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Welcome to the University of California's New Digital Media and Learning Research Hub and Website
Today, at the forum on Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age, being hosted by the Sesame Workshop at Google headquarters, we are announcing the launch of a major new research initiative in digital media and learning (DML) and its associated website. Based at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in Irvine, California, the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub is generously supported by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. The Research Hub, for which I serve as Executive Director and Mimi Ito the Research Director, intersects work promoting and networking collaborative efforts to understand and assess the participatory ways in which digital media are transforming youth learning practices and lifelong learning opportunities.… more
Empowering Youth-directed Learning in a Digital Age
Tashawna is a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY. In the morning she leaves home for school listening to MP3s, texting her friends about meeting up after school at Global Kids, where she participates in a theater program, or FIERCE, the community center for LGBT youth. On the weekend she'll go to church and, on any given day, visit MySpace and Facebook as often as she can. While she misses television and movies, she says… more
$2 Million Competition Seeks Ideas to Transform Learning
Today, in conjunction with an announcement by President Obama calling for new efforts to reimagine and improve education in science and math, we are announcing a $2 million open competition supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for ideas to transform learning using digital media. The competition… more
When Is an Art Museum a Workshop? A Field Report from Korea
Earlier this month, I participated in the Digital Natives Workshop hosted by KAIST, the MIT of Korea, and attended by researchers from the U.S. and across the Pacific Rim. My talk on adolescence and the science of attention (entitled “The Kids Are All Right”) has been recorded along with the other presentations and posted on Google Wave by Dave Sonntag, one of the organizers. I also live-blogged at www.hastac.org. After the workshop, we took the three-hour bus trip from Daejeon to Seoul where we had a field day at the Samsung D’Light interactive showcase and then, on Saturday, were part of a Bar Camp at the high-tech Daum University, in a room that came with a slogan: “Beyond Learning.” I’m still pondering that.… more
Sociality Is Learning
As adults, we take social skills for granted... until we encounter someone who lacks them. Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children. Perhaps it's precisely their passion for learning sociality that devalues this as learning in the eyes of adults.… more
eBooks and Learning
Now that the ebook industry has set its sights on the textbook and educational markets, it's especially important for educators to shape discussion of the benefits and potential impact of ereaders. Rather than bemoan the loss of wood pulp and glue that make up current texts, we are better served by asking how these physical objects serve learning, and what is lost (or gained) by replacing them with electronic texts. One doesn't have to abandon a love for print books to appreciate the unique affordances of new technologies. For example: how many would prefer poring through multiple volumes of a print encyclopedia to the clean, stream-of-consciousness experience offered by hyperlinks in a digital encyclopedia?… more
Apprenticeship 2.0 Could Fuel 21st Century Learning
In a recent New Yorker piece on cookbooks, Adam Gopnik observes that "the space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense." Although Gopnik is explicitly referring to cooking, this statement could be equally applied to most forms of learning since the nineteenth century.… more
Diana Rhoten: The Science of Reimagining Learning
“From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school. That is the isolation of the school - its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests, and activities that predominate in his home and neighborhood.”
- John Dewey, School and Society, Chapter Three: Waste in Education
The radical idea, going back at least to John Dewey, that young people might be more engaged in learning if the object of learning had anything to do with the rest of their life, might be finding new life in a world of digital media.… more
"Scaling John Seely Brown" and the "End of Endism"
![](http://dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/imagecache/blog_image/blog_images/teaching600.jpg ""Scaling John Seely Brown" and the "end of endism" Blog Image")
I recently had occasion to talk on the phone with someone whose posts on education and social media I follow with interest on Twitter. ToughLoveforX (his Twitter name) is a retired printer whose scan of the educational horizon in the digital age is as eagle-eyed as that of anyone I know. I follow him on Twitter because I know that, if I click through to one of the url’s he posts, I’m bound to find something good. When I asked him what he would do, if he could make one monumental change that would have an impact on the worlds of learning and social media, he said, “Scale John Seely Brown.” Perfectly to the point of my question. Perfectly Twitter. You cut right to the chase when you think in 140 characters or less. Scaling John Seely Brown is an awfully good idea.… more
Librarian 2.0: Buffy J. Hamilton
Which of the following two assignments is more likely to engage high school students and inspire them to learn something?
1. Write a paper about contemporary US war veterans.
2. Create a multimedia resource of news feeds, archival video, student interviews with veterans, document how you accomplished it, and share your findings with the world.… more
In Praise of Mo' Better Grading
Meanwhile, back at the pedagogical ranch...You may remember that back in November I reported on my experiment in grading, combining the long tradition of contract grading with what I call “crowdsourced grading.” Since I was already constructing “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” (ISIS 120) as a peer-taught course, I decided that the students responsible for team-leading each class would also be responsible for determining if that week’s required blogs on their reading assignments measured up to the contract standard. It didn’t seem like such a radical idea. This is a course on cognition and collaboration in the digital age and responsible evaluation, feedback, and participation are part of that equation. I thought of this as simply “practicing what I was preaching,” an object lesson to the students in how to be responsible public citizens of the Internet. Well, some people thought of it differently. They acted as if “Prof Davidson” was destroying civilization as we knew it.… more
It's an amazing time to be a learner - Will Richardson
Your personal learning network is not just a network of people you learn from. A "pln," as enthusiasts call them, is a network of people who are learning together. I was given this essential lore - and truth be told, much of what I know about social media in education - by Will Richardson. The reciprocal nature of learning networks is only the latest useful insight Richardson has given me and the rest of his network. In part, this blog post and interview is a form of reciprocation: you know you have succeeded as an educator when your students start teaching to others what they learned from you.… more
A professor with unconventional methods, message
Digital media and learning initiatives often talk in utopian terms about a “future without books,” but don’t say that to New School faculty member Trebor Scholz. Scholz, who teaches in the Department of Culture and Media, has had great success with making a book the final project turned in by students at the end of his new media courses. Instead of merely offering a traditional final exam, he asks students to submit print-on-demand publications that consist of at least 10,000 words and display real production values, even in large lecture classes.… more
Lessons From Sweden
This month I had the pleasure to spend time in Sweden, hosted by Patrik Svensson, Director of the HUMlab at Umea University in northern Sweden, and then with Göran Blomqvist, CEO of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond as well as Arne Jarrick, a prominent historian as well as the Secretary General for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Swedish Research Council. It was a fascinating trip but it was especially exciting to talk with these leaders in the world of academe and philanthropy about digital media and learning. Most interesting to the DMLcentral community were discussions about the Swedish response to its own economic downturn.… more
It's the Learning, Not the Technology - Jessica K. Parker
Without a doubt, your 15-year-old daughter can text one-handed while holding her phone under her desk. Your 11-year-old brother leads his own World of Warcraft guild. Your fellow college students are Googling you during the first class you have together. And if you are the professor, you know that your lectures are now competing against the entire Web for your students' attention. Without a doubt, today's youth are tech-savvy. That doesn't mean, however, that their proficiencies automatically grow into literacies, that they appreciate the lasting social implications of an inappropriate photo on Facebook, know how to use a blog as an e-portfolio or a platform for advocacy, understand how to evaluate the validity of what they find when they use a search engine. As a parent, a teacher, an avid user of digital media and participant in networked publics, I am one of those who feels strongly that educators and educational institutions should help young people understand the consequences of their social media practices in their own lives. Although pioneering teachers and librarians like Diana Rhoten, Will Richardson, Buffy J. Hamilton, and Meredith Stewart are igniting enthusiasm and guiding their students' explorations of participatory media for classroom learning, youth adoption of new media has happened too quickly for institutions to react en-masse.… more
Searching for What's Next in Learning and Digital Media
A young girl in rural South America uses a laptop from the One Laptop Per Child movement.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is publisher of the annual Horizon Report, which "seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education." I recently had an opportunity to talk with Keene Haywood, Director of Research at NMC, and probe a bit further into the 2010 Horizon Report, which covered trends in mobile learning, open source content, the future of textbooks, among many other pressing topics at the intersection of technology and education.… more
Probing What's Next in Learning and Technology, Pt 2
Children in Nigeria use laptops from the One Laptop Per Child movement.
In the second part of my interview with Keene Haywood, Director of Research at the New Media Consortium, publisher of the annual Horizon Report on technology in education, we covered: the future of textbooks, visualization teaching methods, use of augmented reality and gesture-based computing, open content movement, new media literacies, and practical strategies for advancing the field of digital media and learning… more
Veiled Censorship: Social Media and Education in Brazil
Internet access in Brazil has been growing. Data from IBOPE/Net Ratings from December 2009 showed that Brazil had 67.5 million Internet users, with 1.2 million new users just since September 2009. Accessing the Internet from work, schools, and home are all on the rise. This growth has also fed social media usage in Brazil. According to data from CGI (Comitê Gestor da Internet), for example, almost 67% of Internet users access social networking sites such as Orkut and almost 90% use Internet for everyday communication. Interestingly and disturbingly, the use of social media in education and learning is not increasing, because of lingering institutional prejudices against these sorts of social learning tools… more
If technology is making us stupid, it's not technology’s fault
There has been growing concern that computers have failed to live up to the promise of improving learning for school kids. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and PBS have all done stories recently calling into question the benefits of computers in schools. When computers fail kids, it’s too easy to blame the technology. And it’s disingenuous simply to cast aspersions on the kids. Those are responses that do little if anything to account for what is a much more layered set of conditions. Computers don’t define how they are taken up socially, people do. Guardians, or extended families more largely, are a key constituent in the conditions for productive, participatory learning engagements with technology. But they are not the only players, by far. Teachers, policymakers, even gaming corporations share responsibility to fashion the sort of robust, attractive learning ecologies, instruments, and products to maximize the vast potential computing technologies and the Internet hold for engaged and indeed lifelong learning experiences.… more