Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.4.09 | Here are two items we noticed that may be of interest to educators and others working in the field of digital media and learning:

Digital Culture & Education, an international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, has issued a call for papers for a special themed issue, “Beyond ‘New’ Literacies,” to be published in May 2010.

Specifically, the special issue seeks to expand the new literacies’ theoretical paradigm by asking:

• How might we expand the idea of new literacies through fine-grained examinations of specific literacy practices with particular tools or technologies, like social networking, digital games, and multimodal design through different frames?
• How can new perspectives, practices and/or theories (i.e. discourse analysis, feminism, Queer, gaming, literary theory, or post-structuralist) provide additional insights around the congruencies and/or tensions between literacies and digital technologies across institutional and non-institutional contexts? 

DCE encourages submissions from scholars, researchers and practitioners from around the globe, working in areas such as literacy and education, gaming, new media, sociocultural studies of technologies, literary theory and technology, fan studies, adolescents and digital media, and media and identity. Submissions from research groups working in projects like video games research, digital storytelling, and mobile learning are encouraged.

Interested authors should send their manuscripts to Dana J. Wilber: wilberd [at] mail.montclair.edu or the editor of Digital Culture & Education: editor [at] digitalcultureandeducation.com by March 1, 2010.

The inaugural issue of DCE is available at http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com.

In separate news, the Risky Behaviors and Online Safety track of Harvard University Berkman Center’s Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative is creating a compendium of youth-based internet safety programs and interventions. From the call for descriptions:

We are requesting organizations, institutions, and individuals working in online youth safety to share descriptions of their effective programs and interventions that address risky behavior by youth online. We are particularly interested in endeavors that involve educators, social services, mentors and coaches, youth workers, religious leaders, law enforcement, mental health professionals, and those working in the field of public or adolescent health.

Deadline: December 21, 2009
Submission Length: 2-5 pages
Send Submission to: ymps-submissions [at] cyber.law.harvard.edu

Submissions should be documentations of solutions, projects, or initiatives that address at least one of the following four areas being addressed:

• Sexual solicitation of and sex crimes involving minors
• Bullying or harassment of minors
• Access to problematic or illegal content (including pornographic and violent content)
• Youth-generated problematic or illegal content (including sexting and self-harm sites)