So much happening, amazing momentum and passionate partners. That’s the 10,000 foot view (or 3,048 meters, if you prefer) of what we’re working on every day.
In the spirit of openness, and because two of us can only move this train so fast, we’d love your input on the following:
HistoryPin – as a network, Hive NYC is excited to work with this seriously amazing tool. Chime in on this etherpad with ideas for what we can and should be building. Stay tuned for our Hive Innovation Heat Map and so much more to come.
Modular webmaking – if you know of any prototypes or curriculum for teaching people how to make things on the web, please share them on this growing list of resources.
1st Amendment Hack Jam (working title) – we’re planning an exciting event with the American Constitution Society in May, to help youth explore their unique perspectives on freedom of speech. Exercise your right to say what’s on your mind (or just help us come up with a better name for the event) here.
Teen Tech Week – Geek Out @ your library March 4-10. Have something fun planned? Please let us know about it comments so we can include in an upcoming blog post. (Or Tweet us @hivelearningnyc)
DML – if you’ll be at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco next week, visit us as the Mozilla DML Science Fair on Thursday, March 1 at 6pm. And join our session on Friday, March 2 at 9am - Hive Learning Networks: An Infrastructure for Connected Learning. AND check out Chris Lawrence’s Ignite talk on Saturday, March 3, “Throw a Learning Party!”
Today, Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Mark Surman blogged about the Hive Toronto Youth Hack Jam which took place last weekend. They had 50+ youth in attendance, along with their parents and some volunteers, and proved the demand for creating a local community dedicated to raising a generation of web makers is alive and strong in Toronto.
Photo by Jon Lim - see more at http://bit.ly/wlq4dh
We highly recommend you subscribe to Mark’s blog, Commonspace, if you haven’t already (see other Mozilla blogs you should be reading here. It offers great insight into what’s churning not-so-behind-the-scenes at Mozilla in regards to learning.
Our thinking continues to evolve, as we and our colleagues pursue opportunities to help us explore and test what makes web makers, what the necessary skills are for developing digital literacy, and how we grow a global community of those who share our ethos. In addition to building our own learning tools like Hackasaurus and PopcornMaker, we’re working harder to highlight, build and strengthen relationships with the people and existing projects that contribute to richer learning experiences for all.
We’re well on our way as Mark points out:
“Hive NYC is already a model of how diverse organizations and technologies snap together into a learning experience bigger and more exciting that anything that a single org could do. The interesting part is that we’ve now done this in three new cities: London; Tokyo; Toronto. And, in each, we’re finding the same willingness to play beyond turf and build a new way of teaching using the ethos and technology of the web.”
But of course we can do more. If you have recommendations for folks we should be speaking with or tools we should be checking out, please let us know!
In the ongoing spirit of sharing my/our thinking around issues, ideas, challenges and opportunities swirling around Hive, I am sharing what Lainie and I recently brainstormed around the question that Mozilla has challenged us to answer: “What are you building?”
Mozilla Foundation projects and staff are very prolific, engaging and insightful bloggers and one of our goals with Explore Create Share is to both plug into these conversations and bridge those conversations to those within Hive and our activated community. We recently collected all the “MoFo” blogs and created a page. I urge you to read these when you have time (I know, I know…what time?)
Please hack away at our ideas. And revisit our draft 2012 goals. Would love to have feedback and then take another pass at this.
What Hive is building:
Community
better engaging the community of professionals and youth that comprise our membership
activating and growing communities of NYC of parents, educators and others interested in our work
connecting thought leaders and practitioners – how can we serve as a connection with others doing similar work outside of, within and beyond NYC?
connecting with communities in other cities (US and globally) towards building Hives through similar and collaborative processes – meta-level organizers
Learning Lab
collaborative curriculum/software/tools/resources that demonstrate/model/produce learning programs and environments that benefit the learning landscapes and establish Hive as valuable incubation space
digital distribution infrastructures that spread the curriculum/software/tools
funding streams that prime the pump to overtly produce projects that help us become a lab in aggregate
a cadre of engineers, designers, coders, technologists, artists, scientists, media producers and other professionals interested in building/learning and iterating with Hive
taking a bird’s eye view – we’ll look for emergent themes, patterns and connections amongst the work that goes on in Hive NYC and the larger learning landscape – from this vantage point, we’ll work to become a matchmaker to connect the right people/orgs to resources and collaborative opportunities
seeing when these labs mature or produce worthwhile curriculum and tools, and help to fast-track them towards iteration, prototyping and scalability
I wanted to loop you into a public and thoughtful discussion that we are engaged in with our Mozilla Foundation colleagues about what are essential digital literacies and how we might empower/build/grow webmakers from the youth we serve. Michelle Levesque is tasked with, amongst other things, identifying key web literacy skills that help scaffold our work. In a recent blog post (well not so recent, Michelle is prolific and you should be reading her blog) she described what she is working on and I couldn’t help but see how Hive could help her in the/our work. I emailed her some thoughts, but then also said, “Why not think aloud in public with the Hive folks?” So here is my stab of responding to her task list on where we coud peer-assist. Would love to hear your thoughts about how Hive NYC can contribute.
Michelle’s tasks in bold
My responses are in plain text
Finalize and test the first set of web literacy skills
We would be happy to be a test bed for these when they are in various stages of ready. We could test these in venues with high-skills youth at places like MOUSE, The Institute of Play/Quest to Learn Schools, and Global Kids and more general youth with various skill levels at places like the YMCA, NYC/Brooklyn/Queens Public Library Systems and New York Hall of Science. Is there a way to make this into a fun, digital “test your Web skills” quiz format like you might have taken in magazines? I just took a cool one in HGTV Magazine (don’t laugh) about knowing your “Home Ownership Score” that was not didactic and taught me a good amount as I acquired new knowledge and skills. This could be a cool way to blast out to youth/professionals in Hive and capture some data in the process. Just a brainstorm.
Help our existing offerings integrate those skills
I am keen on helping to get these skills integrated into the projects that the Hive Digital Media Learning Fund at the NY Community Trust funds. These projects run the gamut from media production and digital art curation to social justice campaigns using social media. I would love to better embed web literacy skills in all of these without altering the essential activities of the projects.
Identify where our offerings fall short in skills we believe people should learn
I think we could help, but no real ideas other then by having the projects Hive members do be studied.
Hive community help me out here!
Develop scaffolding/activation strategy for non-MoFo instructors
This I think the educators/professionals at Hive NYC orgs could be extremely valuable in prototyping, writing and helping think through what these training wheels might be. The Hive education communities are great at low-risk opportunities to test things out and get feedback with. They are more dialed into web literacy theory and practice but still on the front lines about implementing programs and working with youth. They also have the delivery mechanisms to do programming on a faster scale then most institutions, certainly schools.
Develop a community for non-Mofo instructors to share best practices for teaching these skills (“hackable templates”), etc.
Develop a community for the learners (makers)
Help build a compelling story for why people (potential makers and instructors) should care
Develop a set of metrics for measuring success. And measure it. Iterate to improve.
This is the reason we’re now a part of Mozilla. I was recently told that Mozilla adding Hive NYC was an attempt to add an existing, activated learning community who were hungry for what MoFo had to offer and had just as much to contribute.
At Hive NYC, digital learning is in our DNA. We’ve assembled an ecosystem of organizations with a shared ethos: that learning doesn’t just happen in school, that youth can thrive when offered the opportunity to explore topics that interest them most, that digital media and technology can be the “glue” to help them learn, and that to learn by doing/making can lead to tremendous “a-ha” moments that leave a lasting impression.
Hive NYC member MOUSE created this banner for their social media channels today
From their website: “Digital Learning Day is a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology that engages students and provides them with a rich, personalized educational experience. On Digital Learning Day, a majority of states, hundreds of school districts, thousands of teachers, and nearly 2 million students will encourage the innovative use of technology by trying something new, showcasing success, kicking off project-based learning, or focusing on how digital tools can help improve student outcomes.”
We’re really proud of the innovative projects that we support through the Hive Digital Media Learning Fund at The New York Community Trust. Part of what we’re working towards getting better at is sharing our critical work, and Digital Learning Day gives us the perfect opportunity to do just that. Here are a few resources from Hive NYC – please check them out, adapt, critique and employ as you see fit!
Hackasaurus Hacktivity Kit:Step by step instructions for running your own hack jam, to teach kids what the web is made of via exposure to HTML and CSS. You’ll find printables, sample lesson plans, assessment rubrics and cheat sheets. Hack away!
Eyebeam Digital Day Camp 2011 Curriculum: During this summer program, twenty NYC teens spent three weeks working under the guidance of a team of creative mentors to produce a series of deep, media-rich stories about our NYC neighborhoods. Their stories became part of a web-based, interactive map that included photographs, drawings, videos, music, games, words, and more. Easily scalable to any neighborhood, city or space!
Green Machine: Building Sustainable Futures Curriculum Pilot: This program sparked youth interest in engineering design, and local and global issues, but also sharpened participant ability to propose strategies and build solutions to real-world problems. These curriculum modules were play tested and iterated upon by Institute of Play.
Iridescent Technovation Challenge: An app-design, challenge-based curriculum that Hive NYC helped fund an iteration of at the New York Hall of Science in 2011.
And here are just a few examples of projects in the works, tracking their progress as we go along:
Girls Write Now Digital Remix Portfolio:A group of 16 Girls Write Now mentors and mentees are contributing to this pilot run collaboratively by Girls Write Now, Parsons The New School for Design, and Figment.com. Each month, participants experiment with photo & video, design & animation concepts, and audio & sharing, using new tools to complement their writing and the writing of their peers. Follow along as the project progresses.
Neighborhood to Neighborhood Multimedia Workshop:Facing History and Ourselves and WNYC Radio Rookies are running youth workshops to produce stories about neighborhoods in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Emoti-Con 2012:This year marks the 4th annual youth-made media and technology festival, and we’ll be posting updates here leading up to the event (June 2nd). You can also keep up-to-date by following @EmotiCon_NYC on Twitter.
We’re happy to show our support for the first-ever Digital Learning Day, and look forward to continuing to be part of the conversation and sharing our work.
Please leave any feedback on these projects in comments – we’d love to hear from you.
Last week, approximately 18 educators convened at Eyebeam for our second Hive NYC professional development session.
Eyebeam teaching residents Esther Cheung, an architect and artist who also teaches at ITP, and Don Miller, an afterschool mentor at Institute of Play and adjunct professor of emerging media at BMCC and CUNY, led the session. They introduced us to the experience and curriculum that resulted from the Eyebeam Art + Technology Digital Day Camp program they ran last summer for 20 high school students from across New York City.
The theme of Digital Day Camp 2011 was “remapping,” and over the course of three weeks, students were sent out into the city to interact with the community, to engage with neighbors, and to interpret spaces. Workshops included model building, performance art activities, Photoshop/Illustrator basics, creating digital personas and more.
Each day offered a balanced mix of hands-on, focused activities, such as documenting their progress via daily blog posts, and free time to spend on their final projects – a unique 10’x10’ intervention/art/performance spaces nearby Camp HQ in Chelsea. Their interpretations of remapping encompassed everything from staging a “guess that tune” game using digital audio, to encouraging adults to re-experience play using blocks and other toys. Oftentimes students collaborated, providing input on final projects or helping with tactical execution such as painting, testing, etc.
The four artists who ran the program provided guidance throughout the process, and also led mini-workshops related to their personal works. One such workshop involved a quick field trip to collect a range of data (20 photos, 5 statistics, 2 stories and 1 video), and in the process exploring how to become active observers in telling a neighborhood story.
So at our PD session, representatives from Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, City Lore, Cooper Hewitt, DCTV, Global Action Project, Global Kids, Institute of Play, Museum for African Art, NYSCI and Wildlife Conservation Society/Bronx Zoo divided into small groups to experience the same process of heightening our awareness of the neighborhood around us, while sharing and becoming part of its story. Check out some of our photos!
As the program came to an end, the students spent a day with several youth from WNYC Radio Rookies, to be interviewed about their final projects, and to practice their elevator pitch in preparation for their public engagements. Take a tour of all final projects here.
Digital Day Camp was promoted via posters and outreach to guidance counselors and school administrations, and students were selected through an application process that included a short essay on why they wished to participate and a letter of recommendation from a teacher. Hundreds applied, but twenty were ultimately chosen to take part in this exciting summer opportunity.
The program was supported by a grant from the Hive Digital Media Learning Fund at The New York Community Trust, and the PD was written into their grant as a way to share their learnings with other members of Hive Learning Network NYC.
As a result of this project, Eyebeam developed a curriculum for Digital Day Camp that can be forked, hacked, adapted and scaled by other organizations. Stay tuned for the link, and sign up at Eyebeam if you’re interested in their other youth and family programs.
Hackasaurus Hacktivity Kit:
Emoti-Con 2012:
