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Podcast for the Digital Literacies and 21st Century Skills course at Adelphi University's Educational Technology program.
Hosts
Welcome to the Remix Podcast.
Divya
So I'm your first host. My name is Divya. I currently got my bachelor's degree in history, and now I'm in a Master's getting my education degree.
Adriana
Hi, I am your second host. My name is Adriana Franco, and I'm a communications major here at Adelphi University.
Kat
Hey, I'm Kat, and I am becoming a teacher of arts at Adelphi University.
Okay, so let's get right to it. We are Remix. Really fun topic. We wanna jump right in with the question of what is remix? So we surmised that remixing is essentially when original content or media is modified or combined with other elements to produce something fresh and unique. So we also all think that remixing in general is going to be super effective for teachers everywhere.
So as teachers, we already need to consistently and perpetually be changing, evolving, going with the flow, and growing with our students as they learn and change. And that includes the present-day technology. I think remixing, we think remixing lesson plans and teaching according to how society and life changes will provide better instruction quality and more relatable things for the classroom.
So I'm gonna turn to the girls and ask, how do you see yourself using remix as a teacher?
Divya
So I can begin. So a little story time. When I was in middle school, I had this teacher, this really old teacher. She taught social studies, and everyone just dreaded going into social studies class. She was one of the oldest teachers in the whole building, and everyone always said how she was so good, but all of the students just hated going to her.
And I never understood why until I had her. And it was because she would just talk the whole period. We never did anything fun in class, and she didn't have any PowerPoints up. She didn't have anything but herself, and maybe that would've worked 30 years ago when she had started teaching, but it definitely was not working when we were, I, learning. And it was just horrible. Like we, everyone was falling asleep there. No one liked coming to class. Everyone was just bored. And that's just a sign of people who aren't coming with the age and evolving and growing as teachers professionally to make sure that their students are getting the best experience they can.
Kat
Yeah. Sounds like she was...over it.
Adriana
Yeah.
I think for me as a teacher, I would probably put myself in the shoes of my students because students nowadays, kids nowadays grew up with technology. They're a lot more tech-savvy than I am at this point, so I would most likely look into the trends that they're paying attention to, look into what's trending for them on social media, learn their slang, learn their little lingo, and I would probably try to adapt to it. I will most definitely adapt to it. And I'll use the empowerment through social media, through media because that empowers both myself and the students by engaging with digital tools and just media in general.
Kat
Definitely keeping up with the kids, I think, is necessary. Also, just so you can access them on a more social colloquial level without being unprofessional. If you teach yourself the evolving tools and use—not use the slang, but at least understand it and the memes and the relevant media that's going on, and pervasive media—then you can become part of their lexicon. And I feel like that establishes the foundation for better connection. Better "he gets me" is, yeah.
Adriana
And not only just understand it because I don't want my students just to understand media, but I want them to use it, like them using media instead of media using them.
Kat
Yeah, exactly. And in teaching them, we can teach them what not to do. Don't put your social security card on there. Don't talk to random people online at two in the morning. If it's part of the pedagogy, it's not gonna be something that the parents have to handle on their own, which I think is a good and interesting idea.
Divya
Exactly. I think that's also a good way because I feel like a lot of parents, there's so many different backgrounds of parents. Some parents don't know how social media works and how technology works, but the kids can learn it in school, and that's a perfect transition to the next point. Remixing allows educators to ensure that learning materials are inclusive and accessible to all students, and that they can adapt resources to accommodate diverse learning needs, ensuring that no child is left behind.
I think that's like exactly what both of you said. That just perfectly sums everything up.
Kat
Yeah, and we could see some, what I think is universal, which is hygiene for—what am I saying? Like technology hygiene. What to do, what not to do, storage, the nuances of using these things that have to do with not only the method but also the upkeep.
Okay, so we're moving to our external source. We broke down a few points from Dr. Jeff Share from UCLA, starting with the idea that he put forward: social constructivism. So this addresses who made the media, as in their personal background and the individual people. So the, excuse me, guys—everyone takes different things into their own point of view. This can be avoided through understanding the presence of differences and the importance of tolerance and respect to opinions that are not our own.
I think this is a universal message, obviously, but definitely is necessitated by the current media structures I think that we have in our society. Because I think if people were just in general more tolerant, there would be fewer escapades leading to echo chambers and chat boards about hating this or that, etc. Because if you diversify, then you're less likely to wind up in a pit hole of just hearing your own words spit back out at you.
And personal differences as an idea of encountering art, I think, is pretty, pretty established already. I think this is like a duh point on the other hand because I feel like if I were to interpret a painting hanging at the Louvre and Adriana was to do the same, it's very likely that we will do so differently contingent upon our past experiences, color, how we encounter the world. So why would art be any different? So on that level, I definitely think this can be applied in many different ways, but it was worth saying. It was worth noting.
Divya
Yeah, and the second point that Dr. Jeff Share shares is politics of representation, which is that all messages have a point of view that relates to a value. For example, what is being represented here? What do we see that's missing here? What are we not seeing or hearing here? This kind of has to do with a bias. Someone can interpret one thing in a different way, and it's just, it's gonna happen no matter what. Someone will always have a differing opinion. Someone will always have their own perception of things, but just understanding that that is a possibility is one way to ensure that remixing will be successful.
Kat
For sure. That last question—what are we not seeing or hearing here?—it reminds me of lying by omission. Presenting everything but the thing they don't want you to see because it doesn't help their point. And I think that has just taken over, especially on television where you're getting piecemeal information. But if you had the whole story, you'd be able to come to a different conclusion, and they don't want that to happen. They want you to just stay on that one track. So that's very risky stuff. It's hurtful already societally, in my opinion, but hopefully, as we evolve, we will make a point to just present everything—the entirety—and let people come to their own conclusions.
Adriana
Okay, so I'll dive into the third point that we thought was important by Dr. Jeff Share. He mentions how people, us as consumers, we media consumers, we just take whatever media is free. People usually don't question media, especially if it's free. So how are companies like Google making money? How are they profiting from us just making a Google search? And that's basically by them extracting data. It’s taking our information and when we're putting it there, and then they're selling it to somebody else.
This is why after searching for something, we keep getting ads related to the topic afterwards, which is insane because that's literally what happens. Every time I open an app, I Google something, and then I go to Instagram, and I get so many ads of the topic or of the product I searched for. And that also happens like on TikTok. Whenever I go to a hashtag, I press on a hashtag, and then I get bombarded with the same concept over and over.
Kat
So annoying.
Adriana
Yeah, the algorithm is crazy. So I feel like basically what Dr. Share was saying is that we have to start questioning that. We have to keep asking those questions because they're collecting data, and it's important for us to have the knowledge of what we're looking for. Then we have to inform people, especially the young generation, to be careful of what we're exposing ourselves to.
Divya
Agreed. And going off what you said, Adriana, about how people are just like, "whatever," it's like, what if there’s a post—they’re just gonna believe in it. I’ve definitely fallen victim to this. Like one time, I was just scrolling and someone was like, "There’s gonna be a tornado." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, there’s gonna be..." Like, I really thought there was gonna be rain and everything, and it wasn’t. It was gonna be completely sunny, but oh no.
But this is like what happened—I don’t know if you guys heard about what happened with Taylor Swift and the Trump campaign? She recently endorsed Kamala Harris, but in her caption, she put how
the reason she’s doing this is because the Trump administration or someone else had created fake AI and then posted it on social media saying that she’s endorsing Donald Trump. And so many people, like so many of her fans, and she was believing that they went to support Trump, and it was this huge thing.
And it’s just crazy because a lot of her fans are younger. Even some older fans too. Maybe they don’t know how AI actually works or anything, and they’ll just believe in it, which is so scary. And we really need to be aware. Like just because something’s a post or something’s on TikTok, or it mentions someone famous or popular, like it’s not, like there’s a possibility it’s not true at all.
Kat
And those pictures were a perfect example of a remix gone wrong. They just took pictures of her crowd and pictures of her outfits and her face and manipulated them. The details weren’t great. If you had a trained eye or an awareness of AI, you probably were able to pick out that it wasn’t real. But like you said, her following are the youth, so I doubt that they have that. And it’s just really questionable because they, a professional—think about it, like a national professional campaign used her likeness to remix their own images to promote themselves. That’s so bad. If we don’t come up with some kind of safeguard, like a technology safeguard or something in litigation, then there’s gonna be a lot of that.
Divya
Yeah.
Adriana
Yeah. Especially young people are—they’re highly influenced by small things like that. And like you said, to the trained eye, it seems pretty obvious, but to the naked eye, I’m gonna believe it. As someone who doesn’t really understand AI, I’m gonna believe it, and I’m gonna be influenced. So yeah. So, accountability.
Kat
Okay, so moving on. As digital tools and technologies evolve, remixing itself allows teachers and educators to integrate multimedia and digital platforms into their practice. Helping them stay current and making lessons more interactive and effective. This kind of hearkens back to what we were talking about before—just staying on top of things trend-wise and giving your kids more access to you in a way because you speak their language. And I think that just proliferates rapport and trust and all of that good stuff in the classroom.
Adriana
On that topic, I do wanna mention, I had an experience where I was doing an internship for Schneps Media. They're a huge publisher, and most people working there were over 35, so they didn’t really know what was going on in terms of what sells in media, like social media, what the kids are looking at.
So one of the reasons why I was hired is because I’m fresh eyes. I’m like, I’m supposed to know what’s in with the trends. So they basically asked me to brainstorm and come up with new concepts, new ideas on how we could enhance their Instagram account or make it more aesthetically pleasing for the younger generation.
And one of the problems I came across was that I am not someone who’s super tech-savvy, so I can’t really come up with something from scratch. So my method was I would go to other publishers, I would go to their Instagram accounts, I would look at their YouTube videos, I would look at interviews they were doing, and I would basically remix what they were doing instead of saying copying, because I was basically copying what other big companies were doing. And I would just add a little twist to it just to make it our own.
And this is basically going back to the video Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson. He basically says that nothing is original, nothing is new, and we just need to keep using other work, like copying other work to evolve ideas. So like, the new ideas evolve from the old ones, basically.
Yeah, so that was my experience at Schneps, and this is how I used remixing in the workspace, and I feel like more people should be doing that. And like he said, we should be copying more. We should keep doing that until we find the perfect formula to fit what we wanna do and who we are.
Kat
That reminds me of, you said this before, of how people—advertisers are now copying TikTok as a framework for getting their stuff out there, which I think is hilarious. Part of me feels like they’re like, "Let’s trick the kids. They won’t know the difference." But yeah, it’s everywhere, for sure.
Adriana
Yeah. I feel like we’re all doing the same with the same materials here, so we might as well just use each other to perfect things.
Divya
And I feel like more people should get on top of that and just understand that remixing is—it’s just gonna happen. Like in songs, they’re all sampled off each other. Fashion, like people just have to realize that fashion comes back. It’s like a remix.
Kat
Oh yeah, wow, that’s a good point.
Divya
Yeah, so I feel like we just have to realize that it’s okay. Like you said, copying should be happening because it’s showing, yeah, showing we’re building off one another. So once people realize that, I feel like everyone can just be successful. They’ll grow in their industry, teaching, business, marketing, whatever it is. Once people understand that, we’ll be set.
Kat
Yeah. Because think about it, because of our diverse backgrounds, we’re always gonna have an element that’s different. The copy is always gonna be somewhat augmented, perspective-wise. Like I use Canva all the time for, instead of PowerPoint, for social media, everything. I consider myself an artist, and everything I work from is working from a template—that’s a remix. Remix is no longer taboo, and I think that’s what people haven’t really wrapped their heads around yet. They still feel timid because of the whole taboo of copying someone’s creative work, when that’s not what is going on.
Adriana
Yeah. And like Kirby Ferguson mentioned in the video, it’s been happening for ages. It’s happened, it’s been happening since the beginning of music. And he basically mentioned how the most dramatic results happen when different ideas are combined, and we shouldn’t criticize that. Like, I know a bunch of people are criticizing Olivia Rodrigo, like he mentioned in the video as well, because she’s using samples of older songs, but that’s how all artists, good artists start. That’s the beginning. And then they’re gonna come up with their new ideas, and we should just keep encouraging it instead of criticizing it.
Kat
You wanna bring us home, Divya?
Divya
Yes. Thank you for watching our podcast. We really hope you enjoyed learning about remix and how it affects teaching, as well as just everyday society. So as more people understand what remixing is and how successful it is, people will be able to grow in whatever they’re doing.
Kat
Power to the people.
Divya
Thank you!