TakingITGlobal

I introduced my Student Activist Club today to the TakingITGlobal.org Web site. The teenagers perused the site and spent some time checking it out and seeing what is available there. I believe they were most excited about being able to communicate with young people from around the globe; young people with an interest in bettering their communities, just like my students want to.

We were pressed for time today, since they're already working on a project; Locks of Love. Ours is a vocational high school, and the Student Activists are hosting a Locks of Love day in coordination with the Cosmetology shop. They have planned the fund raiser (for cancer patients) for early next year.

I hope the TakingITGlobal site is something we can build upon over time. Perhaps, if one of them strikes up some personal connections on the site, it will catch on and quietly grow as a source of inspiration and growth. Also, the site provides some very useful resources. I printed out their how-to workbook. It's about twenty pages long and is a terrific planning document. It was written by young people, for young people, and seemed to be an excellent tool for organizing and leading individual projects.

There is also a how-to on presenting workshops. This would be an extremely ambitious project for the club, since it was only founded about two months ago. However, once a track record has been established with a few successful projects, I believe this group will certainly be up to the task. The TakingITGlobal manual was very thorough and would serve as an excellent guideline.

In any event, I have found yet another outstanding resource, in this case TakingITGlobal.org, which is a perfect fit with my high school Student Activist Club.

I will add that to some other very practical things I've learned in this media course. Namely, how to create a blog, how to participate in a live internet classroom, and just today I learned what a wiki is, and went about creating a space on wikispace.com. Wikispace offers a free classroom space to k-12 teachers. I'm going to take them up on that, since I see some great potential there.

This stuff is amazing!

Independent Media

STRANGE

My recent investigations of independent media uncovered an odd situation. It appears to me that independent media is mainly a liberal effort; a rant and rage against evil corporate moguls who feed the public what it wants to hear for the sake of profit. But my personal experience has been that the drivel being fed out is mostly liberal drivel.

I like to read all points of view. But in the mainstream, corporate media, I find an overabundance of liberal views, and a darth of libertarian and conservative views. So when we dug into independent media, I hoped to find relief from this one-sided view of the world. But it was not to be. The independent media appears overwhelmingly slanted leftward, while it rails against corporate America.

I find that strange.

Why are leftists angry that someone is turning a profit by publishing what leftists want us to know? Do profits upset them? Maybe they don't like corporations. Or maybe they don't like the public. Or maybe they don't like profits, corporations, and the public. Who knows?

INTERESTING

As our UMass course progresses, it becomes more clear to me what a great flux mass media finds itself in. Also becoming clear is the idea that we have a number of potential alternatives floating about, but none have yet solidified and become strong, viable options.

YouTube and the like offer great potential, but how will it be realized? Presently, it seems like a wild and crazy blizzard of internet flakes. In the past few weeks, however, this has changed greatly. I've gone from seeing YouTube as teenagers' playground to perhaps being the next great media outlet. The potential is there for it, and similar outlets, to have tremendous impact.

Then again, maybe it fizzles... potential unrealized.

Film at 11:00.