HarlemLive & AI: Some Reflections

Nidhi Parthasarathy, May 2024

HarlemLIVE was a trailblazing youth-led internet publication with a strong track record of empowering youth through journalism and community engagement over nearly two decades (1994–2011). The inspiring journey of HarlemLIVE and its founder, Richard Calton, are summarized in the book “The legacy of HarlemLIVE”. The book has a lot of fascinating stories and insights that are very thought provoking. In this article, I summarize what I l learnt from the book and some of my thoughts on how we can replicate and scale HarlemLIVE’s success in the age of AI.

Richard Calton’s Journey

The book begins by talking about Richard Calton’s journey to becoming a teacher and how his teaching principles developed. In this part of the book, Calton describes his story and personal experiences that motivated him to become a better teacher and encourage his students to reach their potential. His philosophy was to “give kids a broad range of experiences and the agency to make decisions and manage projects.” Some of the activities he employed in his classes to engage students included: letter writing, after-school trips, theatrical plays based on African Folktales, guest speakers, and student-led newspapers.

Calton cared about each student’s diverse stories, interests, and learning styles. He wanted his students “to glimpse a world beyond their own and perhaps discover something that would ignite their passions”. To do this he exposed his students to professionals in different fields, took them on various trips to places like the Statue of Liberty, and created activities where students could create a real impact. Calton also talked about his own burnout that led him to volunteer at ILT (Institute of Learning Technologies) where he worked on overcoming the digital divide and his interest in HTML and online publications. All of these experiences played a part in the creation of HarlemLIVE.

HarlemLIVE

HarlemLIVE embodied a lot of Calton’s philosophies. HarlemLIVE focused on empowering young people through experiential learning, trust building, community involvement, mentorship, and ownership. It gave students a way to express their perspectives through various hands-on activities, including story telling, poetry, and memoirs, and the opportunity to report on issues concerning education, health, politics, war protests, and more.

But apart from giving students a way to express their unique voice to the world, HarlemLIVE helped students feel respected and trusted. One thing that Calton emphasized in the book was that “respect goes both ways”. HarlemLIVE implemented this belief by trusting the students and allowing them to take control of the process: choosing topics to present on, finding people to interview, and writing their own articles. As Calton said, “journalism was a dynamic vehicle to impart a wide range of transferable skills: scheduling, organizing, researching, critical thinking, navigating, adaptability, interviewing, listening, communication, collaboration, teamwork, writing, storytelling, self expression, publishing, technical web skills, editing, producing, networking”.

HarlemLIVE gave students exposure to a wider world so they could find and ignite their passions. Calton explained how HarlemLIVE gave students in less advantaged schools a way to gain education on par with a well-resourced school. Rather than being instructed to conform, follow directions, and memorize facts, HarlemLIVE promoted leadership, self-advocacy, and a culture of risk-taking.

Reflections on HarlemLIVE best practices & the potential role of AI

Experiential Learning and Real-Life Exposure: Calton emphasized the importance of giving students a chance to take matters into their own hands: to “take charge, make choices, and own the outcomes”. To become a great leader, one must be given the opportunity to lead first. Grounding education in the real world instead of making it hypothetical and about learning a lot of facts can encourage creativity and exploration and can help students learn to analyze critically, synthesize, and reflect. It is also important to balance hands-on experience with reflection.

• Can AI help give students the opportunity to lead?
• Can AI give students diverse real-world opportunities?
• Can AI help students reflect and find balance?

Trust and Empowerment: HarlemLIVE shows how trust and respect can empower students to create an impact and become leaders. Students need a safe space to spread their wings and reach their full potential. They need people who trust and believe in them no matter what they do or how they think. There is a misconception that teenagers are incompetent and will run wild if given authority. However, this is untrue. Teenagers actually thrive when given the opportunity to be in charge. When in charge, teenagers can explore their full creative potential, allowing them to learn more about their passions and interests along the way. Trusting in students and believing that they are capable can create students who love learning and will learn life-long.

• Can AI create a judgment free zone for students to embrace their creativity?
• Can AI help students gain authority in a safe place?

Adult Mentoring, Peer Teaching, and Community Building: Another important facet of HarlemLIVE was adult mentoring and peer teaching. HarlemLIVE didn’t have the funds to hire a full staff and used peer mentoring instead. This, however, had a lot of benefits of its own. It fostered a strong sense of camaraderie and teamwork among the students and created a tight knit community of young people who supported and encouraged one another. Furthermore, the mentor-mentee pairings put an emphasis on mutual learning and support which also helped students. Mentoring and peer teaching created a safe place for students, allowing them to thrive and reach their full potential.

• Can AI be a low cost alternative for mentoring?
• Can AI foster a sense of community in students?
• Can AI help create a family-like environment?
• Can AI help show the importance of teamwork?

Adaptability and Resilience (risk-taking): For students to become leaders they need to be able to take risks. They need to embrace the possibility of failure and recognize the value in the process, not just the outcome. Being able to adapt to changes in the world and technology is also very important. Calton thinks that AI use will be the next thing that students need to learn how to use without diminishing their inner creativity.

• Can AI motivate students to take risks and embrace failure?
• How can the digital divide in AI be closed?

Engagement and Personalization: Calton also talks about the need for curriculum and activities that are both stimulating and engaging. Safety, warmth, and connection gives students a sense of belonging.

• Can AI create more engaging content for students to learn?
• Can AI personalize content for each student?
• Can AI learn about students on a personal level and adapt to student learning styles?

Some ideas to explore AI’s Potential

Creating Engaging Content: AI can streamline content creation and create engaging material that can be personalized to each student. It can go through vast amounts of content and recommend the most relevant materials. It can also use Q&A sessions, practice exercises, and active engagement to create continuous learning.

Mentoring: One of the reasons why Calton needed peer mentoring was due to the limited budget they had for mentoring. AI can provide a low cost alternative for mentoring along with peer mentoring. AI can provide real-time feedback and optimize/edit student work while maintaining the student’s voice.

Personalization: AI can analyze large amounts of student data to tailor learning experiences to individual needs and preferences, including learning style and student interests.

Creating a Judgement Free Zone: AI provides a platform where students will be comfortable voicing their opinions as AI isn’t judgemental. LLMs have large, diverse datasets and will be more objective in its comments based on the data it is trained on. Students are also less afraid of a machine than they are of humans who have real thoughts and real power and this will help students to express their opinions more freely.

Simulations of Real Life: AI simulations of real life can help here. AI (GPT-4o) can create real-life models of people that students may want to talk to or interview in the future. This can help students practice speaking to people they might find unapproachable, learn diverse perspectives, and build confidence in themselves

AI + Humans: A lot of the success in HarlemLIVE comes from human to human interactions. While AI can be a useful tool in creating a more engaging and useful learning process there are some interesting open questions on how AI and human interactions can be used in a balanced way to address some of the more intangible aspects of HarlemLIVE like instilling responsibility, challenging one’s fears, and creating connection/family.

AI + Journalism: HarlemLIVE was based on combining journalism with the then-disruptive technology of the time — the internet. AI is now the new disruptive technology, and there are a lot of interesting applications for journalism that uses AI. An example is using data commons (datacommons.org) to have more sophisticated data analysis.