Meme Histories – Learning the Web So We Can Make It Better

The challenge I have designing digital practices activities is trying to find an authentic activity that doesn’t fall apart. One of the key literacies of a person who makes effective use of the internet is the ability to confront uncertainty.

“I don’t know what that is.”
“I can’t figure that out.”
“I’ll put that aside until later.”
“I’ll ask someone.”
“Or… wow, I only figured out part of that and I’ll just have to live with it.”

This is not how we were taught to learn. Clear objectives, clear success criteria. I mean, that’s great and everything, but my life certainly doesn’t look like that. Working on the web certainly doesn’t look like that. I believe that people sometimes need to learn to work building their objectives on the fly given what they’ve been confronted with. So how do I design activities that allow for people to learn to persist through that uncertainty and still be willing to accept half answers when that’s as far as they will get?

Meme histories. That’s how.

What is a meme?
I will leave you to your own research on the validity of the ‘scientific’ sense of the word meme and stick to the way it has been taken up in culture. Suffice it to say that many serious people think memetics is either very serious or total nonsense.

Culturally a meme is an idea (often a joke) that spreads. It’s an idea that becomes a marker of your membership in a given community. When I post a picture like this one…

Where's the beef. (from Wikipedia)

It would situate you in a community of people familiar with North American TV in the mid eighties. It’s an age group and a culture group. Lots of meme like qualities. I could, for instance, say “where’s the beef” at a BBQ where the burgers weren’t ready yet. Some people might laugh. Some people would be confused. Group A would smile knowingly at Group B and try to describe the commercial. Group B would probably not get it. Inevitably someone would say “you had to be there.” It’s a shared cultural reference. This is (partially) how our identity is built. We share cultural references, sometimes to classic literature, sometimes to TV commercials.

Memes now
It used to cost thousands of dollars to create a cultural reference. You either had to be famous, or have a giant marketing company – phrases like “cooking with gas” still exist in our culture long passed the point where people remember they were marketing slogans in the 30s. Now anyone can try and start a ‘meme’ that could spread from person to person and become part of our daily language. It happens fast. It happens often. You will not be able to ‘keep up’.

Luckily the history of some of those memes are relatively accessible on the internet and they can be quite interesting. The class I was teaching recently (ages 30-60) came together when we did the meme history on this poster

Keep calm, keep reading.

It’s a nice, mostly clean narrative. It has an answer. A quick google search will get you there. (see me modelling good digital practice 🙂 ) Another activity that seemed to work well was the ‘where are they now’ meme search. Seeing the people pictured in memes as real people brought home to everyone that, you know, the internet is full of real people. Who have feelings. A little kid pictured in a silly picture becomes a big kid some day… who’s picture is all over the internet.

[note: be careful with these searches, searching for memes can bring you to places that can put nasty things on your computer]

The answers are not all easy… or nice
There are a number of ways to track down a meme. You can go to a website like knowyourmeme that does some research on how they developed. Some of them are quite detailed, others I can’t seem to find. Any number of different google searches or reverse image searches might get you to the story of how some of these were built. They also can get you to the root meaning, and sometimes, that meaning is not very nice.

A number of these memes were originally created in some of the darker corners of the internet (arguably the ‘lets put text on an image’ sense of meme started in those spaces) and there are often some fairly ugly first meanings for those memes. They can be a way to insult, bully or otherwise demean people on purpose. That also can happen without you even knowing it if you are sharing a meme you don’t have a full grasp of.

And, frankly, sometimes I have been wholly unable to track down the original history of a given meme. It makes for a frustrating class when your students can’t find what they are looking for. My advice is to prepare a few like the ‘keep calm’ one and then let them loose (depending on age obviously) on some less certain ones.

WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!? – Why meme histories are important
This is what makes the meme history such an interesting (if fraught) journey. Meme commentary (using a meme to comment on someone’s postings) is a pretty common activity. In the years that I was mentoring young adults I can think of a dozen times where I sat down with one of them to discuss the content of their meme. “Do you think that might be racist?” “Did you mean that in a kind way?” “When you say you were just trying to be funny… walk me through what was funny about it.” “Where do you think that meme comes from?”

And some of them are perfectly innocent. They are straight cultural references that allow people to share identity with each other. Others are not so much. Whether you’re doing it as a classroom activity or as something your talking to your friends or your kids about, I think thoughtful discussions on meme history offer an opportunity to bring our moral compass to the internet.

How abundance might mean we need to change the way we learn to learn

I’ve been having a transformative experience here in the Department of Education in PEI in many ways. One of the most rewarding is the digital practices course that i’m currently teaching. I’m working with some very experienced teachers, coaches, assessment folks and curriculum people. They are willing, engaged and challenging. The best kind of students. I’m learning tons about what can practically get done with change in the system. What can teachers manage? What is too much? What are they really looking for?

Abundance
One of the core concepts in the course is that the abundance of information available on the internet fundamentally changes what is possible in the classroom. It also, potentially, changes what we should be doing. I mean… i don’t think its ‘potentially’. I think it should change it. Finding and ordering are now more important than remembering.

And, to the point of this blog post, we need to prepare people to learn random things. They need practice dealing with uncertainty. Dealing with things where they might be the first person they’ve met who has ever come across it. Something we can’t prepare them for.

Learning something really new
Our classroom activity last week was hard. It was hard for me as a facilitator, and it was difficult for them as a group (one group found it more challenging than the other). I gave them random microbit parts and said ‘start’. I was trying to recreate the feeling that many people have in the world right now… people confronted with a new phone, people confronted with taxes, with a new social network, with cambridge analytica… people seemingly expected to know how to do, and how to understand, hundreds of different things. Things that we didn’t know we were going to know how to do. Things we are going to have to figure out with whatever is available to us.

Gradual release
One of the main items of feedback from the students is that they prefer a gradual release methodology to learning about things like the microbit. Some structure up front. Goals clearly outlined. Targets identified. Scaffolding in place. You acclimatize to the water by slowly lowering the temperature of the pool from a balmy 85 degrees all the way to a proper maritime 66 degrees in the summer. This is certainly an effective mechanism for getting people to acquire certain skills.

It’s also not how much of our world works now.

But i don’t like technology
This was an excellent critique from a number of participants. The challenge I gave them was not really a level playing field. If you already understand code, or you have an existing interest in tinkering with technology the activity is going to be much easier to adapt to. You’re going to dive in and play around with it.

I don’t know how to adapt this activity to this objection. More thinking needed here.

What are the new practices?
We had some talks. I don’t think I rolled it out as well as I could have. They pulled it together. Their reflections (which for a variety of reasons are not public) are exceptional. Their home activity was to do an instruction activity for ‘something’ in the microbit and write a reflection on how they felt about it. They have written amazing instructional pieces that we’ll be able to use in classrooms. They are now reading each other’s manuals and learning how to use the microbit. Student centred, student driven, student guided.

I’m torn to be honest. One part of me thinks – here is the way we need to be able to learn in 21st century. We are confronted with too many situations where we don’t know what to do and we need to learn how to get that first instructional video, that little bit of help from our friend (or whatever) to get ourselves started. We need to deal with the frustration of a task we don’t understand and use our connections. That’s the practice.

The other part of me thinks that if we can save people the frustration, shouldn’t we just go ahead and do that?

Going forward
I’ve heard lots of complaints recently that ‘kids these days’ are helpless and unwilling to try and solve their problems. They’re constantly looking for guidance and to find an expert to solve their problems. Firstly… that sounds like a survival mechanism for a generation that has 100 times more decisions to make than I did. 1000 times more personal choices and options available to them. 1000000 times more things that they could watch or read.

Also, it just might be that the way we help them learn makes them a little too dependent. Doesn’t make them struggle quite enough. Doesn’t quite manage the learning they need to do in the world.

I’m looking forward to difficult discussions with the group tomorrow.

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