Category Archives: Professional Development

Hive Hacks the Day

Posted on by
Reply

Last week, a group of developers, designers, educators, programmers and learning innovators came together to hack for a better web. The Project:Connect hackathon, hosted by Facebook, MacArthur Foundation, the Family Online Safety Institute and Mozilla, kicked-off the fifth Digital Media & Learning Competition, to advocate for the innovative use of new media in support of connected learning.

Screen Shot 2013-05-10 at 9.23.46 AM

At the event, nearly fifteen teams of professionals worked to create plans and prototypes for tools to enable a more equitable, social, and participatory internet.

We were proud (but far from surprised) to see that Hive NYC was in full effect. Representatives from City Lore, Exposure Camp, Global Kids, Institute of Play, Iridescent, MOUSE, New York Public Library and WNYC Radio Rookies were all in attendance, and spent the day iterating on new and existing ideas to help young people access and leverage the web for everything from building community support frameworks to gaining better information access in schools.

Teams quickly got into “less yak, more hack” mode. Large Post-it pads lined the walls as wireframes were drawn, domains were purchased and minimum viable prototypes were built. At the end of the day, each team had five minutes to present their pitch to a panel of judges that included: Cynthia Germanotta, co-founder of the Born This Way Foundation (also known as Lady Gaga’s mom); Chris Bevans, Founder of CBAtelier, creative director for Billionaire Boys Club and MIT Media Lab Fellow; Diana Rhoten, Chief Strategy Officer at Amplify; Anne Collier, safety expert, on the Facebook Safety Advisory Board and editor of NetFamilyNews.com; and Dave Steer, Manager of Policy Communications at Facebook.

Team Emoti-Con advocated for a youth-led campaign to advocate for blocked URLs at schools and libraries to provide greater access to students looking to leverage the web for conducting research and creating web-based media projects. A special bookmarklet would enable youth, parents, students and educators to submit URLs for review, and start a dialogue about which websites should be used for educational purposes.

Screen Shot 2013-05-09 at 2.44.40 PM

Team Emoti-Con advocated for unblocking URL at schools and libraries.

Team Truth pitched a new web app called Cyberstoop, which calls upon local communities to help keep youth connected. Teens would enter their zip code to find local businesses willing to share their wi-fi during after school hours, providing greater opportunities for access to do homework or surf the web. Congratulations to this team for winning 3rd place in the Social Tools for Social Good category!

Screen Shot 2013-05-09 at 1.16.24 PM

Team Truth called on local businesses to share wi-fi access with students after school.

The That Could Be Your Sister team proposed a youth-led, virtual neighborhood watch on behalf of victims of sexual cyberbullying. This was the only team that had a high school student participate–big kudos to Temitayo for joining us! According to their prototype, a social media bookmarklet would be used to report images and videos that engage in “slut-shaming,” and micro-communities would rally to reach out and support victims. Click the image below to hear more about their pitch and the movement Temitayo and Radio Rookies have already started to build. Listen to the story that Temitayo and Radio Rookies produced for WNYC on the topic of sexual cyberbullying, check out their complete pitch presentation, and follow @couldbeyoursis on Twitter.

Screen Shot 2013-05-14 at 6.49.28 PMCongratulations to this team for winning 1st place in the Social Tools that Enable Control of Information category!

Winners-thatcouldbeyoursister

That Could Be Your Sister addresses sexual cyberbullying with a community-based approach to “Protect Our Sisters”

We’d like to congratulate all of the winners and everyone who participated! We look forward to sharing updates on how some of these projects continue to develop. Until then, let’s keep exploring ways to co-create experiences that help young people enhance their civic participation on the web!

Digital Learning in Museums Snapshot – April, 2013

Posted on by
2

This is re-posted from Barry Joseph’s blog. He is the Associate Director For Digital Learning, Youth Initiatives, at the American Museum of Natural History, and also a founding member of Hive NYC.   

Last month I realized I had NO IDEA what was actually going on in museum education programs around the country. Is everyone teaching youth how to design games but no one is teaching them how to use a mobile app? Or is it the other way around? Everyone is talking about digital badging systems, but is anyone actually using one? I wanted to know and I figured I was not alone.

To find out, I posted a survey on the ASTC listserv, which is primarily focused on science and technology centers. And, professionally, that is where Natural History museums find ourselves, even though our focus differs. This was NOT a formal study. I invited people to post anonymously (only I would know their name and institution and I invited them to let me know if I could share their examples and/or that they even participated) and to do so informally – no need to spend weeks kicking it up their chain of command or run it through their communications department. So this is just an informal snapshot of how things might look around the country.

So here you have it, the April 2013 Mooshme Digital Learning in Museums Snapshot:

30 Institutions were included in the final count (I did not count those who did not give me their name and deleted duplicates when more than one person submitted for the same institution). Half identified as science or technology centers, 5 as Natural History museums, 4 as children or youth museums, followed by one each from an assortment of others (aquarium, history museum, nature center, planetarium, and zoo). They came from 21 states/territories and included: Exploratorium, California Academy of Sciences, Orlando Science Center, Chattahoochee Nature Center, Adler Planetarium, The Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, Dean, SEE Science Center, New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, Children’s Library Discovery Center, COSI, Children’s Museum of Houston, Teknikens Hus, and Ontario Science Centre.

For all of the categories below, there were more than four dozen examples explaining in a sentence or two what exact program the museum was currently doing in each area. This helped me to insure we were all speaking the same language – by and large the program descriptions matched my understanding of the question. However, most requested I not share them, so you’ll have to trust me.

Without any further ado, the results:

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 11.50.03 PM

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 11.50.10 PM

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 11.50.30 PM

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 11.50.38 PM

Screen Shot 2013-05-01 at 11.50.52 PM

How does your institution compare with the results of this survey? Where are you an innovator? Where do you see new opportunities?

Brooklyn Explorers: Follow-Up Training at Partnership for After School Education (PASE)

Posted on by
1

This post was written by Julia Vallera, an artist and educator working with Hive NYC on Brooklyn Explorers and other youth-serving projects.

Training picture collage

Image courtesy of Yvonne Brathwaite @PASEsetter

This year, Hive NYC is partnering with PASE (Partnership for After School Education) to add a Mozilla Webmaker component to the Brooklyn Explorers Program.  The program provides 4th-6th graders attending Brooklyn-based afterschool programs with experiential learning activities that explore different neighborhoods and expose them to the rich assets in these areas. Hive NYC will help them turn their experiences into dynamic web content via tools like Thimble and Popcorn. Six Brooklyn-based schools and centers are participating.

Our initial training was back in January and lasted for two days. It was a thorough introduction to the curriculum, activities and tools. Last week we held a follow-up training for the educators running the Brooklyn Explorers program. We practiced using the Webmaker tools and talked about the process of getting content from the students’ activities onto the web. This flow chart was a guide through that discussion.

BE Media Flow Chart

After a brief recap we jumped right into the webmaking tools. A few of the participants had been practicing Thimble, so they already had great questions for me related to HTML, browsers and CSS.

Screen Shot 2013-03-15 at 12.43.52 PM

The training was divided into two parts: Thimble Lab and Popcorn Lab. Each were about 45 minutes. Three templates were provided for the educators to hack. They chose which one they wanted to use based on difficulty level.

Screen Shot 2013-03-15 at 1.30.50 PM

Everyone was hard at work for the rest of the session, and it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop! It was great to see everyone having “ah-ha” moments as they were getting the code to do what they wanted.

i61Y3ZtlgU1bbYW-ZoTdpMIULcrZ_MaNBXCVKAPyVFQ 2IRl9q1U-v-xoKOujI0QE9FZYrv3uYmvhmblnhbmukE

We talked about how the students will be going through the same exact process and will dig into the code the same way. Through April and May, I will be visiting each site to assist with the Webmaker tools. MOUSE youth (also known as digital ambassadors) will be joining me to assist as well.  I am excited to see the student’s work in the coming months!

Go Brooklyn Explorers!