New Media Literacies Blog

It's About (tiny.cc/itsabout)

It's About - tiny.cc/itsabout - and the conference artist-in-residence program.

I have been helping students, teachers develop new media literacies for 30 years- or whenever our text centric culture began to yield some of its ground to more visual and auditory forms of expression. (Stand by- smell and touch are on their way). Here is a project I thought members might like to know about.

The short story is that the Alaska Society for Technology in Education (ASTE, ISTE's Alaska affiliate) created the "conference artist-in-residence program" for its 2012 conference. I got to direct it. The idea was to involve students, conference participants and the resident artist in the production of a piece of art, in this case multimedia-based art, that was to be created during the course of the conference, and which addressed the question: what is the future of technology and education?

We used the conference as input, gathering photos, interviews, video, sounds, as well as web material. From that emerged a script and the original electronic music you hear, created by our artist-in-residence, composer Craig R Harris. The visuals came from many sources, all of which are documented.

We introduced the idea at the opening of the conference, and showed It's About at the closing, about 3 days later. In fact, there was post-production work, but it mostly involved chasing down permissions to use some of the material we adapted for this piece. But the script, narration, music and many of the visuals remained the same.

Students got to present their experience to the entire conference; it was clearly transformational for them (and all of us).

If this is something you would like to know more about, I would be happy to talk to you. Feel free to pass this on to anyone, or create an entry about it in any of your publications.

Jason
--
Dr. Jason Ohler // www.jasonOhler.com
Professor Emeritus, Educational Technology, University of Alaska

Author, Digital Community, Digital Citizen

Reflections on iKids and Kidscreen Summit 2012

Originally posted on the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Blog 

PLAY! and Other Acronyms

Our team has just finished wrapping-up our PLAY! (participatory learning and you) professional development pilot with LAUSD educators and is about to embark on making sense of the rich data we have acquired these past few months. At first glance, what teachers seem to be embracing most strongly from this experience are the practices of participation - or the 4 Cs (connecting, collaborating, creating and circulating). It seems that not only students, as we discovered in our after-school pilot last spring, but teachers find them the most accessible entry-point to the new media literacies.

At the onset of the pilot, we framed the PD as an exploration of the 5 characteristics of participatory learning that NML had begun to identify last year. This approach - to explore what the culture of the classroom requires in order to allow participatory practices in - was a divergence from the ways we had previously worked with teachers in schools. In prior collaborations we helped address learning goals for students by applying the new media literacies to traditional content, hence increasing and deepening levels of student engagement with it. An example was the Moby Dick project. The complex and often intimidating novel, was dynamically transformed into a musical performance where students remixed relevant themes and cultural references with an old text. This produced a teachers' strategy guide called Reading in a Participatory Culture (and is a forthcoming book!). We hoped other teachers would use this model and adapt it suitably for their own classrooms. But without support and collaboration, this was an undertaking most teachers argued they did not have adequate time to explore.