DUSTY, Digital Storytelling for You(th)

I’d like to continue an exciting conversation started in West Oakland with Michael James, co-founder of D.U.S.T.Y., Digital Underground Storytelling for You(th). He, Glynda Hull and others have been working with youth in W. Oakland for several years, namely through an after-school/summer program housed in a beautiful Victorian home in West Oakland.

One of the aims of the program, as I see it, is to provide youth with opportunities to engage in various digital literacy practices and multimedia production (i.e., digital DJ-ing, digital storytelling). Creative self-expression through digital tools is often compelling, both for youth and adults, and I’d argue these experiences carry over into our personal and academic lives.


I hope with this post to list some of the issues Michael and I talked about (including sustainability) that linger for these types of youth programs. Possibly the greatest impetus for this post is to begin looking for the overlaps between the work at DUSTY (and other programs—Dave Egger’s 826NYC for youth in Brooklyn) and the work many local writing project sites are beginning for youth (i.e., summer tech/literacy camps). My hope is that we can celebrate the excitement in this work and learn from any logistical and/or political/theoretical questions that arise.

A quick review of my notes from my conversation with Michael (mostly questions):

1. How can writing projects with youth tech camps and other youth tech/writing programs like DUSTY collaborate and/or learn from each other?

2. How can writing projects and DUSTY design programs with sustainability? What funding issues need to be addressed? What is the potential for teacher/preservice teacher professional development involving technology and literacy?

3. How can we help foster skills/practices that are “marketable” for youth? In other words, how can we acknowledge various economic/power structures youth face as they navigate through (and exit) different stages of their educational lives? How does/should our work interact with public school curriculums?

I’m butchering these questions, but I invite any suggestions for their revision and more importantly any dialogue about how we think through them. Here’s a modest (and redundant) start. Red Cedar Writing Project is sharing their plans online for a youth tech workshop for anyone interested to see. Thanks RCWP.

Web 2.0

Like many, I’m thinking much about the Web 2.0 buzz and it’s relevance for education. I’ve been a little overwhelmed since my return from NWP’s Tech Matters institute in Chico, both by a desire to become proficient with some of these new tools (i.e., blogs, RSS feeds) and by some of the big ideas behind online “learning networks,” many that challenge the traditional academic hierarchies I'm navigating through. About the former, I’ve been almost paralyzed by the thought that our tech team is scheming a plan to introduce/explore Web2.0 with any interested teachers in our local writing project area. Right now I can hardly make it through a morning without getting lost in the Edublogosphere or trying to explore what some of these online apps can do. There’s just a tremendous amount of stuff going on out there, and I’m dogpaddling. Thankfully, my paralysis was loosened somewhat by a recent Dave Warlick blog about Web 2.0

My goal is not to assure that all of the teachers in my audiences know what a blog is, what RSS is, how to create a wiki, or even publish a podcast. Hell, that’s all going to change anyway. My goal is to convince educators and education stakeholders to understand that these incremental advances in technology have affected our information experience. It has become far more participatory, reader controlled, and it conducts human interactions in ways that were never possible before — and it is having profound affects on many aspects of our culture.

Funny, I sat down to write about D.U.S.T.Y. and Tech Matters and never made it there.

A Pedagogy of Blogging

Seems appropriate that a first blog post should be about the reasons I'm choosing to blog in the first place.

Until I read sections from Will Richardson's Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroooms, I thought of blogs more a place for personal (and narcissistic?) publication than a tool for learning. What can a blog do that a content management system like WebCT or Blackboard can't? We've been using WebCT for 2 years in our writing project (Red Clay Writing Project) to upload/download documents, create discussion boards, among other useful classroom applications. What I'm just now recognizing is how contained that information is, how inaccessible it is for others outside of our project (i.e., other writing project sites). This dawned on me when we shared our WebCT structure (reading lists, agendas, etc.) with others in our GA writing projects state network. It literally took someone showing someone at an annual meeting for that information to move beyond its original site.

Blogs, on the other hand, seem ready to open up access to that information, and technologies like RSS feeds (Real Simple Syndication) and Aggregators (i.e., Bloglines) are examples of ways teachers and students can collect (and subscribe to) specific content/webpages relevant to their interests. Yeah, I’m just now getting that.

A simple example: Red Clay is currently brainstorming for its next youth writing camp. We recently viewed Red Cedar Writing Project’s plans for their youth tech camp on one of their wikis, plans that would likely remain hidden behind firewalls and passwords in a content management structure like WebCT.

A question that still lingers for me concerns copyright issues, especially for posting published academic readings. I appreciated Brian Lamb’s article Dr. Mashup: or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix, which touches on copyright issues (notably the practice of designating Creative Commons licensing) and raises good questions about issues in education involving creativity and intellectual property.