Syndicated

It's been over three years in the making, but we are at long last releasing the results of our Digital Youth Project. The goal of this work was to gain an understanding of youth new media practice in the U.S. by engaging in ethnographic research across a diverse range of youth populations, sites, and activities. A collaboration between 28 researchers and research collaborators, this was a large ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of their Digital Media and Learning initiative. I was one of the PIs on the project together with Peter Lyman, Michael Carter, and Barrie Thorne.

The project has been quite a journey, and has been by far the most challenging and rewarding research project I've undertaken so far. It tested my skills at so many levels -- fieldwork, conceptually, theoretically, and in management. I feel so fortunate to for the opportunity to have undertaken this project with fabulous colleagues and a team of graduate students and postdocs who taught me so much along the way.

I'm particularly proud of the shared report that we have just released, which was a genuinely collaborative effort, co-authored by 15 of us on the team, and including contributions from many others. We took a step that is unusual with ethnographic work, of trying to engage in joint analysis rather than simply putting together an edited collection of case studies. We spent the past year reading each others interviews and fieldnotes, and developing categories that cut across the different case studies. Each chapter of the book incorporates material from multiple case studies, and is an effort to describe the diversity in youth practice at it emerged from a range of different youth populations and practices.

You can find all the details in the documents linked below, and a summary of our report. The book is due out from MIT Press next fall, but in the meantime you can read a draft of it online. Our book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Lyman.

Sadly, I won't be able to attend, but my team will be celebrating the release of our report at a reception at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco. Saturday November 22, at 6:30-8:00pm, San Francisco Hilton & Towers, Golden Gate Ballroom.

Click here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Click here to download the summary white paper.

Click here to access the full report.

Click here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

cogdogblog posted a photo:

Flickr offers many tools that allow you to transmit or "syndicate" your images so they dynamically appear on other web sites-- so when you update your photo collection on flickr, they can be displayed on other sites without having to do any work there.

You can look at using this on two different levels- ones is to create a flickr account that is the source to publish images elsewhere, or to be broader and use tools to transmit images that everyone is posting on flickr.

For the second example, I made an example that generates a Flash "badge", or an small animated display of all photos added to flickr that have been "tagged" with the keyword k12online06 -- so as pepope participate in this conference, maybe upload their own photos, this badge gives a way to peek into previews of the most recent photos. It's likely one of these will appear on the conference web site, but I made an example you can see, and have provided the code you can copy and paste to use in your own sites:
cogdogblog.com/stuff/k12online06/badge-all.html

Flickr has a badge generation tool that lets you create this on 4 easy steps.

For the more limite approach, you may want to post just the images you want from a single account, say a teacher who is using it to form an image pool that can by "transmitted" to her class blog page, perhaps showing the latest student projects for parents to get a peek at, or recent photos for a field trip. Flickr also provides a badge tool that can create a vertical or horizontal strip of images; either ones form an entire account, or from my second example, just my own pictures that feature dogs:

cogdogblog.com/stuff/k12online06/badge-dog.html

Lastly, flickr accounts have the ability to connect them to various blog tools, including Blogger, so that you can create a blog post using any of your own flickr images-- it will allow to to enter the text to go along with the picture, and automatically publish it to your site. Check out an example of a photo of some big old canyon (my onw photo) I posted to a Blogger site directly from flickr:
cogdoghouse.blogspot.com/2006/10/blog-posting-from-flickr...

But actually, you can also create blog posts based on other people's images (if they have provided the permission to do this), so this opens some possibilities for having students research images within flickr, and then publish findings, with commentary, to a blog site.

So I used the flickr creative commons search for some school related images, and found an interesting photo of a sign at a school, so I used flickr's tools to again, compose a blog entry based on someone else's image:
cogdoghouse.blogspot.com/2006/10/blogging-someone-elses-p...

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return to cool flickr stuff
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This is but one piece of "I Didn't Know You Could Do That with Free Web Tools", a presentation for the 2006 K-12 Online Conference. Other pieces are scattered across the web!