Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.24.10 | Get InspirED: The latest issue of inspirED looks at the rich variety of assistive technologies designed to improve access for all, including screen readers, assistive gaming and interactive light displays. There are more than 30 concise summaries of new programs and tools, plus links to articles and resources. InspirED is produced by Futurelab, a UK nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming teaching and learning.

Texts Without Context: New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani discusses a number of new books that “share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research.”

These works, she continues, “examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.”

Learning Through Participatory Chinatown: Eric Gordon, leader of the Participatory Chinatown project, a 2009 Digital Media & Learning Competition winner, took part in a Q&A published this week at HASTAC. The project encourages residents without prior urban planning experience to participate in the collaborative design and development of their own public spaces in Boston’s Chinatown.

David Palter and Amanda Shuman, both PhD students at University of California, Santa Cruz, focused the interview on issues related to the gaming and technology aspects of Participatory Chinatown, as well as on how the participation of a diverse community has influenced the project. Describing how the project has changed over time, Gordon states:

In our first iteration of the project, we used Second Life.  It is here that we developed the concept of augmented deliberation. Essentially, we worked out the process by which people could inhabit a virtual space and a physical space at the same time as a means of enhancing the communicative potential of the deliberative forum.  But this process was lacking some structure of engagement.  We received criticism from architects and planners that we gave too much control to the public.  We responded to that criticism by building game rules and some content into the process.  Now, our participants have to learn about the neighborhood in the game before they make suggestions about changing it.  Since our first project in Second Life, we have more fully developed the capacity of role play.  Now all players assume a character and are asked to make decisions about the neighborhood as someone other than themselves.  We experimented with this in a low-tech way in our first project.  In participatory Chinatown, role-play is the foundation of the game.

A Plan to Connect All Americans to the Digital World: Writing at Huffington Post, Common Sense Media CEO Jim Steyer and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Foundation co-founder Mike Feinberg argue in favor of a government-sponsored Digital Literacy Corps:

Last month’s Kaiser Family Foundation study showed that millions of Americans ages 8-18 still have limited broadband access—from a low of 49% for those whose parents have only a high school education to a high of 65% for those whose parents have a college degree. And this is not just about young people. According to the FCC’s most recent data, 35% of American adults have not adopted broadband. [...]

Like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, the Digital Literacy Corps will recruit youth and adults as volunteers to work in underserved communities, helping people get connected—not only to broadband, but to the educational and economic resources that broadband can bring to the next generation of Americans.

The Digital Literacy Corps was proposed in the FCC’s newly released National Broadband Plan, which aims to provide affordable, high-speed Internet to 90 percent of Americans by 2020. The wonderful blog Libraries and Transliteracy has highlighted key sections of the plan as it relates to libraries and education.

Cloud-Based, Open-Source Future For Teachers? ReadWriteWeb reports on the release of the draft 2010 National Education Technology Plan prepared by the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology.

Audrey Watters writes: “Much of the NETP emphasizes ‘21st Century learning’ as the path to transforming education: ‘engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners… and leveraging the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits all curriculum.’ The plan seeks to challenge the traditional model of the isolated teacher in a classroom, promoting the idea of ‘always on’ learning resources and online communities for both educators and students.”

A 60-day comment period is currently underway; commenting is enabled at the bottom of each page of the plan.