One feature of the Center that we love to, well, feature is our completely unique set of courses. This semester we have three of them -- two taught by professor and Center co-principal investigator Sasha Costanza-Chock and the other, in his MIT class debut, by our director Ethan Zuckerman. Registration is still open:

CMS.362 Civic Media Collaborative Design Studio
S. Costanza-Chock
Project-based studio focusing on collaborative design of civic media provides a service-learning opportunity for students interested in working with community organizations. Multidisciplinary teams create civic media projects based on real-world community needs. Covers co-design methods and best practices to include the user community in iterative stages of project ideation, design, implementation, testing, and evaluation. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Limited to 16.

In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, Editor and Cofounder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN.

When we started telling people about our "nutrition label for the news" project, one question came up fairly frequently: “Do nutrition labels even work?”

Of course, when people ask if labels work, they implicitly mean, "Have nutritional labels prevented America from growing more obese each year?" In this case, the obvious answer is “No.”

This doesn't mean that labels don't serve their purpose, or that we don't need them to get healthier. Your political identity is shaped by many things other than where you get your news: your parents, your siblings, your childhood, your education, your workplace, or hey, maybe even your most basic morals or the type of bacteria in your belly.

(For MIT undergraduates only.)

With the increasing proliferation of mobile digital media tools and online video distribution, there is a need for secure easy-to-use platforms for sharing and organizing media content among youth. While capturing and tagging digital media with time and location is possible, editing and organizing it for producing seamless narrativesthat can be easily shared online remains complicated. This project seeks to undertake development of mobile tools and online platforms that support young media makers and citizen journalists to create, organize and share digital narratives produced in their own neighborhoods over time, while allowing new forms ofinter-generational learning, location-based storytelling and civicadvocacy.

(Download the full video or watch below.)

Hackasaurus is a great project by Mozilla which makes it easy to see the structure of a web page and remix it. In education, it's a great way to combine learning about composition with learning about how to make.

Today in the Media Lab's class on Technologies for Creative Learning, we met with Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance, an organisation which mobilises Harry Potter fans for social good. We also had a great conversation on the ideas of Henry Jenkins about participatory culture and participatory learning (for more, see this report by Jenkins funded by the MacArthur Foundation).

Greetings from London! Matt, Dan, and I from the Center for Civic Media are in the UK this week for the Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom, and the Web. Matt and I arrived in London on Wednesday to meet up with interesting people in the UK before the conference. Here's a quick run-down on our trip thus far.

In Cambridge, we spoke with Matt Williams, social enterprise coordinator for the UK Youth Climate Coalition. Matt was the programme manager for PowerShift UK in 2008. We talked about organising climate campaigns as well as models of action around adaptive responses to the human impact of climate change.

Cross-posted with henryjenkins.org.

Henry Jenkins: On September 20 2007, we officially launched the MIT Center for the Future of Civic Media, a joint venture of the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program.