“Design” is not simply about coming up with ideas but, often more importantly, picking among ideas and deciding which ones to implement. Because development resources are finite, priorities need to be set, choices need to be made.

In our thinking about participatory design, we have so far mostly discussed participation in the generation of ideas. It would be interesting to examine as well how we handle participation in the choices among those ideas, how we generate and share information about the costs of various alternatives.

One interesting source of data on these costs is redmine, the system we use to track system development. Because our programmers keep track of the time they spend on developing features and fixing bugs (that is the basis upon which they get paid), we have good data on how much we are spending on individual features. With a bit of cleanup and categorization, this data could give use a fairly accurate picture of the relative costs of various vozmob design features.

Assessment of our participatory design process should include checking whether users are aware of these relative costs, so we can gauge the extent to which they have participated meaningfully in making choices among the related features. A next step would be to figure out better ways to communicate these relative costs (including cost estimates for future features) so that vozmob users can more fully participate in design choices going forward.

Ultimately, we’re hoping that projects like ours can help bridge conversations across communities that seldom talk together (but often do scream at each other). We believe that a useful starting point is for people to tell their own stories, so that others can begin to understand who they are rather than simply judge them by how they are portrayed. Thus the vozmob platform, making it possible for immigrant workers in L.A. to tell their stories in their own words, pictures, sounds and videos, using a readily available tool – the mobile phone in their pocket. That storytelling is of course immensely worthwhile in itself, as storytellers develop self and collective awareness, and build literacy skills. But for it to have a real impact beyond their community, the stories need to be accessible to people who don’t understand Spanish. This is not only a translation issue – we can learn to tell stories with pictures and sounds and video, as several stories on vozmob have done quite effectively, or with maps, and we’re interested in exploring those possibilities. But in many cases, translation becomes crucial – translation of text (SMS, MMS’s text fields, or text entered into the vozmob blog from a computer), but also translation of speech (story told into a phone, speeches or interviews recorded with a phone), soundtracks from videos, or texts that appear in photos. I mention all these different modes because each poses distinct challenges, each is amenable to different technical solutions, and to different translation processes. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of things we’ve tried, thought about, or would like to explore:

- Text: our CMS currently allows any registered blogger to translate any blog post and its title, as written text. That can serve as well to transcribe speech, soundtracks or text on images, and to translate those transcriptions. So far, we’re relying on volunteers to do this (see examples at http://vozmob.net/translated or http://vozmob.net/traducido), and we have no ‘quality control’ process – no good way to note whether a translator/translation is good or not, to provide feedback, suggestions or edits to translators in a systematic way. We’ve talked about teaming up with a Spanish language class or with an ESL class offered by IDEPSCA, and about crowd-sourcing translations, which could be improved collectively on a wiki blog node. Any pointer to groups that do this well would be appreciated. We’re interested in both tools and process.

- Sounds: All we’ve done so far is the occasional transcription/translation into text mentioned above. An obvious improvement would be subtitles, in the original language and/or translated. We’re aware of sites like dotsub, Suggestions about doing something like that would be welcome as well (any dotsub-like plugin we could use with Drupal?). Also, we haven’t yet talked about dubbing, but that might be an interesting avenue to explore, especially since we soon will be able to send content back to phones on which reading text or subtitles may not be easy.

- Content management / context: Drupal’s own interface is mostly translated in Spanish (less thoroughly so in Portuguese or French). We’ve set up our site so that administrators can contribute translations back to the drupal mother ship when they run into something that’s missing. We’ve also used a somewhat haphazard approach to bilingual tags – e.g. we have used both ‘mujeres’ (http://vozmob.net/mujeres) and ‘women’ (http://vozmob.net/taxonomy/term/75) as tags, not really consistently. There is probably a drupal way to connect them… we should look into it.

- Machine translation and Text-to-speech is something we haven’t really looked into yet, except for occasionally generating first drafts of translations using google’s translate tool (with mixed success, partly because the original Spanish text often includes colloquial expressions, mis-spellings, etc).

I’m probably forgetting some aspects and will let others chime in. But generally, we’re interested in thinking through good ways to conduct these bilingual (or multilingual) multimedia conversations, we’d like to be in touch with others who are wrestling with this and who have found approaches that work, pointers to useful tools, etc. And of course, we always welcome volunteer translators – all they need to do is sign up on the site and get going.

(related post: http://vozmob.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/translating-vozmob-content/)

On Tuesday July 28th Amanda, Charlotte and I led a Vozmob workshop at the 8th OURMedia conference in Rionegro, Colombia. We had the opportunity to work and share ideas with several practitioners of various projects using communication for social change, including Sebastian Gerlic (from a project using mobile phones with indigenous communities in Brazil: http://www.indiosonline.org.br/), Wilna Quarmyne (Ghana Community Radio Network: see http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ghana_Community_Radio_Network), and Alejandra Castaña, a scholar and media producer trying to find ways to improve the function of community media and public broadcasting in Colombia. After learning how to use the vozmob system, the group brainstormed some possible uses of the tools based on participants’ own work, and some of the questions and potential challenges they envisioned.

We really would have liked to have members of the popular communication team (PCT) here with us representing the project, and look forward to discussing the outcomes of the workshop as a group when we return. Here is a summary of the suggestions, ideas and questions that emerged from the workshop discussion:

Potential uses of the vozmob tools:
- Uses for radio practitioners
- research & documentation
- Portfolios of work (i.e. pictures of completed work, portfolio of stories or other creative work, etc)
- GPS – as a way to place stories in geographic space to document what is going on in the area or to associate stories with particular spaces
- Send out content for community building & access to online information
- Contributing content – increasing participation
- Educational tool
- Sharing ideas
- Storyboarding/pre-production of videos
- Alerts
- Peer-to-peer sharing
- Production & distribution of ongoing story series (‘soapies’)
- Increase discussion around other media programs

Challenges/questions:
- facilitation/training; how much is needed to enable use of the tools?
- some groups are reluctant to adopt or work with new information & communication technologies (ICTs) – e.g. cultural concerns, cultural resistance, conceptions of the internet, phones, etc
- editorial process? i.e. hate messages, or ‘quality control’ for donors
- time & resource limitations
- how to measure change/impact

Amanda, Holly and attended the 2nd Digital Media and Learning Competition event in Chicago last month. This year they opened the competition to international projects. (Check out our blog post about one such project, M-Ubunto, at dml.vozmob.net.) Over the course of the day’s events, MacArthur Foundation President Jonathon Fanton and his colleagues raised the question of the ‘participation gap’—versus simply the ‘digital divide’—which is certainly a topic of concern to the Mobile Voices project. (What ‘participation’ actually entails – what counts as digital participation, and its value – would be an interesting discussion to have in more depth with other MacArthur awardees.)
Connie Yowell, Director of Education, talked about MacArthur’s focus on learning (i.e. the process) rather than the traditional focus on expert-determined educational curriculum; the learning process is what can and should be participatory. (This reminded me of some of our discussions of Freire’s critique of the ‘banking system’ of education.) MacAthur has a strong interest in research and practice that can drive innovative program design and policy; such research is being collected on the website www.futuresoflearning.org, created by MacArthur awardee Mimi Ito and David Theogoldberg.
Ito and Howard Rheingold spoke on a panel on “Digital Youth and Participatory Learning” responding in real time to questions and ideas twittered by the audience. Check out our moblog posts on this on the dml.vozmob.net page. Other interesting work from last year’s winners was also featured; check out Black Cloud (http://studio.berkeley.edu/bc/; http://www.dmlcompetition.net/1/winnerDetail.php?x=bc).
In a break-out session with other 2009 awardees (Global Challenge, Mumbai WAVE, M-Ubunto, and Tecno.Tzotzil) we discussed questions around the inclusion of underserved communities in digital learning: the challenges, technologies and methods of assessment. (This latter topic was discussed primarily in terms of qualitative methods.) How can we encourage and support participation? What is the value of the resulting content to various audiences? Holly raised a key question about privilege and the role of power dynamics in projects working with underserved communities. For example, one might question why, if the emphasis is on horizontal learning instead of expert knowledge, was there a privileged position given to the Principal Investigators for each project?
The MacArthur social networking site for 2009 DML winners will soon be up and running – we should contribute to this once every 4-6 weeks. (They gave us a flip camera to use for this purpose.) There will be both private and public functions on the site, to enable collaboration among awardees. Hopefully some interesting conversations and collaborations will transpire.

On May 5, 2009, we presented vozmob at USC’s “Teaching With Technology” conference. After a quick overview of the project, Madelou described the project from the PCT’s point of view and presented one of her stories. The panel continued with Bill Celis and Brian Frank presenting Intersections, another ASC project with which we are starting to collaborate.

The TWT09 panels covered a lot of ground, but one strong theme running through the morning’s three panels was ’storytelling’. The morning’s first presentation showed how USC French language classes use the testimonies by holocaust survivors collected by the Shoah Foundation. Colin Keaveney emphasized the value of emotional engagement with the stories as part of language acquisition. Tara McPherson described Vectors and the multimedia telling of academic research stories it allows.

Multimedia literacy, at its heart, is about storytelling: cultivating the skills required to tell a compelling story, acquiring the ability to understand and interpret the stories told. While this is nothing new, digital technology multiplies the ways in which stories can be told, and what can happen to the stories after they are told. We ought to explore this more carefully as part of vozmob.

A big thank you to all those who helped spread the word about VozMob, voted for us in the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge, and pushed our application into the Featured Projects list. We’ll see you in San Jose!

Our users’ mode of digital storytelling has so far turned out to be via MMS, even though we didn’t start with that assumption. But based on that, much of our development is now finding workarounds to do things with mms that aren’t based on the phone service providers’ narrow imaginations about the possible use cases. For example, we have to strip out all kinds of junk that the service providers add to mms in order to publish them as stories on our site. And we are trying to figure out the best way to send mms to phones, but we are pretty much limited to either 1. using the providers’ email to mms gateways, which don’t allow very much control for how the messages actually get to the phones (for example, how to send a multislide mms with 5 pictures, 5 titles, and 5 associated audio files via email using the gateways?) Option 2 is using a computer to phone bridge and actually sending the mms from the phone, which might be better but probably won’t scale very well.

Lets look at the options providers have for composing and sending mms. For example Verizon says:

There are six ways for a consumer to send an MMS message:

* Verizon Wireless phone to any Verizon Wireless phone

* Verizon Wireless phone to wireless phones from other select service providers view provider list

* Phone to any valid E-Mail Address

* E-Mail to Phone using Mobile Number @vzwpix.com

* Phone to the on-line multimedia library – Picture & Video Messaging portal

* On-line multimedia composer (Picture & Video Messaging portal) to any Verizon Wireless phone

(This is from http://www.vzwdevelopers.com/aims/public/MmsLanding.jsp. You can see the last option, the online mms composer, here: http://picture.vzw.com/pub/composer/guestCreate.do?sortField=-creationDate&category=Free+Media%2CImages.)

Maybe we can hack the ‘multimedia composer’ functions and use them to send mms directly from our site. But what we REALLY want is a way to write a Drupal module that can interact directly with Verizon’s mms gateway!

In effect, what we want is to build our own ‘multimedia composer’ that can send mms, but via any provider. What we need is open APIs for all the providers’ MMS gateways.

This would be great for their business anyway! It looks like they are hoping to make customers buy images and sounds via their own ‘composer’ portal, but I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t benefit more just by sticking to their main business model – selling phone service – and letting hundreds of developers build ‘mms composer’ portals and applications. It would increase the volume of mms and the proportion of customers who pay for mms packages and plans. Maybe these open APIs already exist? Maybe no one ever asked for them? Anyway, would love to hear some thoughts and comments on this possibiliy.

To everyone reading this, thanks for your interest and support to VozMob thus far. Up until now, we’ve contributed in our own ways, but now we have the opportunity to take COLLECTIVE ACTION.

Voz Mob is in the running for a $25,000 prize from NetSquared’s N2Y4 Mobile Challenge. All we need to do is be voted as one of the top 14 contestants by the end of the week. So here’s what you can do in three easy steps:

Step 1: Register on Netsquared: http://netsquared.org/user/register

Step 2: Vote for us in the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge Project Gallery!  Click here to get started: http://tinyurl.com/vote4vozmob

Note: The voting system requires you to choose three projects before you cast your ballot, so vote for us and at least 2 others from the project gallery. Once you’ve picked 3, you’ll see the “cast ballot” link appear in the right column of the page. Click the “cast ballot” link and you’re done! Here’s the link to our project: http://tinyurl.com/vozmobN2Y4

Step 3: Spread the word! Please pass the word along to your friends on your social networks, twitter accounts, Facebook status, etc. Use this message:

VozMob entered the N2Y4 challenge! http://tinyurl.com/vozmobN2Y4
Please Vote for us by Friday, April 10! http://tinyurl.com/vote4vozmob

The voting window is really short. It closes at 3pm Pacific Time this Friday, but we think we have a real shot at getting it as long as we get everyone to cast a vote.

Thanks for your continued support!

Today I went to a meeting organized by USC’s Community Based Learning Collaborative (CBLC). There were people in the room from across the university who are involved in some kind of community partnership that links faculty and students to community based organizations. The JEP program folks, who administer the Service Learning program which allows USC undergrads to gain course credit for community based work, were there, as were people from the USC Volunteer Center, and the University wide office of City and Community relations.

JEP places about 2000 students each year for service learning, including courses as well as litearcy programs. There has been some JEP work on immigration (http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/jep/jep/immigrant.htm).

We were divided into tables by interest area, including computer science, arts, education, health, and so on. I was at the education table. There was a series of presentations by panelists discussing various approaches to assessing the impact of service learning, followed by round table discussions at each table. Unfortunately, the format didn’t provide much opportunity to meet or network with people who weren’t at your table, but it was still interesting.

The first presentation was by Adrianna Kezar, about assessment and evaluation of Service Learning. Here’s a summary:

Adrianna Kezar, Evaluation of Service Learning:

• When you measure outcomes, dont just look at traditional measures. Also look at:
  -partnership
  -learning outcomes
  -student experience
  -impact
  -student and faculty perspectives
  -partner impact
• In the vision for assessment, it’s important to determine the level you’re assessing. Is it the partnership level? School wide? Cross campus comparison? If its more local, action based and community based models might be better. If more global, standardized instruments might be better. Think about who the audience is for the evaluation.
• Assessment areas for partnerships: common vision and goals; on going planning; policies; designated leads and roles; communication; decision making processes. Its best to track these things along the way, not just wait until the end. Its important to be flexible and be able to make changes along the way. Important to understand what went well, and what didn’t.
• Often, these kinds of assessments don’t happen because of time and energy limitations. Often an office or institution at the university level can help, because it makes you sit down and do evaluation.
• How to use research to inform assessment. What are we measuring? People who are proponents of service learning and community partnerships know that it works, but then they have to prove it to the provost in order to get money. So if you’ll have to do this, then one approach might be: pretest and post test with control and experimental group. But that may not be the best way to test what people actually learn.
• Learning outcomes: knowledge, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. They looked at these things over 4 year college education. Understanding this research might help us when we think about how to assess outcomes. SL can have an impact that isn’t visible for years. Very hard to measure outcomes. Using portfolios and other qualitative forms of measuring outcomes. Having students choose what they think was the most important outcome. We have been able to see measurable impact on prosocial attitudes in students who have participated in SL.
• Two goals: create good citizens, vs. real life systems as a place to best learn particular bodies of knowledge. These things often get fuzzy. Choose which one you are focusing on.

Eric Wat, Asian Pacific American Community Research Roundtable (APACRR)

Next presentation was by Eric Wat from APACRR, a project of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (http://www.a3pcon.org). He went over core values they use to develop partnerships as well as various kinds of collaborative projects.

• Values: equality between campus and community; research as a tool for change in community; shared standards for community based research; community as producers of knowledge; nurturing next generation of API researchers.
• Challenges and Strengths for CBOs, faculty, and students.
• Potential roles in a partnership, drawn from focus groups and committee decisions:
  -facilitator
  -researcher
  -disseminator
  -technical assistance
• Think about difference between short term and long term impact.
• group project vs individual; school year vs. summer; division of labor between uni and CBO. Who manages the students? Who evaluates and assesses what?
• Incentives for students: course credit; major requirements; $$$.
• Regular service learning class is better than independent study. A requirement for a major is even better. But the best motivator is $. 3-4,000 can make a big difference in student motivation and might not be that big a dent in your budget.
• This presentation discussed various elements to consider in setting up, designing, managing, and evaluating community university partnerships.

Following that was

Gary Kosman, America Learns (http://americalearns.net)

re: how to set up Service Learning projects with a deliverable.

Gary talked about the problem where a service learner is placed with a CBO, does good work, but what they do is not actually used by the CBO. So, showed us a draft ‘Application to Give a Service Learner an Incredible Learning Experience that Helps Our Organization in a Meaningful Way.’ An application for the CBO to fill out that indicates project clarity, who will be the project manager, the project plan, etc.

Barry Boehm, Computer Science Department

Finally Barry Boehm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Boehm) and another presenter talked about their experience developing a service learning course within the computer science department. Comp Sci 577 is a class where student programmers get credit for working with real-world community clients to develop software that can actually be used for community needs [I can't resist: sounds way better to me than Dr. Boehm's previous gig as director of Information Science and Technology at the DoD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)]. Read more about the community software development class at http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/news/2007/viterbi-computer-science.htm. They operate with weekly effort, progress, and risk reports; grading criteria for artifacts; two live reviews per semester: client is there in the room. Together they present how it’s going, things done right, things to improve. Client evaluations: 20 questions, 1-5 ratings, comments, what did you learn about how to learn?

Overall: a lot of interesting people and ideas in the room, and definitely some good contacts if we want to figure out how to hook USC undergrads into our project.

Here’s a great piece from NetSquared.

NetSquared
Interview: François Bar, “Mobile Voices”
March 6, 2009

I was very fortunate to interview François Bar, Associate Professor of Communication in Francois Bar the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, about his work on Mobile Voices. Here, Bar is doing some unbelievable research in the field of mobile-based reporting. His work is particularly exciting to me because, unlike a lot of us in the NetSquared community who are excited about – and sometimes obsessed with – with what’s on the horizon, he is trying to figure out how to put what already exists to work for more people. [Read More]