Click here for the video!

Yesterday marked the first day of LAMPcamp 2010, running concurrently in the Bronx with the Mount Hope Housing Company and in Brooklyn at the Park Slope Armory with the Prospect Park YMCA!

In The Bronx, News 12 stopped by to interview LAMP students and teachers for a video segment on LAMPcamp. Click here to check it out!

Brooklyn LAMPcamp also got off to a fantastic start. In the words of lead facilitator Lorenzo Tijerina:

“The group was, as expected, very boisterous and lively and eager to get started. We began with the entrance survey, which everyone filled out. We moved on to to viewing commercials and got to use the fancy new projector, which I love by the way. We got the kids talking by showing them a few sensational videos involving BP and the World Cup, asking them to describe the purpose of these commercials in their own words. They had a great understanding of the intent and techniques used by the advertisers. We also showed them a re-cut BP commercial on YouTube and they were very excited about the idea of expressing opinion through satire and video.

We introduced the class to some of the vocabulary of persuasion, and with the help of the facilitators they really seemed to get it. By the halfway point we moved into the first exercise, the Media Scavenger Hunt. We ended up with about 16 kids, which allowed us to divide them up pretty evenly into four groups. I stayed behind while the kids hit the streets with the YMCA staff and the other facilitators. Katherine, Chrissy, Scott and Mike all agreed that the children were calm and well-behaved outside, but still excited about the exercise.

The children videotaped their findings, paying particular attention to ads that are not supposed to be directed at them, such as alcohol and cigarette advertisements. They did describe many of these ads as being very colorful and attention grabbing. This led into a discussion about their interest in these products, peer pressure and the glamorization of adulthood.

Finally, at the end of the class I went around with a Flip camera and got to know everyone. Then, everyone signed my cast and we called it a day.”

Stay tuned for more LAMPcamp news!

So, what is news literacy? It’s the ability to think critically about the news, and the way you find out about what is reported in the world around you. It helps you form your own opinions, and become a more active media consumer. Instead of believing whatever a news outlet tells you, you’ll be thinking for yourself about how, why and where you get the news that shapes your life and your everyday decisions. Download Check out the news! for free today, and you’ll never see news in quite the same way again.

In a recent issue of Education Week, an online newsletter published for K-12 educators, included an article about Obama’s emphasis on technology and K-12 education as a key component of his economic stimulus plan.

Great, I guess.

Of course it’s great that Obama understands the importance of improving access to broadband technology and sufficient computers in all schools so that students can use the Internet in the classroom. And of course that is where education is headed globally. The United States must absolutely improve its education model to incorporate in a significant way the new ‘dominant tool of our cultural conversation’ (to borrow from Neil Postman, who used that term decades ago to describe television).

The use of media technology such as the Internet, when used the right way, can revolutionize education, making it work for everyone, not just for those in schools and school districts with economic means. Obama is right that our hopes of future economic strenghth begins in excellent education for all young people right now.

What I want to know is how, specifically, do Obama and his administration envision the use of technology such as the Internet in classrooms? My hope is that a good chunk of education using media technology incorporates critically understanding how media technologies work, how media differ from each other, how message are produced, and how all tools of conversation can be analyzed and critically examined. In short, I hope that media literacy is part of the package. It’s one thing to make it available; It’s another thing entirely to make it useful.

The Education Week article did mention the need for lots of professional development for educators as part of the plan. Yes, absolutely! There are many media scholars and media literacy organizations, including non-profit organizations such as the LAMP, that truly understand how to use media and also how to examine media within larger contexts such as education, social interaction, and even politics and the economy.

It’s time to get the word out to the new administration. If you’re serious about media technology in schools, we’re here to help deliver it the right way.

–Katherine G. Fry, PhD

We know kids are attracted to television commercials, and are, for the most part, impressed by catchy ad messages, wherever and whenever these ads catch their attention. I see the attraction in my own children, though I try my best to point out to them the flaws in the messages every chance I get. As a result, my 10 year-old has become a bit cynical. Good for him.

What most people may not know is the lengths to which marketers go to shape children into consumers – even going so far in their “research” as to visit the homes of these malleable little spenders, talking to them about what they eat, what they wear, and what they like to do, all in the interest of figuring out the best way to sell to them. The marketers also get the wee friends involved, since it’s best for marketing practitioners to witness kiddie group think. The worst part is that not only do the marketers talk at length, and intensely, with these burgeoning consumers, they also just sit and watch them—with the video camera running. As one critic featured in Consuming Kids aptly explained, it’s just absolutely creepy!

The video is a must-watch for parents. It reminds me of a kiddie version of “cool hunting,” a practice explained in the PBS documentary Merchants of Cool, where marketers penetrate the minds of urban youth trendsetters, looking for ideas to steal so they can brand their sodas, sneakers and other products using techniques that continuously associate those products with the latest, hippest trends.

The irony is that it’s just so uncool to shape children into consumers. I realize it’s been happening for a long time, and that it’s virtually impossible to steer clear from it. After all, how did we get into this financial mess in the first place? But thank goodness for a video like Consuming Kids, which lays it out there–cynical marketers, cutesy advertising, the resulting eternally dissatisfied children slathered in advertising–all of it.

Truth be told, kids need to watch this, too. I’ll get my 10-year-old to sit down and watch. Maybe we’ll get a viral anti-marketing thing going at his school, for the kids and the parents.

–Katherine Fry

The First Amendment to our Constitution was written when speech and print were the predominant means available for political and social discourse. But as each new communication technology–first broadcasting and now the Internet and other digital means–has developed, we take another look at what freedom of speech and the press ought to mean when a new environment for discourse is created. Whose rights should be curbed, and under what circumstances? Underpinning these new inquiries is a fear of the social implications of the new communication technology/environment,especially where young people are concerned. How can we control them?

The Philadelphia Inquirer just reported that the Hermitage School District in western Pennsylvania is appealing a judge’s decision that a high school student had not violated a school’s civility code by things he posted in a MySpace profile. The profile, first posted in 2006, was bogus. It was a parody profile that the student, Justin Layshock, made up, attaching his high school principal’s name and image. The student was making fun of his principal, and was, according to the attorney representing the district, being vulgar about it, thus violating the school’s civility code.

The school district wrought heavy discipline on Justin who was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union in a suit Justin’s parents brought against the school district. That judge ruled in favor of the student, and now the decision is under appeal in a Federal Appeals Court in Philadelphia.

Without going into all of the details here, it seems the Appeals Court will uphold the first judge’s ruling. What I really mean to say is, if I were a judge hearing the appeal, I’d uphold the decision. Why? Because the comments were made on MySpace and, as the first judge declared, that’s not in school, and it’s out of the jurisdiction of school.

Now, there could possibly be a libel case in there, if the principal could sufficiently prove malice, irreparable harm to his reputation, and a host of other things, but this was a case about a student saying something kind of nasty about a school authority figure—which happens all the time. Except this time it was on a social networking site where young people post lots of things that they used to just say to each other face to face or on the telephone. And it wasn’t posted on a school computer, using a school’s server. It was away from school, on his grandmother’s computer, no less.

Understandably, the whole incident is upsetting to the principal and other school figures, and probably lots of other people. But the big issue here is preserving freedom of speech. Even if it’s not pleasant speech, and even if it’s speech by a minor who probably deserves some kind of reprimand.

Maybe the reprimand could come by way of giving this young person—and all young people—a better understanding of the ramifications of speech on the Internet, particularly via social networking sites. Who wants to go through all of this kind of legal wrangling, anyway?

Instead of fearing this medium, these social networking sites, it’s best to take a breath, accept that we, all of us who use the Internet for a host of things everyday, are part of a new communication environment. And it’s challenging us while it’s changing us. That’s what environments do. We’re being shaped and it’s sometimes frightening, and we want to protect young people from this thing we don’t understand.

It’s best to offer measured guidance about wise uses of social networking sites—maybe uses that aren’t depraved. But let’s not censor anyone anew just because of the new means of communicating. And let’s listen to those—many of them students–who use the sites without fear. We can probably learn a lot from each other.

–Katherine Fry, Ph.D., LAMP Education Director

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Happy Holidays from the LAMP!

I always felt the fear factor was higher than it needed to be, and that fair use provisions of the U.S. copyright code were not examined and discussed as widely as they should be among the students and faculty. In part this is understandable because, as the Utne Reader’s recent online article, “How Fair use Got its Groove Back,” points out, fair use provisions are vague, and most of us in media education are encouraged to fear for our legal lives. As a faculty adviser myself, I’ve been more liberal in my encouragement that MFA students include those few seconds of footage or that still image where it would help make an important point in the documentary. After all, as author Julie Hanus suggests in the Utne piece, how can you engage in (very necessary) media criticism if you cannot invoke the media productions themselves? It really can’t be done.

Educators need to be bold, and need to challenge media producers as well as outdated copyright law itself. After all, media scholar and producer Sut Jhally boldly challenged big corporate media when he produced his first video in the Dreamworlds series with the Media Education Foundation. The Dreamworlds productions use clips from years of televised music videos to scrutinize the sexualized images of girls and women. At first MTV went after Jhally, but their legal case essentially went nowhere. It was a gigantic coup for media educators and critics, but it didn’t quell the fears of most media educators. Too bad. Someone needed to take this on as a full-time project. Especially now that digital media are fodder for so much more media, and so much more media criticism.

Now we have that project. American University’s Center for Social Media (see their document “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use”) is taking on the whole issue of fair use and copyright law on behalf of media educators and artists. People like the Center’s Patricia Aufderheide and Temple University’s Renee Hobbs are taking bold steps on behalf of those of us who are impassioned by the need for media literacy, which includes the need to use examples of media language to critique that language, with the goal of developing critical faculties among the youth and adults we’re committed to educating. And that’s our commitment at the LAMP.

There’s a lot at stake here, and in this media saturated environment, we’ve got to be bold, not cowed. We’re media literacy educators. If we can’t take on big media ourselves, how can we possibly teach others to do the same?

–Katherine Fry

Summer Vacation 2008

Originally uploaded by merfam

As our Education Director, Katherine, heads out of the city on a long car-saddled road tour of our western landscape, it brings to mind the storied tradition of the assignment that usually awaited students on their first week back into school:

An essay describing what they did on their summer vacation.

When I authored these reports in my youth, they were exclusively written down on a sheet of paper, and then read in front of a classroom. I might even bring with me small trinkets and mementos that I could display for my audience that would aid in illustrating my adventures, but that is as fancy as i would get. Nowadays, there are so many incredible ways a student could tell the story of their summer. I’m curious if there are in fact teachers, parents or even students who spend their months off by capturing them via a blog, or a video camera or even a digital sound recorder, who will then later share this interactive presentation with their classmates.

Man, just thinking about that kind of report makes me wish I was on summer vacation.

p.s. Let us know by e-mail if you give or receive an assignment like this: dc@thelampnyc.org Happy Summer!