Anthony Bryk & Arthur Levine: Convenings to Take Stock and Look Ahead in Digital Media and Learning
Filed at 8:00 am on January 19, 2009 in Civic Engagement, Credibility, Games, Identity, Digital Divide • 2 comments
The presidents of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation describe a new effort to host a series of conversations about emerging lessons in digital media and learning.
by Anthony Bryk and Arthur Levine
Over the past several years, the MacArthur Foundation has stimulated and supported a truly impressive array of projects in the area of digital media and learning. The resulting body of work creates an unprecedented opportunity to ask what lessons are emerging and where those lessons lead us, and we are pleased to announce that The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation will partner with MacArthur to facilitate a series of conversations to begin answering those questions.
Specifically, this partnership will support a set of interactive convenings hosted at our respective offices in Stanford, California and Princeton, NJ, to explore emerging issues in digital media and learning. The aim of these get-togethers is to build this field of work in ways that set the stage for further developments and bring coherence to a diverse range of efforts and findings. Over the next two years, we will organize approximately twenty small-group meetings, and two large conferences, comprised primarily of current MacArthur grantees and focused on topics suggested by them and informed by their work. Our hope is that attendees will benefit from interacting with others who share their interests, dilemmas, and questions. In addition, we will share the fruits of these events with a larger group of practitioners, scholars, and policy leaders by developing video interviews, extracting meeting highlights, and catalyzing broader engagement around the growing universe of explorations in digital media and learning. Both Carnegie and Woodrow’s programs span the full spectrum from K-12 education to graduate and professional schools, and running through all of them are issues about the character and quality of learning in a changing society. We’re eager to learn from and contribute to the terrific work that MacArthur grantees have underway.
Arthur Levine Photo by Emile Wamsteker.
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Comments (2)
1: Tom Hoffman at 10:06 pm on Monday, January 19, 2009
Tony,
I hope you’ll consider inviting 1990 MacArthur Fellow Richard Stallman or one of his colleagues at the Free Software Foundation to participate in one of these meetings.
The Digital Media and Learning Initiative’s approach to intellectual property and licensing issues has been inconsistent and feckless—for example where do I go to download the supposedly code written with the Digital Media and Learning Competition grant money?
Licensing costs, reliance on external hosts, and dependence on proprietary platforms have huge impacts on the gap between theory and practice in this area. These issues require more serious and sustained attention by this initiative.
2: Dan Bassill from Tutor/Mentor Connection at 2:14 pm on Sunday, February 22, 2009
I think that the untapped potential of learning is not what it can do to engage youth, but what it can do to engage adults who area leading businesses, faith groups, philanthropy, and representing us in all levels of government.
The problems facing our world are complex, and distributed in thousands of locations, and the people addressing these people are scattered in various places, mostly dis-connected from each other, and from the knowledge that is being learned in these separate endeavors.
Through the internet we can create knowledge sharing hubs and we can use visual aids, like poverty maps, to focus attention on all places in a city, or country, where the same problem exists, but different people are trying to solve it.
We can also sequence what we know, and what we are learning, into blueprints, that show what needs to be done first, before we can do what needs to be done second. For instance, these could show investments and actions that help kids come to school better prepared, and support them in elementary school so they are better prepared for middle school. They could then show actions at middle school that lead to success in high school, and in high school that lead to college, vocational and trade school, and then to jobs.
As this information is being collected, it can be shared, so that anyone working to help kids to careers, can be drawing from the knowledge of everyone else who is sharing in such hubs. Each year what seems to be working can be showcased, so that everyone else is benchmarking their work against the best work being done elsewhere. If donors are in this process, it can lead to funding of constant improvement in many places at the same time.
I hope that the discussions you are holding will point to places where this type of knowledge hug is already in existence, or where people are trying to make it happen, such as at the Tutor/Mentor Connection, based in Chicago.
Such events can create public attention, which points other donors and volunteers to the knowledge library, so that these type of efforts don’t depend on one or two lead funders, but can be supported by a growing number of stakeholders who share the same concern for the same problems.
Because we have a link in our site to this blog, we’re already sharing what is being learned here with everyone who visits our site. If others do the same we can increase the number of people who find and use the information on each other’s web sites.
In this way we can engage more adults in this process, which is essential to expand the range of resources needed to engage more youth.
Robust discussion/debate is encouraged. Comments are reviewed before posting to ensure they are on topic and do not promote commercial products or services.
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