Mojo Big Challenges Part 1

[Gamaliel Nation]

Inmy heart of hearts, this is what I most hope for from MoJo: dozens, hundreds, thousands of developers and journalists sorting through the very practical challenges of working together.

Example: a thing you hear a bunch from the more journalisty folks in the NewsLab: wow, my ideas about the web and open source are really shifting a bunch, so much more is possible. Great stuff!

Of course, our most immediate challenge is finding five awesome news-hacker-steins. The first round of MoJo fellows will need to exemplify this hacks and hackers mind meld within one person. As Andrew Leimdorfer of the BBC put it to me recently:

Our team focuses on client-side delivery of projects that go from brainstorm to live in a short time frame (1 day to 2 months max). If the fellows are going to be a success, they will need to be hack/hacker types, people who love finding a story and mashing up the technology at their disposal to tell it in the most engaging way possible.

I knew Dan was the right guy for this gig when I learned that he a) taught web dev to journalists at Columbia College for 3 years and b) successfully ran Punk Planet magazine for 13 years. Web dev, journalism and gritty business chops to boot. Exactly the sort of things MoJo is about.

If you are interested in the connection between the open internet and journalism, you should enter the MoJo challenge. All you have to do to get started is submit your idea.

When I visited the Globe a few weeks back, I saw two things that really impressed me. The first was the prototype of a fully cross platform HTML5 version of the paper: I saw it work (and resize itself) seamlessly across big monitors, tablets and phones. It was beautiful. I also saw a mini-lab with about 10 devices that allowed developers to test the new paper in real time: as I surf, all the devices show the page I am on at the same time.

This is part of series of interviews with people involved in the Knight Mozilla News Innovation Partnership (MoJo). Find out more on the MoJo web site or enter the MoJo news innovation challenge.

It took 25 years for Eisenstein to grab hold of this technical wonder and then say: wow, I bet you we could tell a more powerful story if we varied the shots a bit and then edited them together. With Potemkin, he invented the visual language we still use to tell stories today: montage.

The potential of web native truly is awesome: we can now link any frame within any video to any other part of the web. This was hard to do in the world of Flash video. The introduction of the HTML5 tag over the last two years has made it easy.

The same tools have been used to show how transcripts can be used to search and then navigate immediately to anywhere within a long clip. This demo from Danish public radio shows how this can work with web native . The same thing could easily be done with video.

Google and Arcade Fire took this idea a step further, pulling moving images from street view and Google Earth into a rock video. If you enter your zip code, your neighborhood becomes a character in the narrative in real time.

The current MoJo challenge topic is about exactly this question: how can new online video tools transform news storytelling? Tying video snippets to other web content and data. Letting audiences join into the debate. And do on.

As Mozilla Knight News Innovation partner, Al Jazeera English will be hosting a fellow who will work on web apps that explore this trend. I know that Mohamed is especially interested in fellows who want to work on grassroots reporting, social media and video, which ties into our current MoJo challenge topic.

In this episode we continue our series on the intersection of race and parenting, which we started with Dr. Margaret Hagerman on the topic of White privilege in parenting; then we covered White privilege in schools with Dr. Allison Roda and what parents can do to overcome structural racism as well as talk with their children about race with Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum.

Yeah, yeah. That was not on the list, but one of my favorite passions as a child and as an adult now still with my own reading is about the native people of North and particularly Central and Southern America. I really, really enjoy that. Yeah.

Okay. Well, we may get to talk about that a little bit more in the interview. I wonder if we could start up by talking a bit about your work. Can you tell us what kind of books you study and how you study them?

Yeah, it totally does. And I think the images, using historic images can be so powerful. I remember just recently when I was researching this, coming across a photo, it might have been of Ruby Bridges or one of the other early African American children going into a school and seeing the White mothers just furious and screaming and if you take away the fury and the screaming, they are these decent White people who you would think, oh they have the perfect lives and the perfect family and you could imagine them in their kitchen cooking dinner for the family every night. And just that juxtaposition of (and I guess the incongruity of) where you typically in the picture you have in your mind of that White fifties housewife and put her in this environment where she just does not want this African American child to go into her school where her child attends. It was just mind boggling to me.

Yup. Yeah. I remember reading somewhere that textbooks that discuss Lincoln published during the Bush administration were very different in terms of their stunts and content compared to books published I guess probably before, but certainly after.

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Emery, R.E. (1988). Mediation and the settlement of divorce disputes. In E.M. Hetherington & J.D. Arasteh (Eds.). Impact of divorce, single parenting, and stepparenting on children. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hetherington, E.M. (1999). Should we stay together for the sake of the children? In E.M. Hetherington (Ed.)., Coping with divorce, single parenting, and remarriage: A risk and resiliency perspective (p.93-116). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

The age of the child at the time of the divorce may also be an important factor, and many studies have been done on this, with mixed results from which we can still draw some conclusions. Overall, the research suggests that divorce has a particularly negative impact on very young children, and that the impact is less if the child is a teenager when the divorce occurs. Children whose parents divorce in the preschool years will be acutely aware of the departure of one parent, and will fear the possibility of abandonment by the other parent which may be manifested in extreme anxiety when the child is temporarily separated from the custodial parent. The child may become very clingy and unwilling to go to daycare or preschool when they were previously happy to go. They may also see bedtime as a separation, and may experience terrifying nightmares. They may experience disruptions in their normal ability to resolve inner conflicts through play and fantasy, or may even stop playing altogether. They might be restless, noisy, and irritable.

Do you have supportive family around to provide a sense of continuity even as the nuclear family changes form? Do you feel as though you have the societal support you need, from the very practical child support and a job that pays your expenses, to a feeling of belonging in your neighborhood? These factors can help to support your own mental health which turns out to be the key indicator of resilience in children of divorce.

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