Thursday’s dress rehearsal reiterated all of our hard work during the last few months. Listening to Karyn’s excellent presentation reinforced our mission and values. Seeing our website overflowing with multimedia stories from the US and international students fills me with so much pride and joy. This has truly been a digital humanities project, one that includes a global and inclusive perspective. With these in mind, we faced so many questions, from hosting and design choices to privacy, safety, and service to and for young students. It’s easy to forget the struggle we faced, the hard decisions and compromises we had to make to create, sustain, and make this project one that has the potential to continue for years to come.

As I think back to my role as the media manager, I can confidently saw our contributors are truly thoughtful, talented, and genuinely much more compassionate and thoughtful than how most adults see them. It’s no wonder that they have chosen to express their experience in various ways. Their works are simple but thoughtfully made; their message is heard/read loud and clear. The practice of editing these videos and enhancing their images and sound reminded me of my work with other creative and wise students at the Youth Channel. I miss my work there, but I’m happy to have collaborated and amply their voices/stories.

I wonder what their parents and educators would think once they view the Corona Chronicles!

As we head into the final weeks of class and as our presentation approaches, I can’t help but look back and see how far we’ve come. The Covid19 Student archive, Corona Chronicles, started with a global and inclusive point of view. As week after week we face challenges from obtaining content to thinking about incentives for contributors to doubting the project’s global reach and sustainability, it’s great to our site and social media take shape and tell a story not just about the learners and their experience, but our team’s experience as well.

This project inspired a digital pedagogy project focusing on co-creation and our experience working and learning from our young teammates. With this in mind, and taking in from past DH courses, including Digital Pedagogy I and now Digital Pedagogy II, it is as if it’s all coming to a full circle. My final project for digital pedagogy II will be a quick guide to co-creation in open education. The project will reference this experience along with testimony from one of my teammates as we explore our roles as guides, educators, and co-producers, allowing for the audience, in this case, middle and high school students, to have a clear and prominent voice in a project that’s about them and for them.

As I continue to edit incoming video pieces for the covid19 student archive, CoronaChronicles, I’m taking note of how impactful this archive could truly be. Karyn and Vallarie have done a great job at networking with students, educators, and afterschool programs to collaborate and provide us with creative and unique media pieces from students inside and outside the United States. Their drawing, photographs, poems, and creative short films will live as small but powerful snapshots of #pandemiclife!

This week I’ve been thinking about our working relationship with our young contributors and co-producers who have been taking the time to provide our team with valuable insight and creativity. I’m happy our team decided to reward all participants and create certificates acknowledging their achievement and contribution to this archive.

This week our team focused on incentives and rewards for our contributors. This conversation reminded me of my Open Education and Open Educational Resources studies in my Digital Pedagogy course. There, I learned about co-creation practice, when the educator/instruct and the learners work together to construct a piece of material that others can use. During this practice, educators have to make sure the learners are still learning while contributing to the collaborative work. They also have to make sure to scale their work and that each learner has the necessary skill and equipment to contribute to the creation. With care and inclusivity, the instruct must note the amount of time, effort, and dedication the class takes to assemble the product that may be used for years to come. With this comes the issue with incentives.

In this vein, our team made a point to discuss the incentives and rewards not only for our awesome young ladies that contributed, took the time to meet with us, create a sample project, and assisted in some of the decision making for our site, but also the students who took the time to create wonderful works of arts for our archive. We are still deciding how best to recognize their achievements and make them feel part of the archival process, making truly a by the youth for the youth project.

I’m part of the Student Covid 19 Archive project, also known as CoronaChronicles. Amanda, Karyn, Vallerie, and Phil bring so much energy and productivity to our Thursday and Sunday meetings. I look forward to talking to them every week, not only because we are all into this project, but we also care about one another. I enjoy being part of team that shows up, delegate, and above all listens to everyone’s opinions; even if they disagree.

Though we had lots of conversations regarding our content and our participants, middle school and high school students, we are striving to make this a great platform and outlet  for the youth and the adults around then, like parents and educators. This past week we were given the first pieces of content for our site. The amount of heart and realness in these young women (the first three students) when talking about their covid 19 pandemic experience. The pieces gave us insight about the isolation, and fustration many learners are feeling as we all adjust  to remote learning, quarentine, and our new relationship with the virtual world.

I’m proud of the progress  we have made and I can’t wait wait for everyone to see/hear the stories/voices of these young people, who are now given a platform to express themselves creatively as we archive, take a snapshot, for what time really felt like for the next generation.

This past week the team met with Lara Alonzo from coronastories.world . She alogn with one of her partners, discussed with us among other things, data!  They mentioned constructing their own site and obtaining the project’s main content; videos of people across the world answering two questions relating to their lives during Covid19, by solicitation. They obtained the 30-40 seconds videos through email, social media, even Whatsapp. However, they had to compile each video, catergorize them, and edit them by adding lower thirds graphics and subtitles. The participants consent to exposing their information by submitting their videos.

This conversation got me thinking about the Covid 19 Archive ‘s own data. Similarly, our team will need to collect the media, alogn with consent forms for the participants, and possibly, the school information. This sensative data needs to be organized, and most importantly protected. This week I created a second draft of a consent form that can also act as a way to collect media. I did this on a shared Google Form. What’s great about this form, if we manage to work out the signature component, is how it creates an esay to use categorized spreadsheet.

As the media producer, I will be responsible to collect,and organize raw media from our participant. This one needs to be stored locally, on my computer, to be edited, and exported to the proper format for our plaform and possibly youtube as another hosting site. However, I will be providing the team with all of the raw, drafts, and final products. Therefore, the media data, will be stored and organized on at least three places: locally on my computer, on a server for the team to access, and lastly, the final product, will be stored on our site’s storage and maybe on the Youtube server.

Other possible pieces contructed for promotion and marketing purposes, will be store on my peresonal Canva account, where they can be easily edited, and shared. However,  the final verisons of these these can also be downloaded and stored.

I’m writing this late but nevertheless, I’m very encouraged by the discussions with my teammates. Last week we had our in-class meeting and our first “Sunday Brunch” meeting! Thanks to our project manager Amanda, we’ve been in total organization mode: scheduling meetings, delegating tasks, and completing our agreement and proposal. It’s encouraging to work with others who value communication and organization.

My position in this project deals with multimedia creation, editing, and management. We are not quite there yet. Our sources, scope, and hosting site, will later determine some of the questions I’m asking from the team including the tool needed to capture video and audio, the length of the final products, and the format (mp4, mp3, etc).

Other questions surrounding the construction of the legal consent form deals with children on film/video, the public aspect of this project, and the partnership we will have with schools and other educational institutions. Since we are still talking about the scope of the project, these questions are still left unanswered. However, I’m confident that as we continue to communicate and bring up great ideas about the possible “talent” / contributors (age and demographic of the student) and audience (student, parents, and educators), we will be able to answer these questions.

During our class meeting, we had the opportunity to meet with Micki who very generously gave us great insight on possible challenges we will face, and possible solutions/paths we could take in this multimedia project.