Topic: Inspirational People: Creating Community Expression
Topic Summary: "We seek to capture the wealth of the many outstanding people around us by interviewing them in a creative and engaging way and broadcasting the interviews to high school kids with the aim of providing a consistent and diverse source of role models who they can look up to and strive to emulate. Examples of these could be students who come from some really difficult backgrounds and work hard to get into college, faculty who are outstanding in their fields and who would be excited about sharing their wealth of wisdom with others, people who are doing important community service work that's changing the lives of others for the better etc. We hope people will contribute ideas, resources, novel tools and ways for encouraging individual and community expression. This project has the potential of inspiring kids to set high goals for achievement."
In short, this is a call for a story-based campaign to make local role models and everyday heroes more accessible to under-resourced high school students. Possible locations of profile postings may include: school buses, local buses, subway tunnels (zootrope/Submedia), basketball backboards, playgrounds, hair salons, cell phone banners and cameras, cd players, and video games.
More interesting is the following challenge posted in the corresponding ThinkSpace:
Challenge: "I'm plain stupid!" - "I have come to the realization that our target audience has a lot of disillusioned people - those who believe that they are simply not intelligent - especially those who are used to being told that they are plain stupid. Any ideas on facts to show them that a normal person is capable of doing great intellectual/powerful things?"
Response: I first approached the challenge by identifying some underlying roots to the problem. Many students absorb negative energy from teachers:
- who may not treat students as respectable adults,
- who do not teach with excitement or fail to emphasize the importance of education,
- who may not give each child the individualized attention he/she needs because the class size is too large.
A first idea was a teacher feedback mechanism that could quantify verbal and non-verbal actions that inhibit the learning experience. For example, a device that monitors favoritism and the intensity of the teacher's voice.
building dialogue
Another source of a child's lack of self-confidence is that he/she is not encouraged to actively participate in classroom discussion. I've modeled an education tool that provides a dynamic visual representation of group dialogue, serving as both an immediate feedback tool and a form of positive reinforcement. The hope is that students will be engaged as both active talkers and listeners in the discussion, brainstorming, and question-asking processes.
The system consists of individual user head pieces that send data regarding the amount of conversation and eye contact to a central processor that projects a "Sim City" like representation of the dialogue. Its application extends beyond the classroom and can be used for assessing leadership and team-building skills and for studying group dynamics in the workplace.
