At MIT Saturday for the Project New Media Literacies “Learning in a Participatory Culture” Conference.
Goals of the conference were to
- Launch the New Media Literacies learning library
- “the learning library is a flexible online-learning environment that incorporates an expanding collection of multimedia elements and challenges and offers users the opportunity to design and contribute their own related marterials.” Threshold Spring 09 p26
- Have participants engage with the resources
- Share worked examples
- Investigate implementation strategies
The new media literacies come from a white paper published by Henry Jenkins and they include play, simulation, performance, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, negotiation, networking, and visualization.
Many of the ideas discussed during the conference are featured in Threshold Spring 09, a cable in the classroom publication.
In the screenshot above you can see four required challenges. Before commenting or remixing material from the library these challenges lay out expectations and norms. Three challenges help students understand attribution and one is to help students understand tagging. These are essential new media skills and I will be using these with students and spreading the word that they are available for teachers whether or not they are going to use the learning library. They are a valuable foundation for the use of the library.
Opening Slideshow
by Jenna McWilliams, project NML’s curriculum specialist.
First Breakout Session
Each of the first sessions were designed to engage and introduce attendees to the media. It was very difficult to choose which session to attend, but when I found myself in the appropriation session with Henry Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, of the literature faculty at MIT, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, artistic director of Mixed Magic Theatre, I knew I was in for an interesting hour.
Appropriation and remixing represent important forms of creative expression in a participatory culture and students can grasp this quickly as soon as you reference their favorite music and recording artists. The panel talked about Moby Dick “Then and Now” by Ricardo which can be seen in it’s entirety on mit tech tv . He described how, in rewriting the epic, he had to stay true to the original and keep coming back to it. In his rendition the tale is retold in a way that engaged his urban audience and introduce them to the classic in a way that leads them to more deeply understand the original.
NML curriculum was featured in work done with a 5th grade class from Global Learning Charter Public School. In their study, they wrote and acted out a prequel to the classic where “Ishy” as a young boy is telling his parents over breakfast his desire to go to sea. Through this appropriation exercise they could connect more deeply with the original text.
Ricardo talked about how students and teachers should learn to be cautious about appropriation, acknowledge the value of the source, pay homage, but also understand their contribution to the emerging story.
The teachers talked about how having the students annotate the text, add ornament to the text brought an illumination of meaning to the text. The collective conversation amongst students made them invest in making it good, the feedback engendered close reading strategies.
Henry Jenkins made it clear that the learning library and new media literacies are not wedded to new technologies. Low tech versions are possible and these still get the students into the conceptual space, developing the habits of mind to navigate across tools. This was a key point as many teachers are still faced with lack of access to technology in schools, teachers with access to hardware ore often blocked from using many game sites, or video sites such as youtube. I would like to think that any network administrator would be willing to open up access to the MIT learning library, they just need to be asked. The weight of the MIT name and the prescreening that has gone into the content should provide enough incentive for action.
Second Breakout Session
The second breakout sessions were designed to feature the case studies of the new media literacies. Zoey’s room is an online curricula for middle school girls to get them engaged with science and technology. Integrating fail and fail often into STEM
The website can be used independently online, it gives girls the opportunity to geek out with things they love!
“The more you use the newmedia literacies the more you see the interconnectedness “ from case study teacher.
The students in the case study reacted positively to Zoey’s Room, but after hearing that they were never allowed to use computers in school, and they had to get special permission to use them for the case study, I have concerns that the enthusiasm for the activity came out of that, rather than the their enthusiasm with the program itself.
Some movies in zoeysroom were authored using xtranormal
Third Breakout Session
The third session was intended to cover implementation strategies. I atttended reading in a participatory culture: Motives for Reading.
Reading materials were handed out and we had to describe the artifacts that ranged from bus timetable to music score. The conversation led to how much reading is done beyond books that students might not consider. Prescription bottles, bank statements, bedtime stories, cd covers etc.
What other types of reading do we do? Reading clothing, body language, read between the lines, read accessories, odometers.
Teachers from New Bedford High School and Somerville High School facilitated the discussion and shared examples of student work, which was very valuable. Seeing the students annotations made it more likely that the ideas could be replicated by participants in our own schools. The Teacher Strategy Guide can be downloaded for free here
Closing Session
Henry Jenkins closing remarks took a look at today and at New Media Literacies in the future. 
Within a story of superman working in a participatory culture, Henry Jenkins eloquently weaved a story of why the new media literacy is required for full civic engagement in society. In recent years their has been a digital divide, we are now moving into an era of the participation divide. Those fluent in the new media literacies will be able to participate and those who can’t will not. He talked about tapping into students passions by looking at their t-shirts. Touching on unrecorded and undocumented learning he brought up the example of game playing and stated WoW (world of warcraft) as a perfect example of an online culture that encourages civic engagement and leadership skills. He talked about his meetingSenator Fernando Flores Labra of Chile who plays World of Warcraft and is so convinced of it’s benefits he recommends using WoW for educating Chileans. Thinking about the chances of gaming like this being adopted in my school is slim to none. Schools, with state testing requirements, mandatory filters, means that much of this learning is happening and has to happen outside of school. School policies may amplify the participation gap. It remains educations’ challenge to close the participation gap.
Civic engagement through social media was however a great success in recent the presidential election that leveraged online engagement and got young people out to vote in record numbers.
Participatory Culture in the Conference Setting
Participants were encouraged to join the newmedialiteracy ning for collecting resources and conversations. The twitter tag used was #nml09and the sessions were streamed using elluminate (archived ?). The twitter feed was used more than organizers expected. I was using twitter to take notes for myself, I was aware that virtual participants would be watching so I felt that obligation to report out at 140 characters a time. I also knew my own ed-tech followers would be interested, and attendees in other sessions. These multiple points of hyper focus made for a mentally exhausting but exciting experience. I hope bloggers in other sessions write up their experiences, let me know or add a link in the comments. One improvement could have been having more conference materials online.
As a technology integrator, my implementation plans in my school include
- Embed learning library into website
- Utilize required challenges
- Download teacher strategy guide
- Describe and record new media literacy practices in ongoing blog posts. Many teachers have awareness, but don’t use the same language to articulate what they are doing and why, be the interpreter and synthesizer of these activities.
Tags: Digital Projects, education, teacher, web 2.0 // Add Comment »
The second step is to create a mathcast. Our teachers have smartboards and the software has a built in screen recorder they can use while teaching. The playback file can be uploaded to 
