Search Results for: game design

Discovering Masterman, Discovering Myself

February 1, 2011 by professorkim

The Re-education of Me Table of Contents

One late afternoon in April, 1967, the guidance counselor at Kearny had called me and my parents in to tell me that the transfer had been approved. I could throw away my homework for that day; I was going to my new school tomorrow. This wasn’t unusual, I would learn later. After months and years on waiting lists, the word that we’d been admitted to Masterman often came suddenly, at odd times during the school year.

The next morning, I was led into Mr. Cragg’s fourth-grade classroom at JR Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School. Mr. Cragg was a tall white man with the build and carriage of a former athlete and the kind of face that magazine writers of that day would call “ruggedly handsome.” He welcomed me, introduced me to the class and pointed to Jo, who was to become my locker mate and guide. At some point, some teacher or counselor explained to me that learning at Masterman was based on the Discovery method, which meant that we would have opportunities to experiment and learn things for ourselves, instead of rote instruction. Educators of that time were heavily influenced by psychologists such as Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget who theorized about ways of structuring school and classroom culture in ways that were organic to the way that children learned to do such things as speak and problem-solve through immersive engagement with the surrounding world.

This would lead to a number of formal and informal experiments in everything from the configuration of furniture in the classroom, to new modes of in-class and out of class instruuction. Across the school district, some of these experiments would lead to the creation of all sorts of specialized programs, from a storefront schol annex of Gratz High, led by Marcus Foster, designed to keep teen mothers from dropping out of high school, to the creation of the Parkway program, a high school without walls that allowed students to use the city’s libraries, museums and other community resources as their classroom. As a laboratory and demonstration school, it was explained to us that many of these new ideas in education would be tried first on us, so that others could study the results and perhaps implement them elsewhere. Consequently, people from as as far away as Africa and Europe would occasionally visit our classes and observe what we were doing.

My first recollection of experiencing the method in practice in Mr. Cragg’s class was the class newspaper, “The 210 Express.” It was a mimeographed affair, planned, written, edited and produced by the students. I still have a copy of the issue that includes a brief item on my arrival in the class. What was even more exciting for me, though, was that I wrote a poem that was published in the newsletter. It was a melodramatic depiction of the siege of the Alamo called “Carry on, My Captain.” I cringe now at how bad it was, but I saw my name in print for the first time, and I had peers who thought that was cool.

There was more. The kids at Masterman came from all over the city. They were white, black, Asian, and some were even racially mixed. One boy said he was descended from Robert E. Lee, the leader of the Confederate troops, and he wasn’t too thrilled about it. I met Catholic and Jewish kids for the first time. There was even a Muslim girl and a girl who explained to us that she was a Black Hebrew. I ate my first bagel. Some of them were obvious prodigies, especially at music. This being the 1960s, were socially aware. Vietnam, racial justice, and funding for education figured in our conversations, along with more typical kid fare: the latest music, tv shows, and gossip about which boy asked which girl whether he could “stand a chance.” Had he seen the way we learned from each others’ backgrounds and developed a group ethos, Piaget would have been satisfied that we validated his theory about the potential positive impact of peer relationships on children’s social and moral development. As James Youniss put it:

“While [Piaget] is recognized for stimulating interest in the child as an active cognitive agent, little has been made of his proposal that children can construct a mutually understood principled morality which puts common benefit above individual interest.” (Youniss)

Writing for the 210 Express, along with experiences outside of school, started me on the path of thinking of myself as a writer. But I remember doing other activities that are now associated with teaching computing concepts to children. In sixth grade math class, I recall playing with games and manipulatives, such as cuisenaire rods, which we used to illustrate problems with fractions, among other things.

We also had clear plastic containers that we used to measure the volume of things, illustrating concepts such as the conservation of numbers, weight mass and volume. Piaget maintained the children understand this concept at a very young age, so I think the teacher’s interest was in making our inductions visible.

My favorite activities were two strategy games, Towers of Hanoi and Mancala. I now recognize these games as examples of algorithmic thinking. In Towers of Hanoi, the player is presented with three discs stack on the leftmost of three poles. The disks are arranged in size order, from smallest to largest. The challenge is to move the disks from the leftmost pole to the rightmost pole in the fewest moves. At no time can a larger disk be placed on top of a smaller one. It’s a very familiar game in the world of math of computer science. If you haven’t played it, try this virtual version from Dynamic Drive.

Mancala is the name for a collection of games called “Count and Capture” games. Mancala games use a board that is like an egg carton, and objects such as seeds or stones that are distributed in each of the cups in groups of four. Players can only move the pieces on their own side. They take turns picking up all of the stones in one cup on and distributing them, one at a time, in each successive cups in a counter-clockwise fashion. Depending upon the set of rules being used, players “capture” stones based on where they end up after distributing them. The goal is to capture the most stones. Math education researchers note that this game can help players explore subjects as simple as arithmetic and as complex as combinatorics .

So far, all of these experiences constitute creative approaches to learning traditional subjects, with opportunities for me to make serendipitous discoveries on my own. However, it was our music teachers, Gloria Goode and Virginia Hagemann, who took us to a new frontiers of personal growth and exploration. My next post will focus on their work.

Younis, James. Parents and Peers in Social Development: A Sullivan-Piaget Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 1980 pp. xiii-xiv

The Me Nobody Knew Then

January 6, 2011 by professorkim

The Re-education of Me Table of Contents

“When I first get up in the morning I feel fresh and it feels like it would be a good day to me. But after I get in school, things change and they seem to turn into problems for me. And by the end of the day I don’t even feel like I’m young. I feel tired.”

John, 13

The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices From the Ghetto, Stephen M. Joseph, ed. (first printed in 1970, reprinted in 2003)

The word that I had been admitted to Masterman, a public school for gifted children, came not a moment too soon. It was April, 1967, I was 10 years old, I was considered one of the top students at Kearny Elementary School, but socially and emotionally, I was failing badly. Had I not been transferred to Masterman when I was, I am not sure how I would have coped with my growing sense of loneliness and isolation. Reflecting upon these experiences leads me to think about how a child’s interactions with home, school, neighborhood and the larger environment affects her perceptions of her place in the world, and her chances of overcoming its obstacles and seizing its opportunities.

In recent years, psychologists have advocated for models of child development that give central consideration to the role of culture and socio-economic status in shaping the way a child views the world and functions within it. Yvette Harris and James Graham, author of the 2007 book: The African American Child: Development and Challenges (Springer Publishing Company, New York, NY.) argue that this is especially important for understanding children of color.

I had never been accepted in Penn Town, the neighborhood in which I had lived since moving to Philadelphia from Camden, New Jersey at the age of six. To begin with, I soon learned that only a few of my peers had ever been to New Jersey, so I was something of a foreigner. Even though Camden was only a few minutes away by car, and we lived fairly close to the Benjamin Franklin bridge, not many families owned a car, and the public transportation services that shuttle between the two cities now hadn’t yet been built. I must have talked about Camden too much, because I remember a boy telling me that he had been to New Jersey once, and it wasn’t so special, so there!

My father’s second-hand Chevy and my outsider origins weren’t the only problems. I lacked the social qualities that would have given me some currency among my peers. I was a slow, awkward runner, I couldn’t fight, and I had left Camden before I learned to jump double-dutch. Worse yet, I was double-handed, which meant that I couldn’t turn the ropes with a sufficiently reliable rhythm. To make matters worse, I was an only child, so I had no natural allies, and I had my own room. My father and stepmother wore second-hand clothes, but I had a new school wardrobe from Sears every year, and the latest toys. Worst of all, I was the teachers’ pet.

I might as well have had a kick me sign tattooed on my forehead. As is true in every neighborhood, we had our designated bullies, and I was a favorite target for teasing and occasional beat-downs. For the longest time, I didn’t fight back; I’m not sure why. Nor did I know how to play the dozens, the ritual game of insults built on race, class and gender stereotypes. I also had the annoying habit of questioning the logic of the taunts directed at me and others during an argument. It was common, for example, for a girl to say that she would “beat the black off” another girl. I couldn’t help wondering about that, because they also went around saying there was something wrong with looking too black. Following that logic, wouldn’t they consider it an improvement to have some of the “black” removed? Like the robot in “Lost in Space,” I spent a lot of time saying, “That does not compute.”

Eventually, there was a girl who declared that she would beat me up after school that day. She had been threatening to fight me since summer camp, and now the weather was cold enough for a coat. She had been a constant menacing presence. We met at the appointed hour, and, thinking that I would stand up for myself for once, I took a swing at her. She pulled my coat over my head and pulled my hair out An excited crowd ringed around us and made enough noise that eventually some neighbor heard and got my stepmother to come rescue me.

Her response to the incident is telling. She brought me and the other girl into our apartment and told us that we were letting down the race by fighting like dogs in the street. She extracted apologies from us, and a promise to try to get along. I think a conversation with the girl’s mother followed, or at least attempted – that would have been the norm. I think it was not long after that when my birthday coincided with the date of our regular Girl Scout meeting and she decided to host it at our place, complete with cake and ice cream. My tormentors were part of the troop. I can’t say we became friends after that, but I don’t recall any more beat-downs.

But by then, I carried the terror inside of me. Not just the fear of the neighborhood bullies, but the spectre of even worse violence. There were the tales of the tackheads, dark–skinned black girls with (snap fingers) that much hair who would supposedly grab girls, beat them, and carve up their faces to make them ugly. There were the gangs – in our neighborhood, there was 12th and Wallace and the Valley – gang geography was a required survival course in in everyone’s curriculum. During my childhood, the gangs went from zip guns to real guns, and before I left high school, some of my childhood neighbors, schoolmates and relatives were dead, or had suffered near-fatal injuries.

These dangers were mostly visited on boys, of course. In her book, Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality and Gendered Violence (NYU Press, 2010), sociologist Jody Miller described the violence and threats of violence routinely visited up African American girls and women in urban neigbborhoods.

Without going into detail, I will say that by the time I was ten years old, I witnessed or experienced actions that I now recognize as acts of assault and sexual harassment, and coercion, and I know that I was not alone. One did not talk about having been the victim of such experiences, although it was not unusual to hear a boy brag about having “felt somebody up,” or to hear that some group of boys, “ran a train” (gang-raped) a girl. That was usually told without sympathy for the girl, who was thought to have allowed herself to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Layered on top of all of this was the violence in the adult world – the real and rumored incidents of police brutality, the arrest of a neighbor’s father for killing someone in a bar fight, the occasional sight of a violent domestic argument that spilled out into the street.

I write of these things now because I recognize them as experiences that could have derailed me, and that did, over time, derail some of my peers. I also recognize that today, I could easily have met with the fate that befell Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old Chicago honor student who was stomped to death in September, 2009 as he was trying to escape a street fight that erupted as he was leaving school.

If we are serious about getting more young people from under-represented backgrounds into computing-dependent professions, our interventions must be sensitive the lived reality of children’s lives.

In another section of this work, I will explore these culturally sensitive models of child development and their implications in more detail. For now, I want to close with a presentation by Dr. John Rich, a trauma physician who heads the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at Drexel University. Dr. Rich’s work focuses on young black men who are victims and perpetrators of violence. Using an ethnographic approach, he tries to help us see and understand the human hurt at the heart of behavior that is beyond the comprehension of most people.

What Would WEB Du Bois Tell Henry Jenkins and Soulja Boy?

November 13, 2010 by professorkim

The Criteria for Negro Art in the Age of Computational Media

In June, 2008, I attended a presentation in which Henry Jenkins, then Director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, contemplated the lessons of Soulja Boy Tellem’s use of what he calls “participatory culture” to create a career as a hip-hop star. Jenkins described how teenager DeAndre Ramone Way (Soulja Boy) built a fan base by posting the music and a home video of his song, “Crank Dat,” and encouraging listeners to remix it, make video responses to it, and share it freely. (The presentation video is only available to members of the New Media Consortium.)

The process illustrates Jenkins’ concept of “spreadable” culture — a term that he argues is more accurate than the “viral” model, since viruses proliferate by attacking their hosts, while “spreadable” culture invites voluntary participation. He showed examples of fan videos of “Crank Dat,” including produced by his MIT grad students. Then Jenkins paralleled Soulja Boy’s encouragement of artistic appropriation and the cultural borrowing employed by Herman Melville in crafting Moby Dick.

In his blog, Jenkins mused about Soulja Boy’s precocity:

I can’t decide what fascinates me the most about this story: the fact that this teenager broke into the front ranks of the entertainment industry by using tools and processes which in theory are accessible to every other person of his generation or the fact that he has recognized intuitively the value in spreading his content and engaging his audience as an active part of his promotional process.

Jenkins did not address the actual lyrical content of Soulja Boy’s music, and the actual ideas being packaged in the catchy beat and the playful dance steps. The content wasn’t the point of the presentation. The lyrics offer the kind of puerile vulgarity one might expect from a boy who is trying to impress his peers with stories about his sexual prowess and toughness. “Crank Dat” includes such lines as:

“Soulja boy off on this hoe…

“Then Superman that hoe…”

“I’m jocking on your bitch ass
And if we get the fighting
Then I’m cocking on your bitch ass…”

The lyrics reflect the cliches associated with the worst of hip-hop: degrading women while declaring dominance over other males by feminizing and threatening them. When Soulja Boy released “Crank Dat,” he was a 16-year-old high school student, and the song was spread largely by other teenagers. The character that Way portrays in the video is the stereotypical black male hip-hopper: hypersexual, prone to violence, gaudily attired. But the implausibility of the lyrics suggest that, like most amateur writers, Way is imitating what he has heard or gleaned from listening to others, not writing from life experience.

Jenkins showed videos of smiling teenagers and young adults bouncing on one foot, cranking their arms and lunging forward to make the “Superman” gesture.

In conversations with other conference participants, I seemed to have been the only person who was profoundly disturbed by the content that Way, AKA Soulja Boy, his minions, and ultimately, his record company were spreading. In part, I later learned, that was because many of my colleagues weren’t familiar with the lyrics. There was also the fact that “Crank Dat” was only another in a long list of songs, cartoons, games and other media content that they knew kids were exposed to, and it wasn’t the worst thing most kids would be exposed to. And after all, it’s not as if vulgar or even racially stereotypical music originated with remix culture.

I probably sounded like the scolds of the 1950s yelling about rock and roll, or the highbrows at the beginning of the 20th century inveighing against comic books and “pulp” novels. The Republic was still standing. I’m sure some thought I needed to smooth out that bunch in my panties and move on.

Or maybe not. The practice of analyzing form and distribution apart form content sits well within the tradition of media studies, going back to Marshall McLuhan’s declaration that “The Medium is the message,” and in rhetorical terms, “The medium is the massage.” However, I find Kathleen Welch persuasive when she argues that rhetorical analysis of both content and delivery is important to understanding the social justice implications of modern communications. If one follows the history of remixing trail of “Crank Dat,” one finds that its commercial success, facilitated by social media, led to the song being played in venues that would have been unimaginable in earlier times.

For example, a few months earlier, I had been sent a link to another performance of the song by a frustrated colleague and fellow member of the National Association of Black Journalists. It seemed that someone thought it would be fun to liven up a New York local morning traffic report with a performance of the song. The traffic reporter, Jill Nicolini, was part of the morning news “happy talk” format. A former Playboy bunny and occasional reality TV star, she routinely drafted men to dance with her after detailing the morning’s jams, delays, and alternate side-of-the-street parking rules. On this particular morning, she summoned Craig Treadway, the co-anchor, as her dance partner.

The Dancing Weather Girl – Watch more Funny Videos

The most telling moment for me was when Treadway broke into a tap dance. What was Treadway’s shuffle? And what do we make of the black male crew member bunny-hopping in the background?

I don’t know Mr. Treadway, Nicolini or any of the other members of that newscast, and I have hesitated for more than a year about writing this post because I’m not trying to cast aspersions on him or any other cast member of the show. If this post does that, I apologize in advance. They were doing their jobs, and perhaps they even had some fun. What I am trying to probe, as delicately as possible, is the meaning of the moment for journalistic norms in the age of remix culture.

Of course, the packaging of local television news as entertainment has been going on for a long time. A quarter-century ago, Neil Postman demonstrated the emerging parallels between the television news show and a television show designed as entertainment in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Entertainment (Penguin, 1985.):

“If you were the producer of a television news show for a commercial station, you would not have the option of defying television’s requirements…. You would try to make celebrities of your newscasters…. You would have a weatherman [sic] as comic relief, and a sportscaster who is a touch uncouth (as a way to relate to the beer-drinking common man.) You would package the whole event as any producer might who is in the entertainment business.

“The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the world….” (p. 106)

I came of age professionally during the early 1980s, so as a news consumer and media professional, I understand the pecking order of news shows. The anchor might smile and exchange some banter, but the anchor stayed dignified. I wasn’t thrilled at Nicolini’s shtick, but I understood it for the reasons Postman described. What I wasn’t ready for was an anchorman to be drawn into the clowning. It is very likely that what stuck in my craw was the sight of Treadway, who probably had to endure a great deal to attain an anchor desk in a major market, pulled out of the role on which, traditionally, his credibility rested.

There is one sense in which the problem is entirely mine, because it represents a collapsing of norms my generation of media professionals can’t quite stomach. It has become clear in recent years that there is a great deal of skepticism about the kinds of conventions that journalists traditionally adopt, whether it be certain standards of decorum, or a studied modesty about stating their political views. Even a growing number of journalists reject that last standard.

Then, too, there is the shifting calculus of racial symbolism to consider. Surely, the sight of a black man dancing alongside a young white female in 2008 does not mean what it meant in my childhood during the 1960s. In those days, such a sight was restricted to Shirley Temple movies. Treadway and Nicolini’s performance occurred the same year that a man with an African father and a wife descended from slaves won the White House.

It’s unlikely that WEB Du Bois would have approved of SouljaBoyTellem’s art, or much of hip-hop, for that matter. The pioneering scholar, editor and activist hoped that those African Americans who gained access to the instruments of culture making would infuse high culture with the gifts of Africa. For him that meant spirituals (delivered Jubilee-style, of course) the vibrancy of traditional African art and artisanship, the nuanced poesy of a Jessie Fauset or Countee Cullen, with the occasional swinging riff from the deceptively accessible Langston Hughes. In his definitive essay on aesthetics, The Criteria of Negro Art, he implored:

“If you tonight suddenly should become full-fledged Americans; if your color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously forgotten; suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and powerful; — what is it that you would want? What would you immediately seek? Would you buy the most powerful of motor cars and outrace Cook County? Would you buy the most elaborate estate on the North Shore? Would you be a Rotarian or a Lion or a What-not of the very last degree? Would you wear the most striking clothes, give the richest dinners, and buy the longest press notices?

“Even as you visualize such ideals you know in your hearts that these are not the things you really want. You realize this sooner than the average white American because, pushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true spirit; if we had the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling Heart; if we had, to be sure, not perfect happiness, but plenty of good hard work, the inevitable suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting, all that — but, nevertheless, lived in a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all America.”

Part of Jenkins’ point is that participatory media expands the ranks of the tastemakers beyond Hollywood elites, intellectuals, and activists. Jay Rosen has been saying similar things about the shift to participatory journalism in essays such as The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” But when the ethos from which these new media products emerge can be tainted by values that are corrosive, a critical perspective is necessary.

In her essay, “Learning the 5 Lessons of Youtube: After Trying to Teach There, I Don’t Believe the Hype,” Alexandra Juhasz makes the argument that corporate dominance of this major media sharing site has turned do-it-yourself culture into a tool for replicating ideas and values that are fundamentally anti-democratic. In particular, she and her students found that depictions of African Americans that reinforce vulgar race and gender stereotypes are more popular, and thus more prominently featured, than those promoting more positive images or cultural critique.

And this is part of my concern, even as I contribute to this participatory culture and teach students to do it as well. The uncritical replication of negative images of black males is particularly vexing, because it undermines the effort to transfer of positive values from one generation to the next. In some ways, the current environment is arguably more challenging than the pre-Civil rights era, because in those days, there were alternative, black-controlled civic institutions that promoted images that countered the stereotypes of the dominant culture. Byron Hurt’s 2008 mini-documentary demonstrated Barack Obama’s rise exposed a deep-seated confusion and ambivalence about the possibilities of success, respect and power for black men in an era that is supposed to be “post-racial:”

I thought about this ambivalence as I watched clips from DeAndre Ramone Way’s videoblog, which has since been removed. He has been known to talk about his interests in art, education, and business along with his “beefs” with other rappers, his jewelry and his cars. Pop culture never was a good place for a complicated persona. When pop culture goes “spreadable,” what gets lost? Sometimes I’m afraid it’s the substance of a culture that we can’t afford to lose.

The Re-Education of Me: Prelude to My Sabbatical

September 18, 2010 by professorkim

With the commencement of the school year, I am officially on sabbatical to write about the research I’ve been doing to help bring together computing and journalism education. I have a proposal that lists the academic work I will complete. However, underneath the project is a cry of the heart that is aching for expression, and that will likely determine the form of the work I ultimately create.

This project is really about understanding how we foster constructive and inclusive conversation and problem-solving in an age where the craft of articulate writing and argument has lost much of its currency in public discourse and popular culture. We live in an age dominated by manufactured controversies, where propagandists like Andrew Breitbart get called journalists.

I could go on with all the examples of sour discourse out there, the full breadth of what Al Gore correctly called, The Assault on Reason, but I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the essential duties of journalism to democracy is to keep us talking so we don’t kill each other. My studies of other diverse cultures leads me to think that a robust public square is what keeps a pluralistic democracy together. Our traditional fealty to uncovering verifiable truths is one of the important ways of fulfilling that obligation, but in the cacophony that our contemporary media landscape has become, it’s not enough. We have to facilitate democratic civic discourse even as the libertarian and utilitarian foundations of our belief in a free press buckle under the weight of the evidence that human beings are not rational actors, that it’s not always good that almost anyone can be a publisher these days, and that the tools that let us customize our news also allow us to ignore contrary views and evidence that we may need to understand for the sake of our own survival.

Also, we have to earn a living. To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, I’ve seen some of the best newsroom minds of my generation completely buffaloed by the destruction of the business model for creating and disseminating the content that informs and entertains us. My job is to figure out what aspiring journalists and professional communicators need to know in order to be effective and ethical practitioners. I went into the classroom to serve people who are as I was – a young lover of words whose dream was to earn a living weaving them together.

In 1990, when I took my magazine writing and public relations experience into the classroom full-time, we knew what that meant: reporting, writing, copy-editing. A broad familiarity with literary forms and genres that could serve as writing models. A solid liberal arts education for the sake of cultural literacy, and as the foundation for developing expertise on a beat. A little experience with a camera, enough graphics and production knowledge to be able to re-size a photo or write to a designer’s specs, and there was nothing wrong with some marketing and communications theory. Add campus media experience, some internships and you had the makings of a cub reporter, editorial assistant or PR staffer.

When I trained for my Master’s degree in journalism in the early 1980s, that approach to journalism education seemed natural. In fact, formal journalism education only began about a century ago, and this model of journalism instruction took a few decades to form. In other words, the academic discipline of journalism has always been in flux. Its place in the academy has always been suspect. The newspaper barons who endowed the first journalism schools believed that college educated men would create a superior product. Subsequent generations of journalism educators sought to define and instill certain professional norms through accreditation standards, ethics codes and other markers of professionalization. In this, they consciously mirrored such fields as law, engineering, education and medicine. However, unlike those other professions, there can be no licensing restriction on the practice of journalism, because that would violate the First Amendment.

Besides journalism education occupies a marginal place in both the Academy and industry because of the myopic view that journalism is primarily a set of skills and not an intellectually rigorous endeavor with its own approach to knowledge formation. The media owners who were to be the primary employers of journalism graduates wanted to know that our students could report accurately, write grammatically and meet deadlines. That made them suitable raw material that could only be molded into a journalist after some real-world experience. They wanted faculty members who were steeped in newsroom culture, not some ivory-tower Ph.D. On the other hand, the attributes that employers valued were precisely the ones that led other scholars to disdain the intellectual value of formal journalism education and educators. There were a handful of journalism Ph.D. programs when I was pursuing my MA at NYU. My professors, all decorated veterans of the nation’s most prominent news organizations, were openly dismissive of them.

In any event, that world is long gone, and people who built their careers on that gospel either struggle to stay relevant or they have abandoned the game. We all have had to re-invent ourselves and examine our assumptions about the way civic discourse works, and the means by which one earns a living supporting it.

When you make a fundamental change in course, it’s good to reflect on how you got to be where you are. And so, the first part of this investigation will be a bit of auto-ethnography. I’m going to explore the roots and evolution of my approach to teaching and learning journalism and professional writing. Then I’m going to explore the shift from journalism to civic media, drawing heavily on my teaching and formal research experiences. Then, I’m going to strive for some kind of coherent conclusion about how we meet the challenges of democratizing civic media. Expect extensive explorations of seminal texts, such as Jay Rosen’s “What Are Journalists For?” Also I hope to record conversations with everyone from the retired principal of my middle school to my research partners, students and some of the leading lights in the contemporary media landscape. I’m also hoping for advice from you along the way.

In calling this entry the Re-Education of Me, I am paying homage to two unlikely sources of inspiration. The first is The Education of Henry Adams, an early 20th-century call for a shift away from the traditional 19th-century educational emphases on philosophy and classics in favor of education in science and the professions. The second is Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro, a blistering and still sadly-relevant expose of the ways in which our education system perpetuates false notions of human difference that warp the social fabric. With that, I begin.

Can VIBE magazine be saved? And should we care?

July 1, 2009 by professorkim

What will it take to bring back VIBE?

Oh the irony. In a week that saw a jaw-dropping surge in music sales, television ratings and internet traffic in response to the death of Michael Jackson, VIBE, one of the nation’s leading music magazines, abruptly stopped publication Tuesday. Magazine staffers received the news in a memo from CEO Steve Aaron as they labored to produce a special issue on the death of the King of Pop.

In some ways, the news shouldn’t have been a surprise. Rumors about the magazine’s impending demise had been swirling for months. There had been staff and salary cut. A slew of magazines have gone down the tubes in the past year, including popular music magazines such as Blender. However, the announcement came with stunning suddenness.

And as the news lens has shifted from Jackson’s home to the BET Awards to the tribute at the Apollo and the upcoming public viewing at the Neverland Ranch, millions of people continue to chatter, twitter and facebook about every detail. Watching all of this, I can’t help but wonder, could VIBE have modified its business model to have been better poised for such moments?

Obviously a media enterprise can’t base its survival on single spectacular news events. However, the use of Facebook and Twitter as a place for sharing news and making meaning of Michael Jackson’s death is significant. Blogher CE Virginia DeBolt noted that the patterns of recent news coverage demonstrated the shift in the roles between the old and new media:

In the next news cycle or during the next big story, will mainstream media remain inclined to wait for confirmation from the AP or The New York Times? Or will we begin to accept the word of sources that may be regarded as sleazy some of the time? Is news turning into the world according to Twitter?

VIBE’a magazine’s founder, entertainment mogul Quincy Jones, seems to think so. According to Ebonyjet.com, Jones , 76 , is working n a way to regain control of the 16-year-old enterprise. VIBE was sold to its current owner, Wicks Media Group, in 2006. Jones’ plan is to turn VIBE into an exclusively online enterprise, “because print and all that stuff is over.”

While going online will relieve the VIBE media group of the cost of print production, observers are quick to point out that the magazine already had, in Aaron’s words, “a profitable digital operation.” As Natasha at Young, Black and Fabulous put it:

Can VIBE pull it off even if they come back with a strictly online presence and Quincy Jones buys it back? Their latest editions haven’t been what they used to be. But time will tell…

What would it take for a magazine such as VIBE to succeed in this new media environment? I was prompted to think about this as I reflected upon how I and throngs of other viewers used social media to register our visceral reactions to the BET awards Sunday night. Of the dozens of facebook and twitter entries I scanned that night, I can’t recall a single reference to VIBE’s live-blogs of the event. (You can check them out here and here). Obviously, I’m not pretending that my feeds were exhaustive, or that I caught everything that came past, but I follow both VIBE and its editor in chief on Twitter. What could VIBE have done that night to draw my attention that night?

My curiosity is more than personal. Popular music is one of the United States’ major exports. At the time of its founding in 1993, VIBE had a winning formula that was rooted in the popularity of hip-hop, but that provided content that crossed demographic boundaries. That earned it favorable comparisons to Rolling Stone, among other kudos. (Check out TheRoot.com’s retrospective of notable VIBE covers to get a sense of its impact over the years. ) VIBE’s failure is partially the result of the faltering economy – the loss of key advertisers, such as the auto industry and the seizing up of the capital and credit markets. But it’s also the result of the same shifting patterns of media use that have decimated the record industry and the traditional news media. Writing for TheRoot.com, Todd Boyd acknowledged that VIBE’s star has been fading for a long time:

For those who never took to the shiny suits and the advent of bling culture, Vibe probably began to lose its luster a long time ago. Like “Kwame and them fuckin’ polka dots,” the magazine began to be played out around the same time that the music industry started to take a dip and the point at which the Internet began stealing the thunder of all those monthly publications that couldn’t supply information fast enough in the new 24/7 news cycle.

Dr. Sybril Bennett blogged about her experience of watching the BET Awards while connecting with friends via Facebook:

As more and more people joined the conversation about the BET Awards, from the opening number featuring New Edition including Bobby Brown, I slowly realized what was about to transpire. I didn’t have to watch the show alone or make a phone call. I didn’t have to text. All I had to do was remain on facebook and participate.

Based on her reflections and suggestions from her online friends, Bennett came up with tips that any news organization can use to make a collective experience more interactive. Among her tips: use existing tools such as CoverItLive and Ustream; have someone on the television show staff monitoring social media and engaging with the online audience.

Bennett’s tips got me thinking about other innovative ways in which magazine publishers can merge the best of what they have to offer – expertise, credibility and contacts in a particular field – with the community-building power of social media. Amy Gahran says the key for news organizations to join the conversations in which your audience already participates, rather than trying to initiate conversations from scratch:

Just as with journalism, to do social media right you’ve got to get out there and talk to people on their turf.

If I had a chance to advise Quincy Jones, I’d tell him to hire some smart programmers to create a widget that would allow readers to integrate their facebook twitter and youtube conversations. Then for special events such as award shows, hall of fame inductions or the occasional spectacle of a megastar’s funeral, make it easy for your readers to use your tools to share the experience the experience with their friends – whether on your site, Facebook, or Twitter. Make an API available and allow readers to remix your coverage. Come up with a strategy for highlighting the strongest content from the community on the main site.

And I’ll add one thing that no one has mentioned – encourage game development. A Michael Jackson trivia game, crossword or word jumble would have been a simple way of engaging readers while conveying information about the late singer’s life and achievements. As Facebook and Yahoo Games have amply demonstrated, such games are popular social media platforms. But beyond that, a content sharing partnership with a game publishing outlet might be worth exploring.

The challenge in all of this, of course, is how any of these ideas would have insulated VIBE from the reported 42 percent drop in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2009 in comparison to a year ago. No one could have predicted the sudden surge in sales of Jackson’s music and memorabilia, and the thought of trying to make book on the next celebrity death is grotesque. But those aren’t the only kinds of events that can draw a crowd. For starters, how about a roster of virtual album release parties with celebrity live-chats and promotional offers on their music and memorabilia?

Even if you aren’t a hip-hop fan, the fate of VIBE matters if you care about what happens in the magazine industry. If an enterprise such as VIBE, designed to serve a niche that is passionate invested in hip-hop music and culture, can’t survive, what media organization can?

cross-posted at Blogher

Kim Pearson

Civic Media Researcher