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.
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
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.
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!
By Jenna McWilliams on June 1, 2009 8:38 AM
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Today is the first day of my last month at Project New Media Literacies. It would be a lie for me to say that every minute of the nearly two years I've spent with this project was exciting, fun, and exhilarating; anyone who's done this kind of work knows that it's often exhausting, frustrating, and stressful.
That's because to do educational research well, you have to care, and you have to care deeply. And this means facing some difficult realities: That the institution of education is deeply flawed in some important and fundamental ways; that educational innovations are often stymied by policy issues and bureaucratic red tape; that most of the time, educational research--even at its most valuable--has a minimal impact on education as a whole.
By Matt Levinson on April 16, 2009 10:55 AM
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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.
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.
By Daniel Thomas Hickey on March 5, 2009 10:50 AM
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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.
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
By Ricardo Pitts-Wiley on November 29, 2008 11:46 PM
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The following is a copy of a letter I wrote to the editors of the newspapers on our press mailing list after Mixed Magic Theatre's trip to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC to do our production of Moby Dick: Then and Now.
Last weekend Mixed Magic Theatre loaded up three vans with a troupe of actors and a set and went to Washington, DC. We went there to perform our production of Moby Dick: Then and Now at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. As the author and director of the play and the Artistic Director of the company, I had a lot to be proud of. But greater than my contribution to this effort is the pride I felt about the energy and commitment of actors and technicians that made the journey special. Not only were they a blast to be with and around, they all had a sense of this time in history and how they were not just performers, but a part of the Mixed Magic Theatre mission to "build more literate and arts active communities." Most of the company started with the project more than two years ago and I have witnessed their growth and willingness to claim ownership of the work.
By Jenna McWilliams on October 22, 2008 1:32 PM
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Project NML has completed its first teachers' strategy guide, called Reading in a Participatory Culture, and we're field testing it at several schools. Though the curriculum itself is not quite ready for prime time--we'll most likely give the whole thing a pretty significant overhaul after we see the results of implementation--I wanted to show you just the introduction to the guide.
