God didn't promise days without pain,
laughter without sorrow,
or sun without rain,
But He did promise strength for the day,
comfort for the tears,
and light for the way.

If God brings you to it,
He will bring you through it.

A little girl and her father were crossing a bridge.
The father was kind of scared so he asked his little daughter:
"Sweetheart, please hold my hand so that you don't fall into the river." The little girl said:
"No, Dad. You hold my hand."
"What's the difference?" Asked the puzzled father.
"There's a big difference," replied the little girl.
"If I hold your hand and something happens to me, chances are that I may let your hand go. But if you hold my hand, I know for sure that no matter what happens, you will never let my hand go."

In any relationship, the essence of trust is not in its bind, but in its bond..So hold the hand of the person whom you love rather than expecting them to hold yours...

You Never

You never said I'm leaving
You never said goodbye
You were gone before I knew it,
And only God knew why
A million times I needed you,
A million times I cried
If Love alone could have saved you,
You never would have died
In Life I loved you dearly
In death I love you still
In my heart you hold a place,
That no one could ever fill
It broke my heart to lose you,
But you didn't go alone
For part of me went with you,
The day God took you home

An appropriate poem..
In memory of my father..

Outlandish is the story of a band that insists on the vantage point called "The World We live in," as stated in the band's official site. Quite a bit has happened since Lenny Martinaz, Waqas Qadri, and Isam Bachiri broke ground in 1997 to form Outlandish and launch a career together.
In a live interview with IslamOnline.net, Waqas Qadri described how Outlandish started, "In the beginning, not so many people believed in us; back then hip hop was more looked upon as a 'black' thing, so how could a Pakistani, Cuban, and Moroccan bunch of kids ever do good? Therefore, we were forced at an early stage to take matters into our own hands."

Calling their style 'life music', Closer Than Veins Album marked a departure in this respect, particularly on the socially and politically heavy side the group has called in lyrical reinforcements. This is actually highlighting through one of their most outstanding tracks "Look Into My Eyes" that was principally written by Gihad Ali, a young Palestinian poet.

Lenny, Isam, and Waqas (From left).

Lyric:

"Look into my eyes
Tell me what you see
You don't see a damn thing
'cause you can't relate to me
You're blinded by our differences
My life makes no sense to you
I'm the persecuted one
You're the red, white and blue

Each day you wake in tranquility
No fears to cross your eyes
Each day I wake in gratitude
Thanking God He let me rise
You worry about your education
And the bills you have to pay
I worry about my vulnerable life
And if I'll survive another day

Your biggest fear is getting a ticket
As you cruise your Cadillac
My fear is that the tank that has just left
Will turn around and come back

Yet, do you know the truth of where your money goes?
Do you let your media deceive your mind?
Is this a truth nobody, nobody, nobody knows

Someone tell me...

Ooohh, let's not cry tonight
I promise you one day it's through
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters
Ooohh, shine a light for every soul that ain't with us no more
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters

See I've known terror for quite some time
57 years so cruel
Terror breathes the air I breathe
It's the checkpoint on my way to school
Terror is the robbery of my land
And the torture of my mother
The imprisonment of my innocent father
The bullet in my baby brother
The bulldozers and the tanks
The gases and the guns
The bombs that fall outside my door
All due to your funds

You blame me for defending myself
Against the ways of my enemies
I'm terrorized in my own land
What am I the terrorist?

Do you know the truth of where your money goes?
Do you let your media deceive your mind?
Is this a truth nobody, nobody, nobody knows?

Someone tell me...

America, do you realize that the taxes that you pay
Feed the forces that traumatize my every living day
So if I won't be here tomorrow
It's written in my fate
May the future bring a brighter day
The end of our wait

(pause)

Ohh let's not cry tonight I promise you one day is through
Ohh my brothers! Ohh my sisters!
Ooh shine a light for every Soul that ain't with us no more
Ohh my brothers! Ohh my sisters!"

Ever since the movie "Iron Man" opened, the popularity of this picture I took last summer in France has ballooned, thanks to people who are searching Google and Flickr for images with the keywords "iron" and "man" and "mask."

Apologies to the fans. I know it's not what you were looking for. But if it's any consolation, this was awesomely hilarious to see on the chateau tour.

After many months of thinking, learning, writing, talking, designing, testing, thinking more, rewriting, and learning new stuff again, the public beta of Youth Media Exchange is live!

YMEX.org is a new online social network, developed by TIG, Global Kids, and Asia Society, where young people can share, create, and learn about digital media for social change. It's full of resources to learn about both digital media production and global issues, and it's ready and waiting for YOU to come check it out, share your media, and get your voice heard.

There's much more to be said about the process, as well as what's still to come. But as we know, if I wait to write a well crafted post, it will never get done, so for now, just check it out: http://www.ymex.org and let us know what you think!

The deluges of rain, snow, and American Airlines cancellations from April 9-12 were no deterrents to a great few days at the National Service Learning Conference in Minneapolis. I still haven’t broken my recent streak of traveling to bad weather (San Antonio, I have my eye on you…) but the NSLC was worth it nonetheless.

A couple months ago, a fellow frequent-conference-exhibitor had tried to warn me about the NSLC, a conference, in their opinion, with a totally dead exhibit hall. In MY opinion, an empty exhibit hall is a sign of a GOOD conference! Not only was I glad to see that the NSLC has such a compelling agenda that people actually went to the workshops, but the booth saw plenty of traffic during breakfast, lunch, and other breaks.

I met a professor from Argentina who coordinates a network of thousands of schools there involved in service learning (Damian, I’ll be putting you two in touch!), made new contacts at organizations looking for online tools to connect the young people in their programs, and shared resources with several hundred teachers and students who are highly active in service learning projects in their schools and communities.

And, when things were a little slow, I took the opportunity to check out all the other great groups who were there to share resources with the young people and educators involved in service learning. I’m still not all the way through the stack of materials I picked up, but here’s a sample:

At the Free Tibet booth, I signed a petition and had an inspiring conversation with a student activist (who is a Tibetan refugee born in India, now living and studying in Saint Paul – he told me Minnesota has the second largest Tibetan community in the US) about Tibet, China, and the Olympics.

At the Peace Corps booth, I learned more about how they connect volunteers in the field to classrooms in the US, and met a staffer who thinks very highly of the TIG Guide to Action, and recommended that their whole network use it in planning events for Global Youth Service Day. It means a lot to have the endorsement of a leading service organization.

The folks from the Shinnyo-En Foundation were handing out t-shirts and DVDs to promote their new Six Billion Paths to Peace initiative, and I talked to a program officer for a while to understand what the campaign is about, since I missed out on the gala that the rest of the GYAN crew attended in New York in March (while I was still recovering from the flu) :)

There was no one at the Project Learning Tree booth, but I was intrigued by this sign, in thinking about our own sustainability practices when it comes to outreach and marketing:



It was also great to meet leaders from Youth Service America and put faces to names I’ve heard around the GYAN office in planning for GYSD.

There were three sessions I managed to attend – both keynotes (awesome move on NSLC’s part to close the exhibit hall during the keynotes!), as well as a panel on youth media.

Pedro Noguera, as much respect as I have for his work, gave a surprisingly generic keynote compared to other times I’ve heard him speak. He made some great points about how unacceptable and sorry the state of our education system is, but with this crowd, he might have been preaching to the choir. Then again, almost every keynote I’ve ever heard pales in comparison to the inspiration and energy and awe that I gained from hearing Archbishop Desmond Tutu deliver the keynote on Friday. How can you beat a Nobel Peace Prize Winner and spiritual leader telling a knock-knock joke in reference to the Bible?



In all seriousness though, having spent a lot of time thinking about the distinctions between service and activism, Desmond Tutu’s keynote gave a refreshing bit of historical perspective. I’ve struggled with the way service and activism (both of which fall under the umbrella of civic engagement) are often separated from one another, particularly service as a “safe” or non-political term, one used to describe what students do unto other, less-fortunate people, while activism gets pigeon-holed as a more radical thing that happens separately from learning. In limiting what each term means, we also misunderstand and underestimate the importance they play in enabling young people as social changemakers, whether in school or out. Archbishop Tutu reminded us that young people have always been changemakers and activists – from the Bible (it was a young person, David, who stood up to Goliath) to the students who led the civil rights movement, protested against South African apartheid, and now speak out against the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Finally, the youth media panel was perhaps a bit long, but I learned about some cool projects:

- thefoshow.com – Run out of the high school for performing arts in Minneapolis, it’s the only commercial radio station in US completely run and produced by high school students.

- Strive Media – print and video production (Gumbo Teen Magazine) out of Minneapolis

- Beyond Green – the latest project from Listen Up!

- Teen International Media Exchange (TIME) – program using media to explore seven global issues, based at Media Academy at Cleveland HS in Los Angeles

I was really honored to meet Sidibay, a young person I’ve heard a lot about through our mutual friends at iEARN Canada, who presented his award-winning documentary about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

The importance of global perspectives and connections in service learning really seems to be on the rise within the NSLC community, so it was great to participate in that conversation as it expands, and hope we’ll be back next year!

Knowing that having a site as multilingual as TIG is unusual, it was cool to happen upon a panel at SXSW about website internationalization and localization. While the moderator had a few annoying moments (mostly making a big deal about how many in the audience raised their hands to the question "do you live in a country where English is the primary language?" - this should not be surprising at a conference with mostly American attendees), overall there were quite a few tips that I think we can learn a lot from.


-being bilingual does not make you a translator

-translators are often not technology people, so they don’t know the right technical language to translate interface words (“apply”, “enter”, “submit”)

-context is everything – if the translator can’t see the language in context, they will get it wrong

-have a translator on board at the wireframing stage, so that person can point out contextual and cultural issues

-localization isn’t just replacing the words in one language into another, it’s also about giving appropriate cultural and social context

-translation needs to deal not just with literal words, but also with concepts that don’t translate from one culture/language to another

-Social networking sites don’t choose their users, users choose the site – snses grow because users tell their friends, and want to find people like themselves. If a site has a high concentration of users in a particular culture, it sometimes turns users from other countries off because they don’t understand why the site seems so saturated with members and content from another country (this happened with Orkut – Americans complained that it was too Brazilian! So Orkut responded by giving users the option of only connecting with other people who speak the same language as them)

-most sites view internationalization efforts as moving to a language other than English

-Community driven translation is NOT the norm - one of panelists asked if anyone was allowing their online community to do the translation for them – only two of us raised our hands (probably 75-100 in the room)

-use icon based representation with mouse-over where possible, to reduce multilingual formatting issues (words being longer in diff languages) – but beware the problem with an icon/image having different cultural meanings

-sometimes you try to localize so much that you end up with something that is “just ok” in a lot of languages, and “not so great” in a few – instead of trying to rebrand and make the site almost its own stand alone in different locations

Cool sites to check out:
-One of the speakers was from Worldwide Lexicon project – really cool open source translation and localization tools, ability to develop multilingual web apps, Simple Localization System (SLS - php library), and multilingual blogging/publishing tools – with a wiki approach to translating web content.

-dotsub – community subtitling and translation tool

-publishing industry becoming unbundled from old fashioned vertical integration and will be replaced by companies that just do one element of the business

-Budapest Open Access Declaration – scholarly articles (in medicine, science, and engineering) should be open licensed and available for everyone – NIH now mandates that publications resulting from projects it funds must be open access

-now there is a call for a similar movement - Capetown Open Education Declaration (Shuttleworth Foundation, OSI) – main premise is that all publicly funded education materials should have open access

-changing role of people in producing knowledge – mixed roles of “teacher” and “student” and “expert” etc.
-changing role of content and how we classify information
-changing role of context – textbooks lack context and personalization, digital content allows customized learning experience

Often the most difficult challenge to improving our life, to making a change, or to implementing a plan is finding out how to motivate ourselves to take the first step toward a goal and then to remain constantly motivated.

Have you given some thought to what motivates you? What gets you going when there are constant distractions? When your intellectual and emotional energy levels are low, how do you turn things around? Or when you are working on one project that is taking lots of your time, how do you stay focused and motivated to keep going until the project is complete? These are not questions with easy answers.

However, during the teenage years, it is important that you at least begin to explore the topic of motivation and come to some understanding about how you can motivate yourself. Although your preferences and inclinations about what motivates you might change as you grow older, you will be much better prepared for college and other goals you intend to pursue.

Start With Your Intentions

No matter what activity or goal you wish to pursue, there must be an effort to make an intention, to think clearly about what it is you are about to undertake and for what reason.

Working on your intentions right at the outset also serves the purpose of helping to develop a clear objective and, God willing, a concrete sense of what is needed to achieve the objective and how much time will be needed to do so. When your motivation suffers midway through the process of achieving a particular objective, it is highly likely that the intention itself was not clear at the outset and therefore distractions easily slipped in and the focus became unclear.

Do your best from now on to articulate your intention; if needs be, take a moment to write down your thoughts. Keep your intentions clear, and check back with yourself should your motivation level starts to decline.

Develop a Plan

Starting off on a project without having a clear sense of the resources or the estimated time needed to complete it is not recommended. Not knowing what books you will need to complete a report means you will have to stop and go look for a relevant book or source each time need arises. The risk that you will become distracted or even lose motivation is great because you will have started the project already but will feel discouraged if a particular book is not available.

In addition, you will find yourself diverting valuable energy unnecessarily to look for this or that resource, and even worse, fall victim to the tendency to "help" a friend with his or her problem. You should always be helpful to friends but not at the expense of losing valuable time working on your own project that has a specific deadline. If you get bogged down with too many distractions, whether self-inflicted or peer-imposed, then you are bound to feel less motivated to continue working on the initial project, whatever it was.

Develop a plan of action right at the outset, incorporating milestones and checkpoints so that you can pace your progress, as well as appropriate break times so that you do not suffer from burnout. It is never advisable to overwork oneself or to expect that one can remain consistently and constantly motivated over the same thing.

A bird glides gracefully through the polluted skies above Tehran. Air pollution in the Iranian capital killed more than 3,600 people in just one month in 2006, an environmental situation described by local officials as “collective suicide.” Considered one of the world’s most polluted places, Tehran’s air is so toxic it triggers lethal respiratory and cardiac problems, with 80% of fatal heart attacks believed to be directly attributable to the noxious smog smothering the city. Half of the six million cars clogging Iran’s streets fail to meet global emissions standards and burn twice as much fuel as their European equivalents, spewing vast quantities of carbon monoxide into residents’ lungs.

Jason Fried is the founder of 37signals.com – an innovative technology company that has made some simple and awesome web-based productivity apps, like basecamp and campfire. He gave an amazing talk about productivity and collaboration ("Stuff we've learned") – this is a list of advice I’d kind of like to memorize.

-red flag words: need, can’t, easy, only, fast

-“be successful and make money by helping other people be successful and make money” – people are more willing to pay for things that help them – spot chain reactions and be the catalyst for making them happen

-minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players – e.g., build tools that provide just the simple solutions of what people need (vs. the products that are overkill for most people “nonconsumers”)

-question your work regularly – remember that you don’t know everything:
Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Will this change behavior?
Is there an easier way?
What’s the opportunity cost?
Is it really worth it?

-it’s really important to ask what you can’t do because you’re taking on something else?

-many sites don’t just suffer from bad design, they suffer from bad copy that don’t make sense to anyone – PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORDS YOU USE TO CONVEY MESSAGES TO USERS. Words that need fixing are a much cheaper problem to solve than technical ones.

-err on the side of simple – start with the easy way of doing things and see if it satisfies what you wanted to do

-get three things done in one week, instead of one thing done in 3 weeks – “the longer it takes to develop something, the less likely you are to launch it”

-resist the urge to try to do more the next time around

-invest in what doesn’t change – what are the core things about the business that are important now and will still be important ten years from now?

-“what’s your cookbook?” – Celebrity chefs as a metaphor (they don’t try to keep their recipes a secret out of fear that people will open copy-cat restaurants). Figure out what expertise you can share, and share it – don’t be afraid that people will overtake and steal your business – your business is sharing what you build.

-interruption kills productivity – having people around you who interrupt you makes you not get stuff done. Try to combat this with passive communication (wikis, IM, email, etc) – these tools let the other person hear from you when you’re ready, not when they think you’re ready

-be open, honest, public, and responsive – people would much rather hear the truth, even in crisis.

-break problems down to the atomic level – “when you make tiny decisions you can’t make big mistakes”

-everything you do should matter – don’t do stuff that doesn’t matter!

-hire by looking for people who are honest/have good character, curious (most important), and do interesting things outside of work

-use what you build, and then you will know when it works

If You Take Your Eyes
Off Your Goals..
All You Will See
Are The Obstacles!!

A winner says "Let's find out";
a loser says "Nobody knows."
A winner makes comitments;
a loser makes promises.
A winner says "I'm good, but not as good
as I ought to be";
a loser says "I'm not as bad
as a lot of other people."
A winner credits his "good luck" for winning -
even though it wasn't his good luck;
a loser blames his "bad luck" for losing -
even though it wasn't his bad luck.
A winner listens;
a loser just waits until it's his turn to talk.
A winner does more than his job;
a loser says "I only work here."
A winner says "I fell";
a loser says "somebody pushed me."
A winner respects those
who are superior to him
and tries to learn from them;
a loser resents the superiority of others
and tries to find chinks in their armor.

I'm finally getting my notes from SXSW posted. I took a lot of them, and came home and promptly got really sick. But they will all appear here in good time.



The opening keynote on Saturday was a conversation between Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You) and Henry Jenkins (professor at MIT, Comparative Media Studies Program). As a chronic conference-goer, I find myself hearing the same people keynoting over and over again, saying the same things over and over, and often saying essentially the same things as one another. It was refreshing that, despite having read the work of both speakers, and having heard each speak at other events, I actually learned some new things and had a chance to rethink some previous ideas.

That said, there were some points I was glad to hear repeated, since the audience at SXSW is not dominated by educators. We need people in other sectors to rally behind the need for empirical evidence and educational assessment models that support new media literacies, and to challenge the current reality that schools measure autonomous, not collective, learning. Also:
-high school students are one of the most highly underestimated groups online, but the challenge is – can we free young people up to write about what’s happening in their community? (not punish them, censor them, restrict their first amendment rights)
How do we give students the tools to use the time, creativity, and idealism they have, so they can be active community participants?

-if 50-60% of young people are creating content online, what is causing the other 40% not to create? Social, cultural, and economic disempowerment? Lack of ethical guidance from adult mentors?

-if America is failing in the world, it’s because workplaces and schools are failing to empower workers and students to realize their full potential – they start with the premise that we’re all idiots, not that we are all knowledgeable with expertise and creativity to share.

On politics, Jenkins made some interesting points about Obama’s “yes we can” as a metaphor for new kinds of social/civic engagement, by using language that describes a process of participation, collecting knowledge and distributing it to make change. He also argues that the criticism of Obama borrowing pieces of a speech from Deval Patrick holds less water if you look at it through the new lens of collective learning, knowledge, and participation. And, we should be asking what a culture of democracy truly looks like.

Other thought provoking ideas:
-the deep level of fan/consumer engagement with tv shows like Lost and The Wire, and the pop culture communities that have grown up around them, often come out of people not having enough intellectual and creative stimulation in the workplace.

-thinking about collective intelligence as Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” (pooling knowledge and averaging out an answer) vs. the deliberative sharing of knowledge from different points of view and reaching a consensus (dependent on individual expertise, diversity of the community, and respect for all perspectives brought to the table). Jenkins aligned these approaches with YouTube (what moves up is the dominant/majority/popular perspective) vs. Wikipedia (a space with mechanisms for inclusion of diverse perspectives).

-it’s important to question the usage of the language of addiction related to online activity and gaming (many “addicts” are actually depressed and the addiction is manifesting itself through gaming; also Chinese gov’t using “addiction” as reason to restrict young people’s access to the internet)

-progressives need to have a context for where progress is coming from in order to encourage the movement to continue growing (this sounds like what Chris Lehman often says about the current technology in education movement)

Cool sites they mentioned:
- Harry Potter Alliance– global network of young people trying to change the world, inspired by Harry Potter as a young person who transformed his world:

- Outside.In – Johnson’s project, building out geographic infrastructure of the web and fostering people using the internet for very local community participation. Their about-to-launch tool is On My Radar (“like a geo-twitter,” commented Kate). Speaks to a need for civic media tools for local experts to participate and share knowledge without having to go through traditional media structures to communicate

Finally, some dissertation-ey thoughts about new media literacies. Because of YMEX I’ve had Jenkins’ framework on the brain for quite a while, but one component I would like to spend more time unpacking – is where these new media literacies intersect with the sociolinguistic concept of codeswitching. If young people are developing the ability to learn and access information across a range of modalities (what Jenkins calls transmedia navigation), can it also be argued that they are learning to communicate in a range of linguistic codes that these new media require? How well do they codeswitch between the linguistic norms of each – from text messaging to online social networking sites to the f2f classroom, etc.? How might educators interact better with their students if they understood their ways of communicating through the lens of codeswitching? I’ve been thinking particularly about how Ben Rampton’s work on codeswitching and youth could be applied…

And, apparently not everyone at SXSW was hearing repeat speakers. As I walked out, I heard a guy behind me say to his friend, “It was cool, but I didn’t know who he was exactly…I thought it was Henry James.”

Right.