Category Archives: Conferences and Community Events

Last week I had the chance to head back to my home turf to attend the “Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents” conference at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania.  The conference was organized, hosted, and moderated by Dr. Amy Jordan, director of the Media and the Developing Child sector of APPC and Dr. Dan Romer, director of the APPC’s Adolescent Communication Institute.  The day featured informative and engaging presentations by some of…

This past fall, I wrote a blog post for the Cooney Center about my experiences at the annual DIY Days conference at UCLA.  In that post, I wrote [emphasis added in bold]: “Many of the people I met are deeply invested in new ways to approach the role of media in children’s learning ecologies.  I believe that various projects presented at DIY Days (including R<3S and another very special project I’ll share in a later post) have deep implications for…

On Friday, March 30, the Cooney Center-partner USC Annenberg Innovation Lab held its annual Innovation Summit. The day-long event brought together the sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent worlds of academia, private sector, non-profits, and artists to play hands-on with new prototypes and applications from the Lab. We had the pleasure of having JGCC Director of Research Lori Takeuchi join us for the event. Besides the Cooney Center, the Lab’s collaborators include IBM, DirectTV, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),…

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…

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…

On Friday, February 24th, 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…

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…

Join us at DML 2012: Extreme Makeover DML Edition: Rethinking designs for younger and older users | March 2, 2012 Attending the DML 2012 Conference next week in San Francisco? Don’t miss our panel: Extreme Makeover DML Edition: Rethinking designs for younger and older users, Friday, March 2, at 2:30 pm The Fillmore Room. Most new consumer technologies are designed for the 18- to 49-year-old set. But when a product strikes success across this market, it inevitably reaches the hands…

I just returned from Kidscreen Summit and its new digital offspring iKids, where I had the rare opportunity to participate in a platform diving competition. OK – that makes me sound way cooler than I actually am. By platform I’m referring to software on a mobile device, and by diving I’m referring to launch strategy. But entering the children’s app space can be scarier than plunging headfirst off of a 10-meter plank into a body of water, so the analogy…

In 2011, The Cooney Center formed six action teams, based on geographical location.  The teams were charged with building promising practices and scalable models of the ways that media, and particularly digital media, can promote children’s learning in environments outside of school. These teams were an integral part of the Learning From Hollywood Forum where they had the opportunity to network with industry and policy leaders across media, technology, education and philanthropy, and where each team walked away with hard…