Digital Democracy

Gary Stager again for Digital Democracy. This blog is more of a stream of notes jotted during the session. 

Richard Dreyfuss is a proponent of civics education, and argues that our democracy is at risk unless we educate our students to participate in democracy.

Gary says his social activism is inspired by his 7th grade social studies teacher, who, every day, the students knew they might have to march on the school board so he could keep his job.

What’s possible?

• making sense of data (with tools like Google Earth, GIS Software, InspireData, TinkerPlots, Fathom, Mathematica). Use the vast amounts of data to make an inquiry of the data & look for the answers.
• mathematics of polling
• historical perspective
• propaganda creation
• effective communication

Social science applications of math that are really critical for our society.

Mathematica has access to huge databases of information.

50% of mathematics has been invented since World War II. It’s partly the social sciences demand for numbers.

Is Democracy Fair? The Mathematics of Voting and Apportionment

We need kids to be thoughtful and to be able to get answers from multiple sources. You don’t really know something until you look at it from multiple sources. The web makes it easier to look at topics from multiple sources.

We should be really careful at pointing a finger at wikipedia and the web when we’ve been allowing textbook publishers to lie by omission for so many years. The example was the whole speech of Dr. Martin Luther King. Most of us didn’t recognized it until several pages into it.

Primary sources ….
There are always controversial topics for discussion in a democracy.

Why aren’t kids taking the same raw footage and this side of the room make an ad for that person and this side of the room made an ad against that person. (or a consumer product). Every candidate has video online you can digitize and download and manipulate in this way.

One way to make informed decisions is to know how you’re being manipulated. The way to understand how your’e being manipulated is to create your own manipulations yourself.

What ways to use you to make someone look bad: slow mo, tight shows, black and white, testimony, music cut off to pay more attention, playing on emotions and ears, parody, the nostalgic autobiography,

For an example of the parodies, look at Swift Kids for Truth

Ask kids – what makes you feel positive or negative about someone? ask kids to make for & against commercials.

Political activism / citizen journalism
Kids press freedoms have eroded so far; why does it matter? how come it doesn’t occur to them to publish their own stuff?

It’s cheap and easy to worry about people far away (classroom projects for Darfur etc.), but do we care about being active in the local community?

Battleground Minnesota – Shakademic – an example of student journalism. Look at these: Media Rights News, Shakademic’s MySpace site, Get Battleground.

High school kids who have never talked to an adult – had an actual conversation – not just being talked at or bossed around.

If you send an email and ask “can you do this at your earliest convenience, people answer.” Kids can invite people someone to talk to the students – they need to learn that they can do this and how to do it.

They need to learn to interact with adults on a civil basis.

Kids could be looking at real problems in our community and trying to solve them.

“School is like an empowerment free zone for too many kids” why do kids just shrug and take it? we have to teach them they aren’t powerless, helpless and defenseless.

Another example of student work: Joey interviews a cutter:
Youth Radio Project also read more on wikipedia.

Very thought-provoking session as usual. Challenging to do these types of activities with kids, but essential to teach kids civics.