The current  issue of the on-line journal - Youth Media Reporter -  features an article about YouthLAB called: “Listening Across Borders: Creating Virtual Spaces for Youth Global Exchange ”

YMR’s purpose is to build the youth media field by documenting, from multiple perspectives, the work produced by and for young people in video, film, television, radio, music, web, art, and print. YMR offers insight to the degree young people and their adult allies use media to make a difference, address a point, enhance creative imagination, and match leadership with voice.

Below are a few excerpted “sneak preview” passages from Mindy Faber’s article on YouthLAB:

“Bringing youth in conversation together about oppression and injustice, both in physical and virtual space and both in disagreement and solidarity, is not only where critical consciousness begins to take root, but where we they form new relationships across previously uncomfortable differences.”

“Young people envision current technological landscapes as non-commodified sites of vibrant imagination, youth activism and international engagement. How can we as youth media educators create a different kind of pedagogical space where the tools of participatory media (blogs, wikis, social networks, digital sharing sites, etc.) allow knowledge and media to be co-constructed by and through the participants on a global level?”

“By creating these pedagogical spaces where hierarchies are flattened out but differences are not erased, youth media makers can provide a global example of dialogue by listening across borders.”

DOWNLOAD FULL ARTICLE

Chicago is the host of the 3rd Coast Audio Festival (November 1-3) and youth and community media producers from across the country were in town to attend. Pictured here with Open Youth Networks Director, Mindy Faber (far right) is Rebecca O’Doherty, Director of Appalachian Media Institute, Whitesburg, KY; Lissa Soep, Director of Education, Youth Radio, Oakland, CA; and, Jesikah Maria Ross from the Save the Sierra Project, Davis, CA.

Learn more about the 3rd Coast Audio Festival at http://www.thirdcoastfestival.com/

Mindy Faber just returned from Lexington, Kentucky where she taught  for four days at Arthur Rouse’s awesome 12 credit Narrative Filmmaking course.

The participants were among the most promising and talented filmmakers in the region and produced some smart, funny and well-crafted shorts in just a few days.

On October 22nd, YouthLAB members Spencer Fitzsimmons, Lori Moody, Sadia Nawab and Zane Scheuerlein were invited to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism to train the McCormick Tribune Fellows how to blog. We joined with youth from Free Spirit Media to blog with these established media managers about the representation of youth in the news and media. See the blog at http://fellows2007.blogspot.com/

In 2006, a group of parents at Evanston Township High School spied on the Facebook sites of several students. They reported some of these to the school administration for disciplinary action. YouthLAB member Zane Scheuerlein created this poster above an allegory of the event done in the style of artist Barry Kite. Thanks to Ms. Boyer at ETHS, Zane’s terrific Graphic Communications teacher.

The National Coalition Against Censorship is featuring YouthLAB and Zane’s design on their site. Check it out!

A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University

This is a collectively authored map by YouthLAB participants of the slave trade, migration routes of our ancestors and present families and our dreams for future journeys. It is individually customized by each of us telling stories that are deeply personal and yet politically and historically situated.

Red and grey lines show the slave trade routes. Blue lines show more recent family migrations. Yellow shows trips we have made and places we have visited. Pink marks the spots in Barbados and Blue marks spots in US. Film camera icons are where you can watch videos we have made. Suitcases are places we dream of visiting. We are always working on it so check in often.

View Larger Map

YouthLAB is curating a program for 24/7: A DIY Video Summit to be held in Los Angeles in February. You can see what videos we are considered by clicking here

“You-TubeSized.”

Here is one that is pretty funny from Reel Grrls in Seattle called WHAT IF MEN MENSTRUATED

Not only can you read the proposal by Marisol, Andy and Zane but you can rate it and offer comments. Click below to there now.

Little Village MapZine (A Google Map Mashup)

We are in the Final Round and Marisol, Andy and Zane need your feedback to make their proposal better! So please read and rate it now!

Knight Challenge Grant for Youth under 25

This from a Knight Foundation news release:

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and MTV announced today the Knight News Challenge “Young Creators Award,” a new digital journalism grant program for young people age 25 and under anywhere in the world. The contest will award up to $500,000 to young creators with compelling ideas for using digitally delivered news and information to enhance physical communities – improving the lives of people where they live, work and vote. The new award is a component of the Knight News Challenge, an annual competition awarding $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. www.youngcreatorsaward.com

Yes, that is right. You can help YouthLAB raise money for our new media projects simply by voting for us at GiveMeaning.org . Click below on the word YOUTHLAB, read our proposal and then vote YES. If we get 100 votes in one month YouthLAB will be listed on the Give Meaning website. We promise you don’t have to donate - just click and vote Yes. http://www.givemeaning.com/proposal/YouthLAB

YouthLAB

YouthLAB has been invited to participate in 24/7: A DIY Video Summit

School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California24/7: A DIY Video Summit will bring together the many communities that have evolved around do-it-yourself (DIY) video:
artists, audiences, technology providers, academics, policy makers and industry executives. Speakers include Henry Jenkins, Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig. Guest curators include Ryanne Hodson, Eric Sax and Mindy Faber

Mindy Faber and YouthLAB Chicago members are among the six chosen curators for this three day event. We are leading a Sunday workshop and organizing a program called YouTube-sized: Youth Personas, Protests, Paranoias & Pleasures

In addition, our video THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED will screen in the MAIN PROGRAM. Learn more at http://www.video24-7.org/

24/7 will feature curated programs on design video, activist documentary, youth media, machinima, music video, political remix and video blogging. The video program will culminate in an evening program and reception on February 9 that will draw from all of these video genres.

We hope to raise money so that as many of our YouthLAB members can attend as possible. Please donate to our ChipIN site http://openyouth.chipin.com/travel-fund-to-la-diy-fest.

Here is more about our selection.
YouTube-sized: Youth Personas, Protests, Paranoia s & Pleasures

A beguiling collection of works dealing with thorny issues of youth pleasure and protest
in the networked public media landscape. Curated by members of Open Youth
Networks, under the guidance of PeabodyAward-winning video artist/curator/educator Mindy Faber. The
program is presented by youth in four 10-15 minute acts.

PRO-LOGUE
The Revolution Will Be Televised by YouthLAB 1:45 2007

ACT ONE
Cell-Phone Cinema
From counter-surveillance to Luke Johnson’s Phone experiment, teens make the most
of mobile media devices. Media moments made by teens - captured in private and
made public through YouTube.

ACT TWO
Youth Culture as Terrorist Threat
A teen perspective on the Boston Bomb Scare as played out on the internet by Fox
News, Comedy Central, the Mayor of Boston and a slew of news outlets. The
presentation includes a compelling compendium of video responses to the moral panic
instilled by youth culture in the form of mooninites and Lite Brite toys.

ACT THREE
“TV is Sooooooo 20th Century”
What we as youth watch online and why. From Ask a Ninja to sleeping puppies to
underground music – teens curate and analyze their own online video pleasures.

ACT FOUR
Trying on a Different Face (What’s Your Cultural Makeup?)
A montage of short videos and vlogs in which youth either construct or imitate
different personas online. This disarming and intimate selection reveals how we as
youth attempt to make sense of gender, race, class and other identities by pretending
to be an(other). Videos include What if Men Menstruated, Geisha Girl, Slip of
the Tongue, and a montage of YouTube videos in which youth pretend to be of
another race, gender or ethnicity.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED
BY YOUTHLAB CHICAGO

The Revolution Will Be Televised
It will be brought to you by me and
Brought to me by you
It will show pictures of what needs to be seen and
Some things that don’t.
It will be broadcast without distortion.
It will be broadcast through the cables of consciousness and brought to you by the Camcorder of the Commons
It will be brought to you by TBS: Thoroughly Broken Silence

The Revolution Will Be Televised
You will be able to create your own news
You will be able to carry it in your pocket and
View it with out commercial interruption
You will be able to download it without being subpoenaed by the R I A A
You will be able to capture brutality on a cell phone and set it free on YouTube

The Revolution Will Be Televised
But it will not give pop culture a new home
It will not give Anna Nicole paternity tests
It will not give you seizures from pocket monsters
It will not result in nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach or diarrhea
The revolution will contain a solution but not in the purchase of 409
The revolution will not be censored
It will not give into the man
It will deliver a boot into the crotch of oppression
It will not be anorexic
The revolution will be fat and happy

The Revolution Will Be Televised
It will put a microscope on Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzalez and Scooter Libby.
The revolution will not plead the fifth
The revolution will be televised by hackers broadcasting from their mom’s basements
The revolution will not be controlled by septuagenarians
The Revolution Will Be Televised
The Revolution Will Be Televised
The Revolution Will Be You-Tube-sized
The Revolution Will Be Televised …..by Me

On Friday August 3rd, YouthLAB premiered our videos and website at Columbia College. We had a great turnout. We took turns introducing the videos and explaining our process. Everyone had worked tirelessly all day shooting and editing the poetry video and we got it done an hour before the premiere! Whew! But everyone loved it and we will continue to refine it. Mindy is making a documentary about the entire YouthLAB EXperience and Barbados Partners will be adding more work too. So keep coming back to our site.

Barbados YouthLAB wanted to know more about American Music so we set off for Street-level Youth Media to ask their views.