Defining, Measuring, and Achieving Success
In February 2015, the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics (MAPP) team organized the By Any Media Necessary: Scaffolding & Sustaining Participatory Politics webinar and twitter chat series in partnership with ConnectedLearning.tv.
As we have engaged with both teachers and activists through our work, two questions keep surfacing: “How do we define success?” and “How can success be measured?” While this subject is touched on in the upcoming By Any Media Necessary book, it is not extensively explored there. We saw this series of convenings as an opportunity to bring together both activists who were interviewed by MAPP in the case studies as well as individuals throughout our wider networks. Our hope was for the final conversation to serve as an informal epilogue to By Any Media Necessary.
We decided to host this convening as an online webinar for a several reasons. Firstly, the webinar format is flexible. Secondly, the webinar in as inexpensive way to bring together a diverse set of individuals from various regions in the United States. Additionally, we once again were able to partner with Connected Learning, which plugged us in to an already established network with a set infrastructure for making the webinar series a success.
We also introduced a new component to the conversation: the twitter chat. Twitter has always been a part of MAPP’s webinar conversations, with members of the MAPP research team live-tweeting highlights from our webinar conversations. This time, we decided to bring these twitter conversations to the forefront. One week after each of our two webinars, we hosted a follow-up conversation on twitter using the hashtag #byanymedia, highlighting and further discussing themes that emerged from the previous week’s webinar conversation.
The MAPP team also published highlights from this series on Henry Jenkins’ blog, and key moments from Webinar & Twitter Chat 1 and Webinar & Twitter Chat 2.
Follow the path below to explore conversations with activists and educators about Scaffolding and Sustaining Participatory Politics by any media necessary.