Tag Archives: sesame workshop

This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post.   On Tuesday, June 7, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop will present a report at the E 3 Expo in Los Angeles that may surprise media designers and cause policymakers to step back from their current concerns about kids’ digital multitasking addiction, cyber-bullying, violent videogames, and mobile disruptions in school. While much of the public discussion about digital media is concentrated on how little influence parents have in shaping…

This post was written for the Learning at Hollywood Forum that took place at USC in May 2011.   My hope for this forum is that it helps realize, in some concrete way, the vision of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. At this moment in time — the birth of the digital era — it is important to have the industry find a way to seize the unprecedented opportunity to entertain, educate, and make a sustainable profit through new media…

Today, The Electric Company will re-launch its third season with an all new transmedia story, “The Adventures of The Electric Company on Prankster Planet.”  Airing in a new segment at the end of the TV series and a new area of the website, this transmedia story engages and immerses participants in an experience through multiple forms of media, each element making a unique contribution to the story. Here, key members of the interdisciplinary team behind this new transmedia effort share…

This May, a group of leaders from the creative media industries, education, research, policy, and philanthropy will come together at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Leadership Forum, where we will spend two days considering innovative ways to support young people’s learning with and through media.    Entertainment is often considered the antithesis of education. Children go to school and learn; then they come home and “relax” or “unwind.” The dichotomy between entertaining content and…

Today, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop are releasing a new report entitled Always Connected. The report is a synthesis of data from seven studies and presents a comprehensive look at young children’s media use over the past five years. As someone who is interested in research methodology, and as one of the authors, the report has encouraged me to think more carefully about the way we define and measure media use. Measurement of media use taps into…

The Sesame Workshop research team has been following the development of a game promoting intergenerational computer literacy. Mindy Brooks shares some of the lessons they’ve learned about designing an educational game that appeals to both parents and kids. How do you design a game to engage both parents and children to play together and ultimately enhance the child’s literacy skills? After hearing multiple exclamations from parents such as, “Watch out for that word!” or “No, that’s not the “t” sound!”,…

The following remarks were delivered by Sesame Workshop CEO Gary E. Knell at the Grantmakers for Education annual conference last week. The end of World War II was a pivotal moment in our nation’s history – it was the first time in 150 years that the government made a serious investment in public education. And it was the beginning of a long-term demographic shift of historic proportions.  Soldiers returning from war were given opportunities to a higher education long considered…

The domestic educational research group here at Sesame Workshop gets to have really fun conversations. We talk to experts. By experts, we mean the 3- to 9-year-old children for whom we create content. We explain to them that we’re grown ups and don’t remember what it was like to be their age and that they’re experts about what they like and what they think and know about the things they read, watch and play. We also talk to their parents…

I was asked by the Cooney Center to share my thoughts about winning this year’s Prize for Breakthroughs in Literacy Learning: Innovate with The Electric Company. When I found out we won, I immediately called my wife and kids to let them know. I have four kids and the three oldest — Hannah (7), Isaac (5) and Josh (3) — are huge, I mean really huge, Electric Company fans. My youngest, Gabriella (1), is too young for TV, but I’m…