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By Erin Reilly on March 5, 2010 8:00 AM
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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
crowdsourced many different resources, notes and links from people
who participated. So, if you weren't able to join in person and want
to take a look under the hood, check out this link.
I'd like to highlight two sessions that I found very interesting and also relevant to NML's current research.
- Cultivating Creativity and Criticality in Schools and After-School Programs with Scratch. Not only is Scratch
a wonderful program that exemplifies the new media literacies but this
research group is pondering some of the critical questions they we too
are exploring -- including "How can we create numerous entry points for
different users while still drawing on the best of creative
practices?" And a follow up question of, "In setting up these entry
points, how do we design them so that the entire program is still open
and participatory?"
- Data Visualization for K-12 Learning.
In 2009, we added Visualization to our list of new media literacies.
We define visualization as the ability to interpret and create data
representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns,
and identifying trends. Graphical data such as maps and graphs to
newspaper statistics to scientific models have long been a part of
everyday literacy. However, we are now entering an era where new
technologies are bringing quantitative data analysis into more parts of
our daily lives. Each participant shared their different tools or
processes they use such as Global Kids Digital Portfolios to SmaLLabs emotion map diagram. NML is also exploring visualization in the design of the Learning Library
and we look forward to continued discussions with questions we were
left to think about, including: How can I make my data accessible to
other researchers using other tools?, How can we best improve
interoperability to advance the field? and How can we get meaningful
participation from designers, researchers, stakeholders and data
visualization experts?
But the most thought-provoking was given by the end keynote, Sonia Livingstone.
The two day conference provided designers, researchers, policy makers,
and practitioners to come together to share stories and experiences in
this emerging digital media and learning field. It was a warm and
inviting place to be, surrounded by colleagues all excited about the
possibilities of what we've done and what's to come. But Sonia had us
all do a reality check. She posed challenging questions for us to
think about, like "What is it we want youth to learn? Not what is it we want them to participate in?" And, reminded us that we need to see with a critical eye.
As chair of the conference, Henry Jenkins,
the critical utopian that he is, reinvigorated the conference
participants with encouragement to take on the challenges Sonia
suggested, but not let the air out of the balloon. He reminded us that
diversifying participation is crucial and that we need to invite new
voices to the conversation by choosing one person or one group removed
from the work that we do and make a real commitment to dialogue and
create together.
And to do that, I close this post with
encouraging anyone reading that we are eager to learn from you... How
are you addressing or thinking about some of the questions posted above?
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