Education and the future

Add a Comment

Comment by Bruce Eric Montgomery on April 9, 2009 at 12:27pm

First Annual Digital Media and Learning Competition Winners' Showcase - Friday, April 17

Winners of the MacArthur Foundation's first Digital Media and Learning Competition will showcase their work through panel discussions, interactive demonstrations, and exhibits.

In addition to a central exhibit hall where you can interact with the media and talk to the Winners about what they have learned throughout the year, there will be a series of small group breakout sessions on topics from Twitter to blogging to using social networking more effectively to learn, create, teach, and organize--or on anything else that attendees would like to meet and discuss together.

April 17, 2009
9:30 a.m.- 3 p.m.
Palmer House Hilton, 6th Floor
Adams and Monroe Ballrooms
17 E. Monroe Street
Chicago, Illinois 60603
Free and open to the public
RSVP encouraged by April 14th
Schedule of Events for April 17, 2009

9:30 - 10:30 a.m. - Panel Discussion Featuring Inaugural Competition Winners Black Cloud, Sustainable South Bronx GreenFab and Virtual Peace

10:30 - 11:30 a.m. - Interactive Conversation on Participatory Learning with Mizuko Ito and Howard Rheingold

Mimi and Howard will encourage participation via Twitter, with a Twitterfall projection of the feed searching Twitter hashtags for the event. This is a chance to learn to Twitter if you have not already or to learn how to Tweet more effectively.

11:30 a.m. - 3 p.m. - Interactive Exhibition of 17 Winners' Projects from the Inaugural Competition

Breakout sessions throughout the day will allow for in-depth interaction with winners, to learn about what they learned in the course of developing their project, to find out more, and also to break into small groups for dynamic conversations about a range of participatory learning opportunities, using social networking, mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, and other means for organizing, creating, teaching, learning, and interacting.

HASTAC Scholars will be microblogging the entire PLOrk event and the Showcase on Twitter.

For more information on the Digital Media and Learning Competition visit www.dmlcompetition.net.

For more information on MacArthur's $50 million digital media and learning initiative visit www.macfound.org.

* * *

http://tiny.cc/PECYk: View this video for interviews with the first group of Digital Media and Learning winners who will be exhibiting, interacting, demo'ing, and a hands' on forum for sharing information about what they've learned over the course of the year.

*EXHIBITORS
Winners of the first (2007) Digital Media and Learning Competition will demonstrate and discuss their projects

Black Cloud Environmental Studies Gaming
Black Cloud is an environmental studies game that mixes the physical with the virtual to engage high school students in Los Angeles and the Clean Air Embassy. Teams role-play as either real estate developers or environmentalists using actual air quality sensors hidden through the city to monitor neighborhood pollution. Their goal is to select good sites for either additional development or conservation. Combining scientific data with human experiences, students collaborate, share and analyze their findings, including working cross-culturally. Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles has been playing the Black Cloud game, working to improve air quality in classrooms, and reporting on its environmental findings throughout the year.

Critical Commons
Critical Commons is a blogging, social networking and tagging platform specially designed to promote the ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material in support of learning. The project engages and organizes academic communities to articulate their needs, models and ethical principles of fair use. The project aims to promote a strong, legally viable and expanding conception of fair use, especially in support of learning.

FollowTheMoney.org: Networking Civic Engagement
FollowTheMoney.org: Networking Civic Engagement, a project of the Institute on Money in State Politics, is an online interactive site and users’ guide that supports civics research by young people and promotes their understanding of—and engagement with—electoral politics and legislative activities. Teacher and student collaborators guide development and testing of this interactive site for networking youth civic engagement.

Fractor: Act on Facts
Fractor is a web application that matches news stories with opportunities for social activism and community service. ‘Facts’ and ‘Acts’ are organized on a single, intuitive page where every news story is linked to real-world actions that users can pursue. Fractor gives news readers the tools to ‘act on facts,’ connecting them to a world of dynamic social involvement and activism.

Hypercities
Based on digital models of real cities, “HyperCities” is a web-based learning platform that connects geographical locations with stories of the people who live there and those who have lived there in the past. Through collaboration between universities and community partners in Los Angeles, Lima, Berlin, and Rome, HyperCities develops and offers a participatory, open-ended learning environment grounded in space and time, place and history, memory and social interaction, oral history and digital media. A recent Hypercities partner is the L.A. Phillipino Workers’ Center. Hypercities asks, “what if you could surf a city, browse its streets, get lost in its buildings, meet friends and strangers in a hyperlinked world, go back in time, and reemerge in another city?”

Let the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop for Social Issue Games
The Let the Games Begin workshop was a soup-to-nuts tutorial on the fundamentals of social issue games. Appealing to those who are new to designing learning games but passionate about social issues, the workshop featured leading experts on topics including game design, fundraising, evaluation, youth participation, distribution, and press strategies. The workshop was held in conjunction with the 2008 Games for Change Festival, and will be extended for the rest of 2008 through an online community dedicated to learning about social games.

MILLEE: Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies
Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies, a project conducted in rural India, promotes literacy through language-learning games on mobile phones—the “PCs of the developing world.” MILLEE’s mobile phone games are designed to create rich storytelling environments that enable language learning.

Mobile Movement
Mobile Movement connects young African social entrepreneurs with young North American professionals. Using mobile phone technology, which is now widespread, this network facilitates both micro-funding and the exchange of professional advice to projects in Africa that promote public benefit. A website shares the project’s successes, lessons learned, and new ideas for scaling toward future collaborative and transnational youth partnerships.

Networking Grassroots Knowledge Globally
Networking Grassroots Knowledge Globally, a project of the Global Fund for Children, is a new community and “information commons” that includes blogs, video clips, sound slides, podcasts, and photographs to help share innovative practices for helping marginalized and vulnerable children. The commons allows grassroots practitioners and marginalized young people to harness and share new models for learning, organizing, and communicating around the world.

Ohmwork: Networking Homebrew Science
Ohmwork is a new social network and podcast site where young people can become inventive and passionate about science by sharing their do-it-yourself (DIY) science projects. They can also contribute to one another’s projects, customize the site, and collaborate as part of their collective digital learning. Developed by Vision Education, Ohmwork aspires to become an online network for DIY science.

PLOrk: Princeton Laptop Orchestra
Mobile Musical Networks is an expressive mobile musical laboratory for exploring new ways of making music with laptops and local-area-networks. Students collaborate in designing these technologies. In the process, they learn about a variety of subjects, including musical acoustics, networking, instrument design, human-computer interfacing, procedural programming, signal processing, and musical aesthetics.

RezEd: The Hub for Learning and Virtual Worlds
RezEd: The Hub for Learning and Virtual Worlds was developed to serve as an online hub to promote the use of virtual worlds as rich learning environments. The participating community shares best practices, encourages dialogue, provides access to the leading research, hosts podcast interviews with community leaders, and features the latest news on learning in virtual worlds.

Self-Advocacy Online
Self-Advocacy Online is an educational and networking website for teens and adults with intellectual and cognitive disabilities, targeted at those who participate in organized self-advocacy groups. In supporting greater networking, peer exchange, collaboration, and communication to a general public, Self Advocacy Online will extend the reach of and interaction among people with disabilities so that they can more effectively speak up for themselves and make their own decisions.

Social Media Classroom
The Social Media Virtual Classroom is an online community for teachers and students to collaborate and contribute ideas for teaching and learning about the psychological, interpersonal, and social issues related to participatory media. This digital learning space features and analyzes the use of blogs, wikis, chat, instant messaging, microblogging, forums, social bookmarking and instructional screencasts for teachers and students.

Sustainable South Bronx GreenFab
The Sustainable South Bronx GreenFab project is a laboratory that allows people to turn digital models into real world constructions of plastic, metal, wood and more. Part of a broader MIT-led initiative, this particular project applies the principles of personal fabrication to learning about urban sustainability. The project examines connections between virtual and physical spaces, collaborative design, and the potential for impact within the South Bronx.

Virtual Peace
Virtual Peace is a digital humanitarian assistance game that creates a learning environment for young people studying public policy and international relations. The game was developed by repurposing an existing military simulation into a tool for humanitarian training. Learning within the game focuses on leadership skills, cultural awareness, problem solving, and adaptive thinking —all of which are necessary to coordinate international humanitarian assistance for natural disaster relief.

YouthActionNet Marketplace
The YouthActionNet Marketplace is a dynamic digital networking platform for young leaders to engage in social entrepreneurship and address critical social problems. Young social entrepreneurs can link to a global community of innovators to share, collaborate, customize, and evaluate information and ideas, and showcase them to a general public searching for new ways to address old issues.


Bruce Montgomery
Montgomery & Company
Technology | Innovation | Commerce
P.O. Box 10796
Chicago, Illinois 60610-0796
773-410-0608 [cell]
onepresence@yahoo.com

Comment by Kevin Burrell on August 13, 2008 at 6:15pm

Thank you this is very relevant to what is going on.