And they kept coming all day.

One of them was a 19-year old named Loric Frye. Frye was a Pennsylvanian, and because of that, he was a key voter in the presidential election. Senator John McCain had staked his strategy on winning the state, hoping to steal it from Senator Barack Obama in his comeback bid.

But Frye was far from the kind of clean-scrubbed, neatly partisan first-time voter Republicans would ever think to appeal to or CNN would ever bother to interview.

Frye was a young brother in oversized pants. His young son was at home and his girlfriend was pregnant with their daughter. He had no high-school diploma. He had no fancy title. Frye was, no, still is in the process of putting it all together.

If you went strictly by the stats, he wasn't even supposed to have found his way into the voting booth yesterday. And truth be told, he almost didn't.

He admits that up until this year, politics didn't interest him. Barack got his attention. But the person who really turned him around was a man named Paradise Gray, a legendary hip-hop promoter and activist, who got Frye work as a community organizer doing voter outreach.

Frye spent the year canvassing, registering and door-knocking with Khari Mosley and the League of Young Voters. He started to feel deeply invested in the election and the political process. He spent the last few weeks doing get-out-the-vote work. All politics remains local. All transformations begin
with the personal.

So Loric Frye was excited to cast his first ballot yesterday.

But when he showed up with his voter registration card, he was told he "wasn't qualified", he said. "Something about it was illegal."

At first he thought it was the fact that he had been arrested once. But he had never been convicted or charged. He called Mosley and Gray. They came and took him down to the Board of Elections. There, Frye discovered that there were 6 registration forms in his name. Faced with conflicting information, including different social security numbers, some clerk had decided to qualify him.

It was true that he had moved twice since filling out his first form. When you're young and you're trying to get yourself together, that kind of thing happens. But he was so hyped to vote he made sure to re-register his new address every time that he moved.

When the Board of Elections official pulled out the other three forms, Frye could see that they were fakes. The registering agents were from ACORN. They had apparently used his name, invented addresses, and forged his signature 3 more times. The irony of the ACORN voter fraud case is that, in the few instances that it did impact real people, it didn't affect McCain supporters, it affected the poor people most fired up to vote for Obama.

When dawn had broken, a massive national effort at election protection got underway, born of the nightmares from the disputed 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. It was aided in part by web 2.0 tools. A fraudulent text message and a hacker-produced email at George Washington University that urged Obama voters to show up on Wednesday were both exposed via the internet.

In battleground states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio, the highest voter turnout in almost a century led to worries about a lack of ballots and slow lines. At South Carolina State University, a historically Black college, dozens of students were told that their polling places had changed. Student activists and the NAACP organized buses to get 32 students to the correct locations, but worried that at least 50 more were discouraged from voting.

Even Republicans circulated a memo detailing voting irregularities. Most of the incidents rose nowhere near the level of the kinds of voter suppression that Democrats faced in Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004. In fact, the first listed on the memo, an accusation of intimidation by alleged members of the New Black Panther Party at a polling place in North Philadelphia, was little more than a hilarious televised encounter between a Fox News reporter and a Black poll-watcher that seemed as if it was scripted for The Boondocks.

Republicans also explored allegations of double-voting by students in Georgia and media in Kansas who may have voted both in person and through absentee ballots, unfilled absentee ballot requests in New Mexico, missing military absentee ballots in Virginia, and calls in Pennsylvania with fake polling
information.

But hours later, all this seemed moot.

As soon as the polls closed in California, all of the networks called a landslide victory for Barack Obama. The margin was nowhere near close. In the popular vote, Obama beat McCain by nearly 6 million.

Over 90% of African Americans voted in record numbers for Obama. But he also won among women, split the white working class, and picked up a much larger number of white male voters than John Kerry had in 2004. Obama's electoral college tally corresponded to his margin of victory among young people, Asian Americans, and Latinos: 2-1.

The election of the first biracial African American president in the history of the U.S. set off ecstatic celebrations all across the country. Twitter's server stopped for a few minutes, overloaded by messages. In Oakland, Berkeley, and Seattle, people poured into the streets and instant block parties sprung up as if it was the Bronx in the summer of '77. Crowds marched cheering to the White House. They filled Times Square as if it was New Year's Eve. They came 1 million strong into Grant Park to hear Obama deliver his victory speech, the very place where the Democratic Party collapsed in police riots 40 years ago.

For a small group of people in Pittsburgh, the victory began earlier that day, when an elections official restored Frye's right to vote and handed him a ballot. For Mosley, the League's National Political Director, a longtime community organizer and a veteran of the 2004 battle, it was a gratifying moment.

"The biggest thing I've seen today is the number of young African Americans from the hood that have never voted—teenage parents, the formerly incarcerated, just an incredible number of people voting," he said. "We're really seeing a sea change. The college students have been voting. Now we're seeing a movement among those who never did go to college. That could be monumental not only on the local level but the national level."

"Man, I'm happy as hell I get to vote," Frye told Mosley. "I'm just so happy to get my voice heard."

The victory would not just belong to Barack Obama, but to Loric Frye. "I'm hoping for change," Frye said. "I know it ain't gon' come today or tomorrow, but I'm hoping for change. I'm pushing for change."

http://blogs.vibe.com/jeffchang/2008/11/its-a-new-day/

This girl ROCKS!!!

I thought that I should share with all of you, since so frequently (on campus and in cyberspace) I am asked why and how I use blogs as tools for teaching, learning, and as a means of distribution for creative media work. I did conduct a workshop last year on FEMINIST TEACHING WITH TECHNOLOGY, but that was mostly tech (with theoretical overview), much of which is expanded here.

I would have to say that my favorite use of the course blogs (beyond what I've listed below) is the adaption of a "typical" midterm film analysis paper that asks students to analyze a film scene, shot by shot. By adapting that assignment to be a blog assignment, SEE HERE, I can actually see the images (students take using screen grab in the FMC, which gives them additional tech tools, as well as opens up their work to all of our classroom community of learners.

So here's the letter:

I am a doctoral candidate and Graduate Instructor in the department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and an avid user of the UThink blogging system for teaching, learning, research, creative work, and community building. The use of UThink blogs has been central to all of the CLA courses that I have taught from 2006 to the present. I have been eagerly awaiting the UThink update to the latest version of Movable Type because the group blog format and other enhanced features that are currently available. An upgrade of the current system would be tremendously beneficial to my work, and to the work of many UThink bloggers in my department.

I first used a course blog for my fall 2006 course (WoSt 3307) FEMINIST FILM STUDIES. This course had 80 enrolled students, which is a large course for GWSS and can be difficult to teach with feminist pedagogy; I engage practices and methods that centers student voices, utilizes active learning practices, and builds the classroom as a space of community of learners. Using the blog for this course enabled community building beyond our weekly meeting time, in so many ways. I was able to “hear” all of the student’s voices and ideas, which is an impossibility during the limited class periods. I found that students who rarely speak in the classroom, often took the lead on blog discussions, and their ideas prompted many rigorous discussions. The first assignment, a “low risk” task, was to post a “Top 10” favorite list of films. This assignment allowed the class to share films screened outside of class, and let me know, as the Instructor, that they knew how to post, embed images, create links, and embed video clips, all tasks that were required for the remainder of the course’s academic and creative assignments. I also discovered that students, without being required to post comments, read each other’s posts, posted comments, and began to create a true community of learners beyond the “traditional” campus classroom and meeting hours, without my prompt, requirement or intervention.

Additionally, the blogs connect students, very literally, to learning and community beyond the enrolled students. I use blog as a way for students to share their research, like an assignment that asks students to “report” on women of color filmmakers. Students were amazed when some of the filmmakers posted in the comments of their posts. In their course evaluations, the students said that having their idea on the web, connected to filmmakers in the “real” world, made it seem that their assignments were a part of the feminist tradition of recovery and spotlight of women’s works that aren’t always easily accessible. For course final projects (often videos, photo essays, and powerpoint presentations), I ask students to post their work to the blog. This enables us to easily move from one project to the next (without the usual tech set-up delays during in-class presentations), is a way for students work to be showcased beyond class, and remains as an archive of the work, and still receives comments from those on and off campus.

In courses such as my spring 2008 (GWSS 3390) FEMINIST MEDIA MAKING, and my current course (AFRO3910/GWSS 3390) DIGITAL STORYTELLING in and with Communities of Color the blog is central to assignments and active student learning practices. I required assignments be posted to the blog, which creates engaged conversations (that is normally only a two-way street, traveled between student and Instructor only). With the blog, students ideas and discussions flow across complex interchanges and intersections, with all of the community of learners participating and benefit from peer learning. Blog posts often become prompts for course discussion, and a site for all of us to share information linking our site to news and events on campus. I also post all of the technical instructions (like how to use particular software or embed video in their post) on the blog, and as a result I find that students, accessing this information from anywhere they find themselves working, and often they post more than just the required assignments. Additionally, I often have students keep their own blogs as journals to trace their engagement with course ideas. Without the group blog features available in Movable Type updates, I create a work-around by linking the course blog to each of the blogs in the right sidebar, functional but clunky, to say the least.

It’s also important to note that I was an CLA IT Fellow (2005 – 2007), and taught the faculty, graduate students, majors, minors and enrolled GWSS students how to blog. In the beginning many were cautious, skeptical, or just resistant to using the blogs, fearful of privacy issues and exposure of their students. With my courses as a model, and an instruction on uses display name alias tool in UThink, I’ve found (and heard through feedback with others) that students, accountable to the reading “public” post thoughts phrased more critically, rather than personally attacking (as some feel comfortable doing when they only hand the paper in to the faculty). Some of our courses use the blogs for assignments, event postings, and reading response papers, while some courses use blogs for the sharing of creative work like adbusting and postcard projects (similar to Post Secret. Blogs are used for large and small enrollment courses, and for both lecture section and discussion sections. I have not received any negative feedback from the use of course blogs. Currently, there are numerous GWSS course blogs on the UThink system, and the numbers and methods of uses seems to be expanding exponentially.

I welcome you to visit our blogs to see brilliant, creative, and engaged scholarly work that is happening because of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Department’s use of the UThink blogging tools.

Visit is our departmental blog: GWSS COMMUNITY BLOG

Visit some of our course blogs:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/feministmediamaking/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/gwss3307_summer2008/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/gwss3307_fall2007/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/gwss1001/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/gwss3307_summer07/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/wost3307/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/giust002/feministfilmfall08/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/hedg0028/gwss/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/puxxx012/gwss1001sec3/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/puot0002/gwss4103/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/puot0002/glbt1001/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/puot0002/gwss3004/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/puot0002/gwss3306/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/puot0002/gwss4402/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/puot0002/gwss4402/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/puot0002/gwss5103/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/kamin001/gwss8490/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/zitax001/blog3307a/

Visit some of our personal blogs:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/RaeSpot/
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/englu057/gwss3307/

Please don’t hesitate to contact me to discuss my excitement and uses of the UThink blogging system in further detail. I support a quick upgrade of the UThink system and hope that we can upgrade the system immediately. Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely,
Rachel Raimist
Former IT Fellow / Doctoral Candidate, GWSS / Graduate Instructor, GWSS and AFRO

I wanted to follow up with information about where to submit proposals
More Information about proposals: http://www.ptoweb.org/cfp.html

PTO: REVISED CALL HERE

For Submissions: http://www.ptoweb.org/submission-form.html

Finally, clarifications on the conference dates:
May 18-20 Pre-conference workshops with Augusto and Julian Boal
pending Augusto's health and with Chaka Mkali and Marc Bamuthi Joseph
on Hip Hop as Organizing Tool.
May 21-24 Conference
May 24-25 Post-Conference Arts Literacy workshop with Jan Mandell and
others

Registration for conference and workshops will be open later beginning in January 2009. Please note that all presenters must pay conference registration fees (on a sliding scale from about $65 for students and others with lower incomes to about $155 with scholarship and volunteer opportunities.) Pre- and post-conference workshops require additional fees exact amount to be determined. Additional information on accommodations will be posted soon.

Mad as Hell? Now Move (or Draw, or Act…): Organizing for Social Justice @ PTO Gathering ‘09

What makes you mad? What injustices compel us to act? What are the success stories? How do we organize long-standing and sustainable changes for the good of our communities? How might we use problem- posing to address the conflicts that confront us? How do we navigate the spaces between the World As It Is and the World As It Should Be? The PTO Board and the Local Organizing Committee request proposals for interactive presentations, panels, performances, dialogues, and workshops that wrestle with our organizational mission: To challenge oppressive systems by promoting critical thinking and social justice.

Download info HERE and more details after the jump

work sample by RACHEL RAIMIST [bad compression = ( ]

RAP / HIP-HOP REEL (videographer/editor:RACHEL RAIMIST)

excerpt from FREESTYLE THE ART OF RHYME (videographer/Editor: RACHEL RAIMIST)

old version of ESTILO HIP HOP (videographer: RACHEL RAIMIST)

IF I COULD HEAR MY MOTHER PRAY (videographer/editor: RACHEL RAIMIST)

ghostbox#1: killer cancer cells (videographer/editor: RACHEL RAIMIST)

B-GIRL BE PROMO (2006) (videographer/editor: RACHEL RAIMIST)

A B-GIRL IS... (editor: RACHEL RAIMIST)

TRACKS by Tish Jones (videographer/editor: RACHEL RAIMIST)

PINK LADIES by Moira Pirsch (editor: RACHEL RAIMIST)

Fun with Media Mill Video!

SPECIAL WORKSHOP: THIS SATURDAY
Conscious Women Rock the Page
Presented by JLove Calderon, Elisha Miranda, Sofía Quintero, and Marcella Runell Hall

In this session, participants will be introduced to a cutting-edge practical implementation of Hip-Hop content and pedagogy in the form of the new book, “Conscious Women Rock the Page: Using Hip-Hop Fiction to Incite Social Change.” This session seeks to introduce attendees to the upsurge of feminist popular fiction utilizing Hip-Hop culture to raise substantive issues including race, class, gender, sexual orientation and culture. The four authors have teamed up to develop a curriculum based on three popular Hip-Hop novels to engage communities on the issues and themes that their books raise and to inspire action. The authors will read brief excerpts of their works, co-facilitate a sample activity from our curriculum and discuss how participants can harness popular fiction to raise consciousness and promote activism, especially among young women who may not identify as either feminists or activists.

To get registration info for the entire weekend of workshops and activities, please email Program Director, Parker Pracjek at parker@urbanwordnyc.org or call 212.352.3495. Scholarships available.

Presented by Urban Word NYC, Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development and the Center for Multicultural Education & Programs at NYU.

For more on JLove Calderon, visit www.jlovecalderon.com.
Email her at jlove@jlovecalderon.com