[iDC] The Bronx Blog Project

[Joshua Levy]

Hello fellow iDC'ers, I'm Josh Levy, an MFA student at Hunter College  
in New York and an editor for the web site Personal Democracy Forum  
(www.personaldemocracy.com).  Last spring I completed a project that  
continues to hold valuable lessons for me as I continue on with my  
thesis and other adventures.

The project, called the Bronx Blog Project (www.levjoy.com/ 
bronxblogproject), resulted from my excitement about emerging social  
media practices and my disappointment that large segments of society  
were missing out on them.  I had gotten interested in the political  
and social implications of social software and the grandiose claims  
being made by its marketers.  One comment from Bart Decrem, who'd  
worked Firefox and at the time was the head of the Flock browser  
project, was particularly striking:

> We are part of the participation revolution, a shift of control  
> away from corporations, publishers and others large entities, and  
> towards the individual.

A revolution!  He was talking about a new web browser that -- in  
accordance with Web 2.0 doctrine -- was supposed to help enable the  
production of "user-generated content" (see Jon Pareles' piece in the  
NY Times today for a more reasoned discussion).

Essentially, Flock was/is (it's still under development) a web  
browser based on Firefox that makes it easy to upload pictures to  
Flickr and see your friends' pics, tag bookmarks for del.icio.us,  
write blog posts, etc., all using tools built into the browser.   
Fun?  Yes.  Important?  Probably.  Revolutionary?  I dunno.

But I realized that a big reason why I got interested in this stuff  
-- why I've been so fascinated with Clay Shirky's discussions of  
folksonomies, or the rise of Wikipedia, or rise of citizen journalism  
-- is that within these emerging structures there may actually lay  
the seeds of a genuine change in paradigm, of the way that culture is  
produced and emitted.

If this was true, then how could we reach out to members of our  
society who might get left even further behind by these advances?

The optimistic and naive answer was: let's get immigrants blogging!   
I've been continually inspired by
Global Voices' support for "third world" bloggers and their belief in  
the political implications of blogging and citizen journalism.  Why  
not try this stuff at home?  I thought.

So I met an ESL teacher at Bronx Community College who taught an  
immersive English class.  Her students, mostly Dominican, were in  
class for 25 hours week, learning English so they could apply to the  
"senior" colleges in the City University of New York system.  She was  
interested in the educational potential of blogging, and we gave it a  
shot.

So I led weekly classes on how to blog, from starting up an account  
on Blogger to inserting links and pictures in posts to learning how  
to comment and link to other bloggers.  The classes were filmed, and  
each student's blog was aggregated on the project's web site.

While some students knew of and used social networking sites, few of  
them had heard of blogs, and it was a rough start for many of them.

Eventually, though, we had the whole class up and running on  
Blogger.com and a few of them got into it, posting pictures of their  
children and girlfriends and taking advantage of the form (and the,  
um, assignments) to write about topical issues.  Their writing about  
immigration was especially moving, as it was a response to a national  
discussion about immigration.  Students sometimes weathered  
unfriendly attitudes from online strangers who'd found their sites;  
it was a quick lesson in the challenges of public communication.

In any event it proved difficult to get most students blogging, and I  
sometimes found myself trying to convince them of the importance of  
this stuff when I should have been listening to why they were or  
weren't interested.  It was a lesson in theory vs. practice.

Enough of me.  Check out the aggregate site at http://www.levjoy.com/ 
bronxblogproject where I collected all of the students' posts, video  
of them in and out of class, and some other goodies.

Whatever high-minded ideas I had about social media were tempered by  
everyday frustrations of internet access, student apathy, and the  
obviously larger problems of getting by as a recent immigrant in New  
York.

I look forward to your comments.

-Josh Levy

--
www.personaldemocracy.com
www.levjoy.com


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20061213/820abc80/attachment-0002.html