VozMob (Voces Móviles/Mobile Voices), a collaboration between faculty and students at USC and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), was one of 19 projects selected in a global competition to receive funding to explore digital media's ability to help people learn.
The project team at USC, which includes communication professor François Bar (pictured), Annenberg Ph.D. students Melissa Brough, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Carmen Gonzalez, and Charlotte Lapskansky, Global Communication graduate student Philip Javellana, Annenberg Ph.D. alumna and Texas A&M communication professor Cara Wallis, and USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy faculty member Holly Willis, received $135,000 in the competition funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
VozMob is a university-community partnership that connects low-wage immigrant day laborers in Los Angeles with popular communication practitioners, university researchers, and open source software developers. Together, they design, deploy and use a low-cost, mobile, multimedia platform that promotes everyday sharing and dialogue. Through VozMob, immigrant workers become citizen journalists, sharing, creating, and publishing multimedia stories directly from their mobile phones. These stories represent their own experiences, perspectives, and ideas. VozMob allows other communities to create their own storytelling networks so that future uses of the platform may expand the possibilities of collaboration, dialogue and cultural understanding.
"This grant will allow us to move forward with an exciting university-community partnership that involves participatory technology design, research, and civic engagement through digital media literacy,” Costanza-Chock said. “We invite the Annenberg community to check out what we've been up to so far on our beta site at http://vozmob.net or our research blog at http://blog.vozmob.net, and we welcome participation from anyone who'd like to get involved."
The competition is funded by a MacArthur grant to the University of California, Irvine, and to Duke University and is administered by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), a virtual network of learning institutions. The competition is part of MacArthur’s $50 million digital media and learning initiative designed to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life.
"This open competition makes an important contribution to the emerging field of digital media and learning by seeking out and embracing the freshest of ideas and the most innovative thinking," said MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton, addressing competition winners at an event showcasing projects produced through last year’s competition. "The competition demonstrates that pioneering work often takes place at the edges and sometimes between the most unlikely of collaborators. These projects are true exemplars of how digital media are transforming the way we think and learn, and perhaps even how we participate in our democracy."
The 2009 Digital Media and Learning Competition includes two categories: Innovation in Participatory Learning and Young Innovators. The Innovation in Participatory Learning category sought novel projects that used digital media to help learners of any age use new technologies to share ideas, comment upon one another's projects, and plan, design, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Applications were accepted from Canada, China Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Young Innovators, a U.S.-only category for this year, accepted applications from individuals aged 18-25 to bring novel participatory learning ideas from the "garage" stage to full implementation and to think boldly about what comes next.
Successful projects will promote learning and participation through a variety of mechanisms, including games, mobile phone applications, virtual worlds, social networks, wikis, and video blogs. The competition’s challenge to identify different forms of participation, as well as the eligibility of ten countries outside of the United States, yielded a diverse pool of awardees including individuals, a school, community organizations, universities, and for-profit companies. Awards ranged from $9,000 to $211,000. Fifteen winners come from the United States, and the remaining four are from Canada, India, Mexico, and South Africa.
Detailed information about the winning projects and the competition is available here.
