Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

Tené Gray: Artists as Teachers

Tené Gray discusses using professional learning communities to support the development of artists as teachers.

Nichole Pinkard: Girl Power, Encouraging Sixth Grade Girls to Give Video Games a Try

Digital Youth Network Director Nichole Pinkard talks about using traditional classroom context to introduce girls to game design.

Barry Joseph: Staffing the Virtual World

Global Kids’ Director of Online Leadership asks: “How do you hire staff for a medium that most do not know even exists?”

Josh Fouts: The “ROI” on Virtual Worlds,  The Importance of Understanding Culture

Josh Fouts debriefs his recent experience at the Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose. He discusses concern for return on investment and the rise of the Immersive Web in China.

Akili Lee: Designing a Social Networking Site

The Digital Youth Network’s program director talks about the creation of the program’s new media driven social networking website, Remix World, that allows youth to share and critique each other’s work.

Mike Hawkins: The Remix Renaissance

Brother Mike teaches multi-media literacy, radio, and spoken word/hip hop for the Digital Youth Network. In this post he discusses his work with students in Chicago in a multi-media arts class. His students created their own record company and used it as a vehicle to respond to negative images of young women in popular culture. 

Nichole Pinkard: Preparing Urban Youth to be Multiliterate

A researcher with the University of Chicago’s Center for Urban School Improvement asks how we prepare young people for the multiliterate world of the future.  This begins a two-week long series on the Digital Youth Network, a hybrid school/ after model that aims to help urban youth become creators and consumers of new media literacy.

Competition Closes with Over 1000 Entries

The application deadline for the Digital Media and Learning Competition closed this week with an unprecedented response. In this post Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg report in on the swell of interest in 2.0 learning. The Competition will award $2 million in funding to emerging leaders, communicators, and innovators shaping the field of digital media and learning.