digital camera for community producers to use - it would be amazing if this was made possible by donations! You can watch the progress of the trip or make a donation at the blog below.
http://samville.blogspot.com/

We will teach at their Television School and will encourage community members to take advantage of this new great asset in their community. Since they are far from the “major” television stations in the big city, the stories of the folks in southern Ghana are rarely told. The advent of this station in southern Ghana has revolutionary value!

If you are able to make a donation please do so, if you would like to send this message or a link to the blog to your networks, that would be great and appreciated! http://samville.blogspot.com/

Lets support Community Access Television Globally - If there is one station in Ghana there can be many more!!!”

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The new ACME website is up! As mentioned earlier, the site was built using Drupal. As a result, there are lots of new features and ways for members and visitors to participate in our coalition’s work:

• Browse by Subject: search the website by tags, including Media Education, Advertising and Branding, Youth Media and more . . .
• ACME Blogs Page: aggregates blogs on a single page with an RSS feed
• ACME Partner News: read recent blogs posts from ACME partners
• ACME Bookmarks: browse our del.icio.us feed from the homepage

We’re also working to move the ACME Discuss E-List to a new server. We hope to have it up and running in a few days. In the meantime, take a look, drop us a note and tell us what you think.

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From Bill Densmore:

“On Aug. 7-8, the Media Giraffe Project at UMass Amherst helped convene ‘Journalism That Matters: The DC Sessions,’ at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The event brought together more than 150 journalism editors, mainstream and web/citizen journalists and mission-driven activists with the aim of planning ‘The Next Newsroom’ prototype.

OVERALL LINK: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-dc

A couple of the breakout sessions covered:

1) How journalism education must change.

2) What’s going on in youth media and youth-media education.

We videotaped and audioblogged portions of both sessions and the multimedia or text notes are useful for getting a sense of the intersection between our work at ACME and what journalists are thinking. My strong sense is that journalists who have time to think have realized they need to be thinking about media literacy if they want to have an audience in the future.

Here’s the whole roster, many linked to profiles:

http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-dc-roster

And here are the blog posts that will get you to the text, audio and video of the two relevant breakouts:

YOUTH MEDIA:
http://newshare.typepad.com/jtm2007/2007/09/video-diverse-g.html

JOURNALISM EDUCATION:
http://newshare.typepad.com/jtm2007/2007/08/audio-excerpt-o.html

– bill
————————————-
Bill Densmore, director/editor
The Media Giraffe Project Journalism Program / 108 Bartlett Hall Univ. of Massachusetts

What happens when all that’s left is the journalism?
Help plan and launch The Next Newsroom in a U.S. community
sometime during 2008. For background:

KICKOFF: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/
WHO CAME: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-dc-roster
THE BLOG: http://newshare.typepad.com/jtmnextnewsroom
ANOUNCEMENT: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/pdf/jtm-dc-announcement.pdf
THE SESSIONS: http://www.mediagiraffe.org/wiki/index.php/Jtm-dc-reports“

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Over the summer, I’ve been working with ACME (Action Coalition for Media Education) Co-President Rob Williams and Flow Media Design’s Rick Hood on building a new website for our organization using Drupal. It’s been a crash course for me in learning Drupal, which has been a lot of fun. I’m still learning my way around, but Rick’s been absolutely fantastic in helping me get up to speed.

There are lots of great things about working with Drupal for the new ACME site. Most importantly that it’s an open source CMS. But, also we’ll have a new site that will provide the opportunity for ACME members to blog and have an audience that includes many of the leading progressive media educators, media makers, and activists across the country and around the world.

We hope to have the site up and running in a couple of weeks. I hope it will serve as a much more interactive web environment for ACME and others interesting in sharing their work and collaborating on issues related to media education, justice and democracy.

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