Teaching and eating Popcorn at Mozilla Festival 2012

The Webmaker Makers

Here at Mozilla and Hive NYC, our community and network members work with learners of all ages to encourage “hacker literacies.” These include how to create a webmaker (a reader and writer of the web) and how to empower anyone to take something he or she uses every day to apply it for creative and critical purposes. We work across disciplines and New York’s five boroughs to enable others to recognize and understand any system or discourse that gets in their way. Hive NYC facilitates makers. One of our common goals as a network is to impart a sense of confidence to change and remix the worlds that we participate in every day.

One of the essential tools in this “remixing” is Popcorn. Since its beta release in March 2010, Hive NYC members have been excited about Popcorn’s ability to tell compelling interactive narratives. Part of Mozilla’s Webmaker creativity toolkit, Popcorn enables users to pull web content into the video frame. Even at its earliest stages, we’ve seen Popcorn as one of the key components in the maker educator’s repository, a mechanism of potential use a diverse community of members and partners. Like all of the components in the creativity suite, Popcorn juxtaposes learning, making and the critical recontextualization of web content. As one educator explained it, Popcorn explores what happens when sound and moving images “get tangled in the web.” If you haven’t played with it yet—check it out. We’ll be right here when you get back.

This month, Hive NYC HQ will begin a series of buffet-style workshops that capitalize on member interest, the official release of Popcorn Maker 1.0, and Mozilla’s charge to “hacktivate learning” through its work with the growing community of educators and mentors interested in teaching and learning webmaking. Hive NYC StoryCamp is our deep-dive into Popcorn and extends our efforts to build and explore cross-disciplinary strategies through a hands-on, learning lab approach. Hive NYC has some of the most discerning and thoughtful educators and cultural practitioners we know. They are serious about form and format, pedagogy, art and advocacy. We’ve picked Mozilla’s StoryCamp as a learning guide and framework for our work. It’s an impressive and multi-faceted toolkit of Popcorn-based resources and activities.

The Framework: StoryCamp 1.0

StoryCamp 1.0 was a free online learning lab that ran for six weeks during summer 2012. Popcorn and web-native storytelling provided a point of entry to explore myriad issues related to open-source media, web literacies, fair use and remix culture. It was also a living demonstration of how real and digital learning spaces can enhance and support one another. From Anchorage, Alaska, to Venice, California, participating youth media centers ran face-to-face StoryCamp workshops, enhanced by live casts, a Minigroup forum for educators and mentors, and collaborative coding sessions. The open source web conferencing system Big Blue Button was used to interact with visiting educators and artists such as Damian Kulash of OK Go and FemFrequency videoblog auteur Anita Sarkeesian.

Radio Rookies Stop and Frisk project from radio broadcast to interactive story

StoryCamp 2.0

New York being New York and Mozilla being Mozilla, a lot changes in a few months. So after lurking around StoryCamp 1.0 all summer, Hive NYC HQ and the Popcorn team set out to re-design the StoryCamp experience. Hive NYC network members work with issues of media literacy and critique, digital media, social justice, critical literacy, science and storytelling. Recent projects funded by the Hive Digital Media Learning Fund in The New York Community Trust specifically leverage Popcorn as both tool and inspiration, including project collaborations from WNYC Radio Rookies creating DIY videos, Rev-’s Popsquad and Global Action Project‘s digital reboot of their Media History Timeline. We hope that these projects will also make the StoryCamp 2.0 learning lab a well-timed venture.

Rev- Popsquad summer 2012

What’s Different, What’s New

• Hackable Teaching and Learning Mozilla and Hive NYC’s recent focus on the webmaker makers has included some deep rethinking about how we deliver information and translate our learnings to others. For StoryCamp 2.0, we’ll use Hive NYC’s learning lab, Mozilla’s open source ethos and our network of experts to explore cross-disciplinary and multi-modal approaches to helping educators and mentors to express their methodologies. We’ll rely heavily on Mozilla’s Laura Hilliger’s thinking and her updated StoryCamp activities, which prototype ways for people to share and collaborate around learning activities (or hacktivities).
• Hack Jams, O Hours and Home Delivery We’ll also rely on other Mozillans, like Jacob Caggiano, to help us troubleshoot and field member questions. Jacob will oversee the educator forum on Minigroup and offer virtual office hours to field unanswered questions and facilitate projects. Popsquad’s teen educators will work with local groups using the Paper Popcorn planning tool and other resources they’re developing in their work.
• Direct-to-Maker Resources All StoryCamp sessions will be archived online so that our distributed network can review hacktivities and engage with StoryCamp anywhere and anytime.
• Everyone’s a Maker and Teacher A key change in approach to StoryCamp 2.0 is the opportunity for Hive NYC to learn together. In contrast to StoryCamp 1.0 when educators were exploring activities on their own, StoryCamp 2.0 follows the teacher as learner model, allowing educators and youth the opportunity to learn and discover at the same time. Although we are anxious about how to balance and pace the distributed and face-to-face encounters without a loss of momentum—Hive NYC HQ and the StoryCamp team are eager to get started and keep the door open for honest and thoughtful feedback.

A Guide to Super-Charged Web Video

• StoryCamp v2 Teaser by Jacob Caggiano
• We Love the Internet or What is the ITU? pure Popcorn and localized in many different languages
• IN MEMORIAM NPR Music remembers artists who died in 2012 and their legacies
• Popcorn TED Talk by Ryan Merkley
• WNYC Radio Rookies Stop and Frisk Popcorn Remix
• All is Not Lost Interactive HTML 5 video by OK Go x Pilobious
• Satirical 2012 Election News Ads Courtesy of Popcorn and PBS NewsHour AdLibs
• Filmmaker and Director of Mozilla’s Popcorn Project on Popcorn Past and Future How the #MozParty is changing Popcorn.
• Running a Popcorn design challenge Popcornning Chicago