Students lose track of time as they spend hours navigating the web for material to create their stories and feel a sense of belonging through encouragement by their peers to post their stories on Facebook, illustrate them on Flickr, and share them with friends and the public at large through the multiple resources available on the web. This participation in new media environments is a way to be creative and innovative, but it is also new opportunities for our students to acquire and synthesize information in a meaningful way. Students today often remix original texts based on their own interests in order to create a new work that encapsulates their ideas and concerns about the issues that matter most to them.
In this conversation, Erin Reilly will highlight tools and strategies our students are using today to make their voices heard. You will learn how to adapt these tools and strategies to classroom activities that will encourage everyone in the classroom to participate in their own learning and be encouraged to transform digital media and learning into a collective, embracing, and transforming process of engagement that leaves teachers and students alike wanting more.
Z Score,T Score, Percential Rank and Box Plot Graph
Remix Culture 4 Learning
1. the gap between
Life and Art
Remix Culture for Learning
Erin Reilly
Research Director
Project New Media Literacies Retroactive I - Ro
bert Rauschenber
USC Annenberg School for Communication g
ebreilly @twitter
www.newmedialiteracies.org
2. One in four online teens remix
content they find online—like songs,
text, or images—and remix them into
their own artistic creations
3. Remix in Music
mashups
http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/newmedialiteracies:1000/videos/505-mashups-amp-remixes
Audio Recording
Software
Reason
ProTools
Logic
Fruity Loops
4. Remix in Music
remix
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ltAGuuru7Q
5. DJ Culture
http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/newmedialiteracies:1000/videos/369-what-is-a-dj
6. Remix in Video
Recut
http://www.youtube.com
Editing Software
/watch?v=nUk7hb5HdE0
iMovie for Mac
Windows Moviemaker for PC
Political
http://jaycut.com
Remix
no software needed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J_FkP9OVE4
Machinima
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK54WRu0jW4
7. Fan Vidding
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNRjzUB7Afo
12. appropriation
- the ability to meaningfully sample
and remix media content
projectNML
connectcommunicatecreatecollaborate
13. To develop a remix...
http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-profile-jalen-video
The creator must consider
how the original source is
related to a new context.
14. Source: Living and Learning with New Media
Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project Nov 2008
USC and UC, Berkeley
17. ........................
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........................
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Media Makers Challenges
Makers Challenges
........................
Media Makers Challenges
........................
Media
In the Learning Library, challenges are multimedia learning activities. They include short videos, links to web-
sites where members can play games multimedia learning activities. They include short videos, links to chance to
In the Learning Library, challenges are or create media, questions about members’ experiences, and a web-
sites where members can play games or create media, questions about members’ experiences, and a chance to
share what they’ve learned. Within the Learning Library, New Media Literacies has created a collection of chal-
share what they’ve learned. Within the Learning Library, New Media Literacies has created a collection of chal-
lenges featuring exemplary new media makers. This Media Makers Challenge Collection has been designed with
lenges featuring exemplary new media makers. This Media Makers Challenge Collection has been designed with
the goal of offering members rich opportunities to learn about and practice the twelve new media literacy skills.
the goal of offering members rich opportunities to learn about and practice the twelve new media literacy skills.
The challenges included in the Media Makers Challenge Collection are described below, in a list that groups
The challenges included in the Media Makers Challenge Collection are described below, in a list that groups
them according to the skills they explore:
them according
to the skills they explore:
Play - the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings asas form of of problem-solving
Play - the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings a a form problem-solving
Fail and Fail Often
Fail and Fail Often
Re-imagine play as experimentation, and failure asas valuable way to to learn.
Re-imagine play as experimentation, and failure a a valuable way learn.
Changing the Rules
Changing the Rules
Learn about iterative game design and practice play byby modifyingfamiliar game.
about iterative game design and practice play modifying a a familiar game.
Performance -- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Performance the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
The Meaning of Bling
Meaning of Bling
What messages are you sending on your MySpace profile?
messages are you sending on your MySpace profile?
Permutationsof Performance
Permutations of Performance
Watch various performances and think about what performance means.
Watch various performances and think about what performance means.
Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models real-world processes
Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of of real-world processes
Outbreak!
Outbreak!
Learn about how World of Warcraft can help scientists understand what happens in ain a health epidemic.
Learn
about how World of Warcraft can help scientists understand what happens health epidemic.
Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Explore appropriation through Justin Cone’s video “Building on the Past”.
Explore appropriation through Justin Cone’s video “Building on the Past”.
New Versions and Visions
New Versions and Visions
Explore appropriation by browsing through audio remixes on ccmixter.org, a community remix site.
Explore appropriation by browsing through audio remixes on ccmixter.org, a community remix site.
Total Recut: Transformations
Total Recut: Transformationshow appropriating content can transform meaning.
Watch a video “recut” to learn
Watch a video “recut” to learn how appropriating content can transform meaning.
Dump Your Pen Friend
Dump Your Pen Friend re-used photograph sheds light on the complexities of appropriation.
An interesting case of a
An interesting case of a re-used photograph sheds light on the complexities of appropriation.
The Harry Potter Lexicon
The Harry Potter dictionary infringe on the original author’s rights?
Does a fan-made Lexicon
Does a fan-made dictionary infringe on the original author’s rights?
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www.newmedialiteracies.org/library/ C R E A T E C I R C U L A T E
C R E A T E
C O N N E C T
C I R C U L A T E
C O L L A B O R A T E
C O N N E C T C O L L A B O R A T E
18. CREATE ...a production of new creative forms of learning
http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/library/#/media/253
Expressing Characters Challenge
19. CREATE ...a production of new creative forms of learning
• Concept in context: Demonstrate the core concept, skill, or
idea at play in the world.
20. • How would Jay Gatsby speak?
• What if Jay Gatsby hadn’t taken the blame for Myrtle’s death, how would the others act?
• What would each of them write in 140 characters over a couple of days of storytelling,
especially if this story were of today’s American Dream instead of the 1920s?
23. What’s essential to the
original source?
What matters most
to you?
What can be transferred
to a different medium?
24. Reading a Remix
1.What constitutes the primary source material?
2. What is the media form of the remix?
3. What is the context of the remix?
4. What elements of the primary source material are being remixed?
5. Are the works of the same genre or different ones? How do you know?
6. What techniques are deployed in reworking the original material?
7. What is the intended purpose of the remix?
8. How does the remix build from, add to, or alter the cultural meaning of
the original work?
Activity in Teachers’ Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture
25. Join a Community of Practice
• ccMixter (found at http://ccmixter.org)
• Total Recut (found at http://www.totalrecut.com/index.php)
• Political Remix Video (found at http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/)
• Organization of Transformative Works
(found at http://transformativeworks.org/projects/vidding-history)
• Project New Media Literacies (found at http://projectnml.ning.com)
Notes de l'éditeur
In the 1960s, fine artist - Robert Rauschenberg created a series of collages called the Combine Series. His goal with this series was to transform the objects into something new and Rauschenberg would often remark that the combines’ series allowed him to work “in the gap between life and art.” This work was a reflection of Rauschenberg’s shift from creating art for his own individual expression to involving his community into his artwork by writing into meaning his views on the state of society—to represent what was happening in history.
Collage is a type of remix. Remix allows us to experience a sense of recognition that leads us to reflect and build upon what came before.
Today, one in four online teens remix content they find online and remix them into their own artistic creations.
By remixing texts, teens re-create and redefine them to share with others. In the process they are acquiring new habits of expectation, meaning, and credibility; new ways of acting, interacting, and doing; and gaining the competencies to become part of this digital world.
There are a variety of subcultures of people who participate in remixing content because they are passionate about a specific style of production, whether it’s mixing music or editing videos or performing backyard theater. These amateur productions are drawn from multiple sources and illustrate the practice of remixing media as a form of participation. Thus, youths have online spaces where participants share and build upon each other’s ideas, where they pool their knowledge and are engaged and connected because of a similar interest.
Remixing is practiced across various disciplines and each discipline has a diverse array of methods. In traditional literature, for example, methods include parody, adaptation, or translation.
For the music culture, methods vary from sampling to mashup to remix.
Show Video
Music helps define who we are. Music is one of the top modes of expression for bringing youth together and building a sense of community. We sing songs around the campfire and lull our babies to sleep. We learn our first form of literacy by singing the ABCs.
Creating remixes provides a way to update the old and invoke enjoyment of the lyrics and sounds of yesterday. American Film Institute nominated “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as the greatest song of all time. Not surprisingly, this song has been remixed and adapted for every genre from alternative to blues to dance.
The practice of remixing as we define it today gained popularity in the music industry as a result of the Jamaican dance hall culture of the 1960s where a DJ with mic in hand would rally the crowd to get the party started. The DJ would often encourage a battle of the bands to determine which had the better sound. Using two turntables, the DJ would mix his favorite parts of multiple songs to force certain sounds and rhythms to stand out in relief.
Play video
In addition to music remixes, people are also remixing videos. A diverse subculture has developed on the Web centered on creating and sharing video remixes. Armed with free programs, such as http://jaycut.com/, or software programs such as iMovie or Windows Moviemaker, teens are learning from each other how to remix videos.
There are a variety of video remix styles each with their own interest-based community, including movie trailer recuts, political remixes, and remixed music videos. These all allow students to build upon the originals and create new meaning, such as a parody, alternative messages, and even new forms of music with subliminal messages.
The Fan Vidding community create fan-made music videos derived from television shows or movies. If you’ve ever created slideshows set to music, then you are part of the precursor to fan vidding. Fan vidding has a rich history and is the earliest music video remix culture having been in existence since 1975.
Today, vidders edit clips of their favorite television show or movie and transform them into a music video.
Raise your hand if you watch and are a fan of “Heroes”, “Supernatural,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or even movies such as Star Trek or Twilight
All of these have been used as inspiration by vidders to participate in telling more of the story or redefining it to share with others. Fan-vidding is our visual poetry, an interpretation of the television shows and movies that vidders love.
And if you were one of those who had your hand raised, you will understand the vid better because you’re familiar or have seen the television show or movie that is being represented. With this knowledge, a viewer can move beyond the storyline to see the nuances of what a vid is trying to represent both in story, aesthetic, and technical remix.
This vid that I’m going to show you is “Vogue” by Luminosity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNRjzUB7Afo). And it spread to the mainstream in 2007, and brought new attention to fan vidding by being voted “Best Online Video” in New York Magazine. This brought the very underground world of fan vidding and media literacy to the forefront.
Play video
Students today often remix original texts based on their own interests in order to create a new work that includes their ideas and concerns about the issues that matter most to them. It is up to us as educators not to leave some students behind but to encourage them as media-driven explorers which play an important role in fostering creativity in the classroom.
These gained experiences are the new equivalent of a hidden curriculum. The learning ecology teens participate in today is similar to the hidden curriculum educational theorists in the 1960s who said that children whose parents took them to museums, had dinner conversations on politics and civic engagement, had encyclopedias in their home and listened to opera records would perform differently in school than those who didn’t have those opportunities. Students who grow up in households today with access to Wikipedia, Facebook, and YouTube have different experiences in the classroom than those who don’t. Our research refers to this divide as the Participation Gap and that means educators in afterschool programs, libraries, and classrooms have to help solve the gap by giving access to skills, such as remixing, and encouraging learning in a participatory culture.
We are in a paradigm shift in the classroom where educators need to work in the gap between life and school. Across multiple art forms, youth are immersed in the remix culture. This provides teachers an opportunity to offer learning objectives in their classrooms in a new way, while at the same time offering students opportunities to read and write their cultural practices that are central to their own everyday experience. Incorporating participatory practices into the classroom, such as remixing, allows for a blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning and harnesses the power of digital technologies for students to reflect on the participatory culture that they live in.
Access to new media encourages a wider population to remix. This new form of literacy helps teachers understand that our students are reading and writing in new ways. Reading and writing was once relegated to reading books and writing papers (lessons commonly found in English and language arts classrooms). However, a possible hypothesis is that the educational system has not caught up with the shifting landscape of participatory culture where there are new ways to read, write, and compute numbers.
This shift changes the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement where creativity and active participation are the hallmark. And it makes it increasingly important to understand and be competent in the skills of citizenship, art, and expression of social connectivity. These are the skills identified in our white paper as the New Media Literacies and ones we need to foster as we think about education.
Show Video
Remix is synonomous with the NML, appropriation—one might interpret the language of the words new media literacy to refer to a new era where we build upon our interactions with media to analyze and critically consume media so that we’re no longer consumers but producers of media. By practicing this art form we interpret and better understand the social and cultural world we live in.
The George Lucas Educational Foundation released the Digital Generation Project that gives voice to our children. Instead of adults talking for them, this project profiles a variety of children of all ages as they geek out on their passions. What this project provides to teachers is a glimpse into our students’ lives and the strategies they engage in to communicate, socialize, and learn—not just from us but from their peers and larger community.
Jalen is a 12-year old artist and the epitome of a young creator of media.
Show video
The NMLs are visible in Jalen’s story and his and many others were part of a new paper done by a sister research project run by Mimi Ito. This paper describes a really interesting ecology …and takes youth terms to talk about different modes of learning and discovery:
♣Hanging around – Engagement with new technologies that are driven by social friendship groups. Hanging out physically in someone’s living room or online through twitter or social networks. We know what hanging around looks like.
♣Messing About – Grab a computer and try something. They’re not using instructions – they’re experimenting with their own surroundings and testing their hypothesis, digging deeper into a subject that interests them.
♣Geeking Out – You find your real passion. This is your interest-driven network, the thing that matters to you and you dig in hard. Often hanging out and messing around encourage geeking out on something you’re really passionate about (Ito et al., 2009).
We can clearly see in Jalen’s story that he is geeking out on his passions and his parents and teachers are encouraging him to use them to influence and foster his learning and understanding of the new media literacies across the subject areas he studies during an average day in school.
In his book, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan says that a medium is “any extension of ourselves,” suggesting that a hammer extends our arm. Tools we have today, such as the ability to sample music, capture video, and edit media encourages students to use that which they are comfortable with to socially construct meanings of the world. Remixing allows us to find ways for people to connect around common interests and encourages the expertise of both youth and adults in the learning process, where contributing to knowledge building is the reward for their inputs.
The idea of remixing might be foreign to the classroom, but there are ways to wade into participation.
Educators have told us that they lack a vocabulary to talk with their students about emerging forms of media and that they do not yet have a set of standards to evaluate student work. Moreover, they complain that students lack role models for understanding media production or thinking about the ethical challenges they may be facing as fledgling media makers. To address these concerns, we created the Media Makers collection, a set of learning modules that explore the different sub-cultures of media artists ranging from DJ artists to Cosplayers, Wikipedians to Fan Vidders. 
We’ve hosted this collection in the Learning Library and its provided as a resource to explore and practice the new media literacies.  These learning modules are nonlinear, consisting of activities and media prompts that together create a coherent lesson or thought-provoking concept. The activities can be online or offline, group or individual; they usually culminate in some kind of "your turn" project, where teens create material in response to the learning they've just experienced.
Often these learning modules co-opt tools available on the web.
Take for example, the Media Makers challenge, Expressing Characters. Show Video - Jessie Alexander and Mark Warsaw give you an overview of what transmedia storytelling is.
Expressing Characters challenge asks you to consider how a character can be expressed through different media. Each media focuses on unique traits of the character. For graphic illustrations, the learner has to think about movement, color, the character in one time and space. In video, the learner reflects on the character in motion, as a live being in a real world. In theater, learners have to think of the character as interacting with other characters. All three express character in very different ways but the goal with transmedia storytelling is to make each expression stand alone and foster the attributes of that said media while at the same time presenting the same character. Similarity in multiplicity is a great way to get students to think about how an author expresses character and remains consistent.
Integrating expressing characters into a larger lesson would be a way to incorporate popular culture into the classroom and could be tied to a character in a literary text that the class is reading by practicing transmedia storytelling. This could be used as an introductory activity or extension by having the class collaborate on creating a twitter feed for the different characters from The Great Gatsby over a few weeks. How would Jay Gatsby speak? What if Jay Gatsby hadn’t taken the blame for Myrtle’s death, how would the others act? What would each of them write in 140 characters over a couple of days of storytelling, especially if this story were of today’s American Dream instead of the 1920s?
When we piloted the Media Makers collection last year with teachers, we on purpose gave little direction.
The challenges were taken up in a range of different ways. Some sought to gain a better understanding of the new media literacy concepts and practices and used the challenges as is. Others took the challenges directly into their classrooms and applied them to texts they were studying with their students. Most pulled from many challenges and adapted them to different curricular contexts. In short, the teachers appropriated and remixed the challenges for their own ends.
So as you think about taking up these new practices in your own classroom, start off by “being conservative in content, but radical in approach.”
We took this to heart as we worked the past three years to find best practices of integrating the new media literacies across curricula. In looking to develop a strategy guide for English / Language Arts classrooms, we studied Herman Melville and Moby Dick. Development of our Teachers Strategy Guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture has given us opportunities to think about the constant cycle of appropriation--Melville engaged in remixing / appropriation of the 19th century justaposed to today’s contemporary practices and how many artists have appropriated the novel for other purposes.
Examples of Appropriation:
* Patrick Steward in the movie,
* Star Trek’s Wrath of Khan,
* Ricardo Pitts-Wiley’s theater performance with incarcerated youth and
* Nerdcore Artist, MC Lars with his Ahab video.
A key in skillful adaptation is thinking about what’s essential to the thing that you’re appropriating, and what matters most to you, and what can be transferred to a different medium.
For many of today’s youth culture, remixing is native to the digital tools afforded to them and I could continue to share with you even more tools that can be used in remix. However, like Shawna said in the video -- you do not need to have technology in order to encourage remixing. Remixing, like all the new media literacies, is on the development of skills and mental models rather than on the tools and techniques of new media. So one can look across disciplines and see how they apply.
Becoming familiar with current remixes is a way to help you understand the aesthetic. Encourage your students to bring in remixes, mashups, collages, and recuts that interest them. As you review examples with your students, have a discussion relating the original source to the remixed version ...perhaps even refer to the Reading a Remix activity that is in the Teachers’ Strategy Guide.
But the most important practice I can suggest is for you to get involved. You don’t have to learn on your own or feel your way through this blindly by yourself. For any type of remix you’re interested in, there is a community out there waiting for you to participate. Use this as an opportunity to make time in your schedule to create change in your classroom... to learn some radical approaches to remix your current curriculum.
I’ve posted here a couple of communities that are in reference to the different genres we’ve talked about today:
ccMixter (found at http://ccmixter.org) encourages amateurs and professionals to share music samples, lyrics and finished remixes.
Total Recut (found at http://www.totalrecut.com/index.php) provides online resources and social networking opportunities for fans and creators of video recuts, remixes and mashups.
Political Remix Video (found at http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/) hosts a blog to critique power structures, deconstruct social myths, and challenge dominate media messages, as well as share
the most innovative and inspiring political remix videos.
Organization of Transformative Works (OTW) (found at http://transformativeworks.org/projects/vidding-history) supports all fan works and provides a history of vidding as well as many projects
that document this culture.
Remixing is not a single or solitary occupation but a colllective, embracing and transforming process of engagement ...go out and be Hunters and Gatherers, close the gap between life and art; life and school and encourage a remix culture for learning.