Media

Media planning to attend the event:

Video interviews

Rory O'Connor & Brian Dentz, Globalvision
Vanessa Bertozzi & Neal Grigsby, ProjectNML (New Media Literacy)

We are looking for Wikimaniacs to interview. Please contact us at 917-692-4564 or email Vanessa.

We're making a short educational video about Wikipedia. This video will go into an online, free database of eduational materials we're developing for ProjectNML (New Media Literacies), a research project headed up by Professor Henry Jenkins and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. We are grad students at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. The videos in this database will be bundled with hands-on activities and grade-school level media studies curricula. It's an exciting project and we're hoping to contact individual Wikipedia editors before Wikimania, so that we can arrange interviews.

The purpose of our Wikipedia video is to introduce jr high and high schoolers (and teachers and parents) to Wikipedia, the nuts and bolts of how it works. But we also make these videos to serve as jumping off points for thoughtful dicussions about the role media plays in our lives. Wikipedia, as we well know, brings up many fascinating topics. What do you Wikimaniacs think the most important aspects of Wikipedia are? Collaborative writing/editing for sure...Open-source access to knowledge...Accuracy in representations of people and facts...What would YOU like to talk abot with us on camera? What topics, stories, anecdotes would you like kids to hear? What ethical challenges do you face? What would you say to a teacher, parent, or Encyclopedia Britannica person who doesn't think WIkipedia is a legitimate source? What about the online social interactions of writing with many folks you've never met face-to-face? What drives you to be dedicated and passionate about Wikipedia?

Neal and I met with Wikipedia editory SJ and we brainstormed an idea for a segment of our video. There must be a particularly controversial entry with a long history of negotiation and revision--SJ suggested Gdansk/Danzig--that we could use as an entry point. Thus we'd be able to use a specific example to talk about the issues of collaborative writing, contested history, transcultural representations. Most of all, we want to illustrate these issues in an engaging manner. We want to make a video that will be fun for kids to watch, that they'll be dying to talk about after they watch it! Please write back with your recommendations. We're excited to hear what you think of our project.

Media

Video interviews

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