All posts by Zachary

Participatory Culture

Abandon Commercial, Consumer, Mainstream, Mass Media

With the recent SOPA (HR 3261) and PROTECT-IP (SB 968) bills making their separate ways through Congress, I asked myself, “Why do people continually consume media by corporations whose only perception of its patrons is that of a passive consumer. Ignorance? Complacency? Apathy? Naivety?”

Since I have made my own switch to a more participatory culture (one that encourages my involvement instead of stifles it), I have found my media engagement to be considerably more fulfilling.

Two major proponents of participatory culture are FLOSS (Free, libre, open source software) and the Creative Commons.

For those that wish to join me, and the millions of others who have already made the switch to abandon commercial, consumer, mainstream, and mass media, here is a small guide, starting with audio, to help you with that process. I will also be documenting this guide on a similarly titled page.

Audio/Music

  • Archive.org’s Audio Collection – A huge collection of music, lectures, and everything else that can be recorded via audio. Archive.org has partnered (one of many) with etree.org to archive many of their collections of trade-encouraged and freely recorded works.
  • WFMU – Freeform, commercial free, listener supported radio station of the nation. The fun 91. They archive and have made accessible (almost) every show their DJs have played since the year 2000. That’s over 96,000 hours of audio for you to enjoy.
  • Free Music Archive – A Creative Commons, public domain music curated collective.
  • etree.org – The award-winning leader in lossless digital audio distribution on the Internet. They are a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format.
  • Bandcamp – A website that allows artists to distribute and sell their audio and merchandise directly to fans. Not all of Bandcamp’s content is Creative Commons licensed, but they do also support these artists. You can find some who are by searching tags creativecommons and creative commons. Hopefully this will improve in the future.
Applications

Scratch: A Taste of the FLOSS Programming World

Scratch-MIT-Logo

I recently had the pleasure of playing around with Scratch while building a new universal image for our labs. Scratch is a graphical, drag-and-drop programming language aimed at young people and beginning programmers. The intuitive interface makes programming a snap. Because of this, we have made sure to install it in all of our computer labs.

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Compared to ALICE, one can be up and programming within a matter of seconds.

Some interesting features:

  • Drag and drop interface
  • Shape and colored coded elements
  • Built in, simple graphics editor to create new sprites easily
  • Online community built upon sharing the program and code with other users around the world

I like that MIT has developed a social community focusing on various aspects of the greater FLOSS world to encourage Scratch programmers to share, discuss, and build upon the knowledge and efforts of others. This is definitely a must have for any child’s computer.

Scratch: overview from andresmh on Vimeo.

Resources

ProCon.org

A student recently requested the site ProCon.org be unblocked for research. It was blocked because the web filter, Lightspeed, categorized the Medical Marijuana subdomain as a drug web site. Upon reviewing the page, I discovered that this non-profit research portal was a great free resource for investigation.

ProCon.org provides a clean, easy to follow interface for anyone who wants to engage in an educational journey with one of their 43 controversial topics. The site includes bibliographies, pictures, video, and audio that surrounding the chosen topics. Who would have thought learning about the pluses and minuses of Ronald Reagan could be so much fun.

If you are a teacher and want some ideas on how to use the site, you can check out their teacher and librarian resource page. There are several great ideas to incorporate into your classroom today.

ProCon.org also provides a great resource regarding the 2012 US Presidential Election. The enjoyment never stops with this web site!