This was a week for pushing in various directions, but not totally finding clarity. I have worked out pretty well the population with which I want to engage with for my project (it helps that I am thinking about this same thing for Design For Change)… it’s also clear the territory I want to be in (the digital lifeworld), but it’s not clear what I want to do with them. I am doing some reading here and there and found a few nice tools:

  1. Trace my shadow: does some of the stuff I was thinking about. It was nice to see this tool and use it because it was not as satisfying. One is still left asking… so what? Why should I care? Or even… what is this analogous to in life? For e.g. this made me think about doing a lesson in which the students find out their neighbor has been tracking what time they leave and come home every day. The neighbor does not know where they went or what they did, but they do know the timings. Maybe using that as a gateway to see how we feel about metadata.
  2. Human Rights, Children, and Digital Tools: found this very cool MOOC that plan to take when it starts on March 1.

For my interactive experiments I tried two things:

First, I some folk tales or humorous tales that might start to highlight some of the issues I want people to think about and discuss. Since they are not fully written out I told them to a few people (adding changes inbetween various tellings) to see how they would react.

Second, I made a set of small cards. These cards have on them things like feature phones, mobile phones, cell phone towers, name, call time, call length, phone number, location etc etc. The idea is to let people play around with what kind of information about them might be known in various types of situations. I am still not sure what the game is here. I was feeling very stuck. So I just made the cards and gave it to 2 different people to play with. I was hoping some kind of inspiration would strike… but alas, nothing really cool happened. I think I have to just sit with these a bit more to see if there is anything in them.

Finally, the two people I think will be interested in my project:

Michelle Bachelet – Former President of Chile and current Human Rights Commissioner for the UN who works on Digital Human Rights issues.

The Editorial Team at The Record Nepal a newspaper that takes critical positions on many mainstream issues in Nepal