I Hate the Movies

Not the actual model.

We have a (relatively) new library with a fabulous (ha) projector system that's supposed to play Blu-Ray and project laptops onto a screen that is supposed to come down and go back up in a reasonable fashion.

Me, I would rather sit and read to 50 squirmy kids for 90 minutes than have to try to operate this useless piece of techsrement. It did come with some sort of remote, but not the sort of remote that you or I use for watching DVDs at home - oh no! I'm not sure what it does, but the remote isn't in anyway useful. In fact, I didn't know we even had one until out of desperation in trying to figure something out, I opened the case on the wall. The remote was inside. Ah, so it wouldn't get lost, I imagine. It would have been nice to have known it was in there, even if it's useless.

This equipment, which was undoubtedly expensive, came with no guide or operation manual. If there had been one, the installers took it with them when they left, just before they hid the remote inside the casing. We have no idea what we're doing most of the time. The only advice they gave me was "Never turn this off," and the man pointed at the main switch. "It will mess up the programming." I have never turned it off. I dutifully put a sign next to that switch that says "Never turn off."

It would also have been nice if there was some audio input so that I could play my puppet show recordings, but no. I have to set my boombox up on the stage for puppet audio.

It's useless. Just plain without any sense or rhyme.

Today we had to show a movie, and I suggested we get going 45 minutes ahead because I know this trash heap can be ... finicky. We inserted the Blu-Ray, pressed the Blu-Ray button and a selection screen was projected. There was no way to make a selection and it would not move past that screen to play. We tried everything. By this time there are now three of us working on it. We tried the laptop, and that was taking forever to come up. We clicked the laptop button and waited for the disc to start up. Nothing but the blue screen of death was being projected. And the laptop wouldn't give the disc back. Finally, I pressed the laptop button again and it came on. We were able to choose "English" and the video progressed.

We were done with five minutes to spare and not all the popcorn was ready, but it was close. This happens almost every time we use the contraption. Something is always going wrong and we have to bash at buttons and find work-arounds.

Meantime, it's busy out in the Children's Room. People are signing up for Summer Reading and asking questions. Fortunately, the internet and wireless were down, so that cut down quite a bit of that sort of traffic. However, I was a quivering blob by then.

I hate that system. It's useless. I can't think of another word than "useless," unless with some sort of string of emphatic intensifiers. I can only hope that the next time they plan to show a movie (even more annoying is that the person who set up the movie schedule no longer works here to handle it herself), I will be either in another country or on another planet.

Please, please let us not show any more movies. Shoot me first.

Digital Youth Conference Part I

BlueWings uses her voice chat to stream the audio from the Digital Youth summit into SL. I type notes madly trying to keep up.

If you don't want to bother with my notes, the podcast for this part of the summit is here.

Today I attended the Second Life (I know, I know) herniation of the Digital Youth summit at ImaginOn in Charlotte. The keynote speaker was Anastasia Goodstein. Goodstein is the author of Totally Wired: what teens and tweens are really doing online http://www.totallywiredbook.com/. Her blog, YPulse http://www.ypulse.com/, is a leading media, technology and youth development information source, and School Library Journal recently published Goodstein's article What Would Madison Avenue Do? Marketing to Teens. http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6555544.html

[Cribbed from Deborah Hotchkiss's promotional e-mail]

We had some technical hiccups to begin with, but then got the stream of Anastasia's speech fairly clearly. I took notes like mad, but I wasn't always able to keep up. Anastasia gave a presentation on Teens in the morning and one tailored more about Tweens in the afternoon. Also speaking in the morning was Megan Deana of Global Kids, a non-profit group working with urban youth and digital media.

Megan Deana of Global Kids

Anastasia began by describing SL to the attendees, who, if they were familiar with SL, would be listening to the conference in the comfort of their own homes wearing sweatpants and petting their kitties. Ahem. She was describing the Teen SL as a teaching tool. She went on to talk about social sites (such as MySpace and Facebook). Teens are too savvy to talk with creepy over 50s that could be either librarians [got me nailed there] or predators. They don't want to hang around authority figures of any sort. They want to interact with other teens, preferably ones they already know. But their lives are not constructed to hang out with friends, like our were. Teens lead highly structured lives where they have more lessons scheduled outside of school or sports activities. The places where they used to hang out, such as the malls, are becoming more restrictive. The bad behavior of a few teens has eliminated a real world space for them to meet. One of the few ways left to hang out with their peers is through social sites or mobile devices. And these are becoming increasingly popular.

Picture youself as a teen and recall the music you listened to. [I know I listened to the radio while doing my homework. There are certain songs that can whip me back to particular times of my life faster than an SL teleport ... when it's working.] Music is something very important to teens and young people. Choosing favorite songs and artists helps give them identity. MySpace started as a place for 20-somethings in the arts to display their wares. Teens are always interested in what the 20s are doing (the way that Tweens are interested in what the Teens have), and they were lured in by their favorite musicians. Then the Teens co-opted it for their own use, making contact with each other and displaying their individuality (personalizing their profiles).

Most teens (about 55%) use social sites like this. They are starting to migrate from MySpace to Facebook because of the rampant spamming and commercialism in the former (partially from being snapped up by Fox and forced to generate real revenue). Facebook started as a place for Harvard students to connect. Then they grudgingly opened it up to other Ivy League schools. It was meant for college students, but their teen siblings saw them using it and wanted in. Besides, authority-types (such as the police and parents) had cottoned on to the party bulletins that were sent out on MySpace. Many parties were being busted. Now even us common folk can join to make contact with old and new friends. Facebook tends to attract the more upwardly mobile, "college type" people while the Other Folk tend to stick to MySpace. Facebook was meant for people who already knew each other [although recently I've been receiving messages acquainting me with people I might know, based on the friends lists of people I do know whom I can add to my list of friends. That is still pending on their approval, though.] Despite the influx of teens, the over 40s are the largest growing segment of the population on these sites. Most teens have profiles on at least 2 sites.

Other social sites that are growing quickly: myyearbook.com, Beebo, skonex (??) tagged.com.

Teens are also all over the virtual worlds. Teen SL is one, but it's not the most popular and tends to be more for the nerdy types who enjoy scripting, etc. They are predominantly male and mostly have parents in the SL maingrid. Other, more popular worlds: gaia online, zwinktopia, hammahotel [don't quote me on this stuff - I didn't have a powerpoint in front of me], virtualhills (and MTV virtual world that eventually moved to gaia because that's where the teens were). The virtual worlds are the new chatrooms. MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft are too much crowded with content to be places to chat. You're busy helping your team achieve some goal to talk about the latest music. [And this is why Linden Labs and IBM have been working on allowing avatars to cross platforms, so that you can slay dragons in WoW and then cross into SL, which is rubbish for gaming apparently, to a bar and boast to your buddies, possibly bring the head of the victim with you.] 24% of children/teens will use virtual worlds monthly, making them not nearly as popular as the social sites.

Identity: It's all about who am I and how am I different from my wretched parents. And they have no taste, most of them, at this age. Their profiles are littered (or perhaps glittered) with these expressions of individuality. The way we had individualized our lockers [those of us who bothered - can't say I did], they find crazy fonts and widgets for their profiles and special ringtones and wallpaper for their mobile phones.

While some kids just use sites for socializing, others make them altars to their interests. They make mash-ups, and Anastasia used as an example the craze last year for making your own video for SoulJa Boy [video on this link explains it all]. If you go to YouTube, you'll find hundreds of versions where kids do the dance themselves or they set Dora the Explorer or SpongeBob video to the song. Crank that! [Apparently the new In Thing is to make a parody of Katie Perry's "I Kissed a Girl."]

Validation, Fame, and Fortune: Today's teens feel differently about privacy that we did and do now. Anastasia blames, I mean, traces this back to reality tv shows. They are used to seeing real people using the camera as a confessional. They share their most personal thoughts and feelings in blogs and on video. Using Paris Hilton and her sex tape as a paradigm, they feel such exposure only makes someone more famous, more notable, and they don't see it as the end of the world. Anastasia opines that if employers start eliminating hires based on their Facebook pages, they would soon run out of viable candidates. The emphasis today is on celebrity (Top Model, etc.) and not so much on how you achieve it. They seek instant validation, which the technology can provide. How many views on YouTube this past hour? [Erm, or who's looking at my blog through lijit.com.] She gave examples of teen entrepreneurs becoming famous behind the scenes, so it's not all just for notoriety.

Education and School: Nickelodeon proposed taking the internet away from kids for a week and asked what they missed most. They claimed they were unable to do their homework. [A likely story!] When the computers go down in offices, the Babyboomers say, "Go get a pencil and do some brainstorming," and the GenYer's say, "We can't do anything - let's go to Starbuck's." Teens are great at getting information, they just don't have the patience to sift through the first five hits. They're great finders, but not memorizers [Now they keep their memories outside of their skulls?]. They depend too much on Wikipedia without thinking about any editing going on there. Corporations can edit Wikipedia to suit themselves. This can be tracked on Wikiscanner. Teens don't realize they can be manipulated.

Anastasia considers the blocking of social sites at schools (and some public libraries) to be a travesty. This means that there is no way for teachers to show them how they can be used better, safer. Teens are on their own, like in Lord of the Flies.

Teens are media multi-taskers; they'll have everything going at once. Homework, four browser windows open, music playing, IM popping in and out. The tv networks are terrified. They still read what's left of the teen magazines. They want shorter, bite-sized entertainment, like the webisodes. Prom Queen was a story in segments less than one minute long. They are the most-marketed to generation. They totally "get" brands. They brand themselves.

Things to do:
1. Survey your teens. [We are told over and over and over to ask people what they want, but do we do it? No. We decide what they should have and then get all frustrated that they aren't grateful and don't show up in droves. Again and again this happens. We know this, we've been told this by experts, and we never never never ever do it!]
2. Teach them reputation management
3. Teach them to recognize ID product placement, when something is not a straight-forward ad, but is sneaked into content.
4. The trailblazers need to evangelize - reach out beyond your trailblazing peers.
5. Support efforts to unblock social media in schools (and public libraries where it occurs)

Questions:
We weren't able to hear the questions asked (next time let's instruct the speakers to repeat them because I'm sure even all the people on location were able to hear the questions). There was a question about inappropriate relationships with the teens. Anastasia suggests you be available to teens, but not friends. Have your own friends and professional contacts, not teen friends.
Webblogged [couldn't find] has lists of books on using social networks and tech for education, also extensive blogrolls for online reference.
Kids want more and better cellphones because they want the internet available on their cellsphones. [OMG]