Preparing for NWP

Valorie Stokes at Prairie Lands Writing Project and I are in the process of planning together for an NWP workshop about designing summer tech camps for youth. It's already been valuable for me just to see the different ways camps can be run--PLWP has been holding month-long camps for several years now. Valorie and I have had success sharing documents and writing together with Google docs, and I'm wondering if we might simply add to it the resources we've found valuable and open it up as a resource site. The other option would be to create a resource wiki. I think both would allow others to contribute, which is what we're after--a resource page about designing tech camps that can grow from other sites who're leading youth tech programs.

Valorie has used digital storytelling in her camps, and I stumbled today on Jason Ohler's webpage through a de.lic.ious "digital storytelling" search. The 25 questions to ask about technology handout might stir some thinking about the questions we ask when considering the benefits of different technologies in our classrooms.

I'm thinking about asking some of the social context questions during our digital video workshops this week with Paige's high school students.

Movie Maker Projects

Student "poster projects" created to brainstorm and share film making ideas



If you're interested in using Movie Maker (or iMovie for that matter) in your classroom, check out the beginnings of a project that Paige Cole is doing with her high school students. They're creating short films about important issues in their lives--pregnancy, relationships, stresses of college entrance exams, displacement from Hurricane Katrina. Paige and I are trying to share resources we've found or created about both Movie Maker and using digital video as a learning tool through Red Clay Writing Project's tech team wiki. We'd welcome any new resources.

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.