Daily Archives

4 March 2011

DML Conference Day Two

General Entertainment, Work by
  • Comments Off on DML Conference Day Two

The first full day of conferencing at DML 2011 kicked off today in Long Beach and it certainly gave off a much more organized air than yesterday’s upside down workshop and keynote affair. I began my day in the Novel Content track with a panel discussion of the ways in which new modes of learning are being explored at several different levels from K-12 in suburban Wisconsin to textbook publishing to higher education.  Ideas of literacy were the primary focus, chiefly the concept of integrating “knowledgeable others” into the roster of accepted classroom information sources. Of particular interest to ETS was a staggering bit of information from the K-12 realm where a new game design course garnered enough buy-in from 9th through 12th graders to merit a full eight sections during its first year.  The EGC will certainly have a large pool of interested students in the coming years if this is a national trend.

Next was a panel on living a Networked Public Life curated by danah boyd.  I was probably the most starstruck at this session and for good reason.  danah brought together researchers who were discovering ideas of persona, celebrity, access and agency from diverse groups like Bay area tech professionals, Appalachian Queer youth, Australian aborigines and Indian mobile phone users.  My big take away from this session actually came from the work of Mary Gray with LGBT young people in rural environments, though peripherally.  I realized that there were lessons to be learned that are directly applicable to how I – and the Media Commons – interfaces with rural campuses in western PA.  Specifically, how we approach and assume values imposed by urban-oriented media and media creation.  Having myself grown up in a very rural place, I do know that it’s highly important to many of these communities to be identified as local and to be part of the familiar as opposed to be an outsider or anonymous.  It will certainly be a point to remember going forward with building MC communities at our less city-centric locations.

The day rounded out with a session on Emerging Platforms that covered the OLPC efforts in the West Bank, Twitter use in Philadelphia area elementary schools, inner city learning initiatives in San Francisco and New York and research from ETS’s own Heather Hughes.  Later, I made my way to the plenary panel which prompted a feisty backchannel discussion about pop culture in education, privilege in creating learning ecosystems and licensing for music from Requiem for a Dream.

If you are starting to gather that DML is a really varied (and vaguely disjointed) conference, you are headed in the right direction with your assessment.  

DML Conference Day One: Day in Reverse

General Entertainment, Work by
  • Comments Off on DML Conference Day One: Day in Reverse

At least that’s how I’d term this first day of the Digital Media & Learning Conference in Long Beach.  After traveling for what felt like an eternity yesterday, today’s laid back pace was welcome – at least at first.  Registration started at 8:00 am on the second floor here at the Hilton with workshops following at 9:00.  Each session was paired with four others, making choosing a track somewhat difficult, as many interesting title ran concurrently.  This promoted quite a bit of room-hopping which did make the conversations between participants a bit difficult, as it seemed like quite a few attendees were plotting their escape midway through each two hour block.  

My morning session on “Designing for Designers” was a good cross section of the participant backgrounds in attendance, though.  In just my circle were two grad students studying social media and youth culture, a project manager from Google, a curriculum developer for a K-12 initiative, an media space coordinator from Singapore and a LA-based social advocacy programming producer.  I learned a lot about how each of these different people thought of the questions we were asked, which included such topics as “how to negotiate designer vs. content creator rights in communities.”  While I looked at this from a physical space perspective (Media Commons installations), the K-12 developer saw it as it related to the classroom, the Google employee saw it as online products and services, the woman from Singapore saw it as how interactive exhibits were developed, etc.  And our session organizers from MIT’s Scratch project saw it as something entirely different, making providing an answer a bit of a challenge.

The conversations held between sessions with fellow attendees made up for the awkward workshops, though and the delightful keynote from Alice Taylor – former gaming content coordinator for Channel 4 – really made the day worthwhile.  In fact, the entire welcome session this evening really connected the dots on how the day was conceived and made sense of the disparate tracks and presenters in each workshop.  I hate to be traditional about it because I know what the conference organizers were going for by structuring the day as freeform as it was, but I would almost have preferred the day’s last formal session to be its first.  In talking with other participants, I am not alone in this sentiment.

Oh well – onward into the first day of official lecture sessions tomorrow.  If they are a fraction as compelling as Alice’s, I’m going to be pleased this time tomorrow.