Andrew Whitacre
Are you an MIT undergrad with a coding background and interest in media? Check out this great opportunity with the AAGO project:
UROP Positions: MIT Center for Civic Media and the Comparative Media Studies Program
Faculty Supervisor: Prof. James Paradis
Project Title:
Aago: Mobile Media Diaries for Youth Citizen Journalists
Project Description:
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 narratives that 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 of inter-generational learning, location-based storytelling and civic advocacy.
Aago is a mobile media platform designed at the MIT Center for Civic Media, in collaboration with the Comparative Media Studies Program and the New School for Public Engagement. The tool is being prototyped using the iOS development environment and currently runs on Apple iPod devices. In addition to the mobile tools, we also plan to design and implement a web portal for youth to share, collaboratively author and publish digital media narratives. The tools and platforms will eventually be released as open source software for wider public dissemination. The current prototypes have been tested with youth this summer and will be expanded to support extensive pilot workshops conducted with youth community groups in Boston and New York City over the coming year.
The project is being jointly supervised by Prof. James Paradis at CMS and Prof. Nitin Sawhney at the New School for Public Engagement. We are seeking 2-4 qualified UROPs to join the project team to work on mobile software development, designing the web platform as well as conducting user evaluation with youth community groups.
Dates: The project will be conducted during the 2011-2012 academic year and possibly extended over the coming summer.
Prerequisites: Working knowledge of mobile iOS programming using Objective C and the X Code development environment OR web programming using PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and HTML5. Experience with digital video production and location-based applications using mobile and web platforms is helpful. Good user interface design and rapid prototyping skills are expected. Experience or interests in working with community youth media initiatives is a plus.
Contact Information: If you are interested, please contact Prof. James Paradis at jparadis@mit.edu and include:
- Resume/CV and links to relevant projects conducted
- Summary of previous UROP experience and references
- Overview of mobile/web programming experience and interest in the project
