Thanx to Danielle, Ben, and Aliya.

Took a little tinkering but, finally, I think, got the bugs figured out.

Translation, fewer text attachments, more (coherent) posts.

And considerably less frustration.

Thanx gals

(and guy).

I created a little smorgasboard of my notes from one-on-one calls, the PSO in January, the MA area meeting last week, and the Digital Media group call a couple weeks ago to produce the long awaited Digital Media Group Updates! Wooohoo! [I've taken the liberty to bold the most interesting tidbits.]

•  AJ McGuire (HOME Inc.) - working with school as part of Research Action Change Class, on issues of global warming and educational inequality, and created videos; working on implementing the MOSAIC media literacy curriculum and incorporating video production
• Colleen Kelly (Project: Think Different)- youth action summit on MLK Jr. day with media watch team; managing interns; implementing a media literacy program at Edwards Middle School two days a week
• Dan Chen (Pui Tak Center) - tasked to develop digital media program for youth, incorporating his photography and graphic design skills; helping the org by developing template for the annual report and updating the website; writing grants for new cameras and looking for volunteers/mentors
• Derek Maxwell (Phillips Community Television) - *new* - doing well so far, although PCTV is not really a cable access station...
• Elisha Durrant (The Inland Northwest Community Access Network) - *new* - youth media and community outreach for TINCAN;
• Jessica McCoy (Center for Digital Storytelling) - getting into nitty gritty of collecting content and doing phone interviews for the StoreForChange.net portal for community digital storytellers; also working on Youth Uprising project to develop curriculum for collecting digital content for Oakland Tribune; updating CDS cookbook with more on post-production of digital stories and managing some interns to take over some of the post-production tasks on CDS workshops
• Julie Bohnlein (Boston Community Access and Programming Foundation, Inc.) - *new* -  working at Roxbury studios primarily of BNN to create youth show/channel; has a nice cubicle and a phone; floating between Roxbuy and downtown studios; needs foodstamp letter; connect with Lauren and Richard
• Kevin Palmer (HOME Inc.) - just received grant to create a community radio station at a school and writing more grants for other media labs at other local high schools; partnering with Julie at BNN to create Boston youth media program/show
• Lauren Bratslavsky (Media Bridges, Cincinnati, Inc) - attended Media Reform conference in Memphis; started Saturday youth media lab… intro curriculum to use Photobooth and working on handouts tutorials for iMovie; developing Youth Media Block (new name on the channel); working with charter school's wed elective day to do PSA workshop and planning a summer program; has an intern from the university
• Leena Silverman (YMCA of Greater Boston) - *new* - establishing more technology programs at Eggleston Sq YMCA through Cyber Y lab; setting up new policies/procedures and summer youth program; implementing Kinetic City
• Mike Matthews (The Media Aid Center) - *new* - working with Ramon on developing tv programs and focusing on distribution
• Naomi Jimenez (Marcus A. Foster Educational Institute/OTXWest) - *new* - working with new multimedia center and updating digital storytelling curriculum for summer institute; working on Sat to attend/ghost classes at OTX; connected with ol CTC VISTA (now staff) Jeff Benton
• Ramon Myers (The Media Aid Center) - *new* - started out as a volunteer but now is a VISTA working to develop TV programs and marketing in TV studio embedded in a high school; working on outreach into the community
• Richard  Anderson (Grand Rapids Community Media Center) - working on some video projects; working a little on the audio stuff but the financial status of the station/center; hosted January open house to do community outreach; doing some interview with Catalyst Radio program;
• Shaneka Smith (Westside Youth Technical Entrepreneur Center) - continuing work on entreprenuerial projects with youth like t-shirt buisness and commercials; doing more music mixing, album covers, & music videos; also working on awareness videos with Girls program on the topic of abusive relationships
• Tony O'Rourke (Boys & Girls Clubs of the East Valley, AZ) - sat down with supervisor and successfully talked about expectations; started doing outreach with the community with kids to come to Club, targeted Young Champions (young athletes); reorganized the computer lab over the holidays and writing grants to get new equipment
• Will Quinones (Reel Works Teen Filmmaking) - went to Sundance Festival and presented as part of the Adobe Youth Vision, paired with filmmaker and did a daily video blog; doing outreach for ReelWorks through MySpace and ListenUP!
• Sharon Smack (Seventh Day Baptist Community Development Education and Service Outreach Ministry) - switched from Community Organizing group in January; created commercials for the youth service projects and will also be doing some radio broadcasting.

[Yes, I'm missing a few folks...don't worry...I'm on the case!] 

Also on the call, we discussed Leena's plight to explain VISTA to the YMCA staff and heard many suggestions from folks on how they explain it to others (check out Leena's handy one pager on her blog). 

Next call, March 2nd 2pm EST...BYO Curriculum (more details next week!). 

Its Like Self-Esteem, Just More Invisible Trying to get into some of that Capacity Building stuff.  Working on some teacher tutorials on how to use things like the internet and word processing and a mouse.  Trying to figure out how to deceive the kids into thinking I have magic powers.  Lusting pretty hard for Apple Remote Desktop.  Anyone know any freeware alternatives to that?Also, is anyone in good with the Information Technology or Instructional Technology or Nerd Patrol or whatever they call it at Boston Public Schools?  I've found myself in the curious position of being the de facto computer lab guy at the school I work with and I just want to make sure Im not  a: screwing anything up b: making more work for myself c: overstepping my authority  That last part has been somewhat amorphous.  It seems that I get granted authority over things by taking responsibility for them.  It seems there is no higher power than making things up as I go along.  Excelsior, etc.

I think that I have just gotten over my first hump in introducing myself and what my role is in the organization, now it is time for action.

Here at the Cyber Y computer lab we just hired an intern to help maintain the computers and printers and also help with children when programs are running.

We are trying to set up a successful "open access" time. We want to find good ways to advertise to the community that we have open access and also we are looking for good surveys to give to the community to understand what they need and want out of the open access time. Because we would like to set up computer literacy classes for grown-ups and or seniors citizens.

So, for the little kiddies after school i am working on implementing a program called Kinetic City. This children's computer program is an entertaining way to learn standards-based science. It is the ideal combination of technology and hands-on collaboration. Basically, kids learn reading, writing, and basic computer skills along with a little science thrown in. First though, i need to learn the curriculums and train the existing staff at the YMCA to promote capacity building. Then i will have groups of kids that will go through the program through out the year.

M y next big goal is to set up a youth media program during spring and summer for teens. Got lots of ideas. I'm thinking media literacy and media production for girl teens.

When people ask me (as they inevitably do when they find out I'm a full time volunteer) why I do VISTA, I often cite the ways it connects me to groups and people that I could have never imagined I could meet doing a regular job. In fact, my work this year doing digital storytelling facilitation and other related projects for MassIMPACT came out of meeting Natasha Friedus (of Creative Narrations) at UMass Boston and getting myself invited to her second Spreading the Stories train-the-trainer workshop last year. And so it was how I ended up at the MIT Museum this past week, working with able fellow facilitator Lisa Dush of Story Builders, UMass Amherst, and MIT in the fall. We were asked by Cesar McDowell of MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice to help out with the new Museum Without Walls project.

Museum Without Walls (MWOW) is an interesting approach to bringing the museum experience out of the museum, approaching the entire MIT campus like a potential historical and personal tour and reflection space. Using adapted video players with WIFI access and GPS, the project aspires to have visitors walk the campus and access a rich library of video and still content based on their physical location by 2011. Since it's MIT, the gadgets will certainly be innovative and the stories unique, but the interdisciplinary idea of museum content that could change as users add and walk around with it piqued my personal interest in placed based storytelling.

Our small digital storytelling workshop was billed not only as a pilot to create MIT place based stories, but as a Independent Activities Period (IAP) offering. (I learned later through one of the stories that this is a way for MIT students and staff to explore small subject explorations in the time between fall and spring semesters.) We set up a workspace in a long exhibit space, so that our story circle and laptop workspaces were surrounded by antique single lensed microscopes. In fact, this full immersion in the to Museum became a quiet theme to the week, where we were invited into the archives to find images and I passed by Harold Edgerton photos and holographs on my way to the bathroom.

Our host Otto Loggers gathered a group of graduate students from the HASTS (History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology & Society), Urban Planning, and Biology programs, sprinkled in with a staff from the Alumni office. In the beginning, Lisa and I were curious on how we could balance the desire to include historical references and facts with authentic narratives usually characterized in digital stories. The fear is always that participants will lean toward professional, objective tales and away from more personal stories, but this group also had the challenge of being the pilot stories in the MWOW project. We decided to go with the flow and see where the participants' stories and group's dynamics took us.

I'm glad to report that the group came together well, still bringing a myriad of tones, purposes, and expressions. While one PhD student mused why MIT isn't more focused on environmental sustainability, another detailed her participation on huge, puzzle riddled annual Mystery Hunt. Another student candidly discussed her emotions around being an Iranian student at MIT and shared a table with fellow HAST student who hysterically chronicled her initial days of getting hopelessly lost in the maze of MIT's buildings. One story even connected MIT to Lawrence and Lowell through past funders and current initiatives. Even the stories about alumni and IAP featured personal touches such as famous crimson red jacket and a "borrowed" sign warning of laser beams. (As soon at the stories come out of post-production and the MWOW folks figure out next steps of getting the pieces online, I'll include a link here.)

The usual stress of learning a new form of expression coupled with new technologies was a bit increased when we learned that most of the participants were Mac folks and we were confined to the Windows laptops we were able to procure. But I always make the argument that the stories can be made with even the most rudimentary tools and keeping it simple never hurts. So even when Windows Movie Maker crashed and the participants started to perfect the Day 3 hunch over their machines, I told them to be patient, stretch and take breaks, and save often (Ctrl S is your friend). In three days, they not only made seven 3-5 minutes long digital stories, Lisa introduced the group to audio editing in Audacity and we managed to scan quite a few photos and artifacts for both the stories and the Museum's digital archives as well.

In a stroke of luck, we invited the Museum staff that had opened the doors for us or researched our topics in the archives to come see the finished pieces. I say this was lucky because they were such a gracious and appreciative audience - especially friend Adam Holt who's excited about the possibilities of this project to combine digital storytelling and mapping. These staff had seen us around the last three days, but they had no idea that we were working on such "gems" of MIT's history funneled through personal experience. After a frazzled afternoon of harried video editing, these compliments soothed our storytellers and got them thinking about how they could take digital storytelling back to their departments and projects as the next semester begins this week.

This workshop was a good break for me from working with youth or community organizers, strictly because the mind sets seemed so different. MIT students seem strangely focused on their individual studies and programs yet still connected with so many aspects of the world and the environment. By throwing a personal narrative process into this mix, Lisa and I created a space that yielded new challenges and benefits for me as a facilitator. The juxtaposition of the microscopic and global mind sets created a compelling challenge as we revised the stories based on the perceived audience and intended point of view. And the idea that personal reflection should be tempered with historical and archival facts and context both limited and expanded the impact of each story differently.

The next step is determining how I can bring this new both PLACE and HISTORICAL mind set into the next set of train-the-trainer workshops I'm trying to do this spring with housing developments and community organizations in Boston and Springfield.

[Also blogged at VerdeSmoke.com]

I've been playing around with tag and word clouds lately. Clouds are basically interesting (and esthetically appealing, in my opinion) ways to visualize the prevalence of words. Words that are more prevalent show up larger/darker than more rare ones. Oftentimes you will see Tag Clouds which show how many posts there are in certain categories (we have one on the CTC VISTA Digest).

Below is a word cloud made up of all the posts on CTCVISTA.org. This isn't the categories, but the actual posts themselves. It was created by a very nifty website call TagCrowd.com.

An interesting side note is that, excluding common words (and, like, the, pronouns, etc.), we have a lexicon of 7,369 unique words on the website.

<!--
begin tag cloud : generated by TagCrowd.com
Feel free to modify as long as you keep this notice.

This code and its rendered image are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/

For commercial licensing, contact Daniel Steinbock, daniel@steinbock.org
-->

<!-- end tag cloud : generated by TagCrowd.com : please keep this line -->

Comment from AJ McGuire on March 9, 2007 - 3:56pm

Its ON.

 

-AJ

One of my more recent projects has been re-working the network map for the local community wireless network. My efforts thus far can be found at http://map2.cuwireless.net. Credit for the CSS and the text accompanying the map goes to Ross. This is just the first part. The next stage is to add an admin/management interface.

The map is powered by PHP and the Google Maps API (which uses javascript). The Google Maps API is incredibly easy to use and has lots of features.

For anyway who is interested, this little project will be distilled into an open-source package once it is complete (should be sometime this month).

Freecycle:  (Give or Get):  - http://www.freecycle.org/ 

In our conference call I agreed to provide information about what commercial database my organization decided to go with. Although, I'm not sure exactly who asked for it. So whoever you are...here it is.

Social Solutions is the name of the company. They specialize in social service organizations big and small. They have clients that are 5 employees and hundreds, from Girl Scouts of America to Computer CORE (5 employees). The database software is called ETO (Efforts to Outcomes) and is built around the idea of tracking successes and clients.

Shoot me an email if you have any other questions. ceseifert@gmail.com

Later!

carls

Comment from Erin Taylor on February 8, 2007 - 3:04pm

Carl,

Thanks for the info. I'm scouting out a lot of options, and this certainly helps. Hope all is well in DC -- looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference!