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Boston Area Educator Share Practices Using Web 2.0

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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.

New Media Literacies Announces a Monthly Webinar Series

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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.

Harry Potter: The Exhibition, or what Location Entertainment Adds to a Transmedia Franchise

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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.


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?

Call for Session Proposals - 1st Annual Digital Media and Learning Conference: "DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION"

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February 18 - 20, 2010

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.

Interning at NML

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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.

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Schools and Facebook: Moving Too Fast or Not Fast Enough?

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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. 

If it Doesn't Spread, It's Current Educational Practice (Part Two): Distributed Instructional Routines vs. Spreadable Educational Practices

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This is the second in a series of posts examining the educational implications of an eight-part series called If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead, a white paper written for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) by Henry Jenkins and colleagues (Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf, and Joshua Green). These posts are written by Dan Hickey, Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Indiana University; Michelle Honeyford, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Culture, Literacy, and Language Education; and Jenna McWilliams, a writer and curriculum developer at Project New Media Literacies.

In this post, we use the contrasting models of "sticky" and "spreadable" media practices to consider two different approaches to developing, promoting, and disseminating curricular materials in educational environments. Specifically, we liken corporate efforts to create sticky websites and viral messages to the experimental validation and centralized dissemination of what we call disseminated instructional routines (DIRs). Just as most efforts to create "sticky" media environments have failed to capture and retain consumers, we argued that most centralized efforts to reform education have similarly failed at their stated goal of increasing gains on targeted tests, or improving education more broadly. Rather, DIR-focused efforts have actually created barriers to creating and sharing of more worthwhile approaches, which we are calling spreadable educational practices (SEPs). We believe that such an approach can better support wholesale improvement of educational practice, while also delivering measurable and consistent gains on standardized achievement tests.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Current Educational Practice

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This is the first entry in a planned series of blogposts taking up media scholar Henry Jenkins' notion of spreadability and considering the application of this idea to educational practices. The posts are co-written by Daniel T. Hickey, Michelle Honeyford, and Jenna McWilliams.

In his blog Confessions of an Aca/Fan (as in Academic/Fan) media scholar Henry Jenkins has serially posted eight chapters from a white paper entitled If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Jenkins, Li, Krauskopf, & Green, 2009). The paper rejects prevailing notions of viral media, memes, and stickiness for ignoring key aspects of the participatory culture in which ideas spread among individuals and become part of contemporary cultural knowledge. The authors then introduce the notion of spreadability as a more useful and productive way of thinking about these phenomena.

It already happened; nobody noticed: A new blog about culture, education, new media, and crocheting

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I recently wrote about blogging as a technology that can be leveraged for engaging in participatory practices. That got me wondering: Why haven't I put my money where my mouth is? Why haven't I started my own blog?

Well, now I have. And I'm linking to my most recent post, which begins as follows:

This is one of my favorite quotes in the universe:

"There won't be schools in the future.... I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum-- all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible with the presence of the computer... But this will happen only in communities of children who have access to computers on a sufficient scale."--Seymour Papert
My deep, deep sense is that Papert is right. In all significant ways, computers have exploded...(click here to link to the full post, "It already happened; nobody noticed")