Leap-frogging the Matrix: A Collage Inspired by Black Thought 2.0

Note: This past weekend (April 6-7, 2012), I participated in Black Thought 2.0: New Media and the Future of Black Studies. The event was the brainchild of Duke University African American Studies professor Mark Anthony Neal and was held at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

The program consisted of a Friday evening keynote address in which sociologist S. Craig Watkins shared his research on young people’s engagement with media technologies and the effort to deploy those technologies to create more effective, culturally responsive learning environments inside and outside of school.  He called upon Black Studies departments to do more to make the physical and intellectual resources of the Academy available to those stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. This was followed by four Saturday panels that contemplated, the history of African American engagement with the Internet, teaching and research in the digital age, internet activism, and the role of the black public intellectual in social media. The event was a dynamic interplay between face-to-face and virtual participants since it was live-streamed and live-tweeted.

Videos of the conference are being edited and will be archived for public viewing at the Franklin Center’s YouTube channel.

This is the first of what I suspect will be several personal ruminations on this event.

 

Leap-frogging the Matrix

Sojourner Truth sold the “shadow to support the substance.”

Sojourner Truth sold these "cartes de visite" at public appearances, bearing the caption, "I see the shadow to support the substance."We store her shadow in clouds for sampling remixing reusing

What is the essence that we download?

 

I am not being plain. Let me tell you what I mean.

Long ago I learned to seek truth like Diogenes

Holding the tales of my griots aloft

I headed for the agora that had not imagined me.

Straining ears and eyes for places to connect

And Terry said , “Try to remember, my dear, we’re only pilgrims here…”

 

 

 

 

“Discourse” from WTSR-FM: A conversation about ACTA and Internet freedom

On April 4, I was interviewed by TCNJ students Melissa Radzimski and Amanda Reddington, hosts of the WTSR-FM radio show, “Discourse” on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and other issues related to Internet freedom and intellectual property rights. It was a wide-ranging conversation that included tome discussion of the history of the Internet. I appreciated the host’s invitation and enjoyed the conversation. We’d all love to hear your thoughts.

On teaching game design in a journalism class, Part 4: Newsgames as literary journalism

In the  last blog entry on my newsgames class, I reported on my students’ remix of my intentionally buggy, incomplete Food Stamps game. That exercise served multiple purposes:

  • It provided an accessible example of the challenges of conceiving a newsgame, and for defining requirements for such a game as journalism and as a game.
  • Splitting the students into groups focused on specific aspects of the game (story, media, gameplay) afforded an opportunity to reinforce and extend ideas in their texts through collaboration and peer teaching.
  • It provided a natural segue into guiding students into the development of their own games.

One of the first challenges of getting students thinking about the requirements for their own game projects is that I found no literature on how one actually reports and organizes information for a newsgame, not to mention the ethical standards that ought to apply.  Game designers are accustomed to thinking conceptually not literally, so they take liberties that potentially violate the canon of journalism ethics. This has led to some interesting discussions with colleagues. For example, in 2008, my computer science colleagues and I were planning the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers, one of my colleagues had one of our research assistants build a Scratch game that offered a crude representation of the issue of global warming. In the game, clicking on the aerosol raises the earth temperature until the planet explodes:
Scratch Project

I expressed concern about the scientific inaccuracy of the game, and we had an extended discussion about how literal the game needed to be. Interestingly, the project generated nearly 700 views and dozens of comments and remixes, including a debate about global warming. In addition, both this researcher and another student colleague built a number of interesting prototypes, including this game about campus cafeteria food options:
Scratch Project

With this experience and my magazine writing background in mind, I opted to teach the students to think of the reporting and storytelling aspects of the game as a kind of linear, multi-threaded literary journalism. Literary journalism combines the factual reporting of journalism with much of the artistic freedom of literature.

Reporting

We reviewed the reporting process of collecting data from secondary sources and primary sources, interviewing, and organizing information in cluster diagrams. I had them give me abstracts and annotated source lists, as I would in a magazine writing class. Because we lost the first two weeks of classes due to Hurricane Irene, this process was somewhat truncated, but we did spend some time on interviewing and vetting sources. We also spent a lot of time on copyright, ethics, libel and defamation rules. We also talked about the fact that narrative newsgames are often built on a degree of fictionalization and the creation of composite characters – practices that would be considered unethical in literary journalism.

We talked about ways of mapping story structure to game mechanics. And we talked a lot about new journalism with its emphasis on scene-by-scene construction, changing points of view, dialogue and experimentation in narrative structure. We  did close readings of Gay Talese, Susan Orlean and Jimmy Breslin.

We talked about strategies for fulfilling or confounding audience expectations in order to create suspense and engagement. I used clips from the 80s TV show, Moonlighting, which does this brilliantly:

 

Parodying Dr. Seuss:

Taking an irreverent approach to a classic, also breaking the fourth wall:

As we brainstormed about their game ideas, Moonlighting also helped me introduce them to genres that might be suitable for the storytelling for their games, but with which they were unfamiliar. For example, I suggested that the conventions of film noir might be worth exploring for one group’s game about the workings of Ponzi schemes.

With the students’ permission, I soon hope to share some examples of the ways in which they applied these ideas to their games.

On teaching game design in a journalism class, part 3

UPDATE: December 6, 2011. Obviously, I wrote the post below several weeks ago. An end-of semester update coming soon.

 

We are now just past midterms this semester, and I can share the work done by the  News Games class to remix the Food Stamp Game. As I have described in the two previous posts in this series, I created a very rudimentary, glitchy, incomplete game in Scratch designed to simulate the experience of shopping on a food stamp budget. My idea was to have the students critique the game and remix it both as a game and as journalism.  The image at left is a screen shot of the flash-based prototype they created.  We had less time to work on this project than I had anticipated because Hurricane Irene and our Labor Day schedule forced a late start to the semester.  Still, students reported that they found the experience valuable, both as an introduction to the course, and as a way of building community.

In addition to their contributions to the game, students wrote reflective essays critiquing their work as journalism and as a game.

The focus of their effort was on enhancing the storyline, as well as improving the esthetics and the gameplay. With more time, they wanted to create more player profiles  (a single parent with children, an unemployed adult, a retiree, etc.) to illustrate varied scenarios under which people acquire Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.  They also would have make hotspots out of more of the items, and they would have added a corner store or bodega to the shopping options.

From here,  the students moved toward developing their individual game projects, which have turned out to be quite varied. In thinking through how I expected them to incorporate journalism into the game design and development process, I adapted my approach to teaching students to do long-form magazine writing. I will elaborate on this in my next post.

 

New Article: Computational Thinking and Expository Writing in the Middle School

Ursula Wolz, Meredith Stone, Kim Pearson, Sarah Monisha Pulimood, and Mary Switzer. 2011. Computational Thinking and Expository Writing in the Middle School. Trans. Comput. Educ. 11, 2, Article 9 (July 2011), 22 pages. DOI=10.1145/1993069.1993073 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1993069.1993073

ABSTRACT

To broaden participation in computing we need to look beyond traditional domains of inquiry and expertise. We present results from a demonstration project in which interactive journalism was used to infuse computational thinking into the standard curriculum and regular classroom experience at a middle school with a diverse population. Outcomes indicate that we were able to develop positive attitudes about computational thinking and programming among students and teachers who did not necessarily view themselves as “math types.” By partnering with language arts, technology and math teachers at Fisher Middle School, Ewing New Jersey, we introduced the isomorphism between the journalistic process and computational thinking to 7th and 8th graders. An intense summer institute, first with the teachers and then with students recruited from the school, immersed them in the “newsroom of the future” where they researched and wrote news stories, shot and edited video, and developed procedural animations in Scratch to support their storylines. An afterschool club sustained the experience. The teachers adapted interactive journalism and Scratch programming to enrich standard language arts curriculum and are infusing computational thinking in classroom experiences throughout the school.

This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.