Category Archives: Conferences and Community Events

Happy August! It’s Panel Picker Time — one of our favorite times of year here at the Cooney Center. Our team has spent most of the summer so far dreaming of tacos and tunes in Texas! We can’t wait to catch up with old friends and meet new colleagues next March at SXSW EDU 2025- and we’re so obsessed we might have been caught planning our proposals while on wifi-free vacations. Just kidding! (Sort of.) This time, we’re looking forward…

The Cooney Center was honored to be invited to PRIVO’s inaugural Children’s Digital Privacy Summit in Los Angeles in January. We don’t have the opportunity to connect with those in the privacy and compliance world as much as we would like, so it was extremely valuable to learn about ins and outs of the challenging environment that companies are navigating. We were glad to be able to offer an aspirational reminder to attendees of what a positive digital world for…

The Call for Applications period has closed. Please learn about our Fellows here!   The Cooney Center is excited to announce our new Well-being by Design Fellowship, supported by Pinterest. We invite applications from mid-career designers of kids’ technology and media who want to prioritize designing for well-being at early stages in the development process and are currently working on a project/product that can be workshopped throughout the fellowship period. This free program will involve interactive virtual sessions over four…

Update, Nov. 2023: We are thrilled to share that both of our proposals have been accepted!  Please check out Co-Design for a More Inclusive EdTech Ecosystem (SXSW Edu) and Cultivating Citizenship Through Digital Connections (SXSW) and join us if you’ll be in Austin! We will update with schedule information as soon as we learn more.   Suddenly it’s August again. Like us, you might be thinking about how summer has flown by while adjusting to new school schedules, or you…

The Cooney Center was thrilled to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Games for Change Festival alongside an incredible community of thoughtful people dedicated to making games and the world better. We always learn so much at the festival and make so many important connections that help us to advance our work. This year was no exception. The theme of the Cooney Center’s participation in the festival this year was designing digital play for well-being.    Why focus on well-being?…

Is it possible to create digital media experiences that will help children—and adults— thrive? And what are the tools and resources that can help make these experiences a reality? In the past few years, we’ve heard warning bells about the potential harms and risks that children might encounter online. But there’s also a growing movement that acknowledges that while we work to minimize the dangers of the very real safety and data privacy issues that must be addressed, we should…

Researchers gathered last month at the biennial Society for Research in Child Development conference in Salt Lake City to discuss the impacts of various technologies and media on children’s learning and development. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center was honored to organize a conversational roundtable inspired by the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) initiative, founded by the LEGO Group and UNICEF and supported by the LEGO Foundation. On March 24,  2023, Cooney Center Senior Director of Research Medha Tare…

Where were all the influential tech and media companies hanging out in early March? They were all at SXSW 2023— and so was the Cooney Center! We’re back from an amazing few days of hanging out in Austin with innovators who are shaping our future, and are thrilled to share some of our highlights from an incredible few days here. With two panels and a very popular LEGO Play Lounge during the conference’s Design Track, the Cooney Center, in collaboration…

On Safer Internet Day on February 7, 2023, The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop hosted a webinar with adult and youth experts to discuss issues around well-being and technology. Michelle Ciulla Lipkin (NAMLE), Elizabeth Milovidov (LEGO), and Michael Preston (Joan Ganz Cooney Center) were joined by teens representing the Headstream Accelerator and #ICanHelp.

Michael Levine, PhD, was the founding executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center from 2007-2018. We’re grateful for his leadership and vision for the first decade and beyond!   When you think back on your time at the Cooney Center and the work that we’ve done, what are some of the things that you’re proudest of? The Center turned out—partly through planning, and admittedly, through sheer serendipity—to be an incredibly timely enterprise.  Who knew when we began planning a…