The following image viewers are free to download and use. Use them to display your images on any web page.

Based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, UnionDocs is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization. Our mission is to present a broad range of innovative and thought-provoking non-fiction projects to the general public, while also cultivating specialized opportunities for learning, critical discourse, and creative collaboration for emerging media-makers, theorists, and curators.

“In Verse” is a multimedia reporting project combining poetry, photography and sound. The documentary poems will be broadcast on Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen the weekend of November 6, 2009. The first installment of the project, “Women of Troy,” documents the lives of working mothers in Troy, New York–once one of the richest cities in America, thanks to its role in the industrial revolution. Now roughly 19 percent of the population is living below the US poverty line.

FREE lesson plans and educational resources

Google Earth has opened up potential for students in classrooms around the globe with its bird’s-eye view of the world.

Find ideas for any age student and a handful of virtual tours that will not only help you instruct your students, but might even teach you something along the way.

This video, produced by Google, features Google Search Engineer Matt Cutts explaining what happens when you do a web search on Google. Cutts also explains how Google indexes and ranks websites.

Their attention spans are not short for games, for example, or for music, or rollerblading, or for spending time on the Internet, or anything else that actually interests them. It isn’t that they can’t pay attention, they just choose not to.

The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less you’re able to think and reason out a problem and the more you’re willing to rely on stereotypical solutions.

I teach at MIT, I teach the most brilliant students in the world. But they have done themselves a disservice by drinking the kool-aid and believing that a multi-tasking learning environment will serve their best purposes. There really are important things that you cannot think about unless it’s still and you are only thinking about one thing at a time.

MOSEP addresses the growing problem of adolescents (aged 14 to 16) dropping out of the formal education system around Europe. Students of this age find themselves at the transition phase in their lives where they have to choose between going into upper secondary education or entering vocational training. It is a time when they have to make decisions and need to be supported in making the best choices for their future careers.

Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

It is not hard, with 20/20 hindsight, to see what went wrong. In the blink of an eye, the spectacularly long-lived success of the publishing industry succumbed under the weight of too much free content flooding the internet, causing a crash in the value of content.

"Building sites that perform well for humans, not search engines, [is one change necessary to] reverse the damage we've done to ourselves in the last 15 years of the internet.

Kelly is the poster child for the next-generation publisher who places primacy on creating great content that drives loyal visitors. Not so easy to do -- but ultimately that's probably more profitable than just herding traffic that will leave as soon as they got there.

Radio drama, ranging from "Captain Midnight" to the high art of Orson Welles, thrived for 40 years in America. It was all but gone by the 1960s, killed off by television. Yet now that TV must contend with the Internet, the Internet has given radio drama a whisper of new life. It can't be called "radio drama" anymore, since hardly any of it gets on the radio. Mr. Greenhalgh settles for "audio drama," but the catchiest name for it is "mind movie."

Kids with Cameras was founded in 2002 by photographer Zana Briski out of her work teaching photography to children in Calcutta's red-light district. We believe that photography is an effective tool in igniting children's imagination and building self-esteem. We believe in the power of art to transform lives, for both the artist and the viewer.

The Center for Future Civic Media is working to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

We use the term civic media, rather than citizen journalism: civic media is any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting. MIT students are experimenting with a variety of new civic media techniques, from technologies for protests and civil disobedience to phone-texting systems that allow instant, sophisticated votes on everyday activities. The Center amplifies the development of these technologies for community empowerment, while also serving to generate curricula and open-source frameworks for civic action.

“participatory culture”

Virtual Gaza is a website where ordinary Palestinians under siege can describe their experiences in their own words, and where the destruction can be documented by those experiencing it directly. It was created as a response to the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in January 2009.

Voices Beyond Walls is a participatory media initiative that supports creative expression and human rights advocacy among impoverished youth through digital storytelling workshops, new media production, and global dissemination of their work.

“My Ohio State colleagues took the initiative last November to convene a community conversation to discuss the implications of the report for Columbus. They could not get a single mainstream media news outlet (print or broadcast) to participate—although public and alternative media were well represented…”

“What would it be like to organize an entire college or university education around the idea of journalism? I am not talking here about what we think of as vocational journalism education. The idea is not to make everyone a professional editor or reporter. I am talking, instead, about conceiving an entire program of liberal education that takes as its central theme the idea that the new media phenomenon is potentially making everyone a journalist.

I’ve long believed that basic journalism training would benefit everyone, and that journalistic assignments could start as early as elementary school. Shane points out that his vision of journalism-centered higher education could help solve three major social problems: The shortfall in local news production around the country. The well-documented deficiency in college student writing. Low civic literacy: Americans’ generally poor knowledge about how social institutions work, and who makes the policy decisions that affect their lives. Shane also observed that involving students in local journalism “wins the educational trifecta”: Students would tackle meaningful and intellectually challenging issues. Students enjoy dealing with such issues. Students would develop marketable skills while also learning to function effectively as citizens.