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November 2009 Archives

Interview with Ed Beat Blog

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I was interviewed about NML recently for the Ed Beat blog, which is run by a non-profit I used to work at, Learning Matters.

Here's the intro followed by a link to the rest of the article:

Last week, when John Merrow's post on technology in schools generated a long discussion in its comments section, we learned just how important this issue is to educators and students. This week we spoke with Hillary Kolos, who worked with Learning Matters from 2002-2005, and is now a graduate student in MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. She's a research assistant for a project we've mentioned here before-Project New Media Literacies-which is attempting to explore what media literacy means in the 21st Century, and how students-and their schools-can learn to do it well. Full article

Using Alternative Assessment Models to Empower Youth-directed Learning

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Barry Joseph
Online Leadership Director
Global Kids, Inc.
Tashawna is a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY. In the morning she leaves home for school listening to her MP3s, texting her friends about meeting up after school at Global Kids, where she participates in a theater program, or FIERCE, the community center for LGBT youth. On the weekend she'll go to church and, on any given day, visit MySpace and Facebook as often as she can. While she misses television and movies, she says she just can't find the time.

This describes what we can call Tashawna's distributed learning network, the most important places in her life where learning occurs. Not just at home, school and church but also through digital media, like MP3s, SMS and social networks, and at youth-serving institutions, like Global Kids and FIERCE. Some are places that require her presence, like school, while others are opt-in, like MySpace. But the learning she gathers across the nodes in her network are preparing her to succeed in the classrooms, workplaces, and civic arenas of the 21st Century.

And Tashawna is not alone. In part due to the changes in education, in part due to the affects of digital media, youth have a wide array of options for learning knowledge and developing skills. But how many youth feel in charge of their networks, or are even aware they exist as an interconnected whole? How do they learn to synthesize what they learn and communicate it to future employers and college admission staff who won't learn of their strengths on most school transcripts?

Notes from Home Inc. Media Literacy Conference: Part One

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Last weekend, Home Inc, put on a vibrant, thought-provoking conference here at MIT. Project NML was represented in two sessions. Erin and I presented about appropriation and using remixes in the classroom. Jenna McWilliams, former NML curriculum specialist and current Phd candidate at Indiana University, presented about the participatory assessment model she is working on with Dan Hickey using examples from the Teachers Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see any of the other workshop presenters, but I heard there were some very interactive and inspiring sessions. I'll have a Part Two post about our NML sessions up soon and hopefully a link to videos from the conference!

Before discussing the workshops, I wanted to write about an overarching issue that came up throughout the conference. As the day progressed, we began to notice through corridor chatter and tweets (check out #homeinc on Twiter for the threads from the conference) that copyright/fair use confusion was becoming a trend. None of the sessions were explicitly about copyright, but a pattern emerged in many of the sessions where someone would raise a copyright issue or ask a fair use question, others would offer resources or their perspective, and debate would ensue because of the many different understandings of copyright/fair use law.