The Gap Between Life and Art: Remix Culture for Learning

Erin Reilly, University of Southern California

• Context of remix culture
  • One in four online teens remix content that they find online (like songs, text, and images) and remix them into their own artistic creations
  • Remixing media is a part of participatory culture; teens meaningfully connect in ways that combine media
• Music culture
  • Remix and mashups of songs, combining melodies from two songs to make a new one
• Video remix
  • Using preinstalled software or other web-based programs like jaycut
  • Recut — take one of your favorite movies and cut it into something new (Shining)
  • Political remix – Racial Equality for $29.95
  • Machinima – Global Kids (using the practice of remixing to create new content based on content studied)
  • Fan Vidding
• Participation Gap
  • Access to tools like Wikipedia, YouTube, and networks for collaboration changes the game
  • We in teacher education, K-12 classrooms, and other educational settings need to encourage learning in a participatory culture
  • We need to work in the gap between life and school
  • We are now reading a transmedia story, writing across networks, participating in games
  • Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006)
• To develop a remix…
  • The creator must consider how the original source is related to a new context
  • Edutopia: Digital Generation Project (Nicole Pinkert’s project: Digital Youth Network)
  • Geeking out, messing around, and hanging around (Ito et al)
  • McLuhan — media as an extension of ourselves
• How do I get started?
  • Trying to think about the logistical and ethical challenges of creating new media: Media Makers Challenges
  • Transmedia characters, such as the ones from Heros (video of Heroes creator Tim Kring on transmedia storytelling)
  • How to do this in the classroom? Invite your students to create character profiles on Twitter, invite them to create new texts from the characters’ perspective
  • Begin by learning about these ideas for self-education, then moving into classroom and after school programs
  • Be conservative in content, but radical in approach
    • What’s essential, what can be transferred into a new medium?
  • Reading a remix strategy
  • Communities of Practice to Join
    • CCmixter
    • Total Recut
    • Political Remix Video
    • Organization of Transformative Works
    • Project New Media Literacies Ning
• Notes from Q&A
  • New Media Early Adopters Group in New Hampshire
  • Reading in a Participatory Culture
    • It is very important to have a community of practice, and if we leave students and teachers out of this community they will not gain as much.
    • The process is messy; we need to recognize and embrace this.
    • We are so tied to the idea that things have to be perfect, but they do not. We need to know that things can be messy.
  • Henry Jenkins’ idea of transmedia storytelling is now appearing in a major federal grant
  • CAST from Harvard - UDL Bookbuilder
  • Play as a new media literacy
  • Thinking about 21st century assessment with Jim Gee’s project
  • Dan Pink’s book, Drive — autonomy, mastery, and purpose as motivators
  • Authorship, ownership, copyright, and fair use
    • New media literacy of appropriation, and how to deal with that – three modules on the new media literacy library deal with this
    • People don’t understand the context of fair use — check out Renee Hobbs and the Temple Media Education Lab
  • Study from Matt Levinson on laptop integration, From Fear to Facebook
  • Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard