CMS News

Project New Media Literacies has produced videos to help teach kids how new media creators go about creating. The MacArthur Foundation, an NML sponsor, featured the videos on its Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog:

In the challenge "Expressing Characters across Multimedia," youth practice the skill of "transmedia navigation" by first learning about storytelling, and then watching a video with NBC's Heroes creators Mark Warshaw and Jessie Alexander. The two discuss how they use the characters in the show across different media, such as in a graphic novel or even through toys.

Students then explore how the character Claire Bennett navigates and is featured in different media platforms, including the television show, in her Myspace account, and as an image in a graphic novel.

"Originally the video collection was somewhat static," says Anna van Someren, Creative Manager, Project New Media Literacies. "But we've pushed it a lot farther now. We wanted to move toward a new framework - the Learning Library - that allows users to interact with the material. It's a much more community-based, dynamic experience now."

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:11 PM in CMS In The Press | Permalink

A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technology has undergone vast changes, the underlying motivation for, and execution of, the process has not changed radically. Baer cited numerous examples of specific product designs that made it all the way through the process to a successful product and drew some conclusions from that experience that shed some light on the continuum of invention, development, and marketing novel product ideas.

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 11:38 AM in Podcast | Permalink

In 2006, Alyssa Wright, then a Media Lab student studying mapping, tackled a similar goal: she created a walking memorial in Boston to commemorate civilian deaths in Iraq. Shocked at the "astronomical" discrepancy between the actual civilian death count (she estimates it was up to 250,000) and what Americans thought the death count was (around 9000, she says), Wright wanted to make an impact. So she hit the streets with an exploding backpack.

"We really don't have a sense of what it's like in someone else's shoes, but technology can bridge that gap," says Wright, who tracked media-reported deaths in Baghdad and overlaid them onto a map of Boston. When she wandered into an area of the city that corresponded with a Baghdad death, her backpack exploded with white confetti, each piece inscribed with the name of someone who'd died.

These days, Wright is channeling her tech-meets-art-meets-protest angle into Hero Reports, a Manhattan-based Web operation that tracks courageous moments among everyday people by collecting e-mails, phone calls, and letters, and then mapping positive news. It's a direct counterbalance to New York City's "See Something, Say Something" campaign, which encourages people to look at each other with suspicion.

Hero Reports is not just a Web site. The project, which she began at the Media Lab's Center for Future Civic Media, also uses an open-source mapping platform, which allows for greater customization. Most of all, it shows how technology can change social engagement and political decisions. Which is exactly what Wright wants.

From "Inventing the Future", Boston Phoenix

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 12:50 PM in CMS In The Press | Permalink

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:09 PM in , Events | Permalink

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:09 PM in , Events | Permalink

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:08 PM in , Events | Permalink

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:06 PM in , Events | Permalink

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 3:00 PM in , Events | Permalink

Jenna McWilliams, of Project New Media Literacies and recently a columnist for the Guardian, was interviewed on BBC World Service last Friday.

She's introduced just around the 40-minute mark, and be sure to listen soon, as the Beeb only leaves World Service recordings posted free online for a week.

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 8:38 AM in Media Appearances | Permalink

Jenna McWilliams, education researcher and curriculum specialist at Project New Media Literacies, recently picked up a new side-gig: columnist for The Guardian online.

Her first two posts are up now--the first on the film State of Play and its ignorance of how journalism works in the digital era--and the other, published yesterday, questions Rupert Murdoch's recent proclamation that news online will inevitably revert to a pay-per-view model. A taste:

The technology guru Clay Shirky writes that "It's not a revolution if nobody loses," and the first losers in this particular revolution were broadcast media outlets (TV, newspapers, magazines) and cultural elites whose social status relied on the ability to control who had access to the news, what stories they had access to, and what they did with that information.

If Murdoch is right that "the current days of the internet will soon be over," it will only be because a small handful of corporations own the vast majority of media outlets. My sense, though, is that he's wrong: That even if newspapers return to a pay-for-view model, the people will rise up against and then roll right over it by making the same content available for free elsewhere online and developing new uses for social media that subvert the efforts of Murdoch and others.

So keep an eye on Jenna's Guardian pieces. And be sure to comment quickly--the Guardian is running its own experiment by allowing comments only for the first two days after publication.

Jenna McWilliams at the Guardian online

Posted by Andrew Whitacre at 10:23 AM in CMS In The Press, Publications | Permalink