from “The School and Real Life” by Herman T. Lukens 1898

Toward the end of last semester, K-State Proud approached me about being their “Honorary Co-Chair.” Usually this is somebody who is well-known and respected throughout the K-State community. The former co-chair was our popular basketball coach Frank Martin, and before that it was (now retired) University President Jon Wefald, so obviously it was a great honor to be approached about this. But looking at my research and teaching schedule, I was hesitant to get involved. At the time, I thought K-State Proud was just a t-shirt selling campaign. It seems like everybody has one of those “K-State Proud” t-shirts. I think they are great shirts, but its just a shirt, and I’m thinking that I’m way too busy to be selling t-shirts.

It wasn’t until I sat down with students from the K-State Proud committee that I found out what Proud is really all about. Every dollar goes toward student scholarships, most of which helps students stay in school when all of their other resources are tapped out. Over the past 3 years, students have donated over $250,000 to keep their fellow students in school when they need it most, like when their house has been taken by a tornado, their belongings have been taken by a flood, or when a serious illness drains them of their last dollar and the will to go on. Most importantly, it even helps those students who are perpetually struggling financially to stay at K-State.

Meanwhile, the new semester was quickly approaching, and I needed to design my crash course in digital storytelling for my incoming Digital Ethnography students. Most students come in with little or no digital video background, so each year I design a 4 week program that allows them to complete their first mini-project before moving on to creating their major semester project. Like always, I want the mini-project to be more than just another assignment. It has to matter to them and to the world. The Proud campaign seemed like a perfect match. We contacted former Proud winners and matched each of my incoming students with one of them. Each student then created a short video vignette about the Proud winner. We arranged interviews with a cancer survivor, a Katrina survivor, and many others who have overcome more than their share of struggles and still remain here at K-State. I was personally surprised to find so many of my favorite students on the list of former Proud Award winners. And without Proud, they would have never been in my classes.

But we still needed to show the K-State Community that Proud is more than just a shirt - that it is students helping students. And that’s where the Flash Mob of Kindness comes in. What you see in the video is 100 students coming together, pooling their money, and then running all over campus using that money to perform random acts of kindness for other students. It is simply a way of acting out what K-State Proud really does. When a student gets a Proud Award, it is as if the entire student body has pitched in a little bit to help them out, just like you see in the video. In all, it made for a crazy fun day, and I’m sure if you talked to any of the students involved, they would tell you it was well worth the money they donated just for the experience alone. Three weeks later, the video is edited and ready to go, just in time for the Proud Rally to be held tonight in the Student Union.

One last pedagogical note: activities like this make for a great first day of any digital storytelling / media class by giving students some experience in online organizing and planning, handling a camera, and also allowing them to bond with each other through a fun experience. And in the three weeks since that first day, the students have been meeting with their Proud Award winning partner, recording interviews, and shaping video vignettes like this:

K-State Proud Award Winner Kala Raglin (by David Westfall)


K-State Proud Award Winner Hannah McSpadden (by Shane Oram)


K-State Hero Award Winner Rachel Day (by Kristin Russell)

More coming soon!

You can learn more about the Proud program at www.k-stateproud.org.

This is from Lynn Schofield Clark’s Innovation in Mass Communications class at the University of Denver. If you are a fan of The Office, and you follow the discussions about technology use in the classroom, you will love this. They really nail the opening, and they have some great moments.

I saw the video premiere at DU last week in front of an appropriately appreciative crowd and had the opportunity to talk to the students who created it. As in so many cases, the value of the video goes far beyond the final product. The real value came in the actual production of the video. The video was produced in the first few weeks of class, and now the students have a number of characteristics that we all want for our students: They’ve bonded. They are comfortable with one another. They respect one another. They are engaged and excited. They want to learn more, and they know that they can and will be responsible for most of that learning that is to come.

For this reason, I’m a big fan of mini-projects like this to kick off a course. Sometimes my students create “trailers” for their final research projects. It helps them learn how to tell a story visually, how to edit, where to find visual material and Creative Commons or public domain music they can use, and the final product is usually something they are proud of and that they can look back on to re-energize when they get so deep into their research that they have forgotten what originally excited them about the project.

This year we are doing something extra special for our mini-projects. They launch tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Here is the video from my recent talk at the Personal Democracy Forum at Jazz at Lincoln Center. About 10 minutes of it is a minor update (rehash) of An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, but the rest is new. The gathering may have been the highest concentration of amazingly creative and concerned global citizens I have ever been around. Hallway conversations were different than your typical conversations. Instead of lots of people saying, “You know, somebody should … ” there were lots of people saying, “So I did this, this, and this, and now I’m working on doing this, this, and this and we should collaborate … ” In other words, it was a bunch of people blessed with what I once heard Yochai Benkler and Henry Jenkins call “critical optimism.” Nobody there was blindly optimistic, thinking technology was going to make everything better. They were all continually trying to figure out where we are, where we might be going, and the possible downsides and dangers of new technologies so we can use the new technologies to serve human purposes. In other words, it was my kind of crowd.

While surfing for videos about the future from the past, I found this little gem from Apple:

The video comes from a time in which very few were actually on the internet, hence the question, “What *would* you do?” The most recent YouTube comments paint a disheartening picture of what we have become:

There is considerable GLBT hatred on YouTube. Some of it is generated by Anonymous trolls just doing it for the LULZ, but a good bit of it is genuine. After studying YouTube for several years now it is easy to see why Candis Cayne would call the GLBT community “the last great minority”, noting that they “can still be harrassed openly” and “called out on television.” (from Wikipedia entry on LGBT)

In my short time as a professor, I have already heard three horrific stories from students who have suffered through violent and humiliating GLBT hate crimes.

In light (or darkness) of all this, I get a certain joy out of watching the big fat gay collab video, now spreading around the intertubes like wildfire and receiving tons of (thankfully) positive comments:

(Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics)

Almost 9 months ago, the College of Wooster president, Grant Cornwell, forwarded my video to a remarkable collection of people who were daring and creative enough to think they could dance it … not just dance to it … but truly dance it.  And they do.  What a great performance.  The choreography by Kim Tritt is mesmerizing and surprising (see 2:31!).  The music by Sebastian Birch and Ed Caner of Kent State University is nicely melodic and reflective while maintaining the sense of a driving technological edge that is enticing and seductive (the machine is us, yeah!) yet menacing and sometimes threatening (the machine is using us, yikes!).  And it is danced beautifully.  Special thanks to Dale Seeds for helping to put all these remarkable people together for this production.

The following are brief notes from our recent discussion with the great Alan Levine (twitter: @cogdog) and the New Media Consortium.  To see & hear the full discussion, click here.

First off, here is our research team for 2009:

How our class works:

First off, we organize it as a research group, not a class.
So, instead of a syllabus we have a research schedule.
The research schedule is editable at any time by anybody involved in the project.

All edits are (almost) instantly reported at our Netvibes research hub via RSS.

The hub also includes a Yahoo Pipe combining the feeds from each of the 15 students’ blogs.
There is a second Yahoo Pipe that combines all the comment feeds from those blogs as well.

To the right, we have a feed from our Diigo group, which we use to share links and notes on the web.

The course is entirely purpose-driven, so it does not have much of the traditional structure typically provided by a syllabus, but it is (loosely) structured.

The basic format is this:

• First 3 weeks: exploration stage
• Second 3 weeks: guided introduction to the field
• Next 4 weeks: self-guided research
• Due at 11th week: Research paper (followed by collaboration exercises)
• Final (16th week): Share with world (video, website, etc.)

Students keep a blog throughout, and do most of their “assignments” as blog posts.

The exploration stage begins with the “94 Articles” activity, allowing us to cover a good chunk of the literature in our research area.
During the exploration stage, students are also making video “trailers” which are ultimately all put together into one single “course trailer”

This little smartpen from livescribe just might revolutionize my note-taking in seminars, discussions, and ethnographic interviews.  If you have never seen it before, check out some of the demos on YouTube.  In short, it records audio as you write and links what you are writing to the audio (by recording what you write through a small infrared camera near the tip of the pen).  When you are done recording you can actually tap the pen anywhere on your page and the pen will play the audio that was recorded at the time you were making that specific pen stroke.  Students are already sharing lecture notes in the community section of livescribe.com.  As recording devices become increasingly embedded into everyday objects the days of protecting lectures from being recorded seem numbered.

Embedded below is my first use of the pen in my Digital Ethnography class.  This was Day One of midterm research updates by my research assistants (”students”).  As you can see, you can click anywhere in the notes to hear what was being said at the moment I was writing.

I feel like this is one of those “Rear View Mirror” moments in which a new technology comes into our lives with enormous potential and we just don’t know what to do with it yet.  We think of it in terms of what we know (pen and paper) and fail to recognize the potential.  It is impressive as it is, but I’m especially excited to see what happens as they become more popular and people start building new applications and new ways to use them.

After the 94 articles activity I reported about here 2 weeks ago, my research team (”students”) began crafting their research proposals.  These were then aggregated into one collaborative proposal showing how each project is related to the others.  In the meantime, they have also been learning the language of video; gathering clips, pictures, and techniques for demonstrating their proposals in compelling ways.  Most of them had never edited video before, and yet here we are just 4 weeks into the semester and they have already mastered the basics and created some interesting work.  The video below is simply some of the best of their 16 “trailers” mashed together to give you a glimpse into the project we hope to create throughout the rest of this semester.  We call the project: “The Fight for Significance in the Age of the Microcelebrity: Anonymity, Anonymous, Smart Mobs, Mad Mobs, Bot Mobs and the Great American Poets”

All the students are actively blogging about their projects.  You are welcome to follow along at our research hub.

My student-researchers and I tried something a little different to kick off our semester.  Instead of the standard syllabus that requires everybody to read a few articles to discuss, we decided instead to organize ourselves into a Smart Mob that would try to read a good hunk of the literature on a single topic in one go.  We chose to explore the implications of anonymity online, which is the centerpiece of our project this year.

Each student was required to find 5 articles, read them, and summarize them; uploading their summaries (or the author’s own abstract) into a ZohoCreator form.  ZohoCreator is a free service that allows you to create database input forms.

As the students entered their summaries, they were made instantly available to the other students as an online database.  One member of the research team, Kevin Champion, then created a page that took all of the data from the database and formatted it into this very slick and readable presentation:

All summaries were due 36 hours before the next class period, leaving those final 36 hours for all students to read all the summaries posted by their fellow team-members.

By the time of our next class, all 16 students had read 5 articles and been exposed to the main ideas of 94 articles.  This created an amazing foundation for deep conversation.  I think all of us were literally on the edge of our seats, finding connections and debates across the literature at a level I have *never* experienced in an undergraduate setting.  I count it as a huge success, and I would highly recommend it to any other faculty out there looking to spark an engaging conversation with your students.