karen louise smith

GovCamp 2011 was held in June at Mars here in Toronto. I found I needed an easy web link to my presentation so I embedded it here on my blog.

This post was originally created for the Center for Teaching Support and Innovation, where I also blog. (See: http://blogs.ati.utoronto.ca/wordpress/ctsi/2011/11/17/curriculum-guides... for the original post)

This post addresses a question I have fielded as a TATP trainer who teaches a workshop on video in the classroom.

Partcipants sometimes ask, where can I find video curriculum guides to help me teach in my discipline? This question does not emerge out of thin air. It comes up because when I teach the workshop, I bring along a curriculum kit called Teaching the Levees. Hurricane Katrina caused devastating damage to New Orleans. The curriculum guide is intended to support discussion of the associated social and political issues that are raised in Spike Lee's film When the Levees Broke.

In my experience, TAs and instructors alike are very enthusiastic that other people prepare discussion questions that may be appropriate for their classroom! It is often a novel concept that such resources are available.

A challenge for post-secondary educators, is that most curriculum guides for film seem to be directed towards the teachers of kindergarten to grade 12 students. In researching this blog post, Jenaya Webb, Public Services Librarian, OISE Library, indicated to me that they have a collection of curriculum guides to assist their student teachers on placements in the K-12 educational system. Jenaya also helped me to compile a list of more widely available resources to the U of T community (see below).

In order to find curriculum kits or guides that may be useful in your post-secondary teaching, I recommend using the web as a starting point to find resources that you can adapt to make relevant for your course. Some options in alphabetical order include:

1) Amnesty International Film Curriculum Guides
As a human rights organization, Amnesty has a number of PDF downloadable curriculum guides for films that address issues such as war, race, and gender. I downloaded the curriculum guide for Born into Brothels, an academy award winning documentary, and found that some of the grade 9-12 level discussion questions could be easily adapted by linking to a university course level reading.

2) HotDocs: Toronto's own documentary festival has film resources in their HotDocs library for K-12 learning. Here you may find materials that link to your courses. In the words of the HotDocs team, "these docs will engage students with issues of our day; with vital ideas, critical questions and new perspectives outside the mainstream media and school textbook."

3) National Film Board (NFB) of Canada:
The NFB has a comprehensive section of their website devoted to educators. There is a section of the website where teachers can search for teaching guides on various topics. Additionally, I find the playlists for educators organized thematically (i.e. films about Science and Technology) to be a great resource.

I hope that you are able to find curriculum materials for films that are relevant for your classroom. If you have experiences or tips you wish to share, please comment.

Colleagues from The New Transparency project including Kate Milberry, have produced the following video on (Un)lawful Access legislation which we expect is under development in Canada.

(un)LAWFUL ACCESS from The New Transparency on Vimeo.

On Wednesday June 8th I presented a session at GovCamp 2011 in Toronto, as part of Netchange week. My session was titled 'Can they hear me?' Exploring Citizen-led participation.' The image above is one of my closing points from the session.
I plan to add a full blog entry later.

Credit: The scaffolding image was originally created by Magnus Franklin, magnusfranklin at www.flickr.com/photos/adjourned/1636521574/ under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

My day tomorrow, seems to center around Aarhus, Denmark. I am currently collaborating on a paper with IDLab colleagues in Toronto and our friend Nik Borchorost in Aarhus.

In addition to the paper (and the pastries I might pick up from the Harbord St. bakery) the Danish theme continues tomorrow. Nik's use of future scenarios with Susanne Bødker and colleagues through the eGov+ project, inspired my class project for the Knowledge Media Design graduate pro-seminar I am teaching this semester. The student videos are being premiered tomorrow evening.

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This afternoon I sent off a revised copy of the paper 'Playing with surveillance: The design of a mock RFID-based identification infrastructure for public engagement' which is accepted for publication in the journal Surveillance & Society. The image above shows a component of our mock infrastructure which is written about in this paper. Brenda McPhail, Joseph Ferenbok, Alex Tichine and Andrew Clement are my co-authors on this work.

Our abstract reads:

In many jurisdictions around the globe, governments are developing ID schemes based on radio frequency identification (RFID) and biometric technologies. In Canada, four provinces recently implemented RFID based ‘enhanced’ drivers licences (EDL) in response to the United States’ Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), which requires all persons entering the United States to present a valid passport or alternative ‘secure’ document to prove their identity and citizenship.

As researchers, we were closely involved in following the EDL policy development process. It became evident, as we attended legislative hearings, that parliamentarians needed clarifications to understand how the RFID identification scheme would function in practice. This project began with the goal of designing prototypes to demonstrate security and civil liberty concerns with a new RFID-based identification (ID) scheme in Canada. Influenced by participatory design and probe approaches to technology design, we built and tested mock infrastructures of RFID-based identification systems including low fidelity paper prototypes, and high fidelity prototypes using RFID-chipped cards, a database, antenna and reader. We also worked closely with civil society organizations to run public engagement activities.

This paper reports on our attempts to create spaces for ‘playful’ engagement with RFID-based ID scheme technology at a time of ‘serious’ policy deliberations. Designed in the spirit of serious play, our mock ID infrastructures make the security and civil liberties challenges inherent in the proposed combination of ID cards and databases more visible, while demonstrating how such ID schemes work. At this point, we see future promise in the design and use of mock ID infrastructure for public engagement during relevant policy deliberations about ID schemes and databases which contain personal information.

Organized by Megan Boler and Matt Ratto, the DIY Citizenship conference was held this past weekend at the University of Toronto. It was a treat to have many scholars working in the fields which intersect with my own arrive in my own backyard. One of the highlights for me, was to hear of the parallels between Boler and Henry Jenkins’ work.

For several years, Boler has been studying political satire in both broadcast and web 2.0 culture. During a keynote, she explained the question always arises, if an audience of satire can become politically engaged in the more traditional sense. In another keynote address, Henry Jenkins outlined how fan culture and political engagement are blending. The example of the Harry Potter Alliance was provided to demonstrate how fans are mobilizing around the values which underpin the fictional series. Fair Trade chocolate, human rights and the Darfur crisis are relevant to Harry Potter fans who seek social justice both in the wizzarding and ‘real’ worlds. These presentations gave me a greater sense of how the ‘fun’ of cultural studies can blend with political engagement.

In one of my roles at U of T, I work with the Teaching Assistant Training Program in the Center for Teaching Support and Innovation. Yesterday, I proposed running a new workshop in the winter semester, 2011.

YouTube, the website launched in 2005 which allows us to broadcast ourselves allows for new possibilities in the integration of video content in the classroom. This workshop begins with a brief history and overview of participatory media traditions. Subsequently, this (propsed) workshop will cover 4 main topics:

• Incorporating YouTube and Video in the Classroom:
  The skills required to effectively integrate a YouTube video in the classroom will be covered such as: incorporating a hyperlink in PowerPoint and including a screen capture of the images in your presentation.

• Explaining Difficult Concepts Using Video:
  Online video repositories can be a source of videos which explain course concepts, appropriate for post-secondary education. Multiple examples including 'Dance your PhD' will be presented (see below).

• Fostering Discussions Using Video:
  Active learning strategies which allow you to use video to help foster discussions will be practiced within this workshop.

• Using YouTube to Help Teach Participant Observation:
  The use of YouTube to practice participant observation will be role modeled through an exercise in this workshop using YouTube.
  
  

Additionally, each participant of this workshop is requested to bring the URL of a YouTube video and a description of how it aligns with the learning objectives for the course for group discussion.

Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using SELEX from Maureen McKeague on Vimeo.

Currently, I am authoring a report with Brenda McPhail and Andrew Clement on the process we utilized to develop a consensus contribution to the federal government's consultation on the digital economy strategy in the spring of 2010. Dave Kemp pulled together this video which is potentially a very useful visual component for the piece.

Having worked on a collaborative submission for the Digital Economy Strategy consultation in Canada, I was very interested to come across this debategraph of a similar British initiative regarding the Power of Information Taskforce (2007). I plan to try out the debategraph interface to map a policy issue of interest sometime soon.