While young people today grow up in a media saturated culture, they rarely experience media created by their peers about the issues that most impact their lives and communities. CYI aims to harness the power of youth generated media as a tool for cross-disciplinary learning, civic engagement, and critical digital literacy. By combining innovative social media and interactive tools with youth-generated media, CYI will raise awareness among youth and mobilize them to better understand and take action on community issues. This project will also evidence the power of youth and social media as an effective pedagogical strategy for teachers and educational leaders.

CYI begins in Spring of 2011 with the curation/organization of a youth media education and distribution package. The package will include 10 exemplary youth-produced media projects across a variety of formats and genres (spoken word, digital games, written stories, radio pieces, and video documentaries) generated from youth media programs in Chicago. One featured work will be CYVN’s NUF SAID project, a citywide data gathering and multimedia production project that examines how the economic crisis has impacted youth in the City of Chicago.

Then during the Summer 2011, CYVN will design and prepare a suite of learning resources to accompany the compendium.
Each youth media project will be accompanied by a suite of learning resource materials including:
• Original media in high quality digital form as well as written transcript of original story.
• Interactive Voice Thread Prompt by the youth author/creator invited student responses and interpretations.
• Ideas for lesson plans – linking the story to themes and subject areas, including the increasingly relevant area of media literacy.
• Toolbox Handouts – downloadable printouts to help facilitate discussions.
• Standards Alignment – linking the story to content standards through a “synthesized” standards listings.
• Links to further resources -connecting and extending story, as well as links to guides for students’ creative media-making projects.

During the final phase of the project, participants (including schools, teachers, and youth media groups) engage with VoiceThread and other interactive tools utilized in the project. VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in five ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). VoiceThread will enable two-way conversations to take place between the creators of the youth media and the student participants in the classrooms that view their works. It will also facilitate a built in evaluation system for assessing the impact of the media on its audiences.

Chicago Youth Interactive (CYI) falls on the heels of Nuf Said, CYVN’s model project of citywide youth media collaboration, open source information sharing, and peer-to-peer data gathering. During Nuf Said, 40 youth pollsters from ten youth media groups, using social and mobile networks, collected 850 survey responses from their peers, aged 12-23. The responses yielded illuminating findings, much of which would be difficult for adult and professional journalists to access on their own. The survey also provided a totally unique jumping off place for youth created media, providing insight into how youth think and feel about some of the key issues in their lives. Dozens of youth media products were created and are shared on the www.nuf-said.org website, that was launched at the end of October 2010.

Young Chicago Authors has done it again – pulled off another amazing city-wide poetry slam – Louder Than a Bomb!

The largest of its kind in the world, Louder Than a Bomb (LTAB) is the city’s rapidly-growing teen poetry festival. Aiming to bring teens together across racial, gang, and socio-economic lines, LTAB is a friendly competition that emphasizes self-expression and community via poetry, oral story-telling, and hip-hop spoken word.

As author and LTAB co-founder and artistic director Kevin Coval describes, “For three minutes at a time the students speak about their lives. For the other eighty-seven minutes, they are listening to the lives and stories and dreams of others. Kids that don’t look like them and come from a different neighborhood. In listening, the city shrinks.”

Based on alumni surveys, LTAB boasts an 85% high school graduation rate, and most notably—within a year of national discussion on youth violence—has had zero incidents of violence in it’s 10 years of working with students from across the city. Traditionally operating outside of regular school programming, LTAB brings together poetry teams that are often founded by students and coached pro-bono by teachers, for the annual three week competition each Spring.

Louder Than a Bomb’s 10th anniversary year is themed “The Real Chicago Renaissance,” a play on Chicago Public Schools controversial Renaissance 2010 school privatization program. Beginning February 20th, with finals taking place at The Vic Theater March 6, LTAB 10 will be dedicated to Chicago’s legendary oral historian Studs Terkel.

For more information on Louder Than A Bomb, and the documentary recently filmed about it, please visit:

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur has just released a new publication,  Re-Imagining Learning, that is available for free downloading here.

Preparing young people to compete and thrive in a global, connected world demands new ways of thinking about education. Digital media has the potential to help us fundamentally re-imagine teaching and learning. We must create new ways and places to learn, new and more rewarding roles for parents and teachers, new approaches to assess learning as it takes place, and, most importantly, a new focus on fostering passion, creativity, innovation, and the skills needed in the 21st century workforce. —MacArthur Foundation, 2010

The website version is particularly interesting as it contains interviews with scholars like Mimi Ito and features our friend and ally Digital Youth Network. Highly recommended, this beautiful site highlights what youth can achieve when given access to innovative technology tools.

Imagination. Education. Celebration.

Young visionaries let their voices be heard at Cinema/Chicago’s CineYouth Festival. Celebrating its sixth year in 2010, the CineYouth festival showcases and celebrates filmmakers 20 years old and younger.

During the three day Festival, CineYouth provides young filmmakers the opportunity to attend numerous workshops (past workshops include: Screenwriting 101, Bach or Beyonce – Soundtracking Your Film, Am I Gonna Get Sued for This?, Final Cut Editing), film school panels and discussions, and access to industry professionals, all at Columbia College Chicago, the country’s biggest film school.

CineYouth brings filmmakers of all ages and from around the country together to share their work, learn together, and be inspired by each other.

OYN is presenting a couple of workshops in Game Design using Scratch. The tacks for this year’s conference are as follows:

Indigenous Media and Technology

Medios Caminantes: Medios creando, fronteras derrumbando

Do-It-Yourself Technology

Rad Art: 2-D images for 3-D movements

Trans & Queer Youth Media

Eco-Justice Media Making for Sustainable Communities

Media Policy for Social Justice

The AMC is followed immediately by the US Social Forum.