Recently in speaking engagements Category

NML at the "Diversifying Participation" Conference

Almost the entire NML research lab headed west to California two weeks ago to participate in the Digital Media and Learning: "Diversifying Participation" conference; and since this is a transition year where we're spread over the US from east to west -- it was nice to get everyone together in one place.

• 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.
  

There were many sessions to choose from during the 2 days.  Mark Danger Chen has

Join us at Home, Inc.'s Media Literacy conference Oct 24th

We hope that you will join us in a couple weeks for Home, Inc.'s Media Literacy conference. It will be held here at MIT and will run from 8:00am to 4:00pm. This conference was the reason I first visited MIT and it is truly inspiring.

Project NML will be represented in two panels at the conference:

Erin and I will be presenting from 10:15 to 11:45 about NML's tools and resources and how you can use remixes in the classroom to help students become familiar with appropriation and transmedia navigation.

Jenna McWilliams, who is now a graduate student at Indiana University, will be presenting from 2:15 to 3:45 on participatory assessment and the Teachers' Strategy Guide - Reading in a Participatory Culture that we implemented in several schools last year.

We'll also be tweeting before, during, and after the conference using the #homeinc tag.

You can register here for the conference. Below are more details!

See you there!

Join us at Home, Inc.'s Media Literacy, Teaching and Learning and 21st Century Skills, October 24th at the Tang Center, MIT, from 8 AM-4:30 PM.

Click here for more information and registration.

HOME, Inc., TechFoundation and MIT's Comparative Media Studies program partner on their biennial one-day conference on Media Literacy. Prominent educators, filmmakers, public health workers and representatives from dedicated organizations will highlight programs that promote and teach 21st Century skills and new media literacies.

Keynote Presenter: Alan November, author, leader and innovator in the field.
Keynote title: Digital Nation- Education in Transition to 21st Century Learning

This Keynote presentation includes an analysis of trends in learning... independent and hands on learning that tracks projects that explore how the web and digital media is changing the way we think, work, learn and interact.

Twitter
For those of you who can't attend please follow us the day of the conference on Twitter!
Follow tweets tagged #homeinc and join the discussion!

Situating the NML skills in SCRATCH

Last July I attended to the SCRATCH@MIT conference that took place at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. People from all over the world met during three days to share their experiences as players, users, teachers, developers, researchers, and fans of this new programming language and online community created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group. It was very interesting to see how a worldwide community that usually interacts on the internet can meet in a geographical location to participate in hands-on workshops, listen to diverse presentations, and discuss about what are children and youth learning when they create and play with SCRATCH.

Before I tell you more about how the NML social skills and cultural competencies can be situated in SCRATCH, let me explain more clearly what SCRATCH is. First of all, it is a programming language made for helping children and youth create and design interactive projects and learn how to program with out having to deal with complicated syntax. Instead of writing code using many symbols and parenthesis --as you do when programming in C++, java, or python-- you can just snap and drag visual blocks in SCRATCH as if you were playing with LEGO and create projects such as games, maps and animations. Therefore, programming becomes more playful and fun with SCRATCH and allows kids and teens to think creatively and solve design problems. (The program works in Mac and Windows, is in many languages, and can be download it from: http://scratch.mit.edu/download)

Second, SCRATCH is an online community where all the members publish, remix, and share their projects, discuss and learn about their experiences in forums, and build networks of friends and collaborators. In other words, the SCRATCH online community is an "affinity space" like the ones described by James Paul Gee, in which people learn (informally) through participation. The community has grown very fast and after one year of being online has reached 149,286 registered members and nowadays displays 200,273 projects --the 15% of these projects are remixes of other ones.

As we can see, both at the community and the programming levels SCRATCH can be connected with the research and frameworks that Project NML is developing. SCRATCH is a technology of communication that is allowing children and youth to think creatively, to actively participate, communicate, and to informally learn. The presentation "Situating the NML skills in SCRATCH," (download the slides in pdf format) showed how the new social skills and cultural competencies can be learned while participating in the online community and while creating projects with the programming language. For instance, the "play" skill is learned while you build, debug, or tinker a SCRATCH project; the "appropriation" skill is learned when you remix a project that has been made by another user or when you sample images or sounds in your designs; and the "networking" skill is learned when you make friends in the online community, comment on their projects, and exchange ideas and critiques. In addition, the presentation showcased two NML learning activities that use SCRATCH as the basic tool to create a fan video (Manny Manny) and community interactive maps (Lawrence maps).

What's art got to do with it?

NML in Rotterdam

I had the opportunity to travel to the Netherlands, to make two presentations about NML at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. The festival featured a international conference on media education, called How to Stimulate Film Sense(s). The organizers, Ulrike Söbbeke and Carolien Labib were wonderful hosts, and I had a lovely time during my visit. Summaries of the talks I gave, "Exploring New Media Literacies: The Challenges and Promises of Participatory Culture" and "Parrying with Awareness: Artists in a New Media Environment" can be found here.