Digital Media & Learning Competition Winner's Hub

Social Media Classroom is scheduled to launch next week. One of the many things I overpromised in my application was a series of videos for educators about social media. Here's one.

Teledensity. Now there's a word.

According to TechEncyclopedia, teledensity is "the number of telephones in use for every 100 individuals living within an area." My neighbors, a family of five, have seven phones between them, not including phones at work and school. Tele-saturation, maybe?

We don't hear about teledensity in the US very often because we're a phone-rich country. Most of us struggle to pull away from the grid, whether it's email, Facebook, cell phones, Google. In developing countries, however, teledensity is a way for government agencies and international bodies to measure the digital divide. While One Laptop per Child was whipping the tech sector up with its rather adorable computer, organizations like the UN were taking a much more serious look at mobile phones, arguably the real workhorses closing the gap of the digital divide. In fact, in the UN's Millenium Development Goals, an initiative adopted in 2000, Goal 8f is to "develop a global partnership for development that would include making available the benefits of information and communication technologies." And the UN recognizes that many of the other goals: to eradicate poverty, achieve universal primary education, and combat epidemics are inextricably tied to the tools of information technology.

Measuring the number of worldwide cell phone subscribers is wrought with difficulties, but if the International Telecommunication Union is to be believed, we'll reach 4 billion mobile phone users by year's end. That's one in two people with a phone. All over the planet.

Anyone who owns a moderately decent cell phone can imagine the possibilities for a rural family with limited economic prospects. Fortunately, some innovate groups are not only imagining the possibilities, they're making them happen.

Two of the 2007 HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media & Learning winners are using phones as a centerpiece of their projects. Mobile Movement (formerly Always with You) is currently in Nairobi to document a pre-selected group of youth entrepreneurs that will directly connect to business mentors through mobile phones in countries like the U.S. and Canada. No more third-party middle person handling correspondence, no more cash under the mattress - thanks to mobile phones.

According to Mobile Movement, "Young Kenyans can actually manage small businesses because of new technology that is accessible. And with Mobile Movement, you can build a history with a small business owner or youth group, build a relationship over time. And beyond individual giving, we are creating a trust-building system of micro-finance that could really change the way corporations and agencies like the World Bank and the UN help people in communities and monitor the progress of their smaller programs. It's going to be more possible to fund small groups and monitor them in a way that can really leverage a new style of funding, and could open up a lot of possibilities."

A similar dynamic is taking place with Mobile Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE). Several months ago, MILLEE traveled to India for a field study.

As members of MILLEE explain, "The goal of this exploratory study was to identify opportunities for informal learning that e-learning games and other software applications on cellphones can facilitate. Out-of-school learning is especially critical in this context, for at least two reasons. Firstly, out-of-school learning can complement a public school system in which teachers are often absent or inadequately prepared to teach the official curriculum. Secondly, a substantial fraction of children in rural India who are school-going age do not attend school regularly because they need to work for the family in the agricultural fields or homes. As such, we envision that educational applications on a mobile device, such as a cellphone, can enhance access to education when employed as learning tools in out-of-school settings, such as the fields or home."

More often than not, I think of my phone as part nuisance, part convenience. Mobile Movement and MILLEE have changed that. Between e-learning and micro-finance, cell phones are stepping up to the world stage in a way that makes real change entirely possible.

(This blog is a re-post from Hastac.org/node/1709

In a recent article, Julia Morden of The Huffington Post wrote, "With all the turmoil in the markets, it seems time to write again about people who are doing good works..."

We could argue that anytime is a good time to write about people doing good works, but hey. It was nice to see a shout out for Suzanne Seggerman ofGamesforchange.com, one of the 2007 HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media & Learning Competition winners. Games for Change helps organizations use digital games for social change, and just hosted the highly successful Let the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop for Social Issue Games.

But the spirit of the article could apply to any of the Digital Media & Learning winners, because each of one of them uses technology to address big issues in innovative ways. Virtual Peace is a digital humanitarian assistance game that creates a learning environment for young people studying public policy and international relations. And RezEd.org: The Hub for Virtual and Learning Worlds is the must-join network for educators interested in teaching with metaverses. Many of our winners use social networking tools, or knowledge networking, but these three winners - Virtual Peace, Games for Change, and RezEd are focusing on virtual worlds in ways that make best-selling video games look like junk food.

Our winners have had a nice presence on The Huffington Post this week -- Barry Joseph of RezEd.org did a wonderful job with his article, From Tech Geek To Social Reformer. In it, Barry shares a fundamental question: "Can the Internet be used to form connections between people in the places where they have been separated by prejudice?" I plan to memorize this question, and when friends of mine -- particularly those who have kids -- talk about the worrying effects of video games, I want to tell them that there are people like Barry Joseph and Suzanne Seggerman (I could write each of our winners names here, they all belong to this sentiment) who are at the frontier of technology and possibility, using these tools to create community leaders, teach others about social justice, create reform, and educate the next generation.

Over the upcoming weeks, I'll be reporting on other winners and their projects, sharing their progress here. Every time you hear "$700 Billion Dollar Bail Out," I encourage you to visit one of the Digital Media & Learning winners for a shot of hope. They're changing the conversation about technology, and in the process, are changing the way we talk about social issues.

(This is a re-post of a blog that appeared on Hastac.org/node/1694)

1. What are you most excited about accomplishing so far as a HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition winner? How has winning this award helped your project accomplish this goal?

The most exciting aspect of receiving this award is that it has allowed us to expand and enhance our existing social networking platform. Specifically, the award has funded the construction and integration of an Idea Incubator. This platform will allow our whole youth demographic, comprised of young change makers to post innovative solutions to critical societal problems. These problems could be at the community level, country level, or even global in scope. Once posted, the networked community has the collective opportunity to evaluate, comment, rate, and workshop each idea. Ideally, after undergoing this “workshop” experience, ideas could potentially develop into concrete projects ripe for seed funding.

Primary among YouthActionNet®’s program goals is connecting, supporting, and advocating for young social entrepreneurs around the world. The virtual Marketplace and the Idea Incubator are vital resources in achieving those goals.

2. What are your goals for the next three months?

The Idea Incubator, when launched, will reside within the YouthActionNet® Marketplace. Our immediate goal for the next three months is to successfully launch the Marketplace and begin actively building our member community. To that end, the launch will be supported by SEO efforts, profile development and participation on other networks, as well as having our existing YouthActionNet® alumi Fellows begin posting their user content. In two months, construction on the Idea Incubator will have advanced to the beta stage. At that time, formal launch becomes imminent!

3. Is there any kind of assistance, advice, PR, communications, networking, or any other kind of support from fellow Digital Media and Learning Competition winners or HASTAC staff that could help you with your project in any way?

YouthActionNet® would be interested in utilizing existing or planned mechanisms to:
• Post questions and challenges to the winners and HASTAC staff during the construction period
• Tap the winners and HASTAC staff networks to contribute content on various issues via blogs, forum participation, informal interviews.
• Help broadcast the Idea Incubator launch and other key announcements to winners, HASTAC staff, and their extended constituencies.

So, this year one of our main tasks is really to shrink ourselves into a more compact and meaningful ensemble for music, performance, innovation, spatialization, and improvisation.

Who? The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk).

We are an ensemble of musicians in an educational institution concerned with making compelling music with computers free of the constraints of large PA systems and the inherent disembodiment of sound that results. We are also concerned with moving past the obstacles presented by commercial performance software and its grids, processing methodologies, and compositional constraints.

PLOrk, in addition to hosting its own ensemble of computer musicians capable of working together to render specific musical compositions, improvisations, and other pieces, hopes to train individual computer musicians to work within the same acoustic capabilities as traditional instruments, and to develop ensemble relationships that result in musical communication and collaboration.

One of our current tasks is to scale down the size of our ensemble in order to allow us more flexibility. In addition, we hope to experiment with reducing our dependence on the power grid. We hope to pioneer some wireless performances this year. More to come!

--ss

The picture above shows a shack in which boys spend most of their time during the mango season. They even sleep here in the nights.

Here's a glimpse of the inner side of the roof. The boys spend so much time here that the inside of the shack’s roof becomes a convenient spot to stash things that are important to them or that they use regularly.

Cell-phone sharing varies based on gender. Here, the boys fight for possession of the phone

By contrast, these girls wait for their turn with the phone.

1. What are you most excited about accomplishing so far as a HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition winner? How has winning this award helped your project accomplish this goal?

To date, our most significant accomplishment was a two-week field study in a rural district in North India. The study took place in June 2008, and involved us interacting with over 45 children from 20 village households. The participants were familiar with cellphones, since most of their families own at least one cellphone each. We are excited about the findings from this study. These lessons will inform how we can better integrate cultural aspects about rural life in India into our technology designs for informal learning, which is one of our priorities for the Fall 2008 semester.

The goal of this exploratory study was to identify opportunities for informal learning that e-learning games and other software applications on cellphones can facilitate. Out-of-school learning is especially critical in this context, for at least two reasons. Firstly, out-of-school learning can complement a public school system in which teachers are often absent or inadequately prepared to teach the official curriculum. Secondly, a substantial fraction of children in rural India who are school-going age do not attend school regularly because they need to work for the family in the agricultural fields or homes. As such, we envision that educational applications on a mobile device, such as a cellphone, can enhance access to education when employed as learning tools in out-of-school settings, such as the fields or home. In this study, we therefore sought to identify these scenarios in the everyday lives of the rural children, and to understand some of the cultural factors that might influence technology adoption in these scenarios.

As our first step in addressing the above questions, the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning award provided us with the resources to travel to the above site. The team that conducted the field study was exceptionally well prepared for the cultural challenges. It comprised three graduate students (Matthew Kam, Deepti Chittamuru and Anuj Tewari), and six undergraduate research assistants. Matthew is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Computer Science with a minor in Education. As the leader of the MILLEE project, he has previously made seven trips to India totaling seven months on the ground. Deepti is a native of India who is a Master’s candidate in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Deepti was first taught the social norms in village life by her grandparents when she was growing up in an Indian village. Her education on rural culture continued over a seven-year stint as a social worker in India prior to graduate school at Berkeley. Deepti speaks five of the official languages in India, including Hindi, which is the predominant language in North India. Anuj is in the Ph.D. in Computer Science program at Berkeley. He was a volunteer in MILLEE for two years prior to graduate school and was familiar with the above rural district, which was close to his hometown.

On this trip, we spent our first week getting a glimpse into the everyday lives of the children who live in the above rural district. We carried out participant observations, after which we constructed “a day in the life of a child” accounts of their everyday lives by analyzing our field data. In the process, we were struck by some of the major differences in their lives that were delineated along the social fault lines of gender and caste.

In particular, two observations stand out. Firstly, regardless of age or caste, girls are expected to clean the home, help with cooking, wash dishes, carry water, wash clothes, gather firewood and get fodder for cattle. On the other hand, boys are responsible for agricultural work and are not expected to do housework. As such, it is socially unacceptable for girls to travel farther than an hour’s walk from home, whereas boys who spend most of their time indoors are frown upon by their parents. Girls from the lower castes are the exception, since they need to be outside to find daily-wage jobs. Secondly, while boys from both the upper and lower castes spend several hours in the fields, their free times differ markedly. While the lower-caste boys have to be at work as hired laborers, the upper-caste boys have time to play in the fields. That is because the upper-caste boys are present only to oversee the former working in the fields, which belongs to the former’s families.

These observations have profound implications on when and where children in rural India – both boys and girls from the lower and upper castes – can use cellphones to learn outside formal schooling, as well as the social circle that they have access to for peers to engage in cooperative learning with. From the accounts of the children’s everyday lives, we identified opportunities for them to use cellphones for informal learning. For instance, a child can play an e-learning game on a cellphone during his or her free time before going to bed. As another example, boys from the upper castes can share a cellphone to play an e-learning game, when they are on watch in the mango groves. In total, we propose nine scenarios for cellphone-augmented learning in out-of-school settings.

In our second week, we sought to investigate the extent to which the proposed scenarios were culturally feasible. To do this, we gave the child participants and their parents a feel for some of these scenarios, by loaning them cellphones preloaded with e-learning software prototypes developed by us. We encouraged the children to experiment and come up with their own ways of using the cellphone applications to learn. We observed several interesting ways in which children use the cellphones, which varied from how we had originally expected the above scenarios to play out.

One of our observations involved differences in how girls and boys shared the phones, both among and between themselves. For example, in rural Indian homes, parents tended to allocate the choicest resources, such as food that is hot off the stoves, to their sons, such that the mothers and daughters ate only after the husbands and sons in the families had eaten. This gender bias carried over to their behavior with cellphones. We observed that any boy who was playing an e-learning game would pass the phone to another boy beside him after he had completed the game, but never to a sister in their company. Similarly, any boy who saw a girl playing an e-learning game would demand that she hand the phone over to him. She did so because women have been socially conditioned to accede to such requests from the males in their households.

This observation suggested that even though we had envisioned a child playing an e-learning game on a cellphone while at home, it is almost likely that the boys will monopolize the cellphone at their sisters’ expense. One design implication is that e-learning games intended for this scenario have to designed as collaborative games, with specific design features that required boys to share the game with their sisters in order to make progress in their gameplay. There were other design implications resulting from our field observations that we do not discuss here, due to limited space.

The MacArthur grant enabled us to cover the travel and accommodation expenses for the above field study. This funding was especially instrumental for providing six undergraduate researchers, who implemented the software applications that we piloted in the second week, with the opportunity and tremendous satisfaction of observing rural children engage with their prototypes. We should note that the undergraduate researchers are local engineering students based in India, and hence are familiar with the local languages and customs to assist with our field study. In preparing them to participate in fieldwork, the graduate students in MILLEE enjoyed introducing them to participant-observation techniques, and were thrilled to see some of them applying the concepts readily in the field. By volunteering in MILLEE this summer, the undergraduates had their first taste of participatory design, in which local stakeholders are actively involved throughout every stage of the technology design process. We would not have the resources to facilitate this unusual cross-cultural learning experience without the MacArthur grant.

Moving forward, the DML award has made it possible to build a solid foundation for MILLEE, on top of which we are pursuing new collaborations to scale up the project. We are particularly excited to have the Byrraju Foundation come on board as a new partner. The Byrraju Foundation is a non-government organization based in South India. It currently works in 180 villages in the state of Andhra Pradesh, and is impacting the lives of a million people. When the MacArthur funding cycle is over, we will be working with the Byrraju Foundation to investigate the extent to which our lessons from North India are applicable elsewhere, on a larger scale. We currently plan to collaborate on a large-scale, longitudinal study with 800 rural children that will commence in mid-2009.

The boy, the brother of the two sisters, attempts to take the phone away from them.

Since the girls have been conditioned to accede to requests from male members of the family, they gave the phone to him. Not only were they denied a chance to play the game on the phone but they also had to hold the phone for him.

2. What are your goals for the next three months?

The above field research in the summer of 2008 provided us with emerging models for cellphone-enabled learning in out-of-school contexts in rural India. Our goal for Fall 2008 is to develop software prototypes around these models, so that we can evaluate these models more comprehensively in the field. We are working with a local English teacher in India to design our prototypes, so that they will target a curriculum that is aligned with local language learning needs.

These prototypes will be piloted between December 2008 and March 2009 with the above rural community. Two of the above undergraduate researchers, Anuj Kumar and Akhil Mathur, will participate in this semester-long field study. Their involvement will fulfill their requirements for their senior honors thesis research, and we are delighted that the MacArthur grant will make this unique educational experience possible for them.


3. Is there any kind of assistance, advice, PR, communications, networking, or any other kind of support from fellow Digital Media and Learning Competition winners or HASTAC staff that could help you with your project in any way?

As we ramp up to expand MILLEE after the MacArthur funding cycle, one of our next steps is the above collaboration with Byrraju Foundation on a large-scale, longitudinal study with 800 rural children. This deployment is expected to commence in mid-2009. If successful, we can make a more compelling case to governments and major NGOs to adopt our work. Positive learning results will also convince cellphone manufacturers and wireless carriers that a customized, ultra-low cost cellphone model can be developed for rural education. Similarly, positive results will enable us to make a stronger case to third-party, non-profit Indian content developers on the feasibility of targeting the cellphone platform in their computer-aided learning initiatives for underprivileged children in India. These content developers currently target the desktop computer platform, which has a limited reach in developing regions due to electricity and infrastructural barriers.

We have been contacting suitable funding channels to support the Byrraju expansion, and would benefit from fellow DML winners and HASTAC staff who know of contacts and channels that we may have overlooked. While financial resources are crucial, in-kind sponsorship is equally invaluable. Our wishlist includes 235 programmable cellphones, wireless subscription plans in India for these cellphones, laptops, video cameras and frequent-flyer miles.

Looking at a longer-term horizon, we would like to explore the literacy challenges in underserved communities beyond India. We would appreciate assistance in introducing us to potential collaborators.

1. What are you most excited about accomplishing so far as a HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition winner? How did winning this award help your project accomplish this goal?

We are very excited about showcasing the experiences and voices of our grantee partners in India who participated in the 2008 Enterprise and Learning Knowledge Exchange. Thanks to the MacArthur Foundation grant, our VP of Communications and Director of Information Technology had the opportunity to travel to India to survey the technology requirements of our grantee partners, and interview our partners to capture their stories and experiences. We are now working on integrating issues raised around youth development into our KLARA, GFC’s Knowledge, Learning, and Resources Exchange Network.

2. What are your goals for the next three months?

Over the next three months, we hope to conduct additional rounds of interviews with our grantee partners and post on our website. In addition, we are beginning a “Flip Cam” project whereby we will distribute flip cameras to 3-5 of our grantee partners in India and Africa to film their experiences within their organizations and share best practices around youth development. Our partners will then directly upload their videos to our website and participate in guest vlogging and blogging. Also, we are preparing for our next Knowledge Exchange where we plan to include a specific discussion section on digital knowledge sharing.

Global Fund for Children is also working on creating exchanges between our grantee partners around the issue of food security. Many of our grantee partners have been impacted by the increasing cost of food, food transport, as well as poor crop yields and supply disruptions due to climate and crisis. Global Fund for Children is encouraging our grantee partners to exchange information about how they are coping for the short and long term. The goal is to have our grantee partners participate in discussion groups on KLARA and contribute blogs that inform our grantee partners throughout the world about coping strategies around the issue of food security. We are using Survey Monkey to conduct our survey which, when completed, will lead our grantees to our KLARA knowledge and learning exchange website to continue the dialogue.

Global Fund for Children also has a Knowledge Exchange page that features blogs and video slideshows from the workshops and events in India. Click here to view our India Knowledge Exchange page

3. Is there any kind of assistance, advice, PR, communications, networking, or any other kind of support from fellow Digital Media and Learning Competition winners or HASTAC staff that could have helped you with your project?

We are learning a great deal through the DML winner’s hub website, spotlight blog, and email updates. It would be helpful if there was a technology or video equipment resource page on the DML website for winners to learn more about what video tools work best, which to avoid, etc.

Twelve adorable sensor boxes called PuffTrons arrived at Machine Project a few weeks ago, and were placed around Echo Park in discreet locations. Once activated, they transmitted data about local air quality at Black Cloud's website to create a pollution map of the city.

A team of UC Berkeley mad scientist-types and a group of precocious student-types from Manual Arts High School in South Central Los Angeles presented the PuffTrons' data alongside their own fieldwork in a series of events at Machine Project, operating as the Black Cloud Scientist League.

Black Cloud at The Machine Project took place August 23 and 30 and featured several events:

1. A DIY air quality sensor building workshop in which participants learned to build a basic air quality sensor using an Ardunio microcontroller.

2. A Black Cloud Citizen Scientist League presentation that discussed PuffTrons, research by the Manual Arts High School students, and air quality in Los Angeles. Beloved gelato makers Scoops prepared a special 'Black Cloud' ice cream for the event.

3. A community air pollution mapping event.

Black Cloud's Citizen Science League will set up its next study in Cairo, Egypt!

Watch the video below to find out how Edwin Bender of Follow the Money and Suzanne Seggerman of Games for Change (another Digital Media & Learning Competition Winner) have found a way to collaborate.


What are you most excited about accomplishing so far as a HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition winner? How has winning this award helped your project accomplish this goal?

Winning the DML grant has opened doors for the Institute that we never considered before as we talked about developing an on-line users guide, particularly in the emerging field of using games for education. Our initial meeting with the winners in Chicago resulted in discussions between myself and Suzanne Seggerman of Games for Change, whom we invited to our annual meeting in Montana of board and national advisors. She talked with our board about the role games are playing in education at all levels of society. We also sent our Web programmer to the Games for Change conference in New York City to him to the latest innovations in the gaming world. We explored this avenue further with Alex Quinn at Games for Change in NYC and have been introduced to Colleen Macklin at Parsons The New School in New York.

While our proposal isn't for a game, it's clear that our on-line guide to FollowTheMoney.org will be a first step toward creating a more interactive learning tool that makes using and understanding our complex data sets simpler. That's exciting!

What are your goals for the next three months?

Next steps include drafting story boards on one specific issue, such as energy donors, and linking our on-line tools in a way that answers specific questions, such as why people and/or companies make campaign donations, what do they expect and why is that important to them and the public. Once we've linked the tools for one set of donors and an issue, then we can expand to other issues, such as health care or the environment.

Once the prototype is working, we'll circulate it to high school civics teachers and a national civic education organization that have agreed to advise us on tool and to promote it when it is complete.

Is there any kind of assistance, advice, PR, communications, networking, or any other kind of support from fellow Digital Media and Learning Competition winners or HASTAC staff that could help you with your project in any way?

With a pilot vetted through educators, we will post a pre-launch version to the Digital Media & Learning site for review by staff and other winners.

Creative Director, Erik Loyer, has completed an interactive schematic of the Critical Commons website, mapping out the full functionality of the project. Click here to view a set of clickable wireframes:

While the site is not yet functional, these wireframes give a good sense of the depth and navigational structure of the site. We are currently trying to find developers to handle the programming of the site. The backend will most likely be built in a free open source programming environment called Plumi, which is a video-enabled variation of the content management system Plone. The developers we have been talking to, EngageMedia, are actually the ones who created Plumi, so we are very hopeful that they will be able to take this project on in time to meet our launch schedule in the Spring.

In addition, our graphic designer, Alex Louie, has completed a set of look-and-feel design comps for the site. We now have a logo, text treatment and color scheme for the site.

In conjunction with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, Critical Commons is also sponsoring a Fair Use Day event to be held at USC on October 27th. Confirmed participants include Peter Jaszi, from the Center for Social Media (CSM) at American University and Jennifer Urban, who directs the Intellectual Property Clinic at USC law school. The goal of this event will be to build awareness about copyright and fair use and facilitate high-level conversation about the future of fair use for media and learning. We will also be strategizing ways to work with key institutions and parallel efforts such as the CSM's Best Practices Guidelines for documentary filmmakers and online video creators. The day will conclude with a planning session on how to best market and launch Critical Commons.

Holly Willis and I have also proposed a presentation to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference to discuss fair use for media educators and to present Critical Commons (which will have recently launched) to this key constituency. SCMS is a crucial collaborator for us in thinking through best practices for media studies and we intend to make sure Critical Commons will have high visibility at this year's conference in Tokyo.

For those that are not familiar with Ohmwork, our goal is to have bi-monthly podcasts during the school year where projects will cost at most $35, we are aiming to have costs as low as possible to help parents and teachers implement these projects in their homes or classroom. We hope that by creating a social network site we can create a resource for teachers as well as students to perpetually build better D.I.Y activities and curriculum.

We have been working the past two weeks ramping up for our web launch of November 1st. Corey and I have finished with our podcast ideas and began to purchase and test. Joseph has started to build our social network site with ning and drupal. For our first podcast we begin with fundamental concepts of electricity we will be covering:

• How devices are powered, electrons flow from the ground to the + to power devices
• Explain that electric currents only flow when a circuit is complete and that current is a component of electricity
• Explain that conductors are materials that conduct electricity
• Explain resistance as a component of electricity and how resistance can change the flow of current

Our activities for podcast one will be to , build a LED circuit using conductive thread to either enhance a picture or the circuit itself becomes the picture. We continue in the podcast to incorporate Origami with the circuit. Here are a few pictures of our initial tests

For starters, welcome to the Always With You blog. Except that we have decided to change our name to Mobile Movement...so, rather, welcome to the Mobile Movement blog. We changed the name because we realized we are creating a movement on two fronts:

1) We are going to change the way people support grassroots youth projects with direct telecommunications, and

2) We are energizing our generation with a new culture of philanthropy: one that is accessible, cool, fun and full of passion.

The passion starts here: so read on.

Our project is a partnership between Interactive Filmmaking, UN HABITAT, Microsoft Research India and the Environmental Youth Alliance. As a partnership, sometimes things take a little longer than expected, so while we are not yet off schedule, we were delayed in the first few months, waiting for a matching grant to be contracted. UN HABITAT has contracted the Environmental Youth Alliance (EYA) to run a Youth Environmental Entrepreneurship Program, which Mobile Movement will work with. Originally the contract was going to be in four countries in Africa, but now the program has been scaled down to Kenya. So the youth entrepreneurs we will be working with will be all based in Kenya, but that works for us, especially because it makes sense for us to support grassroots projects there, given the recent violence many young people faced earlier this year after the elections.

EYA will select 10 youth groups from low-income communities to start a socially and environmentally responsible small business, and will support them with vocational training, ongoing business advice, and start-up funds. The small businesses have a large range, from environmental projects like waste management, sanitation, composting, getting water, which is transported manually and expensive, to small individual businesses (like selling chapatis, meat, charcoal). EYA has decided to support youth groups who want to start businesses, so it will involve more people and have more chances at success. From the selected 10 groups, we will choose 5 to focus on, and will film their stories and create an interactive website where the audience can engage with the youth groups through the web and mobile phones. We will encourage the audience to give micro-loans, professional advice and in-kind support to the burgeoning businesses, and the progress of the business and the relationships will be recorded on the website and become part of the narrative...

Here is a calendar, which will give you a rundown of our plan:

Phase 1: Summer 2008
Selecting Youth Groups
There was an open call for youth groups, supported by The City of Nairobi and UN HABITAT. 120 youth groups applied, and 10 will be chosen in the next couple of weeks. The groups have been ranked, for factors like business viability, environmental and social benefit to the community, and group diversity. We have hired a coordinator on the ground in Nairobi, who has been interviewing the youth groups. The final 10 youth groups who are selected for the Youth Environmental Entrepreneurship Program will receive vocational training, start-up funds and on the ground support through UN HABITAT.

Phase 2: Fall 2008
Test User Site
Our goal is to see if a web/mobile-based blog can help support 2 of the youth groups with micro-loans, in-kind contributions and professional advice. For this test site, we will choose 2 youth groups from the group of 10 youth groups in Nairobi, and build a simple website to test our concept of Mobile Philanthropy. On this site, we will invite 20 test users, who are colleagues from a cross-section of fields, from new media to international development, to support these 2 youth groups over a 3 month period. All the test users will have to donate some funds, but they can decide when and how much.

During this prototyping period, we will look at how the youth groups and the test users interact. How often will they contact each other? By web or by phone? How long will it take for test users to donate? What other kinds of support will they provide? How useful will the professional advice be to the youth groups on the ground? How often do people want to be contacted by SMS (in real time, in a weekly digest, etc)? Does the reporting become a burden for the youth group? What kind of cultural misunderstandings may arise? Can we create intimacy and teamwork between people who have never met each other?

Phase 3: Fall and Winter 2008
Media Production
We are sending our team of filmmakers and digital storytellers to Kenya in the fall to meet the youth groups and begin documenting their work. We will shoot video and stills, and also do media workshops with the youth groups so they can continue to tell their own stories.

Phase 4: Spring 2009
Bringing it all together
We will use the results of our Test User Site to design a website that will use storytelling to share the multimedia stories of 5 of the youth groups in Kenya. We will design a compelling website that will feature these youth groups, and encourage ongoing support of these groups through personalized web and mobile interactions.

Phase 5: April 2009
Launch of website
Once the website is launched, the site will need to be moderated, maintained and promoted. We can encourage young people in North America, and all over the world, to use the site. This project is a prototype for both UN HABITAT and for us. They would like to grow the Youth Entrepreneurship Program globally, and we will also be interested in scaling the project, if it works! Other international development and human rights organizations may be interested in the results of the site as well...

When we launch the project, we will need a lot of support promoting the work, and perhaps further support in managing the site. For now, any connections with groups and organizations are welcome...and if anyone wants to be considered as a Test User for our site, please contact me at: leba@interactivefilmmaking.com

What are you most excited about accomplishing so far as a HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition winner?

I've been going back and forth between Kenya and Canada, and when I get back to Canada I see our generation are looking for something more. We don't only need stability, we also need meaning. The idea of citizen to citizen philanthropy is great.

This project gives people a way to get involved and keep in touch. It's true grassroots communication, and it's an easy way to do it. We might be able to drive a whole new sector, because it's hard for institutions to interact with grassroots young people, especially in places like Kenya. But with lower transaction costs and this new mobile phone banking, there is no more cash under the mattress. Young Kenyans can actually manage small businesses because of new technology that is accessible. And with Mobile Movement, you can build a history with a small business owner or youth group, build a relationship over time. And beyond individual giving, we are creating a trust-building system of micro-finance that could really change the way corporations and agencies like the World Bank and the UN help people in communities and monitor the progress of their smaller programs. It's going to be more possible to fund small groups and monitor them in a way that can really leverage a new style of funding, and could open up a lot of possibilities.

-Karun Koernig, Manager, International Projects, EYA

I'm most excited about how the project is capturing people's imaginations and interest. Talking about it at dinner parties etc. doesn't make people's eyes glaze over but sparks an interest, a leaning in if you will, that is stimulating thought, discussion, and a ready desire to participate. Particularly the notion of grantor/grantee engaging with one another directly and not having everything mediated through a third party.

-Jess Fraser, filmmaker and activist

We are just getting started, but I think the excitement for me is also in using the technology in a really innovative way. As an interaction designer, I am always thinking about how to create intimacy and meaning with technology. It's hard to do. Really hard. So can we move people through technology? Can we inspire young people in Kenya and the US and make connections between people who have never met? Can we promote global citizenry one-to-one? And can we share those stories so others want to join the movement? I think we can, I think we must. I just found out I have a friend detained in China for protesting about Tibet, and instantly I have engaged my online community to act. We have people all over the world, and now we can reach them in an instant. We are learning to make more connections, and to use them in service of a greater vision.

-Leba Haber Rubinoff, artist

No need to go through this if you saw the one I posted under a password. I've updated and tightened this -- down to 8 minutes from 12 minutes.

Robert Emery Smith Director, Technology Services, at Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, has been making short videos of how teachers use the affordances of Stanford's Wallenberg Hall. Here I talk about WHY I decided to start teaching courses about social media, using social media.

1. What are you most excited about accomplishing so far as a HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition winner? How did winning this award help your project accomplish this goal?

We are very excited about showcasing the experiences and voices of our grantee partners in India who participated in the 2008 Enterprise and Learning Knowledge Exchange. Thanks to the MacArthur Foundation grant, our VP of Communications and Director of Information Technology had the opportunity to travel to India to survey the technology requirements of our grantee partners, and interview our partners to capture their stories and experiences. We are now working on integrating issues raised around youth development into our KLARA, GFC’s Knowledge, Learning, and Resources Exchange Network.

2. What are your goals for the next three months?

Over the next three months, we hope to conduct additional rounds of interviews with our grantee partners and post on our website. In addition, we are beginning a “Flip Cam” project whereby we will distribute flip cameras to 3-5 of our grantee partners in India and Africa to film their experiences within their organizations and share best practices around youth development. Our partners will then directly upload their videos to our website and participate in guest vlogging and blogging. Also, we are preparing for our next Knowledge Exchange where we plan to include a specific discussion section on digital knowledge sharing.

Global Fund for Children is also working on creating exchanges between our grantee partners around the issue of food security. Many of our grantee partners have been impacted by the increasing cost of food, food transport, as well as poor crop yields and supply disruptions due to climate and crisis. Global Fund for Children is encouraging our grantee partners to exchange information about how they are coping for the short and long term. The goal is to have our grantee partners participate in discussion groups on KLARA and contribute blogs that inform our grantee partners throughout the world about coping strategies around the issue of food security. We are using Survey Monkey to conduct our survey which, when completed, will lead our grantees to our KLARA knowledge and learning exchange website to continue the dialogue.

Global Fund for Children also has a Knowledge Exchange page that featureds blogs and video slideshows from the workshops and events in India. Click here to view images of our Knowledge Exchange in India,

3. Is there any kind of assistance, advice, PR, communications, networking, or any other kind of support from fellow Digital Media and Learning Competition winners or HASTAC staff that could have helped you with your project?

We are learning a great deal through the DML winner’s hub website, spotlight blog, and email updates. It would be helpful if there was a technology or video equipment resource page on the DML website for winners to learn more about what video tools work best, which to avoid, etc.

1. As recipients of the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media & Learning Competition, what have you accomplished so far?

Winning one of the inaugural "Digital Media and Learning" awards has enabled HyperCities to establish an international network of schools, universities, and community partners interested in exploring the location of culture, focusing on the significance of place, and mapping the invisible strands of memory. We have been inspired by the number of "sibling" projects that we have encountered that link storytelling with place and have established three new partnerships with community groups and universities working in New York, Tel Aviv, and Ollantaytambo, with several others in the works.

Focused on community development and planning in Ollantaytambo, the University of Virginia's Peru Studio recently finished its second collaborative mission and data gathering session in Peru. The highlight of this trip was a presentation to Plan COPESCO, a regional government group that develops infrastructural projects in Cusco and through the Sacred Valley. The team collaborated with COPESCO over the course of the semester to develop several architectural schemes that will assist in protecting the town of Ollantaytambo, a small town in the Sacred Valley. Parts of the presentation and a compilation of architectural proposals will be featured on the HyperCities platform and will provide the basis for several digital media learning projects over the next year.

With USC's digital library, the team successfully piloted a new web-service that allows a HyperCities user to browse a geo-referenced library collection (such as archival photographs or newspapers) by time and space. This is an exciting development for us because it allows HyperCities to realize one of its goals of becoming an interoperable geo-temporal platform in which archives can expose their media items in an integrated context that supports new modes of inquiry, contextualization, and discovery. We are currently working with several other archives and museums to make collections of digital objects available on the HyperCities platform. The beauty of this rich contextualization is that institutions are able to showcase their collections next to content generated by communities in ways that enable the one to enhance the other.

The first "HyperCities" undergraduate courses (Berlin and Los Angeles) were offered at UCLA in the spring, and our team is currently gearing up for future HyperCities courses on Los Angeles, New York, and Tel Aviv. Together, these courses enrolled over 200 students who created more than half of the content used in the courses through their collaboratively produced maps on spatial history. KML files for Berlin are now a permanent part of the repository of media items and can be seen in the course group on HyperCities.

Here are some sample student responses:

• "I was able to really make the city my own and delve deeper into particular areas ... The first time I added and saw my own self-created map on top of the maps from different years, I was absolutely blown away."
• "I discovered an entirely new dimension of technology and learning."
• "I've never learned about history like this. [We] actually have a frame of reference to truly see what we are learning about."
• "Because of the visual associations, I have retained more in this class than any other history class ... I have also created maps for my friends and relatives on Google My Maps."
• "HyperCities provides connections and fluidity, not one-dimensional, detached fragments [as] in a book."

Finally, through our collaboration with Public Matters and the Pilipino Workers' Center (PWC) in Los Angeles, we have begun to develop a sustainable youth media and civic engagement program in Los Angeles' Historic Filipinotown ("P-Town"). As a collaboration between local immigrant youth and UCLA students, the project will use HyperCities to explore and publicly display media content about Historic Filipinotown's history, culture, and significance.

Members of Public Matters and the UCLA team have held weekly planning meetings with the Pilipino Worker’s Center throughout the summer. Here are some of the meeting outcomes and highlights:

o Community Advisory Board: This group consists of key stakeholders in Historic Filipinotown—representatives from community organizations, community scholars, business owners, activists and representatives from media-based fields—along with Asian-American scholars. They will play an active role in project oversight, serve as guest speakers and also connect the project to community development and needs. To date, we have about half of this group committed.
o Relationship with City Councilman Eric Garcetti’s Office: Ryan Carpio, assistant to the Councilman who represents Historic Filipinotown has agreed to serve on the Community Advisory Board and support not only the project but also all public events including the Tactical Sound Garden and P-Town tours.
o Relationship with Belmont High School: Nearby Belmont High School is opening several new “small school” campuses this fall including an arts magnet and a school that includes a focus on civic engagement. We are currently lining up a formal relationship with the school and its students.

2. What do you intend to accomplish over the next three months?

Over the next three months, PWC Youth will begin by mapping and exploring the concept of “spheres of influence.” Where do they feel they are at home in Historic Filipinotown? Where do they feel they have an impact? These questions will be posed to other community residents across ages and occupations, creating a “use map” of the community. As the project grows over the next year, an aim will be to expand Historic Filipinotown’s own sphere of influence in Los Angeles. In the winter quarter, a course on Historic Filipinotown will be offered at UCLA that will form the test-bed for the civic engagement program. Together, PWC Youth and UCLA students will explore the neighborhood’s history. PWC youth will gain skills in the use of digital media and in gathering oral histories through workshops with Public Matters and UCLA faculty. PWC youth will create a rudimentary tour of Historic Filipinotown and its history that they will use to introduce UCLA students to the area. The tours created by PWC youth and the UCLA students will form the basis of a "Tactical Sound Garden" which will open to the public in April.

In terms of technical development, we expect to launch several new features on the HyperCities platform that will further enable participatory learning, discovery, collaboration, and community mapping. The first development is a new mode of browsing and organizing the content of HyperCities that will allow users to create customizable "navigation routes" or "playlists" through a given city using permalinks. The second is the integration of 2D and 3D content for the cities of Berlin, Los Angeles, New York, Rome, Tel Aviv, and Ollantaytambo. Thirdly, we are working on a new "time dial" feature that will allow users to drill down at various levels of granularity, ranging from days, minutes, and seconds to years, decades, and centuries. This will play a critical role in creating family and community genealogies. The current platform is entering a beta-testing mode, and we expect to see a tremendous upswing in content generation for these cities over the next few months. We currently have more than thirty user-generated groups and several hundred registered users; we expect to see these numbers increase substantially over the next three months.

3. Is there anything that you would like assistance with from HASTAC/MacArthur?

The team has been inspired by the number of groups that have contacted us as possible collaborators, and we are excited to grow the project in a number of new directions. We would like some advice about scaling the project and networking with other groups working on similar aspects of community memory and mapping.