More and more kids are involved in digital networking, to the point where mastery of this is a crucial 21st century skill. Which means more and more kids online are being exposed to cyberbullying – with, according to PEW Internet’s August 2011 Tracking Survey, 21 percent even admitting to joining in.  While younger children, our usually audience, are protected by the age guidelines of most social media platforms, tweens, teens and young adults are all at risk to be potentially affected by cyberbullying.

During SXSW, Inspire USA Foundation launched a Teen Facebook App Developer Competition – Don’t Just Stand By. This competition calls on teens 13-17 to create a Facebook app that will help inform and empower potential bystanders of cyberbullying to take action.

Cyberbullying continues to be a challenging issue for teens and young adults happening through email, chat rooms, online social networking, instant messaging and web pages.  Cyberbullying can happen to anyone, and the bully can act anonymously. People can also be bullied online by groups of people, such as classmates or members of an online community.

Through May 25, Don’t Just Stand By challenges young developers between the ages of 13-17 to help young people speak out against cyberbullying through a Facebook App.   Each entry must:
• Focus on people aged 16-24 who would be potential bystanders to cyberbullying in online spaces/communities
• Increase understanding of what cyberbullying is and the role of bystanders
• Empower young people to want to make online spaces/communities more positive and safe for everyone
• Include a specific call-to-action for potential bystanders
• Focus on the positive, do not use negative language or triggering images depicting cyberbullying, self harm or suicide that could re-traumatize victims/survivors

Don’t Just Stand By Teen Facebook App Developer Competition will award three prizes:
• First Place = $2,000 plus five hours of virtual mentorship from an adult programmer
• Second Place = $1500 and one hour of virtual mentorship from an adult programmer
• Third Place = $500 and one hour of virtual mentorship from an adult programmer

Programmers will be matched with mentors according to the type of app they develop. Inspire USA has partnered with Teens in Tech Labs, which provides tools and resources to young entrepreneurs world-wide to help encourage entrepreneurship at a young age, to help promote the competition.

For more information and rules about Reach Out’s National “Don’t Just Stand By” Teen Facebook App Developer Competition please visit http://www.reachout.com/contest.  Tweet about the contest at #dontjuststandby.

There may only be 2 days left to enter the National STEM Video Game Challenge but the STEM never stops.

The Museum of Mathematics is offering a cash prize of $25,000 through the inaugural Rosenthal Prize for Innovation in Math Teaching.  The Prize is designed to recognize and promote hands-on math teaching in the upper elementary and middle school classroom.

To learn more, visit rosenthalprize.momath.org.

A Communique on the Horizon Project’s Recent Communique.

Many of you may have heard of the annual Horizon Report, the report put out by the New Media Consortium that tracking the most important trends technology for education over the last decade. To celebrate ten years of producing what has become a vital indicator of social change,this past January the report’s organizers brought together 100 international leaders from academia and industry. Putting their heads together, these experts identified 28 megatrends that they believe will dominate the intersection of education and technology in the coming decade. Below are the top 10:

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative.
2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to.
3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network–and already is at its edges.
4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media.
5. Openness–concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information–is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world.
6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society.
7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success.
8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy.
9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training.
10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing.

As is obvious in some of their conclusions, the Horizon Retreat participants were thinking across all types of educational levels and contexts. Nevertheless, I think that there are latent implications in these ideas for families and younger kids, as well as the researchers who study them. I want to highlight a few for your consideration.

– We have already seen ample evidence of how opportunities for learning are expanding beyond traditional classrooms in all sorts of exciting ways. This simultaneous blurring of boundaries and expanding of frontiers is exciting and as it should be: all of life should offer us opportunity to discover and learn.

As researchers, we should pay greater attention to both formal and informal contexts of interaction. We may also need to expand a few definitions to best understand the multiple different types of venues and conditions that comprise informal learning spaces now and in the future. After school programs, museums, and libraries have dominated our understandings up until now, but what will it mean when the park bench, coffee shop, bus or playground is considered equally as rich a site for engagement as these other venues have always been? Not only might it be harder for me as a grey-haired ethnographer to tail along and observe but understanding the learning ecosystems that youth are beginning to engage in will require more reliance on the data of kids’ app and gadget usage. While mining this trace data is enticing to many a researcher, it poses obvious privacy problems let alone problems of appropriate interpretation. Needless to say, the cloud-based, mobile, multiplex world in which we are fast moving will be ripe for analysis–especially via number-crunching of big data sets–but will require new methods and policies to assure the same standards of ethical inquiry we’ve held to in the past.

– Another thing that jumps out at me when reading these megatrends is the word ‘network’. I consider this especially relevant when paired with the word ‘literacy.’ It is true that we are part of an ever expanding “global, mobile network”–one dependent on utility infrastructures in ways that we are not even aware of. Steeped within this web as we are, it’s important that we understand how to function with it. I believe that this is a vital aspect of ‘digital literacy’ and should be included as part of the educational assessments that are currently being developed by educational policymakers. What does it mean to be part of a network? I contend that it means one should understand how networks are structured, what a position in a network signifies, how ties are built and broken, and finally how networks, particularly at the regional level, interlink to create access points to new information, new people, and new ideas. Sociologists have long studied networks and their dynamics, but moving forward navigating these should become basic skills for 21st century children (as well as their parents).

– ‘Openness’ as a megatrend is fantastic and is taking hold in all sorts of ways, especially in the governmental sector. This trend is vital moving forward, but it presupposes the ability to be a creator or producer in the first place, or in other words having data of some sort to share openly. There is a three-pronged consideration buried in this assumption that is worth explicating a bit. First, openness means that people need to have access to the tools and infrastructures that will allow them to join the global networked conversation. While the digital divide is shrinking in many ways (as traditionally defined by having access to technology), it is far from a basic right or practice around the world and even in our own country. Researchers need to continue to understand the trends here and report them widely so that efforts toward equitable access can be supported. Second, it suggests that in sharing openly, we also have the power to control our creations at some level. We need to continue to legitimize the use of licensing schemes like those set up by Creative Commons to make this social contract between openness and agency a reality. And finally, we need to be open to new ways of being creative producers. The great thing about the dynamic, collaborative network of which we are now a part, as well as the expanded, technological ecosystem in which we can now participate, is the opportunity to discover, produce and share new creations quickly and easily. The fact that these creations may not always fit our existing categories is a worthy moment for open reflection regarding how these new practices and productions might be exciting indicators of adjustment to the world identified by the ten megatrends.

At the risk of pontificating any further, let me just reiterate that researchers have much to attend to in the global, mobile, cloud-based, open and dynamic world of the near future. Rather than fear these changes or limit our reflection with overly narrow interpretations, let’s herald the approaching future of unbounded learning with a ethnographer’s eye–what do we see and how do we make sense of it? Always an exciting place to be.

The title for this post is borrowed from Antero Garcia, doctoral candidate in Urban Schooling at UCLA and chair of the Innovations for Public Education conference track at DML 2102. At DML, Antero presented a stellar talk entitled, “This Ain’t Montessori: Mobile Participation in South Central High School” in a panel on issues around inclusion in online and offline learning environments.

I was instantly intrigued by the “ain’t Montessori” line, and learned that it was a reaction to the opening keynote speech by the sage John Seely Brown, whom both Antero and I respect immensely. (JSB is the former Chief Scientist at Xerox PARC and, full disclosure, current Chairman of the Advisory Board of the lab I’m affiliated with – the Cooney Center-partnered USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.)

Having been stuck in the airport Thursday morning, I unfortunately missed JSB’s keynote. But luckily for all of us, it’s available here. To summarize, JSB discusses how the philosophies of Maria Montessori and modern Montessori education (note: not necessarily the same thing) might be scaled to challenge the current dominant social practices and institutional structures around learning, digital media, and technology in grade level or high school level education.

Antero’s “ain’t Montessori” line was meant to problematize JSB’s (as-presented) rather romantic notions around Montessori education, and point to how a “Silicon Valley”-inspired model of Montessori education is not necessarily globally or culturally appropriate. Taking Antero’s lead, I’d like to use this space to problematize not just JSB’s presentation of the role of Montessori in universally “cultivating the entrepreneurial learner,” but also to specifically call attention to the absence of early childhood educators and scholars in the DML space, and why it should matter to all of us.

JSB argued that through the lens of Montessori’s philosophy, today’s digital technologies hold unparalleled possibilities as “curiosity amplifiers.” Montessori teaching values tacit learning, or the development of key practices, habits, and “know-how” that can only be learned through personal experimentation. However true, Montessori is NOT the only model of early childhood education that values embodied play and learning. While the guys at Google might have grown up and thrived going to schools inspired by the pre-WWII teachings of Maria Montessori, how about inviting to the metaphorical sandbox another Italian pioneer of early childhood education, Loris Malaguzzi of the post-WWII Reggio Emilia movement? I’ve argued in a recent article in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy that there’s much the DML community can learn from Reggio Emilia-inspired practices, too.f It is unfair to reduce early childhood education solely to Montessori when other models might in some ways be a better philosophical fit for framing certain discussions in the DML space.

Let’s avoid stagnation purely based on sagacity. While I applaud JSB for taking early childhood education seriously, I don’t want his thesis to go unquestioned the DML audience, who may or may not have a deep understanding of theories and research in early childhood education. I don’t buy that Montessori-inspired pedagogy alone is the magic answer for fostering new processes and connections around education reform. I do believe that bringing a plurality of voices, representing a wide range of early childhood education philosophies and professionals gets us somewhere closer. I take issue with reductively and symbolically talking about preschool when it becomes talking for the diverse players in the preschool world who can speak for themselves (about Montessori and much more) if given the stage.

The Cooney Center is at the forefront of mobilizing scholarship, policy, and practice in the area of digital media and learning. As part of the Center’s Bridging Learning initiative at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, we are exploring the ways that early childhood and elementary school-age children learn across their media ecosystem. Key to that initiative is recognizing that the opportunities to participate in this cultural convergence start before children begin kindergarten. Appropriating Pre-K philosophies for K-16 education reform might isolate Pre-K teachers, students, and parents from the kinds of rich and interesting conversations had annually at DML.

Now, who wants in on my DML 2013 panel submission on the “ABCs of DML”?

My second day at DML focused on the “Extreme Makeover – DML Edition” panel.  Like the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition television program, the presentations focused on re-thinking and re-making design to fit the needs of younger and older users – but without Ty Pennington.  Despite the fact that digital media are pervasive in all of our lives, from infants to the elderly, the majority of available media has been designed with the needs and abilities of 15- to 55-year-old users in mind.
Our own JGCC Research Director, Lori Takeuchi, moderated the session and began by emphasizing the need to suspend assumptions, from a research and a design standpoint that media users are between 15 and 55 years of age.  She invited four panelists whose work focuses on the ways in which young children or older adults interact with technology and content and how that technology and content may be better designed to suit these varying audience needs:

Jeff Makowka, Senior Strategic Advisor in the Thought Leadership Group at AARP
Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research and the Co-Director of the Future of Information Alliance
Cynthia Chiong, Director of Research for Sirius Thinking, Ltd.
Rafael “Tico” Ballagas, Principal Research Scientist and Designer in the IDEA Team at Nokia Research Center

For me, three prominent ideas emerged from their presentations and the following group discussion.  Ideally, these principles may help yield more user-friendly digital media experiences for the young and the old – facilitating greater enjoyment and learning from interactions with media technology and content.

 (1) It is often not enough to change the design of discrete devices—we must consider the usability of the entire digital ecosystem.  AARP’s Jeff Makowka described AARP’s “Design For All” campaign.  The campaign, which invests in products and services that “enhance the quality of life for all as we age” (AARP’s mission), is meant to inspire designers to create things that can be used by as many people as possible.  As an example of a highly useable device (regardless of user age), Makowka praised the new LG “wand.”  Much like a Wii controller, this television remote communicates gross motor waving motions onto the screen, with very little reliance on buttons (which are difficult for many older adults to see and effectively manipulate).  The broader television ecosystem in a typical home, however, makes this user-friendly wand obsolete.  For example, those with a cable box or TiVo would have to use a completely different remote to use their television, and a DVD-player or game system would require a third remote (none of which use the wand technology or are easily synchronized together).  Thus, true improvements in the digital media experience for seniors (as well as children) will be achieved only when entire digital ecosystems are designed holistically, with the audiences’ needs and conveniences in mind.

(2)  We must spend time carefully observing children and older adults using digital media in order to determine what the particular challenges are and how design improvements may alleviate those challenges.  Harkening back to a prominent theme from Thursday’s events, several panelists described studies in which they acquired rich and useful information only through direct observation of children’s digital media use in action.  The University of Maryland’s Allison Druin described a study in which she and colleagues observed 7- to 17-year-olds conducting Google searches.  They found drastic differences between the styles and success-rates of younger searchers (7 – 11) and older searchers (14 – 17).  Further, Druin and team found that common models of search behavior did not map onto the searches of younger children.  Youngsters were often bound by limited, frustrating and unsuccessful search techniques, such as an over-reliance on visual searches (for example, watching Youtube videos of dolphins to try to find out what they eat instead of entering keywords), or “rule-bound” searching whereby children adhere to a particular method that isn’t always appropriate to a situation (such as always visiting only Wikipedia).  As a result, they quit before acquiring the information they set out to find.  Druin and her colleagues took the information gleaned from these observations and, consulting children as advisors, worked with Google to translate this research into actual changes to the Google search engine (such as personalized results based on kids’ prior searching and suggested related pages based on similar searches by others).

Similarly, Cynthia Chiong, Director of Research at Sirius Thinking, described how observing children directly impacted several studies.  In a study of the benefits of supplemental materials for the Between the Lions (BTL) television program, she found that 3- to 8-year-old children with high pre-test scores on literacy assessments exhibited significant learning gains from using BTL digital materials in addition to print books based on the show.  Conversely, children with lower literacy scores at the start of the study did not benefit from the digital materials when they used the material alone, though the print books did boost their learning.  In a second study conducted with the Cooney Center, she assessed preschool children’s comprehension and parents’ and children’s interactions while co-reading print books and e-books on iPads.  While children seemed to understand the stories regardless of platform, she has found differences in the amount of detail they remember and varying patterns within parent-child-book interactions based on the platform and features of the books.  From these two studies, Chiong concluded that we must consider the child, the parent, and the media when we design for children.  Often, young children glean the most from digital media when their use is actively scaffolded by a parent or caregiver jointly engaged in the experience; thus, we must consider how to design media such that their scaffolding is facilitated and encouraged.

(3) Grandparents and young grandchildren both have the time and desire to connect to each other, yet current communications tools hinder optimal remote interaction between these family members.  Nokia Research Center’s Rafael “Tico” Ballagas has been building and studying new designs for long-distance family member communication.  Preliminary field research conducted by his team within families’ homes indicated that telephone conversations, still the dominant means for long-distance communication, were difficult for children under the age of 7.  Ballagas pointed out that young children often communicate physically, through hand gestures or kissing the phone, which does not translate over the telephone.  Young children have not yet mastered the full scope of basic communication such as giving long verbal responses to questions or asking questions of the other party.  Skype, while gaining popularity for long distance communication, does enable communication through physical gestures (what Grandma doesn’t love to see her toddler grandchild send her a kiss through the screen?).  However, effective communication through Skype and other video platforms is still limited by children’s difficulty with verbal communication, as well as older adults’ difficulty navigating the complex technical demands of this technology.  As a solution, Ballagas and his colleagues at Nokia (in partnership with the Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop) have been developing video conferencing tools that use children’s books as a tool for structuring remote interaction.  In Storyvisit, the pages of a children’s e-book are synchronized on the screens of the child and the grandparent, and the beloved Muppet Elmo helps to structure the conversation by asking questions along the way and providing tips for the grandparent.  The team has also been working to reduce the technical demands for both parties by incorporating a user-friendly interface.  Already they have found that Storyvisit has significantly increased the length of time that grandparents and preschool-age grandchildren spend conversing together with 12 minutes for Storyvisit averaging 12 minutes of interaction vs 1-2 minutes for phone and 2-3 minutes for skype.

The “Extreme Makeover: DML Edition” presentations were insightful and thought-provoking, and prompted a very interactive Q & A discussion between audience members and panel members.  Some comments from the audience referred to other segments of the population to consider in digital media design as well, such as those with physical or cognitive disabilities.  These considerations were particularly timely for me, as my next post will feature the use of iPad’s to teach children with disabilities – so stay tuned!

When people ask me what I write about, my answer is that I discuss the positive potential of new and emerging forms of media. I fundamentally believe that media has the potential to play a positive role in children’s lives, am obsessed with Sesame Street, and feel honored to work for an organization that is named after a woman who believed that television could make a difference in the lives of children. I tend to stay away from writing about issues like violence, privacy and safety – not because they aren’t important, but because I’m not an expert and quite honestly I tend to agree with Dan Donahoo that the attention these issues get is excessive. But over the past 6 months, there has been a firestorm of headlines surrounding recent press released about kids, privacy and apps: FTC Testifies on Protecting Children in a Fast-Changing Marketplace! New Report Raises Privacy Questions About Mobile Applications for Children!!, and most recently Parent App Developers Announce New Privacy Disclosures for Users!!!

So while I don’t normally touch on these types of issues, considering I just released a report about the growth and potential of educational Apps for kids, I figured I should acknowledge what’s going on. So here’s the story. The government organization (the Federal Trade Comission, or FTC) that enforces the eminent rules surrounding children’s online privacy in the US (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA) is undergoing proposed revisions to the act. This is a very good thing! These are the first significant changes to COPPA since its rules were issued in 2000 when things like social networking and mobile apps weren’t even part of our vernacular. Again, a very good thing! So where does the media-storm stem from?

As part of its revision process, the FTC has been taking a series of steps including seeking public comment on its proposed amendments, hosting workshops to gain input from interested parties, and releasing reports to inform both consumers and the FTC’s work. Last week they released the first of these reports, which delves into the hot topic of children’s apps, probing the quality of information available to parents when downloading apps for their kids. The report found that most apps don’t provide the information parents need to determine what data is being collected from their children, how it is being shared, or who will have access to it. While the FTC acknowledges that mobile apps offer considerable opportunities, it expresses concern over the lack of information available to parents prior to downloading mobile apps for their children, and calls on industry to provide greater transparency about their data practices.

I’ve been an advocate of the need for policy work in this space for some time. That being said, it’s a dicey issue, as such policies can hinder creative development and interfere with natural market forces. Considering I’m not a developer myself, I’m not intimately familiar with the potential impact of such policies on developers, so I reached out to a few of my favorite App developers – ones who I know have children’s best interests as their utmost priority, but are also looking to build sustainable businesses. I was pleased to see that they were also excited about the work the FTC is doing:

“Duck Duck Moose believes in the paramount importance of children’s privacy, and believes that a formal policy by the FTC could help parents make more informed decisions when purchasing apps. As parents of young children ourselves, we have taken an extremely conservative approach, and have gone well beyond any legal requirements, to ensure the privacy of children in our apps. We do not collect any information or include any ads, tracking, or integration with third-party software as detailed in our Privacy Policy. By doing so, we can guarantee 100% to parents that no data is being collected from our apps. In taking this approach, we have had to make business sacrifices such as foregoing valuable analytics data about usage of our apps.”
-Caroline Hu Flexer, Duck Duck Moose

“The crew here at Launchpad Toys Galactic Headquarters is excited to see the FTC working towards more sophisticated and nuanced guidelines for personal information data collection in apps. As our Toontastic users can attest, we’re in full support of transparency to the parent – in this day and age of GPS chips, cameras, microphones, and online sharing networks, it’s incumbent upon all developers to make it easy for parents to decide what their kids should or shouldn’t be posting online. Like any website, sophisticated apps need to phone-home to provide generic analytics to the developer, providing us the dashboard necessary to adapt and improve our products. High-fives to the FTC for drawing a distinction between this and “personal information” and pushing to open up communication lines between parent and developer. We’re really excited about all the incredible storytelling taking place in Toontastic and being shared on ToonTube and we’re quite happy to see the FTC working to ensure that other developers are upholding the same standards for safety and parent communication that we’ve built into our global storytelling network for kids.”
-Andy Russell, LaunchPad Toys

It was great to see these developers who respectively represent best-in-class products for both preschool and elementary aged children responding positively. It’s also important to note that both mention the value of anonymous analytics in product development.

I hope this blog helps provide some high-level insight. I’ll end with a personal plea to the relevant parties:

• – For parents: Do not panic! There hasn’t been any major breach of children’s privacy that we know about – this is simply a case of policy responding to an evolving market. While legitimate issues are being raised, it is important to continue to support quality content and equally important to not write off an app solely because it is collecting data. In many instances, data collection is completely anonymous and is being used to improve the product and provide better experiences for your children. That being said, the FTC report raises an important fact, which is that it is currently difficult to tell what kind of data is being collected and for what purposes it is being used. Until the policies are in place, the onus is on you to try and understand this important issue.
• – For the FTC: Keep working with developers in the finalization of the proposed regulation. On the heels of the recent efforts to revise COPPA, the leading provider of app analytics (Flurry) disallowed its services to be used by developers of children’s apps, who rely heavily on such analytics to improve their products. Continue dialogue to ensure a balanced approach that puts children’s interests first but which does not unintentionally confine high quality and “family friendly” developers.
• -To developers: Be transparent and keep lines of communication open. This process gives you the chance to stay ahead of regulators and a concerned public by ensuring your apps and corresponding marketing materials are in full disclosure.
• – And last but not least, a call to the marketplaces: In my opinion, if there is one relevant party who is currently not bearing their weight on this issue it is the marketplaces. As gatekeepers to the content, the App stores have a huge impact on helping parents (and developers) navigate this jungle, and should take leadership in ensuring that parents have the basic information they need to make informed decisions for their children.

In the long term, Apps will be both better for kids and better for business if we have good policies from the get-go. Perhaps by protecting the kids, we are simultaneously protecting the medium.

On Friday, February 24^th, the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University hosted the Teaching with Technology Conference to promote conversations around how technology is currently being used in learning environments and how the field of education can develop the best possible relationship with technology across various disciplines and settings. Many issues central to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s mission and areas of focus were brought up in discussions of the day – particularly the notion of fostering evolving “new literacies” that children need to compete and cooperate in the interconnected, global world of the 21st century.

One key question of the conference was how to bridge learning experiences in global learning and collaborations across cultures. Christopher Hoadley highlighted the importance of engagement in designing such learning experiences, reminding those in the audience to be sensitive to different cultural opportunities and constraints for different learners, and to conceptualize people’s use of technology as part of a whole ecosystem. Diana Taylor of the Hemispheric Institute presented an overview of the organization’s digital library, which ties together different culture groups in the Americas, with translations of content into multiple languages. Additionally, courses being offered at the New York City campus of NYU are beginning to take a global classroom approach in their design, planning learning activities with the express purpose of increasing inter-cultural communications across global campuses (in locations like Abu Dhabi and Shanghai) and broadening student perspectives.

Considering the hodgepodge of academic fields represented with speakers in backgrounds as varied as Journalism, Computer Science, International Education, Business, Gaming and Public Service, the magic word of the day was most definitely collaboration. Members of the educational community are increasingly concerned with how information can be best shared, how individuals might work together over distances and across cultures and mediums, and how experts in their respective disciplines might effectively come together to inform the design of educational technologies. As the keynote speaker Clay Shirky pointed out, we are now living in a networked age.  However, in the online space, our society is currently in a situation where “we spend more money preventing people from getting to information than we do sharing it.” Teachers and researchers are going to need to be “massively collaborative” in their actions and mindsets in order to be successful. Those speaking at the conference offered many ideas and opportunities for advancing collaborative practices.  

An approach for promoting stronger bonds across learning experiences might focus on the cultural and personal preferences of the learners themselves, like work being done in gaming technology by Jan Plass and colleagues at the Games for Learning Institute (G4Li). Dr. Plass provided several examples of a how games for learning are currently being used in classrooms to encourage student collaboration and motivation in areas like math and science. The design of technology is an essential part of collaborative experiences as well, as Ken Perlin demonstrated with a new program for viewing e-books. The user experience centers around the idea of many readers collaborating over an authors work, in a format where examining books can be approached more like a searchable wiki.

David Schachter from the Wagner School of Public Service summed up the day’s discussion rather eloquently by applying the political scientist Robert Putnam’s notion of “bonding and bridging” to the future of education. The terms typically refer to social capital and networking in traditional business settings, however it became clear throughout the day, as a variety of perspectives and interests in teaching and learning were presented, that these same terms will be essential in teaching with technology as we head into the 21^st Century. How can we use technology effectively to “bond” and “bridge” people and learning experiences?

There are many questions that arise when thinking about how to use technology effectively to create meaningful and successful learning experiences, but if the collaborative effort of the Teaching with Technology conference is any indication, there are a lot of great answers out there. 

Intrepid Research Fellow, Sarah Vaala, is attending her first Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco. In between convening, attending and conferencing, she is going to be blogging for the Cooney Center about what’s happening at the conference and what the big ideas of each day were.

Greetings from San Francisco! From keynote speakers, to panels, to “ignite” talks, to the evening’s science fair – there was a lot of ground covered among digital media enthusiasts today. The best way to approach my “daily dispatch,” I decided, was to mention and describe a few of the buzzwords and phrases from the events I attended:

Entrepreneurial Learning. The morning began with a keynote address from John Seely Brown (University of Southern California; Deloitte Center for the Edge) entitled “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century.” An entrepreneur, he contended, is someone who is constantly looking around at their environment for new and innovative ideas and puting those ideas into practice. In the context of education, then, entrepreneurship should take two forms.

1. Students should be encouraged and enabled to learn through an interest-driven process of ‘thinking’ and ‘making.’ Entrepreneurial learning is the point at which thinking (about ideas and interests) and making (context and things) meet. As examples he pointed to wikis, fan fiction sites, blogs, and online game discussion boards that allow kids to practice writing skills, knowledge production, and knowledge dissemination while making their own content in an inherently motivating way.
2. Practitioners and educational policy-makers must become entrepreneurs as well, by scaling up the innovative ideas and practices that enable students’ learning in the 21st century. Kids are engaging in very profound learning experiences outside the classroom through production and remixing of digital media. Institutional learning needs to begin to incorporate those experiences inside its formal institutions as well. If the typical 20th century learning institution was a steamship plodding along at a consistent speed on a set course, explained Brown; then the optimal learning institution of the 21st century should be a white water raft moving quickly with the ability and agility to traverse whatever direction or waves the immediate environment dictates.

If entrepreneurial learning is the goal, then the next two buzzwords can be considered means for achieving that goal.

Tinkering. In a quotation that particularly stuck with me from the day’s events, Gever Tully, of Brightworks and the Tinkering School, re-defined tinkering as “the moment between when you think you are done and when it actually works.” In his panel discussion, Tully described his experiences running Tinkering School sleep-away camps where 8 – to 17-year-old campers dreamt up things they wanted to build and worked together and with adult facilitators to build their ideas (think rope bridges made of recycled plastic bags and go-carts operated by rowing – too bad the age limit is 17!). Along the way to the finished product came frustration, tinkering, testing, more tinkering, and durable educational lessons inextricably embedded in memories of fun and senses of real accomplishment and creation.

Super Awesome Sylvia (who, at 10 years old is certainly the youngest conference panelist I have ever seen!) further illustrated the teaching power of tinkering. Her web-based show, “Sylvia’s Super Awesome Maker Show” consists of (super fun) tutorials on how to make things like “squishy circuits,” lava lamps, and monochronic clocks. She and her assistant Dad (aka “TechNinja”) explained that their typical episode trajectory progresses through the stages of (1) having a super awesome idea for a project, (2) trying to figure out how to make that project with little to no prior background knowledge, (3) failing, (4) figuring out a new way to approach the project, and (5) repeating steps 2 – 4 until the project works. With an estimated 20,000 subscribers to the Maker Show, Sylvia and TechNinja are not just learning on their own through their tinkering, but also inspiring untold amounts of tinkering-based learning among other families as well.

Play. This final buzzword was perhaps the most ubiquitous throughout the day’s presentations and intersects with many of the other themes of the conference. John Seely Brown described play in his keynote address as “permission to fail, fail, and fail again and then get it right.” It’s the intrinsic drive to play that prompts us to tinker and try out new ideas. It’s the drive to play that leads us to keep tinkering and trying out new ideas when our first solutions don’t work. It’s impossible to watch a webisode of “Sylvia’s Super Awesome Maker Show,” for example, and not see playing, learning, and teaching all occurring simultaneously as the duo brings the imaginary into reality. And while play can lead to the acquisition of “academic” knowledge like the science needed to design a circuit or the math necessary to build a real life go-cart from a scale model, it can improve social skills and self-confidence as well. In one panel, Laurel Felt  of USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism described how LA high school students boosted their self-confidence and communication skills through an afterschool improv class. “Laughter for a cause”, she claimed, gave kids the space they needed to look silly, goof around, fail, and have fun. The students essentially were given permission to play, free of peer pressure, societal expectations, and academic assessment, all while building trust with each other and co-learning the basics of improv comedy.

What is more, not only do kids learn from play, but we can learn from their play as well. A number of panelists described the value they culled from incorporating students’ play into formative stages of their research and design processes. For example, Elizabeth Swenson and her colleagues from the USC Game Innovation Lab ran “junior design camps” with middle school and high school students in order to design a Facebook-based game for preparing high school students to apply to college. During the camps, middle and high school students from a range of backgrounds spent a month designing their own card games and playing the games together. The insights gleaned from watching them build and play their own games led the researchers to build “Mission: Admission,” which will be deployed this Spring to help break down the digital divide with regards to applying to college. Similarly, panelist Jessica Klein the Design and Learning Lead of Mozilla’s Hackasaurus described how “Hackasaurus” grew out of “hack jams” with teens who were given very basic instruction in how to remix the web. Through watching these students play around, Jessica and colleagues designed the Hacksaurus curriculum, complete with “web X-ray goggles.” Free, and promoted through youth ambassadors worldwide, the curriculum enables youth on a broader scale to learn about web programming, take risks with technology, and have fun.

These were just a few musings on the day’s events, but you can find out more detailed information about and reactions to the DML presentations by checking out the tweets of conference participants at #DML2012. (My favorites are the ones about zombies).

A brief message from our friends at Reading Rockets and AdLit.org who are working with the Library of Congress and the Ad Council to help support the Explore New Worlds. Read.

It has been 100 years since Edgar Rice Burroughs first introduced readers to Tarzan and “John Carter” — a hero whose Martian adventure hits the big screen this month in the new Disney film of the same name. Give K-12 readers the chance to learn more about Edgar Rice Burroughs and have a writing adventure of their own with the thought-provoking prompts in the Writer’s Quest writing contest from Reading Rockets. The contest begins on March 9 and ends May 4, 2012. Prizes include a collection of books, “John Carter” titles, T-shirts and movie posters.

Burroughs’ first John Carter novel A Princess of Mars is available to read online at Read.gov.