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.
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.
By Daniel Thomas Hickey on March 10, 2009 3:30 PM
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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.
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.
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
