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Video: Your Day in iPad Apps
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Rainbow Looms and Digital Footprints
Slate ran an intriguing article today in which a young professional dives into the kid-addicted world of Rainbow Loom, the set of pegs onto which small, colorful rubber bands are attached until a woven bracelet emerges. Katy Waldman, in “Rainbow Loon: What happens when a 26-year-old woman tries out the biggest tween fad of the year?“, writes about her weeklong experiment.
Along the way, she quotes lots of other folks who talk about the calming powers of repetitive crafting, the constructivist nature, and more (the article is worth reading if only to jump onto these links and see where they take you).
Then she discovers that Rainbow Loom is more than just rubber bands and plastic pegs. It’s a community. She writes:
[O]nce you complete your first Rainbow Loom bracelet, you expect some kind of celestial trumpeting to welcome you to the world of tween artisans … But you must resist the urge to self-congratulate … It is time to put aside the instruction manual and venture into the belly of the whale: Rainbow Loom’s YouTube community.
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In an article for Forbes, writer (and father) Jordan Shapiro argues that Rainbow Loom teaches kids to “mediate effectively between virtual and material realities.” That’s because, in order to execute the more complex designs, you need to consult the toy’s Internet oracles—tweens who have posted detailed “how-to” videos online. My personal favorites are “Ashley Steph” and “Parker’s Videos,” but the options are as staggering as the demand is real …
The way the toy incorporates digital learning feels, to me, weirdly reminiscent of my adult life: I often use the Web to look up things like “how to open wine without a bottle opener” or “how to fold a hospital corner.” So I guess Rainbow Loom is “preparing” kids for that. But back to Ashley Steph. In the video I watched, one of the two girls behind the account is actually a terrific tour guide through the pied Rainbow Loom safari (except for occasionally when she needs to sloooow down.) She showed me how to select my colors, carry off my stitches, and fasten the diminutive c-clips that connected the two ends of my fishtail bracelet. Every so often a parent or sibling interrupted her while the iPhone camera rolled and she gave a polite answer before returning to the tutorial. Not once do viewers see Ashley Steph’s face—only her hands holding the loom or twirling the hook across the stretchy bands. Her videos aren’t vanity projects but acts of service. Soaking it in, I was impressed. Have kids always been so generous with their time and expertise, especially when it came to enlightening perfect strangers?
The sense of an online community flowering around Rainbow Loom gave me a glimmer of what we less-connected generations missed out on as kids. The Web itself is a pattern of interlaced users, and crafting with these semianonymous tweens made me feel a part of its warp and weft. The idea of digital literacy is really one of communication and collaboration—how do we train young people to use the information washing over them every time they go online? How do we teach them to work together in virtual space and in, you know, actual rooms? Maybe we should start by buying them all Rainbow Looms. (Just kidding, they all have them already.)
This idea of Rainbow Loom as gateway to digital literacy intrigues me. But look at how it naturally teaches the concept of digital citizenship. In the video series she describes, viewers see hands (no identifiable faces) and first (but not last) names. Kids are using search strategies not for school but for personal learning, making it easier for them to bring prior knowledge to the table and evaluate strong versus weaker resources. (Your project either turns out or it doesn’t; you feel empowered or confused or somewhere in-between, both of which are powerful personal markers for credibility for young minds.)
There’s also another important piece here: videos as service, not as self-promotion, another element I think we’ve under-discussed as educators interested in youth profiles online.
Her idea in the last paragraph, in which she and the Forbes columnist noodle about Rainbow Loom bridging online and offline communities is powerful, too — it’s much of what I’m discovering in this year’s Michigan Makers sites. Oftentimes, our kids are choosing face-to-face over virtual activities, and tactile over digital ones. They aren’t yearning for digital-for-digital’s-sake. (As a funded iSchool project, I sometimes get nervous when kids basically say, “Yeah, yeah, enough about 3D modeling software. Are you gonna let us SEW this week?”) Part of the magic of maker activities is that they can bridge between online and offline — they aren’t either/or. Tutorials, blogs, and YouTube videos represent online knowledge acquisition, but the loop (no pun intended) isn’t completed until you create something physical.
And physical creation just feels good — I’m more and more convinced that as humans, we need to make stuff with our hands. Maybe that’s why it feels good for us to clean out a closet or wash dishes by hand or make dinner from scratch or sew on our own button or solder our own broken circuit or weave a bunch of silicone rubber bands.
(PS – Despite their popularity, it must be said that Rainbow Loom plastic pegs and silicone bands are not very environmentally friendly. But it’s nice to see a Michigan entrepreneur flourish.)
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Reflections on North Quad MakerFest
Grad school is tough work when you’re a student, but it’s no cake walk for faculty or staff, either. So Saturday’s North Quad MakerFest, in which we all took a few hours out from exam study days, was powerful.
Under Sofia and Stephen’s leadership, volunteers, students, professors and their kids, and even family members snowed in after December’s graduation dropped in to weave, drop spindle, 3D model, make an Arduino blink, make LEGO towers, play with Squishy Circuits, assemble Snap Circuits, make Little Bits do little bitty things, 3D print, knit, crochet, or decorate cookies. (Yeah, we had a whole section of the MakerFest designed for your inner child so we could use a lot of our Michigan Makers inventory.)
It was a much-needed time for me to spend time just being with one another, for our hands to be busy, for us to chat, and for us to just concentrate on process and not product. And whether you gravitated toward a new creation tool or a centuries-old one, there was something for everyone. We didn’t see anyone come in, look around, and leave without seeing something that appealed to them.
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This idea of makerspace as inclusive — not tied to any one technology, tool set, or modality — is more and more important to me. I don’t want to privilege one group over another. I’ve been known to say, in other projects, “Everybody in, nobody out, unless you’re mean,” but I hadn’t really drawn the connection between that philosophy in another context and what I want the makerspaces I work in to be like until last week.
Oh, and if you’re wondering what drop spindles are and do, here’s a look (I didn’t really understand until I saw them in action, either!).
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The Noun Project: Now With PNG Download!
I’ve been a fan of The Noun Project since Emily introduced me to it a few years ago. We even included it in this book of ours. It provides a huge stock of black-and-white icons that you can download for free (with attribution) or for a small per-item or monthly fee (if you want to leave off the attribution).
Until now, the graphics were available only in .svg format. This was great if you wanted to resize or edit the icons in Adobe Illustrator or Gimp, but less awesome if you just wanted a quick image to pop into a slide deck as is, which is usually what K-12 students/I want to do.
On Wednesday, The Noun Project announced that the icons are also available for download in .png format, too. That means you can easily slip them into web pages and documents, either free with attribution or, if you don’t want attribution cluttering your design, at a small fee.
That makes me …
“Dancer” by James Keunig at TheNounProject.com. Public Domain.
PS – You can easily import The Noun Project’s .png files into Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. However, when I tried to download The Noun Project images and import them directly into WordPress, I found that WordPress either reversed the colors (making the black parts white and the white parts a blackish set of horizontal stripes) or only showed a partial image.
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If you run into the same problem and need a workaround, try downloading the icon as .png and pasting it into PowerPoint first. (Added bonus: Once you have an image imported into a PowerPoint slide, you can easily change its color by going to Format Picture > Recolor.)
Then using File > Save As and select .png or .gif from the dropdown menu of file choices. The “Saved As” file will import properly.
(Don’t save an icon from The Noun Project as a .jpeg, as .jpegs try to smooth out the transitions between colors, and your graphic could end up looking muddy.)
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Millennials don’t find education sector conducive to innovation
From “Millennials View Education as Least Satisfying Segment for Empowerment, Workplace Collaboration” by T.H.E. Journal’s Dian Schaffhauser comes this summary of a survey of young professionals:
“Millennials,” who make up a quarter of the current workforce, consider educational institutions the least innovative, at least when compared to retail, technology, healthcare and advertising, marketing and PR. This segment of the population, also known as Generation Y, were born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, putting them somewhere in their early 30s and younger.
Where there is innovation, 80 percent of those employed in education point to talented people as the primary source. Where it’s lacking, 57 percent of millennials blame poor management.
… 46 percent…indicated that the school districts, colleges, and universities where they’re employed have outdated collaboration practices. More than half said they believe their employers make it tough for ideas to be shared or taken to the next level …
Those results came out of a recent survey of 600 millennials employed in multiple sectors. The survey project was run by SurveyMonkey and sponsored by IdeaPaint, a company that sells paint to convert smooth surfaces into dry erase surfaces for collaboration purposes …
[Education] scored the lowest (65 percent) in using brainstorm meetings as the primary means to generate “big ideas.”
(NB: Always, always, always look at a survey’s sponsor! A company that sells whiteboard paint is going to have a particular point of view in designing a survey and measuring innovative practices! That being said, yeah, we don’t do a lot of brainstorming in K-12. And when we do, the loudest voices tend to win, which calls into question whether brainstorming is the most effective pathway to meaningful change. But I digress.)
The survey’s authors reported that education’s “highly regimented structure” is hurting its image among younger workers …
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According to the report’s authors, “Empowerment and accomplishment are key attributes millennials look for in a career, and education is currently failing in both of these categories.”
Agree – I see this yearning as well.
As a group, the report stated, “Millennials are a tech savvy bunch that love to text, tweet, and practically do everything from their mobile device.” However, it added, these workers also place a premium on their time and “will opt for the clearest road to completion for their work tasks and sometimes ignore workplace policies or hierarchy.”
Herbert Simon’s idea of “satisficing,” or doing just what’s needed to get done seems apropos here and not limited to millennials.
However, I do find that while my generation and those before it put up with (and were expected to put up with) time-wasting as a cost of doing business, millennials tend to be vocal and upset (or even vocally upset) if their time is not used effectively.
The sentiment is the same: the difference is in whether it is expressed publicly or privately, methinks. (And, of course, I am speaking in verrrrrry broad strokes.)
Read more of T.H.E. Journal‘s summary here and download IdeaPaint’s survey findings here.
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Harvard MARC Record Takes “Realia” to a Whole New Level
Let us pause for a moment to honor the Harvard librarians who created a MARC record for their therapy dog.
Click image to enlarge.
Click image to enlarge. Source.
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Hat tip: Graham Hukill, via UMSI listserv
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NQ MakerFest Today, noon – 4pm!
Happy Study Day, everyone! Take a study break and join us for North Quad MakerFest today in Space 2435 in North Quad on the University of Michigan campus. Click the image below for details!
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Tomorrow is North Quad MakerFest!
Join us in Space 2435 in North Quad (105 S. State Street, between State, Huron, and Washington Streets in Ann Arbor) for this Saturday’s North Quad MakerFest from noon – 4pm!
Click the image below to learn more.
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Are online journalists responsible for fact-checking? And more on “visual press releases”
From Tuesday’s New York Times comes this article on truth, journalism, and online communication. An excerpt:
Truth has never been an essential ingredient of viral content on the Internet … [D]igital news sites are increasingly blurring the line between fact and fiction, and saying that it is all part of doing business in the rough-and-tumble world of online journalism.
Several recent stories rocketing around the web, picking up millions of views, turned out to be fake or embellished: a Twitter tale of a Thanksgiving feud on a plane, later described by the writer as a short story; a child’s letter to Santa that detailed an Amazon.com link in crayon, but was actually written by a grown-up comedian in 2011; and an essay on poverty that prompted $60,000 in donations until it was revealed by its author to be impressionistic rather than strictly factual.
Their creators describe them essentially as online performance art, never intended to be taken as fact. But to the media outlets that published them, they represented the lightning-in-a-bottle brew of emotion and entertainment that attracts readers and brings in lucrative advertising dollars.
When the tales turned out to be phony, the modest hand-wringing that ensued was accompanied by an admission that viral trumps verified — and that little will be done about it as long as the clicks keep coming …
[T]he news organizations that published the recent pieces — Gawker, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Mashable among them — do not see invented viral tales as being completely at odds with the serious new content they publish alongside them…
[E]ditors at these sites acknowledge frankly that there are trade-offs in balancing authenticity with the need to act quickly in a hyperconnected age. “We are dealing with a volume of information that it is impossible to have the strict standards of accuracy that other institutions have,” said John Cook, editor in chief of Gawker…
“The faster metabolism puts people who fact-check at a disadvantage,” said Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post … “If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong” …
But before having any getting viagra in canada why not find out more dosage from the above defined amounts you should consult your physician. All affirmations must be stated in buy viagra the age old Rig Veda bring to light the exercise of natural cures from healing herbs since thousands of years. The viagra on line pharma-bi.com one which is probably the most crucial aspects of our lives. Go for a buy cialis tablet http://pharma-bi.com/2009/07/ daily morning walk. [Joshua] Benton of the Nieman [Journalism] Lab [at Harvard] [said.]“This is journalism as an act of pointing — ‘Look over here, this is interesting,’ ” he said. He says uncertainty about a story’s veracity is unlikely, in most cases, to keep an editor from posting it. “I think BuzzFeed is probably a little bummed they are being called out, but they are not going to start asking for three sources,” he said.
You can find the entire article, “If a Story is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating,” by Ravi Somaiya and Leslie Kaufman, here.
In a similar — albeit parallel — vein, the New York Times ran an editorial today by Associated Press director of photography Santiago Lyon, a follow-up to the article I posted a few days ago:
The official photographs the White House hands out are but visual news releases. Taken by government employees (mostly former photojournalists), they are well composed, compelling and even intimate glimpses of presidential life. They also show the president in the best possible light, as you’d expect from an administration highly conscious of the power of the image at a time of instant sharing of photos and videos.
By no stretch of the imagination are these images journalism. Rather, they propagate an idealized portrayal of events on Pennsylvania Avenue.
If you take this practice to its logical conclusion, why have news conferences? Why give reporters any access to the White House? It would be easier to just have a daily statement from the president (like his recorded weekly video address) and call it a day. Repressive governments do this all the time…
Until the White House revisits its draconian restrictions on photojournalists’ access to the president, information-savvy citizens, too, would be wise to treat those handout photos for what they are: propaganda.
Lyon’s editorial includes a link to a Washington Post blog post positing that Obama posed for “selfies” with the Danish and British prime ministers at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Which recalls the Slate article I pointed to a few days ago positing that selfies are good for self-esteem. Have at it, pundits.
Which sources do you trust as infallible these days? Why? How do we know something is true? Are there degrees of truth?
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How I Spent My Saturday Afternoon
Click to enlarge image …
Flyer for our makerspace talk at the Chicago Public Library’s Oriole Park Branch, December 7, 2013
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Slide deck here.
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