Openness at School
Recently, I have been reading about grassroots media and the bottom up design of the internet. As such, I have started noticing these two concepts around in different places, one of which happens to be school. Yes, my school is surprisingly open. The interesting thing about that, however, is they are open without even realizing it (or so it looks).
As you may or may not already know, I go to a school called High Tech High. Contrary to what the name may suggest, we are not a tech school but we do incorporate technology into our projects and such. One of these “projects” is the yearbook.
Normally, yearbooks are pretty top-down. A group of the journalistic “elite” usually spend months locked up in a classroom trying to pump out a book filled with the year’s “memories”. Not at my school. At High Tech High, students are encouraged to contribute photos for this year’s yearbook. We have a share drive full of photos from this year’s many events. Students usually edit the photos but rarely ever are the originals actually harmed. People can even retouch or take red eye out of the photos . I have yet to hear of a case where this happened but I’m sure it can’t be that far off.
Another example of collaboration was in one of our projects for English. We’re doing a project documenting 19th century baseball and some of the changes that happened during the early days of America’s pastime. We went to the library to check out some books but, we checked out so many nobody would have time to look through all of them. To solve the problem, we used the share drive again (wow, we use this like a wiki don’t we) but instead of everybody posting images, we wrote up little descriptions of books and what pages to find good information.
I hope to be posting more about school and the bottom up nature that I am noticing in it. I have no idea what to expect but whatever they are, I am looking forward to them.