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Notes from Home Inc. Media Literacy Conference: Part Two

By Hillary Kolos on March 11, 2010 7:07 AM | Permalink

Here is the second (and long overdue!) post about the Home Inc Media Literacy Conference that took place at MIT last November.  Video of our workshop on appropriation and remixing has been posted so we wanted to share it with those of you who weren't able to make it to the conference. 

Keep reading for a run down of the workshop and relevant links.

NML at the "Diversifying Participation" Conference

By Erin Reilly on March 5, 2010 8:00 AM | Permalink

• I presented with Flourish Klink and Barry Joseph from Global Kids on Mad Skills: Making New Media Literacy practices accessible to educators and students alike. This provided us time to dialogue with participants on a Worked Example that is in progress.  We are writing and editing videos from the field of our observations on how the Media Makers Collection in the Learning Library was taken up and adapted into Global Kids' Media Masters program.  Here is the video presentation.  And after the presentation, we had everyone participate in a scavenger hunt game which had participants dialogue on the questions we posed in the presentation and situate it into their own contexts of learning.
  

• I joined James Bosco, Milton Chen, Margaret Weigel and Christine Greenhow on a panel about Participatory Learning in Schools: Square Peg in Round Hole?  It was a pleasure to be part of such a diverse group of panelists.  We each took 8 minutes to share insight into what are some of the critical sticking points that need to happen to change schools in order to provide a space for participatory learning. We then opened it up for a lively discussion.  Some key take-aways for me included Jim encouraging us to unite and create a strong policy voice to help change the structure of schools where Milton reminded us that this change will happen by a grass-roots effort; that there is already great examples of participatory learning but they are segmented and lost in the shuffle.  Margaret shared insights from interviews with teachers and the constant tension between school culture, even with the most innovative teachers.  I shared our recent findings from our field work with 7 schools on the Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture and suggested some design principles to consider in how to create a new school culture.  And Christine closed with advocating for more research in this area ...one we all agree is needed.

• Alice Cavallo, NML's Curriculum Specialist, chaired with Sasha Costanza-Chock to create a panel on Digital Media Production and Social Change.  Alice shared insights into her dissertation on Virtual Forum Theater (VFT), an animation tool that allows the creation of digital plays as a vehicle to convey and discuss unjust social sketches. Alice shared stories of how VFT connects youth from any part of the world expanding the importance of role playing as a way of understanding interpersonal and political struggles in order to foster social changes. Through these stories, she made connections to how the new media literacies, play, performance, judgment, negotiation and collective intelligence, are present in participating in VFT.
  

Notes from Home Inc. Media Literacy Conference: Part One

By Hillary Kolos on November 2, 2009 2:57 PM | Permalink

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.