Last week, I participated in one of the ongoing series of webinars for teachers which is being conducted by our Project New Media Literacies team. The series emerges from an Early Adopters Network we are developing with educators in New Hampshire to drill down on the skills we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation and to think through how teachers in all school subjects and at all levels can draw on them to change how they support the learning of their students. Vanessa Vartabedian is the coordinator who has been running this series. Each month, they focus on a different skill. This month's focus was on Transmedia Navigation. The webinars are open to any and all participants and are drawing educators from all over the world. The webinars are also available after the fact via podcast. The Transmedia Navigation discussion involved not only some remarks by me but als
o a conversation with Clement Chau from Tufts University and Mark Warshaw from the Alchemists who has developed transmedia content for Smallville, Heroes, and Melrose Place, among other properties.
"Our Ning site is where our community of educators are exchanging ideas and trying out resources. You simply need to sign-up and fill out a short profile to access the schedule of upcoming webinars, as well as links to the archived recordings for previous webinars."
The focus of transmedia navigation offered me a chance to think a bit more deeply about what it might mean for us to produce transmedia education and I thought I would share some of those insights with you.
This week, I want to use my blog to call attention to a provocative recent book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. The authors of the book are Allen Collins, formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education, and Rich Halverson, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.
I have gotten to know Halverson through the Games, Learning, and Society conference, where I will be speaking this summer, so I was curious to look at this book when it came out. Given its authors, it's no surprise that the book is well informed about contemporary debates surrounding new media and education, and like the best books that have come out in the past year or so (including those by Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins, which I have profiled here), it strives to balance between the inflated hopes of early digital advocates and the inflated fears of those who would lock technology out of the classroom.
The authors offer sage new proposals for how we might deal with the apparent tensions and incompatabilities between education as it has been conducted in this country and the new media landscape as it is lived beyond the schoolhouse gates. But the real surprise and strength of the book is the ways they are able to situate the contemporary moment of media transition in relation to the several hundred year history of American education. In doing so, we avoid the breathless sense of the "unprecidented" or "Inevitable" consequences of new media and we also avoid the sense that things have always been this way and are thus not subject to change. They show how American education's processes, policies, and structures shifted over time in response to, for example, the industrial revolution and thus give us a context for imagining the gradual yet decisive transformation of schooling which will grow out of our current moment.
I was lucky enough to get Richard Halverson to agree to an interview about the book, which I will be running over the next two installments. Much of the interview focuses on the historical insights and how they contribute to putting the present into a greater perspective.
My father used to have the expression, "never let schooling get in the way of your education." You make a similar distinction across the book. In what ways is schooling getting in the way of more informal kinds of learning today and why?
Your dad's expression was really the state of the art once upon a time! The rise of institutional schooling in the 20th century- from preK to lifelong learning - can be seen as an effort to permanently weld schooling to learning. Beginning in the early 1900s, schools rooted in formal learning environments expanded to incorporate most areas informal learning as well (consider widely available classes on knitting, oenophilia and game design). On the other side, if you didn't go to a class from a recognized institution, if you didn't have some sort of certificate/credit statement of completing, then by the mid 20th century people came to question the legitimacy of your learning. This double-movement of expansion and legitimation came to define learning in terms of schooling.
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.
I recently attended an event at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston as a member of the Regional Youth Media Arts Education Consortium (RYMAEC) that gave educators using web 2.0 technologies (and beyond) the opportunity to share best practices with one another. RYMAEC's mission is to create a community of Boston area individuals, organizations, and community-based groups committed to supporting and strengthening the youth media arts field through exchanging information, resources, and youth-produced media.
The event was Pecha-Kucha style, where all but the special presenter had roughly 3-minutes to share their practice and an example of how students or teachers were using it. Kindly, after the event, which was held in the museum's theatre, the curtain was raised, revealing the glass wall which serves as the stage's back-drop, where the Boston Harbor in it's winter glory was the scenery for networking with peers, discussing best practices and partaking in drink and food.
The consortium (and event) is the initiative of Joe Douillette, a long-time advocate and youth media educator and director of the successful Fast Forward video production program for teens, also housed at the ICA, and a member of our very own NML community.
The presenters at this event consisted of RYMAEC members and peers. Below is a list of presenters and links to their content, web 2.0 tools and examples of some work that span content area and differentiated uses of technologies.
NML has recently partnered with New Hampshire's
Department of Education to facilitate a year-long
professional development initiative using the new media literacies as a springboard for developing innovative curriculum. Our goal is to help foster a broader perspective of what it means to be media literate in the digital age, and offer tools for translating the social skills and cultural competencies outlined in the white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006) into meaningful and engaging learning experiences in the classroom and beyond.
Educators are exploring the urgent challenges that
21st Century learners face by expanding their own learning experiences using a
participatory, digital model of professional develmopment. In this context, educators are able to practice
their own skills as teachers by creating, collaborating, connecting,
and circulating with one another in an interactive, multi-media
environment. Not only are they developing new materials for their own schools and
districts, but also an 8-part webinar series focused on a comprehensive,
practical understanding of the NML skills for the larger educational community.
The 8-part series will begin on February 11th and share
the framework of social skills and cultural competencies which shapes the work
of New Media Literacies, and illustrate the skills by looking more closely at
learning through such cultural phenomenon as computer game guilds, youtube
video production, Wikipedia, fan fiction, Second Life and other virtual worlds,
music remixing, social network sites, and cosplay. Each webinar will examine
closely new curricular materials which have emerged from New Media Literacies,
Global Kids, Harvard's GoodPlay Project, Common Sense Media, the George Lucas
Foundation, and other projects which are seeking to introduce these skills into
contemporary educational practices and leave participants with plenty of
opportunities to take the material, information and methods back into their
classroom.
We will host the first webinar on Thursday,
February 11, 2010 at 7pm EST and focus on the new media literacies, judgment and appropriation as well as copyright, fair use, and creative commons.
Our special guests will be Flourish Klink, a graduate student at MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, and Erin Reilly, NML Research Director.
See the full listing of upcoming webinars and get information on how to join the sessions here.
While in Cambridge for the Futures of Entertainment conference, my wife and I stopped over at the Boston Museum of Science which is currently playing host to Harry Potter: The Exhibition. We had both attended a fascinating presentation about the design and development of this exhibit during last Summer's Azkatraz convention in San Francisco and so we had high anticipations for the show and were not disappointed.
If you live anywhere near Boston, you should definitely try to make it there for the exhibit which runs through Feb. 21. The exhibit is pricy since you have to pay a fee above and beyond the price of admission to the museum itself, but we found it more than worth it.
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?
Cal IT2 University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California
**SUBMISSION DEADLINE: OCTOBER 30, 2009**
**KEYNOTES ANNOUNCED**
We
are pleased to announce the first Digital Media and Learning
Conference, an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation. The
conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual
gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on
fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking
theory, empirical study, policy, and practice.
For this inaugural
year, the theme will be "Diversifying Participation". Henry Jenkins is
the Chair of the Digital Media and Learning Conference and our Keynote
Speakers will be Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins.
We
invite submissions for session proposals that speak to the conference
theme as well as to the field of digital media and learning more
broadly. Those wishing to present work should look to propose or
participate in a panel topic (see submission process outlined below).
DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION
A
growing body of research has identified how young people's digital
media use is tied to basic social and cultural competencies needed for
full participation in contemporary society. We continue to develop an
understanding of the impact of these experiences on learning, civic
engagement, professional development, and ethical comprehension of the
digital world.
Yet research has also suggested that young
people's forms of participation with new media are incredibly diverse,
and that risks, opportunities, and competencies are spread unevenly
across the social and cultural landscape. Young people have
differential access to online experiences, practices, and tools and
this has a consequence in their developing sense of their own
identities and their place in the world. In some cases, different forms
of participation and access correspond with familiar cultural and
social divides. In other cases, however, new media have introduced
novel and unexpected kinds of social differences, subcultures, and
identities.
It is far too simple to talk about this in terms of
binaries such as "information haves and have nots" or "digital
divides". There are many different kinds of obstacles to full
participation, many different degrees of access to information,
technologies, and online communities, and many different ways of
processing those experiences. Participatory cultures surrounding
digital media are characterized by a diversity that does not track
automatically to high and low access or more or less sophisticated use.
Rather, multiple forms of expertise, connoisseurship, identity, and
practice are proliferating in online worlds, with complicated
relationships to pre-existing categories such as socioeconomic status,
gender, nationality, race, or ethnicity.
We encourage sessions
that describe, document, and critically analyze different forms of
participation and how they relate to various forms of social and
cultural capital. We are interested in accounts of the challenges and
obstacles which block or inhibit engagement to different forms of
online participation. We also encourage session proposals that engage
with successful intervention strategies and pedagogical processes
enabling once marginalized groups to more fully exploit the
opportunities for learning with digital media. Conversely, we are
interested in hearing more about how marginal and subcultural
communities find diverse uses of new and emerging technologies, pushing
them in new directions and navigating a complicated relationship with
"mainstream" forms of participation. Specifically, we seek to
understand the following:
What can research on more diverse communities contribute to our understanding of the learning ecologies surrounding new media?
What
are the technologies, practices, economic, and cultural divides that
lead to segregation, "gated" information communities, and differential
access?
When and how do diversity and differentiation in
participation promote social and cultural benefits and opportunities,
and when do they create schisms that are less equitable or productive?
What
strategies have proven successful at broadening opportunities for
participation, overcoming the many different kinds of segregation or
exclusion which impact the online world, and empowering more diverse
presences throughout cyberspace?
Are there things occurring on
the margins of the existing digital culture that might valuably be
incorporated into more mainstream practices?
In addition to
these questions directly addressing the conference theme, we welcome
submissions that address innovative new directions in research and
practice relating to digital media and participatory learning.
Hi, I'm Lieke, an NML intern from the Netherlands for two weeks. Erin asked me if I'd write a blog about my experiences so I'm doing that right now.
The week started with meeting everyone who was at NML and GAMBIT on Monday. I stayed at GAMBIT so I could play with the Learning Library to find out what everyone would be talking about on the conference on Saturday. The rest of the week I helped with putting papers into the folders, making signs to show where the workshops and restrooms would be, and listening to the presentations of the NML-team.
On Friday I was supposed to meet the other teens who would be at the conference - the Global Kids - but their bus got delayed. Instead we went to dinner with a couple of researchers from Indiana who work with NML to a little African restaurant where we had some good conversations. Most people left early because Saturday was going to be a long day.
By Matt Levinson on April 16, 2009 10:55 AM
|Permalink
Last year, when I purchased my iPhone, I braced myself for the 4-hour online tutorial to learn how to navigate the device. However, just as I was sitting down to begin the tutorial, my 8 year-old son told me not to waste my time. He could teach me in 20 minutes, he stated boldly. All he needed was a little time to "play" with the phone. Sure enough, he proved to be a better and more entertaining teacher than the online tutorial and I fast learned the basics of iPhone use. He continues to be my iPhone navigator, updating the phone, looking for "cool" apps to add and explaining the phone to me in clear, easy to understand language. Technology has flipped our roles. It used to be that parents and teachers taught children. Now, the reverse is true and the quicker we can grasp this concept, the better equipped we will all be to live in the 21st century. President Obama knows this. He has retooled government's approach to communication. Each week, he uploads his weekly address to YouTube, the White House web site invites viewer interaction and he even found a way to hold onto his BlackBerry. And, the President has enlisted a chief technology officer to rewire the government's whole technology apparatus.
Schools need to do the same. Students are fast growing disenchanted with the snail's pace of change going on in classrooms regarding teaching with technology. Thankfully, some teachers have grabbed the mantle and are taking steps to meet students where they are in the online world. One talented teacher cooked up an entire 20th century China project on Facebook. Students adopted the personalities of Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong and Chang Kai-shek and created and updated Facebook pages and profiles, replete with photos and wall postings. In the words of the teacher: "This project changed the classroom. Students were so motivated and put far more hours into their research than they would have done with a traditional project." The best part about this project was the organic way it developed in the hands of a teacher who listens to her students. As the class brainstormed the beginning stages of the unit, one of the students simply suggested that the class create Facebook pages for the three leaders and be required to chat, post and debate online. Instead of balking at this potentially outlandish idea, this teacher jumped at the opportunity. This is exactly the kind of collaborative learning that the 21st century demands, but it does mean surrendering a bit of curricular control to the students. For many teachers, letting students "run" the show poses a challenge to the traditional "sage on the stage" model, even in the most progressive of teaching environments. The time has come to turn the reins over to the students.
