Putting Technology Second

With all the creative projects that can derive from audio, video and interactive media, it can be easy to forget that hardware and software are just tools. Fortunately, the producers of a project called HearMe at Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE lab,  learned that lesson quickly. They realized that to take advantage of media tools, people had to come first. In the project, which captures youth stories in audio files distributed throughout the city of Pittsburgh, they brought in interviewers and mentors to help children and teens think through what they want to say and how they wanted to say it. I wrote about the producers' aha" moments in my October article for Future Tense, a project of Slate magazine, the New America Foundation and Arizona State University. Here's an excerpt:

Hear Me is now less about the technology and more about the guidance and structure—the “scaffolding,” to borrow a favorite term of educators—that comes from mentors sitting with, listening to, and challenging kids to take their ideas to the next level. As Jessica Pachuta says: “Personal interaction makes technology meaningful”—and it also makes the technology secondary.