Ever since the movie "Iron Man" opened, the popularity of this picture I took last summer in France has ballooned, thanks to people who are searching Google and Flickr for images with the keywords "iron" and "man" and "mask."

Apologies to the fans. I know it's not what you were looking for. But if it's any consolation, this was awesomely hilarious to see on the chateau tour.

After many months of thinking, learning, writing, talking, designing, testing, thinking more, rewriting, and learning new stuff again, the public beta of Youth Media Exchange is live!

YMEX.org is a new online social network, developed by TIG, Global Kids, and Asia Society, where young people can share, create, and learn about digital media for social change. It's full of resources to learn about both digital media production and global issues, and it's ready and waiting for YOU to come check it out, share your media, and get your voice heard.

There's much more to be said about the process, as well as what's still to come. But as we know, if I wait to write a well crafted post, it will never get done, so for now, just check it out: http://www.ymex.org and let us know what you think!

The deluges of rain, snow, and American Airlines cancellations from April 9-12 were no deterrents to a great few days at the National Service Learning Conference in Minneapolis. I still haven’t broken my recent streak of traveling to bad weather (San Antonio, I have my eye on you…) but the NSLC was worth it nonetheless.

A couple months ago, a fellow frequent-conference-exhibitor had tried to warn me about the NSLC, a conference, in their opinion, with a totally dead exhibit hall. In MY opinion, an empty exhibit hall is a sign of a GOOD conference! Not only was I glad to see that the NSLC has such a compelling agenda that people actually went to the workshops, but the booth saw plenty of traffic during breakfast, lunch, and other breaks.

I met a professor from Argentina who coordinates a network of thousands of schools there involved in service learning (Damian, I’ll be putting you two in touch!), made new contacts at organizations looking for online tools to connect the young people in their programs, and shared resources with several hundred teachers and students who are highly active in service learning projects in their schools and communities.

And, when things were a little slow, I took the opportunity to check out all the other great groups who were there to share resources with the young people and educators involved in service learning. I’m still not all the way through the stack of materials I picked up, but here’s a sample:

At the Free Tibet booth, I signed a petition and had an inspiring conversation with a student activist (who is a Tibetan refugee born in India, now living and studying in Saint Paul – he told me Minnesota has the second largest Tibetan community in the US) about Tibet, China, and the Olympics.

At the Peace Corps booth, I learned more about how they connect volunteers in the field to classrooms in the US, and met a staffer who thinks very highly of the TIG Guide to Action, and recommended that their whole network use it in planning events for Global Youth Service Day. It means a lot to have the endorsement of a leading service organization.

The folks from the Shinnyo-En Foundation were handing out t-shirts and DVDs to promote their new Six Billion Paths to Peace initiative, and I talked to a program officer for a while to understand what the campaign is about, since I missed out on the gala that the rest of the GYAN crew attended in New York in March (while I was still recovering from the flu) :)

There was no one at the Project Learning Tree booth, but I was intrigued by this sign, in thinking about our own sustainability practices when it comes to outreach and marketing:



It was also great to meet leaders from Youth Service America and put faces to names I’ve heard around the GYAN office in planning for GYSD.

There were three sessions I managed to attend – both keynotes (awesome move on NSLC’s part to close the exhibit hall during the keynotes!), as well as a panel on youth media.

Pedro Noguera, as much respect as I have for his work, gave a surprisingly generic keynote compared to other times I’ve heard him speak. He made some great points about how unacceptable and sorry the state of our education system is, but with this crowd, he might have been preaching to the choir. Then again, almost every keynote I’ve ever heard pales in comparison to the inspiration and energy and awe that I gained from hearing Archbishop Desmond Tutu deliver the keynote on Friday. How can you beat a Nobel Peace Prize Winner and spiritual leader telling a knock-knock joke in reference to the Bible?



In all seriousness though, having spent a lot of time thinking about the distinctions between service and activism, Desmond Tutu’s keynote gave a refreshing bit of historical perspective. I’ve struggled with the way service and activism (both of which fall under the umbrella of civic engagement) are often separated from one another, particularly service as a “safe” or non-political term, one used to describe what students do unto other, less-fortunate people, while activism gets pigeon-holed as a more radical thing that happens separately from learning. In limiting what each term means, we also misunderstand and underestimate the importance they play in enabling young people as social changemakers, whether in school or out. Archbishop Tutu reminded us that young people have always been changemakers and activists – from the Bible (it was a young person, David, who stood up to Goliath) to the students who led the civil rights movement, protested against South African apartheid, and now speak out against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Finally, the youth media panel was perhaps a bit long, but I learned about some cool projects:

- thefoshow.com – Run out of the high school for performing arts in Minneapolis, it’s the only commercial radio station in US completely run and produced by high school students.

- Strive Media – print and video production (Gumbo Teen Magazine) out of Minneapolis

- Beyond Green – the latest project from Listen Up!

- Teen International Media Exchange (TIME) – program using media to explore seven global issues, based at Media Academy at Cleveland HS in Los Angeles

I was really honored to meet Sidibay, a young person I’ve heard a lot about through our mutual friends at iEARN Canada, who presented his award-winning documentary about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

The importance of global perspectives and connections in service learning really seems to be on the rise within the NSLC community, so it was great to participate in that conversation as it expands, and hope we’ll be back next year!

Knowing that having a site as multilingual as TIG is unusual, it was cool to happen upon a panel at SXSW about website internationalization and localization. While the moderator had a few annoying moments (mostly making a big deal about how many in the audience raised their hands to the question "do you live in a country where English is the primary language?" - this should not be surprising at a conference with mostly American attendees), overall there were quite a few tips that I think we can learn a lot from.


-being bilingual does not make you a translator

-translators are often not technology people, so they don’t know the right technical language to translate interface words (“apply”, “enter”, “submit”)

-context is everything – if the translator can’t see the language in context, they will get it wrong

-have a translator on board at the wireframing stage, so that person can point out contextual and cultural issues

-localization isn’t just replacing the words in one language into another, it’s also about giving appropriate cultural and social context

-translation needs to deal not just with literal words, but also with concepts that don’t translate from one culture/language to another

-Social networking sites don’t choose their users, users choose the site – snses grow because users tell their friends, and want to find people like themselves. If a site has a high concentration of users in a particular culture, it sometimes turns users from other countries off because they don’t understand why the site seems so saturated with members and content from another country (this happened with Orkut – Americans complained that it was too Brazilian! So Orkut responded by giving users the option of only connecting with other people who speak the same language as them)

-most sites view internationalization efforts as moving to a language other than English

-Community driven translation is NOT the norm - one of panelists asked if anyone was allowing their online community to do the translation for them – only two of us raised our hands (probably 75-100 in the room)

-use icon based representation with mouse-over where possible, to reduce multilingual formatting issues (words being longer in diff languages) – but beware the problem with an icon/image having different cultural meanings

-sometimes you try to localize so much that you end up with something that is “just ok” in a lot of languages, and “not so great” in a few – instead of trying to rebrand and make the site almost its own stand alone in different locations

Cool sites to check out:
-One of the speakers was from Worldwide Lexicon project – really cool open source translation and localization tools, ability to develop multilingual web apps, Simple Localization System (SLS - php library), and multilingual blogging/publishing tools – with a wiki approach to translating web content.

-dotsub – community subtitling and translation tool

-publishing industry becoming unbundled from old fashioned vertical integration and will be replaced by companies that just do one element of the business

-Budapest Open Access Declaration – scholarly articles (in medicine, science, and engineering) should be open licensed and available for everyone – NIH now mandates that publications resulting from projects it funds must be open access

-now there is a call for a similar movement - Capetown Open Education Declaration (Shuttleworth Foundation, OSI) – main premise is that all publicly funded education materials should have open access

-changing role of people in producing knowledge – mixed roles of “teacher” and “student” and “expert” etc.
-changing role of content and how we classify information
-changing role of context – textbooks lack context and personalization, digital content allows customized learning experience

Jason Fried is the founder of 37signals.com – an innovative technology company that has made some simple and awesome web-based productivity apps, like basecamp and campfire. He gave an amazing talk about productivity and collaboration ("Stuff we've learned") – this is a list of advice I’d kind of like to memorize.

-red flag words: need, can’t, easy, only, fast

-“be successful and make money by helping other people be successful and make money” – people are more willing to pay for things that help them – spot chain reactions and be the catalyst for making them happen

-minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players – e.g., build tools that provide just the simple solutions of what people need (vs. the products that are overkill for most people “nonconsumers”)

-question your work regularly – remember that you don’t know everything:
Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Will this change behavior?
Is there an easier way?
What’s the opportunity cost?
Is it really worth it?

-it’s really important to ask what you can’t do because you’re taking on something else?

-many sites don’t just suffer from bad design, they suffer from bad copy that don’t make sense to anyone – PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORDS YOU USE TO CONVEY MESSAGES TO USERS. Words that need fixing are a much cheaper problem to solve than technical ones.

-err on the side of simple – start with the easy way of doing things and see if it satisfies what you wanted to do

-get three things done in one week, instead of one thing done in 3 weeks – “the longer it takes to develop something, the less likely you are to launch it”

-resist the urge to try to do more the next time around

-invest in what doesn’t change – what are the core things about the business that are important now and will still be important ten years from now?

-“what’s your cookbook?” – Celebrity chefs as a metaphor (they don’t try to keep their recipes a secret out of fear that people will open copy-cat restaurants). Figure out what expertise you can share, and share it – don’t be afraid that people will overtake and steal your business – your business is sharing what you build.

-interruption kills productivity – having people around you who interrupt you makes you not get stuff done. Try to combat this with passive communication (wikis, IM, email, etc) – these tools let the other person hear from you when you’re ready, not when they think you’re ready

-be open, honest, public, and responsive – people would much rather hear the truth, even in crisis.

-break problems down to the atomic level – “when you make tiny decisions you can’t make big mistakes”

-everything you do should matter – don’t do stuff that doesn’t matter!

-hire by looking for people who are honest/have good character, curious (most important), and do interesting things outside of work

-use what you build, and then you will know when it works

I'm finally getting my notes from SXSW posted. I took a lot of them, and came home and promptly got really sick. But they will all appear here in good time.



The opening keynote on Saturday was a conversation between Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You) and Henry Jenkins (professor at MIT, Comparative Media Studies Program). As a chronic conference-goer, I find myself hearing the same people keynoting over and over again, saying the same things over and over, and often saying essentially the same things as one another. It was refreshing that, despite having read the work of both speakers, and having heard each speak at other events, I actually learned some new things and had a chance to rethink some previous ideas.

That said, there were some points I was glad to hear repeated, since the audience at SXSW is not dominated by educators. We need people in other sectors to rally behind the need for empirical evidence and educational assessment models that support new media literacies, and to challenge the current reality that schools measure autonomous, not collective, learning. Also:
-high school students are one of the most highly underestimated groups online, but the challenge is – can we free young people up to write about what’s happening in their community? (not punish them, censor them, restrict their first amendment rights)
How do we give students the tools to use the time, creativity, and idealism they have, so they can be active community participants?

-if 50-60% of young people are creating content online, what is causing the other 40% not to create? Social, cultural, and economic disempowerment? Lack of ethical guidance from adult mentors?

-if America is failing in the world, it’s because workplaces and schools are failing to empower workers and students to realize their full potential – they start with the premise that we’re all idiots, not that we are all knowledgeable with expertise and creativity to share.

On politics, Jenkins made some interesting points about Obama’s “yes we can” as a metaphor for new kinds of social/civic engagement, by using language that describes a process of participation, collecting knowledge and distributing it to make change. He also argues that the criticism of Obama borrowing pieces of a speech from Deval Patrick holds less water if you look at it through the new lens of collective learning, knowledge, and participation. And, we should be asking what a culture of democracy truly looks like.

Other thought provoking ideas:
-the deep level of fan/consumer engagement with tv shows like Lost and The Wire, and the pop culture communities that have grown up around them, often come out of people not having enough intellectual and creative stimulation in the workplace.

-thinking about collective intelligence as Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” (pooling knowledge and averaging out an answer) vs. the deliberative sharing of knowledge from different points of view and reaching a consensus (dependent on individual expertise, diversity of the community, and respect for all perspectives brought to the table). Jenkins aligned these approaches with YouTube (what moves up is the dominant/majority/popular perspective) vs. Wikipedia (a space with mechanisms for inclusion of diverse perspectives).

-it’s important to question the usage of the language of addiction related to online activity and gaming (many “addicts” are actually depressed and the addiction is manifesting itself through gaming; also Chinese gov’t using “addiction” as reason to restrict young people’s access to the internet)

-progressives need to have a context for where progress is coming from in order to encourage the movement to continue growing (this sounds like what Chris Lehman often says about the current technology in education movement)

Cool sites they mentioned:
- Harry Potter Alliance– global network of young people trying to change the world, inspired by Harry Potter as a young person who transformed his world:

- Outside.In – Johnson’s project, building out geographic infrastructure of the web and fostering people using the internet for very local community participation. Their about-to-launch tool is On My Radar (“like a geo-twitter,” commented Kate). Speaks to a need for civic media tools for local experts to participate and share knowledge without having to go through traditional media structures to communicate

Finally, some dissertation-ey thoughts about new media literacies. Because of YMEX I’ve had Jenkins’ framework on the brain for quite a while, but one component I would like to spend more time unpacking – is where these new media literacies intersect with the sociolinguistic concept of codeswitching. If young people are developing the ability to learn and access information across a range of modalities (what Jenkins calls transmedia navigation), can it also be argued that they are learning to communicate in a range of linguistic codes that these new media require? How well do they codeswitch between the linguistic norms of each – from text messaging to online social networking sites to the f2f classroom, etc.? How might educators interact better with their students if they understood their ways of communicating through the lens of codeswitching? I’ve been thinking particularly about how Ben Rampton’s work on codeswitching and youth could be applied…

And, apparently not everyone at SXSW was hearing repeat speakers. As I walked out, I heard a guy behind me say to his friend, “It was cool, but I didn’t know who he was exactly…I thought it was Henry James.”

Right.

I was never one of those kids who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up (in fact, I'm still not entirely sure...). But it's a privilege to me that I had friends who knew exactly what they wanted to be, and blazed paths in pursuit of those goals, so I knew what it can look like to get from point A to point B, and onwards to C, D, and F. To be sure, I was also graced with examples from adult role models, but it was especially meaningful to see my peers make their way and to learn from them, and now, have the chance to be proud of them.

One of my best friends from high school is now an actor in one of Chicago's most successful and fresh young theatre companies, and she refused to settle for anything less than her dreams, no matter who told her that she would have to wait tables, or that she better major in something practical, just in case. The pictures of my sister sitting at a typewriter at age two seem now to be the perfect symbol of her life path to becoming a newspaper reporter, covering the politics beat. Neither are easy goals to attain, but I'm lucky to know firsthand what it takes to get there.

The person who is perhaps my oldest friend in life - we started school together at age seven and graduated from high school together ten years later - is now a scientist, completing her PhD and contributing to research that is deepening our understanding of ocean sustainability and climate change. My memories of her as far back as middle school include her dreams of being a marine biologist, and I've had the opportunity to see that dream grow into a reality, through many years of formal education, fieldwork, muddy boots, and the most admirable tenacity, even in circumstances under which most of us might give up. Knowing her all these years did little to improve my own scientific abilities, but it taught me what it looks like to do hard work, to be a researcher, and now, to care more about the application of scientific knowledge to the social issues about which I already care very deeply.

For all the talk about preparing students for the world of work, as important as it is to define skill sets and ready them for the global economy, it often seems that we leave out from the conversation what those pathways really look like. There is outstanding work being done to define specific pathways to global citizenship and to digital citizenship, but are we also showing students what it looks like to identify their passions and pursue their own goals? It seems like we're afraid to let students see, "this is what it looks like to be a scientist" and how you can get there, because we're caught up in a belief (or fear?) that jobs will change too fast, as if the economy of the future does not allow for goals or dreams. Knowing that those pathways exist is important, even for the ones who haven't figured out what their dreams might be, and regardless of what they ultimately pursue. Young people should have a realistic (and media literate) understanding of the pathway to the least attainable goals - like being an NBA superstar or the next American Idol, and they should have the same awareness of more common professional journeys, and of those pathways that change at every turn. We should be situating the necessary skills, knowledge, and capacities in these real world pathways - we'll never engage students in those frameworks in the abstract. And, they should know that each of these involves failure, and most of them involve failing multiple times. We're definitely too scared to let students in on that secret, even though learning from failure is likely the most important piece we can model for them.

Just when I think irony has finally been pushed off a cliff to its death (often while people watching in certain areas of my neighborhood in Brooklyn), my faith is renewed.

This morning I set out to read a New York Times article about the convergence of casual games and social networks, as seen in the success of games like Scrabulous, and the enormous potential that has for generating advertising revenue. No sooner had I clicked on the title, which included the phrase "a net to snare social networkers" in it, than was I assaulted by an OpinionMart popup survey asking me to give it all up right then and there.

It's not a bad article, by the way, but since I still can't figure out if this is intentional irony or not, I'm resisting the urge to help the Times with their potential link baiting strategy on this one.

The violence in Philadelphia is bad...very bad...people out of the blue getting hurt and kiling people for no reason. Sometimes there is a reason but there’s no reason for a person to kill another person.
Like my hood if you walk down the street and you don’t live down there u would get jumped are getting ran out the hood. The act of violence in Philadelphia is horrible, we need to be ashamed about how we acing because it’s unneeded.

I realize NYC is 6 times the size of Philadelphia but in 2005 NYC had 4 times as many violent crimes as Philly, but you never hear about NYC being an unsafe place to live. If NYC has 40,000 violent crimes per year and Philly’s has 10,000 violent crimes, in reality which place is more unsafe? I could show you a crime map of NYC, Chicago, DC, and La that would make you never want to step within 1000 miles of those cities.

Crime is everywhere in the cities. Certain sections are where 95% of the crimes take place. Is there spillover into what are seemingly safe neighborhoods? Yes but its exception not the norm. Just like Manhattan is going to be safer than parts of the Bronx/Queens, Center City is going to be safer than West/North Philly

Statistically you're more likely to die in a car crash driving around in suburbia than you are to die as an innocent victim of gun violence in the city.

(You're also much more likely to die on the drive to the airport than you are in the plane. People fear irrational phenomena because they don't feel in control of their lives, not because of actual risk analysis.)

As for Philly's housing values, it's not "worth it" to live anywhere but the exurban fringe of a Sunbelt city (say, Phoenix) if you're doing a strictly economic comparison of housing prices and incomes. But people value intangibles (culture, lifestyles, family). That's why people pay $2,000 a month for apartments the size of boxes in Manhattan. They're not crazy; they're just putting value in other things.

Philadelphia's housing has been historically undervalued when compared to its peers in the Northeast (NY, Boston, DC). Philly's basically playing catch-up now

*Loves to joke
* Attractive
* Suave and caring
* Brave and fearless
* Firm and has leadership qualities
* Knows how to console others
* Too generous and egoistic
* Takes high pride of oneself
* Thirsty for praises
* Extraordinary spirit
* Easily angered
* Angry when provoked
* Easily jealous
* Observant
* Careful and cautious
* Thinks quickly
* Independent thoughts
* Loves to lead and to be led
* Loves to dream
* Talented in the arts, music and defense
* Sensitive but not petty
* Poor resistance against illnesses
* Learns to relax
* Hasty and rushy
* Romantic
* Loving and caring
* Loves to make friends

Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam .. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience!

One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, "You're Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk . You were shot down!"

"How in the world did you know that?" asked Plumb.

"I packed your parachute," the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, "I guess it worked!" Plumb assured him, "It sure did. If your chute hadn't worked, I wouldn't be here today."

Plumb couldn't sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, "I kept wondering what he had looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat; a bib in the back; and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said 'Good morning, how are you?' or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor." Plumb thought of the many hours the sailor had spent at a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn't know.

Now, Plumb asks his audience, "Who's packing your parachute?" Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. He also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory -- he needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports before reaching safety.

Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We may fail to say hello, please, or thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason. As you go through this week, this month, this year, recognize people who pack your parachutes.

One day an employee sends a letter to his boss asking for an increase in his salary!!!


Dear Bo$$



In thi$ life, we all need $ome thing mo$t de$perately. I think you $hould be under$tanding of the need$ of u$ worker$ who have given $o much $upport including $weat and $ervice to your company.

I am $ure you will gue$$ what I mean and re$pond $oon.

Your$ $incerely,



Norman $oh


The next day, the employee recieved this letter of reply:



Dear NOrman,



I kNOw you have been working very hard. NOwadays, NOthing much has changed. You must have NOticed that our company is NOt doing NOticeably well as yet.

NOw the newspaper are saying the world`s leading ecoNOmists are NOt sure if the United States may go into aNOther recession. After the NOvember presidential elections things may turn bad.

I have NOthing more to add NOw. You kNOw what I mean.

Yours truly,
Manager

ONE. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

TWO . Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.

THREE. Don't believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.

FOUR . When you say, "I love you ," mean it.

FIVE. When you say, "I'm sorry," look the person in the eye.

SIX . Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

SEVEN. Believe in love at first sight.

EIGHT. Never laugh at anyone's dream. People who don't have dreams don't have much.

NINE . Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it's the only way to live life completely.

TEN. . In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

ELEVEN . Don't judge people by their relatives.

TWELVE. Talk slowly but think quickly.

THIRTEEN . When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and ask, "Why do you want to know?"

FOURTEEN . Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.


FIFTEEN. Say "bless you" when you hear someone sneeze.


SIXTEEN . When you lose, don't lose the lesson !

SEVENTEEN . Remember the three R's: Respect for self; Respect for others; and responsibility for all your actions.

EIGHTEEN. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

NINETEEN. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

TWENTY. Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice.


TWENTY-ONE. Spend some time alone.


Now, here's the FUN part!
Send this to at least 5 people and your life will improve. 1-4 people: Your life will improve slightly.
5-9 people: Your life will improve to your liking.
9-14 people: You will have at least 5 surprises in the next 3 weeks

15 and above: Your life will improve drastically and everything you ever dreamed of will begin to take shape.

A true friend is someone who reaches for your hand and touches your heart.

This was my favorite picture from the community walk because I was glad to see that the community gave tribute to the Philadelphia Negro League because a lot of black people do not recieve a lot of credit and for them to have a whole memorial deicated to the Philadelphia Baseball Negro League its a step up from not reconizing black people at all.