They Call Me "MISS Coraline"!

Coraline by Neil Gaiman


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Nicely drawn. Good story. I was just reading some graphic novels today and saw it hiding behind Beowulf Glad I saved it for last! Heh, I have some button eyes in Second Life that I think are cute (see above picture), but now they seem a bit more sinister. Good thing I read this in the daytime! I've been acquainted with Russell's artwork (in collaboration with Gaiman) in Neil Gaiman's Murder Mysteries, a very very very creepy book, especially the framework story! This story brought all that horror back to me.

Coraline is bored with her parents and her life, but when presented the opportunity of a life of endless amusement and devoted and doting parents, she chooses the chance to be bored on occasion. The mirror existence turns nightmarish and she embarks on a mini-quest to escape her "other mother," the Beldam. She will submit to having the button eyes sewn on if she can't locate her parents (in a rather obvious place, I thought) and the souls of three other children who were duped before her. All she has to help her are her courage, the cat, and a talisman: a rock with a hole in it. Oh, and those three kids.

And I wonder if that well is deep enough ...

View all my reviews >>

Fat Girl Reviews Fat Kid Book

Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
There was a brief article about the author in School Library Journal and we had two of her books in. I chose the one that seemed the least depressing. Our library copy had all the "cuss words" underlined in the beginning by some enthusiast - until there were just too many to bother with, I guess - heh! But this book is about kids in New York City and leaving that out wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of these kids. The NYer in me laughs when Troy takes taxis everywhere. NYC is the walkin'est, public transportationist place I've ever lived. The only time he seems to have use for the subway is to attempt suicide (okay, and once he takes the subway with Curt to show how Curt can leap over the gates and ride for free).
That aside, I can't tell how accurate any of the other bits are as a) I am not a teen and b) I know nothing at all about the popular music scene. I do, however, know about being fat. I can't say I found the fatness totally convincing, but the story was pretty good. Parents might be appalled by this book, but it's a light read and teens will go for the angst.
Troy, or Big T, is a big guy: he's over 6' tall and almost 300 lbs. Rather than being shunned, one would think he'd be feared, but instead he is too good-natured to be a bully and so turns in on himself. For no good reason at all, he's conscripted by a homeless prescription drug addict to be in a band. Troy's younger brother has no respect for him and his father, retired Marine Corps, despairs of getting the boy in fighting trim. (Now, how can that be? How can a kid totally cowed by his father like Troy is, not be sent out to run laps?) The HPDA is apparently a guitar genius and magically recognizes something punk in Troy's soul and tries to develop it. Troy tries to sabotage himself every step of the way. Now, that rings true.



View all my reviews.

Digital Youth, Part II: Megan Deana

The second speaker in the morning was Megan Deana from Global Kids. Megan started out with a degree in computer science and then moseyed to education (presumably because she'd be making too much money in computer science) and got a job through LinkedIn that led her to the non-profit group, Global Kids, whose mission is to transform urban youth into successful students and global and community leaders by engaging them in socially dynamic, content-rich learning experiences. Ninety percent of their students graduate from high school. Digital media is just a part of this.
Megan works with the Online Leadership Program, a student-centered program, which leads the kids to things they need to know in order to be successful, collaborating with different kinds of people. They learn about global issues by building and playing socially conscious video games. They spend the 1/3 of the first semester discussing what topic they want to cover. They learn what goes into making a game by partnering with a game designer professional [Don't think our library can manage that].
One group created "Ayiti: The cost of life" where players help a Haitian family living in poverty make decisions in work, education, etc. to better their situation. [Far cry from the 1960s board game about living in a ghetto, eh? I remember going straight into prostitution on that game.]
Another program is the Virtual Video Project. They do a machinima video on a topic of they're interested in. They meet twice a week, lured in with subway tickets and snacks. They learn storyboarding, scriptwriting, character development, and set designing (digitally, of course, because this is machinima). Example is "A Child's War" - where they interviewed experts and put together a fictionalized account using Second Life. They learned presentation skills, pitching their ideas to Ashoka Youth Ventures.
Global Kids guides the kids, facilitating not teaching.
They learn how to create a "safe space" in which to interact, and decide their own rules on this, defining respect as no cursing, no put-downs, no weapons [well, duh!].
Use a technique called the human barometer, where spaces are set out (say, on different levels) for "for," "against," and "undecided." And they have to explain why they are moving from one level to another.
There is a Ning for educators interested at RezEd: the hub for learning and virtual worlds.

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]

American Born Chinese

After the Staff Education Day on Young Adult Services Wednesday (I know, I haven't even finished going over the Children's Literature Conference), my thingie - resolve, whatever it was, was to read more YA materials, which I do a bit anyway. Whither my favorite authors go ... I was quite taken with the thought of American Born Chinese by Gene Yang. The other books mentioned sounded too much like the Serious Realistic Fiction That I Go Out of My Way to Avoid in the adult section. "Oh, it's so gooooood!" people tell me about this stuff, but I get enough realism in my own damn life and when I read a book, I want to be taken somewhere else other than, say Vietnam (where I spent my dinner hours growing up) or Nazi Germany (where I had relatives, thankyewverymuch, who may have turned in their Jewish neighbors but certainly suffered more in the war than my stateside family did (we have letters and our family sent clothes, etc. when the war was over). And I have no interest in drugs (okay - not a lot of interest, unless they are tasty frozen concoctions) because I lived through the 60s and 70s - suis allee la, fait cela, obtenu le tattoo.
I have read The Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett (no surprise there - I'm a huge fan) and listened to the audio book read by Stephen Briggs, which is terrific. He reads many of the Pratchett books, adult and YA, and has wonderful characterizations. I even read one of his Johnny Maxwell books (more for boys), which ... was good but not as complex as the Tiffany stories. But then, it is for boys, innit? I love Diana Wynne Jones' children's books and so I have also trod into her YA. Hornbook often has recommendations for YA that pull me away from my usual concentration in Juvenile (and trashy adult mysteries) which led me to The Swan, a graphic novel by Ariyoshi Kyoko. Now, I knew that the Japanese manga were to be read back to front, but for some reason I forgot when I picked up this one, so I was a bit confused for a short while. "This doesn't quite make sense," I thought, "but I can see where it might if I ... Awwww, shhhhhugar!" And I had to start over ... from the back. I can see where teens might enjoy that book, but it wasn't my cup o' cha. It's disconcerting to see Japanese characters (the people kind) all wrapped up in something so european as ballet (but our teens could relate) and I'm not keen on romantic longing and angst (ew! ew! - but teens could relate). Probably won't read more of that, which I think is a series. I also read The Life of Pi by Yann Martel as a YA recommendation (very funny article in Hornbook where Martel is at a book-signing and a young teen comes up and gushes about how much he really liked the tiger in the boat. I don't wanna spoil anyone's read of this, [Stop reading here] but Pi made Mr. Parker up. [Safe to read again.]).

But I came here to bury Caesar, not to praise him, so on to American Born Chinese. Which I read yesterday.

This graphic novel weaves a story on several levels: Chinese folkloric background story, an only slightly exaggerated (loved the lips on the test animals!) realistic story of the titular American born Chinese kid, and the sit-com over-the-top (complete with laugh-track along the bottom of the frames) version with the character that looks like he stepped right out of Claire Bishop's "Five Chinese Brothers": Chin-kee. The story is touching, milk-out-the-nose-snortingly funny, and enlightening - I cannot say enough good things about it. I had only one teensy problem with one itsy-bitsy frame, but I won't go into it here or I can see a bit of trouble with my co-workers on this. Oh well, just call me "Mr. Partypooper." Other than that, this story is PERFECT as well as perfectly beautifully drawn.