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Full Conference Registration Site: https://www.faingroup.com/DML2015/

Please note that all accepted participants must pay registration fees in order to present in the DML2015 Conference.

Registration Fee Schedule
Online Registration Rates
Professionals: $150
Students: $100

Cancellation Policy

Cancellations will incur a $25 processing fee. Cancellations made close to the conference date are non-refundable.

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Whether you are attending DML2015 in-person or catching the highlights remotely, we encourage your realtime participation. Check out the social media sites in the footer below and Follow @dmlconference and #DML2015 on Twitter for announcements, news & updates.

Should you have questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us via email at dmlhub@hri.uci.edu.

Coffee service.

Organizer: Glynda Hull
Participants: Urvashi Sahni, Shibani Sahni, Priya Dubey, Moni Kannaujia, Poam Maurya,
Preeti Rawat

This session features young women from India whose school curriculum included critical feminist perspectives, digital media production, and community activism. Their school’s founder will describe her vision for girls’ and women’s emancipation in India, and the young women will share the films they’ve made about their communities and the possibilities and constraints of their lives. The session illustrates how digital media practice situated within a critically oriented school can powerfully intersect with struggles for equality. In this case such practice served as a lever that helped young women to voice their perspectives on gender equality—demonstrating to their families that they are “son enough”—and to narrate more hopeful and agentive futures.

Participants:
Dr. Urvashi Sahni, Founder, Study Hall Educational Foundation, Lucknow, India
Shibani Sahni, Study Hall Educational Foundational, New Delhi, India

Filmmakers from Prerna School, Lucknow, India:
Priya Dubey
Moni Kannaujia
Poam Maurya
Preeti Rawat

Organizers: William Penuel, Katie Van Horne
Presenters: Michael Harris, Timothy Podkul, Kiley Larson, Nathan Dadey, Nichole Pinkard
Discussant: Vera Michalchik

This panel focuses on approaches to studying the quality of opportunities to learn for youth in connected learning. Examining equity and access in connected learning requires understanding which youth are participating and their access to opportunities to grow in interest-related pursuits. This panel opens up a dialog on what these opportunities look like, who has access to and participates in them, and what methods for studying connected learning can help inform equity and access issues in practice.

We examine youth participation in and across contexts through different approaches to studying the quality of connected learning experiences with a specific focus on equity and youth participation in connected learning from social and spatial perspectives. We present approaches to understanding youths’ access to interest-related pursuits across multiple contexts while examining outcomes such as expanded social capital. We also explore how young people themselves can engage in study of their own connected learning experiences. The panel will consist of five presentations, a discussant, and time for questions and discussion. The panel includes:

Critical Analysis of the Promise and Challenges of Youth Participatory Research

We critically examine the design and implementation of a youth participatory action research project that used Google Hangouts to connect geographically dispersed sites to study factors that create or frustrate young people’s equitable access to future employment in the creative sector.

Brokering, Mentoring, and Connecting: Youth Reflect on their Personal Networks

We describe the application of social network analysis (SNA) to engage youth in research and better understand how social capital, mentoring, and brokering influence youth engagement with connected learning activities. We illustrate how this method can help unpack outcomes related to Connected Learning principles, how these principles interact with one another, and how youth can benefit from engagement in SNA.

Taking an Open-source Approach to Create More Equitable Designs

Cities of Learning (COL) provide youth with opportunities to attend local programs, showcase talents online, and explore interest-based activities. We share our approach to understanding youth access and participation, especially in non-dominant communities, using GIS mapping and data mining of COL log data, highlighting the importance of sharing visualizations and findings with multiple stakeholders.

Access, Equity, and Potential Pathways: Mozilla Hive Learning Networks

We describe how teens are discovering and participating in programming run by organizations in the Mozilla Hive Learning Networks. Through the use of GIS mapping, surveys, and in-depth interviews, this work highlights how a mixed-methods approach helps document spatial and demographic patterns of access, connected learning experiences, youth academic outcomes, and exposure to potential career and academic pathways.

Quantifying Equity and Participation in Connected Learning

While connected learning experiences afford youth with numerous opportunities, it is unclear if participation in these experiences is equitable. Using hierarchical linear modeling we examine the relationship between youth participation, characteristics, and pursuits using survey data. Initial results suggest that girls participate less than boys with little difference across pursuits, while nondominant youth participate less overall and levels of participation vary across pursuits.

Organizers: Paula Escuadra, Mat Frenz
Presenter: Mat Frenz
Discussants: Randy Weiner, Louise Dube

How do we, as an industry or intersection of industries, make learning visible? More and more educators are using the power of digital games that provide immersive and interactive opportunities for learning. For educators and learners, however, the process for finding and using high-impact, high-quality digital games that have proven learning outcomes is difficult. The same barriers apply to edtech companies striving to create positive learning impacts but lack the infrastructure to do so. Every moment is crucial on – and off- the screen, and it’s necessary to capture those moments in a way that are measurable, accessible, and actionable. In order to truly address the needs of learners in – and out of – the classroom, it is no longer viable to continue living in silos, just as it is no longer realistic to assume that every individual learner absorbs, masters and utilizes information the same way. An intentional, collaborative effort on a systems level is necessary to engage 21st century learners. Specifically, it is necessary for such an initiative to have scale, reach, engagement, choice, and disruptive in a way that can break long-standing institutional barriers to long-term impact. In this panel, we will explore the theory and practice of creating an open and collaborative community between traditionally separate learning domains. Educators, researchers and game designers will discuss these challenges of digital games in learning spaces, and how a personalized learning assessment engine can serve to capture rich, measurable learning experiences. We will discuss exactly how they have come together in a concerted, collaborative effort to introduce game-based learning to the classroom, and what they have learned in the process.

Mat Frenz develops strategic partnerships and defines sustainability strategy for GlassLab. His focus lies in GlassLab Games Services, identifying the most innovative companies in the learning games space and collaborating with them to create a seamless pathway into classrooms for their products. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida.

Randy Weiner is the CEO of BrainQuake and has worked in start-ups, education and education technology for the last 20 years. Expert in agile development, Randy is also a co-founder and the Chairman of the Board at Urban Montessori Charter School in Oakland, CA — the nation’s first public Montessori, Arts Integration and Design Thinking school. A Teach For America alum, he taught for five years in Oakland and Madagascar and holds B.A.s from Middlebury College and an MA in Education from Stanford University.

Louise Dube is the Executive Director for iCivics. Prior, she was the Managing Director of Digital Learning at WGBH, helping to launch PBS LearningMedia, a platform with more than 87,000 classroom-ready digital resources reaching 1.5 million educators. Louise has also served as President of Pangea Tools, VP of Marketing at Time To Know, Vice President and General Manager of Speech Products, and President of Soliloquy Learning. She holds a law degree from McGill University and an MBA from Yale.

Organizer: Erhardt Graeff
Presenters: Erhardt Graeff, J. Natan Matias,Ruth Nicholls, Miriam Martinez

The rise of accessible open technology has led to growing excitement about the potential to unlock citizens’ creativity and growing interest in how technology can be harnessed for civic engagement. At the same time, communities and governments are committing to increasing young people’s digital skills through formal and informal technology learning. How can we bring together agendas for digital literacy, tech learning, and civic engagement?

Technology and data literacy efforts are accepted as important efforts in formal and informal learning settings: promoted and funded in connection with economic pressures calling for more graduates from STEM fields. However, despite an ongoing perception of crisis in civics, there is not the same kind of excitement for efforts that promote practical civic literacies such as critical media making and online and offline community organizing. Barriers to equity and empowerment in contemporary civic life—falling along race and gender, economic, and cultural lines—include both digital divides and “the participation gap” (Jenkins et al. 2006), whereby opportunities to practice using technology and media to shape civic and political realities are unequally distributed.

Youth deserve a full voice in civic life. Technology, like the “civic technology” proliferating around government services, is one path toward participation, but this approach needs to be embedded in a set of thoughtful social processes that youth should also have experience in designing. Creating technology is relatively easy once a context and problem is well-understood. The more difficult parts are understanding the context and problem in the first place and then working with a community to ensure technology is implemented as an appropriate and effective solution. Technology literacies ought to be developed alongside authentic civic engagement, exercising critical and systems thinking as well as engaging with communities to construct social processes that overcome real issues.

This panel will report on a series of workshops co-organized by the MIT Center for Civic Media that explore the social aspects of civic technology and learning. Over the past year, we have worked with high school students, social studies teachers, and community organizations to think about how civic technologies designed for empowerment might be incorporated in civic education curricula; we have been developing learning guides and a community of practice for youth-focused and community-based technology projects; and we have convened organizations like Mikva Challenge and Young Rewired State, who run innovative programs at the nexus of youth, community, and technology, in order to brainstorm and coordinate around shared agenda.

During the panel, we will also introduce a framework for thinking about the broader civic technology movement in terms of “youth + community + technology” and propose a research and practice agenda to develop, promote, and evaluate these efforts according to community-oriented social goals and core values of equity, empowerment, and efficacy.

Organizers: Antero Garcia, Christina Cantrill
Presenters: Christina Cantrill, Antero Garcia, Mark Gomez, Kim Douillard, Stephanie Rollag, Anna Smith
Discussant: Ernest Morrell

Though principles of connected learning strongly resonate with classroom teachers today, few empirical studies demonstrate how this work is taken up within classrooms and by teachers. To further the DML community’s dialogue around in-school research, this panel explores how equity-focused Connected Learning is being researched with teachers. Sharing research curated by the National Writing Project, this session bridges models of co-design and connected learning to focus on classrooms that sustain equitable education and civic engagement.

Since 1974, the National Writing Project (NWP) has linked local sites of engage practitioners in improving teaching and writing experiences in schools across the country. Continuing to remain at the cutting edge of professional development and teacher leadership, NWP supports teachers at the national, local, and classroom-specific level. This session build on these models of support to explore how connected learning can sustain civic engagement and equity within varied school contexts and age groups.

Framed as concentric circles of research, this panel begins with findings from Kim Douillard’s work within the San Diego Area Writing Project as she shares connected learning classroom practices that extend into local community spaces like museums. Building beyond the classroom, Mark Gomez and Antero Garcia will discuss how intentional school design sustains connected learning as civic engagement within the Critical Design and Gaming School – a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Stephanie Rollag will illustrate how teacher-driven inquiry is sustaining lasting changes for networked teachers at various stages in their career. Finally, Anna Smith will share recent findings on the role of remix as professional learning in the National Writing Project’s CLMOOC initiative. By looking at a classroom, an entire school, and national efforts at collaboration this panel extends conversations around equity by looking at how stakeholders are supported within this work.

With framing from the National Writing Project’s Associate Director of National Programs, Christina Cantrill, and discussant remarks from Ernest Morrell, President of the National Council of Teachers of English (and DML conference committee member), this session invites participants to build connections to their own sites of research and to further conversations around classrooms, equity, and co-design. Ultimately, this session pushes for attendees to consider how models of equity-driven practices within classroom spaces can further educational equity across the country.

Organizers: Alan Levine, Jim Groom
Presenters: Laura Gibbs, Tim Owens, Erin Richey, Ben Werdmuller, Jonathan Worth

With its own history and inherent decentralized design, the internet ought to be the truly equitable participatory platform, one that will not be just another television. Yet potential is never guaranteed by technological design; the nervous system does produce our human character. Today’s technological solutionism prevents us from seeing what McLuhan recognized: technologies are extensions of people (he said “man”) — “tools that extend human bodies and capacities.” A learning ecosystem that is unbounded and distributed, that makes mistakes and corrections, that evolves through participation — that learning ecosystem is one that ought to extend our human capacities.

This session brings together the experiences of people who have been immersed in open learning via designs that mimic the distributed/connected network of the internet itself, where the fundamental organizing units are the students/participants, learners who manage their own digital spaces. The course then becomes one of many spaces fueled by the flow of individual actions. When we shift the locus of learning outside of an institutional platform, students gain agency over their experiences, something that meshes with the larger world they operate in beyond school.

There is no single easy button template driven platform to build these kinds of environments, yet they are eminently achievable with open source or free tools running on the open web; millions of dollars of funding is not required. These are a mix and remix of both old and new technologies, co-mingling emergent ones with what Jon Udell describes as trailing-edge ones.

We bring together practitioners who are crafting such spaces via platforms such as WordPress / RSS (ds106, Connected Courses), the IndieWeb (Known), and patchworks (e.g. Google apps + Inoreader) and how they can even work together. Rather than a series of presentations, this session will be run more like a talk show. The tools features are not the primary subject of the conversations; panelists will use their these designs as a way to provide references and an audience experience. Instead, we will focus on how these networked structures break learning out of the boundaries of institution, geography, and social standing while also facing up the challenges of isolation and non-inclusion:

* How do different types of web publishing platforms help students and instructors interact online as colearners?

Organizers: Zoe Corwin, Tracy Fullerton,
Presenters: Tracy Fullerton, Zoe Corwin, Elizabeth Swensen, Sean Bouchard, High School Student, Foshay Learning Center
Discussant: Leslie Aaronson

Improving college access and completion for underrepresented, underprepared, and low-income students has been a persistent challenge for practitioners, policymakers, and academics for decades. Despite having high college aspirations, many first generation college-goers do not have solid understandings of college options and processes, are poorly informed or misinformed about college costs and financial aid, and have limited support for college preparation and college behaviors such as submitting applications to college and for financial aid. These challenges are exacerbated by abysmal college counselor to student ratios in schools serving low-income and/or first generation students – and substandard technology infrastructures at low-income schools. Five years ago, panelists initiated a collaboration to address systemic shortcomings in access to college information and support for first generation college students/students from under-represented backgrounds through the creation of innovative digital tools. The students’ perspectives anchored all aspects of the project, from conceptualization to development to research. By meeting students where they were — in virtual and game spaces – panelists sought to incorporate students’ cultural repertoires into the design and implementation of the games, and thus dramatically change college access tools available to youth.

The primary goal of the project was to capitalize on game-based tools, social media and technology to move beyond simply providing under-served students with information about college. Instead the team sought to cultivate strategies and skills conducive to expanding students’ college knowledge and college-going efficacy. What started as an effort to create one game evolved into a multi-year collaboration among game designers, researchers, educators and students to develop a suite of college access games. The suite now includes: (1) a no-tech card game and (2) a Facebook application where players role-play a college applicant as she balances activities and deadlines during a college application cycle; (3) an online game designed to illustrate the importance of financial literacy and choosing the right college; and (4) an online game targeted at middle school students intended to boost college aspirations.

In this session, panelists will: (1) outline the “unfreedoms” informing the project; (2) describe the development process including conceptualization, iterative playtesting with target audience members, and implementation; and (3) describe each of the games highlighting learning objectives, features and game mechanics, and related research. The discussants, a high school teacher from one of the playtest sites and one of her students, will provide a practitioner and student perspective on the games and guide Q & A among session attendees. The goals of the session are to: (1) provide examples of digital tools being used in school and home settings to address inequitable access to information about college and lack of high quality support for college aspirations in low-income schools; (2) highlight the value of centering student players in the design and research process; and (3) stimulate dialogue among session attendees about best practices, challenges and future possibilities. Furthermore, the session will offer an example of a local collaboration with ramifications for national-level scale up.

Organizers: Caitlin Martin, Denise Nacu
Presenters: Ugochi Acholonu, Sheena Erete, Sybil Madison-Boyd, Asia Roberson, Jim Sandherr
Discussant: Kylie Peppler

Online networks have the potential to scale unique learning opportunities to communities who may not have access to interest-based projects, content experts who can provide feedback, learning resources, and ways to share work and ideas. A challenge is how to design systems on a large scale while simultaneously recognizing the specific knowledge, opportunities, challenges, and goals of different communities of learners.

Our panel will share four socio-technical designs intentionally developed to address inequalities in opportunities and participation for youth learners. The presenters–designers, researchers, and practitioners working with the Digital Youth Network in Chicago–contribute a range of perspectives. Each presentation will define the issue of equity being addressed; the focal community and their involvement in the design process; and the unique design intervention. Learning environments span classrooms, informal clubs, and city-wide initiatives. Each intervention uses online learning networks in conjunction with face-to-face time, and each engages in collaborative design with participants, including educators, organizers, and youth. Themes across presentations include: Recognizing expertise, interests, and goals of particular populations; Inviting participatory design; and Designing visualizations of use data that can reveal inequities within classes or communities to incite action.

1. Promoting online Latino youth voice through collaborative design
As more people use the Internet to learn, it is imperative that critical voices represent diverse viewpoints. We will share our collaborative design process with classrooms in a predominantly Latino community to develop features promoting dialogue, feedback, and interaction on an online learning platform. For these middle school students, 40% classified as English Language Learners, finding a voice to critique and contribute is complicated by different expectations and cultural norms between home and school.
2. Digital narratives to engage girls in computational making
Through the creation of interactive story experiences, we invite middle school girls to participate and persist in computational creation as they design wearable computing in an after school club. We share prototypes of the digital narratives, designed to employ story structure and character identification to move girls beyond STEM exposure to engaging in computational making and thinking.
3. Lowering barriers to computer science by bridging communities
Connecting non-dominant youth to relevant participatory computing cultures is one way to lower the barriers to their participation and engagement in computing. Using the Chicago City of Learning initiative as our context, we explain our approach to designing supports to help youth interact with expert networks, visualize pathways to computing expertise, and facilitate entrance to participatory cultures that have the potential to foster long-term engagement and expertise in computing.
4. Learning pathways: Application of an equity-informed framework
Transparent pathways are critical in addressing youth engagement and achievement barriers in under-resourced schools and families. We argue that connecting more youth to pathways is not enough; pathways must be designed with intentionality around how learning shapes identity, builds capital, and addresses equity. We will share our learning pathway framework and its application to a writing pathway created for Chicago City of Learning.

Organizers: Eduard Muntaner Perich, Jordi Freixenet, Xavier Cufí

Inventors4Change wants to provide children with tools and techniques that let them invent the changes they want to see in the world. It consists of a network of schools which use Technologies for Creative Learning and Digital Media tools to foster Invention-Based Collaborative Learning and Education for Global Citizenship among children from different countries. The project is particularly focused on children from disadvantaged communities, and children’s inventions are inspired by Human Development challenges.

The pilot project revolved around cross-cultural virtual exchange through Scratch (a free online programming language and education community designed at MIT to encourage kids to create and share interactive stuff), and took place from October 2013 to March 2014. In the first phase there were four participating schools, two from South India and two from Catalonia (Spain). The participating schools in India provide education to the most vulnerable and underserved children of India’s lowest caste, the so-called “untouchables”. The participating schools in Spain provide education to sons or daughters of immigrant families with very low socioeconomic status. Each school selected a group of students of different ages, and the organizers designed mixed teams of children from India and Catalonia. Each of these teams used Scratch and asynchronous communication (in English) to collaboratively invent a story/animation related to the issue of Children’s Rights.

After this trial, the idea is to progressively open the project and create a wide network of schools from around the world. In the second phase, right now we are training more teachers and conducting workshops for children in India (low-cost robotics, digital storytelling, etc.). A new school in India and a secondary school in Catalonia are joining the project, and some schools in Wales and US will join the network very soon too. This year the main topic for the animations/stories will be again inspired by a Human Development challenge, and connections among children via videoconference will be promoted.

We strongly believe that Computational Thinking, Invention-Based Collaborative Learning and Virtual Exchange help develop creativity, critical thinking and teamwork among children. Moreover, when this learning process takes place in disadvantaged communities, we are also helping those involved children to become agents of change, being more innovative and motivated to make positive changes. We promote educational uses of digital and networked media that enable greater voice, visibility, and equality for children from underserved communities.

The second phase will be completed in April 2015, so in June we will be able to share all the results.

The project was officially presented last summer at MIT Media Lab, during the Scratch Conferece 2014. Inventors4Change is a project of UdiGitalEdu (University of Girona).

Website: www.inventors4change.org

Blog posts related to Inventors4Change: http://www.eduard.cat/search/label/Inventors4Change

Scratch Studio (with stories uploaded by children): http://scratch.mit.edu/studios/278075/

Organizers: Jennifer Borland, Molly Webster

What does open learning look like when delivered via broadcast airwaves? What happens when public audiences engage in science alongside STEM professionals? What does curiosity sound like?

Radiolab has finely honed its unique brand of curiosity-driving programming that hooks listeners with well-crafted narratives—chock-full of science but never short on humor and wit. The Discovery Dialogues project, however, sought to go a step further by providing new types of interactive and participatory experiences for public audiences (especially younger adults) through a combination of freely available broadcast and podcast programming, live shows across the United States, and a variety of multimedia resources and opportunities to interact both online and face-to-face including maker events, citizen science data collection initiatives, live-tweeting events with great line-ups of special guests and STEM experts, and an online naming competition that allowed Radiolab listeners to determine the name for a newly theorized precursor to humans and many other mammalian species (wherein the “hypothetical placental mammal” ultimately came to be known as “Shrewdinger.”)

This short talk will explore specific instances where audiences came to be more engaged in science and were able to develop deeper understanding of science through topics and events designed to pique curiosity by actively engaging audiences with science, rather than hearing about it secondhand. Join us as we seek to uncover what happens when listeners become active creators and influencers of science content rather than passive recipients of information.

On your own!

Quick Bites | Breakfast & Lunch

Starbucks, 735 S Figueroa St #308, $
Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, 801 W 7th St, $
Corner Bakery, 801 S Figueroa St, $
Le Pain Quotidien, 509 W 6th St, $$
Nazo’s Bakery, 810 W 8th St, $
Marie’s Coffee Deli, 731 W 7th St, $
Mendocino Farms, 444 S Flower St, OR 735 S Figueroa St, $$
Crepe X-press Cafe, 529 W 6th St, $
Madame Monsieur, 512 W 6th St, $$
Guisados DTLA, 541 S Spring St Ste. 101, $
Tulip Cafe, 628 Saint Vincent Ct, $$
Mexicali Taco & Co. – 702 N. Figueroa Street, $
Grand Central Market, 317 S Broadway, $
Natural Selection, 646 S Main St, $
Chipotle, 601 W 7th St, $
The Counter, 725 W 7th St, $
Local Table, 800 S Figueroa St. Ste 103, $$
Tierra Cafe, 818 Wilshire Blvd, $
Tossed, 700 Wilshire Blvd, $
Tender Greens, 505 W 6th St, $$
Gil’s Indian, 838 S Grand Ave, $$
FIG at 7th, 735 S Figueroa St (Starbucks, California Pizza Kitchen, Indus by Saffron, The Melt, Morton’s, Sprinkles, The Flying Pig, Twist Grill, Gentaro Soba, City Tavern, New Moon Cafe, Loteria Grill, Pizza Studio)

Open Spaces to Sit and Network

Library Bar, 630 W 6th St #116A
Pershing Square, 532 S Olive St
FIG at 7th, 735 S Figueroa St
LA Live, 777 Chick Hearn Ct
California Plaza, 350 S Grand Ave #A-4
Area around Disney Concert Hall, 111 S Grand Ave
Area around MOCA, 250 S Grand Ave
Area around LA Central Library, 630 West 5th Street

Dinner | Walking Distance

Italian
Bottega Louie, 700 S. Grand Avenue, $$
800 Degrees Pizzeria, 800 Wilshire Blvd, $$

Seafood
Water Grill, 544 S Grand Ave, $$$
Seasalt Fish Grill, 812 W 7th St, $$

American/Gastropub
Nickel Diner (BLD), 524 S Main St, $$
The Black Sheep, 126 E 6th St, $$
Engine Co No 28, 644 S Figueroa St, 1st Fl, $$
Blue Cow Kitchen, 350 S Grand Ave, $$
Industriel, 609 S Grand Ave, $$
Guild New American Bistro, 611 W 7th St, $$
Faith and Flower, 705 W 9th St, $$$

French
Cafe Pinot, 700 West Fifth St, $$$

Chinese and Japanese
Sugarfish, 600 W 7th St. Ste 150, $$$
Chaya Downtown, 525 S Flower St, $$$

Mexican
Mas Malo, 515 W. 7th Street, $$

Mediterranean
10e, 532 S Olive St, $$

African
The Briks, 1111 S Hope St. Ste 110, $$

Organizer: Brenda Hernandez
Presenters: Grace Quintanilla, Melissa Avila, Todd Diederich, Nicole Marroquin, Brenda Hernandez

As educators and youth advocates we are aware of the way teens and their culture(s) are misunderstood and consequently under-valued in society at-large, this even more so for youth living from urban cities, they are scrutinized, criticized and excluded from the sociocultural landscape. To address this issue organizations engage with youth through educational programming during and after school, teaching them valuable tools and digital media practices so that society can perceive them as successful learners, yet their cultural repertoires are limited or even silenced. Youth on the other hand are engaging with issues of culture and aesthetics, they are creating culture and expanding aesthetic notions within their own communities.

Yollocalli Arts Reach of the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, IL. and the Center for Digital Culture of the National Council on Art and Culture of Mexico in Mexico City will share their approach to engaging youth into an equitable discussion and production of youth culture, aesthetics within their digital media programs.

Yollocalli Arts Reach is a youth initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art, they offer free arts and culture programming to teens and young adults. Located in the heart of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, they serve as an open community center with studio spaces, computer lab, recording studio, a large art library, and a creative, supportive staff and teaching artists who are always around to help, encourage, and inspire. Yollocalli urges teaching artists and staff to strengthen the students’ creative and cultural capital by engaging them with their own cultural discourses through art making.

The Center of Digital Culture is a physical and virtual project for the general public with the goal of investigating the cultural, social and economical implications of using digital technology in daily life. It is also a means of communication, an artistic creation and an entertainment forum, which aims to promote awareness of the meaning of living in a world in which we are both “users” and “creators” of digital culture.

This panel will be moderated by Nicole Marroquin, Assistant Professor in Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with the participation of teaching artists from both institutions. Together we will explore, discuss and share strategies for inclusion of cultural repertoires of nondominant groups into digital media programs, perspectives on issues of equity within digital art and cultural production and how we can begin to equitably bridge the digital culture divide to include youth voice.

Organizers: Victor Lee, Mary Briggs

Much popular press has been given to the Quantified Self movement – a label for both the increased ability to obtain and analyze personal data due to the explosion of consumer wearable devices and the accompanying online community that has emerged. The ideal represented by QS is a democratization of data. For instance, it is now possible for an individual involved in QS practices to know more about their health than their professional healthcare providers. In terms of media, this also represents a new space for exploration, as personal data become objects to be shared, discussed, and visualized. However, who is participating in Quantified Self activities, and is it equitable?

An earlier analysis we had conducted of online video archives from Quantified Self meetup groups suggests that participation is, like the Maker movement, heavily male (82.5%) and non-Hispanic white (84.1%). All participants were adults. As such, we were curious about how a Quantified Self experiences might look different with a group of a very different composition. Therefore, we attempted to seed a small Quantified Self group comprised of five Latina high school girls, provided them with wearable and other devices for their use, and provided technical support for data acquisition and analysis. We found that there were important circumstantial challenges that they faced as both youth and individuals from families with much lower income. In our presentation, we will discuss our experiences and lessons learned about both the Quantified Self and its scalability to non-dominant populations.

Organizer: Kelly Mendoza
Participants: Tanner Higgin, Reina Cabezas, Mat Frenz, Lucien Vattel, Jim Pike, Sujata Bhatt

What are innovative models of games and learning happening in California schools with low-income and historically racially disadvantaged student communities? What can we learn from them in terms of what’s working – and what’s not? What are successful relationships between schools and developers that test and improve products for different student populations? This panel brings together educators and developers (or those in both camps) to discuss different models of innovation with games and play reaching disadvantaged student communities. We’ll first explore Epic, an Education for Change public charter middle school located in one of Oakland’s poorest and high crime neighborhoods. Epic (opened in August 2014) re-imagines middle school by using features of gaming. Students re-define their personal narratives as heroes in their own Epic journey, in which classes are redefined as magical worlds, and lessons as heroic quests. Epic is a science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) school with a rigorous curriculum. Students discover their inner hero though four houses with strong cultures, encouraging teamwork with integrated rituals woven around a larger school narrative. Reina Cabezas, an Engineering Teacher at Epic School, will share how game mechanics are integrated into the school culture and the assessment system to foster students’ self-expression and achievement. Mat Frenz at Glasslab Games, who works with Epic School, will share how they collaborate with weekly on-site play testing, feedback from teachers who pilot games, and professional development collaboration to better inform implementation strategies. In addition, Lucien Vattel, founder of GameDesk and Director of PlayMaker School, will share PlayMaker’s model based on the principle that students should be empowered to create meaningful relationships with knowledge by interacting, playing, and making. Play Maker, launched in 2012 in partnership with New Roads School in Los Angeles, incorporates principles of game-based learning into the instructional model, but with an additional focus on making and discovering. PlayMaker recruits students from historically disadvantaged minority backgrounds and low incomes to create a racially and economically diverse community of learners. Students work with an “Adventure Map” that guide them to choose a personalized learning path, which includes a combination of low tech and high tech activities. Students also complete formative assessments tied to Common Core Standards. Lucien will also share how PlayMaker informs GameDesk’s research and product development. Lastly, Jim Pike, a third grade teacher at Ascension Catholic School in Los Angeles, and Director of Education at Learn by Gaming, will share his own model of innovative learning with games. Jim designed, developed, and implemented “Mathcraft”, a Common Core Math curriculum centered around the popular video game Minecraft. Jim teaches in South Central Los Angeles, where much of the student population is living below poverty level. Learn how his Mathcraft curriculum dramatically increased student math scores and improved the academic culture of his class. Dr. Tanner Higgin from Common Sense Education, who researches race in videogame culture, will moderate the panel.

Organizers: Sandra Quinones, Brian Bailey, Matt Bundick,
Presenters: Joe Ehman and students, Renee Knox, David Goldbach, James Foster

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) engages young people in the act of conducting original research and creating multimodal texts so that they develop cultural and academic capital to operate in multiple discourse communities. Simultaneously YPAR works to create more socially just schools where youth are encouraged to take a lead in questioning policies and educational practices, including unequal power relations in our schools and society (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Duncan Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006). Youth Films Collaborative (YFC) is a digital media initiative between Obama Academy (Pittsburgh Public Schools) and the Canevin Center for Educational Transformation and Social Justice at Duquesne University, in consultation with a faculty member from Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. By providing a collaborative, experimental, mentored space in schools for 11th grade students, this project aims to sharpen participants’ digital video production skills and give them new ways of engaging with a range of important critical multimodal literacy practices. More specifically, the YFC engages youth in the development of mini-documentary films on equity and social justice issues that are timely and relevant for youth-schools-communities using their “voice”. The concept of voice is used to show how people resist oppression, as seen in many feminist and post-feminist theories (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; hooks, 2000). Voice also refers to instances where youth attempt to overcome and resist the ways in which schools and communities work to silence (Fine, 2003) and marginalize students by reproducing inequalities on account of race, class, gender, disability, and sexuality (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Oakes, 1985). Voice is used in this presentation to question who gets to speak and who gets to make decisions with regard to school and community issues that directly impact youth. As such, the YFC seeks to cultivate reflective and change-centered processes (including the development of youth’s critical thinking and research skills), as well as practices which promote relationship building and inter-cultural dialogue with peers and adults in and outside of school.

Over the course of the 2014-2015, we are in the process of:

• Identifying community issues that are important to youth

• Asking essential research questions about the community issues

• Collecting data and reading literature on the issue

• Creating a mini-documentary on a social issue

• Distributing the video online, through social media, and film festivals and in public screenings

• Organizing “action events” around their video with the following questions – What is the change that you would like to see with regard to the community issue? How do we create action around the message in the mini-documentary film?

This session will unpack the process for our work, provide an example of how youth are using media production for social change, present clips of the mini-docs, and give youth co-presenters a chance to speak their own truth to power and resistance about community issues that impact their lives.

Organizers: Mindy Faber, Don LaBonte, Nathan Phillips
Presenters: Nathan Phillips, Becca Woodard, Kim Richards, Mindy Faber, Don LaBonte
Discussant: Julie Keane

Much of the research on connected learning has focused on informal sites of learning rather than examining how schools and teachers can support such work. In this panel, compelling case studies will be shared that break new ground in researching and documenting the possibilities and challenges of bringing connected learning into high-need, urban public schools.

Convergence Academies is a whole school digital integration model developed by the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago in partnership with Chicago Public Schools. The model is being implemented over three years with the support of a DOE funded “Investing in Innovation” grant in two high need public schools (1,200 students, 60 teachers and school leaders).

This panel brings together researchers and project leaders to engage the DML community in a dialogue about what school-based education reform might look like within a Connected Learning framework.

By grounding this panel presentation around case studies and micro-ethnographies, we will share findings that exemplify four strategies for enacting a Connected Learning model in urban schools:

• Cultivating professional learning communities that build teacher capacity to assume dispositions as connected educators, learning designers and drivers of change within their own schools.
• Designing production-centered student spaces that provide mentorship, tools, challenges and partnerships with out of school domains to support student interest and choice along diverse learning pathways.
• Creating frameworks and tools to support classroom-based learning structures that bring relevance, meaning and engagement to academic learning.
• Leveraging the strengths of multiple stakeholders to support equity-driven transformation

Phillips’ presentation will explore the Digital Atelier, a designed learning environment that encourages student production-centered play, participatory agency and creativity. This case study takes a learning-in-place (Leander, et al., 2010) perspective that views processes of learning and interaction within the school and the digital atelier as connected to flows of culture, history, bodies, and politics streaming within, across, and without the “boundaries” of the school (Nespor, 1997).

Woodard’s presentation will show that although much work situates students as learners who draw from diverse funds of knowledge (Hull & Schultz, 2002; Moje et al., 2004), teachers are often depicted primarily in their roles as representatives of the official discourses of school. Woodard argues for the importance of locating, not just students, but also teachers as participants across varied sociocultural contexts who draw from a wide range of resources in their practice. Applying a connected learning theoretical framework to teacher practice, this paper examines a grade-level team of teachers’ diverse pathways to knowledge.

Richards’ presentation will examine how academic learning and youth cultures are integrated through six instructional designs or pillars; collaboration, authentic participation, play, choice of expression, critical response, and iterative learning. Curriculum structured around the 3Cs of Connect, Consume, Create works in tandem with the 6 Pillars to support Connected Learning principles within classroom based structures.

Project Directors will contextualize the project and also state the need for working in cross agency partnerships to create roadmaps that can lead to collective impact.

Organizers: Karen Smith, Marc Lesser,
Presenters: Carla Casilli, Sam Toll

Youth have varied experiences related to privacy in their everyday lives. Dominant discourses surrounding privacy and youth highlight “risk” and the apathy of young people. Additionally, perspectives which emphasize youth as consumers, and passive subjects of surveillance and monitoring are prevalent. These discourses have been identified as insufficient by scholars and practitioners.
This panel of presentations, as part of the Open Learning/Educational Technologies Track, will push back against this idea that youth lack agency concerning their privacy. We will explore promising privacy learning pathways that are reflective of open educational practices and that help to reinforce privacy as a foundational right and as a component of an equitable and just society.

Potential open educational resources (OERs) and practices to encourage privacy literacy amongst youth, and their active participation to build their privacy rights are diverse. The panelists involved in this session will be highlight their experiences with the following privacy learning pathways.

* Pathways of resistance: how are youth resisting surveillance and monitoring in their everyday lives? What monitoring and surveillance practices are problematic to youth and how do they contest them?

* Pathways of expression: how are youth sharing their experiences of privacy through online story telling, remix and other forms of creative expression. What types of activities to elicit creative expression on privacy have been successful when implemented by teachers, youth workers, and youth themselves?

* Pathways of exploration: how are youth responding to issues of privacy in novel ways based on their unique experience and context? What type of activities could we design that aren’t part of our lived experiences as educators/adults?

Organizers: Jared Lamenzo, Craig Langlois, Richard Scullin

This talk focuses on the results of a collaboration between Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter School (BART), The Berkshire Museum (Pittsfield, MA), and OpenPath. BART’s model puts art and technology at the center of learners’ experiences; oftentimes, it is difficult to get students out of the classroom to encounter art or gain the insight of practitioners. Recently, BART teamed up with OpenPath, a real-time, browser-based interactive video service for learning. In the pilot, the museum is a lab for learning about art, culture, and science. The Berkshire Museum–whose mission is to inspire connections among art, history, and natural science–was ideal. Mentors at the museum, as well as educators at BART, facilitate students to select a work that is meaningful to them and present it to their peers back at school. These students then generate questions for their own investigations, creating a feedback loop. The goal of the pilot is to help define a replicable and equitable model that gives learners agency for their interest-driven learning, using browser technologies found on billions of devices. Presupposing a learner has access to a mobile device and wifi (in a park, museum, school, et al.), there are numerous ways learning can be refigured, some messy, open-ended and exciting. The pilot was supported in part by the National Writing Project Educator Innovator Fund, with initial development support from the Mozilla Foundation, NSF, and US Ignite.

Organizers: Jennifer Schwarz Ballard, Natasha Smith Walker, Krystal Meisel
Presenters: Nathalie Rayter, Karen Jeffrey, Simeon Schnapper, Jameela Jafri, David Bild, Rik Panganiban

Join us for a deep dive into the process (complex), results (mixed), lessons learned (lots) and next steps (exciting) of the creation and pilot testing of the Community STEM Badging Ecosystem (introduced in the 2014 Ignite talk, “And you will know us by the trail of badges”). Over the past year, eight organizations in Chicago have been exploring the potential of digital badges to address the dual challenges of equitable access to out-of-school learning opportunities and recognition for that learning in the larger community. Working collaboratively we developed and pilot tested a shared digital badging ecosystem that documents and recognizes skills common across STEM fields (e.g. building scientific knowledge, communicating STEM, building models, collaboration etc.), is relevant across institutions and program types, and (we think) can help bridge the gap between formal and informal learning environments.

This session shares the results of this work from inception through pilot-testing and national expansion from institutional, educator, and youth perspectives. Concrete examples and evaluation data from four case studies will illustrate implementation with different audiences, programmatic structures, and content domains (Project Exploration’s Sisters4Science program, Adler Planetarium’s Operation Airlift, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum’s Solar Power Up Camp, After School Matters/Chicago Botanic Garden’s Urban Garden Lab).

Institutionally, the conversation will focus on how a shared badge ecosystem can support collaboration and student participation across programs. We will share our development process and illustrate how it fostered other, independent, partnerships across institutions as well as resulting in the shared badge framework, assessment and award criteria. Challenges of collectively documenting, validating, and linking parallel learning experiences, while still respecting individual institutional agendas, and allowing for program, context, and content domain specific badging will also be discussed. Creating a shared set of badging standards can provide validity and consistency, thus increasing recognition of student learning through non-formal STEM programs however, the unique learning experiences provided by each organization have to be preserved.

Not surprisingly, the buy in of educators is critical in successfully using badges to support and document learning, and to creating value for learners. Focus group and observational data from on-the-ground educators illustrating the substantial concerns and challenges, but also enthusiasm for the potential of badges will be shared, as will a few proposed solutions. Likewise, the perspective of youth on the idea, benefit, and usefulness of badges will be shared. Of importance for learners are the ways in which badges are made meaningful, relevant, and usable. For the learner, badges accrue value either because they represent the work a participant has done, or because they have a direct payoff by opening other opportunities or benefits.

The session will conclude with a discussion of next steps for the Community STEM Badge Ecosystem, including how the work carried out to date can and is informing the thought processes and considerations of other organizations (California Academy of Sciences), as they consider if, how, and when to implement badges with their own programs.

Coffee service.

Organizer: Samuel Dyson
Participants: Louis Gomez, Mimi Ito, Chris Lawrence, Katrina Stevens

Achieving equity for all learners is an ambitious goal requiring coordinated efforts across a variety of organizational and academic contexts. While equity may be advanced in part by new, more accessible technologies, overcoming present and future challenges will require as much sophistication from our learning contexts as it demands of our learning tools. We will explore the potential and challenges of blurring boundaries across learning contexts in ways that illuminate shared professional challenges and generate new solutions. The invited speakers to this featured panel will explore how youth and adult learning is being supported across learning contexts through collective efforts to advance equity for all.

Panelists include:
Louis Gomez, Senior Fellow, Network Development and Improvement Science, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Mimi Ito, Research Director, Digital Media and Learning Hub, University of California Humanities Research Institute
Chris Lawrence, VP for Learning, Mozilla
Katrina Stevens, Senior Advisor, Office of Educational Technology and Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Education

The conversation will be moderated by Sam Dyson, DML conference chair for the Blurring Boundaries track.

Organizer: Thomas Philip
Presenters: Joseph Polman, Ben Kirshner, Tapan Parikh, Noel Enyedy

With the proliferation and near ubiquity of digital devices in our daily lives, digital media are now intricately linked to societal processes that simultaneously reproduce and challenge existing forms of inequity, create new forms of marginalization, and generate unprecedented possibilities for transformative solutions. This panel brings together five teams of researchers who explore young people’s engagement with new media in classrooms, communities, and the fluid spaces in between. Through an interactive symposium format, the presenters will highlight the intersections and tensions in their work as they collectively tackle the panel’s central, thematic question: how, under what conditions, and for whom, do new digital tools and media become resources for learning, political critique, and action by young people?

The session explores the unique affordances and limitations of digital tools and media in a wide-range of formal and informal contexts:
1. Tapan Parikh will draw on his findings from a 10th-grade Sociology course to illustrate how alternative pathways to computational thinking for underrepresented students, grounded in design and data, can support authentic social projects that are relevant to them and their communities.
2. Thomas Philip and colleagues will examine how the introduction of new digital tools in an introductory high school computer science course, which was intended to engage students of color in computational and statistical thinking, inadvertently re-inscribed inequitable racialized relationships of power.
3. Joseph Polman will examine the synergies and tensions that arise between cutting-edge science, complex data, and the personal and cultural concerns of youth and their communities, when young people in school and out-of-school contexts work with peers, teachers, program facilitators, and outside editors to produce infographics-based data journalism.
4. Ben Kirshner will draw on data from community-based youth organizing in Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States to analyze variation in how groups mix face-to-face organizing with new digital media to build political power and voice among marginalized young people.
5. Noel Enyedy and colleagues will consider how “cybermurals” – digital murals jointly constructed by youth and community-based activist artists that are interactive and capable of being modified by audiences – engage youth in learning about urban planning while allowing them to develop identities as activists and members of the community.

To generate meaningful dialogue amongst the panelists and with the audience, each presentation will be limited to 8 minutes. During the 2-minute transitions between the presenters’ talks, the audience will be asked to individually reflect on the panel’s central, thematic question in light of the preceding presentation. After the formal presentations, and in lieu of a discussant, the panelists will engage in a dialogue amongst themselves. In this 20-minute segment, the panelists will pose questions to each other to highlight the convergences and divergences in their work, particularly with respect to the panel’s central, thematic question. The final 20-minutes will be reserved for a whole-group discussion to allow audience members to share their questions, comments, and insights.

Organizers: Joy Nolan, Jeremy Kraushar, Rob DiRenzo,
Presenters: Richard Haynes
Moderator: Leah Gilliam

Youth-centered learning benefits users most equitably when it meets young people where they already are: in public schools. This panel offers participants an active role in thinking through the design and implementation of effective, enduring youth-centered programming in public middle and high schools.

Panelists from NYC DOE’s Office of Postsecondary Readiness and program partner Leah Gilliam from Mozilla’s Hive NYC Learning Network will discuss their approach to supporting schools in articulating and designing around youth-centered goals in the service of equity. Panelists represent two innovative programs at NYC public schools:  

• Digital Ready (DR) fosters student-centered, technology-driven innovations in middle schools and high schools, using four levers of change: teaching, curriculum, mastery-based assessment, and expanded learning opportunities.
• The Expanded Success Initiative (ESI) uses creative solutions to tackle the educational achievement gap and increase the number of Black and Latino young men who graduate high school prepared to succeed in college and careers.

Attendees will be invited and encouraged to be an active part of a conversation with the panel.

Expected content/discussion points:

Our shared problem of practice: Well-meaning adults who set out to collaborate on innovations with schools soon discover that it can be difficult to get traction for a host of reasons.

• Educators need models, training, technology, resources, and community to design and implement effective youth-centered programming.
• Schools are relentlessly busy and often underfunded. Many lack technology and/or are strongly focused on the latest mandates and assessments, to the exclusion of other goals.
• Students may not initially see value in choice-driven, collaborative, project-based learning; and/or may have responsibilities that limit their ability to pursue personal/professional interests.
• Community-based organizations may need help identifying school/youth needs, responding with relevant programming, and negotiating effective partnerships with schools.

We take into account these expected challenges, along with each school community’s unique themes, capacities, strengths, challenges, and goals.  We acknowledge the difficulties inherent in redefining the roles of educators and students in order to enrich learning—and want to share our experiences as a possibly useful model for others.

Digital Ready structure and methodology:

We wrap connected learning in a multidimensional face-to-face support system that encourages broad sharing of ideas, models, and resources. With our input, school teams (leadership and teachers) use design thinking to create strengths-based, customized SMART goals. Schools implement their goals via four “levers of change” designed to support their transformation into technology-powered, youth-centered learning environments:

• Curriculum: digitally-enabled/project-based learning, backward design, 24/7 access, customization and sharing of open-source materials, student ownership of learning via research, production, connection.
• Teaching: flexible pacing and grouping, formative assessment drives instruction, digitally-enabled/project-based learning, student voice and choice
• Mastery-based approaches: http://vimeo.com/digitalready/masterybasedlearning designing competencies that name skills and knowledge, providing multiple contexts for developing/demonstrating mastery.
• Expanded Learning Opportunities: in partnership with Hive NYC, we provide technology-rich, authentic contexts for learning to support young people across the city in discovering and developing interest-driven pathways, and in building key 21st-century skills (collaboration, problem solving, research, technology skills, etc.).

DR’s approach relies heavily on fostering an active community of learners: students, partners, and schools. Our model is teacher- and student-empowering because (rather than being about the bells and whistles of technology) it is about developing new models for face-to-face interactions.

Our program empowers students, and the adults who serve them, to collaborate in new ways via a carefully designed holistic program with educational technology and student-centered approaches at its heart.

ESI  structure and methodology:

ESI is an educational component of the Office of the Mayor’s Young Men’s Initiative (YMI) and is supported by Open Society Foundations. YMI is the nation’s most comprehensive effort to tackle the broad disparities slowing the advancement of Black and Latino young men.

As part of that comprehensive effort, ESI works and conducts research in 40 public high schools that have shown promise in reversing this trend; develop and launch new high schools specifically designed to fully prepare Black and Latino young men for success in college and careers; and scale-up college advising training city-wide with the goal of reach all high schools over the next two years.

At the heart of ESI are these three core elements:

• School Practices – 40 ESI schools research, evaluate, document, share, and replicate successful outcomes and data-based models that drive significant change.
• Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) – ESI participants work to ensure that their school’s academics, programs and guidance reflect the culture and experiences of young Black and Latino males.
• School Design Fellowship – ESI is developing a breakthrough school model based on successful school practices and has so far built 3 new schools that embrace the model, bringing together a team of passionate educators (the fellows) who collaboratively create and implement the school design. The fellows then become leaders of schools they help to design.

Organizers: Ty Hollett, Jeremiah Holden

This presentation advances theoretical and pedagogical interpretations of connected learning which advocate robust participation in peer-supported and interest-driven learning oriented toward academic and political opportunity or civic engagement. Specifically, this presentation interrogates the movement of youth civic engagement across space, time, and scale within (and beyond) two digital media-based learning settings: 1) Nashville: Building Blocks (NBB), a youth-driven program at the Nashville: Public Library which challenged teen participants to engage with and re-imagine their city through the video game Minecraft; and 2) the Michigan Student Caucus (MSC), a partnership between the University of Michigan and the Michigan House of Representatives Special Commission on Civic Engagement that facilitates students’ debate, generation, and advocacy of creative public policy. Our presentation of NBB and MSC addresses outstanding questions about digital media and youth civic engagement, specifically: “What programs and projects serve as exemplars that can push our thinking?”

In describing both programs, this presentation re-imagines digitally mediated forms of youth civic engagement, calling for connected learning approaches to foster civic engagement opportunities that move across space, time, and scale. Doing so, we assert, (re)orients how connected learning can be conceived and designed for more equitable participation and learning. We refer to civic engagement that extends across space, time, and scale as civic geographies. Here, we specifically highlight how NBB – like MSC – buoys participants’ civic geographies.

In NBB, interest-driven, production-centered activity facilitated civic engagement opportunities that moved across multiple spaces, temporalities, and scales. In terms of space, varied forms of civic engagement occurred in the digital space of Minecraft, in the physical space of the room, as well as in the city of Nashville. Regarding time, the program continually responded to emerging urban planning initiatives, like re-imagining neighborhood communities, while also enabling youth to work at their own pace (from hours to months). One participant, who often worked on the server from home as well as from the library, noted that this approach was different than school, where things like worksheets had to be done within specific temporal parameters. Finally, concerning scale, civic geographies lets us think about the nuances of being an engaged citizen: some participants only collaborated virtually with others in-game, others collaborated physically in the room that they played in, all the while thinking, talking, and reflecting on spatial issues in their home community.

Given our emphasis on civic geographies – and our broader analysis of both NBB and MSC – we urge connected learning researchers and practitioners to further foster youth civic opportunity by questioning the agential cuts made during civic enactments. That is, in what ways do teachers, students, and mentors care for “this place” rather than “that place”? And, in doing so, how might any social actor, though particularly youth, become more responsible for “here” rather than “there”? As a lens through which to approach political opportunity, civic geographies lets us question the limits to responsibility and how are they are worked through in different spatiotemporal arrangements.

Organizers: Katie Davis, Julie Campbell, Cecilia Aragon
Presenters: Abigail Evans, David Randall, Sarah Evans

This presentation explores open learning in the context of youth’s participation in online fan fiction communities. Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from shallow repositories of pop culture, growing evidence indicates that sophisticated informal learning is taking place in these communities. Our research team conducted an in-depth, nine-month ethnographic investigation of online fan fiction communities, including participant observations, fan fiction author interviews, and a thematic analysis of 4,500 fan fiction reader reviews. Our analyses led to the development of a theory we term distributed mentoring, which draws on and extends Edwin Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition.

We found that members of fan fiction communities spontaneously mentor each other in open forums and via story reviews, and that this mentoring builds upon previous interactions in a way that is distinct from traditional forms of mentoring and made possible by the affordances of open, networked publics. The seven characteristics of distributed mentoring include: aggregation, accretion, acceleration, abundance, availability, asynchronicity, and affect. Together, these characteristics underscore the open, inclusive, and participatory nature of learning in informal online communities like fan fiction forums.

Distributed mentoring holds important implications for understanding the processes associated with open learning, including open-ended exploration, forming new connections among ideas and people, and self-directed learning. In this presentation, we will consider the findings from this study in light of ongoing efforts to leverage networked technologies to build a more participatory and equitable culture for diverse learners.

Organizer: Jorge Lopez
Presenter: Jorge Lopez, Veronica Garcia, Rudy Dueñas
Discussant: Ernest Morrell

This session addresses the power of new media literacies in the lives of urban adolescents and how a critical media education can be implemented in secondary curriculum to raise achievement and social responsibility. Presenters will share innovative lessons and units as well as samples of student work, some which will be presented by youth.

Students attending schools in the United States need to be made more explicitly aware of their relationships with the media. Youth need an education that imparts the skills they need to powerfully consume and produce new media. We are calling this set of skills a critical media pedagogy, which will foster academic literacy development, academic achievement, and civic engagement in city schools. This session addresses the power of new media in the lives of urban adolescents and how a critical media education can be implemented in a K12 standards-based curriculum and school community.

Critical media education teaches critical reasoning skills to decode and analyze texts produced across many genres including but not limited to: television, film, music, the Internet, print media, magazines, murals, posters, t-shirts, billboards, social networking sites, and mobile media content. A critical media perspective also enlightens students to the potential that they have, as media producers, to shape the world they live in and to help to turn it into the world they imagine inside and outside the classroom.

This session will describe the applications of critical media pedagogy across English and Social Studies classrooms. Two Social Studies teachers and one English teacher will share curriculum units and projects that were created from a critical media perspective and philosophy. We will also offer rich examples of critical media education in the third space, collective spaces outside the formal classroom setting such as after school clubs, or programs where students are empowered and learn critical advocacy. An education professor will describe the work of youth who engaged in participatory action research using a critical media curriculum.

Educators, youth, and participants will have the opportunity to dialogue about issues related to the implementation of critical media education in their own schools, such as media literacy across content areas, resources for media production, teachers as media producers, and advocacy.

Organizer: Yasmin Kafai
Presenters: Deborah Fields, Yasmin Kafai, Michael Lachney, Kristin Searle
Discussant: Shirin Vossoughi

Much attention has focused on the lack of diversity in commercial maker activities, such as the covers and content of Make magazine, as Leah Buechley pointed out in her keynote address at the 2013 FabLearn conference. Far less attention has been paid to what makers themselves are producing and how this impacts magnitude and diversity of participation. In this panel we plan to turn our attention to the other side, maker communities, their members and productions to examine what materials, kits, and tools are available for making, who is doing the making, how processes of making unfold, and what is being made. Our goal is to identify some of the blind spots and to discuss what we can do to increase diversity and equity in makers, making, and made things, thus aligning ourselves with DML’s 2015 theme of Equity by Design. Our presentations and discussions will focus on two key dimensions of diversity and equity: (1) availability and levels of participation and (2) approaches to promote and increase cultural diversity in youth DIY media productions. We will begin with an overview of available content for creative production and participation in over 140 DIY media sites conducted by Sarah Grimes and Deborah Fields (http://semaphore.utoronto.ca/diymedia/index.php) and then examine participants and programming projects in the Scratch online community. Deborah Fields, Yasmin Kafai and Michael Giang will share findings from an analysis of over 5,000 online participants with a focus on how newcomers and girls fare in their overall participation and program complexity compared to other members (www.scratch.mit.edu). The next set of presentations will illustrate how culturally aware designs and culturally responsive making can address makers’ blindspots. Michael Lachney introduces a critique of the “content agnostic” design position, in which he shows a “basin of attraction” towards commercial content for children working in purportedly “open” visual programming environments. He contrasts this critique with his own work on the “content aware” design approach to programmable Culturally Situated Design Tools (csdt.rpi.edu). The youth-produced documentary Knit, Purl, Compute shows evidence that content aware educational technology design can be culturally specific while also allowing youth to transfer mathematical knowledge across cultural domains, in this case knitting and Native American beadwork. Finally, Kristin Searle will showcase her efforts to connect educational maker activities with heritage craft practices in an American Indian community school. The work brings together hands-on, project-based learning with craft practices and Indigenous Knowledge Systems, broadening not only who is making but what is being made. Findings highlight the importance of craft practices as an initial point of connection, the importance of allowing space for design agency in engaging students in making activities, and the ways in which the tangible dimension of maker artifacts facilitated connections across multiple dimensions of students’ lives. Our discussant Shirin Vossoughi will focus on challenges in identifying and increasing awareness of blind spots in maker communities and possibilities for intervention to increase access, diversity, and participation.

Organizers: Cati de los Rios, Arturo Molina, Alexandra Thomas

Immigrant students’ schooling experiences continue to be negatively affected by the pervasive anti-migrant climate of the 21st century (Santa Ana & Gonzalez, 2011). Empirical studies of cultural diversity in literacy education have shown that the experiences of immigrant students are marked by a disjuncture between the cultural and linguistic resources in their community and those resources that are valued for learning in schools (Pacheco, 2012). Immigrant youth navigate the terrain between their diverse linguistic and cultural experiences in and out of school using a dynamic set of meaning making practices, such as linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, gestural, and multimodal (Filipiak & Miller, 2014).

These practices often intersect with digital literacies that youth have acquired in informal learning environments and social networks as well as formal schooling (Alvermann et al., 2012; Pew 2013; Vasudaven, 2008). This diverse panel of youth, educators, and researchers from California and Georgia will explore how engaging immigrant youth in their repertoire of multimodal literacies can create authentic, accessible, and supportive learning. Specifically, this panel puts youth, practitioners, and researchers from two different communities in conversation to discuss how they have become youth researchers, critical media makers, and community advocates. Both communities aim to not only develop critical literacies, but also cultivate knowledge and skill sets that would help communities better address their material conditions within a daunting anti-migrant hegemony (Gonzales, 2013).

The first project explores how a high school Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies course with students from immigrant backgrounds was designed to leverage and facilitate the movement of representational resources across home, school and civic spaces. Part of this curriculum includes a community social justice posada advocating for comprehensive immigration reform that is organized alongside day laborers from a local day labor center. These panelist will examine how students’ producing a video on immigration allows them to bring the voices from their community in dialogue with voices from civic institutions and public discourses on immigration.

The second project is an ongoing critical media-making workshop series for immigrant youth through a community based organization. In these workshops, an inquiry group of immigrant youth engage in critical discussion about their lives, school, community while collaboratively and individually creating multimodal compositions to share with a variety of audiences on these topics. These panelists will describe how collaboratively planned and facilitated critical media-making workshops disrupt the teacher/student and traditional/nontraditional “literacies” paradigm often perpetuated in educative spaces.

This panel will address questions posed in the “Digital Media and Youth Civic Engagement” strand, such as: how do digital media projects promote critical civic engagement as well as academic literacies? What does it look like when youth and adults collaboratively plan and facilitate media-making workshops? During this panel, the project teams will share media created from their projects, discuss the affordances of their curriculum, pedagogy, and learning environments; as well as invite session participants in sharing their experiences and knowledge. This dialogue will add to our collective understanding of how multimodal and digital literacies are developed, enacted, and contribute to more inclusive educative experiences for immigrant youth.

Organizers: Jane Margolis, Kimberly Scott
Presenters: Jane Margolis, Kimberly Scott, Joanna Goode, Nancy Se
Discussant: Nelson Mauricio, Reyna Carias, Floyd Anderson, Diamond Wheeler

Topic Significance and Relation to Conference Theme. In keeping with the theme of this year’s conference, this panel examines the efforts of two culturally responsive computing programs designed to foster greater equity for girls and youth of color. In so doing, we also contribute to the conference goal to “move beyond a focus on access to tools,” turning our attention toward youth participation in actually creating the tools and technologies of the future. Indeed, while girls and youth of color experience increasing access and are often avid users of technologies, (e.g., playing games, operating cell phones, making documentaries) they remain significantly underrepresented when it comes to the creation and invention of these technologies (e.g., programming, creating apps, designing games). In 2012, women received only 18% of computing degrees – down from 37% in 1985 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). The picture is equally bleak in industry, where women’s participation in technology professions has fallen from 37% in 1990-91 to 26% in 2013 (U.S. Dept. of Labor, 2013). And these numbers are even more troubling when considering the state of affairs for women of color. For example, African-American women hold only 3% of computing occupations, while Latinas hold only 1% of these occupations. Latinos and African American men also are underrepresented in computing occupations (5% and 4%, respectively) (U.S. Dept. of Labor, 2013). These trends are of particular concern if underrepresented groups are to have an equitable voice in creating the new technologies that will shape future worlds.

To help reverse this underrepresentation, we will explore the design and outcomes of two culturally responsive computing programs. With a perspective rooted in intersectionality, critical race, and feminist theories, these programs were explicitly designed with equity in mind. The first program, Exploring Computer Science, occurs during the regular public school day and enrolls students whose demographics (75% Latino, 10% African American; 45% girls) stand in sharp contrast to other computer science courses in the same district. The second program, CompuGirls, occurs after school and enrolls primarily Latinas and African American girls, often from under-resourced school districts. Both programs employ culturally responsive pedagogies, drawing on students’ existing strengths and prior experiences to further develop their abilities and identities as technologists. Both programs also involve students in examining social inequities and in learning to create technologies that address these inequities in their local communities.

Format. Panelists will first provide information on each program’s design and goals for increasing equity in computing. Panelists will then respond to moderator and audience questions focused on the successes and challenges in designing these programs for equity; key insights learned from the similarities and differences between the two programs; new questions about equity that these endeavors raise; and important future directions. The moderator will encourage audience discussion throughout the session. We also plan to include a youth panelist who will discuss her perspective

Ignite talks are radically different from traditional conference talks. We’re looking for humor, wit, energy and inspiration to be packed into one powerful five-minute talk. Visual and conceptual impact is also a must. To view ignite talks from last year’s DML Conference, click here.

If you haven’t seen an ignite talk, be sure to do a quick search for “ignite talks” to watch some of the thousands of Ignite Talks out there or check out these sites for a quick tutorial:
http://ignite.oreilly.com
http://www.speakerconfessions.com/2009/06/how-to-give-a-great-ignite-talk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_(event)

The DML2015 Ignite Talk events will be Chaired and hosted by Andrew Slack.

Ignite Talks events will take place:

• Thursday, June 11, 2015  5:30-6:30 PM – California Ballroom [watch these Ignite Talks LIVE]
• Friday, June 12, 2015       5:30-6:30 PM – California Ballroom [watch these Ignite Talks LIVE]

This year’s line up:

 On-line Registration is now open!

Full Conference Registration Site: https://www.faingroup.com/DML2015/

Please note that all accepted participants must pay registration fees in order to present in the DML2015 Conference.

Registration Fee Schedule
Online Registration Rates
Professionals: $150
Students: $100

Cancellation Policy

Cancellations will incur a $25 processing fee. Cancellations made close to the conference date are non-refundable.

Follow Along Online
Whether you are attending DML2015 in-person or catching the highlights remotely, we encourage your realtime participation. Check out the social media sites in the footer below and Follow @dmlconference and #DML2015 on Twitter for announcements, news & updates.

Should you have questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us via email at dmlhub@hri.uci.edu.

Critical to the success of the connected learning movement is equitable access to learning opportunities.  However, defining equitable access, tracking and measuring impact on engagement and learning outcomes are areas of potential growth for the DML community.  In her talk, Nichole Pinkard will use the development of the Chicago connected learning ecology of which she has been a principal architect of as a cofounder of Digital Youth Network,  YOUmedia, Chicago Learning Network (now called HIVE), and Chicago City of Learning, to put forward design principles for developing equitable connected learning communities.

watch this Plenary Panel LIVE

Coffee service.

Organizer: Devin Parsons, Rachel Pohl
Participants: Steve Bowen, Jennie Magiera, Arthi Krishnaswami, Danica Petroshius
Moderator: Cathy Casserly

The Aspen Task Force on Learning and the Internet released a report in June 2014 entitled Learner at the Center of a Networked World. Aligned with the goals of Connected Learning and personalized learning, the report calls for action steps that recognize and forward a broad vision of empowering all students to learn any time, any place, and at any pace, both in-school and beyond. In order to reach this vision, all learners must have equitable access to trusted environments for networked learning, which means learning environments in the digital age where thoughtful student data protection policies and practices allow for learning opportunities that are not inhibited by privacy fears.

Aspen Task Force members believe now is the time for a new vision of learning that captures the transformation the Internet presents. To maximize new learning opportunities, students must have access to learning networks that allow them to be fully connected with others who can support their learning and with platforms to share their ideas and skills widely and safely. A key element of new learning networks are digital environments that use student data, such as social networks, mobile apps, online games, and participatory websites. These resources need to be trusted if they are to be used for effective models of learning – meaning trust in relationships among teachers, mentors, parents, and students and trust in the medium itself. Trust is a foundational need to ensure the ultimate success of all learners in the modern era.

Practices with respect to any one student’s data are governed by policies on local, state, and federal levels. This panel seeks to connect the Aspen Task Force vision and Connected Learning to the federal, state, and local policy contexts. Privacy policies at all levels can help or hinder progress toward the goals of Connected Learning, and we hope to ignite attendee interest in becoming advocates for policies that will support the creation of and equitable access to trusted learning environments. A moderator from the Aspen Task Force will provide background on this broader vision and guide a conversation among panelists with federal, state, and local privacy policy expertise around how best to advance equitable DML learning opportunities. Panelists will also host a question-and-answer session to connect their expertise with experiences of people in the field.

· Cathy Casserly, Fellow, The Aspen Institute, Communications & Society Program
· Steve Bowen, Director of Innovation, Council of Chief State School Officers
· Jennie Magiera, Digital-Learning Coordinator, Academy for Urban School Leadership
· Arthi Krishnaswami, Founder and CEO, Ryecatcher
· Danica Petroshius, Principal, Penn Hill Group

Organizer: Meryl Alper
Presenter: Meryl Alper, Morgan G. Ames, Nicholas C. Wilson, Mathew H. Rafalow
Discussant: Ellen Seiter

Infrastructure—the arrangement of sociocultural, political, and technical systems—shapes the design and deployment of educational technologies. This includes teacher and parent organizations, local and national school policies, and wifi access. In an unevenly networked society, infrastructures can both foster equity and perpetuate inequality. Science and technology studies scholars Star and Ruhleder (1996) point out that infrastructure, which tends to work invisibly in the background, often only becomes visible when it breaks.

This panel focuses on breakdowns in the infrastructure of educational technology, specifically the distribution and deployment of tablets and laptops for individual student use in educational environments. The goal of the panel is to make visible the dialectic between “openness” and “closure” that these infrastructural breakdowns enact. For example, when are rollout projects understood to begin and end, and how is this reflected infrastructurally? How does infrastructural support (or lack thereof) create learning opportunities for some students while constructing barriers for others? What tensions between open-source and proprietary software and hardware manifest in these programs? Like the Golden Snitch in Harry Potter, what possibilities open at the close?

Four researchers will each present a unique case of educational technology rollouts. These case studies differ on a number of levels, such as scale, geography, and type of device. These rollout programs are united though in their stated ideals of “opening” learning for various populations (e.g. youth with disabilities, high schoolers, students in the Global South). Following the presentations, Ellen Seiter will respond and facilitate an audience discussion.

Meryl Alper will discuss how one large urban school district is managing special education students’ use of iPads as assistive speech aids alongside a massive rollout of iPads in the general curriculum. The two projects converge and diverge in various ways, revealing new insights into the complexity of educational technology infrastructures.

Morgan Ames will discuss the twilight of a One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project that was considered exemplary until it ran out of money. While negotiating which campaigns to keep, repairs to prioritize, and infrastructure to maintain has undercut the project’s commitment to equity, it has also opened it to discourses about technology in education beyond OLPC.

Matt Rafalow will discuss how two middle schools differently negotiate Chromebook rollouts. At a school that fosters collaboration among faculty, “glitches” during classroom instruction are perceived as collective learning opportunities with students. At another school, mishaps are seen as threats and signs of teacher and student failure, closing learning opportunities.

Nick Wilson will discuss student resistance to technology-based learning activities at a mid-sized working class high school, and how a lack of infrastructural support for implementing student-centered instruction undermined the goal of the school’s laptop program to make learning fun and accessible to all students.

Organizers: Rik Panganiban, Zakiya Harris
Presenters: Matt Williams, Ingrid Dahl

In the DML community, we should all be familiar with the Connected Learning paradigm and what it defines as the main components of learning for young people. I.e. learning should be:

– Interest-powered

– Production Centered

– Shared Purpose

– Peer Supported

– Academically Oriented

– and Openly Networked

It makes a great infographic and espouses goals that we most of us without reservation would get behind.

But how do the Connected Learning principles actually operate in practice? What is the real experience of institutions and youth attempting to embody these principles? For example, can a youth project be both “interest-powered” and “academically oriented”? Is learning truly “openly networked” when youth face real physical and financial barriers to entry? Using the frame of the San Francisco Bay Area (which encompasses 101 cities and municipalities), we will share out some of the real challenges, insights and successes we’ve encountered in the past year as we seek to expand the opportunity space for young people in our communities.

Speakers on the panel will include representatives of the founding committee of Hive Bay Area : Bay Area Video Coalition, the California Academy of Sciences, KQED, the San Francisco Public Library, and the director of Hive Bay Area. We have compelling stories to share from our experiences organizing efforts like “The Mix” learning lab at the San Francisco Public Library, the Bay Area Youth Media Network Festival, Teen Science Night at the Cal Academy, and the “Life is Living” Family Festival. After short presentations, we want to leave time for people to share their own challenges and successes putting Connected Learning into practice in their communities.

Organizer: Tony Streit
Presenters: Patricia Cogley, Isabel Bustillos, Kareen Matushek

Youth media and creative technology programs can be an entry point to young people exploring and creating change within their local community. Young people may examine personal experiences with bullying or access to clean water in their neighborhood. Dedicated mentors and media production practices facilitate new learning and deeper understanding of issues. Research and interviews can uncover new information and lead to new experiences. The resulting media or technology pieces is a foundation for community dialogues or social change campaigns resulting.

This discussion will address how media making supports young people’s work as changemakers. Additionally, it will explore how changemaking efforts can lead to stronger mediamakers. It will feature young leaders and digital media artists from three global models of young people using media to create change:

Started in 2006, Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) is the largest global youth media initiative, engaging with over 5,000 educators and 190,000 youth from more than 100 countries. The core philosophy of AYV is to empower young people to “Create with Purpose.” This challenge to young people is intended to foster a more intentional strategy for media making – one that is purposeful, designed to have impact and effect change, in their lives and communities and the world we inhabit together. AYV is collaboratively developed and managed by the Adobe Foundation and the Educational Development Center.

TakingITGlobal is one of the world’s leading networks of young people learning about, engaging with, and working towards tackling global challenges. Youth around the world actively engaged and connected in shaping a more inclusive, peaceful and sustainable world. Through a collaboration with Adobe Youth Voices, TIG has trained ovver 8,000+ youth participants with media making skills in over 40 countries, creating space for young people to share their perspective and solutions to complex local issues. Over 20 youth in TIG’s network have been finalists and winners in international media festivals.

Ashoka’s Youth Ventures program shares a vision of an “Everyone is A Changemaker” world – a world that responds quickly and effectively to social challenges and where each individual has the freedom, confidence and societal support to drive change. Through training and mentorship, Ashoka Youth Ventures supports young people to have the transformative experience of launching and leading their own lasting social ventures. Creating media has become a key component of Ashoka’s initiative, so that young people can raise awareness about the issues that are important to them, and to engage audiences in continuing to participate in their social ventures.

The three organizations have collaborated to provide young people with a portfolio of specialized tools to develop skills in communication and media making to raise awareness, support their community-minded entrepreneurship, and spread their changemaking stories.

Organizer: Rafi Santo
Presenters: Dixie Ching, Chris Hoadley, Kim Gomez, Leah Gilliam

Hive Learning Networks have been a flagship initiative of the Digital Media and Learning community, taking visions of Connected Learning and applying them to city-scale models that link museums, libraries and community based educational organizations in urban centers. Hive Research Lab, an applied research partner of Hive NYC Learning Network, investigates how Hives operate both as “Networks for Learning”, providing a range of opportunities for youth to pursue interests that lead to positive outcomes, and as “Networks that Learn”, where participating organizations circulate knowledge, learn best practices, and collaborate to design new learning experiences. In this session, we share findings from a two year research-practice partnership (Coburn, Penuel & Geil, 2013) with Hive NYC and offer lessons these networks hold for those interested in advancing Connected Learning more broadly as well as reflections on opportunities and challenges presented by such long-term research-practice collaborations.

As ‘Networks for Learning’, we focus our research on issues of youth pathways with Hives and the dynamics involved in pursuing interest-driven learning across temporal, geographic and social landscapes. We center analysis on how teens go about developing a ‘social learning ecology’ around an interest – the material, knowledge-building, emotional, institutional and brokering relationships that allow them to pursue that interest. In considering where the opportunities associated with Hive Learning Networks fit into this picture, we focus our gaze particularly on the practices of brokering new learning opportunities for young people at the conclusion of programs in ways that allow them to continue to explore these interests. Finally, we’ll share approaches we’ve taken to strengthen Hives as ‘networks for learning’ through design-based research interventions created in collaboration with network members.

As ‘Networks that Learn’, our research on Hives looks at issues of organizational innovation; what practices Hive organizations utilize as they develop new areas of work, how inter-organizational relationships between Hive members support innovation, and the ways that the Hive network acts as an ‘infrastructure’ for innovation. We’ll share patterns of both informal support that organizations provide one another as they innovate, such as giving advice and feedback , as well as patterns of formal collaboration between organizations both to develop new initiatives and scale existing ones. Finally, we will share emergent research on how innovation practices around ‘working open’ that have roots in open source software are circulating into the ways that Hives operate as ‘networks that learn’, and the kinds of tensions that emerge as these practices enter a context focused on equity and learning.

Finally, we share findings on the role of long term research-practice partnerships in a connected learning context. As the DML community moves to more deeply integrate research insights with on-the-ground, everyday work of connected learning practitioners, we will offer perspectives on how to do so in meaningful and productive ways.

References:

Coburn, C. E., Penuel, W. R., & Geil, K. E. (2013). Research-practice partnerships: A strategy for leveraging research for educational improvement in school districts. New York: William T. Grant Foundation.

Organizers: Paul Mihailidis, Eric Gordon
Presenters: Joe Kahne, Sangita Shresthova, Renee Hobbs

Across neighborhoods, cities, and countries throughout the world, people are finding new ways to share ideas, express opinions, and collaborate to build new forms of engagement local, national and global constituents. The opportunities that this new landscape presents are abundant. From open data and public discourse, to civic innovation and socio-political movements, civic technologies are fundamentally reshaping what it means to be a citizen today.

Civic media implies the adoption or invention of new technologies with the intentionality of social, political, or cultural change. The practices associated with civic media range from government “engaging citizens” to activist groups coordinating across the globe for collective action. The common thread is the design or appropriation of tools that create, coordinate or facilitate what can be called “civic” acts, or actions taken in the world to benefit a group or community beyond one’s intimate sphere.

There is a growing field of scholarship and applied work in civic media. Several academic journals and programs throughout the world have developed over the last five years. Journals such as New Media and Society and Convergence have increased their focus in this field of scholarship, art schools such as Pasadena Art Center and Emily Carr have developed design programs in civic and social practices, and research universities such as MIT have developed centers in Civic Media. More and more employment opportunities in government, community media, non-governmental organizations, digital agencies, and cultural organizations focus on the increasingly complex space of design, study and implementation of civic media.

This panel will map the emerging study of civic media to pedagogy and scholarship in the Digital Media and Learning purview. It will present various cases studies and theoretical perspectives that specifically explore the relationship between citizens, technologies and learning in digital culture. Papers will explore engagement games, media literacy and civic voices, the role of fan culture and civic imagination in participatory culture, pedagogical approaches to civic learning, research methodologies that support civic media research, and political constraints in civic media spaces.

Contributors to this panel are authors in the forthcoming Civic Media Reader (MIT Press, 2015). The text will feature 21 chapters and over 120 case studies will support the book by being available online through the digital publishing tool Scalar.

Organizer: Erica Halverson, Kimberly Sheridan
Presenters: Breanne Litts, Abigail Konopasky, Lisa Brahms
Discussant: Crystle Martin

In this panel we share findings from our work in the Learning in the Making Lab that focus on understanding identity in making and makerspaces. While Dale Dougherty – often called the father of the maker movement – asserts that everyone is a maker (2012), it is not clear that individuals and groups automatically take on identities of participation within the maker landscape. This is especially important given critiques about the white male dominance that is often asserted in public constructions of who gets to be a maker. We seek to understand when and how identities are constructed through participation in maker processes.

In earlier work, we have described how participating in art-making processes can support both individualistic and collectivistic conceptions of identity (Halverson, Lowenhaupt, Gibbons & Bass, 2009). Researchers who study identity development in art-making tend to conceive of “identity” as a property of an individual (e.g. Fleetwood, 2005; Wiley & Feiner, 2001; Worthman, 2002). However, in some communities, the collective group itself has a prominent role in both the process and the products of students’ art (Bing-Canar & Zerkel, 1998; Mayer, 2000). In more collectivist-oriented communities, groups (as opposed to individuals) often determine the topics of youth art and co-compose the products, taking over from one another based on availability, expertise, and interest. Halverson et al. (2009) provided evidence that adolescents use artistic production to explore collective identity development, specifically in rural communities that orient their young people toward community-oriented visions of identity.

Our research findings confirm and extend earlier observations around identity and participation in artistic production. First, we find that making affords a range of identity stances – artist, engineer, architect, and entrepreneur – all of which are equally viable within the makerspace. However, we also find that makerspaces construct and communicate desired identity stances through their public communications in ways that likely constrain who comes to see themselves as makers. So while making activities support a range of identities in practice, makerspaces seem to have a strong sense of ethos that constrains who can identify as a maker.

The question “what makes a maker” is a fascinating conversation to have in light of potential parallels with schooling. In studies of schooling and learning we never ask, “what makes a student?” and we rarely ask, “what makes a learner?” When we do, the inquiry is framed in terms of the sociocognitive habits of individuals or in terms of becoming a learner despite school (see, for example work by Nasir, Hand, & Taylor (2008) that explores identity and math practices outside the classroom). Understanding how young people become makers, what their identity kit looks like, and how identities are afforded and constrained in makerspaces has the potential to contribute to the conversation around competency-based learning across the contexts of young peoples’ lives.

Organizers: Sandra Sarmonpal, Hiroo Kato, Kim Welch
Presenters: Moses Okumu, Phillip Egessa, Traci Garff, Antha Holt, Janice Samuels, Eric Hamilton

Conditions of schools in Low-Income Countries (LICs) are well documented: large class sizes, poor engagement, high dropout rates, and a shortage of materials and qualified teachers compounded by the challenges of extreme poverty. Typically missing from this dialog are the voices of the people who teach and learn in these schools every day. This panel discussion gives voice to those teachers and students in Sub-Saharan schools through two types of digital media: documentary footage from three Ugandan schools, and interviews of teachers and students captured during their involvement in digital media workshops. These interviews demonstrate the potential of digital media to empower teachers and students in these communities. The specific approach this session will share involves leveraging the power of the global maker movement in the context of formal school learning, by which teachers and students collaborate to co-create media artifacts for teaching, especially short videos. This panel includes two phases. First, we provide background using documentary footage of Ugandan students and teachers describing how large class sizes (as large as 120), a lack of resources, and limited availability of quality teachers affect their daily classroom experiences; and second, we show evidence from our research that demonstrates how co-created digital media can improve these conditions and alter classroom dynamics for learning.

Background. In 1997, Uganda’s government began a universal primary education initiative which led to an increase in enrollment from 2.8 million in 1997 to 7.6 million in 2004 (Nishimura, Yamano, & Sasaoka, 2008). This impressive increase led to diminishing quality, primarily due to unmatched infrastructure that resulted in a shortage of resources and teachers. Our footage shows students and teachers describing how these conditions impact their teaching and learning, including the cyclically negative effect of poverty on educational attainment. Efforts at poverty alleviation require unsustainable levels of support, and often leave communities with less self-sufficiency and greater dependency on external agencies.

Local Solutions. However, technology provides a sustainable path forward. Teachers and students in Uganda and Kenya describe ways that locally produced digital media provides relevancy, increases engagement, promotes agency, and allows the learning environment to more efficiently cater to large class sizes. The system relies on the community to produce curricular resources, strengthening community resourcefulness and ensuring contextual relevancy. This tool empowers both students and teachers to provide solutions for their schools and their communities. Also of note are the locally conceived innovative solutions building on freely available resources. Two examples will be presented: first, an LMS system developed by a Ugandan teacher utilizing WordPress and Facebook, and second, StudyGateway, a repository and personalized learning platform developed by Ugandan social entrepreneurs.

Organizers: Janeen Lee, Heather Harkess, Fahad Ahmed

Virtual exchange programs are tapping into advances in new media technologies to connect youth across borders, fostering the skills and capacities they need to succeed, and lessening the potential for global misunderstanding. Virtual exchange programs also equip a new generation of youth with key skills to effectively address 21st century opportunities and challenges of an increasingly inter-connected world: the ability to communicate effectively with people from diverse backgrounds, to think critically, to collaborate in teams to solve complex problems, and to work effectively with technology as it continues to change. Key to taking this impact to scale is the collaboration across countries and sectors. In the summer of 2014, DePaul University’s Digital Youth Network (DYN) partnered with Soliya and Search for Common Ground (SFCG) to bring twenty youth from Morocco (representing multiple cities around the country) and Chicago together for a five-week cross cultural virtual exchange program titled Digital Exchange Society. Using synchronous and asynchronous platforms, participants engaged in a weekly, three-hour long virtual exchange using Soliya’s curriculum, facilitation model and platform and also interacted with one another through the creation of various digital artifacts and reflections shared via the iRemix platform. Participants in this panel will learn how virtual exchange experiences can facilitate compelling learning experiences for youth and how the Digital Exchange Society utilized new media technologies to link young people across cultures in sustained and meaningful ways.

12774 Individual Talk ED: Computational Thinking, Digital Literacy, and Civic Engagement: Toward Democratic Possibilities and Designs
Presenters: Sepehr Vakil, Shirin Vossoughi

What are the possibilities for linking digital media-related learning to an equity agenda that centers social, economic, and political justice? Exploring this question requires a clear conception of equity in the context of digital media-related learning and practice. In this talk, we review how “equity” has been conceptualized within technology and digital media communities, as well as how learning has been theorized and studied. Against this backdrop, we argue that by politicizing both equity and learning frameworks we can more powerfully connect digital media-related learning to broader visions of justice and dignity.

Within the fields of technology and digital media related learning, equity has been largely characterized as a matter of access. While we recognize the importance of opening pathways for learning into these fields, we argue a sole focus on “access” leaves us vulnerable to equity blind spots. We argue these blind spots have emerged due to the inadequate interrogation of the larger sociopolitical contexts within which digital media and learning are embedded. In this talk, we draw from other STEM oriented disciplines, such as mathematics, science, and engineering education, which have began to sharpen their equity conceptualizations by asking questions such as “Access to what?” and “Design and innovation for what purposes?” and more broadly, STEM education “toward what ends?” (Vossoughi & Vakil, in press),” – questions that begin to explore intersections between epistemology, knowledge and power. We argue that exploring the politics of digital media related learning will similarly help illuminate the assumptions and epistemologies that are embedded within mainstream educational approaches not often considered as “political” (Booker et al., 2014; Medin & Bang, 2014).

Tightly interwoven with conceptions of equity are questions of epistemology and learning. What constitutes knowledge in the fields of digital media and technology? From Ferguson to Gaza, Tripoli to Tehran, and many places in between, young people are finding creative ways to use, manipulate, and design digital technologies as a form of civic and political action. Youth are often learning these technologies with and from their peers, born out of a necessity to voice their concerns about issues that are of dire consequence to their daily experiences with marginalization. Yet, educational research on technological and digital literacy development has not, thus far, taken the opportunity to learn from the rich practices of youth around the world who are using, designing, and manipulating technologies for civic, social, and political purposes. We argue that analyses of learning in these settings can provide insights useful for designing formal learning spaces that deepen student engagement with technology, and also contribute to extending sociocultural theories of human development by explicitly attending to the political dimensions of the learning process.

Building on studies of learning in the context of valued cultural practices (Nasir & Hand, 2006; Gutierrez, 1999), we offer an emergent framework for 1) studying the political practices involved in young people’s engagement with technology and digital media and 2) designing educational experiences that leverage these practices to expand definitions of equity and learning across school and out-of-school settings.

12671 Individual Talk ED: The Critical Curation of a Collaborative Media Feed
Presenters:Kyle Booten

Too often social media is framed in individualistic terms: who we follow on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram is not just a personal matter but also a political one, since these decisions determine the media and opinions that reach us. In response to the ways that these platforms mediate more and more of our activities and capture more and more of our attention, philosopher Bernard Stiegler (2010) has called for a “politics of attention” through which we as users develop thoughtful, beneficial, and critical ways of consuming media on social networks.

This presentation reports on one classroom intervention designed to foster such a politics.

Over the course of a semester, an undergraduate education class maintained a single collaborative Twitter account. While researchers have explored Twitter’s usefulness for course-related communication (Grosseck and Holotescu, 2008; Kassens-Noor, 2012), this intervention encouraged students to focus specifically on the ways that Twitter can be used to consume media from people outside the class. By following others’ accounts, a Twitter user’s timeline fills up with tweets promulgated by those accounts, creating an endless pastiche of texts—the “feed.” In this “social design experiment” (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2009), students were asked to curate the class feed in ways that responded to a series of questions: how can we shape a feed that is interesting and relevant to the class? How do we find the “best” accounts out of the millions on Twitter? According to what criteria do we judge the feed?

In collaboration with the teacher-researcher, the students developed new practices for collectively managing the Twitter feed as well as new standards for evaluating its content, often in ways that reflected the class’s thematic focus on equity. During periodic reflection exercises, they thought metacognitively about the makeup of the class feed, bringing to light the ways that it came to be dominated by tweets that were Western rather than global, institutional rather than personal, and technocratic rather than critical. They then followed and unfollowed users, trying to reshape the feed to better reflect a diversity of voices from out there in the Twitterverse. As the students themselves observed, however, the technologies themselves may be inherently biased against such “critical curation.”
Social media, used in thoughtful ways, can connect people globally across boundaries of difference, even providing opportunities for cosmopolitan interactions (Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010), but such beneficial interactions cannot be taken for granted. This case study suggests the importance of developing a new vocabulary for critiquing our own “personal” media feeds as public, political objects, and it posits the classroom as an important site in an emerging politics of attention.

12572 Individual Talk ED:Designing global beauty in an online discussion forum
Presenter: Grace Kim

New media present manifold opportunities for youth to access cultures that may be unavailable to them in their local contexts. Virtual spaces offer youth freedom to engage with geographically distant people and places, but how can practices in such spaces reinscribe existing social, cultural, and geographic marginalization? This short talk is part of a study that explored the literacy practices of youth who populate a multinational online forum devoted to Korean dramas. The source for data collection was a free website on which people post, watch, and discuss Asian dramas. Qualitative data included writing, visual images, and interactions created within the forum. Data revealed that the forum functions as a space in which youth living outside of Korea seek learning about Korean culture. In particular, this talk focuses on members’ discussion of beauty practices in Korea, but also their multimodal self-reflections on physical appearance. As members from developing and developed countries engage with each other about global beauty, a collective definition of it is complicated by their varied local economic, ethnic, and religious contexts. Literacy practices supported by the site’s design and reinforced by the social situation of the forum facilitate discourses that affirm and marginalize members. Through this illustrative case, I argue that along with hope for digital and networked media to mediate difference in positive ways, also necessary is critical analysis of how practices within such spaces can reify differences.

12381 Individual Talk ED:Leveraging historical practices to organize new futures: From promotoras to the Promotora App
Presenters: Leah Teeters Susan Jurow

Technology can be a tool for expanding freedom and a source of unfreedom. Kleine (2012) writes, technology is a source of unfreedom “…when people feel or are forced to use technologies which do not reflect the lives they value” (p. 42). This view on the powers of technology deeply informs our participatory design work with historically marginalized communities striving to create more equitable futures for themselves.

Our presentation draws on a multi-year study focused on learning in the food movement. We collaborate with a food justice organization working in a dominantly Mexican community where residents have limited access to healthy, affordable food. The organization appropriated a traditional, Latin American public health model that leverages the shared cultural resources between residents and resident-leaders, known as promotoras, to achieve desired health goals.

Working with promotoras, we co-designed a software application that extends the promotoras’ repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez, & Rogoff, 2003). The application allows them to collect data on their community work, which includes: growing backyard gardens with residents, promoting changes in community health, and developing their professional skills as community advocates. The application has enabled promotoras to reflect on the impact and value of their work. It has also increased their technological fluency, which could translate into future social and economic benefits. To capitalize on the full promise of this technology, while not further marginalizing non-dominant groups, we have designed research and design strategies that are (a) collaborative (b) leverage communities’ everyday practices and (c) promote the values of diverse stakeholders.

12583 Individual Talk: Learning Through Participation in Communities of Digital Fabrication: From an Ethnographic Study in FabLab Kamakura
Presenters: Rie Matsuura, Daisuke Okabe

Manufacturing in Japan is gradually changing as open-source grows with the maker movement, especially in FabLabs. Digital fabrication and personal fabrication is a new wave culture of mavens, who are devoted to an alternative to mass production and the mission of “how to make (almost) anything”.

The ethnographic research reviewed in this presentation focuses on the people who operate and occupy FabLab Kamakura in Japan (In Japan, there are 11 FabLabs in 2014). We conducted the research from the summer of 2013 to the winter of 2014, a combination of interviews and field observations of“Fab Learning”. Fab Lab Kamakura is aimed at achieving to lead generation and across national borders with input modern　method　in the context of “FabLab charter”. For example, when participants of training session learn how to machine tool for FabLab member and regain normal use of it, teaching each other. Crafts people at Kamakura area develop and conduct new program to combine with machine tool and one’s activity. FabLab Kamakura is a valuable venue for peer based exchanging information about, for example, digital fabricators, Arduino, crafts, textiles, and so on.

In this presentation, we analyzes the relationship between “participation and learning” represented in ethnographic case studies of ten informants aged 23-59 participating in common-based peer production site, the FabLab Kamakura community.

First we frame this work as an effort to think about their participation and learning using the concept of “wildfire activity theory” (Engeström, 2009) and “Legitimate peripheral participation (LPP)” from Lave and Wenger (1991).

Then we share an overview of FabLab culture in Japan and at FabLab Kamakura, in particular our methodology based on interviews and fieldwork. Using SCAT (Otani, 2008) methodology, we group our findings in two different categories: (1) learning through participation in FabLab Kamakura, (2) weak tie and mobility made visible through participation in wildfire activities. We conclude that participants at FabLab Kamakura are producing and designing available artifacts for their lives and works, and in doing so, they are designing their thoughts and themselves.

Engeström, Yrjö. (2009). Wildfire Activities: New Patterns of Mobility and Learning. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1(2).

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Otani, Takashi (2008). “”SCAT”” A Qualitative Data Analysis Method by Four-Step Coding : Easy Startable and Small Scale Data-Applicable Process of Theorization. Proceedings of Nagoya University. Graduage School of Education and Human Development,54(2),27-44.

Julia Stasch, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Connie Yowell, the foundation’s Director of Education, will discuss the future and new direction of the Digital Media and Learning portfolio.

On your own!

Quick Bites | Breakfast & Lunch

Starbucks, 735 S Figueroa St #308, $
Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, 801 W 7th St, $
Corner Bakery, 801 S Figueroa St, $
Le Pain Quotidien, 509 W 6th St, $$
Nazo’s Bakery, 810 W 8th St, $
Marie’s Coffee Deli, 731 W 7th St, $
Mendocino Farms, 444 S Flower St, OR 735 S Figueroa St, $$
Crepe X-press Cafe, 529 W 6th St, $
Madame Monsieur, 512 W 6th St, $$
Guisados DTLA, 541 S Spring St Ste. 101, $
Tulip Cafe, 628 Saint Vincent Ct, $$
Mexicali Taco & Co. – 702 N. Figueroa Street, $
Grand Central Market, 317 S Broadway, $
Natural Selection, 646 S Main St, $
Chipotle, 601 W 7th St, $
The Counter, 725 W 7th St, $
Local Table, 800 S Figueroa St. Ste 103, $$
Tierra Cafe, 818 Wilshire Blvd, $
Tossed, 700 Wilshire Blvd, $
Tender Greens, 505 W 6th St, $$
Gil’s Indian, 838 S Grand Ave, $$
FIG at 7th, 735 S Figueroa St (Starbucks, California Pizza Kitchen, Indus by Saffron, The Melt, Morton’s, Sprinkles, The Flying Pig, Twist Grill, Gentaro Soba, City Tavern, New Moon Cafe, Loteria Grill, Pizza Studio)

Open Spaces to Sit and Network

Library Bar, 630 W 6th St #116A
Pershing Square, 532 S Olive St
FIG at 7th, 735 S Figueroa St
LA Live, 777 Chick Hearn Ct
California Plaza, 350 S Grand Ave #A-4
Area around Disney Concert Hall, 111 S Grand Ave
Area around MOCA, 250 S Grand Ave
Area around LA Central Library, 630 West 5th Street

Dinner | Walking Distance

Italian
Bottega Louie, 700 S. Grand Avenue, $$
800 Degrees Pizzeria, 800 Wilshire Blvd, $$

Seafood
Water Grill, 544 S Grand Ave, $$$
Seasalt Fish Grill, 812 W 7th St, $$

American/Gastropub
Nickel Diner (BLD), 524 S Main St, $$
The Black Sheep, 126 E 6th St, $$
Engine Co No 28, 644 S Figueroa St, 1st Fl, $$
Blue Cow Kitchen, 350 S Grand Ave, $$
Industriel, 609 S Grand Ave, $$
Guild New American Bistro, 611 W 7th St, $$
Faith and Flower, 705 W 9th St, $$$

French
Cafe Pinot, 700 West Fifth St, $$$

Chinese and Japanese
Sugarfish, 600 W 7th St. Ste 150, $$$
Chaya Downtown, 525 S Flower St, $$$

Mexican
Mas Malo, 515 W. 7th Street, $$

Mediterranean
10e, 532 S Olive St, $$

African
The Briks, 1111 S Hope St. Ste 110, $$

Organizer: Amy Eshleman
Participants: Sybil Madison-Boyd, Cathy Lewis Long, Ed Meier, Michael Robbins, Jennifer Humke

In our increasingly complex world, learning must expand beyond classroom doors to fully engage young people and provide the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. These young minds, many of whom live in some of our most underserved communities, deserve a life path that provides equal access to opportunity, is driven by their personal passions, and reimagines learning as not just “something you do” but as “something you live.” Today, Cities of Learning are working to solve this. These forward-thinking cities are activating innovation by using technology to connect cross-sector partnerships to ensure all youth have access to learning opportunities in libraries, museums, parks and other local institutions, as well as online. Overall, Cities of Learning are working to close that opportunity gap by remaking learning into an exciting enterprise that is open to all young people and relevant to the world they live in today and will work in tomorrow. This national effort, started in Chicago in 2013, has spread to Dallas, Pittsburgh and Washington, DC, with more cities poised to join.

Objectives:

[1] Attendees will review the origins of the Cities of Learning vision and discuss what it takes to launch a Cities of Learning

[2] Attendees will receive an overview of how connected learning principles and digital badging are used in systematically creating a city-wide learning infrastructure

[3] Attendees will learn firsthand from leaders of the four current Cities of Learning – Chicago, Dallas, Pittsburgh and Washington, DC – what their efforts have achieved for learners and community partners.

Speakers:

Speaker 1: Sybil Madison-Boyd, Learning Pathways Program Director, Digital Youth Network, Chicago

Speaker 2: Cathy Lewis Long, Founding Executive Director, The Sprout Fund, Pittsburgh

Speaker 3: Ed Meier, Chief Operating Officer, Big Thought, Dallas

Speaker 4: Michael Robbins, Founder, Span Learning, Washington DC

Moderator: Jennifer Humke, Program Officer, MacArthur Foundation, Chicago

Resources:

Main website: http://www.citiesoflearning.org

Videos: http://www.citiesoflearning.org/media/

Chicago City of Learning: http://chicagocityoflearning.org

Dallas City of Learning: http://dallascityoflearning.org

Pittsburgh City of Learning: http://pghcityoflearning.org

Washington DC City of Learning: http://districtoflearning.org/

Organizer/Moderator: Kris D. Gutiérrez
Speakers: Ernest Morrell, Glynda Hull

 This session features a conversation between renowned literacy and new media literacies scholars, Ernest Morrell (Teachers College) and Glynda Hull (UC, Berkeley). Moderated by conference chair, Kris Gutiérrez, the session provides an opportunity for these critical scholars to discuss their individual and collective work as they advance their vision of the constraints and possibilities of new media for youth from non-dominant communities, locally and globally. 

Ernest Morrell, Teachers College, Columbia University

Glynda Hull, UC, Berekeley

Kris D. Gutiérrez, UC, Berkeley

Organizers: Omar Ruvalcaba, Samuel Abramovich, Cristobal Martinez
Presenters: Omar Ruvalcaba, Samuel Abramovich, Cristobal Martinez, Peter Wardrip, Lisa Brahms
Discussant: James Gee

Our proposed panel explores how cultural values, practices, and identities relate to children’s engagement and learning in collaborative digital media and computer science learning opportunities. Panelists will share findings from four research projects that unpack how digital media learning can be situated within local cultural contexts. Specifically, all studies contribute to examining the implications of digital media learning on collaborative work and learning in diverse communities.

Past research with digital medial learning has largely ignored the diversity of cultural approaches used by children and adults to learn with digital media and technology, whether it be in formal or informal educational contexts. However, it is important to note that we do not use the term ‘culture’ only in reference to race or ethnicity. Instead, we use ‘culture’ to refer to the practices and identities of a community of people that share a history, practices, and values. In our approach we also acknowledge the potential for individual variation within communities of a shared background. he practices and values of a given community will mediate how digital technology is used and created (Bang, Marin, Faber & Suzukovich, 2013).

The four research studies in our proposed panel are studies that look at youth in an Arizona Native American community, a Jewish community in New York, a comparison of Mexican- and European-heritage children in California, and the local oulture of a Makers’ Space in Pittsburg. The first study provides an analysis of several eTextiles artifacts that were designed and constructed by middle school students at a local Arizona Native American community. The second, researchers how digital badges, based on valued community figures, can guide Jewish students’ learning in a supplementary program for religious school instruction. The third, analyzes variance in Mexican and European-heritage children’s (8-10 years) collaboration with a friend while learning to computer program. The final study is a collaboration with the Museum of Pittsburgh’s MAKESHOP provides findings on the learning practices and the practices within the center. The tension between the pervasive view of monolithic maker culture and the need to be inclusive to account for the practices of various cultural groups represented by making in informal learning settings.

Together these studies provide a complex and dynamic view of culture that can help current educators and researchers use the benefits of positive cultural identity along with the advantages of digital media to reach complex learning objectives. Our panelists and discussant will also engage DML attendees in discussing the importance of considering cultural practices and values in Digital Media Learning. Our goal for our panel is to problematize the existing discussion of culture within digital media learning and to spark a conversation regarding culture and digital media learning.

Organizers: Stacy Kehoe, Kaleen Povis, Marti Louw
Presenters: Taiji Nelson, Nina Barbuto, Dustin Stiver, Ani Martinez, Tom Akiva

Format: This panel will consist of researchers and practitioners who collaborated on three projects that focused on overcoming cross-context barriers that exist in regional learning ecosystems. The panel will begin with an overview of regional network initiatives followed by research/practice teams that will briefly present on the project they implemented. Participants will then be able to interact directly with presenters in breakout sessions that will allow for deeper conversations around methods, design, implementation, and future work.

Overview: Researchers and practitioners recognize learning as a dynamic process that occurs across contexts of development (Brofenbrenner, 1979; Mahoney, Larson, Eccles, & Lord, 2005). Home and school are the two contexts that have dominated research on learning, but in the past two decades our metropolitan learning landscapes have seen a significant increase in informal learning environments and demand for educator-facilitated and peer-supported experiences for youth (Afterschool Alliance, 2014). As enrollment in organized out-of-school time (OST) opportunities has risen, we’ve also seen our educational landscapes reveal stark social-class and racial disparities in learner engagement with these contexts (Phillips, 2011). The expansion of OST environments and persistent disparity in access has led to research and practice collaborations across the Pittsburgh region that strive to a) further understand these challenges and b) design interventions that facilitate equitable access to high-quality, cross-context learning experiences.

A program officer from a local Pittsburgh foundation will discuss how the development of a connected learning network has benefited students, educators, schools, and other learning organizations across the region. The Kids+Creativity Network consists of over 200 organizations that span informal and formal learning boundaries. The panel will then highlight projects that drew on local knowledge (from learners, parents, and educators) to overcome common cross-context barriers that persist in regional learning ecosystems. Each project focused on a particular cross-context pathway: connecting school and OST; connecting home and OST; and connecting technology expertise to OST contexts that traditionally focus on socio-emotional development outcomes. Facilitating equity in access for traditionally underrepresented learners was a core design objective for each project.

The Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy team will discuss the design of an intervention that scaffolds learner movement on a pathway between multiple partner high schools and an intensive summer OST program. The Assemble team will discuss the work of a community arts and technology space in developing outreach materials that effectively connect homes in surrounding communities to their programming. They will discuss the development of tools to better understand how parents/caregivers become aware of OST opportunities for their children, as well as the decision-making criteria that parents use to support their children’s attendance in technology-rich programming. The Digital Corps team will describe a regional program model that linked technology experts to community-based OST contexts that do not have the capacity to provide their own digital learning experiences. Panelists will describe a program model that facilitated technology skill-building in spaces that traditionally focus on socio-emotional development.

Organizers: Asif Wilson
Presenters: Joi Gillespie, Alexis Irvin, Jazmine Freeman, Kaylah Davis, Juvenal Enriquez, Adrian Saavedra

This proposed panel seeks to explore the theories and outcomes of Greenhouse Fellowship, a year-long experience for recent high school graduates that leverages the intrinsic power within youth to remain in their cities and act on them in justice-centered ways. Composed of the administration and the six fellows themselves, we will lead the audience through the theoretical framework of the fellowship–constructed through the lenses of participatory action research (Kemmis and McTaggart, 2007; McIntyre, 2008) and praxis (Freire, 1970; Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2008)– and the use of digital tools within the fellowship to organize and act on a city. The administration will highlight the negotiations that take place within the co-constructed environment as well as the role that adult allies play in the creation of radical spaces of healing for young people coming to terms of their conscientization within the neo-liberal context. The fellows–all of whom are 18-19 years of age–will present their own narratives of conscientization, while also highlighting the use of digital tools to read and re-write their worlds.

Implemented in the fall of 2014, Greenhouse Fellowship is an organization committed to cultivating power within East Chicago youth to act on their worlds. Seven recent graduates of East Chicago Central High School are staffed as fellows for one year. While gaining hands-on experiences in select local non-profits, the fellows refine and develop theories and actions that promote unity, social welfare, leadership, knowledge, responsibility, justice, equity, and love. Through exploration of self, community, theory, and action the fellows hope to construct new ways of being and acting on the world. The fellowship seeks to leverage the power, experiences, and innovation intrinsic in young people to create change in a post-industrial city.

As fellows build and construct their own individual and collective theories of change—driven by input from the community—they are encouraged to act on these theories in an effort to create a more sustainable, caring, and just world.

The fellows, out of their own interests to investigate and act on their world, have taken action to transform their local library back into a public space of inquiry, idea sharing and creation. They have used social media to gain the input of the community, used digital research skills to gain sources of information counter to the narrative of the library adminstration, explored new innovative library spaces like YouMedia in Chicago’s Harold Washington Library, and begun to develop a comprehensive plan to present to the library’s board and director to turn a decaying, exclusive, punitive public space into a technologically advanced space of idea production, action, and community. The presentation will lead viewers through this experience, one which is initiated by the young people but moderated by adults. This project provides a unique example of the role of adults in youth-lead movements.

Organizers: Mikhail Gershovich, Jim Groom, Mark Morvant
Presenters: Jaimie Hoffman, David Morgen, Martha Burtis, Chris Mattia, Adam Croom, Tim Owens

Grounded in data collected over the course of the Fall 2014 term, this session will offer lessons learned from ongoing pilot programs at several disparate campuses of initiatives based on the University of Mary Washington’s ambitious Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) project. In a departure from traditional instructional and IT practices, these programs offer participants what Gardner Campbell termed “persona cyber-infrastructure” — all the tools and resources users need to launch and manage a broad range of websites, to create custom teaching and learning environments, and to curate and manage their online identities on their own terms.

In the Fall of 2014, several disparate institutions piloted programs inspired by the ongoing Domain of One’s Own project at the University of Mary Washington. Each of these projects (CI Keys at CSU Channel Islands, Create at Oklahoma University, and DoOO at UMW and Emory University) gives participants full control over their own web domains and the ability to easily create and launch a wide range of websites. Users were granted access to powerful open source tools that allow them to create online portfolios, exhibits, journals, magazines, wikis, and other digital resources and publications for use in courses, the co-curriculum or however else they choose. These projects embrace the Internet as generative of learning, scholarship and the distribution of knowledge. They enable participants to create unique spaces for teaching, learning, publishing and connecting with others in the open public sphere of the Internet and outside the constraints of a closed Learning Management System. The logic of these programs is that offering users this control means allowing them agency and empowering them to make use of the world-wide-web to serve their own evolving needs as learners, teachers, scholars, and digital citizens.

This reflective session, will present lessons learned across several disparate campuses in pilots of programs that, in a radical updating of traditional IT practices, offer control of IT resources to individual users. We will present the various campus projects and what they might teach us about the broader implications of offering members of a campus community their own domains, web hosting, access to and guidance in deploying a range of web tools to create web spaces for academic and personal use. We are particularly interested in exploring models of curricular integration of these programs and the tools they make available to students and instructors.

Organizers: sava saheli singh, Tim Maughan

The future of technology in education is always portrayed as the answer to what ails current educational realities. But for many of us, this ed tech future with its promise of a democratic system affording equal access and social equity is just that: always the future. The innovation-obsessed cycle continues as we are endlessly dissatisfied with how little difference these promises make to the people implicated in these futures. These products and practices, cloaked in the latest buzzwords and jargon, often trickle down to less-privileged populations after they’ve been tried and rejected, yet still adopted as the new and advanced methodology that will solve the “problem” of education, while ignoring larger societal, cultural, and economic issues.

In an attempt to break away from the standard model of reimagining and presenting emerging technological innovations in a context-free bubble, we want to provide a context based on wider future trends. For example, what real-world effects will issues such as climate change, smart city technologies, and changing modes of access to networks have on individuals attempting to reap the benefits of new educational models?

Instead of investigating or listing out each trend or technology and their individual effects, we will present a selection of case studies to illustrate their possible impact on society and education in both positive and negative ways. We will follow the lives of individuals in imagined futures from different ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds illustrating how each of them might interface and interact with the different technologies.

For example:

– How might gamification and badges translate from school to the workplace for inner city children?

– What could be the implications of big data, ‘smart cities’, and surveillance technology on educational spaces?

– What are the potential differences in how MOOCs may be used for professional development by practitioners in middle-income vs. lower-income populations?

– What is the impact of DIY and Maker communities on global economics and access to education in other countries?

– How might ubiquitous/wearable technologies impact the standard of living and educational opportunities for different communities?
The aim is to merge academic approaches to emerging educational trends with a futures/foresight style approach to wider social, economic, and environmental changes – how can we take possible futures into account and then work towards mitigating the negative effects of those? We will use techniques and methodologies such as design fiction, world building, and user journeys, and also involve the audience in active and lively participation in imagining the future of education.

The goal of this approach is less to make accurate predictions about the impact of future technologies and practices on education and more to place them within the context of emerging trends. We hope to help people reimagine possible educational and technological futures from a more well-rounded, holistic, and inclusive viewpoint.

Organizer: Eun Young Jang

Objectives/purpose

To cultivate media literacy is critical for the NK youths, not only to experience and understand South Korean society, but also to have access to and be engaged in this new society. Nevertheless, media education has not received sufficient attention, leaving North Korean (NK) refugee youths, who presumably had limited access to digital tools and popular culture, feeling distant and incompetent when interacting with their South Korean peers.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the impacts of the media literacy education on identity construction of NK refugee adolescents. Drawing upon the framework of multiple literacies, the researchers examined the ways in which NK teenagers construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct a sense of self and others while participating in the media education program, WHY.M.E. This program was to help NK youths cultivate media literacy – a repertoire of competencies to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms.

Perspectives

The New London Group has pointed out earlier that schools should re-conceptualize the meaning of literacy because there are numerous ways of reading and writing ideas beyond print literacy in the era of media, technology, and globalization. Adopting this framework of multiple literacies, the Deleuzian perspective that supports ongoing, transformative processes of becoming through deterritorialization and reterritorialization is also considered a critical lens to analyze and understand the complicated process of the NK youths’ identity construction.

Methods and Data Source

Framed within the qualitative research paradigm, this year-long action study was initiated by designing and implementing the WHY.M.E. project as an extracurricular course in an alternative school for NK youths. Data sources included observation field notes, interviews, audio/video recordings of the major class activities, and the student-generated media products. The collected multi-modal data was analyzed through thematic analysis while focusing on discursive construction of identities.

Findings and Conclusion

One overarching finding of this study was the critical role of the media literacy project, which served as a ‘safe house’ for NK refugee youths who might suffer from their stigmatized status in South Korea. Through participating in project activities such as storytelling, peer interviewing, and collaborative filming, the NK students were able to situate themselves within their own stories: reconcile their past, encounter their present, and aspire to their future with much less anxiety and insecurity. The aphoristic and metaphorical phrases regarding ‘camera,’ ‘media education course,’ and ‘self’ created by the NK students reflected deep-rooted and re-pictured ideas about themselves and their future.

Significance

This study draws attention to media as an educational resource for NK refugee youths. This is meaningful because media is already the most immediate and presumably, the most favored tool of communication for teens. Further, this action research not only captured the process of identity construction but also provided a digital space where the North Korean adolescents’ ideas and emotions were expressed, their stories addressed, and their futures dreamed and pursued.

Organizer: Lalitha Vasudevan
Presenters: Ahram Park, Cristina Salazar-Gallardo, Tara Conley, Kristine Rodriguez Kerr, Joe Riina-Ferrie, Lalitha Vasudevan

Young people whose institutional affiliations and markers of social location – ie, court-involved, undocumented, foster care, urban – render them institutionally vulnerable are in fact using media creatively to negotiate and navigate in between these institutional boundaries reveal agentive repertoires of re-making in their geographies of learning (Leander et al., 2010). In this session, we explore how youths’ media-making practices promote greater mobility both into and out of different contexts or circumstances necessary for supporting their access to education. For our purposes, we conceptualize mobility in a few complementary ways for this proposal: as stemming from the physical shifting of geographies of practice, as catalyzing shifts in how, when, and where participation is engendered, and as an embodied lens through which one’s lived realities may be altered.

In our interactive session, presenters will share examples from their research that illustrate ways in which young people’s media-making — filmmaking, collaging, social networking, remixing — can crystallize moments of access and mobility being negotiated by youth in pursuit of small moments of justice. Drawing on our respective experiences as educators, scholars, filmmakers, designers, and advocates working with youth in a range of out-of-school, community-based settings, we will explore how mobility is sought, enacted, and embodied in youths’ media-making practices.

Following a brief description of each study, presenters will share their work in the form of a digital gallery for part of the session before reconvening as a whole group. This will provide the audience with further opportunity to engage more closely with the nuanced representations of mobility evident in youths’ media artifacts.

Connection to DML2015 Theme

Media-making can be a practice in which young people develop strategies to reposition themselves in the world and to find freedoms within it. These practices can be transformative opportunities for them to critically expand their notions of justice as enacted in local and globalized contexts and in quotidian interactions.

With increasing access to mobile and documentary technologies, adolescents’ mediated ways of being in the world are being constantly amplified yet remain too narrowly researched. There is a strong need to locate research about adolescents’ learning with and through their media practices outside of school settings and to understand how adolescents mobilize their access to a wide variety of educational supports.

These presentations reveal the ways in which media technologies are not only used by young people, but embodied in their daily lived realities for purposes of creating and maintaining their agency as they navigate institutional, community, and personal boundaries. Thus, what contributes to justice in the educational lives of these youth are the qualities of connectedness, well-being, and opportunities for activism, which are further explicated by the research in this session. In this participatory landscape, learning is redefined and youth are repositioned as active agents in this process.

12527 Ind Talk CE:First in our Families: Digital Storytelling and First Generation College Students
Organizer: Jane Van Galen

This talk reports on a study that explores digital storytelling and social media as a means of enabling greater voice, visibility, equality, and agency for First Generation College students in the U.S. In digital storytelling workshops held at four campuses across the country, marginalized students crafted first-person stories weaving images, video, sound, and silence to craft multimedia pieces about pride, growth, resilience, anger, tenacity, doubt, shame, and discovery as they navigate the economic, cultural and social barriers to access to higher education.

Working at the intersections of art, sociology, democratic education and storytelling, participants collaboratively re-examined their own narratives of educational success as they developed counter-narratives to the deficit-laden language of much of the academic literature on First Generation students.

Students then screened their digital stories at public campus events and disseminated them via social media and a project website. As these stories name the political, emotional, and intellectual work of claiming one’s place in college against barriers placed in their way, we are inviting all stakeholders to imagine new means for making college more inclusive.

Finally, each storyteller was interviewed about how writing and mediating a personal narrative of Being First affected their sense of agency and identity and their contributions to broader discourse about equity in college.

In screening two stories followed by open discussion, this talk with examine digital stories as mediated authoring within contested social and cultural spaces.

This project is a partnership between a university faculty member located on the west coast (who facilitates the workshops) and a national non-profit focused on eradicating class barriers and class privilege, headquartered in Boston.

12582 Ind Talk CE: Young British Muslims, Youth Media, and ‘Justice-Oriented’ Citizenship
Organizer: Alicia Blum-Ross

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with participatory filmmaking projects for young people in London, this short presentation explores the competing understandings of ‘citizenship’ that emerged within an initiative for young British Muslims. Funded by the UK government’s ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ program, this media production project was conceived around a normative concept of ‘participatory citizenship’ (Westheimer and Kahne 2004) in which the young people were invited to take part in pre-sanctioned civic pathways. Instead, some of the participants chose to act as ‘justice-oriented’ citizens (ibid) in providing a challenge to the very premise of the project itself by exploring forms of protest outside of the formal political process. This included, in their final film, a discussion about the rationale for joining the armed jihad and whether this can be conceived of as legitimate a form of protest.

Here I argue that participatory media offer distinctive technical, social and creative affordances through which possibilities for civic engagement can be explored. However, this case study underscores the ways in which youth media projects are discursively positioned within funding regimes and oriented towards audiences that privilege specific forms of storytelling and youth subjectivity. This example demonstrates the potential for youth media to offer young people an opportunity to ‘speak truth to power,’ but also evidence for the potential pitfalls for such a process.

12777 Ind Talk CE: I, Too, Am Here: Digital Youth Challenging Racial Microaggressions
Organizer: Diana Lee

Launched in March 2014, “I, Too, Am Harvard” is a photo campaign featuring portraits of over 50 black and mixed race students at Harvard College holding up dry-erase boards with handwritten examples of racist comments, microaggressions, talk-balk messages, quotes, and other responses to difficult interpersonal and institutional interactions they’ve experienced as students at Harvard College. This powerful youth-created and youth-led counter-narrative challenges complex issues such as post-racial ideologies, tokenism, the myth of meritocracy, color blindness, devalued and dismissed perspectives, stereotypical exchanges, and other problematic everyday interactions. The campaign deeply resonated with many people and rapidly spreading across the Internet, inspiring minority students on over 30 campuses across the country and world to create and share similar projects, and even garnered the attention of the White House.

This is just one example of connected young people harnessing the power of social media to shed light on the kinds of institutionalized and interpersonal racism people of color face on a daily basis. Young people are increasingly using the Internet – through blogs, spoken word and satirical performance videos, hashtags, social media movements, and more – to connect and organize online and offline, using whatever tools and resources they have to actively participate in their world, including challenging, learning, and teaching about race in the U.S. and beyond.

How can educators and researchers understand and highlight these engagements and what can be done to foster their educational and empowering potential?

Coffee service.

1) Antero Garcia, Assistant Professor, Colorado State University
Equitable Initiative: Supporting Teachers and Youth of Color through Tabletop Gameplay

Beginning with a look at the connected learning roots of tabletop roleplaying games, this paper explores the learning affordances of non-digital gaming. In particular it looks at how a game built on Eurocentric tropes can be leveraged for equitable learning, critical literacies development, and civic education. Finally, this paper draws on findings from ethnographic research on tabletop gaming communities to highlight specific connections to classroom pedagogy and teacher professional development.

2) Shirin Vossoughi, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
A Praxis of Embodiment: On the Role of Gesture, Gaze and Language in an After-School Tinkering Program

Analyzing ethnographic data from a social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) on after-school learning and equity, this paper describes the transformative shifts that emerged when researchers and educators co-developed new ways of seeing the role of embodiment in learning. As participants co-analyzed photographs and video-recordings of hands-on scientific and artistic activities, they began to notice and trace the coordination of children’s and adults’ hands, eyes and voices, and consider the subjective meanings these interactions held for participants. This newfound perception brought into relief the embodied forms of pedagogical intervention that either stifled or cultivated student thinking and agency, and gave life to a sustained practice of reflexivity and intentionality among educators. I conclude by arguing for a relational and political theory of embodiment in learning, one that interweaves micro-interactional analysis with political understandings of what it means for teachers and students to embody alternative social and educational possibilities.

3) Cindy Cruz, Assistant Professor, Department of Education
Digital Practices of Queer Street Youth: New Literacies in the Age of Geo-Social Applications

Much of digital and new media literacy research takes place in predominately privileged educational spaces and middle class contexts, where elite youth are able to leverage their knowledge and participation with digital technologies, maker culture communities, and networked social media sites into academic achievement, career possibilities, and even civic engagement (Ito, M., Gutierrez, K., Livingstone, S., et al, 2013; Zimmerman, 2012). Yet despite a growing educational and technological disparity between in-school and out-of-school learning for non-dominant youth, I have found that LGBTQ street youth develop practices of digital improvisation and re-mixing with mobile (SmartPhone) technologies to leverage their own basic needs and interests. This case study of 30 young people aged 17-23 illuminates how homeless queer youth bend digital technologies in ways that circumvent surveillance and must be seen as creative, innovative, and resistant practices of knowledge and survival.

Ito, M., Gutierrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., Schor, J., Sefton-Green, J., Watkins, C. (2013). Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

Zimmerman, A. (2012). Documenting dreams: new media, undocumented youth and the immigrant rights movement. University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Civic Paths Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics Project [Working paper, online], 6.

4) Cristobal Martinez, Ph.D., Arizona State University
Our Digital Media is a Knife Tongue

New Literacy Studies and New Literacies Studies frameworks suggest a colonial continuum between reading, writing, and digital literacies. Simultaneously, media theories argue that the increasingly accessible and malleable properties of digital media in the hands of diverse peoples can lead toward more equitable publics. The continuum between reading, writing, and digital literacies provides a seemingly vexing, or perhaps competitive, crossroads of both subjugation and emancipation. Through a series of worked examples produced within formal and informal learning environments, Our Digital Media is a Knife Tongue theorizes various social, cultural, political, and economic implications of indigenous self-determined media.

Organizer: D. Andy Rice
Presenter: Vicki Callahan, David Gonzalez, Shelleen Greene

This panel focuses on the teaching of digital media practice for social change in learning environments that partner university students with local community organizations. As practitioner-theorists who teach in this area, we share the perspective that these courses “expand freedoms.” Students learn how to critically analyze media, work in a diverse team, initiate creative, inquiry-based projects, and translate social issues into a collective story. The media work that students make often functions as a tool for partnering community groups in their ongoing advocacy and outreach efforts. Working with off campus groups, however, presents structural difficulties that this panel will address. We will consider in particular strategies for managing inevitable differences in timing among the academic calendar, student learning within a course structure, and social justice projects off campus. Differences in timing, moreover, can exacerbate differences in culture. Given that stakeholders confronting key social issues like sustainability, gentrification, housing discrimination, forced migrations, wage theft, and many others work for years on actions and initiatives, how should students making media about these groups in a ten to sixteen week course represent their activities? What strategies do professors of media practice employ to deal with demands on student time to both fulfill general course requirements and represent the activities of partnering community groups that may vary in cultural disposition, regularity, scope, and intensity? To what extent should students create their documentary work so as to be “on message” in the eyes of a partner organization? And what should happen to student work at the end of a course? Participants in this panel will address questions through case studies drawn from their own teaching experiences. D. Andy Rice, in “Documenting Mobility in Los Angeles: Collaborative work in the quarter system,” will discuss learning outcomes in an interdisciplinary, capstone digital media production course structured upon group documentary projects about mobility related social issues including active transportation, lack of access to fresh food, and unhealthy food marketing. Based upon her year-long service learning project with Milwaukee’s Pan-African Community Association (PACA), in “In Another Tongue: Ethical Dimensions of Collaborative Digital Storytelling,” Shelleen Greene will discuss the production of collaborative digital stories between students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and African migrants acquiring English language proficiency. Greene contends that collaborative digital storytelling projects challenge traditional notions of the “individual” voice, giving way to new forms of agency based upon concepts of hybridity and multiplicity. Vicki Callahan’s presentation “Mapping South Los Angeles’s Past, Present, Future: Stories for Connection and Community” examines the collaboration of USC and West Adams Preparatory students (LAUSD) that produced media works – from zines to videos to games — which document, reflect, and speculate on the history and possibilities of the South LA. David Gonzalez in “Voices of Social Justice in South San Diego: After-School Programs and the Challenge of Media Participation“ reviews issues and contentions that emerged from collaborative media production between UCSD undergrads and Abraham Lincoln High School students—two groups of youth with different sociocultural backgrounds—in the context of an outreach program.

Organizer: Daniela DiGiacomo
Presenters: Alicia Blum-Ross, Melissa Brough, Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Lisa Schwartz, Daniela DiGiacomo

Enabling physical access to digital resources is frequently the subject of policy interventions. However, research has demonstrated that in order to address inequity we need to better understand how young people are (or are not) supported to engage with digital media by parents and other adults who care and take responsibility for them at school, in interest-driven environments, and at home. This panel focuses specifically on the role of parents and guardians, contributing to a relatively small body of academic work on the ways in which families’ support for young people helps bridge opportunity gaps. We explore the ways in which parents and children imagine and negotiate the opportunities and potential risks embedded in digital media practices. We focus on three dimensions of parenting in a digital age: how parents are influenced by discourses about digital media and learning circulating at the level of policy, through popular media, and in their local community; understanding parents’ imaginaries around digital media in relationship to their hopes and fears for their children in the present and the future; and how these discourses and imaginaries compare with the actual practices of parenting in a varyingly digital world.

Presenting both recently completed and ongoing ethnographic research from sites in the US and UK, this panel illustrates a range of forms of engagement with digital media among both creative class and nondominant families. In Texas, for example, we worked with a group of first and second generation Latino teens, mapped their home media environments, and analyzed how immigrant families negotiated individual and communal digital media practices as part of their process of assimilation. In Colorado, we documented the interplay between expertise and interest of mothers in relation to their youth’s practices. We also found a range of ‘ingenuity’ (including ‘fixing, making, resourcefulness, and tinkering’) in the daily routines and new media practices of families from nondominant communities. In Los Angeles, we are studying how parents support their children to become connected learners — youth who pursue a personal interest that connects to their academic, professional, or civic development — in contexts where digital participation remains highly constrained. Through a series of diverse case studies in London, including parent bloggers, immigrant families and families with disabled children, we are exploring how parents integrate digital media into their visions of their children’s future and what they see as perilous, or opportune.

Through five short presentations highlighting current work being undertaken by the Connected Learning Research Network, this panel will share and synthesize recent findings to critically address issues of equity and access, with particular attention to how the discourses, imaginaries and practices of parenting with and around digital media play a role in fostering familial well-being. Drawing from our multidisciplinary and multi-sited perspectives, we highlight best practices as well as practices that reveal tensions and areas for growth and support, in order to inform future work in the field of digital media and learning.

Organizers: Eric Gordon, Rogelio Lopez

What is often called “civic technology” is a field of practice focused on the design and implementation of ICTs for government and NGOs. The emphasis is usually placed on some form of “disruptive innovation,” where the technology is meant to shift the organizational systems in which it operates. But in reality, civic tech can be disruptive simply because of clashes in organizational cultures and logics of governance. When organizations attempt to do things with technology, the values and assumptions of the technology challenge the values and assumptions of mission and process. For example, organizations that employ grassroots organizing techniques are often troubled by the seemingly impersonal and scaled systems of social media. We introduce the term civic media to better capture how tools generate interest, get deployed, and get used in practice both intra- and extra- organizationally. Civic media are objects in the world that mediate function and representation—where the meaning of the technology and its impact is always a coupling between actual outcomes and the representation of those outcomes. Our analysis of civic media is based on data from a qualitative study with community NGOs in the United States collected over a period of nine months. Based on participant observations and over 40 interviews, we ask how the desired functions of civic media within organizational settings are impacted by internal and external representations and how civic media are reshaping conceptions of audience, public and constituents.

Organizers: Gabriela Richard, Yasmin Kafai, Brendesha Tynes

Research on games and equity has spanned the past few decades, most notably seeking to understand the lack of female representation in games, in game playing, and in game making. Yet three key groups were not adequately represented in this discussion – male and female players of color, male players in general and LGBT players – because research on these groups has largely remained lacking. Similarly, while one might argue that women have now arrived, not only making up half of the consumer market, but also making up one of the more significant demographics than the young male audience typically assumed, according to the Electronic Software Association (2014). However, recent events have highlighted that this increased presence has not necessarily been met with increased acceptance, or amelioration of the problems associated with representation in games, in game culture and in development. The continued problems of inclusion and representation become most apparent when we look at the insidious nature of gatekeeping, marginalization and vitriol aimed squarely at female play, inclusive game design, and critical game journalism and scholarship that has garnered headlines and social media presence over the past two years. As digital games are developed for K-12, new charter school designs adopt gaming approaches, and participation in gaming is still seen as a springboard into becoming more technologically fluent, we need to better understand intersections between gender, race, identity and sexuality to be inclusive and broaden participation in schooling and computing.

This highly interactive panel will be made up of educators, academics, game developers, and diverse players who will discuss some of the major themes around play, marginalization, and inclusive design for leisure and learning, in order to help set the course for the next generation of games. We will cover three major themes in the panel: (1) a historical perspective on gaming, equity and inclusivity (lead by Brendesha Tynes); (2) the current research highlighting the need for diversity and inclusivity in gaming for serious games (lead by Gabriela Richard); and (3) future directions and policy implications for diversity and inclusivity in design (lead by Yasmin Kafai). We will start with the first two major themes and lively questions for panel members across areas of expertise for a total of 30 minutes. For some of the questions, we will project visual material (pictures and video) for further illustration and discussion. We will then break up the audience into small groups in a highly interactive exercise and discussion on possible policy implications for addressing diversity and inclusivity in design. The small groups will be presented with scenarios based on current hot topics and issues around games and equity, including, for example, the Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian incidents. These scenarios will be presented in a game-like fashion, through cards with different incidents and prompting questions. We will engage the audience in a group discussion with panelists about these current issues, and recommendations, based on research and expert suggestions. We will end the panel with further discussion through audience-lead questions.

Organizers: Theresa Horstman, Carrie Tzou
Presenters: Ian Schooley, Siri Nelson, Amanda Goertz, Kyle Bates-Green

We will present the University of Washington’s partnership with two informal science education programs (environmental science and aerospace) in developing digital badges for college credit program. In this presentation we cover the unique challenges of incorporating an online platform and digital badging framework with traditionally offline, informal science learning programs. We discuss the constraints and affordances of three emerging stories from early research: the differences in pedagogical perspectives of digital badges and online platforms that inform program design, design strategies for creating badge systems to foster identities associated with college- and science-focused learning trajectories, and formalizing informal learning spaces for college credit. We look specifically at how the two pilot programs utilize the technology to support sustainable science education programs and the adaptation of the programs as they work with the university to formalize the participant experience.

We believe our Badges for College Credit program fits well with the Blurring Boundaries: Broadening Equitable Access Within and Between Learning Institutions and Networks theme. We believe our work between formal educational institutions and informal science learning programs to develop educational programs as an alternative for earning college credit creates opportunities for high school students. The intent of these programs is to involve a diverse population of high school students; both those who may or may not self-identify as science focused and/or college bound. Our hope is this work leads to a scalable operation which incorporates additional informal science learning organizations into a digital badges network.

Organizers: Mia Zamora, Howard Rheingold, David Preston
Presenters: Mia Zamora, Howard Rheingold, David Preston, Nik Koyama

This panel seeks to reinvigorate and explore the potential of “open” through the lens of co-learning. Much hope, promise, and cash has been invested in technology for the classroom, yet this hype has often set the stage for nothing more than technologically powered traditional content delivery paradigms masquerading as innovation. The course of magical thinking that continues to celebrate “ed tech” often ends up replicating the same systemic problems that existed before the advent of new tools. Can technology serve as a transformative force for equity and justice? Technology is by no means a quick fix for the shortcomings of education today.

With this observation in mind, we seek to answer the question: In what environmental and cultural contexts can technology actually transform and facilitate learning? The answer (and the hope for institutional change that matters) lies in the potential of “open” in a co-learning context. Co-learning facilitates a freeing experience rooted in the connections we make. In a connected co-learning environment, learners are subjects rather than objects of technology. How can we conceive what constitutes learning itself in the Information Age? A connected co-learning model is essential to reimagining education and realizing democratic aspirations.

This panel will consider the crucial role of open design in the evolution and adoption of new technologies in learning. Our discussion will highlight best practices in co-learning as the engine of transformation. We will present co-learning in the context of both higher ed and high school experiences, and consider the need to bridge these two learning contexts more effectively through both revised expectations and a new understanding of “college readiness.”

The first half of our session will be anecdotal as we share our best practices for 21st century co-learning approaches. Each panelist will offer specific accounts of “pedagogies of openness” and how these approaches to learning allowed for new voices from the margins to be heard in the name of real social change. Zamora and Rheingold will discuss the urgency for a new kind of social media literacy and share examples of open networked discovery in the higher ed context. Zamora will highlight experiences from her “Writing Race and Ethnicity” connected course. Rheingold will speak about the unlearning necessary for students and instructors and about the fear instructors feel about the renegotiation of power that accompanies co-learning. Preston and Koyama will offer accounts of how the dynamics of co-learning can transform the learning context in high school and the marketplace. Preston will address the economic, structural, and cultural constraints that challenge open learning systems.

The second part of our panel will be an interactive collaboration with the audience. Shifting to a “working session” geared towards future action, we will facilitate a brainstorming session on institutional change that matters as we conceive of new initiatives that truly employ the potential of open learning. Together, we will generate a vision document capturing “new ideas for open learning initiatives.”

Organizers: Tené Gray, Elsa Rodriguez, Bernadette Sánchez
Presenters: Dixie Ching, Andrea Hart, Brenda Hernandez, Ashlyn Sparrow, Nathan Phillips

Mentoring has long been defined formally as an intensive interaction with experienced and trusted adviser. However, what mentoring is and is not in informal spaces, across HOMAGO spaces, in pop-ups, and in short instances has been open to interpretation and not clearly defined. When reflecting on the range of experiences that youth have in out-of-school contexts like those found in Hive Learning Networks, one can point to many instances when adults mentor youth in ways that don’t quite fit the traditional model, but are still valuable in their own right. In order to begin bridging connections across Connected Learning spaces for young people, we need to build a community of mentors. To do this, we set out to construct a framework in an effort to develop a common understanding and language related to the type of mentoring that happens in out-of-school spaces. After observing programs and speaking with adults across organizations, we devised the Connected Mentoring Framework. Its purpose is to help practitioners see where their roles fit into a broader definition of mentoring as positive youth-adult relationship building in out-of-school time.

Beyond having a common language and understanding of how adults play a critical role in creating positive relational spaces for youth, it was evident that community of mentors to serve as bridges and guides in navigating learning journeys was necessary. This community would also need a space, a place where practitioners could discuss their professional practice, share what works and troubleshoot needs through conversation. To this end, we built the Connected Mentor website, a collection of the Connected Mentor Framework, best practices from practitioners, dos and donts from youth and a discussion board where mentors can connect, learn and share.

Currently, this has been shared only with a few Hive Learning Communities. Through this panel, we hope to share this framework and tool more broadly with the Digital Media Learning community and increase its usage, thereby continuing to grow this essential community of mentor-identified adults. The site launched in December of 2014 and a variety of organizations and individual practitioners will be using elements of it toward training new staff, on-boarding volunteers, enriching content experts and reflecting on their own practice. After sharing the framework and tool itself, our panel will share a few case studies of usage at each of their organizations or programs and then open up for feedback and allow attendees a chance to think about using this framework in their own work.

We hope to continue encouraging and helping adults working in youth learning spaces to identify themselves as mentors and see the connections they make as crucial in building positive relationships for youth.

12556 Ind Talk CE: Digital Empathy: Designing media production for civic engagement
Organizer: Yonty Friesem

This short talk will introduce digital empathy, a new concept in youth media. During my presentation, I will (1) explain why digital empathy matters; (2) use short clips to showcase how to practice digital empathy; (3) illustrate with students’ artifacts how they enhanced four empathic competencies including civic engagement. By the end of the talk, participants will be familiar with the concept and practice of digital empathy to enhance their students’ civic engagement.

Constantly immersed in convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006), we are connecting to others by consuming and remixing digital media. Ruskoff (2013) describes how our civic responsibility diminishes as we are being forced to digitally engage for commercial purposes. Furthermore, Turkle (2013) encourages us to find opportunities for developing meaningful conversations instead of being digitally connected but civically and emotionally disengaged. At the same time, connected learning (Ito, et al, 2013) demonstrates how students use this constant connectivity to enhance learning via digital media. For these reasons, producing media collaboratively while being civically engaged is becoming a crucial part of the current connected learning process.

Using Kelly’s (2014) Human-Centered Design (HCD) during the media production process, we can enhance four empathic competencies of our students. For our practice and research purposes, we defined empathic competencies (Batson, 2009) through four cognitive and socio-emotional learning constructs: critical analysis, problem solving, collaboration, and civic engagement. Critical analysis is the ability to understand and interpret others’ message. Problem solving is the ability to analyze a situation, suggest alternative narratives, and predict others’ behavior. Collaboration is the ability to work together, negotiate, and compromise. Civic engagement is the ability to look at an issue important for others and addressing it trough the production. All four empathic practices are integrated with the five media production stages (Ohler, 2013): brainstorming, pre-production, production, post-production, and presentation. While our sample of high school at-risk students worked collaboratively on a guided HCD production we were able to identify a positive change in each one of the four empathic competencies (Friesem, 2014).

In the last three years, our instructional and research team have been studying our high school at-risk students’ work. In alignment with Common Core State Standards, we offered month-long college-level media production classes to enhance the students’ cognitive and socio-emotional learning. We found that our use of HCD with group media production process advanced the students’ empathic competencies. Our observations, interviews, and content analysis of the students’ productions showed how they enhanced their ability to critically analyze, problem solve, collaborate, and civically engage with their community.

As we start to explore elementary school students’ practice of digital empathy, we see how urban and rural, gifted and exceptional, younger and older students are enhancing their cognitive and socio-emotional learning via the HCD and group media production process. Our findings call for further exploration of digital empathy with other populations to advance civic engagement of our students as well as their connected learning.

12705 Ind Talk CE: Games 4Chan-ge: Twine as Critical Literacy & Empathy Education (and Anti-Troll Measure)
Organizer: Benjamin Thevenin

This presentation discusses how Twine games might be a means of promoting critical literacy—and more importantly, empathy—in the face of the conflict surrounding Gamer Gate. It involves textual analyses of a number of Twine games that challenge conventions of games, game culture, and existing gender relations, as well as a description of the presenter’s own creation of “Queen Bey and Hermione: Social Justice League Assemble!”–a multi-part Twine game that addresses issues of gender equality within popular culture.

#Gamergate. In the past several months it is has been nearly impossible to scan Twitter or Tumblr or even mainstream news media without hearing about the war being raged on the web between feminists and gamers. At the heart of the conflict is a question of identity—what is a ‘gamer’? And on the front lines of this battle are the real-life dangers of female game designers and critics being harassed, threatened and driven from their homes.

Twine games play an important role in this conflict, and a possible means of addressing it. Zoe Quinn’s Twine game Depression Quest caused the game community to ask some critical questions—how interactive-fiction challenges traditional understandings of video games and how women (as game developers, critics and players) challenge male-dominated ‘gaming’ culture.

Video game scholars have long discussed the opportunity games allow players to inhabit other worlds and experience others’ perspectives. There is a growing community of female Twine-game designers whose work—including popular, impactful games like Depression Quest, Howling Dogs, Queers in Love at the End of the World, and Player 2—seeks to use the special affordances of games for good. Maybe the source of all of this commotion may prove to be its solution—maybe we can kill the trolls with kindness, or at least use the language of games to promote understanding and empathy.

Inspired by these games and others, I created my own series of Twine games following feminist superheroes Queen Bey and Hermione as they assist the Social Justice League (including FemFreq, the Mockingjay, and others) in battling gender inequality in popular culture. I will discuss the series—both its creation and reception—in the context of using Twine games to foster critical literacy and empathy within the game community.

12739 Ind Talk CE: The Resisters: What We Learned From Designing a Social Justice Alternate Reality Game
Organizer: Alexandrina Agloro, Felipe Ferreras

In this short talk, researcher and media artist Alexandrina Agloro and youth co-designer Felipe Ferreras will discuss the process of designing and playing The Resisters, an alternate reality game about social movement history in Providence, Rhode Island. The Resisters was built from physical and digital archival research about local activism of people of color. Using these materials, a participatory design process with young people was utilized to create a three-week immersive transmedia game with an online interface and real world challenges. The game players were college students of color, and local community organizations collaborated to conceptualize the game. As a game, The Resisters is unique because it was designed, played, and features young people of color as main characters. One of the goals of The Resisters was to engage college students off-campus in local issues through play. As a game-based learning process, The Resisters experimented with innovative approaches to twenty-first century community engagement and what it means to work with students, institutions, and community-based organizations.

From the educator/researcher side, Alexandrina will discuss her observations about media-infused informal learning on a college campus, and the challenges and opportunities of working collaboratively with young people, community organizations, and institutions of higher education. As a first-time designer, Felipe will share his experience about learning through design and the limits and possibilities of game design and game play for social justice.

A full account of the game’s unfolding is available on the game’s website: TheResisters.org.

12629 Composing Play: Epic Learning in Literacy Spaces
Organizer: Kim Jaxon

The speaker will share the design of an “epic,” game-based college experience: a quest-driven, adventure game created for incoming freshmen called Early Start: EPIC. The experience was designed to address a (rather awful) mandate taking place in the California State University system called Early Start. The goal of the mandate is to “remediate” incoming freshmen during the summer before arriving on college campuses. Working with upper division writing mentors, we designed a game that uses social media, digital tools, and face to face campus activities as a way to expand definitions of college literacy practices. Data drawn from this game-based design show that the space provides contexts for action as a form of service to larger, shared goals, encourages wholehearted participation, and provides mechanisms for the exchange of expertise.

We adopt Jane McGonigal’s framework of “epic scale” to talk about elements of epic learning in and through the teaching of writing (Reality is Broken, 2011). It may be that no writing course can ever match the intensity of a campus wide tournament of Humans vs. Zombies or the sheer scale of World of Warcraft, but the language helps the mentors and me to think through the uses of game design, paired with social media and writing and writing pedagogy, to encourage students to feel empowered over their learning and literacies. Games, and our use of social media, drew attention to the issues of participation and community that often fail to take root in college classrooms.

12401 Individual Talk EF:Laughing Through Change: Egyptian and Arab Youth Online Subversive Humor
Organizer: Yomna Elsayed

Constrained by their authoritarian ruling regimes and cultural traditions of respect for authority, Arab youth seek to find ways for subversive self expression and public will formation in the non-heavily supervised, somewhat, safe spaces of humor in online videos and social media. Though Arab spring revolutions came at the price of a tightening state grip on students and young adults for fear of dissent, they nonetheless, provided a crystallization — though short-lived– of what was once considered pure imagination. Now that state crackdowns have intensified especially in the wake of the latest military coup, young adults are exploring other means for self expression at the contours of social change, and the subversive murky borders between jokes and insults, seriousness and frivolity. This study argues that there is a cultural symbiosis between paternal and political authority which complicates the Arab youth’s attempts at political change making their task both a social and a political one. It seeks to explore ways in which Arab youth carve out a space for self expression, identity formation, and ultimately social change amid an unwelcoming complex social and political conflict, and how digital media affordances work to facilitate or possibly constraint their participation. The study employs a qualitative thematic analysis of online video productions, and social media discourse of Internet Arab comedians and/or opinion leaders. Findings indicate that the young adults’ emphasis on change targets deeply ingrained social issues within the context of contemporary political events, subverting both the political and social status quo of the Arab world.

12591 Individual Talk EF: Global social media equality: China’s social media sphere and freedom beyond firewalls
Organizer: Zoey (Xuezhao) Wang

Citizens worldwide have been more and more aware of the importance of equality within digital space. Even though the concept of using digital and social media as part of civic engagement to improve the equality in our societies, there are still basic but major issues like inequality of digital access remains in a global scale. For instance, China holds a particularly controversial position in the debate of online equality and freedom of speech (expression). On the one hand, major social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are banned in China, which limits Chinese citizens’ open and active communication with people from other countries. On the other hand, various fast-growing Chinese local social media have played important roles among Chinese “netizens” domestically. However, people from other countries may have confusions or misunderstandings on some conditions.

As globalization expands, we call for more progressive improvement on enhancing digital freedom and online equality cross boarders. In this short talk, I will briefly present the current digital isolation between China and the world and the efforts that netizens both in and outside of China online have made to change the situation. I then will conduct a discussion with my audiences on what could we do to educate our student to cope with the emerging crisis of the digital inequality on a global scale. In Despite of the cultural divide, what are the opportunities that online creators and educators and utilize to push this movement forward.

12752 Individual Talk EF:Anything HE Can Do, I Can Do Better – Girls as Game Designers (LAST MINUTE CANCELLATION)
Organizer: Erica Holan Lucci

This short talk seeks to address the question posed within the conference call in regards to the inequities associated with females interest in fields typically dominated by males. Given the recent controversy surrounding #Gamergate and female game designers’ rights in a professional arena predominantly populated by males, what better time than to explore, nay, HIGHLIGHT, how the up-and-coming generation of female gamers/game designers becomes exposed to, interact with, and thrive within the gamer subculture.

More specifically, my recent work with students ages 7-12 via a videogame design/coding club held after school hours enlightened my perspective on the attitudes females have about gaming and the design aspect of learning in this learning context. The creation of this club was based solely on my personal interest in teaching students how to create their own videogames utilizing the program GameStar Mechanic. My initial foray into this realm began last Spring (2014) with a group of fifteen 4th-6th grade students. By the end of our eight weeks together, the troop had whittled to a mere ten students, with a female majority of the coterie remaining. A second round of more advanced game design (utilizing the program Scratch) was offered this Fall (2014) semester. Eight students signed up, four males and four females. All eight students remained in the program for the entire eight week period it was offered. Informal chats with both my male and female protégés led the groundwork for more substantial research queries I have in relation to the female game/r/designer subculture and how these students represent the future possibilities for the field.

In short, my goal for this 10-minute research review is to discuss my anecdotal experiences with other like-minded scholars interested in broadening the breadth and scope of studies focused on the up-and-coming female gamer generation while simultaneously looking for more in-depth approaches to research females who want equal footing on the “playing field” (pun intended 😉

12647 Promoting Civic Engagement and Social Interaction through Online Spaces in Non-Democratic Environments: Transforming the Approach and Practices of Iranian Educators in Schools
Organizers: Maryam Alemi, Maryam Abolfazli

The Online School for Civic Education (Afrooz School for Civic Education) is intended to give Iranian teachers and educators inside the country the opportunity to reflect, experiment, and create classroom experiences aimed at teaching their students how to think rather than what to think. This online program was created in 2011 by a group of Iranian diaspora working for Eurasia Foundation, a NGO based in Washington D.C.

Afrooz School was developed to provide Iranian teachers and educators with an alternative to existing top- down, ideological, and teacher-centered civic education inside Iran. The Online School’s approach is to give teachers an opportunity to reflect on and practice democratic concepts of citizenship and civic engagement through dialogue and participation in a series of online forum discussions, chat sessions, and other online activities in the Persian language. Afrooz Online School was built upon the belief that education can and should be used as a vehicle for social transformation. As Tikly and Barrett (2011) argue, education can foster key capabilities such as creativity, self-growth, self-awareness, leadership, empathy and compassion among individuals, communities and thus society in general. In this paper, we examine case studies from Afrooz Online School to demonstrate that online spaces can be used as a means to practice such skills and to overcome obstacles to equality, visibility, and inclusion of marginalized groups. Therefore we argue that online spaces provide opportunities for individuals –and in this particular case to teachers- to practice and value forms of democratic engagement and skills that are aimed at creating a more equitable society, as Richard Schaul described it as “practice of freedom.”

In this presentation, we introduce online pedagogical model encouraged by Afrooz Online School or by teachers on-line that promotes civic engagement, mutual trust and inclusion. The case studies provided in this presentation illustrate different perspective on how online spaces can contribute to progressive social change in closed and non-democratic settings such as Iran where teachers as citizens do not have a space to practice democratic citizenship. We argue that online platforms are opportunities to encourage teachers to think and move beyond their classrooms and thus engage in critical praxis that foster social change and transformation. The online environment provides teachers with experiential training in democratic civic education despite and within the context of the existing civic education paradigm in Iran, which defines citizenship in terms of devotion to religious ideology. We argue that online platforms are opportunities for teachers to experience inclusive and equitable environments that encourage and equip them to engage in critical praxis that foster social change and transformation.

Ignite talks are radically different from traditional conference talks. We’re looking for humor, wit, energy and inspiration to be packed into one powerful five-minute talk. Visual and conceptual impact is also a must. To view ignite talks from last year’s DML Conference, click here.

If you haven’t seen an ignite talk, be sure to do a quick search for “ignite talks” to watch some of the thousands of Ignite Talks out there or check out these sites for a quick tutorial:
http://ignite.oreilly.com
http://www.speakerconfessions.com/2009/06/how-to-give-a-great-ignite-talk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_(event)

The DML2015 Ignite Talk events will be Chaired and hosted by Andrew Slack.

Ignite Talks events will take place:

• Thursday, June 11, 2015  5:30-6:30 PM – California Ballroom [watch these Ignite Talks LIVE]
• Friday, June 12, 2015       5:30-6:30 PM – California Ballroom [watch these Ignite Talks LIVE]

This year’s line up:

 On-line Registration is now open!

Full Conference Registration Site: https://www.faingroup.com/DML2015/

Please note that all accepted participants must pay registration fees in order to present in the DML2015 Conference.

Registration Fee Schedule
Online Registration Rates
Professionals: $150
Students: $100

Cancellation Policy

Cancellations will incur a $25 processing fee. Cancellations made close to the conference date are non-refundable.

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Whether you are attending DML2015 in-person or catching the highlights remotely, we encourage your realtime participation. Check out the social media sites in the footer below and Follow @dmlconference and #DML2015 on Twitter for announcements, news & updates.

Should you have questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us via email at dmlhub@hri.uci.edu.

The Global Minimum’s inventor challenges in Africa, Uplift’s STEAM programs in Washington DC, and Homebody Industries gang intervention and re-entry efforts in Los Angeles–this year’s DML plenary features three inspiring innovators and doers, David Sengeh, Leshell Hatley and Fabian Debora, who are arming young people with the tools, relationships, and know-how to create, innovate, and improve their communities. Moderated by international activist and researcher Nishant Shah, this interactive discussion will offer motivation for all of us seeking to make a difference in the lives of young people in all walks of life and around the world.

Watch this Plenary Panel Live

David Sengeh

Leshell Hatley

Fabian Debora

Nishant Shah

Coffee service.

DML Cafe Session #1: 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM

1. Re-shaping the Learning Environment to Support a Participatory Culture. Sandra Markus, Associate Professor Fashion Institute of Technology; Kurt Vega + Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY

As teachers, we all want to encourage our students to become life-long learners. But in practical terms, how do we do that? How do we transform our classrooms into participatory learning environments? How do we, as teachers model peer-to-peer learning? Are we committed to being lifelong learners? Lets get together and explore some of these issues and concerns and develop a roadmap to solve them!
We want to share our practices regarding transforming the classroom into a participatory learning environment. The learning space becomes an environment for both the teachers and the students to engage jointly in a collaborative process of learning and discovery. Students use new digital tools to support knowledge creation and to build their own learning networks to foster learner agency. Students work collaboratively to develop an ethical framework to understand what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. We would like to share how we explore information sources that are not part of the mainstream media to help students recognize and understand the value of alternative information sources. We explore issues of social inequality, and how to use digital tools to listen to the marginalized voices that are frequently ignored or misrepresented. We hope this discussion contributes to the conversation about educational technology’s potential to reshape our perspective and participation within the global environment.

This discussion is based on an interdisciplinary, experimental course that we launched at the State University where we both teach. We hope to spark an interesting discussion about what participatory learning looks like and how it can change learning and teaching.

2. ArtBots. Mya Stark, LA Makerspace; Tara Tiger Brown, LA Makerspace/KitHub/Connected Camps

Amazing Artbots: KitHub and LA Makerspace co-present a fun learning activity combining simple circuits and art supplies to build robots as creative as their makers. Ages 5 and up.

3. oneKey: Library-Embedded Open Hardware in Philadelphia. Brandon “bk” Klevence, The Maker Jawn Initiative at the Free Library of Philadelphia

The oneKey is a simplified version of the MaKey MaKey, an educational toy and invention kit that turns anything into a keyboard key. The aim with this low-cost single-input derivative of the MaKey MaKey is to sustainably introduce library patrons to learning about and constructing hardware they can tinker, play, make with, and take home, all in the context of a neighborhood library branch. Digital media tools such as the MaKey MaKey are becoming increasingly common in informal learning spaces, however at $50/device, the MaKey MaKey is relatively expensive to use across large populations. Furthermore, it did not satisfy our goals of introducing the making and hacking of hardware to youth, teens, and most recently adults. The oneKey is a direct response to these problems. The oneKey is cheap (<$2 a device), and in deploying the oneKey we’ve seen youth aged 7 and up hack and share it. This shows that informal education environments are capable of making their own educational hardware via desktop manufacturing and production methods. Youth in this program feel a sense of ownership over hardware because they not only use it, but modify, and repurpose it as well. In a city where fewer than 1% of African-American and Hispanic students — who comprise 56% of the District’s enrollment — ultimately earn bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields, the Free Library of Philadelphia is directly addressing the accessibility of technology, both through these daily workshops, but also through directly involving youth in the creation of open-source hardware. one-Key, and the Maker Jawn Initiative, are changing public libraries into spaces where non-traditional technology users gain free access to technology and learning resources. Come to our table to learn about, tinker with, reprogram, and play around with the oneKey.

4. Creating an Equitable Scientific Community with the Support of Blogging. Deb Morrison, Boulder Valley School District & University of Colorado at Boulder

As a teacher-researcher I have been examining the use of blogging as a tool in my science classroom communities as an example of digitally-mediated disciplinary learning with the goal of improving student participation in scientific literacy activities, specifically with English language learners. I will share how I constructed my classroom based blogging communities, how the virtual and physical classroom spaces interacted to improve science discourse practices, and what lessons I have learned in going forward with this tool in terms of educational equity. I argue that blogging can provide a reorganization of power in the classroom, making space for students to experience the multiple roles of science writers with their peers. In addition, blogging provides a bridging space between students’ everyday discourse and the discourse of science, regardless of whether students’ everyday discourse is in a completely different language or a dialect of English. The way in which blogger has been used in my classroom enables students to go back and forth between written and spoken discourse, in a safe and supportive learning environment, helping to improve students’ confidence with science writing and speaking thus supporting positive science identity development.

5. Teaching and Learning about STEM and Information Technologies: A Collaboration between a University and a Community-Based Organization. Stephen Adams, California State University, Long Beach

This presentation describes a collaborative project between a university and a community-based organization for teaching and learning about information technologies in science, engineering, and mathematics. The approach involves a university course that is offered to credentialed K-12 teachers concerning using educational technologies in science, engineering and mathematics. As part of a field experience activity for the course, the teachers work in teams to plan and conduct workshops in these subjects at a community-based organization (CBO). The workshops involve 4 sessions of about two hours each. The approach serves two complementary goals, related to the preparation of teachers and to providing educational experiences for under-served youth populations. One goal is to provide field experiences for teachers, together with support and reflection upon practice(Goldstein, Goldstein, & Lake, 2003), as this can aid in helping pre-service teachers move toward more reform-based practices (Roehrig & Luft, 2006). A second goal is to provide educational activities for youth at the community-based organization. A substantial part of the achievement gap can be attributed to a loss of learning during the summer months (Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996, Heyns, 1987), and providing further educational experiences may help offset this gap. This approach was piloted in summer, 2014, with a group of 17 teachers, working in four teams of approximately four teachers each. Each team of teachers worked with one of four groups of 20 students at the CBO. Altogether, there were 80 participating students at the CBO, with half aged 8-10 and the other half aged 11-14. This presentation describes the overall model as well as findings from an evaluation regarding the participating students based on surveys and focus groups. The model and evaluation findings can inform efforts to develop similar collaborations.

6. Increase Student’s Media Literacy by Having Them Tell Stories with Social Media. David Magolis, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

Enjoy creating stories with social media? Do your students enjoy using social media? Do your students like telling stories? Social media storytelling has moved from a pastime to a skilled endeavor. Come to this session to find out how college students are using Storify to increase their media literacy production and storytelling abilities by creating stories with previously produced social media and their own words. Storify is a drag-and-drop multi-media blogging platform that incorporates various social media technologies to help produce and tell stories through pictures, videos, tweets, and other media. Students utilized this drag-and-drop software in a college class as a means to integrate multimedia to produce a story, thus increasing their media production literacy. I will share their experiences of discovery, becoming civically engaged, and telling meaningful stories through text, images, videos and other social media. This conversation will briefly highlight the approaches used in the lessons and will guide attendees to what works and what does not work when using this technology, as well as a conversation about using multi-media platforms to enhance media literacy skills. This conversation will help current and future media users to successfully teach and utilize multi-media platforms for strategic communication endeavors.

7. Connecting Across Discourse Communities. Joanne Larson, University of Rochester; George Moses, Northeast Area Development

We will present interdependent model of developmental pathways and learning trajectories we put together as part of a long term ethnography at Freedom Market. Through participatory action research, university researchers and community members are collaborating to transform an ubiquitous urban corner store into the cornerstone of the neighborhood. We will show how the relationships built at the Market are woven throughout the community through multiple means, including social media.

8. Pre DML. Shimira Williams, TekStart

Does your two year old gravitate to your digital devices? Let us explore how to implement technology into early childcare facilities utilizing the joint position statement issued by the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College as guidance. In addition, methods to inform, families about resources for how create a balance digital diet. More importantly, how do we advocate for equitable access to technology in our early childhood and out-of-school programs?

9. Connected Camps. Tara Brown, Mimi Ito, Timothy Young, Sima Patel, Victor Lazo, and Summer of Minecraft counselors

Embraced by kids, educators, and parents alike, Minecraft offers a unique opportunity to support and spread connected learning. The Summer of Minecraft team at Connected Camps and Institute of Play have been designing Minecraft challenges and in-game events based on the principles of connected learning. We invite educators, games researchers, designers, and Minecrafters to join our roundtable to share experiences in developing Minecraft programs. What kinds of learning environments are best suited to connected learning through Minecraft? What makes for engaging and productive challenges? What kinds of skills do counselors, facilitators need to mentor and moderate on Minecraft servers?

Organizers: Sangita Shresthova, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, Andrew Slack

Inspired by the brilliant minds and creative work of the DML community of scholars, educators and makers, DML in Action aims to create a new means by which this community can connect and make a positive impact in the world. In keeping with this year’s conference theme of Equity by Design, DML in Action puts values of participatory learning and participatory politics into action, creating a space for consensus building and community mobilization through innovative, creative, and performative uses of digital tools and tactics.

During the conference, participants will be invited to share stories, images and ideas about the past, present and future of learning. These contributions will provide the foundations for the DML in Action workshop in which participants will synthesize them into a narrative arc with the intention of launching a social media campaign based on an agreed upon issue or goal that is important to the DML community.

Utilizing a worldbuilding methodology and pop-culture mashup techniques inspired by the Harry Potter Alliance, participants will tap into their civic imaginations to create a spreadable vision of the future of learning and a concrete set of actions to help us achieve or avoid that vision depending on the creative tone and narrative choices of the group.

Joining forces from the Harry Potter Alliance, the Media, Activism and Participatory Politics project and USC’s Media Arts + Practice division, organizers will enact an interdisciplinary approach that mirrors the strengths of the DML community at large. #DML2055

Organizers: Tang Institute team, Phillips Academy http://tanginstitute.andover.edu/
Presenters: Caroline Nolan, Director of the Tang Institute and Mike Barker, Director of Institutional Research, Phillips Academy

Intended Audience:
Teachers and Administrators (especially middle and high school)

Staff from Phillips Academy will share insights into the work-in-progress and development of components and potential approaches of connected learning in the real world of teaching.

About the Workshop:
The Tang Institute at Andover supports entrepreneurial exploration and innovative teaching and learning projects that are designed, developed, and implemented by our community. Our modes of operation are collaborative, experimental, and interdisciplinary, with a focus on bringing a range of connected learning ideas and practices into our classrooms and overall program. Early initiatives include explorations of new technologies and hybrid learning activities; new models for experiential learning; and creative curricular approaches on topics such as cultivating a learning disposition, mindfulness, and the digital humanities.

As we consider ways to (1) continue to support and cultivate a creative culture; (2) meaningfully and honestly assess what we do; and (3) grow, share, and scale the best ideas with new partners and potential collaborators, we are thinking carefully about the use of digital tools and networked approaches in facilitating those activities. We are eager to learn from and engage experts, practitioners, teachers, and learners from a wide range of fields to help us to deepen and expand our work. We are operating in a school context that centers on a commitment to equity and inclusion, alongside a goal of expanding the global perspectives and experiences of our students. Those guiding principles are applicable to a wide range of early Institute efforts.

With the hopes of engaging the expertise and insight of the DML community, this workshop will center on opportunities to translate early projects into tools and other tangible outputs that can be shared with, enhanced by, and further developed in partnership with other teachers and learners. Our Learning Disposition project, led by Tang Fellow and PA History Instructor Noah Rachlin, provides a concrete example and starting point that we hope will generate ideas and recommendations that are applicable to diverse practitioners and workshop participants.

During 2014–15, Noah has been engaging our community in conversations on the ways in which mindset, motivation, practice, and focus impact student learning. How can developing this ‘learning disposition’ enable students to see challenge—and struggle—not as impenetrable roadblocks, but rather as inevitable and meaningful opportunities for growth and development? Growing interest and research on the importance of “self-control, curiosity, optimism, gratitude, social intelligence, zest, and grit” in predicting both school achievement and other meaningful life outcomes have led some in education circles to think more critically about opportunities to measure and teach these essential skills.

Throughout the series, we have built out a repository of learning tools—including readings, videos, and other resources—while also inviting student and faculty partners to contribute and co-develop tangible interventions and concrete strategies aimed at building and sustaining these important practices. Our goal is to empower students as the lead agents in their own learning and to equip them with the skills, competencies, and habits of mind that will allow them to drive their own growth and development in the classroom and elsewhere.

As we consider how to build upon this work, we are eager to use this workshop as an opportunity to focus on meaningful growth and networked approaches that can connect the work of this project with related efforts that many schools are developing. Some of the questions to consider include:

• What are the best ways to leverage and explore the potential of digital tools to enhance the effectiveness of a project that has its roots in analog experience?
• How might we more deeply embed and sustain the student experience, in the classroom and beyond? How might technology support the teaching and learning of these concepts?
• How can we develop assessment practices that help us to surface and identify the most useful approaches and ideas and encourage their growth and scaling?
• How can we tap into existing networks and cultivate a community committed to these ideas of mindset, motivation, practice, and focus, with the hopes of developing a common pool of good practices, concrete interventions, case studies, and resources that can be used by a variety of learners across diverse learning contexts?
• How can we use networked approaches to share our learning with new students and invite them to help us to actively co-develop and share these ideas in creative and powerful ways?

Organizers: Manwah Lee, Mindy Faber, Jeff McCarter
Presenters: Dawn Graham, Natalia Smirnov, and Youth Editorial Board Members, Chicago Youth Voices Network

Scholars use the term participatory politics (Cohen & Kahne 2012, Soep 2014) to describe new forms of online youth civic engagement. To what extent are these activities constrained by platforms that have been created without youth input? What if young people were empowered and supported to design a networked platform that enables them to define their own civic identities, strategies and goals? This workshop will explore how participatory design can push our thinking about infrastructuring youth civic action.

Chicago Youth Voices Network’s NUF-Said 2.0 (nuf-said.org) project engages youth in a participatory design process to develop a safe, active and sustainable online space in which youth can create, share, and discuss media, build relationships, and deepen their civic engagement. Since beginning the project, a Youth Editorial Board (YEB) comprising teens and young adults from different CYVN organizations has been the driving force for the site’s vision, culture, design, and function. As of Fall 2014, 55 youth have participated in as many as 138 hours of ongoing, iterative participatory design workshops led by design professionals, youth media organizers and learning scientists. In these workshops, youth engage in human-centered design activities, such as creating personas, use-case scenarios, and mood boards. They also develop and moderate activity on the platform as it unfolds, by facilitating user-testing sessions, monitoring discussions on featured media pieces, and creating original content.

We draw on theories of participatory design as “infrastructuring” of social relations (Star 1996, Ehn 2008, Light & Akoma, 2014) to reflect on the complex process of working together to design youth-centered networked cultures. Through cycles of asking, listening, developing, prototyping, testing, abandoning and iterating the platform, its policies and features, we move away from the emphasis on designing things (objects, tools, platforms). Instead, we acknowledge the relational work involved in infrastructuring socio-material assemblages – collectives of humans, institutions and technologies that emerge and evolve in use. We prioritize ways these collectives can be assembled to reflect ethics of care, interdependency and social justice throughout the course of many transformations.

In this workshop, we will first report on the process and lessons learned through NUF-Said’s participatory design approach, and then introduce the theoretical framework of infrastructuring that will guide us in reflecting on the opportunities and complexities of this project. For the bulk of the session, YEB members will co-lead participatory design activities sampled from their involvement with NUF-Said. Combining youth media organizing pedagogy and human-centered design methods, these activities will engage participants in mediated encounters to build reciprocity and trust, acknowledge assumptions and negotiate differences, take on users’ perspectives, critically consider cultural, commercial and peer influences, and collectively co-create temporal spaces that encourage agency, vulnerability and mutual care, all while developing artifacts to inform practical designs. Participants will be able to see how these infrastructuring practices create the necessary social foundations for youth-powered civic action, because they support groups to affectively experience the possible futures enabled by equitably designed networked collaboration.

Organizers: Nathalie Rayter, Andrea Hart, Amaris Alanis Ribeiro
Presenters: Nathalie Rayter, Andrea Hart, Amaris Alanis Ribeiro, Robert Friedman

The first step in providing equitable access to learning opportunities is actually getting access to the opportunity providers. Youth face a number of barriers to physically moving in and around learning institutions. While digital media can provide an avenue for engagement that transcends physical presence, often the most impactful relationships stem from building face-to-face relationships. This session invites participants to learn about existing work being done throughout the Chicago Hive Learning Network and then problem-solve solutions for transportation and access issues that they might face in their own cities or regions.

During this session, participants will explore how organizations in Chicago’s Hive Learning Network have come together to address the citywide challenges facing youth that don’t drive, have limited financial resources, and have to navigate through unfamiliar neighborhoods to get to out-of-school-time programs. Although Chicago has a vibrant public transportation network with the potential to encourage equitable access to program opportunities, teens are limited by a lack of accessible transit, complex transit systems, and an infrastructure that – by design – is often set up to make them feel uncomfortable. Individual program providers have implemented ways to help reduce transportation barriers for youth, but realize that these quick fixes fail to address underlying issues of access and disinvestment in neighborhoods, resulting in limited impact.

Session participants will hear a brief overview of current activities intended to increase awareness of the problems and identified potential actionable solutions. Current network-level activities are focused on documentation and include a data visualization for seeing how youth are traveling around the city, a youth-led audio project to document youth stories as they take public transportation, and curating organization solutions and resources. Potential solutions for action range from building infrastructure for encouraging more biking to coordinating free youth-only buses around the city.

After this brief 15-minute overview, participants will come together to share challenges they might face in their own learning ecosystems and brainstorm new solutions. Participants will then workshop potential new solutions in breakout groups. As a group, we will ideate around potential solutions to addressing systemic issues and best practices for change. Potential solutions may include creating a document for best practices when using public transportation, designing mobile solutions, building a system to facilitate shared rides or coordinated use of public transportation, or prototyping ways to activate young people to advocate for changes within their communities.

Session organizers will document the solutions generated by breakout groups digitally for moving the work forward after the conference. Participants will be invited to continue ideating around the issue of equitable access by engaging with organizers through existing collaborative documents and blogs.

Organizers: Anna Keune, Naomi Thompson, Verily Tan,
Presenters: Anna Keune, Naomi Thompson, Verily Tan, Karen Wohlwend, AnnMarie Thomas

Intended Audience:

Aimed toward educators (preschool, elementary, museum, library) and researchers interested in equitable curricular approaches for inclusive orientations to making, this workshop offers a space for conversation and hands-on experience with innovative maker materials.

About the Workshop:

As making is moving into school learning settings, the need to find ways to mediate the playful and discovery rich qualities of informal and interest-driven making is increasing. Through a qualitative research study in a Midwestern preschool, we invited 3- to 5-year old children to play, experiment, craft and collaborate with Squishy Circuits (Johnson & Thomas, 2010), an electronics toolkit that uses playdough as conductive material and is steadily becoming a staple tool in makerspaces across this country. Building on emerging practices of the children and prior literature (see e.g., Wohlwend, 2013), we developed the Design Playshop Model (DPM), a quadrant model that expands Design and Technology(Circuitry) to include Play and Collaboration in makerspace learning. The model can guide educators in selecting mediation strategies to support children to engage across quadrants towards sustained engagement, elaborate project outcomes and a diverse range of orientations.

Enacting the power of exploration as an entry point, we are inviting participants to join this interactive workshop and to explore mediation strategies across quadrants. We will introduce the Design Playshop Model and our experience in engaging children across quadrants. Working in small groups, we will ask participants to engage with and explore the Squishy Circuits toolkit, offering a diverse range of crafting materials, electronic supplies and playful toys. The activity will help illustrate how people engage with the four quadrants differently. We will then present salient vignettes of children who practiced making across quadrants and invite the workshop participants to consider mediation strategies for educators to broaden the participation. Relating their ideas to the DPM quadrants, circuitry, play, craft and collaboration, the participants will brainstorm mediation strategies on worksheets with the DPM quadrants. To prepare for an interactive discussion among groups, the groups will exchange worksheets to compare and share thoughts. In closing, we will allow participants to reflect, followed by sharing our research findings as a powerful way to connect to participants’ own discoveries.

DPM is relevant to the Equity by Design theme as our workshop is an exploration of equitable pathways into making. New materials, coupled with the privileging of various modes of interaction, can invite broader audiences into the realm of circuitry, and by extension, other areas like computing and digital media. DPM as a framework offers new expansive views of engagement by exploring how mediating play, craft, circuitry, and collaboration in making can produce elaborated outcomes in learners’ propensity and ability to interact with technological and design oriented tools. We look forward to growing from the insight of our colleagues as we move forward on this work and consider the DPM outside and beyond the Squishy Circuits toolkit.

References
Wohlwend, K. E., Buchholz, B. A., Wessel-Powell, C., Coggin, L. S., & Husbye, N. E. (2013). Literacy playshop: New literacies, popular media, and play in the early childhood classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Organizers: Benjamin Stokes, Ben Caldwell, Karl Baumann
Presenters: Andrew Schrock, François Bar, Janet E. Dandridge, Patrice Fisher, Rudy Rude, Wesley Groves

Intended Audience:

Those who believe in fighting for local culture through storytelling; no technology experience necessary, but it helps if you’re curious about how to “rebuild payphones” as storytelling hotspots (bonus if you have some experience with Raspberry Pis).

About the Workshop:

Can rebuilding payphones be a grassroots strategy to combat gentrification? We will lead a workshop for empowering communities across the digital divide, while reinforcing local culture. Join artists from LA’s historic African-American neighborhood of Leimert Park, and learn about “payphone redesign.” In the process, we hope to inspire groups to apply our technical and conceptual tools to issues in their local communities.

A key challenge for long-marginalized neighborhoods is how to retain local distinction and community strength. Leimert Park wants to retain its rich African American arts and culture in the face of new investment pouring in after a subway line was announced. Technology alone can actually make gentrification worse. Current models for community technology are often narrow, including short-term hackathons and youth-only training. What’s new? Our model shifts the empowerment debate to the neighborhood level. We build group cohesion tied to physical places, and connect artists with techies to tackle local problems. We particularly focus on bridging community and university groups.

This session has three parts: introducing the movement to reimagine payphones, sharing low-cost tools, and most importantly working in small groups to apply the approach to other cities and social issues.
(1) THE VISION — meet the growing movement to reimagine public objects that blend digital and physical. In the first 10-15 minutes, we will showcase amazing payphone redesigns from around the world, including our own project in South Los Angeles. In our case study, we will describe how we purchased 14 payphones on eBay — and rebuilt them, by rethinking social practices and the hardware. We will bring our installation art piece: a 8-foot rebuilt payphone called “Sankofa Red,” which includes a loudspeaker and microphone for use in public space, and show video of emergent cultural forms — including a “rap the phone” session. We aim to inspire.
(2) TOOLS PREVIEW — we will briefly demonstrate some of the practices and tools that can be used in ultra-low cost settings, helping to cross the digital divide. These include OpenVBX (a free tool for prototyping SMS and voice trees) and our custom Raspberry Pi kit (a low-cost and open-source computer).
(3) NEIGHBORHOOD PROTOTYPING — small groups will rapidly prototype a payphone design for their own neighborhood. Focusing on gentrification, our prototyping process will show how to keep culture and technology in conversation. We’ll begin with paper and embodied prototyping, incorporating game design techniques and aligning with social science research on neighborhood storytelling. (The potential for collective action often depends on a coherent group identity and efficacy beliefs that come from local stories.) Each small group will create a working prototype emphasizing voice-based design, which will be played on Sankofa Red.

Afterward each team be offered a “PiPhone,” our custom PC board that connects old payphones to a Raspberry Pi… and the Internet! Our goal is to foster an international network of grassroots groups who are rebuilding payphones as a way to deepen local culture while fostering more sustainable economic development.

Organizers: Katherine Moriwaki, Steve Ausbury, Armando Somoza
Presenters: Louisa Campbell, Hillary Kolos, Marc Lesser

In recent years “Making” has gained significant traction in the public eye, fueling excitement and interest from educators who see inherent potential in the “Maker Movement” for creating thriving project-based, interest-driven connected learning experiences. The promise of integrating multiple learning domains, across formal and informal settings, through engagement with STEM is tantalizing, as is the idea that with access to the right tools and latest developments in technology, deep engagement and constructionist learning amongst youth will naturally follow. Complicating this picture however, is the critique of Maker culture, which is still perceived as a playful domain of privilege, which omits and obscures the participation of non-dominant groups. This workshop examines the space around making through the lens of equity, access, and social justice, using the experiences of the organizers and their respective institutions in a learning network (Hive NYC) as a starting point for active design-based dialogue.

The workshop aims to target two main topics, involving participants in mapping outcomes and possibilities through hand-on prototyping:

– Re-imagining Narratives: How can the sense of technological possibility afforded by the Maker Movement be broadened to provide space for non-dominant youth to re-contextualize making as connected to their own communities and values? How could the narrative of making become more inclusive?

– Co-Design: How do we create equitable, accessible and inclusive spaces? What do they look like? How are community values negotiated, communicated and instantiated so they are visible, actionable, shared?

During the session the organizers and participants will kick-off the workshop by introducing how they are actively working towards bridging maker practices and tools into their work in ways that are helping to move the needle on issues of equity, outlining both the opportunities and problems that this presents. The discussion will quickly transition to hands-on design-exercises with the intent to capture actionable outcomes that can be shared out to the DML community.

Facilitators will include representatives from Hive NYC member organizations: Brooklyn College Community Partnership, DreamYard Project, gadgITERATION Program at Parsons, MOUSE, and Urban Arts Partnership.

Organizers: Tanya Baker, Kim Douillard
Presenters: Kris Mooney, Doretta Winkleman, Valentyna Banner

Intended Audience:

Teachers, educators from youth-serving informal learning contexts (especially museums), organizational leaders

About the Workshop:

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Intersections is a national project undertaken by National Writing Project (NWP) and the Association for Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) in order to create knowledge about working at the intersections of formal and informal education, science and literacy, schools and museums.

This project supports the development of 10 partnerships between writing project sites and science and technology centers around the country, and aims to develop and study a national network of such partnerships. Over the four years of the project, the network will test and refine multiple program models, resulting in programs that both provide direct service to educators and youth, and simultaneously form a body of knowledge regarding intersections: of formal and informal education, schools and museums, and science and literacy learning.

In this workshop participants will have the opportunity to learn about a partnership between formal and informal educators at the San Diego Area Writing Project, the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, and the San Diego Natural History Museum, where a team of classroom teachers and museum educators have worked together to rethink the field trip as an opportunity to help students see that learning can and should continue outside the walls of school, with or without adults present, and that their own interests and questions are critically important to expanding the possibilities for this learning.

In the session participants will use the tools of ethnographic action research in order to examine materials and experiences of various field trip models and learn about how educators working in schools and museums have worked together to increase understandings about each others’ work and institutions, about science and literacy, and most importantly about young people learning in and across both spaces.

Organizers: Ashlyn Sparrow, Melissa Gilliam
Presenters: Ashlyn Sparrow, Melissa Gilliam, Patrick Jagoda

Game-based learning is an important part of the paradigm shift by which digital culture is becoming central to instruction, learning, and research. Both analog and digital games offer players interactive contexts for thinking through and experimenting with complex problems in a hands-on fashion. The category of serious games also gives players, including youth, action-oriented ways of thinking through equity and justice. Interactive games give youth an opportunity to experiment with social, economic, and political systems. While playing serious games may raise awareness, aid learning, and promote political advocacy about a variety of civic issues, the process of designing a game transforms youth from students into teachers who can create tools with and for their peers.

In 2013, the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab (GCC Lab) created Hexacago, a game board that can be used to design a variety of serious games that contribute to learning about public health and civic engagement. Early game designs have tackled tobacco use (“Smoke Stacks”), urban epidemiology (“Infection City”), and economic inequality in urban areas (“Nickel Dime”). All of the games use a shared board that represents the city of Chicago, overlaid by a grid of hexagons marking different city regions and train lines. The board also enables augmented reality components through which players can learn more information about the topic of the game that they are playing. Each game uses artful play to help youth understand the interrelationships between their personal actions (individual and interpersonal) and the larger systems (institutional, community, and policy) that determine behavioral outcomes.

The Hexacago board also serves as a resource to train youth as game designers who can create their own games about a range of city-specific issues. For example, during a workshop that the GCC Lab ran for 70 high school youth in the summer of 2014, students created transmedia games that intervened in social justice and civic engagement issues. Students worked collaboratively with adult mentors to create games about water shortages, gender discrimination in the workplace, and the status of the American Dream in the early twenty-first century. Though the board was created to support educational game development in Chicago, in November, 2014, we also created a second Austogon board to enable location-specific game design in Austin, Texas. GCC Lab designers used this game to run a workshop at the University of Texas at Austin.

For the 2015 Digital Media and Learning Conference, we propose an interactive workshop in which participants will work in collaborative teams to create serious games specific to the city of Los Angeles. The GCC Lab will create a unique Los Hexeles board on which teams can create games about major social and political issues specific to Los Angeles, including access to water, lack of public transportation, pollution, ecological sustainability, and racial segregation. Following a brief overview of the Hexacago project, we will move participants through an accelerated design process in which they brainstorm social issues, appropriate game mechanics, and preliminary rule sets.

Organizers: Josephina Chang-Order, Michael Harris, Ben Kirshner
Presenters: Samsam Dirie, Jasmine Nurnberg, Jordan Gilliard, Westin Musser, Morgan Rasmussen

Participatory Action Research (PAR) provides opportunities for young people to study and take action to address issues that directly affect their lives and aspirations. Although a new generation of PAR scholarship has shown how it can be a vehicle for educational equity and youth political activism (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Morrell, 2004), it is relatively uncommon to see PAR used in the DML community, despite strong substantive overlap in learning principles that they endorse. This is a missed opportunity because of the complementary strengths of each tradition: PAR can benefit from insights about digital media and participatory cultures (Jenkins, 2006) and the Connected Learning community can draw on PAR’s understanding of how to engage young people in critical social analysis, systematic research, and policy deliberation.

Our purpose in this workshop, therefore, is for participants to learn how to integrate digital media tools, specifically Google Maps, with a critical PAR approach that privileges spatial analysis of differential access to sustainable livelihoods. A team of youth ethnographers and university researchers from the Pathways Project will lead a workshop that combines interactive demonstration of digital PAR methods with sharing of our findings. For the demonstration, we will model a digital mapping method used to understand opportunities for, and barriers to, interest-driven careers within youths’ communities. Youth PAR studies have recently drawn on GPS-supported mapping activities to investigate issues of spatial justice (Soja, 2009) such as young people’s mobility and perceptions of safety (Literat, 2013; Taylor & Hall, 2013). This workshop explores the utility of Google Maps as a tool for understanding spatial justice with regards to local employment and higher education opportunities.

We will also share findings about challenges and opportunities for access to sustainable livelihoods. These findings suggest the importance of Connected Learning sites in supporting young people’s development as professionals, and in providing crucial exposure to, and guidance in seeking opportunities. The Google Maps analysis showed that transportation barriers, part of the spatial mismatch hypothesis (Blumenberg, 2004; Kain, 1992), remains a significant constraint on youths’ ability to expand their literal and figurative range to job opportunities.

This workshop addresses the conference sub-theme through exploring the challenges and opportunities of youth and adults leveraging new media to work collaboratively to investigate equity and access in post-secondary pathways. Conducting digitally mediated youth research with geographically distributed sites can be supported by tools such as Google Maps which serves as both a research and communication tool. The larger research group includes participants from Anythink Wright Farms, the American Museum of Natural History, the Kitty Anderson Youth Science Center at the Science Museum of Minnesota, and The Village Arts and Humanities Center; our project budget will enable us to send a subgroup of youth researchers to this conference. Youth and adults will collaboratively facilitate the workshop. We welcome participants who are interested in exploring new media technologies to support research and practice in YPAR, and those in support of equitable ways to present this research.

Full references available upon request.

Organizers: Ricarose Roque, Natalie Rusk, Eric Schilling
Presenters: Saskia Leggett, Crystle Martin, Santina Protopapa, Celia Avila, Paulina Haduong

Intended Audience: 

Educators (working with youth ages 8 and up) in formal or informal learning spaces, parents, researchers, and other program leaders. No Scratch experience necessary. Bring your own laptop (if available).

About the Workshop:

We live in a society that is increasingly mediated by computational systems embedded within our social networks, transportation, educational settings, and civic participation. For youth, learning how to code, or to create, design, and express oneself with technology, is an important fluency for participation in our society. And as they learn to code, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas and practices such as sequencing, variables, debugging, and remixing.

However, people often see coding as a narrow activity that is disconnected from their interests and appropriate only for a small tech-savvy minority. In this hands-on workshop for educators, youth program staff, and researchers, we will explore two questions: (1) how we can design equitable and robust interest-based pathways into computational fluency? (2) how can we support youth to engage in these pathways?

The workshop will engage participants in a hip-hop dance activity using the Scratch programming language. Hip-hop dance is a part of a global movement initiated by youth which invites creative self-expression. Scratch is a programming language and online community which enables young people to create and share their own interactive media such as animations, games, and stories. In the workshop, participants will learn about hip-hop dance moves, such as toprocking and popping, and then take photos of themselves in several dance moves. Using Scratch, participants will create animations of their dance moves and play with music beats.

We will use this design experience as a launching point for discussing ways to develop and support interest-based pathways into computational fluency for youth from groups under-represented in computing. To supplement the discussions, we will share the lessons we’ve learned implementing this Scratch hip-hop dance activity through workshops with youth and local hip-hop performers at public libraries in Los Angeles and Cleveland. Libraries are a powerful space for providing access and a supportive social context which cultivates the connected learning of youth. This activity has been developed in collaboration with the Progressive Arts Alliance, an arts organization based in Cleveland that engages youth in summer hip-hop camps and works with schools and libraries throughout the year on learning experiences using contemporary arts and 21st century media.

Hosting the workshop are Ricarose Roque, Natalie Rusk, Eric Schilling, and Saskia Leggett from the Scratch Team, Crystle Martin from the DML Research Hub, Santina Protopapa from the Progressive Arts Alliance, Celia Avila from Los Angeles Public Library, and Paulina Haduong from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. This workshop is part of a National Science Foundation funded initiative, “Coding for All: Interest-Driven Trajectories to Computational Fluency,” a collaboration led by the Scratch Team at the MIT Media Lab, the DML Research Hub at University of California Irvine, and Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

On your own!

Quick Bites | Breakfast & Lunch

Starbucks, 735 S Figueroa St #308, $
Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, 801 W 7th St, $
Corner Bakery, 801 S Figueroa St, $
Le Pain Quotidien, 509 W 6th St, $$
Nazo’s Bakery, 810 W 8th St, $
Marie’s Coffee Deli, 731 W 7th St, $
Mendocino Farms, 444 S Flower St, OR 735 S Figueroa St, $$
Crepe X-press Cafe, 529 W 6th St, $
Madame Monsieur, 512 W 6th St, $$
Guisados DTLA, 541 S Spring St Ste. 101, $
Tulip Cafe, 628 Saint Vincent Ct, $$
Mexicali Taco & Co. – 702 N. Figueroa Street, $
Grand Central Market, 317 S Broadway, $
Natural Selection, 646 S Main St, $
Chipotle, 601 W 7th St, $
The Counter, 725 W 7th St, $
Local Table, 800 S Figueroa St. Ste 103, $$
Tierra Cafe, 818 Wilshire Blvd, $
Tossed, 700 Wilshire Blvd, $
Tender Greens, 505 W 6th St, $$
Gil’s Indian, 838 S Grand Ave, $$
FIG at 7th, 735 S Figueroa St (Starbucks, California Pizza Kitchen, Indus by Saffron, The Melt, Morton’s, Sprinkles, The Flying Pig, Twist Grill, Gentaro Soba, City Tavern, New Moon Cafe, Loteria Grill, Pizza Studio)

Open Spaces to Sit and Network

Library Bar, 630 W 6th St #116A
Pershing Square, 532 S Olive St
FIG at 7th, 735 S Figueroa St
LA Live, 777 Chick Hearn Ct
California Plaza, 350 S Grand Ave #A-4
Area around Disney Concert Hall, 111 S Grand Ave
Area around MOCA, 250 S Grand Ave
Area around LA Central Library, 630 West 5th Street

Dinner | Walking Distance

Italian
Bottega Louie, 700 S. Grand Avenue, $$
800 Degrees Pizzeria, 800 Wilshire Blvd, $$

Seafood
Water Grill, 544 S Grand Ave, $$$
Seasalt Fish Grill, 812 W 7th St, $$

American/Gastropub
Nickel Diner (BLD), 524 S Main St, $$
The Black Sheep, 126 E 6th St, $$
Engine Co No 28, 644 S Figueroa St, 1st Fl, $$
Blue Cow Kitchen, 350 S Grand Ave, $$
Industriel, 609 S Grand Ave, $$
Guild New American Bistro, 611 W 7th St, $$
Faith and Flower, 705 W 9th St, $$$

French
Cafe Pinot, 700 West Fifth St, $$$

Chinese and Japanese
Sugarfish, 600 W 7th St. Ste 150, $$$
Chaya Downtown, 525 S Flower St, $$$

Mexican
Mas Malo, 515 W. 7th Street, $$

Mediterranean
10e, 532 S Olive St, $$

African
The Briks, 1111 S Hope St. Ste 110, $$

DMLCafe Session #2: 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

1. Exploring the Intersections of Community Action and Education. Nina Barbuto, Assemble; Sienna Cittadino, Assemble and Maker ED VISTA

Assemble is a community space for arts and technology, focused on serving Pittsburgh youth and the urban neighborhood of Garfield by providing access to Maker, STEAM, and digital media education. Assemble’s Girls Maker Night program engages middle school girls in engineering challenges, human-centered design, public art pieces, and other hands-on applications of STEAM-based skills. The Girls Maker Night participants are currently working on an installation that will be publicly displayed in a nearby neighborhood. The Community Ecology Pattern Project will showcase the girls’ own artwork in a repeated silkscreen pattern. The artwork is all inspired by local biodiversity, and its role in their daily lives. Girls will work hands-on with silk screening, Photoshop, and more to complete the project with the help of expert makers. We intend to offer an interactive workshop in which participants can view the work the girls created (through photograph, as it will be still be on display), and complete a hands-on activity relating to the work. The activity will incorporate the same techniques and processes that the Girls Maker Night participants used to complete the project. We will also offer stickers of the girls’ individual artwork that make up the greater pattern. The overall goal of the workshop will be to promote discussion regarding the role of youth educational programs in community action. The Community Ecology Pattern Project is an example of how digital media education intersects with the wider community. The girls who participate in the program not only learn useful real-world skills, but also how art and technology can affect public perception of society’s relation to our natural world. We hope to foster an interest in this kind of programming elsewhere, and to assist others in getting their projects started.

2. KQED Do Now: Youth Civic Participation Using Social Media. Matt Williams, KQED; Randy Depew, KQED

Two trends have converged in education: Common Core and the changing nature of our digital landscape. Learners are exposed daily to infinite amounts of information online, whether through watching videos on YouTube or sharing photos on Instagram. They have the interest and capacity to read and write simultaneously as this is the norm of growing up digital. However, we cannot mistake this “tech-savviness” as digital literacy. That’s where we as educators can play an effective role as guides and mentors. KQED Do Now is one way to embrace this convergence as it takes on a connected learning approach to education where students learn about and respond to real world issues using media making tools in their pocket and share their ideas on social media to develop critical discourse skills. In Do Now, technology transforms learning as students integrate the of use of mobile devices and social media to convey and respond to arguments about civic issues. In the process of participating in a Do Now discussion, students learn about a topic that has been summarized through the trusted brand of PBS and NPR. They are encouraged to go deeper and learn more about the topic by researching it using social media. Then, they are asked to develop their own response to the issue, often times looking at a national issue through the lens of their local community. They can convey this argument in a variety of ways: 1) a 140 character tweet; 2) a more extensive comment on the website; and 3) a media produced response using one or more modes of communication. When they share their response, it generates peer-to-peer discussion using open platforms like Twitter. This process opens the door to several opportunities for students as they learn to write with a variety of rhetorical strategies, share with an authentic audience, and continue to grow and develop their world-views and voice. They learn civic participation, netiquette, and have the chance to develop into digital citizens – a critical skill for the current and future landscape of our democracy, a landscape in which young people will more and more need to understand how to represent themselves and present ideas in a networked culture. KQED Do Now is simple and elegant as it can be used in a vast amount of ways depending on the learners’ needs. To teach Do Now effective, educators need to understand the Connected Learning framework and allow students to maximize the learning potential through this activity. Working in conjunction with the educator network, the National Writing Project, KQED Do Now is also growing a network of teachers engaged in this work. Currently, over 250 schools from around the world use Do Now in their classrooms. This session will surface ways KQED Do Now can add value to learning in content areas and advance civic engagement and digital citizenship in high school and middle school learning environments.

3. Creating a Digital Hub for College Knowledge: Lessons Learned in Technology Development.  Sharla Berry, University of Southern California

Currently, there is no digital hub for college prep events in Los Angeles. College Knowledge LA is a mobile app that crowdsources college events in the city and lists them in a student friendly format. Join us for a discussion about how to use technology to connect students with community-based resources. College Knowledge LA was built by a group of education researchers. In this discussion we will talk about how we used data about college prep experiences to inform the process of developing the mobile app. The app’s design was informed by focus groups with high school and college students. During the discussion, we will also share what we learned from students about how to build college knowledge in the online space. We will share insights learned from students of color and first generation students about their experiences looking for college prep resources online. We will also discuss lessons learned in the process of securing funding for a civic tech project. In addition to discussing lessons learned in building College Knowledge LA, this discussion will focus on how to build sustainable education technology products that strengthen the pipeline of college information and access for diverse, first generation college students.

4. From our Playbook to Yours: How Educators Can Open-Source Results, Share Lessons, and Broaden Impact Globally. Randy Paris, The Sprout Fund; Nina Barbuto, Ani Martinez, Cathy Lewis Long, Matt Hannigan

At the DML Café, The Sprout Fund will share our Remake Learning Network Playbook, an ambitious project to open source the project code for Pittsburgh’s learning innovation ecosystem. The Remake Learning Network is a diverse group of more than 200 organizations including schools, museums, libraries, afterschool programs, higher education representatives, education technology entrepreneurs, local philanthropies, and community leaders. This collaborative group of individuals and organizations joins together to launch initiatives and channel resources to projects aimed at providing all children and youth with opportunities to develop the skills they’ll need to thrive in the 21st century. The Remake Learning Network Playbook shares (1) the stories of many of Pittsburgh’s leading education innovators and (2) these innovators’ key resources and critical lessons learned. We’re doing so because we want to empower and enable others to benefit from our experience as a learning innovation network. We think that making this project code visible, accessible, and useful for others will hasten the pace at which innovations develop and spread, increase the adoption of effective strategies, reduce redundancy, and allow new innovators to more easily enter the field. We also think that whether you’re a mayor or a museum employee, you have a role to play in remaking education in your community. With the Playbook, we are equipping these practitioners with useful, compelling, and actionable information that will enable them to take advantage of cutting-edge STEAM, digital, and Maker learning practices. Using iPads, participants will be able to engage directly with this novel learning innovation tool and explore The Sprout Fund’s virtual Playbook, guided Sprout staff and some of the learning innovators who the Playbook features. The facilitators will walk participants through the theory behind the project, illustrate the Playbook’s features, brainstorm with Playbook’s utility for participants, and receive direct feedback.

5. Fresh Ed: The Holodeck, Culturally Responsive Technology.  Jamel Mims, Urban Arts Partnership; Michael Cordero, Urban Arts Partnership, James Miles, Urban Arts Partnership

Fresh Prep, the arts-integration test prep program that leverages the engaging power of hip hop music to help prepare students for success in Global History, US History and English exams, presents The “”Holodeck””, an interactive, classroom space that features all original Fresh Prep music, kinesthetic experiences and challenges for students to self-direct their learning. Rooted in culturally responsive pedagogy, which puts students at the center of the classroom – the “”Holodeck”” is a malleable learning environment that leverages technology and gamification to make curricula more relevant and accessible to students traditionally alienated from the classroom experience. Using widely accessible technology such as miniature projectors, makey-makeys, and augmented reality apps, the Holodeck is a learning environment that comes alive as students enter it, and presents them with a series of challenges related to content. Imagine learning about the Neolithic Revolution by experiencing an immersive environment that projects video and sound from rainforests around the classroom, and then challenges the participants to hunt and gather the resources in the room. Touching objects then triggers a music video filled with content related vocabulary that depicts the transition between hunting and gathering and farming. After the video, participants use tablets to scan artifacts, and remix the music video they just watched. At the end of the experience, participants complete a performance based assessment, and record their own music video, karaoke-style, recalling the keywords and concepts they learned. After a widely successful debut at the SXSWEdu 2015 conference this spring, the presentation will feature a live demonstration of the Holodeck, and a discussion on culturally responsive applications of technology. Participants in this workshop will take away valuable skills in developing lessons and designing classroom spaces that utilize core tenets of culturally responsive pedagogy, and leverage the addition of game layers and technology to promote student engagement.

6. Can Eighth Grade Science Students Find Geospatial Justice? Deb Morrison, Boulder Valley School District & University of Colorado at Boulder

This program was conducted in an 8th grade science classroom with the intent of connecting students everyday lives and issues of equity with science. In middle school, students are often very centered on self and their own social worlds. The first step of our work with middle schoolers began having them examine their own educational journeys and looking for patterns in the ways that their classmates have interacted with education over their lives. The initial examination of self and peers was then expanded in the second step of the program to look at the school and community, exploring the ways in which individual experiences differ within the space that the students’ occupy daily. Finally in the third step of the program we asked students to explore one area of the natural world using the geospatial toolkits they had developed and see if there were issues of equity at this scale. These last two steps were done in groups of 3-4 students. At each step, students created maps, shared their work with peers and looked for patterns among the collective work of their classroom communities. Each student produced a digital portfolio of their work which they shared with parents and community members during an open house event. Students gained a great deal of insight into the ways in which they were both privileged and oppressed at various scales and spaces. They engaged in critical literacy work within their science content. The use of geospatial tools provided students with learning around the intersection of technology, geography, and various branches of science in the context of examining the world through a lens of equity. All digital tools used with students are freely available to K-12 students.

7. Teach Web Literacy and Digital Skills with Mozilla Hive Learning Networks. Julia Vallera, Mozilla Hive Learning Networks, Hive NYC; Sam Dyson, Hive Chicago, Robert Friedman, Hive Chicago, Elsa Rodriguez, Hive Chicago, Leah Gilliam, Hive NYC, Karen Smith, Hive Toronto

Multiple facilitators will be on hand from Mozilla Hive Learning Networks, which offers programs and a global community dedicated to helping people learn the most important skills of our age: the ability to read, write and participate in the digital world. Mozilla wants more people to see themselves as citizens of the web. Our approach focuses on peer learning for adults and youth that is production-centered, rooted in open practices, facilitated online and in person, and localized culturally but connected globally. In this DML Café station, attendees will be introduced to aspects of Mozilla’s web literacy educational offerings or to facilitate smaller group discussions on specific topics of interest. Participants can: * Explore the Mozilla Web Literacy Map and related curriculum/teaching resources that are modular, adaptable, and have been developed and tested in various learning settings. * Play with browser-based tools like X-Ray Goggles to remix your organization’s homepage–an activity you can also facilitate with learners * Find out how to host a Maker Party event, or set up a Mozilla Club where learners meet regularly and learn digital skills by making. * Learn about how to bring the Hive Learning Networks model to their city, an organized effort to bring local educators, organizations and learners together for greater impact. In 2015, Mozilla’s goal is to foster and sustain web literacy activities in 500 cities around the globe. Join us by teaching, learning, sharing and imagining the full power of the web.

8. Join Us for a #CLMOOC-style Mini Make Cycle Anna Smith, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Christina Cantrill, National Writing Project; Kim Doulliard, Cardiff Elementary School and San Diego Writing Project

During six weeks in the heat of the summer, educators from around the globe come together online to write, “make,” reflect, and play with new tools and processes in order to explore the Connected Learning framework. Called the Making Learning Connected MOOC (or #clmooc, for short), the goals of this professional learning opportunity are to: – Engage participants in interest-driven, making-centered experiences that embody the Connected Learning principles. – Adopt a collaborative approach and a reflective stance toward the processes of making and learning. – Provide an opportunity for participants to plan for an enactment of these experiences in educational settings. At our table, we will host a #clmooc-style Mini Make Cycle. We will have “make” invitations, a range of supplies and tools to explore, and enthusiastic educators ready to discuss what connected learning means for you and the learners for whom you design instruction. Just like in #clmooc, you can come and go as you please. You may end up hacking a toy or a notebook, making a map to explore an issue near and dear to your heart, or designing images with new apps. We can’t wait to see what we make and learn together!

9. Youth, New Media, and Democratic Governance: Designing Digitally Enabled Initiatives to Support the Youth Participatory Policy Making Process in an Emergent Democracy. Jaime Lee, UNESCO; Ashley Lee, Independent

UNESCO is working on drafting and passing of a legislation on Access to Information (A2I) in Cambodia, in collaboration with local and international partners, such as the Government of Cambodia, international organizations, international and local NGOs, civil society, academic institutions, and youth organizations. Young people have traditionally been excluded from government decision-making processes and are not equipped with skills, tools, and platforms to voice their concerns. Yet, for the A2I legislation to reach a robust implementation stage after its initial passage, it is critical to build the capacity of the public to exercise their right to know and increase the demand for public information. Young people’s participation in the A2I process will be critical for the long-term sustainability of such efforts. This session will explore how policymakers and educators can design policy, educational and technical platforms to engage young people – both online and offline – in the country’s participatory policy-making process. How can the A2I initiative include young people in a legislative drafting process of the Access to Information law, and directly engage them in envisioning and building an open and responsive government? In particular, how can the A2I Initiative leverage digital media to engage young people in countries with a large youth bulge and highly centralized governments? This session will invite you to discuss successful models of youth participation in other organizations, and to brainstorm a multi-stakeholder approach for UNESCO to engage effectively with young people across the partnership structure on its A2I priority areas. In a mini-hackathon, participants will have an opportunity to brainstorm a youth engagement strategy for the A2I Initiative that moves beyond the more traditional channels of engagement by leveraging digital media.

10. Sharing EdTech Skills in South Africa August 2015.  Karen Page, K2 Productions Global

EdTech Summit South Africa is a program that invites teachers from all over the world to apply to join a global cohort that travels throughout South Africa each year in August to share teaching and technology skills and ideas with teachers there. The group is comprised of approximately 15-18 people and we join South African teachers in each Summit location as we present hands-on workshops that help teachers move away from a lecture-based style of delivering content. We are focused on teacher training program development addressing education equity and social justice issues by working to implement creative and cutting edge technologies in schools and communities. The Summit is free for teachers to attend and we reached over 800 teachers last year in 6 locations around the country. We support teachers and learners with innovative technology tools and training to aid in the acquisition of modern skills, methodologies and instructional strategies. EdTech Summit South Africa is specifically aimed at growing the confidence and skills of teachers in creative technology integration and implementation. We are particularly dedicated to educators teaching in challenging, underserved and under-resourced environments where technology has been nonexistent or training opportunities rare. We believe motivated teachers who are aware of the vast open-source and low-cost resources out there to teach with can cross generations of barriers to bring excitement, innovation and measurable learning acceleration into their classrooms. The 2015 program will begin Aug 5 in Johannesburg and travel to 8 locations ending in Cape Town on Aug 25.

Organizer: Mimi Ito

Intended Audience:
Teachers (especially middle and high school), educators from youth-serving informal learning contexts, organizational leaders

Today’s interactive, social, and networked media provide teens new ways of pursuing their interests and connecting to like minded peers, mentors, and experts. Whether it is fandom, gaming, or fashion, young people are taking to the online world to dive deep into these interests, share work, get feedback, and recognition. The Leveling Up project of the Connected Learning Research Network has been conducting in-depth case studies of networked and youth-centered affinity groups that can be productively connected to academic subjects, civic engagement, and career-oriented outcomes.

Organizers: Jason Swanson, Katherine Prince, Andrea Saveri

Equity in education cannot be scaled; however, it is entirely possible to design for the emerging education system and have equity as a core component. Education is currently in the midst of an “era shift,” whereby it is moving away from our outmoded industrial-era education system to a broad learning ecosystem that has the potential to enable many right combinations based on learners’ needs. As this shift occurs, we have the opportunity to think critically about what system of education we want, begin the process of designing how the new learning ecosystem will reflect the needs and constraints unique to each of our communities, and work to ensure that each and every young person benefits from a vibrant local learning ecosystem.

There is a very real danger, however, that this emerging learning ecosystem might exist only for those learners whose families have the resources to supplement or customize their learning journeys. The expanded learning ecosystem could become an increasingly fractured landscape, leaving many learners without such resources falling behind in learning deserts.

KnowledgeWorks’ forthcoming “Building Vibrant Learning Ecosystems” paper builds off our previous strategic foresight work to imagine what the components of a vibrant learning ecosystem might look like. Recognizing that a truly equitable learning ecosystem requires a diversity of digital, blended, and place-based approaches reflecting particular geographies and individual learners’ needs, this foresight design project approaches possibilities for the new learning ecosystem using adaptive bottom-up design, as is commonly seen in ecology when new ecosystems form, rather than the top-down approach of the old industrial model. The project also considers what components of the future learning ecosystem might best concentrate, fragment, or facilitate connections so that stakeholders’ collective efforts are maximizing possibilities for all young people, in effect creating equitable, robust, and connected pathways for all learners regardless of their location.

In bringing insights from this project to life, this session will explore ways in which a vibrant learning ecosystem might be accessible to all learners. Session participants will explore how trends shaping the future of learning might intersect with the unique needs and constraints of various local learning geographies to create new possibilities for personalizing learning for and with all young people. Participants will also use future-oriented design principles to imagine their ideal future learning ecosystems in relation to a framework for considering future learning ecosystem components. Lastly, participants will consider what implications their ideal learning ecosystems might have for education today.

Organizers: Torrey Trust, Lindy Johnson, Delila Omerbašić
Presenters: Grace Kim, Leshell Hatley, Alicia De León, Meghan Welch

Intended Audience:

Educators and researchers working in various learning spaces (e.g., K-12 classrooms, informal online spaces, nonprofit or community organizations) who are interested in discussing and designing a plan for blurring the boundaries between these spaces.

About the Workshop:

In this interactive workshop, co-facilitators and participants will explore meaningful learning and teaching practices across educational spaces (e.g., formal school settings and informal out-of-school settings). These spaces are often divided and bound by unique contexts. The disconnect between these spaces often disrupts the ongoing, iterative process of learning.

Our core challenge is to develop ideas and strategies for blurring conceptual, ideological, and structural boundaries between educational spaces that may not necessarily collaborate to achieve shared goals yet can contribute to practices that facilitate deeper learning.

Our workshop will be guided by seven DML Summer Research Fellows of 2013 who research formal and informal preK-16 educational spaces of historically disenfranchised or marginalized groups. While these spaces are treated too often as separate domains, our workshop aims to bridge and blur the boundaries. Young people navigate formal and informal learning settings freely. Yet, few opportunities exist for researchers who study these two spaces to learn from each other. Bringing our research contexts into conversation with each other will provide the opportunity to re-imagine how technology can contribute to equitable learning and engagement across learning settings.

Recognizing the unique contexts of our pedagogical praxis, research, and community engagement, we will discuss the pedagogical practices that emerge within preK-12 classrooms, out-of-school programs, community centers, and online affinity spaces to identify how they converge and/or diverge in terms of supporting youth engagement across sociopolitical platforms. We will also discuss the affordances, as well as structural limitations of each educational space, before asking participants to break into small groups to continue the conversation in more focused ways.

In small group discussions, we will encourage participants to explore the following key questions: How do we begin to blur boundaries between learning spaces? In what ways (both positive and negative) do technologies shape these spaces? How can technologies be used to bridge multiple spaces? And, what are the practices and mindsets that have the potential to foster equitable learning across informal and formal educational spaces?

Following small group discussions, we will jointly develop an action plan for blurring boundaries across learning spaces.

Here is a brief overview of the workshop facilitators and their research interests:

Alicia De León is focused on community-based research practices of Chicana/o and Latina/o youth with the infusion of cultural arts.

Delila Omerbašić engages with language and literacy practices of adolescent girls with refugee backgrounds in out-of-school settings.

Grace Kim is interested in the literacy and language practices of youth in informal settings.

Leshell Hatley conducts research on the culturally relevant teaching, learning, and assessment of PreK-12th grade STEM Education.

Lindy Johnson’s research focuses on designing participatory professional development for public school teachers around new and digital literacies.

Meghan Welch’s current research interests include participatory digital practices and emerging digital literacies in PreK.

Torrey Trust’s research focuses on how technology can support K-12 teachers in designing contexts that enhance student learning.

Organizer: Benjamin Thevenin, Andrew Walker, Brittany Vance

The Stories for Change project is a media literacy education initiative that uses political remix to help young people become more critical and active citizens, consumers and producers of media. The workshop will introduce some of the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of the project, present some student work produced as a part of the project, and then assist participants in producing their own political remix as a means of fostering critical media literacy.

Since ancient times, communities have used storytelling—from epic poetry to folk tales and songs to zines and fan-vids—to express their values, voice their anxieties, and promote positive social change. While since the advent of mass media and the cultural industries, the most popular stories are those produced by large corporations, some stories are still told by communities in order to address issues and struggles they face. Political remix works within this tradition—using digital media to appropriate and reinterpret narratives and characters from popular culture in order to raise awareness about challenges facing contemporary society.

Given the new ways younger generations understand civic engagement—oftentimes using digital media to engage in issue-oriented politics—it is necessary that media and civic education assist these new citizens in developing and expressing their political perspectives and enacting social change in ways that make sense to them. The Stories for Change project involves undergraduate students from Brigham Young University teaching 10- week critical media literacy workshops in public school classrooms. In creating their Stories for Change—which have ranged from a Transformers/Lorax fan-vid addressing deforestation to a Batman comic about drunk-driving to a Plants vs. Pesticides video game—the K-12 students are learning about issues that affect their community, understanding media’s relationship to these issues, and then expressing their perspectives about these issues through the creative production of alternative media.

The workshop will include 3 segments:

– Benjamin Thevenin will introduce some fundamental theoretical and pedagogical concepts that inform the creation of the Stories for Change project.

– BYU undergraduate students Andrew Walker and Brittany Vance will conduct a mini- Stories for Change workshop in which participants will conduct some research on a social issue, make a small political remix project, and then share their work.

– Participants will reflect on the workshop, discuss the affordances/limitations of using political remix in media & civic education, and give the presenters feedback on how the project might be improved.

Organizer: Clifford Lee
Presenters: Asha Richardson, Teresa Chin, Donta Jackson

Within the DML community of practice, there have been two pathways for young learners. One involves the creation of digital stories, content worlds, and journalism. Another pathway involves the world of programming, app development, and engineering. This workshop takes a look at what can happen when we merge these two pathways, based on a Youth Radio model we use within our Innovation Lab. We will scaffold a learning experience that will take place in real time with reflection and tools participants can take back into their communities for use with their various learners. Examples of our published, transmedia creations will be used as models for participants. We will conclude by sharing preliminary findings from our research and the potential implications for this work in the field of multiliteracies, journalism, app development, and storytelling.

In the workshop phase, participants will work in groups made up of technology and story/content-oriented audience members to develop the foundations of a transmedia project. Youth radio staff and students will lead participants through the process from ideation to production. They will be provided with models, tools, and strategies in developing a powerful story; key ingredients of developing an app; creating an aesthetically appealing and functional wireframe; and the qualities of a great pitch. All of these resources currently exist as curriculum lessons on the Youth Radio website. Youth Radio presenters will assist groups while they brainstorm, tinker, and explore their ideas with one another. Finally, audience members will “pitch” their story and app for feedback. At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will be given an opportunity to debrief and reflect on their learning process and the potential extensions into other communities of learning.

Organizers: Katie Davis, Karen Fisher, Negin Dahya
Presenters: Jason Yip, Liz Mills

On October 16-17 2014, the Information School at the University of Washington hosted a think tank to take stock of and explore research on youth, digital media, and learning across disciplinary boundaries. With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Digital Youth Seattle Think Tank (DYSTT, http://dystt.ischool.uw.edu/) brought together approximately 100 leaders in academia, industry, practice, and policy to discuss the current state of research related to youth and technology. Issues of equity and access emerged as dominant themes that shaped the conversation over two days. The purpose of this DML workshop is to continue that conversation, bring it to a new group of scholars and practitioners, and probe more deeply the opportunities and challenges associated with equity, access, and literacy in the field of digital media and learning.

We will take as our starting point the youth panel that kicked off the DYSTT. The organizers believed strongly that an event dedicated to exploring youth and technology should start with and be framed by the voices of young people themselves. The youth panel included eight Seattle-area high school students representing diverse socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. We invited the teen panelists to reflect on how they use digital media in various aspects of their lives, including social relationships, learning, self-expression, and fun.

The teens’ responses surfaced several issues related to their use of technology in formal and informal settings. Three of these issues emerged as particularly salient and will serve to focus conversation and activities in this DML workshop. They include: 1) the persistence of socioeconomic disparities in youth’s access to educational technologies, despite policy initiatives to address these inequities; 2) the diverse—and often diverging—roles of families, schools, and informal learning institutions in youth’s experiences with technology; and 3) strategies for leveraging the local knowledge, resources, and social networks of non-dominant groups to identify and promote information sharing, enrichment of formal/informal learning, and solutions to inequity in and with technology. The workshop’s focus on the teen panelists’ responses will allow for deeper insight into the role of digital media in issues related to equity, access, marginalization, and learning among youth today.

Workshop facilitators will start the session with a brief overview of the DYSTT event focus areas and key themes. Workshop participants will then engage in a series of design activities aimed at surfacing, probing, and synthesizing core issues through the visual mapping of important topics raised by youth and adult participants at DYSTT. We will encourage workshop participants to contribute insights from their own work in an effort to build on the outcomes of DYSTT. Throughout, we will emphasize the roles of research, practice, and policy in solutions to inequity in educational technology. Documentation from the workshop will be added to our public website and contribute to a white paper, allowing the insights and solutions emerging from the DYSTT and the DML workshop to reach a broader audience.

Organizer: Cydney Gray

Intended Audience:

Teachers (middle and high school), educators informal contexts looking to deepen their social justice/art/maker practice, parents, youth (6th grade and up without an accompanying adult)

About the Workshop:

In this hands-on workshop participants will learn how to make a LED light up books about unsung contemporary leaders who are artists and activists. Through the process of basic internet investigation, circuit construction, bookmaking, and group presentations participants will be able to walk away with a fun, simple project that can seamlessly introduce maker skills, artistic expression, and social justice curriculum into any classroom.

Organizer: Sylvia Martinez

Intended Audience:

Educators in formal or informal learning spaces, youth, parents, and education leaders.

About the Workshop:

People may not think of the Maker Movement or making in the classroom as a political stance, but they both are. Politics isn’t only about who gets elected, or the day to day “action” on Capitol Hill, it’s a negotiation of power in any relationship – who has it, who can use it, and over how many other people. The Maker Movement is about sharing ideas and access to solutions with the world, not for money or power, but to make the world a better place. It’s about trusting other people, people you don’t know, to use these ideas for good. Making in the classroom is also about power and trust, and perhaps in an even more important way, because it’s about transferring power to the learner, our students, who are the ones who will take over the world in the not too distant future. And in giving the learner agency and responsibility over their own learning, they gain trust, not just our trust, but trust in themselves as powerful problem-solvers and agents of change.

It is a political statement to work to empower people, just as it is a political statement to work to disempower people. That holds true for all people, not just young people. Being a helpless pawn in a game controlled by others is disempowering, whether you are a teacher, student, parent, or citizen of the world. Deciding that you trust another person enough to share power, or even more radical, give them agency over decisions, is indeed political.

Making is not only a stance towards taking that power back, as individuals and as a community, but also trusting ourselves and each other to share that power to create, learn, grow, and solve problems. Empowering students is an act of showing trust by transferring power and agency to the learner. Helping young people learn how to handle the responsibility that goes along with this power is the sensible way to do it. Inspiring them with modern tools and modern knowledge needed to solve real problems is part of this job. For education to change, it can’t just be tweaks to policy, or speeches, or buying the new new thing — teachers have to know how to empower learners every day in every classroom. There is no chance of having empowered students without empowered teachers — competent, professional, caring teachers who are supported in this goal by their community.

This workshop would focus on what participants can do in their own situations to take back the power of learning and create classrooms where teachers and students are empowered and acknowledged as the agents of change, not objects of change.

Organizers: Melissa Gilliam, Ashlyn Sparrow
Presenters: Melissa Gilliam, Ashlyn Sparrow, Patrick Jagoda

Digital stories – short multimedia videos relating rich personal narratives – have the ability to capture the public interest and compel engagement on behalf of equality. Historically used to document and preserve communal stories and histories, develop leaders, and give voice to marginalized groups, digital stories are created via a series of media-intensive workshops facilitated by educators. A digital storytelling workshop’s core is its story circle: an empowerment-based process that elicits stories in response to a series of oral and written prompts. Participants craft a script and use video editing tools to integrate images, effects, and music. The final product is a short video akin to an in-depth interview, memoir, or poem.

South Side Stories, a project of the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) supported by the Ford Foundation, uses digital stories to explore how identity, space, and context shape young people’s sense of self, relationships, sexuality, and health (physical, mental, sexual and reproductive). These stories convey the lived experiences and resilience of young people growing up on the South Side of Chicago, one of the most racially segregated and isolated communities in the U.S. In our work, we have found that experiences with stigma and segregation, as well as violence and victimization, profoundly influence youths’ perceptions of themselves, their futures, the societal roles they can inhabit, and the resources available to them.

Through South Side Stories, Ci3 pairs digital stories with contextual research and community dialogue to reframe discourse and policy, transform the environments in which youth live, and create safe spaces for youth. We collaborate with three local youth-serving organizations: Global Girls, the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago’s Youth Development Program, and the Chicago Black Gay Men’s Caucus.

Several South Side Stories reflect the experiences of navigating multiple identities as young gay Black men, alluding to challenges in finding acceptance and a sense of community. We believe that awareness of this multiple minority experience is critical for healthcare providers and others who care for these young people’s health outcomes. In response, we are developing a curriculum for health professionals and educators that will build on several stories, discuss the influence of multiple minority status on health, and identify opportunities to improve cultural competence, increase equity and supportive services, and leverage the resilience and potential of young LGBT people of color.

For the 2015 Digital Media and Learning Conference, we propose an interactive workshop in which participants will learn about our process for analyzing digital stories in the context of relevant research into social and environmental determinants of young people’s health. We will then screen several additional stories, provide context from the research literature, and then facilitate a discussion among participants on how the stories could be used as tools to amplify the voices and visibility of the storytellers for
audiences who could take action – individual or institutional – to address inequalities and health disparities.

Organizers: Craig Watkins, Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Krishnan Vasudevan
Presenters: Alexander Cho, Julian Sefton-Green

In the context of a changing knowledge economy, precarious labor, rapid technological transformation, and increasing inequality many young people struggle to find meaningful career pathways. Today, young people must learn to navigate the rapidly changing world of work, in part, by creating new paths to social and economic opportunity. As a growing number of cities invest in the design of innovation districts we turn our focus elsewhere: to the innovation practices and ecosystems that young people are building. Many young people are learning to mobilize and access some of the resources–economic, social, technological, and physical– that are often associated with more powerful spheres of economic activity and entrepreneurship. Determined to pursue their social and professional aspirations, these youths are cultivating social networks, learning new skills, using technology in dynamic ways, and creating new kinds of spaces–offline and online–to support creative civic, social, and economic activity within the cities and regions where they live. But more needs to be done.

In this unique workshop we combine the screening of a short film that showcases how a growing number of millennials are remixing innovation with a discussion that addresses two central questions: What does the film suggest about the skills that young people must develop as the world of work and opportunity continue to be transformed? How do we encourage our education and city leaders to build vibrant innovation hubs that are intentionally designed to attract a greater diversity of young people while also helping them develop the skills required for social and economic opportunity? We invite designers, artists, educators, policy leaders, researchers, and local youth to brainstorm ideas and collectively outline policies and initiatives that support the development and spread of more open, diverse, and dynamic innovation hubs.