Short Talk Panel MRT: Literacies of Making

Title: Acts of Transformation: The intersection of Technology, Knowledge, and Exploration     
Organizer: Ugochi Acholonu
Participant: Ugochi Acholonu

Tinkering, remixing, and repurposing are all acts of transformation.  Individuals engaged in these practices are not only transforming an artifact from one thing to another, but they are also transforming the relationship between the user and the designer. Instead of just consuming what is given, the "remixer" is fundamentally shaping the technology to more tightly integrate into their cultural ecologies, as well as creating an avenue for authentic expression. Through transformational acts with technology, the boundary of what is possible with technology is expanded. The user, instead of the designer, determines the purpose for the device in their context. The ability to adapt technology to support individual and community needs is a type of innovative skill that many are calling for.  To support this call, we as researchers, educators, and industry leaders must understand what factors are important to supporting the growth of the remix nation.

In this talk, I will discuss a study conducted at a community college that investigates how people behave when faced with the opportunity to innovate with common household technologies.  Through this study, I will highlight the relationship between convention, knowledge, and exploration when innovating with technology in a problem-solving situation.  I will explain why just increasing a person's technical knowledge is not enough to allow people to be comfortable performing transformational acts, such as repurposing, with technology.

Six Degrees of Specialization: How Youth Learn on YouTube
Organizer: Patricia G. Lange
Participant: Patricia G. Lange

Discourses about “digital youth” stress how kids have become immersed in a range of media making and sharing practices. These discourses often emphasize kids’ participation in communicative media such as texting and social network sites. However, research also shows that young people have various levels of interest and engagement with different kinds of technologies and services. For example, the present research on YouTube reveals that vast disparities exist between media makers in terms of how deeply they wish to engage with making and sharing videos, and with helping others to learn about the various aspects of creating and producing videos for online, entertainment economies. Prior to the current iteration of social media, researchers had recognized that amateurs and professionals did not exist in a binary relationship; rather they exhibited a continuum of skills, identifications, and relative commitment to particular creative endeavors. Drawing on a more fine-grained set of categories developed from a two-year ethnographic study, this paper will examine the range of emotional commitments and nuanced specializations that kids and youth have exhibited in terms of participating in video-sharing environments. While some kids were completely disinterested in even making videos, others preferred to specialize in making videos and became quite skilled. In addition, although many young people made videos, not all participants saw YouTube as the best way to distribute them or participate in digital cultures. Participating on YouTube in social ways was a qualitatively different experience than specializing in video by establishing one’s own video blog. In addition, kids often made videos together socially, in groups, and tended to specialize in various aspects of video-making (such as acting, editing, directing, and promotional work) that sometimes broadened their access to acquiring new abilities. Yet, at other times, such interpersonal specialization potentially curtailed exploration of new skills. Operating under time pressures and within social milieu in which kids wanted to perform technical identities of competence, kids did not always encourage equal knowledge-building and skill development between peers. Further, only a select few youth specialized in making tutorial videos to help others learn how to improve video-making techniques. By studying a range of dimensions of specialization, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of the inner workings of video-sharing cultures as well as insight into processes of informal learning.


Making It: An Examination of the Technological Creations of Low-Income, Urban Youth in Community Technology Centers
Organizer: Johanna Pabst
Participant: Johanna Pabst

Drawing on my dissertation research which examines the technological experiences of urban, low-income and racially diverse teenagers within two community technology programs, my presentation will examine the independent, yet guided, technological creations of youth within two very different community technology programs. I explore the youth creations in both centers, generally moving from more independent projects to more guided and boundaried projects. What do the youth make with technology? How do creations reflect the presence or lack of youth autonomy around technology? What kinds of concerns and interests do youth express through their creations? I look at how consumer culture and popular culture appear within these creations in order to demonstrate the permeable boundaries between the CTC space and the larger techno-culture. Ultimately, I explore themes of what drives and shapes youth creation and autonomy in both centers. I consider how youth’s pre-existing attitudes and desires around technology influence the larger community technology project to encourage low-income youth to become empowered users of technology. I find that building youth autonomy around technology is not a straight line as youth come into the CTC world with not only differing levels of technological skill but vastly differing personal experiences of technology, intersecting with variables like socioeconomic status, race and gender. Though the centers have somewhat specific goals for their youth, the actual projects reveal the complex interplay between the community technology environment and the “tech-savvy” consumer youth that enter into it. This work carries implications for those seek to encourage and alter the relationship of low-income youth, as well as youth in general, to technology.


Challenging texts: from machinima to plain text to installation and back again
Organizer: Stephanie Hendrick
Participant: Stephanie Hendrick

The definitions of literacy and text need to be expanded in schools to include vernaculars of multimedia. In a joint project between researchers from sociology, languages and digital humanities, the local municipality and schools in Umeå, Sweden, an expanded notion of text was explored in order to include the grammar of the image, sound, and media composition as co-equal to traditional literary texts and in contrast to national documents. While some national school instructions explore such a notion of text, they tend to only nominally include texts such as computer games and importantly, there is a focus on consumption and analysis rather than production and engagement.

In the project described in this talk, middle school students using the theme, The Other, created short machinima films in a 5-week film production course. Students were given access to researchers from the university, technology and a short film-editing course. From these films, the Swedish prize-winning author, Peter Kihlgård, created a literary text, which was submitted back to the students. The combined works were presented online and in an installation at Umeå University/HUMlab during a media event in which the films and literary text were used to generate a dialogue between participants and the students about how performative and creative arenas can realize an expanded notion of text in education. The aim of this project was to help students create a deep understanding of how different modalities interact in meaning making and to challenge traditional expectations of literacy.

Remix: Learning from Media Fans
Organizer: Tisha Turk
Participant: Tisha Turk

In order to help students become more effective multimedia composers, it makes sense to study the practices of people who do this composing successfully. Vidding--the media fandom practice of editing clips from movies or television and combining them with carefully chosen music to interpret, celebrate, or critique the original source--has been around since 1975: the first vids were slideshows, and vids made on two VCRs were the norm until computer vidding took over about ten years ago. Vidding, like other forms of remixing, is a complex multimedia literacy practice that requires creators to synthesize and analyze multiple simultaneous information streams and to critique, create, and evaluate multimedia texts. It can be a staggering amount of technical and rhetorical work, yet its practitioners undertake that work voluntarily and call it fun. Why?

In this talk, I present preliminary results of interviews with vidders about their processes of planning, composing, revising, and “reading” vids. I argue that if we understand how and why vidders and vidwatchers do what they do, we will better understand the purposes, social contexts, tools, and resources that scaffold multimedia literacy acquisition, and will therefore be able to, as James Gee says, build schooling on better principles of learning.