Charles, Gideon, Luis, Melissa B, Melissa C, and I started off with an interest in the crisis of rising student debt in the United States. After perusing resources and tools for students to figure out how to afford college and plan their financial future, we realized that (1) information on student loans is dispersed across the web and confusing, (2) most calculators are offered by profit-driven platforms, and (3) the convoluted facts about loans and scary numbers of debt and future payments can make users feel isolated instead of part of a community of affected students. Therefore, our first goal was to create a tool that combines basic information and a comprehensive calculator for financial planning with tailored connections to relevant online communities. We hope that our tool can be used both by affected students and by journalists in search of a streamlined way to crowdsource information on the topic and connect with pertinent groups. You can see the tool, the It Gets Smaller website, here.

Our second goal was to use the tool in two journalistic pieces. We proudly present Gideon and Melissa B’s article and Melissa C’s video.

The Student Debt team is looking forward to your feedback!

I transformed a tiny bit of my research on online connectivity behavior into a FOLD piece called Why Screens Can Ruin Your Sleep. I simply love the concept of FOLD with narrative and context cards. I mostly used external links and videos as context cards, but also included some of my own survey data.

The nation needs more social workers. But when they enter the profession, they’re staring at low salaries and mountains of student debt. How are they handling it?

Gideon Gil and I used the It Gets Smaller student loan tool to find out. First, we used the income planner tool to identify a profession where student loan payments are projected to make up a high percentage of a person’s income.

Then we used the second part of the tool, which generated suggested Reddit threads based on our search. The tool connected us to a hoppin’ Reddit forum for social workers. We posted a question asking for stories of how social workers are handling student loans. We got flooded with stories from around the country.

Read the stories here.

Gideon and I worked along with Léa Steinacker, Charles Kaioun, Melissa Clark and Luis Guillermo Natera Orozco on the student debt team, which created the Its Gets Smaller website.

Our hope in creating the website is not only to connect students to better loan information, but also to create a new way to seamlessly connect readers and journalists to social media and Reddit forums, where they can crowdsource advice and more information.

Student Debt Interview, please use password: StudentDebt to access the video.

Website

Group Members:

Charles

Gideon

Léa

Melissa B

Melissa C

Luis

Remember this?

And this?

And this?

I do, too, because I couldn’t get across THIS:

That’s Cambridge Common, the 16-acre park I cross to get to my classes and to Lippman House, where our Nieman activities take place.

On an average day, some 10,000 people cross the park on foot or bicycle. 

But the park pathways don’t get plowed until all the priority plowing – and shoveling – is done.  In a winter like 2015, that meant crossing the park felt something like this:

What if there were a way – to help each other?  When the city has its hands full? 

That got me thinking:  what if we could all come together and lend a hand?  (you can see my first “Scratch” lesson if you click)

Instead of “paying it forward” … what if we “Shoveled it Forward?”

Do you really want to keep trudging over this unplowed path? Of course you don’t!

Imagine Cambridge Common planted with three bright shovels. (Scratch #2, my art is priceless.)  

As you walk the path, your only task as a pedestrian is to shovel two steps ahead of you.  So you will have at least two shovel-wide paces that won’t be as narrow as those dodgy, one-step-at-a-time paths.

Then park the shovel for the next person, who will (we hope) shovel two paces ahead themselves.

Kind of like Boston’s Adopt-a-Hydrant program, only for pathways that don’t always get shoveled.

See how happy this hydrant is at being shoveled out?

It would probably be easy enough to tweak the Adopt-a-Hydrant app – in some form, with some very simple map or geo-coded details – for a few public pathways just for trial.  (If anyone is into this – I can volunteer to leave some snow shovels behind for next year!)

The social media aspect  – take a picture of yourself and your shoveling citizenship, and upload it? Get a badge? – could be done in Tumblr or Instagram.  

You could hastag it “CommonWealth-y”

Or, as I originally imagined, #Shovelitforward.  

Then I discovered there already IS a program like this – in friendly and polite Canada.   

They’ve already built this better than I could have pictured or built.  (Journalism lesson #1 – always check to see who else might have already written about your story!)  

Could we use their model – maybe even co-brand it?  We ARE neighbors, after all.  

Bianca Datta and I worked on the current debate over ‘cognitive enhancers.’ This topic offered a wide range of possible actions for those interested because the debate is both so broad and becoming more visible.

To navigate the space of options, we decided to think about how we could explore our capacities as humans with limited time and resources.

We decided to create an interactive bar chart that allowed a person to signal their general level of interest in pursuing any one type of contribution to the issue. This would (or is supposed to) in turn reshuffle the display of options available to be more in line with the reader’s interest and capacity.

The act of exploring the options not only means a little more thought into how one can ‘help’ but also serves as a survey tool for media outlets.

In the ideal situation, this would be a fully responsive page where information did actually shuffle according to specified preferences but as it stands, it currently lacks that last capability. It is easy enough, however, to gut the information and put in new information so it could possibly serve as a tool in future after some extra work and polish.

With regards to the type of options we left available for the reader, Bianca and I felt that three broad actions governed most abilities to contribute for any given reader. A reader could either spread the information to raise awareness and attention, participate in discussions which could lead to greater action, or donate to an organization that would act in their interests.

Here are some screenshots:

(Drag and release to increase or decrease dosage of action)

(Read about actionables from what was selected as most important to least important – in progress functionality)

Check is out at: http://um-viz.media.mit.edu/fonAction/index.html (slide bars for fun, then click ‘okay’ to see information)

Here’s the link to the site. You can click around to explore the different petitions and even create an account, but so far you can’t actually submit any forms or like or sign anything.

http://wecott.csail.mit.edu/

WeCott is a (prototype) website built by myself and three friends during the iCorruption hackathon a few weeks ago. We envisioned a platform of communities where people could participate in boycotts together – offering advice on alternatives, uploading photos of their boycott, and otherwise supporting each other. Not only would this make the process more fun and supportive, it also allows people and companies to see the effects of the boycott all in one place. You can see some more of our thoughts and designs in our presentation pitch.

These last two weeks, myself, Giovana, Alicia, and Wahyu have been brainstorming how to use this platform to talk about issues that we cared about. The first thing that we realized was that while boycotts could be very powerful as a general tool, it’s not often clear exactly what to boycott given a particular issue. Sometimes problems are so systemic (such as Ferguson) or involve things that we are unable to give up (such as our government). These types of problems may involve some more creative thinking about what could be done as an individual. Other problems fit well into the boycott mold. However, we acknowledged that often boycotts hurt people lower down the power ladder such as workers instead of the business leaders we want to target. At the end of the day, that is a tradeoff that we must make as individuals when voting with our money. Sometimes, whether we know it or not, we can be perpetuating or contributing to entities and problems that we do not support, just when we go to the grocery store!

Giovana and Wahyu both contributed a petition to WeCott – here and here. They can speak more about the specific issues they investigated and the thought processes they went through to create the petition.

I can talk a bit about the design of WeCott and also what else I envisioned but didn’t get to prototype. As you can see, there is a dollar amount that is associated with each petition that is supposed to collect all the money that people have pledged that they will divert. A bit about this – I felt that having a dollar amount would be a really powerful signal to companies. And while we can’t guarantee that people will stick to that, we have thought about ways to help people that pledge, such as sending notification emails, and to encourage people to be accountable, such as uploading photos or maybe checking in on a map to then gain points or badges. I can see other features such as news updates, goal setting, discussion boards, and local or map integrations that could help keep momentum going and provide local support. A lot of the initial design inspiration for WeCott came from both Change.org and Kickstarter. One member of the original team will be presenting WeCott again at the bigger iCorruption conference some time next week.