Advice for 2014 Media Ideation Fellows

Great news for aspiring social and tech entrepreneurs! Media Ideation is looking for a brand new batch of fellows. Applications are officially open. I had the pleasure of being part of the inaugural class of Media Ideation fellows last year.

Several people have reached out asking for advice as they prepare their applications due January 31, 2014. I've compiled a Q&A list below based on questions people have been asking me. Feel free to tweet me @taralconley if you have additional questions or insights to provide. I'll be sure to update this post with new questions as they come in.

Best of luck to all the applicants!

Can you tell me about your experience with the fellowship?

Overall, my experience with the fellowship has been a good one. I was awarded the graduate level fellowship ($12,000), which afforded me the opportunity to develop TXT CONNECT over the course of 3 months. I’ve met people in the design and tech fields that I probably would not have met otherwise. Certainly there are moments when I wish I had more time and more funds to work with but I think these limitations force you to hone your idea into something that is realistic and feasible. The financial support from the fellowship enabled me to work closely with co-designers (youth in NYC), and as a result I was able to develop a mobile platform with young people and also write a research study based on our time spent together. My research study is currently under the review of an international journal.

How are you using the fellowship for 3 months for a project that will likely take much more time to develop?

As mentioned above, because you have a limited amount of time and funds to work with, the best advice I can give to those who are now applying is to narrow your focus and scope down to an idea that can be developed realistically and feasibly. Ask yourself: What can I realistically accomplish in three or six months? Remember that the fellowship is there to help you develop your idea, so use that time wisely. As visionaries we tend to think long-term, certainly keep this strategy in mind, but also incorporate short-term strategies as a way to scaffold, or build up through each phase.

Think about how best your time and funds can be utilized across various stages of development including technology and legal costs and building relationships over time. Really breakdown what development means for your project. It’s not just the technology itself that has to be developed, but also the relationships and partnerships with stakeholders, community members, and/or end users that also need to be developed and nurtured overtime. As it concerns legal issues and costs, you want to do some research about incorporation and/or terms of service. The fellowship offers access to legal consultants.

How did you choose your deliverables for the fellowship period?

Since TXT CONNECT was also my pilot study for my doctoral research, I already had a good idea of what my timeline looked like going into the fellowship. My deliverables were primarily based on a timeline I created early on. The fellowship asks you to outline a timeline, which I think is a great strategy to get you thinking about what and how you can accomplish various benchmarks and milestones. I knew I had 90 days to work with, so I thought strategically about what I could realistically accomplish each month, whether it was solidifying a name, organizing focus groups, or launching a beta version of the platform, each stage or phase was outlined before I began the fellowship. As you are going through the application process consider this the beginning stage of building your strategy.

What did you do during your fellowship?

I spent most of the fellowship designing and developing TXT CONNECT with co-designers in informal focus group settings. We met once or twice a week for 3 months. I also spent a good deal of time consulting with designers, partners, organizers, and lawyers to help think through development and towards implementation. Overall, I spent most of my time listening to other people and redesigning accordingly.

Tara L. Conley Racial Literacy Roundtables Talk

On Monday, October 14, 2013 I presented at this year's first Racial Literacy Roundtables talk at Teachers College Columbia University. I presented on my current and ongoing research involving participatory design and working with young people who are involved in foster care and juvenile/criminal justice systems to develop TXT CONNECT, a free mobile platform for court-involved youth in NYC.

Highlights from the talk include:

• Ways to conceptualize and re-imagine participation.
• Reviewing youth demographic statistics in NYC, highlighting, in particular, the disproportionate number of Black and brown youth involved in juvenile/criminal justice systems and foster care.
• Reflecting on what it means to engage multiple stakeholders in the process of designing a technical and digital artifact with and for young people who are often disconnected and lack reliable access to information.

Some notable statistics (references included in slides below):

• 25% of youth (< 18-years-old) in NYC are considered Black/African American, yet make up 65% of the juvenile justice population in NYC, and 59% of the foster care population in NYC.
• 35.5% of youth (< 18-years-old) in NYC are considered Hispanic, and make up 30% of the juvenile justice population in NYC, and 27.4% of the foster care population in NYC.
• White youth make up 25% of the youth population in NYC, yet make up less than 5% of the juvenile justice and foster care population in NYC

This was the first time I was able to present my research, in depth, to my peers and others in the academic community. The conversations that emerged from the chat were inspiring, particularly as it had to do with the ways educators and researchers are currently thinking about how social and digital media can, and ought to be used as meaningful tools in the classroom and beyond.

So often we assume media are something young people simply and only consume, but in fact, we're learning that young people are also integral mediamakers and designers in the "stuff" they use.

Below is a highlight video from the talk.

Tara L. Conley Racial Literacy Roundtables Talk from Media Make Change on Vimeo.

I've also posted my presentation slides HERE.

For more information on my current research, please visit www.taralconley.org

Credits: Lalitha Vasudevan (photography and videography), Joe Riina-Ferrie (videography)

Participatory Design and Young People as 'Possibilities Personified'

 Tara L. Conley, Teachers College, Columbia University (March 29, 2013)

This past Friday, I had the opportunity to speak about participatory design and fostering critical connections in our work with young people. Though the talk was meant as a brief audition for TEDxTeachersCollege next month, I was able to share some of the work I've been doing with young people involved in building a text line for court-involved youth in NYC.

As I continue to work with young people on the mobile initiative, I'm beginning to understand why it's important for us, as educators, designers, researchers, and social entrepreneurs to involve young people in the work that we're doing. Particularly if your mission is to actively support communities and young people, it's important to involve motivated young leaders because, quite frankly, they know more than we do about what's best for their neighborhoods, families, and local cohorts. It's sounds simple enough but you'd be surprised at how much we end up not actively involving young people in work that is meant to support their growth.

In this brief 5-minute talk I outline some of the reasons why I believe that participating in collaborative working groups is an effective strategy for community building and social entrepreneurship. I also touch on the idea that the process of building and creating technology platforms with others may result in a kinship formation experience where we not only produce knowledge together but we do so in a way that can yield sustainable outcomes for surrounding communities.

A few key definitions and insights that inform my work thus far:

Participatory Design

"Participatory design is a hybrid experience where participants are neither user or developer but both simultaneously. Characteristics of PD experiences include 'challenging assumptions, learning reciprocally, and creating new ideas, which emerge through negotiation and co-creation of identities, working languages, understandings, and relationships, and polyvocal (many-voiced) discussions across and through differences'" (Muller; 2002).

“‘Believing in the potential of everyone to design is more egalitarian than believing in exclusive talents and specialised roles. However, this is not the same as involving every potential user in every design project, or at all stages, or in the same way as the next person" (Light & Luckin, 2008).

It is not the hand that makes the designer, it’s the eye. Learning to design is learning to see . . .Our experience sharpens our eyes to certain perceptions and shapes what we expect to see, just as what we expect to see shapes our experience. Our reality is perspectival. Although we don’t perceive and sense things that a more experienced practitioner can, we can learn. (Reichenstein; 2013).

Transcript from my talk below.

Thank you.

I’d like to share a quote with you from author Margaret Wheatley, who received her doctorate in education from Harvard University. She wrote in 2006,

“Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections.  We don't need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits.  Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment that lead to broad-based change”

I recently received a Media Ideation Fellowship grant that will allow me to begin developing a text line for court-involved youth in New York City. The text line will support young people involved in foster care, juvenile justice, and criminal justice systems so that can use their cell phones to access educational, vocational, and intervention support resources.

I’m currently working directly with young people who serve on the text line youth advisory board to develop the mobile initiative.

For the TEDxTeachersCollege conference, I would like to talk about the significance of collaborative working groups between young people and social entrepreneurs, and the exponential impact this particular collaborative cohort has on the broader community.

I want to talk about how we can, as Margaret Wheatley amply describes, foster critical connections through our work and by way of democratic working processes, and through what Oliver Reichenstein articulates as an understanding that learning to design (in what ever form that may take for educators, scholars, and designers) means learning to see. Learning to see.

To that end, I want to discuss how we might envision and situate technology artifacts as points of entry where community building and kinships can emerge. And how we might re-conceptualize the process of building and incorporating technologies in learning spaces with members of communities we wish to serve.

While working with the youth advisory board over the past four weeks, I’m beginning to notice these sort of third space, or hybrid, themes come about, and I want to share these themes with the TC community as a way to inform our teaching, researching, and design practices.

Some of the themes I’ve noticed include:

• The idea that social entrepreneurship is fundamentally participatory
• That participatory design methods as defined by Mueller look more and more like kinship formations
• Also the idea that critical connections yield knowledge production that is local, specific, and sustainable
• And the idea that hybridization does not only apply to theory and practice but also applies to entrepreneurship and learning
• And finally, it is the notion that education is a concept we can actually define through democratic learning processes and, most importantly, through love.

Before I go, I want to share with you a story. I was walking home with one of the youth advisory board members recently. And she told me that when she first heard about the opportunity to be part of the development of the text line she knew she wanted to be involved. She told me that she thought the text line would be a great way for court-involved youth to access resources that were usually difficult to impossible to access. Then she said to me, “You know, when I first head that someone was developing a text line for court-involved youth, my first thought was, ‘Wow! Someone out there actually cares about fosters kids.’”

That was my ah-ha moment. That was when I realized why it’s so important for us to develop strategies and create spaces where we involved young people in our teaching, researching, and design methods.

Because young people are not statistics or bodies to fill up classrooms, residential facilities, or prisons. They are media makers. They are developers. They are designers. Young people, especially the one I work with, are possibilities personified. Thank you.

References

Fouche, R. (2013). “From Black Inventors to One Laptop Per Child: Exploring a Racial Politics of Technology” in Race after the Internet, L. Nakamura & P. A. Chow-White (EDs). (pp. 61-83)

Kensing, F. and J. Blomberg. (1998). Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns

Light, A., and Luckin, R. (2008). Designing for social justice: People, technology, and learning. Futurelab: http://archive.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/opening-education-reports/

Muller, M. J. Participatory design: The third space in HCI. In J. A. Jacko and A. Sears (Eds.), The Human Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2002, 1051–1068.

Reinchenstein, O. (2013). Learning to see.

Founder Tara L. Conley Named 2013 Media Ideation Fellow

I'm so pleased to announced that I've been named as one of the 2013 Media Ideation Fellows! I, along with Kristy Tillman, Charles DeTar, and Yongjun Heo are among the very first class of fellows supported by the Media Ideation Fellowship, a Voqal initiative.

Several months ago, I asked for your nomination for the fellowship and many of you came through with support. For that, I thank you. I'm humbled and overwhelmed with gratitude, especially knowing that my work will be supported financially and by way of professional mentorship. Through the generous support of the Media Ideation Fund, I will be able to begin developing a text line for court-involved youth in New York City.

The Text Line for Court-Involved (CI) Youth [official name TBD] will provide anonymous means for young people who are tethered to foster care, juvenile justice, and criminal justice systems in New York City to access resources and seek support beyond the institutions to which they are bound.

Eventually, users of the text line will be able to:

• Access available tutoring services and job listings in their neighborhoods.
• Access family planning and mental health services.
• Connect immediately to crisis and emergency response hotlines.
• Set up reminders for court dates and other appointments.
• Receive automated information about Know Your Rights (ACLU) and tips/suggestions about how to talk to lawyers and caseworkers.

There is a tremendous amount of work ahead and the fellowship marks only the beginning of further development that will need to be completed to ensure that young people involved in foster care and juvenile justice systems receive the support and resources they need and deserve.

So far this month I've been meeting (and hanging out!) with several young people who are serving as youth advisory board members. Their insights, stories, and perspectives will inform the purpose and uses of the line. The youth advisory board members will be making their public debut on MEDIA MAKE CHANGE very soon, so stick around and prepare to be touched and inspired by the work these incredible young people are doing. I can't wait for you to meet them!

I'll continue to keep MMC readers updated on new developments within the next few months. In addition to a beta launch of the text line, we will also be launching an official Facebook group page that will begin connecting agencies, organizations, resources, and CI youth online and via social media.

Finally, I invite those who will be in the NYC area on March 29th, 2013 to come support me as I audition for TEDxTeachersCollege. I'll be giving a brief pitch on a proposed TED talk about participatory design and how mobile technology can enable members of transient and displaced groups to build stronger connections and networked communities across contexts. It'll be like American Idol for nerds! You can register for the conference by going to TEDxTeachersCollege.com

With that, I leave you with an excerpt about critical connections that has stayed with me since I began this work. The quote comes from Margaret Wheatley.

Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections.  We don't need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits.  Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment that lead to broad-based change (2006).

If you are a mobile strategist, funder, or developer and interested in learning more about the text line, please email me directly at tara [at] mediamakechange [dot] org.