Researchers mingled with makers, hive learners and digital artists at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco last week.
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Filed by Sarah J.
Like many of you, we’re still digesting all we viewed, heard, read, tweeted and storified at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco last week. From John Seely Brown’s keynote to makers, hive learners, digital artists, and civil and social movements—it was a jam-packed three days.
The beauty of a conference like this is that everyone leaves with their own insights and unique stories to tell. I came away with plenty of story ideas for future coverage on Spotlight. The blogosphere and Twitter streams [#dml2012] that followed the conference proceedings are almost as rich as the conference itself. There are useful summaries and recaps posted by Steve Hargadon, Doug Belshaw, Audrey Watters, and many others. And you can watch Brown’s opening keynote in its entirety here.
I listened in on several thoughtful conversations and talks by researchers. Much of what we hear about educational reform these days is disheartening, so it was inspiring to be in a room (actually many overflowing rooms) with those who spend their days thinking deeply about new visions for education focused on technology and new forms of pedagogy. Speakers included danah boyd, Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, Mark Surman, and Mitch Resnick, just to name a few.
New tools were introduced. We were especially excited by a news aggregator—spigot.org—the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub developed. It’s a one-stop resource for research, news and opinion about digital media and learning.
At conferences like these, I am particularly drawn to panels that include the perspectives of kids and teachers. How are the researchers’ visions interpreted by students? What do teachers think?
Of course, there were not enough of these voices at DML2012; there never are at conferences. But I attended a powerful panel on “Digital Innovation and Equity in Schools,” where several groups of students, including teens from the UCLA Council of Youth Research, talked about the out-dated and often absent technology resources in their high schools in Los Angeles. There was also a powerful presentation by Katie McKay, a fourth- and fifth-grade ELL teacher from Austin, who spoke about the pressure on teachers to “stay out of the computer lab,” in order to focus on core content acquisition.
I had a good conversation with a group of practitioners and researchers working with ARIS, a mobile tool that enables users to create place-based or narrative gaming activities. These folks are working to figure out how educators can best take advantage of mobile technology, and they had great ideas about why and how mobile may help change the conversations around what students need to know and how to assess learning. We’ll have more on their efforts next month.
As finalists in the Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition, the ARIS team had been pulling some late nights working on their proposal and I’m disappointed to report they didn’t win. Thirty teams are receiving grants ranging from $25,000 to $175,000, including the Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana—they have big plans to develop a digital media program for teams of girls ages 5 to 17 to create apps in collaboration with Motorola Mobility Foundation and MentorMob.
The movement to build digital badges to assess learning was a hot topic at DML2012. A panel on Thursday was so crowded that a second group (#occupybadges on Twitter) gathered for discussion in the hallway. During the day, and after the winners were announced that night, some skeptics voiced concerns that badges encourage extrinsic motivation for learning and are a one-size-fits-all solution to educational reform. David Theo Goldberg addresses these concerns and more in his post, “Badges for Learning: Threading the Needle Between Skepticism and Evangelism,” at DMlCentral. And for even more on badges, read “The Future of Assessment, Accreditation & The Internet: Deconstructing Mozilla’s Open Badges Project.”
Stay tuned to Spotlight for more on these topics in the coming months. We’ll have follow-up stories on badges, mobile learning, and how teachers in low-income classrooms are (and are not) able to integrate digital tools.
Rumor has it plans are already in the works for #DML2013 in Chicago. See you there.
from Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/macfound/iQaL/~3/mlKiwU1IrNE/
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