Space2Cre8: A Global Youth Storytelling Network

The Challenge

My first project as a doctoral student was serving as lead site researcher on Space2Cre8 - a multi-institution, internationally funded global youth social-networking project. Its goal was to connect students at schools and after-school programs around the world through a homegrown social network, and to understand how they used digital literacy practices to connect with one another.

Early on, we found that the communication between students felt superficial and forced - lacking the true dialogue that signals meaningful connection. I wanted these students to connect less through transactional messages and more through creative, narrative-driven expression: digital stories and remix.

The Approach

I pioneered a curriculum focused on digital storytelling, where students at sites around the globe - South Africa, Norway, India, Australia, California, and New York - created digital videos, shared them on the network, and then remixed videos from other sites.

With each “conversational turn,” students would view a video from another site through their own cultural lens, create their own version through that lens, and then talk online with the origin site about their intended meaning.

The Build

I traveled to sites around the globe, making videos with students in one country and remixing them in another - to understand how people from completely different cultural contexts interpreted these multimodal texts and made sense of distant others through their own cultural references. The videos became fodder for real conversation about real issues affecting youth in each local geography.

In one particularly salient exchange, students in New York and India reflected on violence, poverty, and school in their respective contexts. They uncovered common threads - but the dialogue also surfaced irreconcilable differences in how violence, poverty, and school were understood and represented across their two worlds.

The Impact

Space2Cre8 became a landmark longitudinal study in digital storytelling and social networking. Over the years our research team won numerous grants - including from the National Science Foundation - presented insights at academic conferences in the US and abroad, and published in peer-reviewed journals.

Across nearly a decade of research and multiple grants, the technology behind Space2Cre8 evolved from very primitive social-networking tools to modern Web 2.0 experiences - eventually including a project with 360° video and VR headsets, where students in New York, California, and India experienced one another’s videos in an immersive virtual environment.