Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

Thanks for your efforts in this area and I believe this will have a powerful and positive effect on the field.

My thoughts on understanding the learning and experience of the “digital natives” are that we as adults need to expend the effort to evolve our understanding through participation. I believe that as the new languages emerge, participation will really be the only effective way to knowledge and understanding for those who are on the outside.

From my recent efforts to live this concept, I can say that it does NOT represent an insignificant investment in time and energy to move beyond the dominant paradigm of email and web surfing to MMORPG collaboration, screencasting, live music performance via streaming media, or visualizing the corpus in your personal knowledge domain through desktop search and visualization.

So, get in there and have fun!

I just came from attending the press conference in Second Life, while viewing the webcast - talk about multi-tasking.

I posted some photos in Second Life—so you can see how those of us in Second Life may have experiened the event.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/sets/72157594335708918/

It was historic, exciting, and a digital inspiration!  Off to blog about it.

Mr. Fanton, thanks for the lively press conference, and facilitating the simulcasts on the web and in Second Life.  I was honored to be present to witness this formal presentation of this new phase in MacArthur’s work.  This emphasis on digital learning could not be more timely or needed.

I hope there is some energy spent on creating progressive policy agendas for the US government (and state and local authorities) to support digital learning.  Much of the government interventions on youth and new media focus on shielding them from its most wicked aspects (violent gaming, porn, sexual predators, etc) rather than encouraging its potential for education and inter-cultural exchange. 

Other governments in the world, from Asian tigers to the EU, have realized the potential for ICTs and new media as educational tools for the next generation.  Our own should do likewise.

We are developing Serious Gaming for Algebra + STEM. Our team includes NASA, Virginia Modeling and Simulation Center, Serious Games, Virginia Deparment of Education, Hampton Roads Partnership, and numerous K12 school divisions.

Our lead game developer, Todd Borghesani of Serious Games, has written a white paper that we are using to frame our work. We will develop the game as algebra is the holy grail of K12. Less that 2% of our incoming freshmen are calculus ready. We and other institutions of higher education are spending millions on remediation. We have a wiki site, http://wiki.nasa.gov.  We are also establishing a joint K12-higher education National Center for Urban Teaching and Learning. It will be sited on the An Achievable Dream grade 6-12 campus(http://www.achievabledream.com. This highly unique private-public partnerhip K12 school is part of Newport News Public Schools in Newport News Virginia. The Dream is 98% black and its children consistently score in the high 90s on the Virginia Standards of Learing Tests. The National Center for Urban Teaching and Learning will prepare teachers to use advanced simulation and modeling technologies and will be the test site for the algebra game. The Center will bring teachers in from across the globe to immerse them in a one of a kind K12 campus that uses advanced technologies in ‘authentic professional’ ways to graduate tomorrows leaders.  Please contact me and I will provide Todd’s white paper discussing SimChallenge and the authentic professional model. We would like to apply for a grant in 2007 to catalyze our plans to make a significant contribution to humankind.

In collaboration with the local high school, the Arts Council for Chautauqua County offers two media education courses:  VideoWorks and RadioWorks.  The courses act as a hook to students who may not find relevance in the traditional classroom setting.  Students in VideoWorks earn English Language Arts credit and a technology credit.  I think it’s wonderful that the MacArthur Foundation has launched this initiative.

Here’s my notes from attending inside of Second Life.
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2006/10/the_birth_of_a_.html

Global Kids was both at the event in NYC, as a funding recipient, and also streamed the event into the teen grid of Second Life. To read what the teens had to say during the event, please check out:
http://www.holymeatballs.org/2006/10/hmds_macarthur_foundation_50m.html
Barry

Bravo! The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society continues to try to figure out how to leverage all these concepts for both learning, fundraising and research.

Best news! This is an important and forward-thinking step in MacArthur Foundation?s work. I hope other money will follow this act, in this direction.
We need to give pencils to all people, everywhere, not just to a few; and we need to study how it works over time. It takes time?

At the World Wide Workshop Foundation we build projects that empower people in the developing world and other underprivileged communities worldwide to experience elements of democracy and globalization through learning Internet technology Web 2.0 skills, using real-time communication, and connection to a global e-learning community. We support youth as they grow to actively participate in one of the first global social networks for young Web builders. 

Disadvantaged but high-potential youth can especially benefit from learning technology development projects and real-time multicultural communication, as well as from the creation of economical and educational connections to the larger global community. As a first step, young people must learn what they can do with a web browser, a wiki, a blog, and use Internet connectivity effectively for fun, work, life.  We find that most people at all ages must work rather hard to discover how to become digitally literate, creative, expressive, collaborative, and effective cybercitizens.  Thank you MacArthur Foundation, because all of us are much smarter than one of us!
- Idit

I am the hearing mother of a deaf son. He’s nearly 17 and doesn’t really read English, despite more than the usual years of schooling. It’s a difficult job getting English into people who have never heard. There is virtually no work being done on using computers (such a visual medium too!) to get language, particularly the very difficult English language, into deaf people.

Will there be an online archive of the 10/19 simulcast?

John,

You can hear the audio stream over at NMC
http://www.nmc.org/sl/2006/10/19/macarthur/

Not sure where or if the video was captured.  Also, if you follow the links from my blog post, you’ll find the text notes in various places, including Danah Boyd’s post on this site.

Games are a facinating topic in education where I work as a high school teacher. The Toronto Board of Education and the York Region (north of Toronto) Board of Education in cooperation with other boards in Canada and industry partners have set up an ABEL (Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning) initiative. This has been in existence for a few years and at this years summer conference we heard from Mark Pensky whose keynote address was about this vary topic - learning and games - it was fascinating. We also had approximately 100 high school students who were delegates and whose task it was to tell us educators how they like to learn. One message came through load and clear. “No more worksheets, please”. Students have moved beyond the dependence on paper and pencil which us “digital immigrants” grew up with.