Category Archives: Conferences and Community Events

Reprinted from the April 2009 Cooney Center Bits Newsletter: “Spore’s Wake: What Seriously Happened?” More than 17,000 game industry professionals gathered on March 23-27 for the largest game developers conference in the world, the San Francisco Game Developers Conference (GDC). This year, one stimulating panel asked, what would it take to make games that leave people better off than they were before playing? As children rise as one of the sector’s top priorities, we hope this important take-away keeps quality game…

Reprinted from the February 2009 Cooney Center Bits Newsletter: I had the pleasure of attending my first TED conference earlier this month in its new Long Beach, CA venue. I have watched TED talks over the years, but before founding the Cooney Center had not thought much about participating in the meeting, which seemed more about invention and technology design than education or children. Technological, Educational, Design wonders from TED’09: Elizabeth Gilbert on creative genius RWJF’s Pioneers Luncheon MIT’s Siftables —…

Reprinted from the February 2009 Cooney Center Bits Newsletter: With President Obama recently winning the fight to keep his BlackBerry, the stage was primed for 200 industry, policy, and education leaders who convened in Washington, DC to discuss the potential of mobile wireless technologies to transform children’s learning.

This post originally appeared on the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age blog.   Hi! This is Nafiza Akter, and I was one of the youth attending the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age Forum. This forum was put together, as far as my understanding goes, to look at how technology could be used and incorporated into the current educational system for the benefit of the students. The nine youth that attended, organized by Global Kids, all helped to incorporate actual youth voices…

This post originally appeared on the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age blog. Here is a pretty shocking statistic. More than 40% of teachers today are disheartened and disappointed in their jobs according to a study just released by Learning Points Associates. It is hard to be an inspirational, caring teacher if you don’t want to be there. The study showed that seven in 10 teachers cited testing as major drawback and 61 percent also cited lack of support from administrators and…

Victor V. Vuchic is Program Officer, Open Educational Resources The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation     Often when we think about innovation, we focus on lots of low cost rapid prototypes and bottoms up design driven approaches. You don’t often hear much about how policy could stoke innovation. Usually, people think of policy as stifling innovation. I actually think there are opportunities to shift policies that could significantly promote innovation. Here are a few areas of opportunity on the near…

Suzanne Seggerman President, Co-Founder, Games for Change           Games can be used for A LOT of purposes – well beyond entertainment. And as they are a young medium, they are not often envisioned beyond their current contexts; we are all still just getting used to them. Some people though have caught on early, and are using games in almost everything they do. Here’s a list I excerpted from an email I received earlier this year outlining…

  We’re excited to participate in the  Cooney  Center’s upcoming Forum. Families of all socio-economic classes are using technology in their daily lives. The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) is on a quest to crack the code on helping families—particularly families struggling with low literacy skills—use technology to further education and their well-being. Parents and children must be equally adept at using technology if we are to realize its full potential for learning. The opportunity to draw upon the nation’s brightest minds in…

David L. Cohen is the Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation This post originally appeared on the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age blog. We are strong believers in investing in stronger communities, and we’re in the midst of one of our most exciting community investment initiatives ever. Building on our partnership with One Economy, we recently launched the Comcast Digital Connectors program, an innovative initiative that teaches young people digital literacy skills and how to use broadband technologies to benefit their communities.…

This post was originally published on the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age blog. In the recent Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams we get to see what a 23rd century Vulcan school was like for young Spock. Hundreds of crater-like pods, with 360-degree projection systems, allow individual students to navigate through an encyclopedic array of topics fully described through visualizations and sound. These images, as science fiction images often do, illuminate more about our present anxieties and desires than they do about…