The Fieldtrip Project has successfully piloted, and now is building out an online community that uses cutting-edge media, created in collaborations between teenagers and professional media developers, to stimulate online conversations that can positively impact learning behaviors. Cell phone videos and games prompt teenagers to discuss the issues THEY believe impact their ability to engage in serious learning and thinking about their futures. The project, housed at the Imaging Research Center and funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, was active for one month in the spring of 2007. 76 short films, posted a-few-a-day, collected hundreds of voluntary comments from an online community of 70 teenagers. The project includes research professors from UMBC’s Psychology, Information Systems, History, Visual Arts and Economics departments.
Fieldtrip is a media-rich web community and research platform for 14–20 year-olds to express, explore and engage on issues they believe will affect them most profoundly.
The goal, and this will take time, is to grow a community of co-created knowledge that is of great use to those wanting to survive and thrive as adults, and to those wanting to help them.
The rationale springs from knowing that the beliefs, attitudes and experiences that all but determine sustainable success in education and in life are largely formed outside school. Though this is well-established, school systems have been largely powerless to create and sustain dialog among families, communities and the larger culture(s). The Internet and mobile communication technologies now afford us an unprecedented opportunity to engage young people in their worlds.
The primary objective is to establish and maintain trust between the teenage community members and the adult media artists and researchers involved in the project.
The approach is to procure salient, authentic and representative content through collaboration with adults that are not condescending, didactic, or controlling.
The project was piloted in 2007, with a small, well-controlled population. Promising results established the feasibility of the approach. Now, a second phase is being planned that will make the web community available to a much wider population and for a much longer, perhaps indefinite time period.
The project was funded by the National Center for Research Resources, one of the National Institutes of Health (grant #1R41RR024089-01), and by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. It is collaborative research of the Imaging Research Center at UMBC, and InfoCulture, a social media development company.
Click on categories to the right to access more information about every aspect of this project.