Full Schedule

Youth have been deeply important to every modern social movement, including civil rights, LGBTQ, feminist, environmentalist and environmental justice, labor, antiwar, and immigrant rights movements. In each case, they’ve used media as tools for liberation. Young people today organize for access to education and against the school to prison pipeline, occupy public spaces, demand an end to racial profiling, hate crimes, and stop-and-frisk policies, mobilize for immigrant rights, and more. In what ways do youth activists appropriate digital media spaces, tools, and practices in order to create, circulate, and amplify social movement voices? What types of media innovations are developed in the
heat of social struggles? How can we learn from and highlight the experiences of grassroots groups and networks of youth activists?

This Feature Session is a conversation between scholars, youth organizers, and media makers who work at the fertile intersection of youth media and youth movements.

Participants:

Global Action Project (NYC): Global Action Project works with young people most affected by injustice to build the knowledge, tools, and relationships needed to create media for community power, cultural expression, and political change. http://global-action.org/

Allied Media Projects (Detroit): Allied Media Projects cultivates media strategies for a more just and creative world. From the intersection of communications, art, technology, education and social justice, we share and develop models for transforming ourselves and our communities. http://alliedmedia.org

Chicago Youth Voices Network (Chicago): Chicago Youth Voices is a coalition of 13 youth media organizations in Chicago working together to strengthen the youth media sector and amplify the voices of youth and their communities. http://cyvn.org/

The Digital Youth Network, as one of the MacArthur Foundation’s original DML grantees, has been fortunate to be a key player in many DML initiatives. As such, in the past seven years the DYN team, consisting of over 35 mentors, has implemented programming in over 30 schools, community centers, and libraries. With being one of the original grantees, DYN has shared many aspects of our work with the DML community. However, sharing our work often limits the ability to provide a complete picture of the complex ecosystem necessary to create learning experiences that engage youth in deepening their digital literacies and accomplishing personally meaningful goals. With the expansion of the YOUmedia model, the creation of the Hive Learning Networks, and the general growth of the DML community, many DML community members have sought out the DYN model for adaptation purposes and to deepen knowledge. As DML 2013 is in Chicago, the home of the Digital Youth Network, we propose a panel session that will enable the DYN team, inclusive of former and current DYN youth, to present the DYN Learning Model and engage in knowledge building with the larger DML community.

DYN Overview


DYN’s goal is to use digital literacy and technology as a vehicle to transform core spaces where youth spend their time actively learning and developing the necessary skills and knowledge to acquire social and cultural capital for full participation in society as critical digital citizens. Guided by professional adult artists who are also mentors trained in essentials of pedagogy, youth produce digital artifacts, share their products, and demonstrate digital media skills and understandings during school, afterschool, and in online spaces.

The DYN Learning Model


The DYN Learning Model which consists of five important components: modes of digital media communication; integrated learning spaces; artifact-driven curriculum; skilled mentors; and regular opportunities to showcase work is specifically organized to allow youth to share, showcase, and critique media projects created by peers and mentors. Interactions between youth, peers, and adult mentors result in a learning environment whereby the demonstration of one’s digital media literacy enables participants to gain status and social capital.

Panel Structure


We propose a hybrid panel/poster/question-answer format consisting of:

• A historical overview of DYN (Nichole Pinkard)
• A poster session presentation of DYN learning model by core team members (Tracy Edwards, Tre Everette, Tene’ Gray, Darrell Johnson, Akili Lee, Asia Roberson, Jennifer Steele)
• A moderated question-answer session with current and former DYN youth (Mike Hawkins (mentor) and four former and current students)

We believe this format will serve the goal of 1) providing a rich description of the DYN Learning Model, 2) discussing the impact of the model in multiple contexts and its evolution over time, and 3) providing an opportunity for members of DYN and the DML community to connect in hopes of extending collaborations.

Over the last five years, we have witnessed a groundswell of innovation in the area of civic technology. While new tools and methods are being designed to harness the potential for citizen-led action, many retain the limitations of traditional tools—they were designed for relatively narrow uses and time frames.  In this panel, the New Urban Mechanics Collaborative (NUMc) will discuss its efforts to combat this problem and highlight successes in improving, studying, and scaling opportunities for civic engagement through the use of digital games and social media. The NUMc team (built of both academic researchers and government officials) will discuss what it sees as vital approaches and institutional models for civic innovation, present its experiences in fostering relationships among government, communities, and researchers, and demonstrate a handful of its digital tools and ongoing projects.

Building off of the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, NUMc is a national effort to improve civic innovation. Rather than simply focusing on creating new digital tools, NUMc’s unique focus is on creating, strengthening, and reorganizing governments’ partnerships with other institutions such as universities and academic researchers and community organizations.  By building a network of organizations and innovators within and between cities, NUMc seeks to reduce the cost and risk of implementing new technologies in the civic space.  Additionally, it is a vital step in the effort to move beyond the limitations of traditional outreach efforts, with the lack of connection to local populations, an emphasis on passive participation, and a top-down power structure in which governments provide for rather than collaborate with citizens.

The bulk of this panel will consist of presenting NUMc’s unique organizational structure as a model that achieves three goals: engaging local citizens, cross-city collaboration, and producing informed technologies and policies through rigorous and accessible research. We will describe its arrangement of formal and informal partnerships with other cities (including Philadelphia’s recently-opened Office of New Urban Mechanics), universities across the country (Emerson, Harvard, UPenn, and Stanford), technology groups like Code for America, and local community organizations. After describing the organization of the network, we will present several projects and describe their structure of funding, scaling, and research. NUMc has established a research agenda for its first year that focuses on how using digital civic tools can impact levels of civic engagement, community relationships, and feelings of efficacy and trust. We will discuss the challenges of finding meaningful connections between the process of academic research and the just-in-time service delivery of local government. 

We will conclude with a discussion about opportunities and challenges for scaling the network to other cities. We want to use this time to problem solve and generate real, practical solutions for coalition building in this space. By presenting an overview of NUMc’s organization and inviting collaboration, this panel will provide civic innovators with models for approaching these difficult challenges and opportunities for building relationships.

It is widely recognized that healthy character development in youth is a critical process that leads towards successful adulthood and greater civic participation. The growth of an adolescent’s character is often the subject of urgent discussion and studies. Young people, especially those in under-resourced communities, are viewed as morally deficient (not engaged, selfish) because of a commonly held belief that is reinforced by popular media.

At ZeroDivide we seek to elevate an idea that culturally appropriate learning environments enable young people, regardless of their level of resources, to develop strong characters. These distinctive environments can be found in the “third space” (not home, not school) where they gain exposure to social justice frameworks, access digital production technologies, and receive support from skilled adult allies. The third space offers youth an opportunity to become capable and committed advocates for their communities. 

ZeroDivide will facilitate a discussion with experts and practitioners that explores the unique intersection of character development and digital media spaces, tools, and practices. We recognize the value of the “third space” for youth that serves as an innovation hub for learning and civic education. Innovative practices in the third space are found in the crucial roles of adult allies (educators, youth development specialists, artists) who provide technical skills and serve as mentors/guides. 

This panel will highlight how organizations use digital media to create effective learning environments and high impact pedagogical practices that enhance young people’s development and their civic participation. 

Finally, our panel will discuss with the audience some of the continuing questions that affect this work. We will conduct real time polling to learn the popular views and recommendations.  

The group questions will include:

• What is the appropriate level of guidance and influence that adult allies should take in getting youth to leverage their social capital toward civic and social justice outcomes?
• What professional standards (i.e., media production, journalistic, leadership) should  youth be held to? 
• What are the critical inquiry paths that young people should (must) pursue on their way to adulthood? 

Reels Grrls, Seattle, WA - The Disability Media Justice Program

A digital literacy and production curriculum engages community youth with and without disabilities to utilize a disability justice framework. This leading edge curriculum has been spearheaded by a program alum who is a disability advocate with cerebral palsy.

Access Humboldt, Eureka, CA – The Real Life Research Lab

In one of the most remote locations in northern California, Access Humboldt’s youth utilize Wi-Fi enabled video cameras to research and document access to broadband and news/information in their surrounding area that includes tribal lands. 

Center for Multi-Cultural Cooperation - Fresno, CA

 Spy Hop - Salt Lake City, UT

Some stereotype youth as apolitical while others highlight how youth redefine their political participation utilizing social media in nuanced ways. Our panel examines these opposing views by describing the actual practices of high school students engaged in various forms of civic participation.

Considering that the average American youth spends more than ten hours a day with digital media -- with minority youth averaging four and a half more hours per day than their White counterparts (Center of Media and Human Development, 2011) -- it is imperative that youth are taught how to make meaning of and produce media that empower them to become active members of their communities. This is particularly salient for students of color who spend more time with digital media and whose civic participation and political involvement are often amongst the lowest (Kahne, 2008).

Seeking to understand the relationship between youth digital media engagement and civic participation in schools, this panel’s three research studies examine youth civic digital engagement in secondary classrooms. All three studies took place in “Exploring Computer Science” (ECS) classrooms whose core mission is to democratize access to CS learning. ECS engages secondary students with college-preparatory CS knowledge through inquiry-based projects related to students’ personal interests. Funded by NSF, this university/K-12 partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has grown over 500% in three years, enrolling over 2000 predominately Latin@ and African American students.

The first panelist examines the process of one female Mexican-descent student, Itzel, bridging her ancestral praxis to CS learning as a positive approach to broaden participation in CS. The study explores identity and agency in the figured world of ancestral computing—critically situating computation from a familial perspective of communal vision. Itzel demonstrates civic participation by sharing her research with the schooling community as well as teaching her mom how to use a programming tool for use at her church.

The second panelist focuses on the possibilities of digital media to improve critical literacies and computational thinking practices through the creation of a video game about issues in the students’ lives and their community. These projects were created with the express purpose to initiate social change through dissemination and game play. This study illuminates the potential of leveraging students’ digital literacies and cultural capital, while teaching computational skills in programming about the macro sociopolitical issues that influence their everyday lives. 

The third panelist explores what students in three different classrooms learned about the power of data, their personal abilities to be researchers, and their potential responsibilities in representing their communities through the “Mobilize” project. Using mobile phones, phone apps, and web services to conduct community research--a process otherwise known as “participatory sensing”--students learned how to collect and analyze their own data about snacking habits and billboard advertisements in a civic engagement campaign. 

The panel will begin by discussing the audience’s vision for youth civic participation followed by a description of the three research projects. The panel’s goal is to welcome a fluid dialogue with the audience for sharing ideas.

We define Civic Media as the intersection of two spheres: civic engagement and participatory media. The read/write culture of participatory media suggests that issues of public interest and concern are now open to broader participation than in an earlier broadcast culture. We are seeing new forms of civic engagement emerge that go beyond voting and participating in political meetings, and involve techniques as well understood as online organizing and media creation, and as novel as protest through cyberattack.

Native to the participatory culture of the internet is the idea of the meme: ideas created by individuals that spread rapidly through acts of amplification and remix. Two years ago, discussions of memes mostly concerned lolcats and the occasional viral video. But memes now classify as widely-accepted political speech, receiving breaking news-like priority on television coverage of the 2012 US presidential election. Memes may have played a role in Obama's victory, and certainly played a role in the Occupy movement's media-based campaign against inequality.

Memes aren’t just clever phrases and funny words though, they are invitations to participate in behaviors modeled by others or to interpret through one’s own remix practices. The ramifications of this are starting to come clear in activisms like distributed denial-of-service (DDOS). Activist DDOS actions invite participants to engage with others across a distributed platform that joins their discrete actions into one coherent event, with strong implications for how these individuals identify as activists and community members later. The Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) is a tool for running a DDOS attack, designed and used by Anonymous in a variety of online actions. But LOIC is not simply a civic action tool; it has evolved to represent explicit strategies of media manipulation and identity construction for a community of activists under the guise of Anonymous.

But Civic Media is not all new tools; it’s also the traditional made new. Change.org has augmented the online petition with professional media outreach and top-tier strategists to make it a powerful force for building international campaigns. Successes include justice for Trayvon Martin and the selection of a female moderator for a US presidential debate. Change.org represents the growing legitimation of low barriers to entry online activism, disregarded as clicktivism or slacktivism, that provides access to powerful tools to those who may struggle to find their voice in most civic spaces.

These civic media practices all embody the participatory as accessible and inclusive practices, however their activations of distributed communities don’t fit neatly into accepted theories of change such as traditional organizing and lobbying. A theory of change for media activism hinges instead on winning the attention economy and pushing for cultural transformation. So what does this kind of framework for change mean in terms of civic media’s ability to scale or sustain? On which types of issues might it be most effective or least effective? And how are we able to study these practices quantitatively and qualitatively?

Staff from two YOUmedia early adopter sites, Hirshhorn’s ARTLAB+ and DreamYard, come together to lead a workshop that explores how different institutional constraints affect the application of HOMAGO principles in digital learning environments.

The workshop will consist of three sections:

I.      Experience Hanging Out and Messing Around at DML (20 minutes)

II.     ARTLAB+ and DreamYard present about HOMAGO at their sites (20 minutes)

III.    Create a HOMAGO model  (50 minutes)

In Part I, participants will experience Hanging Out and Messing Around firsthand. The room will be set up with both peer and interest-driven activities which have been tested at our YOUmedia sites and that encourage interaction.  Upon entry, participants will be able to visit three unique activity stations, including ones that let participants use facebook and video games to ones that can teach them "How to Make a GIF" and "How to Make Beats." Participants are free to explore for a period of time what these activity stations offer them. There will be two to three staff members from the two hosting YOUmedia early adopter sites to encourage and guide the participants experience.

In Part II, Ryan Hill, from ARTLAB+, and Hillary Kolos, from DreamYard, will transition the group from hanging out and messing around to geeking out – about HOMAGO. ARTLAB+ and DreamYard exemplify two different ways that sites have incorporated the same HOMAGO principles. Ryan and Hillary will each give 10-minute presentations about how different constraints at their institution affect how HOMAGO principles are implemented into their programming. These constraints include space, mission/history, audience, and time. The presentations will serve as examples to ground the group activity in Part III.

In Part III, the tables will turn and participants will be asked to problem solve how to implement HOMAGO principles at a new (fictional) institution. The room will be split into groups of four and each will receive large post-it pads, markers, and a template of several “institutional constraints.” This exercise will get groups brainstorming about what HOMAGO might look like at their fictional institution and how it might work for their (fictional) audiences.

For example, one group might be given slips of paper describing an institution:

•      Type of institution: A museum

•      Time: Saturday programs

•      Space: Three rooms, one with 10 desktop computers

•      Content Area: African American History

•      Audience: Teens who can reach a downtown urban area

With this information the groups will think about how they would create new programming for hanging out, messing around, and geeking out within the given institutional constraints. Then, each group will be asked to present their ideas for new HOMAGO-inspired programming at their fictional institution.

Overall, this workshop will allow participants to experience hanging out and messing around, hear from program directors about their experience incorporating HOMAGO principles at their institutions, and problem solve how to apply HOMAGO principles at other institutions. Our goal is to help people understand that the underlying principles for HOMAGO can exist in any kind of unique space and work within the constraints of their institution.

Session on the future of alternative assesment moderated by Connie Yowell.

Through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, The San Francisco Public Library, The California Academy of Sciences, KQED, and the Bay Area Video Coalition have spent the last 2 years creating a model for a sustainable learning lab and community network focused on digital media and literacy skills that will be located in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. The partnered organizations have approached this task with an innovative youth-centered model involving youth in every step of the process.  The original partners have formed relationships with the new Bay Area Youth Media Network comprised of like-minded organizations with similar goals and technology companies Twitter and Mozilla.

This panel proposes to present a case study of challenges and successes involved in building a community network to engage and support youth in their creative and civic activities to shape their local communities.  To demonstrate this innovative civic model, panel members will include partners involved in a variety of youth networks in San Francisco as well as youth advisors from these networks focused on connected learning in SF. Panelists will discuss the role of youth advisory boards, particularly youth who sit on both the San Francisco Public Library and the Bay Area Youth Media Network boards. Youth on the panel will describe their activities and how the advisory boards inform the development of digital media events, contribute to the design of the learning lab, and how they are involved in all facets of community activities associated with the network. 

The partners on the panel will discuss the successful launching of a regional youth media festival, hackathons, Hive pop up events, as well as ongoing work to create sustainable frameworks and drive a youth and Community Based Organizations movement that will evolve, stimulate local impact, and go far beyond a one-stop event. We will explore the role youth and partners play in choosing and developing online spaces to author and review media as well as connect to other youth and community members. Finally, we will discuss the learning lab’s work with a variety of partners in business such as Twitter and Mozilla, in education through collaboration with local schools, and media organizations who work with youth to develop learning opportunities and youth leadership. 

The goals of the coalition are to support youth exploration, critical assessment, development, and ownership of the digital landscape. The indicators of success for this connected learning effort for youth include becoming better consumers and evaluators of digital content; building competencies in using technology and media production tools; sharing and licensing work produced through Creative Commons; and telling stories that support and celebrate local culture and diversity. Through engagement with the learning lab and community network, youth participants also build collaborative learning skills, increased understanding design process, and develop their leadership skills. 

In this hands-on lesson demonstration, participants will experience how affinity spaces in the classroom open up entry points for connecting literary and real-world events, while creating a more democratic learning space based on shared knowledge of an imagined world.  A team made up of a middle school teacher, a multimedia teaching artist, and 8th grade students from Columbia College Chicago’s TEAM program (Transforming Education through the Arts and Media) will guide you through a digital art-making and art-sharing process, aligned with Common Core Standards, meant to build student engagement and critical thinking skills, as well as participatory literacies.  

These two instructors have cultivated an affinity space in the classroom around the Hunger Games phenomenon.  Using the trilogy as a thematic anchor for everything from revolution to metaphor to human trafficking, students can freely explore a wide variety of ideas and concepts in a community with a shared culture and language.  

The workshop will explore and compare the concepts of “propos” (government-produced propaganda films) from the books and memes from our current social media landscape.  Memes are an inverted form of propaganda, as they are created by citizens, and anyone with the internet has the ability to create and disseminate, rather than being owned by a powerful elite or regime.  This activity requires artists to find connections between their world, popular culture, and the world of the Hunger Games.  Using an online meme generator, participants will create their own composite memes that illustrate and comment on those comparisons and analogies, and then we will share them with the world using TEAM’s social media outlets.  

Ample time will be dedicated to discussing strategies for using this activity with students of all levels and assessing student learning.

Detroit, MI has become a national icon of failure. Media coverage highlights drop-out rates, unemployment, and entrenched political dysfunction. These problems are real, and deep-rooted, and they constitute a social crisis for the city. Within this state of crisis, youth leadership has never been more important.  As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his 1967
book, *Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?*, we need to provide young people with opportunities for self-transforming, structure-transforming activities that will allow them to rebuild our dying cities.

Two programs, Detroit Future Schools (DFS) and Detroit Future Youth (DFY) use digital media arts to do just that. Working both inside and outside of schools, we are growing a network of youth, artists and educators committed to building the visionary youth leadership Detroit needs.

DFS works inside of schools to reinvent the purpose and practice of education. Rather than prepare future low-wage workers, or future professionals who will leave Detroit in order to be successful, DFS believes Detroit schools must prepare future leaders who will commit themselves to transforming their own lives and communities through social
entrepreneurship and community organizing.  DFS partners K-12 teachers with digital media artists to design the instructional practices we need to fulfill that purpose. Students produce media projects exploring essential questions that are relevant to students lives and the future of the planet, while integrating core content, and building classroom cultures based on mutual-transformation.

DFY works outside of schools, weaving a network of youth programs that focus on social justice based education and multimedia creation, who are using digital media for self and community-wide transformation. Their long-term goal is to build a city-wide youth movement that builds the future creators, problem-solvers and social change-makers Detroit needs. DFY produced a "Curriculum Mixtape," featuring workshops and media developed by each of the 12 DFY partner organizations. The USB Mixtape highlights media created by youth, with a curriculum book of accompanying lesson plans that were co-designed by youth leaders and their adult allies.

This workshop will give participants a hands-on experience of one workshop from the DFY Curriculum Mixtape. It will also include a panel presentation
that will tell the story of how a grassroots coalition launched these programs with a federal stimulus grant, and explore what each program is doing to invest in Detroit's future by building authentic youth-leadership in the present. Through this workshop, we hope to find allies engaged in youth-led, paradigm-shifting work within their cities and exchange lessons and resources with them. We will present curricula, media samples and evaluation instruments that have come from our programs.

Schools have long been expected to play a primary role in the development of young people’s civic consciousness. Almost a century ago, Dewey’s educational philosophy provided the foundation for new understandings of “connected and participatory learning.”  He promoted a vision of the classroom as a site of democratic participation, open debate, and free expression directly connected - and relevant - to children’s lives outside of the school. 

Over the past 25 years there have been several cycles of prediction that new technologies could contribute toward this goal. As they became increasingly accessible to young people and educators, we hoped that these tools would catalyze radical changes in the organization and structure of children’s education, the relationships among children and the adults around them, and children’s status as actors in the political and social lives of their communities. However, these predictions have repeatedly outpaced the impact these tools have had on children and their status as actors in their own education and development. 

A wide range of research suggests that we have persistently overestimated the ability of digital tools to reconfigure relationships among children and the adults and institutions that care for and support them. Rather than catalysts of change, digital tools may be better understood as motivators for change, which can only be sustained or scaled up when comparable investments are made in training for educators and youth advocates, and policy reforms that create the spaces, time, and incentives that would support these kinds of change. 

This panel will respond to the conference theme, “Envisioning Civic Education in the 21st Century.” It brings together experienced leaders in educational research, advocacy, and practice, who will draw on recent work to consider how current policy contexts are both promoting and impeding young people’s opportunities to use digital tools to drive their civic education and engagement. 

Panel participants include:

1. Jim Diamond, Research Associate at the Center for Children and Technology, part of the non-profit research and development group Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC/CCT). His talk will draw on his experience observing students using digital games to support reasoning about social change and civic action.
2. Julie Keane is a Senior Research Associate at VIF International Education. Her talk will draw on research with young people creating digital autobiographies and seeking to represent their communities using digital tools.
3. Meghan McDermott is the Executive Director of Global Action Project, a youth media organization that provides media-arts and leadership education for youth. Her talk will draw on her long experience with young people using digital media to tell stories about underrepresented youth and their efforts to cause political change.
4. Shelley Pasnik is the director of EDC/CCT. Her talk will focus on obstacles to integrating digital media into all children’s early learning experiences.

Katie McMillan Culp, director of research at EDC/CCT, will act as discussant for the panel.

As innovations in Open Government change the relationships between publics and institutions, we are redrawing relationships of power and decision-making--including, but not limited to, technological interventions. New forms of social and community engagement are also emerging alongside new technologies, and these forces catalyze and add value to each other. Meanwhile, new and newly open data sets are providing the material for evidence-driven policies and advocacies.

The collision between Open Government Movement and Big Data creates an opportunity for communities to adopt the mediums and methods necessary to bring the focus back to human scale and to align these new tools to the best ways that communities already engage and self-govern. 

In this panel we will present three projects focused on bridging the divide between online and offline methods. These projects are:

Tidepools - a locally-hosted mesh-wireless aggregation platform for community issues and conversations, serving as a digital community map hub for everything from events, transit information, and air quality data to tools for documenting and challenging stop-and-frisk policing in Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY.

Public Science Project / Everyday Data Initiative - This initiative draws on open source technologies and visual media to facilitate participatory modes of knowledge production and visualization in, and of, New York City communities. The intersectionality of three of these participatory action research projects are discussed: The Morris Justice Project takes place in Morris Heights in the Bronx, NY, where the community documented and analyzed experiences with the police, by surveying and interviewing over 1000 residents of the neighborhood. The Brooklyn’s Public Scholars project is an AAC&U funded partnership between the Public Science Project and Kingsborough Community College that supports community-based teaching and engaged scholarship. And, the MyDigitalFootprint.ORG Project which works with young people in New York City to investigate and engage their everyday experiences in proprietary information ecologies through collective research and design.

21 Days of Questions, Cambridge Campaign Against Domestic Violence - a community-driven policymaking project linking the power of individuals and their questions to decision-makers, and policy and services around domestic violence in the City of Cambridge.  This campaign is designed and implemented through a partnership between Engage the Power (etp) and the City of Cambridge and is using the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media’s tool, Vojo, a phone first platform for storytelling, to gather questions and input from mobile phone users.

It is our observation that community-driven innovation and engagement among youth exhibit a “long-tail problem” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail). In other words, there are very few young people who are actively and intensely engaged in problem-solving in the civic space around them.  Most young people fall somewhere along the “long tail” of engagement -- with a moderate proportion engaged minimally and a much larger group relatively unengaged. There are a number of reasons for this lack of engagement: personal, historical, institutional, technological, and the paradox of choice among them.  These reasons play themselves out in multiple and different ways at various points along the tail.

The thesis of this panel would be simple, but rich: that a) we should want young people to shape the realities they seek in the communities around them, and that b) there are a variety of interventions that can enable young people, wherever they are on the tail, to do so.

The panel would start with an overview: what precisely is the “long tail problem” of youth civic engagement?  A general framing would describe how the long tail problem manifests in society and economy, and apply the framework to youth engagement.  Panelists would then describe their own thesis of the “problem” that motivated their related work, situating and describing an archetypical young person he/she is trying to target along the tail.  Presenting a “solution” they have put forward to resolve these problems, panelists would specify what it is about this solution that moves young people to higher engagement, and why this greater engagement is a good thing for the world around them.  Specifically, panelists would offer their work in the following realms: community benefits projects among justice-involved youth in Harlem, maker-innovation camps among young inventors in Sierra Leone, visioning labs to ignite the talents and passions of the millennial generation, and voting registration improvements that aim to be as easy as renting a DVD from Netflix.

The moderator would then stimulate Q&A from the audience on such questions as: 

• Must all solutions be sustainable and scalable - or are they relevant and important in their bespoke, or unique nature? 
• To what extent do these solutions build trust, empathy, and collaboration among civic actors?  And need they do that? 
• How are young people re-imagining their own realities by engaging civically? 
• To what end digital technology?  For what purposes? Always? 
• Under what circumstances is being plugged into local-level innovation and engagement processes useful?  -Are they existent everywhere and, if not, why?  
• Can national-level processes or online processes suffice where offline, local ecosystems are not established? 
• What kind of partnerships successfully promote youth engagement?  To which kinds of partnerships have we turned a blind eye? 
• Is there actually a way to increase the area under the curve?  In other words, if there will always be a long tail of civic engagement, is there some minimal level of civic engagement that would be beneficial to youth and society?

Dancing for Democracy? On Bollywood Flashmobs, New Media, and Activism

Presenter: Sangita Shresthova

On November 27, 2011, a flashmob took place in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) train station in Mumbai, India as a group of mostly-young people performed a pre-choreographed, but seemingly spontaneous, dance set to a Bollywood song. Soon, videos of the event appeared online sparking lively debates and media coverage. In this presentation, I engage the debates that surrounded the CST flashmob to grapple with the democratic potentional that lies at the intersection of live performance, popular culture, and new media. I review the global proliferation and online circulation of Bollywood flashmobs as performed fandom. I also point to how the choice of song and location of the CST flashmob informed its local and online significance.  The CST flashmob took place at one of the sites of the terrorist attacks that shook Mumbai in 2008. The organizers also used a song from Rang De Basanti – a Bollywood film about group of young friends who battle corruption in India’s government (Mehta 2012). While the flashmob organizers never made any activist claims, post-event discussions online (and elsewhere) quickly alluded to citizen action, and even to Gandhian non-violence. Following suit, critics argued that this, and other, flashmobs are nothing more than entertaining celebrations of popular culture.  Engaging these critiques, I argue the local significance and online circulation of the CST flashmob point to Bollywood dance as a site of fan activism, which in turn, has much to teach us about the civic potential of popular cultures that lie outside the Euro-American axis.

Our Voice:  Youths’ Meaningful Communication for Social Change in Sénégal 

Presenter: Laurel Felt

Although over 60% of West Africa’s population is under age 25, youths’ perspectives are rarely solicited or shared. Supporting youths’ capacity to communicate via multimedia would help to redress this situation by offering opportunities for youths to raise their voices, engage in civic/public life, and transform their communities.

This interactive talk will examine Sunukaddu, a summer program created by Senegal’s The African Network for Health Education to foster youths’ multimedia civic discourse. It will specifically analyze how staff redesigned Sunukaddu during the summer of 2010 to increase its effectiveness (see Felt & Rideau, 2012). First, the staff established a collaborative curriculum design process that respected “Nio far,” a Senegalese expression that means “We are together” and exemplifies locals’ appreciation of teamwork and co-ownership. Second, they increased participants’ hands-on exploration. Third, they leveraged smartphones. Fourth, they focused on new media literacies (NMLs; Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Weigel, & Robison, 2006) and social and emotional learning skills (SELs; Elias et al., 1997).

Of the 23 participants (22 youths aged 15-21, one classroom teacher of 8 of the participants), 20 identified the NML skill of negotiation as an area of expertise. Collective intelligence was the next most cited NML skill, embraced by 16 participants.  Both skills boast meaningful relations with SELs social awareness and relationship skills. Responsible decision-making and self-awareness were the top two SEL skills. 

Engaging in participatory professional development (Reilly & Literat, 2010) and fostering youths’ communicative capacities is a meaningful way to prepare future leaders and catalyze social change, whether in the Global South or elsewhere.

#hashtags vs. Soap Operas: How Mexican Youth Use Social Media to Fight Political Manipulation

Presenter: Andres Monroy-Hernandez

The role of social media in movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street has been much discussed, and such "hashtagged" social movements continue to appear in multiple latitudes. In this paper I present an analysis of the #YoSoy132 student movement, or "I am 132" in English, that emerged during the 2012 Mexican presidential election. The movement rallied young people against the alleged manipulation by large media networks, in an apparent effort to determine the next president. I examine the genesis and development of #YoSoy132 by looking at a large corpus of messages on the microblogging platform Twitter and through conversations with some of its members. First, I examine how, despite the movement’s antagonism with mainstream media, it was able to gain visibility and respect from a wide-range of political actors and the general populace. Second, I examine how the movement’s visibility was propelled by public-facing social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter, while relying on pre-existing offline networks that organized themselves using a combination of face-to-face interactions and private Facebook groups. Third, I discuss the challenges and benefits of decentralization that included a disparate set of social media outlets, some of which were taken over by opponents of the movement and later recovered by the hacker collective Anonymous. Finally, I close by exposing how the movement revealed the limitations of social media in reaching beyond those who are already networked in light of the results of the election.

Mobilizing Queer Publics:  Film as a Tool of Democratic Politics

Presenter: Andy Silveira

Following the euphoria of Delhi High Court’s watershed verdict which read down Section 377 (that criminalizes “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal,”) of the Indian Penal Code on 2 July, 2009, the Indian LGBT identified youth have persistently sought actual and virtual support through their narratives of coming-out within and outside their respective families as well as in the social sphere. This paper examines how the small, yet growing demographic of LGBT identified people conceptualize their struggles and develop a queer agenda at the policy level that would directly impact the functioning of the state as the chief arbitrator between various lobbying groups attempting to legitimize their struggles for recognition. While the print and visual media in the Indian context, which is biased in a discriminatory fashion in favor of the “romantic” couple, extols queer initiatives within the State, they also sensationalize, marginalize and censure homosexuality as reprehensible, diseased, unnatural and alien. Amidst the threat of stripping the homosexual citizen of his or her fundamental rights, film screenings along with online activism and pride events in several cities and towns foster a sense of solidarity and create a platform for queer mobilization. This paper explores how queer film screening and discussion groups function as sites for political engagement both locally and internationally. This paper also demonstrates how queer initiatives, intimacies, and activism re-imagine democracy through local and transnational support by destabilizing the normative expectations of heterosexuality rooted within a civil society that is strangely at odds with its own ambivalences.

If we understand Youth Media as a movement for global social justice in media, education, and public policy, what are its goals and practices? This panel will feature the voices of prominent Youth Media movement makers, including long term activist-educators, and former and current youth organizers. They will map new understandings of youth media as social transformation, making particular claims for the political participation of youth alongside demands for media justice, and intersecting innovative practices of popular education, community organizing, and grassroots media production. 

Intergenerational Mentorship for Digital Activism – Stories from two continents

Salome Chasnoff, Ph.D., and youth collaborator – TBD

Personal Hermitage Productions and Beyondmedia Education, Chicago, IL 

Social Justice Youth Media Framework - What it means in practice

Teresa Basilio, and youth collaborator TBD, Global Action Project, New York, NY

From Youth Media to Youtube: Democratizing Voices 

C. Davida Ingram, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Visitor Center

SNS Soon Enough: Youth Media and Intergenerational Conversations after Convergence

Tammy Ko Robinson, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

Community Media as Participatory Form – Beyond the “individual” proliferation of experts and activists

Cesar Sanchez, Casa Guatemala, Chicago, IL/Guatemala City, Guatemala

Diana Coryat, Visiting Researcher, Department of International Studies and Communication, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Quito, Ecuador

DISPATCHO Workshop

Organizers: Marisa Jahn

Presenters: Marisa Jahn, Anjum Asharia, Sylvia Guerrero

Youth activist networks face the dual challenge of communicating complex issues in a way that both responds to the needs of their particular constituencies, while also garnering public attention and support. What’s more, communities organized around a campaign often find themselves with limited resources and against rapid deadlines. In this accelerated process, what's left out are those elements that enliven an issue—the strategies that can help communicate complex issues in accessible, innovative and playful ways.

This interactive workshop introduces participants to DISPATCHO, a set of tools (VoIP Drupal and VoJo) and methods that youth organizers and media makers can use to augment their ongoing inquiry and movement building. It draws off of youth media projects such as, “Superheroes of Far, Far Rockaway,” a civic media hotline produced in collaboration with the Queens Library Teen Center in Far Rockaway, NY. A teen-produced audio series, you can call in to get the 411 on the extraordinary citizens of this bustling sea-side community, and contribute to the project by recording your own Superhero story–all accessible through regular telephones! “Civil Rights Remix” is another youth-produced hotline that connects today’s civil rights issues with historical political/activists’ movements in Harlem. Excavating the archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, teens will use the VoJo platform to document research and interviews, gather and share content, and then create audio episodes made accessible via the hotline.

These projects, in turn, build off of “New Day New Standard,” a English/Spanish public art project and interactive hotline that informs domestic workers about their newly-recognized rights under New York State’s 2010 Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. To help inform the 200,000 nannies, housekeepers, and eldercare workers, and their employers about the new law, REV-, partnered with Domestic Workers United, MIT’s Center for Civic Media, and Urban Justice Center to tackle this problem. Given that domestic workers work long hours on the job and in isolation, are without regular access to the internet, use basic cell phones, and prefer discreet forms of outreach, we needed an innovative way to distribute information through the most basic technology and make it accessible at any hour. We created New Day New Standard with three key features: access to resources, engaging episodes, and interactive storytelling. The hotline broadcasts detailed information that augments the existing face-to-face outreach of advocacy groups.

This creative technology has the potential to provide a scalable and affordable for youth to inform, connect, and empower their peers and the larger public, while enabling growing momentum around youth-led movements. For example, it could be a highly effective tool for creating a know-your-rights campaign for undocumented youth, or retail workers’ rights. Through the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to explore other strategic applications of this technology. 

Using Mobile Reporting to Engage with Your Community

Organizers: Neha Agrawal, Becky Hurwitz

Presenters: Neha Agrawal

In Cambridge Community Television’s Teen Media Program, teens use documentary filmmaking to explore issues in their community. Using professional video cameras and Final Cut Pro software, they create media that is well thought out and relevant to their lives in Cambridge. After weeks of shooting and editing, these pieces are shown on our public access channels. There is no doubt that there is much value in the time and labor in documentary style media production. However, in this digital age, are there other ways to share community voices? To be a “reporter”, do you need to have a camera crew and a tv channel? Do you have to be published in a newspaper, or even on a reputable blog?  Reporting should and can come in all different media. It is sometimes easy to forget how accessible the internet is, but there are times when we cannot instantaneously email, tweet, or facebook. More importantly there are larger communities that don’t have consistent internet access. Vojo, developed by MIT’s Center for Civic Media, is a tool that is easy, instant, and accessible. Using Vojo, one can simply call or text in a story. That story then is updated on Vojo’s website or linked to other relevant websites.

This year students from our Teen Media Program took Vojo to the polls. We centered our first project around the presidential elections of 2012. It was a perfect time to get kids wondering about the political process, being critical media viewers, and the importance of voting. After shooting interviews with student political leaders at MIT, they learned how to refine and edit video. However, on Election Day itself the students spread out across different polls in Cambridge and asked three questions to voters: 1. Who are you voting for and why? 2. What changes do you hope to see? and 3. Why is voting important? They were able to record and upload different perspectives instantaneously using just their phones. The audio and text stories were then aggregated on both the Vojo and CCTV websites. Not only were they reporters for a day, but they were teachers too. By utilizing Vojo, they were both able to conduct their interviews and share a technology with the community so that if the interviewees wanted to call or text in a story from their phone, they would know how to do so. 

In this panel/talk/workshop I would talk about youth media work in general but more specifically about 21st century civic education and how Vojo is an accessible tool for teens to directly engage in the voting process. Using Vojo was an important way for the students to learn about the candidates and the issues but also to be media conduits for their community. 

The Maker movement and the broader Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture celebrates innovation, creativity, and community engagement experienced through the open-ended processes of making. Within the Maker movement, there exists a wide array of genres of Making, ranging from cooking to sewing to woodcrafts and robotics. However, public gatherings of the Maker movement (such as Maker Faires) often attract a more homogeneous audience than the population at large. This session examines strategies for broadening participation in the Maker Community, exploring technologies and activities that are explicitly designed to engage more diverse audiences in Making.

The panel explores the question of broadening participation in the Maker and DIY communities by looking closely at three specific examples — Squishy Circuits, e-Textiles, and Scratch:

AnnMarie Thomas describes the ideas and motivations underlying her Squishy Circuits project. The goal of the project was to design tools and activities that provide more intuitive and playful ways for kids of all ages to create circuits and explore electronics — in particular, through the use of play dough. This approach has allowed even young children to engage in learning about circuits by grounding making in materials that are well-aligned to children’s play.

Kylie Peppler highlights a complementary approach to learning about circuits and computation through electronic textiles (or e-textiles). E-textiles are articles of clothing, home furnishings, or architectures that include embedded computational and electronic elements. They also serve to illustrate that electronics can be soft, colorful, approachable, and beautiful. This work serves as a compelling example of how new materials can be a disrupter of the oblique gender representations in electronics, sparking perhaps the first ever female-dominated electronics hobbyist community around e-textiles.

Mitchel Resnick discusses his research group’s work on the Scratch programming environment and online community. With Scratch, young people can program their own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — then share their creations with one another online. In the process, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Scratch is designed to make the activity of programming more tinkerable, more meaningful, and more social — and thus appeal to broader, more diverse audiences than traditional programming languages. Scratch builds on youth interests in popular culture, social media, and expressive communication.

Across these presentations, we reflect on the relationships between technology, materials, and culture to articulate new strategies for broadening participation in the Maker community at large. Discussant Elyse Eidman-Aadahl will draw on lessons learned from her experiences in the National Writing Project.

Interwoven with the presentations, we will engage the audience in discussing issues around broadening participation in the Maker community. Audience members will have the opportunity to break into small groups to discuss their experiences with broadening participation, integrated with question-and-answer interactions with panelists.

Envisioning 21st century civic education requires a wide lens. Designers and innovators (both young and old) push the envelope and show us what might be possible if we re-think our constraints and assumptions. Researchers show us emerging trends that may require us to shift our thinking about what civic engagement looks like and what educational supports are needed.  Institutional leaders help us put innovations into context so that they augment rather than simply compete with existing resources, and help remove barriers to innovation.

Ultimately, however, the practice of civic education is constructed by youth, their adult mentors and allies, and practitioners who innovate and adapt their practice to take advantage of new tools and technologies and to respond to the changing landscape of public life.

In this session, we spotlight youth and adults currently engaged in the practice of 21st century civic education. The  panelists will discuss the innovations and adaptations they are currently making to advance their goals for civic engagement, how they see the practice of civic education changing, how they are facing challenges posed in their educational settings, and their hopes for the future. We specifically focus on students and teachers working to move their schools toward 21st century civic education and connected learning.

This panel can address the various forms and contexts through which young people's engagement in their communities and networked publics are creating distinct opportunities for civic engagement and expanding what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century

Gamers with a Civic Life? Research Findings on League of Legends, from Protest to Volunteerism

Presenter: Benjamin Stokes

Do mainstream youth gamers have typical civic lives -- from volunteering to protesting? Commercial games are very rarely studied for their connection to offline civic engagement. In this presentation, researchers will share findings from an unusual study of League of Legends (LoL). This was until recently the most popular PC game online -- with more than 1.4 million players active daily. Our findings shatter some stereotypes, and raise some new questions.
For this study, more than 20,000 players answered survey questions about their civic activity, from protest, to advocacy, donating, and staying informed. Contrary to stereotypes, this study reveals that the civic participation rates of gamers is actually comparable to typical American parents (a normative stalwart), but that some civic acts are much more popular than others. For example, nearly 3 in 4 players of this game report having raised money for a charitable cause, while only about half have been active around elections with advocacy.

In terms of learning, one surprising finding stands out: these small-group gamers had unusually high rates of "peaceful protest, march, or demonstration" – more than twice the lifetime rate of American parents. We advance a few ideas on why this might be, and call for further research into role-play and "ethical spectacle" as learning processes. Our statistics show that protest rates are closely tied to many behaviors in the game (like whether they had recruited others to play), as well as to traditional politics, like being politically liberal. We also find that the odds of protesting increased by approximately 5% for players who were more helpful inside the game, which indicates some consistency across the game boundary.

Importantly, civic acts can have very different causes. For example, we find that protest rates hardly change based on the number of hours spent gaming each week, but that volunteering rates are lower. Such findings can help our sector avoid the temptation to lump "civic participation" together, and insist that we are more specific about the civic acts we target.

This study was made possible by an unusual collaboration between the University of Southern California led by Dmitri Williams, and the Riot Games, the maker of League of Legends. We will also discuss some ways that such partnerships can be brokered in the future.

Gabriel's Heart Mountain 3.0

Presenters: Gabriel Tajima-Peña, Renee Tajima-Peña

Case study of a youth-originated project to explore Japanese American WWII concentration camps on the Minecraft online video game

Gabriel Tajima-Peña, a 13-year-old student, proposes a case study of his civil liberties history project, Heart Mountain 3.0. Constructed on the multi-player online building game, Minecraft, it is a virtual interpretation of the internment camp where his grandmother, and over 10,000 Japanese Americans, were incarcerated during WWII. The project has evolved from a fun diversion to ease the boredom of a visit to the historical site, into a curriculum and interactive web project. Gabriel will be joined by his project collaborators, game-based learning designer Randall Fujimoto, who leads the curriculum development, and Renee Tajima-Peña, mother and documentary filmmaker who is creating web video content. Using a Minecraft demonstration and video clips of Gabriel’s process, the presenters will discuss the possibilities for using Minecraft to facilitate fun, creative, and self-directed explorations of the history.

Heart Mountain 3.0 shows how game-based platforms can arm youth with creative tools to engage in themes of civil liberties, democracy and race, and share those ideas through the social networking capabilities of online games. Minecraft is inexpensive and accessible for use at home, schools, or community spaces on a growing number of devices, including PC’s, Xbox, Android, and IOS. It is a game that a young person can master, hack, work on individually or collectively and peer-teach, thereby encouraging a sense of empowerment and engagement. Creating and teaching Heart Mountain 3.0 has prompted Gabriel to address unexpected ethical and pedagogical issues. For example, how to integrate contextual information about history onto a changeable and interactive game; how to deal with “griefing” (vandalism) by online players on a social justice site; and how to balance historic accuracy with play.

Gabriel is an 8th grader at a Los Angeles public school. In August of 2011, he joined his family on a pilgrimage to the grand opening of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, near Powell, Wyoming. On the trip, Gabriel grew bored. He is a kinetic learner who is not particularly drawn to traditional museum installations and programs. He also is not a coder or history buff; he simply loves to play Minecraft. For fun, Gabriel started to build a Minecraft Heart Mountain on the family laptop, He then explored the site with his grandparents, talked to former internees, and scanned the exhibits for inspiration in constructing barracks, guard towers, and symbols of internee-created community such as the swimming hole and gardens.
After returning home, Gabriel continued to work on his project, often with other Minecraft friends. Last summer, Gabriel was invited by Fujimoto to peer-teach a pilot Minecraft workshop at a local Japanese Cultural Institute. A multi-ethnic group of twelve kids, researched the history and created their own virtual Manzanar Relocation Centers on Minecraft. Gabriel’s re-creation of the camp will form the center of the Heart Mountain 3.0 curriculum website, which will be deployed for use in schools, community and culture venues, and homes. In the presentation, we will discuss how youth-created projects can move young audiences from passive viewership to active engagement in learning, discussing, and sharing themes of equal justice.

Cosplay, Learning, and Perfoming

Presenters: Daisuke Okabe, Rie Matsuura

Japan is home to numerous amateur cosplay events. Costume play is a female-dominated niche grounded in a DIY and anticommercial ethic of costume making and performance. Although not characterized by formal forms of evaluation and hierarchy, cosplayers (who dress up as characters from manga, games, and anime) are highly conscious of quality standards for costumes. Only handmade costumes that conform to “otaku” (nerds) interests; those cosplayers who dress up outside of otaku-dedicated venues or who display mainstream forms of sexuality to attract the male gaze are ostracized from the community. Cosplay events and dedicated SNSs for cosplayers are a valuable venue for exchanging information and learning from each other about costume making, as well as for evaluating each other's work.

In this presentation, we discuss various cultural practices characterizing the cosplay community based on our interviews with female cosplayers and fieldwork.

We first share an overview of the history of cosplay in Japan, and then discuss in detail the following aspects: (1) performance and learning based on Holtzman (2009)’s “learning to perform and performing to learn”, (2) peer review, and (3) reciprocal learning.
Building stages for their own performances and practices of peer-based niche knowledge exchange make the cosplay community distinct and a meaningful object of study. Compared to learning environments in most schools, the cosplay community has always been based on peer-based, reciprocal learning, with members creating their own rules and codes of conduct. We might look to them as models for designing interest-driven communities and collaborative learning environments.

What does the intersection of digital literacy, current affairs, hands-on media making and civic engagement look like? The emerging area of news literacy offers a clue: Kids discuss the issues that matter to them, monitor their own media habits, experience a self-imposed media ‘blackout’, carry out hands-on journalistic projects, and explore what news and information sources are trustworthy and why. This area is being taught as a stand-alone workshop but also increasingly infused into after-school programs and history, English, social studies, and science curricula. Chicago has become a laboratory for community-based approaches for energizing schools and after-school programs to become engaged in this area, with the goal of feeding teen civic engagement.

Panelists are leading youth media, news literacy and after-school educators from the Chicago area.

From the Bottom Up: Using Media to Inspire, Education and Activate
Presenters: Joanna Marinova, Marvin Brow, Angie Emmanuella
In an environment where youth are boxed in by arbitrary limits on their curiosity and creativity, media can reignite their imagination and opens the door to endless possibilities. Too many have been anesthetized by their education and have stopped asking questions and thinking critically about the world around them.  Press Pass TV is an award-winning organization that harnesses the power of media to provide meaningful education and a tool for organizing to youth living in underserved neighborhoods.  We transform reactionary violence with creative self-expression and empower communities to find shared solutions. We do this by teach life-sustaining technical skills that can brake the cycle of poverty many of our young people face.

Join us for a case study of how we have created a unique partnership-based model that works with young people to support various movements around the New England Area.  These grassroots movements have successfully taken on transportation rights, immigration justice and environmental pollution. We will examine past victories and current battles around reducing the violence and creating a just and fair educational system.  We will look at models using citizens journalism and more creative "edutainment" approaches.

In addition, we will examine some of the political barriers and difficulties and backlash some of our youth organizers have experiences doing this work. We will share best practices on how youth can be awakened from being passive consumers displaying high levels of learned helplessness, to active participants, contributors and builders of their future.

Guerilla Media: Teaching Social Justice Media Tools at LA CAUSA Youth Build Charter High School in East Los Angeles
Presenter: Alexandrina Agloro
For two years, University of Southern California Ph.D. student Alexandrina Agloro has collaborated with staff and students at LA CAUSA Charter High School to teach media skills classes. LA CAUSA, which stands for Los Angeles Communities Advocating for Unity, Social Justice, and Action, is a diploma-granting high school for students in East Los Angeles who have been previously pushed out of the school system (considered “dropouts”) and are returning to school to earn their degree. East Los Angeles has a 94% Latino population, and the school reflects this demographic. In 2011, the Social Justice Media Tools course brought together students, staff, and the Ph.D. student to collaboratively design a digital media curriculum where students kept blog-style digital portfolios of their work. Additionally, the students critiqued the structure and content of each class in a wiki, which ultimately led to the students re-imagining and re-designing the curriculum at the end of the semester. In 2012, using the student re-designed curriculum, a new group of LA CAUSA students chose social justice topics that were the focus of their digital portfolios. Sample topics included: sex education, immigration, child abuse, food deserts, police brutality, neighborhood gang violence, and social justice through music. Projects included interviews, multimedia presentations, and remix video making. The focus of the course was to use free available software to design portfolios that crafted a message about relevant social justice topics from a young person’s point of view.  

In this talk, we propose to showcase a few digital portfolios created by LA CAUSA students, and have Tony Bautista (Sustainability Director at LA CAUSA) and Alexandrina discuss what it’s like to work in a university/community organization partnership. We plan to bring a few students from LA CAUSA to the conference where they will be able to present their projects and discuss their experiences in the course.

About LA CAUSA:
Los Angeles Communities Advocating for Unity, Social Justice, and Action (LA CAUSA) engages historically disenfranchised young people and their families from East Los Angeles to take action against the injustices that impact low-income communities of color. LA CAUSA fosters a commitment to social justice and nurtures a variety of skills necessary to act as agents of resistance and community transformation. LA CAUSA fulfills this commitment through the creation of an inclusive and supportive community where we utilize culturally relevant instruction within our educational, vocational, housing and leadership development programs.  For more information, visit: http:// http://lacausainc.org

Youth Organizing and Media - A National Field Scan
Presenters: Christine Schweidler, Meghan McDermott, Teresa Basilio
In 2011-2012, Global Action Project (http://global-action.org) and DataCenter (http://datacenter.org) conducted a national research project that sought to understand how youth organizers are using media to advance social justice work and movement-building work throughout the United States. In this session we propose to present the findings of this national study.

While many studies have assessed the impact of media on youth or how youth use media in general, few have explored how young people use media to effect change. Our research documents how and why youth organizers are using media for organizing, framing community stories, and conducting media analysis. We sought also to understand the role that media making and media analysis played in deepening the political engagement of youth. In addition to examining media use by youth organizers, we also identified trends, needs, and challenges to integrating media into advocacy and organizing efforts led by young people involved in immigrant justice, educational justice, gender justice struggles and other social justice struggles. The project captures how youth are integrating media in new ways, yet also face significant barriers and gaps. For example, key research questions focused on identifying new media practices among youth organizers, identifying successful strategies, identifying supports for media production and analysis to strengthen political education, leadership and deepen engagement, and to capture critical stories that reflect struggles and efforts educational, immigrant and racial justice struggles and efforts across the country.

Participants will hear about: a) the media needs (i.e., analytical, creative, and technical) of youth organizers working across issues nationally; b) trends, practices and barriers that must be identified and addressed; c) the role of media in youth movement building and engagement; and d) what has shifted in the landscape of media and organizing.

Our research findings will contribute to an informed dialogue about the media needs of youth organizers by moving beyond simple access towards deeper engagement in analysis, storytelling, political education, and leadership. We hope this data will support youth, organizers, practitioners and allies to understand, as well as generate new ways to respond to/increase the scale and impact of youth-led work on the ground. We hope to share our findings with the DML community, and ultimately with organizers, funders, and movement-building allies seeking new knowledge on cross-disciplinary methods and opportunities for media analysis and production as a strategy of deeper youth engagement.

We propose this panel, “Negotiating Globalization, Media Education and Democratic Practice,” as part of the “Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South” track for DML 2013. It critically engages with key questions, significant to researchers, citizens, and practitioners alike, concerning the unique role and importance of networked media production in efforts to build capacity among youth and communities vulnerable to the effects of poverty, globalization, and racism. This workshop brings together three Digital Media and Learning (DML) summer 2012 fellows who have experience working in global contexts in out-of-school and alternative media programs and projects. Given the utopian ideologies surrounding communication technologies, social media, and networked media production, this panel addresses how these dreams about technology manifest when organizations and initiatives historically located in the Global North partner with organizations, communities, and youth in the Global South on educative and media programming. Concerned with sustaining democratic practice and with critically analyzing the attempts of young people to be involved in the public sphere through media production, this panel offers insights into how youth involvement in civic processes is shaped by media flows, the global political and economic climate, and the non-profits providing educational and media programming to young people.What is unique and valuable to this session is the opportunity to work with and learn about the specific experiences of youth participants in international media programs, and the challenges they face as situated within theoretical and academic work.   

Ames and Hauge offer two concrete examples drawn from intensive ethnographic fieldwork with major organizations and initiatives working in the area of children and youth, media production, and civic learning and engagement. Ames’ work on One Laptop Per Child critically examines the utopian beliefs about media and technology that underwrite OLPC’s programming, contrasting those beliefs with the actual experiences of children and communities in Paraguay who have received OLPC laptops. Hauge re-theorizes the role of agency in participation among youth in relation to democratic practice, directly addressing a youth media and community development program run by Plan International in Nicaragua, where rural youth partner with North American youth to produce media and engage other youth about social issues. Taking a step back, Araya’s work examines the political economy of global education and the rise of elite classes across developing societies.

Imagine high school students in a government course Skyping with an Egyptolologist involved in the Arab Spring to authentically explore concepts of democratic revolution. Consider elementary, middle, and high school learners teaching teachers in multiple youth voices sessions for a district professional learning conference. Think about ‘at-risk’ middle schoolers writing, then sharing their personal stories with the world via a rural school’s UStream channel. Envision third graders crowdsourcing questions via a class twitter account and seeing a NASA astronaut, UK physicists, and scientists from the New York Hall of Science respond to their questions in a public Google doc. Listen to dyslexic students describe how free tools offering access to learning is “life changing.” Why are these stories important?

Equitable opportunities and our future as adaptive societies are dependent upon a “democracy of voice,” a wide range of cultural and world-view literacy patterns whose variety is antithetical to methods of teaching reading and writing dominant in most American public schools. In this workshop, we explore the stories of educators in a large, diverse Virginia school district who are “decolonizing” literacy while dramatically expanding definitions of reading and writing, language and structure, by creating an ethos of learning that is challenging, interactive, of interest to, and owned by young people. The shifts in our district’s classrooms are grounded in an ethical sense of purpose among administrators and teachers who believe that the educational space must reflect responsiveness to diversity, universal access to learning technologies and tools, connectivity to authentic, global audiences, and an unanchoring of learning from the dominant teaching wall and nailed-down rows of desks. These shifts were not accidental, but rather the result of mindful decisions to abandon the 20th century factory school “command and control” model of read, recall, write, publish, while embracing a contemporary choice-driven model that engages young people to search, connect, communicate and make.  

We will co-construct a narrative of remarkable changes in specific learning spaces - elementary, middle, high school - through video, still images, and a Google+ hangout (bandwidth required) linking participants with connected educators and learners associated with four case studies - not isolated pockets of excellence but representing the systemic work of our high-performing district with a rural, suburban, and urban footprint of 726 square miles. Transforming curricula, assessment, culture, and pedagogy, our educators apply design thinking to innovate project-based learning through use of contemporary technology, shifting teaching places to learning spaces, and reinventing professional development as collaborative professional learning. Interactive case studies will engage participants in online conversations with district educators and learners who use social media, engage in global connectivity, apply universal design for learning principles, and develop informal coderdojo and maker spaces to empower young people to own their learning and identity, and help lead and define their schools as they build social responsibility and social entrepreneurship skills.

Through this work, our schools have moved far beyond “test” and “common” standards to welcome the contemporary world and liberate the voices of future citizens of our emerging democratic planet. 

Overview
Our workshop addresses the joint role of designers, researchers, educators, and community activists in building an equitable, ethical, and sustainable future for digital youth. Drawing on design concepts and a distinct information school perspective, we will engage workshop participants in activities associated with the Teen Design Day Methodology. Developed by Professor Karen Fisher of the University of Washington Information School, this methodology provides an innovative way to help youth use technology to address complex issues in their communities.

Teen Design Days can be adapted to explore a range of concepts and activities with youth and capture research data in either one-time or serial sessions. The methodology meets youth’s needs for physical activity, self-definition, creative expression, positive social interaction, and meaningful participation in cross-culturally and gender appropriate ways through dance, cooking, drumming, etc. Currently, with support from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, Microsoft, the Seattle Public Library, and other community-based institutions, we are implementing Teen Design Days with immigrants from the Horn of Africa.

Often, ethnic minority youth serve as information mediaries for their families, teaching adult relatives about technology and providing everyday information. This is particularly true in immigrant communities, where youth have a better grasp of English and often help their families navigate daily situations. Thus, these youth occupy a critical position as civic actors, not just for themselves, but also for their families. Working with youth in their own settings, the Teen Design Day Methodology provides insight into their info mediary role and supports youth in designing improved information technologies. In the process, teens develop the skills and competencies, including information and civic literacies, needed to become engaged participants in a democratic future.

Workshop structure
Katie Davis will frame the workshop by describing the unique lens that information schools contribute to the topic of youth civic engagement in a digital age. Karen Fisher will then provide an overview of the Teen Design Day Methodology, including its theoretical and empirical foundations, primary components, and research conducted around it. To provide a firsthand view of the methodology in action, youth will share their experiences in a recent Teen Design Days project, complemented by a brief video documenting the project.

Following this introduction, workshop organizers, including youth, will lead participants in hands-on activities in small groups of their choice designed to explore ways to adapt the Teen Design Day Methodology in their own work addressing digital youth’s democratic futures. We anticipate a fruitful opportunity for researchers and practitioners to examine their work with the perspective of design thinking. By drawing connections between their work related to any one of the conference themes or overall focus and the Teen Design Day Methodology, participants will gain new insight into strategies and technologies for promoting critical thinking and engaged citizenship among youth, especially marginalized groups such as ethnic minority and immigrant youth.

Eliza Dresang will provide closing remarks that reflect on the workshop activities, and synthesize concepts and insights from the session in the broader context of the conference theme.

Agile Development meets Evidence-Centered Design: GlassLab and the Design of Game-based Assessments

Presenter: Katie Salen

This presentation will describe the development of game-based assessments to support the learning of domain-based knowledge and skills. The design work to be discussed is being done at GlassLab, a collaboration between Electronic Arts, ESA, Institute of Play, Educational Testing Service and the Pearson Center for Digital Data, Analytics, & Adaptive Learning.

Labeled serious games, gamification, or game-like engagement, the idea of games and play as central to human experience, development, and exploration is beginning to take firm hold of the learning and assessment worlds. Whether it is Csíkszentmihályi’s idea that games induce flow, a state of heightened engagement and concentration during which learning productivity and assessment validity increase, or are used to create safe, adaptive, and engaging learning and assessment environments to manipulate otherwise time-, space-, or cost-prohibitive objects, games have matured considerably as paradigm for defining, designing, and interacting with systems. Needless to say, advances in the learning and cognitive sciences and the spreading availability of technology have opened up many opportunities for connecting the realm of (digital) games and their immersive environments, challenge-and-reward systems, and multiplayer experiences with the realm of learning and assessment.

There is still a gap to bridge between how games define the operable space for interaction and how learning and assessments (particularly formative assessments) define that. Rubin, Fein and Vandenberg lamented three decades ago that play assessment procedures lacked attention to psychometric concepts such as validity, reliability, and stability. Getting to a state of what they call “psychometric respectability” means building complete construct representation and developing a paradigm of reasoning that explicates what does and does not constitute evidence about what we aim to teach or make claims about. It also means preserving, if not establishing, the critical aspects of play that turned us toward games in the first place. The notion that games and assessments are based on the same learning principles provides the basis for bridging that gap.

On the surface, designing a game and designing an assessment are very different. Typically, they have very different purposes, design criteria, and constraints. Games are designed to create an immersive, engaging experience for the player—and above all, to be fun. Typically, assessments are designed to extract evidence from student performances to make inferences about student learning.

Beneath the surface though, there are some surprising similarities. Both involve creating carefully designed sequences of activities with allowable interactions. Both make inferences from collected responses. Both strongly connect to learning albeit in different ways.

Addressing design criteria from games and assessment simultaneously may lead to improvements in both. This talk will first outline the potential value of including criteria and constraints from games, such as engagement, choice, and feedback, in the design of assessments. It will then explore a process for the development of game-based assessments that combines aspects of evidence-centered design (ECD) with an agile game development framework. Finally, we discuss an application of this process to a game-based assessment currently under development.

Interest-Driven Learning in Game Design Environments

Presenters: Gabriella Anton, Amanda Ochsner, Kurt Squire

Online games and affinity spaces offer a vast array of literacy practices and reciprocal apprenticeship (Gee, 2003; Steinkuehler, 2007; Black & Steinkuehler, 2009; Black, 2008). Interest-driven learning in affinity spaces and games can be harnessed to facilitate the understanding of concepts in core classes (Squire & Jenkins, 2003). The learning benefits of having youth design and develop their own games is not as thoroughly researched. Previous work has suggested that video games and design practices promote a wealth of literacy and critical thinking practices, (Peppler, Warschauer, & Diazgranados, 2010; Peppler & Kafai, 2007) as well as facilitating the development of computational thinking skills like logic, debugging, and algorithm design (Berland & Lee, 2011). We created Studio K as a curriculum and online learning environment for youth that supports asynchronous, collaborative, and interest-driven learning around game design and computational thinking. Within the curriculum, students design and develop games using Kodu, a 3D visual programming language, and collaborate with other students in the site’s community. We hypothesize that interest-driven learning will be indicated in the quality and quantity of interactions a participant has within the website. We expect to find that participants who design more games and revised iterations will produce higher quality games and will show more advanced use of video game language, culture of critique, and academic literacy in their interactions online compared to participants with low numbers of games and revised iterations. The existence of these practices within informal game design curriculum suggests the benefits of such practices for the development of literacy and computational thinking.

How is the digital native generation shaping its future through policy, politics, hacking and organizing? Today's digital native leaders reflect on the values, vision and priorities that define movements both online and off. This in-depth exchange between seasoned policymakers and emerging movement builders will define some of the key challenges for the next four years, including opportunities to build inter-generational strategies that propel the next big ideas into sustainable realities at the federal, state and local level.

The rigorous and compelling work of thinkers such as Jenkins, Papert & Harel, and Kafai have made commonplace the notion that participation is a fundamental modality for 21st century learning. Crafting narratives, designing games--generally making things that reflect one’s own interests and curiosities--allows learners to express their understanding in a form that, for example, might be material, could be shared with others, or allows for interaction with others’ creations. In parallel, the Knight Commission (2009, p.i) has recently reported that “people with digital tools and skill have distinct political, social and economic advantage over those without them.” This assertion has been supported in a number of empirical research studies for instance addressing the digital divide (e.g., Livingstone, Van Couvering, Thumim, N., 2005; Hargittai, & Walejko, 2008; Hargittai, 2010).

This panel investigates the convergence of participatory acumen and civic activity by focusing on the concept of “hacker literacies”-- how this construct might be defined, how it might be researched “in the wild,” and how learning interventions can being designed to cultivate it. We distinguish hacker literacies from digital literacies by their emphasis on making and building within a sociotechnical domain, including learner acquisitiveness, creativity, collaborative negotiation and technical implementation skills. The panel’s four speakers will consider the ways in which the practices that are being discovered as integral to hacker literacies could produce qualities in individuals, groups, and communities that engender new forms of civic participation.

Each presenter will focus on a case study or set of ideas that help to explicate the construct of hacker literacy. Rafi Santo, doctoral candidate in learning sciences at Indiana University, will build on his work conceptualizing hacker literacies as a synthesis of critical and new literacies frameworks (Santo, 2011). Rebecca Reynolds, Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University, will discuss linkages to the concept “hacker literacies” that exist within a framework of “6 contemporary learning abilities” she and a co-author have developed (Reynolds & Wolf, in review) to incorporate the concept “Constructionist digital literacy” in the context of a school-based game design program called Globaloria. She will also highlight the program’s approach to integrating civics core curricular objectives into game design at some schools, and discuss some key findings to-date involving motivation to learn. Chris Hoadley, Associate Professor of Educational Technology at New York University, will discuss the role of indigenous design to allow capacity building for self-determination at the local and national levels based on his work in South Asia (Hoadley, 2011; Hoadley, Honwad, & Tamminga, 2010). Ingrid Erickson, also an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, will discuss the ways that the larger maker community helps to shape and instantiate hacker literacies in practice through events such as Maker Faires and in places such as hacker spaces. The session will conclude by drawing forth synergies from each presentation to prompt discussion and engender deeper consideration of how to promote hacker literacies within the greater DML community.

Lessons from South Bronx bodegas: A beginner’s guide to place-based civic engagement
Presenter: Jeremiah Holden
Teams of high school students, mobile devices in hand, have walked into bodegas across the South Bronx.  Text messages soon sent to others read: “@el tepeyac, 149st & 3av, major soda.” Photographs are geotagged.  Interviews with patrons inquire about the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables.  Field-notes become blog posts about food quality and access, and are posted to an online social network.  This informal evaluation of New York City’s “Healthy Bodegas Initiative” is paired with weeks of legislative research, and culminates in a presentation of youth-generated food security policy recommendations to City Council Members at New York City Hall. One participant notes: “We researched in Mott Haven, which just happens to be the community I live in. I conducted food retail audits, which take quantitative and qualitative measurements of the availability or unavailability of healthy and affordable food. The average amount of fast food establishments compared to the supermarkets was 6 to 1. It reminded me of how underprivileged these neighborhoods are.”

This presentation is a beginners’ guide intended for educators interested in enacting learning at the intersection of place-based education and civic engagement.  While classroom practices can inform students’ civic and political engagement (Kahne & Midaugh, 2008), participation in action-oriented projects outside the classroom has been shown to increase levels of civic knowledge (Billig et al., 2005).  Mobile devices and participatory culture practices are increasingly leveraged to facilitate such experiences (Dikkers & Martin, 2012), broadening how educators imagine and enact civic education and engagement (Squire, 2011).  As mobile devices “remediate” our relationship to place (Squire, 2009) and mobile media cultivate community-based learning and inquiry (Mathews & Wagler, 2009), digital technologies are enabling new forms of democratic participation by students in civic life (Squire, 2010).  Yet few “worked examples” demonstrate the teaching and learning practices that support youth participatory and mobile media use integrated alongside place-based education and civic engagement.  

This presentation seeks to address this limitation by providing a practical guide for those interested in initiating similar work, and begins with the question: “Where and how do I start?”  Four complementary strategies will be highlighted, including:
1. Check your pockets: Leverage students’ familiarity with mobile devices, and pencils and paper too.  Educators can pair pedagogical practices with the varied affordances of multiple tools carried inside students’ pockets, whether high or low tech.
2. Walk the block: Educators will strengthen the efficacy of teaching and learning activities through increased knowledge of local challenges and circumstances.  Asking, “What is the teaching and learning potential of this place?” is central to facilitating place-based civic engagement.
3. Reach out: Contacting local elected officials, community-based organizations, and civic leaders is necessary, but not enough; educators must also reach across disciplinary traditions and inquiry practices.  The opening vignette highlights one possible synthesis of high school mathematics with social studies.
4. Design for difference: Students’ knowledge and experience with mobile and participatory media can be amplified as they design and lead efforts that can make difference in their schools and communities.

Technovation Challenge: High School Girls Create Apps to Solve Problems
Presenters: Jenna Blanton, Dara Olmsted
“I want every girl and every woman to have that confidence that they can lead, that they can create something out of nothing.” - Dr. Anu Tewary, Technovation Challenge Founder

How can we combine technology and entrepreneurship to help high school girls become active citizens and solve big problems in their communities? Technovation helps them identify problems in their lives and community, create and design phone apps to solve those problems, and create businesses around those apps. Over 800 girls have created 163 apps over the past three years.

The free program, available to girls around the world, has helped girls to use technology to fully engage in their communities. Technovation aims to inspire girls to see themselves not just as users of technology, but as inventors, designers, builders, entrepreneurs, and problem solvers. The program also allows us to benefit from the unique perspectives and insights that these girls bring to app development. The app that a high school girl from the Bronx creates may look very different than one a 30-year-old male in Silicon Valley designs.

Over the past three years, girls have built a range of apps to deal with teenage pregnancy, environmentally-friendly purchasing, teenage drinking, and more.
This year, the theme will be to solves a problem in their local community (past themes included science and the environment) and we expect to have 1,000 girls participating in teams of five- so we’ll have a lot of cool apps to showcase.
http://iridescentlearning.org/programs/technovation-challenge/app-quilt/

The Technovation Challenge consists of a 12-week course in which high school girls learn to code by developing a phone app. Each team of girls is supported by a classroom teacher and a professional woman in tech who serves as their mentor. At the end of the 12 weeks, teams pitch to a panel of venture capitalists for $10,000 to bring their app to market.

Our goal is for 200,000 girls to annually enroll in the program by 2017. Any school or community group can host a Technovation team- the curriculum is free and online, and teams only need a laptop and smartphone to participate.

Technovation Challenge is run by Iridescent, an engineering education non-profit, and is funded by the Office of Naval Research and by technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Adobe, and LinkedIn.
 
Digital media technology to facilitate youth-led educated action on green energy issues
Presenters: Takumi Sato, Daniel Birmingham, Angela Calabrese-Barton
Green Energy Technology in the City (GET City) speaks to theme of Envisioning 21st Century Civic Education through the innovative ways middle school youth take educated action on green energy issues as community science experts. GET City is an informal after school science program that engages in authentic science investigations on issues that affect the local community and have global implications. GET City collaborates with scientists to strengthen energy content learning and professional filmmakers to enhance digital media skills of youth participants. The videos are examples of how youth use digital media technology as a tool to gain access to and to take action on environmental narratives from which their community is often excluded based on racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status. Video is used to mediate the language of science and communicate complex scientific ideas to different audiences in culturally sustaining ways.

The youth, self-described as ‘make difference experts’, will lead the presentation. A viewing of their award winning public service announcement videos (PSAs) will be followed by a descriptions of the youth organized Green Carnivals, presentations in school classrooms and appearances on local television. Digital media provided tools for youth led educated action and a medium for sharing important green energy information with their community by redefining who can be and what is meant by science expert. Youth work has led to changes including the addition of a green roof at the local youth center and receiving a donation of 1,000 energy efficient light bulbs from the local power utility for distribution in their community.

Website: www.getcity.org
Sample PSAs: http://streaming.msu.edu/storemedia/download/acb/GETCity/Solar_Summer_20...
http://getcity.org/blog/2011/01/24/award-ceremony-at-ann-arbormi/

Un-coding Utah’s Legislative Bills: Latina/o high school students track discourses of power and practice differential politics with blogging

Presenter: Alicia De Leon

Latina/o communities have long created counter-spaces as sites to affirm their hybrid identities, challenge deficit ideologies towards communities of color, nurture reciprocal relationships of support, and foster individual and collective learning in social and academic realms (Solorzano & Villalpando, 1998). Specifically, digital counter-spaces (e.g. social media technologies) emerge with the understanding that discourses legitimate, reproduce or challenge relations of power and dominance in society (Fairclough, 1995). Given the increasing impact of new media on the political and civic engagement of youth (Cohen & Kahne, 2012), the author is interested in analyzing the relationships among language and important educational issues operating in a legislative internship blog. The Mestizo Arts and Activism (MAA) blog recounts perspectives of Latina/o high school students in their senior year, who track legislation, attend committee meetings, research issues and analyze bills every Spring, since 2010. Drawing from critical race theory (CRT) in education (Yosso, 2006) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) frameworks (Gee, 2002; van Leeuwen, 2008) this discussion seeks to trace the persistence of racism (and other forms of subordination) and engagement with digital politics and civics (i.e. reflection and action) from the linguistic digital practices of Latina/o youth. In addition, this short talk informs the discussions on networked publics (Ito, 2008) in/out of school spaces that particular highlight how transgenerational relationships enrich youth’s social-justice related actions and college-going identities. 

Learning in not about: Citizenship is a Lived Curriculum

Presenter: Bron Stuckey

You can't learn to swim without a body of water or learn to cross a road without ever being on a road. Yet around the world learning in relation to  citizenship (digital or otherwise) is focused on learning ABOUT. Educational systems quote their duty of care to keep students safe is to restrict student access to social media and communities. This talk will demonstrate that our duty of care is only served by treating citizenship as a lived curriculum.

This presentation will focus on experiences in two virtual environments where learners have the opportunity to experience digital citizenship as a direct and lived experience; Quest Atlantis/ Atlantis Remixed(ARX) and Massively Minecraft Education (MMe). These two environments are representative of safe spaces/games where children are able to tinker with creating their own identity, exploring and cultivating community norms and understanding what it means to engage positively in online social spaces. These game implementations are what Jim Gee refers to as affinity spaces, affinity spaces for both students and teachers, with strong positive values. These projects are designed and managed by educators and bring together students from around the world into global communities. The design of activity in these game spaces is intended to expose learners to positive social interactions but more than that to scaffold them in trying on personal agency and social responsibility. Both these game spaces allow learners to to experience positive norms and encourage them to take these out into future online spaces they will inhabit like Facebook and Twitter and their lifeworlds.

The story will be told through inworld cases of learner initiated and designed social action related to their concerns about the “real world” and their passions. Participants will have the opportunity to hear a snapshot of recent research findings in relation to Internet Safety and digital citizenship, research that centers around these two programs.

Participants will all be eligible to join the teacher communities and social networks related to these projects for ongoing support and development.

The objectives for educators would be to :

• Understand that our duty of care is not to lock kids out of these spaces but to take them to them.
• Understand how being in a 'safe' virtual world exposes children lived experiences of citizenship and civic efficacy
• Understand how having their children online with trusted adults in a 'horizontal learning space' takes the pressure off teachers to be online all the time and being able to trust in the norms of the community.
• Consider their readiness and strategies for taking programs like these into their schools,  curriculum and research
• Join communities that support the use of these and other programs in their schools.

At ChicagoQuest, teachers, game designers, and curriculum designers collaborate to create a game-like curriculum that is relevant and engaging to students while teaching 21st-century skills.

ChicagoQuest makes use of the same learning model pioneered by our NYC sister school, Quest to Learn. The Quest schools employ unique standards-based integrated curriculum mimics the action and design principles of games by generating a compelling “need to know” in the classroom. Each trimester students encounter a series of increasingly complex, narrative challenges, games or quests, where learning, knowledge sharing, feedback, reflection and next steps emerge as a natural function of play.

That all sounds great, but what does the Quest curriculum design process look like? How do we do it?

In this workshop, players will be taught the different phases of our curriculum design process. They will form small teams to compete against other teams in a guided challenge to design at each of the “levels” of the curriculum design process, both experiencing and designing CQ-style game-like learning.

By the end of this workshop, players will have a strong understanding of how the Quest model supports learning of 21st century skills like technology, systems-thinking, creative problem-solving, collaboration, and media/technology skills. Players will leave with ideas of how aspects of our design process can be brought back to and incorporated into their own institutions. 

Mapping is one of several genres of data collection that can connect youth with physical space, neighborhood streets, and city planning. What structures of participation are emerging? Can we sustain participation beyond reporting a few potholes? Based on the leading examples today, do we need more leadership from city government to structure youth participation, or more commitment from grassroots organizations to generate useful data?

This panel considers several of the most prominent projects at the frontier of mapping and youth -- including youth-made mobile apps (from Youth Radio), city planning (from Community PlanIt), and food access and map-based storytelling (from RideSouthLA). The respondent for the panel is a city official (Boston office of New Urban Mechanics). Each participant will justify their case study in terms of contributing to the public good -- including working with open data, or advancing city planning, generating media coverage or building human capital.

Our format seeks to tackle hard issues, and avoid romanticizing the case studies. We do this by emphasizing "hard problems" facing the field, and only introducing the case studies in a problem-solving mode, highlighting where more work is needed. Each panelist will begin by proposing a "hard problem," emphasizing barriers to combining learning with authentic civic contribution. After hearing the problem pitch, a case study will be brought forth in response, not to reveal a solution as much as to clarify what makes the problem hard, and where to begin. We expect to reveal 4-5 core problems, before opening the panel to audience discussion.

Some questions the panel will tackle include:

- Integration of online with multiple offline institutions -- how do we get organizations to follow up on their promises of collaboration?
- What is the flow between offline and online in terms of experience?
- Since paper remains the primary distribution vehicle for maps in many neighborhoods, how do we integrate digital data collection, and connect paper maps to social networks for distribution?
- Custom apps for mobile devices has incredible appeal for making maps interactive, and for ensuring data collection -- but it also has huge costs... what can be done without investing in specialty tools?
- Games can structure participation, but also leave the system vulnerable to attempts to “game the system.” How can we ensure data quality, especially if youth are to substantively contribute to authentic civic needs?
- Do we need different metrics to demonstrate learning -- such as "neighborhood belonging" or "collective self-efficacy"?
- Outcomes from the panel will include how city officials and other changemakers can best engage with nascent mobile designs, pitfalls to avoid, and an analysis of some of the platforms we think still need to be created.

In October 2011, twenty-two-year-old Molly Katchpole started a petition on Change.org to mobilize consumer outcry against Bank of America’s proposed $5.00 debit card fee. Over three hundred thousand people signed the petition and more than twenty-one thousand pledged to close their Bank of America accounts. Ultimately, Bank of America reversed their decision.  

While countless examples suggest a strong connection between new media and the politics of young people, there have been few large-scale quantitative analyses of the ways youth engagement in online participatory culture relates to political engagement.  In response to this need, as part of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, two of the presenters (Cathy Cohen and Joe Kahne) oversaw a research team that fielded a nationally representative survey of 3,000 youth. Unlike prior studies of this topic, the survey includes large samples of black, Latino, white, and Asian American youth to enable statistical comparisons across these different groups.

Their analysis reveals that many youth are engaging in participatory politics -- acts that are interactive, peer-based, not guided by deference to elites or formal institutions, and meant to address issues of public concern.  Although participatory politics can be practiced offline, these acts are often facilitated through online platforms. Examples include starting a new political group online, writing and disseminating a blog about a political issue, or participating in a poetry slam.

In discussing the survey, the authors focus on two main findings.  First, those youth who took part in activities related to their cultural interests online (through engagement with hobbies, music, and sports, for example) appeared to develop digital social capital (skills, networks, and orientations that facilitate participatory politics) and were far more likely to take part in participatory politics.  This highlights the value of bridges between what are generally thought to be nonpolitical cultural interests and political engagement.  Second, they found no evidence of a digital divide when it came to participatory politics.  It appears such engagement may facilitate more equitable participation in the political sphere.

To ground the discussion, the panel includes two innovators Dallas Donnell and TJ Crawford.  Dallas Donnell handles social media and is the web coordinator for the Black Youth Project.  Often bridging the cultural with the political, Dallas is responsible for using different forms of new media to engage young people in political discourse and action.  TJ Crawford is the executive director of Chicago Votes, a newly-formed civic organization that engages and mobilizes young adults in the political process. He was also a co-founder of the National Hip Hop Political Conventions held in Newark (2004) and Chicago (2006).

These two panelists will describe their work in relation to the possibilities highlighted by the survey findings. They will pay particular attention to the ways youth new media practices are linked to and supporting political action and social change by youth of color.  The group will then engage with the audience in a discussion about the opportunities and challenges of using new media to tap the potential of participatory politics. 

There is a growing disconnect between the interests and everyday practices of our nation’s youth and formal schooling’s approaches to engaging youth in rigorous, meaningful and relevant learning.  In particular, despite the significance of youth practices with digital media, this activity remains largely outside of academic environments. Of concern, there are social and cognitive, as well as personal, institutional, and economic consequences to disconnected learning.  Today’s youth move across a range of contexts and produce artifacts, increasingly through digital means, that reflect the intercultural, hybrid, and multimodal practices of which they are part.  These repertoires developed across the ecologies of interest and everyday life should be cultivated as an important dimension to learning and civic participation.

Schools today rely primarily on “vertical” views of competence and expertise that suggest that learning moves toward higher levels of mastery or performance in a domain. However, current sociocultural views of learning help us understand that learning and development must ALSO be viewed as “horizontal” movement across activities, domains, disciplinary terrains, and ecologies.  In other words, transformative learning involves shifts between and across new combinations of contexts and tools that can be leveraged across contexts and domains of learning.  From a learning perspective, the repertoires and expertise people develop across everyday and school-based ecologies are referred to as horizontal and vertical forms of learning, respectively.  

In this session, we propose to elaborate a set of Connected Learning design principles organized around a range of media practices that help to connect school, home, and youth culture.  We share a robust framework for disciplinary learning to support the development of toolkits that have utility across tasks, purposes, disciplinary boundaries, learning environments and future-oriented pathways and identities. Our goal is to advance an approach to learning that leverages youths’ repertoires toward consequential learning and productive pathways that have resonance for youths’ life trajectories. Designing for connected and consequential learning requires a new imagination about what kinds of tools and practices provide the context and supports for new forms of learning. We argue that new media technologies can help open up opportunities for connecting learning across range of ecologies.  Specifically, the set of papers elaborate new models of connected learning, known as syncretic approaches to learning (Gutierrez, 2008, Gutierrez, 2012).  Connected and syncretic learning models seek to address, if not rupture the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning by leveraging youths’ interests and repertoires of practice across nodes of interests and influence, including peer culture and academic domains of inquiry.  This session will advance a theory of syncretic approaches to connected learning and will draw on relevant studies of using syncretic approaches to design for more robust learning in both in and out of school spaces, including disciplinary learning. We will focus on building new media literacies and syncretic learning in science, literacy, and computational thinking to exemplify how syncretic learning—learning in which the everyday and school-based are reorganized, fused and leveraged toward more relevant and powerful learning across ecologies and boundaries, both disciplinary and the everyday.

Online communities offer a rich and complex arena for interaction and learning. Participants are bound together through shared interests and activities, making these ideal contexts to examine dimensions of connected learning at work. These communities allow people to come together to develop knowledge and skills, both within the boundary of the activity and beyond, providing a supportive and caring environment for learning outside classrooms. This panel explores connected learning through depth cases in four diverse online community contexts: wikis, video games, modding communities, and professional wrestling. These cases support, as well as complicate, the connected learning model as it has been developed thus far. Christo Sims, Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego, will serve as discussant.

No One Edits Alone: Collaborative Construction of Multimodal Wiki Worlds, Amanda Ochsner

While classrooms are still primarily local, young people learn to participate in globally connected digital worlds by playing games and participating in the online communities around them. Contributors to game-based wikis develop criteria for participation that all members are expected to adhere to. In this panel, Amanda reports on research collected from four game wikis over five months, investigating cultural norms and patterns of participation and collaboration. The wikis represented in this data corpus include Call of Duty, Dishonored, Halo, and Resident Evil.

Welcome to Sackboy Planet: Learning Among LittleBigPlanet 2 Players, Matt Rafalow

Video games are increasingly designed with the capacity for players to not only consume game content but also produce content themselves to be shared with others. Matt will discuss his research on LittleBigPlanet 2, a craft-oriented Playstation 3 game, and its companion player community, Sackboy Planet. Online community members construct a learning environment centered on improving expertise as level designers, and players develop academically-relevant skills such as computer science, art, and team management to produce compelling levels enjoyed by the community.

“I have a bit of a modder’s block”: The Highs and Lows of Learning to Mod Online, Shree Durga

Learning in online communities is an evolving process of self-organized and longitudinal participation. An enduring challenge for educators and researchers studying these spaces lies in being able to effectively “zoom” in and out of individuals’ engagement across varying scales of time. Drawing from a study of a Civilization fan community—Civfanatics, Shree will present a mod-production case depicting a modder’s motivations to mod and how they are shaped by and within Civfanatics as he navigates the cycle of inspiration, iteration, and completion of a Civilization mod.

WWE as Site for Identity Creation, Crystle Martin

The World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Universe encompasses a vast community that has a diverse population and many sub-communities within it. In this panel, Crystle presents her research on one of these sub-communities which runs a fantasy league that functions somewhat like a text style RPG. The community creates wrestlers, writes scripts, and carries out matches, creating many learning opportunities for the participants to learn digital media skills, perfect their writing, and take a leadership role in the community, along with participating in the discourse of wrestling.

This panel will look at how young people's engagement with pop culture is a gateway to finding their voice and place in the sphere of participatory politics.  Drawing from a variety of pop culture formations including hip hop, fan cultures, etc. the panelist will consider some of the creative ways young people engage in participatory politics.

For decades, the thirteen youth media organizations that make up the Chicago Youth Voices Network (CYVN) have worked at the forefront of developing media production processes that engage youth in self-representation. CYVN coalition members understand the power of positioning youth as community agents with stories to tell and messages to deliver, while using digital authorship tools to disseminate these narratives to public audiences. Through community-centered, interest driven and project based learning opportunities, youth media participants develop a sense of self, place and agency essential to building cultural and civic identities that drive political participation and action. 

CYVN youth media groups have historically focused on constructivist learning experiences differentiated by production processes that center on relevant, interest driven themes and genres of communication (e.g. hip-hop, remix, poetry slams).  In the process, youth are encouraged to understand their own personal experiences and perspectives as repositories of knowledge, and the production process as a vehicle for building new knowledge and social connections. Often the result is that youth become deeply engaged in processing their understanding of the complex interconnections between personal and community conflicts, as well as the inequities created by race, class, culture, poverty, gender, sexuality and immigration status.
       
After decades of operation, youth media organizations have graduated thousands of youth from their programs. The “alumni” from nine of these CYVN member organizations are currently participating in a study on the long-term outcomes of youth media programs, being undertaken by the Social IMPACT Research Center and supported by the McCormick Foundation. This study aims to better understand what skills, attitudes and behaviors imparted in youth media programs “stick” into adulthood, especially pertaining to habits of civic engagement, political participation, digital and creative content production and critical media/news analysis.

We propose a panel, facilitated by moderator Kim Richards, and comprised of three alumni of CYVN youth media programs and participants in this study, to interrogate how model youth media programs, practices and pedagogies have served to shape their political agency and identities. These alumni include both pre and post digital natives, aged between 18-32, all of whom began attending out-of-school youth media programs as teens.
 
The youth panel will be joined by Amy Terpstra from Social IMPACT Research Center who will present initial findings from their study. The youth panel will not only react to their findings, but also discuss their involvement as leaders in NUF-Said 2.0, a new online digital delivery platform being launched by CYVN that shares young people’s perspectives on a range of social issues with Chicago’s youth advocates, civic leaders, policymakers, media outlets and general public.

NUF-Said 2.0 broadens the community centered production model to embrace a more digitally networked and citywide community of practice that connects youth across institutional, geographical and territorial divides. The panel invites conversations with the audience on how new social media networks and technological contexts can not only be used to mobilize new generations of youth but to penetrate the walls of power so their messages can be fully heard. 

Towards a Digital Public Square: The (Ab)uses of Facebook Among Nigerian Student Unionists

Presenter: Krystal Strong

Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork on student political practices in higher educational institutions in Ibadan Nigeria, this paper explores the ways Nigerian youth practice politics, negotiate political discourse, and develop civic identities via the use of social media, especially Facebook.  While the countries of the Global South, especially those in Africa, are often regarded as being on the losing side of the so-called digital divide, the recent upsurge in the availability of mobile phones and internet access, most notably in cyber cafes, has created new opportunities for young people to connect with each other and their global peers.  Moreover, with the continuing evolution of Nigeria's young democracy, students in the country's tertiary institutions have taken a renewed interest in student unionism as one avenue for practicing politics (in preparation for broader civic participation and leadership) during the course of their educational experience.  Incidentally, social media, especially Facebook, has been a critical component of young people's repertoire of political practice.  This paper will chronicle the establishment of the University of Ibadan's Student Union (public) Facebook page in 2011 with attention to: the way Facebook, as a stand-in for digital spaces more generally, has allowed students to cultivate a "public square"; and, the nature of political dialogue on the Facebook page, particularly its evolution from "abusive" discourse to more engaged forms of testimony, critique, rhetoric, and direct political action.  The paper will offer insight into both the possibilities and challenges that social media frameworks, created in the Global North, present for Nigerian youth, desiring to use such media for purposes, at times, unintended by the creators.  At the same time, the paper will offer a more general discussion of how social media creates avenues for new modes of knowledge production and civic engagement among Global South youth typically sidelined from civic participation in their home countries.

Becoming Global Citizens through Digital Media: Pathways to Transnational and Digital Public Engagement for Young Women

Presenter: Manisha Pathak-Shelat

Globalization and digital media are the two forces that have shaped the unique identities of the generations growing up in the 1990s and after. These forces have also propelled increasing interconnectedness of the different parts of the world resulting in the revival of interest in the idea of global citizenship. A string of studies, however,  have demonstrated that the availability of communication technology is no guarantee that it will be used for civic/political purposes (Bimber, 2000; Dahlgren 2007), that most of the new media use by young people has been banal more than transformative, and that youth use new media to connect with those familiar rather than those in different socio-cultural locations (Boyd, 2008; Buckingham, 2008; Livingstone, 2009, Watkins, 2009). So, it seems that young people with well developed global civic identities who have recognized the promise of digital media and found value in engaging the global public sphere constitute a unique cohort of young people world wide. My talk draws from the experiences of young women around the world (from 15 different countries spanning all major continents) who find value and meaning in transnational and digital public engagement and see themselves as global citizens. I am specifically focusing on young women because women have conventionally faced exclusion and limitations in public participation, and globalization is a gendered process. Besides, in many societies gender is still an important axis along which digital inequalities are experienced. Despite these structural limitations a number of young women today are active in transnational online public spheres. Even when we find women who are highly engaged digitally and globally, it is important to recognize that citizenship is a culturally and historically situated process. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 women from different parts of the world  my talk traces different pathways that these women have taken to become digitally and globally active citizens. In the process I examine how lifeworlds come together with individual agency and how local interact with global in different locations to shape women’s experience of citizenship. My talk would contribute to discussion on civic and leadership education, digital citizenship, globalization and social change, and media literacy.

Digital Activism in an Analogue Context

Presenter: Ana Sofia Ruiz

How youth in rural communities in Central America use hybrid models of communication (digital and analogue) to engage in activism and reach their audience.

Central America is a region where traditional media prevails, internet penetration and access to new technologies are highly limited. The percentage of population with online connection in Honduras is only of 15.9%, in Guatemala 11.7%, in Nicaragua 10.6%, in Costa Rica 42.1% and in Panamá 42.7%. (International Telecommunication Unit Report, 2012) In a region with growing levels of insecurity, violence, corruption and drug cartels, social problems are deepening and inequality is growing.

Central American youth is no different from other contexts: they commit to social struggles, and engage in social participation, but spaces at hand are very narrow. Even more for young people in rural and indigenous communities. However, despite the difficulties they find ways to be heard and carry their voices as far as they can.

Hivos´ office for Central America conducted two youth camps: in Guatemala and Nicaragua, to learn how youngsters connect to each other and to a broader audience in their engagement as activists.

From this experience we have learned that many of them don´t think of themselves as activists, but do so in many ways: as artists, as young leaders in their communities, as teachers.

Their road into being an engaged youth demands using new technologies, to keep up with their peers in a wold context. But this comes with a disadvantage: most of the Central American audience still uses analog media (traditional press and radio). If young activist want to inform their fellow citizens about the issues going on in their community, they need to use the radio, for instance. On the other hand, if they want to get a world audience involved, they might use Twitter.

Getting access from reliable resources is also scarce, since the media is monopolized by the government or corporations related to drug cartels. This calls for greater actions that can only come from independent media, engaged citizens and youth, but comes with a high risk. In Honduras, there has been at least 28 journalists murdered from 2003 to date, which remain unpunished. In Guatemala, in the indigenous community of Totonicapán, 7 people were murdered by the Guatemalan army, in a social protest against the rising of the electric bills. This event  would have gone unnoticed  and unpunished, if  some of the participants had not had camera on their cell phone or  Twitter accounts, which provided evidence that the President wasn´t able to ignore.

As Hivos´ representative for the Central American office and organizer of these two youth camps, I would like to have a chance to share what youngsters in Central America are doing and the challenges they face.

The Cyber-Public and Digital Squares

Presenter: Noopur Raval

This paper seeks to look at the transformed character of resistances in the digital age through the privileging of the byte and the pixel.  In the course of the paper, the author wishes to explore how the acts of seeing and being seen are central to the unfolding of digital spectacles - flattened resistances produced for global consumption of change. Also, along with this, the author intends to look at information networks and the rhetoric of self empowerment that seem to be at the core of all citizen action in the cyberspaces. In the course of this paper, the author will pick up instances of famous digitally aided revolutions/resistances - spectacles and locate absences and disappearances visually as well as in how the narratives were constructed within the information network with the help of tools available to the citizen activist that may help us reevaluate the success of digitally aided/infused acts of citizen activism.

No Need to Take Action, Just Wait and See: Community Activism and Mexican immigrant Digital Natives

Presenter: Joy Pierce

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach…. [Digital Natives] have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. (2001, p.1)

Digital change often happens quickly – whether we participate in it or not. Social change may take years, despite citizen action. Organizing through the Internet is seen as a mode of self-improvement through possibilities for education opportunities and housing, as well as information on social welfare and political freedom through online information gathering and voting. Yet the promise for social change at the site of the digital is still a shaky proposition for some Digital Natives.

Using examples from case studies, I will address how Prensky’s assertions prove there is much work yet to do concerning organizing community using digital media. What happens when the mainstream population in a community with a large Mexican immigrant population makes assumptions without regard to the specific cultural, linguistic and social needs of that underrepresented population? Teaching and learning technologies using a community-based center with a socially-motivated topic is one way to engage an underrepresented population that is ignored or silenced. This discussion will focus on ways to motivate youth to become informed digital citizens and future activists.

The rise of digital media has created novel contexts for public discourse and participation. These media are increasingly integral to civic and political engagement. Social media platforms provide conduits for information circulation, dialog with peers and elites, and opportunities to investigate civic issues and mobilize social networks (Cohen & Kahne, 2012). The centrality of civic identity to civic engagement has been recognized (Crocetti et al., 2012, Hart et al., 2011), yet little is known about how people decide to use new media to express – or refrain from expressing - their civic identities online. The MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) is exploring the intersection of youth, new media and political life. In this panel, we highlight an increasingly important literacy – the capacity to cultivate and thoughtfully express one’s civic identity alongside one’s social and professional identities in online spaces - and consider implications for 21st century civic education.

Our panel’s diverse methodological approaches (ethnographies, interviews, media content analyses) provide multifaceted insights to the question, “How are young people expressing their civic and political identities online?” We consider how they negotiate various identities and audiences, and the impacts of peers, mentors, and organizations. The first presentation draws on two case studies of exemplary, innovative youth organizations, including a youth group building on a fan community to mobilize for civic purposes and a student run organization, with a robust online presence, that provides resources and support for students who support liberty. This study finds that when members’ personal identities are connected to their organizational roles, they tend to integrate their civic and personal identities. The second presentation draws on interviews with youth engaged in civic or political organizations, and social movements. This study finds some youth proactively express civic identities across different online contexts, feeling a responsibility to inform and engage others. Others fragment their online identities, at times due to push back from peers. The third presentation draws on interviews with youth involved in more traditional civic organizations, e.g. school and religious youth groups. This study finds that while some youth do express their online political identities intentionally, others do so unintentionally. Many of these same participants reported not wanting to engage in political expression online – often to avoid conflict.

Our studies have implications for educators involved in youth development and civic learning. Youth need new skills to navigate the evolving terrain of online identity expression. Educators can facilitate reflective conversations regarding the what, how, when, where, and why of expressing a civic identity; support youth as they explore their civic identities online, helping them connect unconscious expression to a realized civic identity; and help youth deal with conflict and social pressures in online dialog rather than simply refrain from participating in civic and political discussions.
The practitioner discussant will respond to our presentations and offer relevant insights from working at Mikva Challenge, an organization that cultivates young civic leaders and activists.

This workshop will prepare Millennials to be a potent force outside of the electoral cycle by training them on how to directly engage with and impact the policymaking process, online and offline.  By guiding participants on how to craft a creative policy solution and engage meaningfully in policy discussions, the workshop will provide participants invested in leveraging technology for social change and the broader progressive agenda with a clear process and toolkit for how young people can uniquely drive policy change.
 
Abstract: Objectives and Rationale
 
In the recent election, Millennials defied their detractors by matching the turnout numbers of 2008, putting boots on the ground to elect the officials that reflected this generation’s values. Now – what’s next? How can we ensure that the values and policy priorities of young people remain relevant as we transition to governance? How can use policy process to expand their voice beyond the ballot box? Through interactive engagement and group work, this session aims to:
 
·   Inform participants on the Campus Network’s unique form of progressive activism focused on promoting and campaigning around young people’s ideas for change;
·   Prepare participants to craft local and state policy solutions grounded in values; and
·   Train participants on how to connect their ideas to the policy process for meaningful impact on issues, and the potential for young people to re-imagine the public sphere through technological innovation
 
Roosevelt Campus Network members have used this training to transform city blocks in Detroit, incentivize fair tax practices for domestic partners in Richmond, and redesign government for a technology-savvy 21st century. After participating in Design the Change: How Millennials Can Amplify their Voice and Impact the Policymaking Process workshop, individuals will be poised to drive change fueled by their values and ideas back in their own communities.
 
Session Outline
 
 
I.               Set session expectations & objectives (5 minutes)
II.             Introduction to the Roosevelt Campus Network (5 minutes)
III.           The exercise: Introduce values to policy outcomes frame (5 minutes)
IV.           Values: In small groups, participants will brainstorm their top four values (ex. equality, access to opportunity, etc). (15 minutes)
V.             Outcomes: What do those values mean we should be working toward? In the same group participants will brainstorm an outcome for each of their key values. (15 minutes)
VI.           Policy: How can those values be reflected in the world? In the same group participants will brainstorm three policies, two national and one local, that would lead to the outcomes decided above. (15 minutes)
VII.         Technology: Policy in a changing world (15 minutes)
VIII.       Real world application: How to connect ideas and policy solutions to the policy process  (15 minutes)

In what ways are social networks being used to facilitate and support connected learning? This panel presentation explores this question by highlighting the educational benefits and challenges of four different networked spaces across local and global contexts and formal and informal learning environments. Panelists will draw on their backgrounds in computer science, communication, literacy studies, and science education as they lead an interactive discussion about the expanded potential for learning afforded by new forms of communication within social networks. In particular, they will discuss how social networks offer new opportunities to expand the structural, curricular, and geographical boundaries of school-based practices and promote connected learning, and provide young people increased autonomy and agency in creating knowledge and authoring new texts with others.

Each presenter will spend 15 minutes sharing the challenges of designing networks and the potential of social networks as new communicative contexts that support connected learning. The four networks are focused on issues such as (1) new media authoring and intercultural communication, (2) climate change science, (3) media sharing and discussion, and (4) transmedia play and storytelling. Amy Stornaiuolo will discuss the ways in which 194 adolescents around the world authored multimodal compositions on a learning-focused social network over three years. Jessica K. Parker and Diana Arya will detail an eight-week science program in which 141 high school students from the United States, China, New Zealand, and Norway engaged in a social network about climate change. Nichole Pinkard will describe a common core aligned 6th grade writing curriculum design to develop students’ abilities to communicate narrative, informational and argumentative stories across multiple modes of communication (textual, visual, aural, oral, and cinematic). And Erin Reilly will discuss the PLAYground social network, a site for young people to better understand transmedia forms and new cultural practices.

Overall, the panel will serve several related purposes: (1) to introduce colleagues to several examples of social networks in education; (2) to demonstrate diverse applications of SNS in local and global educational settings; (3) to raise questions for future inquiry on digitally mediated teaching and learning; and (4) in a broad sense to generate discussion about configured spaces and connected learning.

Our discussant, Robin Mencher, the Director of Education and Media Learning at KQED, will summarize the findings from the four panelists and then pull questions and issues from the backchannel to help further discussion. She will also open the floor to the audience and help to moderate the conversation.

The DML Cafe is an informal place for you to share your ideas. Ready to Hack? How about some report findings? Do we know about your program or school? Just published a book? Something you think is a must at  DML2013?

Would you like to sign up? Check out the CFP here!

Look who is participating in Session I!

Saturday, March 16 at 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Sheraton 4-5

*Participants are listed by table number. List is subject to changes/additions.

1. Jeremiah Holden, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Placework Project: Civic Engagement and Place-based Learning

The Placework Project is an educational design and participatory research project devoted to exploring the intersection of place- and design-based learning. The Placework Project brings together youth, educators, schools, museums, and community groups interested in promoting place-based design, a pedagogical approach that combines key elements of place-based learning, design-based learning, and democratic education (Mathews & Holden, 2012). The Placework Project has implemented a range of community-based projects emphasizing civic participation, including: community mapping, cultural ethnography, citizen science, and storytelling. Using a design-based learning approach that includes iterative and interconnected cycles of inquiry and design, each project has emphasized original research and design work that emerged from a combination of students’ own interests and the unique needs of the local community. The types of media students created as a result of their inquiries included mobile-based games and stories, community tours, public events and museum exhibits.

The Placework Project has designed, implemented, and researched learning environments and participatory experiences across a range of learning contexts, including school-based design studios, summer camps, and museums. Learn how high school students conducted “citizen ethnography” investigations about everyday artists in their community, and then curated an exhibition featuring digital media at a local museum. In another project, middle school students identified community assets and challenges, ranging from water quality to the safety of local parks, and used web-based and mobile media to present findings from their fieldwork to school and community leaders.

This Tech Café presentation will share lessons learned and address the following questions: How might place-based learning complement the theories and practices associated with design-based learning, and vice versa? Also, how might the affordances of digital and mobile media support youth and educators as they collaboratively engage and co-create opportunities for place-based civic engagement?

2. Belinha De Abreu, Fairfield University and Paul Mihailidis, Emerson College

Media Literacy in Action: The State of the Field

"This “state of the field” presentation is envisioned as an interactive roundtable where key stakeholders in various disciplines, backgrounds, and positions get together to talk about where media literacy is in today’s transmedia landscape. As mobile technologies, social platforms, and digital competencies are engrained further into the daily lives of youth and young adults today, the media literacy field continues to be dragged in many different directions, all at the same time. It seems unrealistic for educational institutions to keep up with the fast paced change in technology, and an ever-savvy core user base. Now 13 years into the 21st Century, this roundtable hopes to elicit a few deep breaths, a pause, and a discussion on where media literacy is, what it’s core foundation means, and where we want to go as a cohesive unit in a ubiquitous media age.

The participants in this roundtable are co-editors and authors of the upcoming book “Media Literacy in Action” (Routledge 2013). This book features over 30 leading media literacy thinkers across fields, across disciplines, and across the world. The aim of the book is to explore the divergent ways in which media literacy is connected to educational communities and academic areas, in both local and global contexts.

This roundtable will use the impetus of this book to have concurrent discussion, interaction and dialog around key areas for media literacy going forward, explore some of the different ways the field is evolving, and explore key contested areas for the future of media literacy.

3. Penny Bender Sebring, University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research and Eric Brown, Northwestern University
YOUmedia Chicago: What Happened in the First Three Years?

YOUmedia Chicago: What Happened in the First 3 Years?
YOUmedia Chicago is the first of the digital-media infused learning laboratories installed in libraries and museums across the country. So what happened in the first three years? How many teens show up at YOUmedia, and who are they? Do they attend consistently? What do they do at YOUmedia? What do teens say they get from participating in YOUmedia? How do the mentors get kids excited about books, poetry, music, and performance? What are the key takeaways from this grand experiment to put a digital media learning center in the Chicago Public Library?

We will answer these questions and engage conferees in a discussion of what the findings mean for attracting teens and planning and operating learning laboratories in the digital age.
YOUmedia Chicago launched in 2009 and is located at the Harold Washington Library Center (HWLC) in downtown Chicago. It serves high school-age youth. YOUmedia encompasses a physical space as well as a virtual place—a website—dedicated to YOUmedia users. Both are designed to draw youth into progressive levels of participation in digital and print media. Between 350-500 teens come to YOUmedia each week to hang out with their friends and explore their interests. With the guidance of mentors, they can discover and pursue their interests through both collaborative and solitary activities such as music, spoken word, electronic gaming, and writing and design. Special events open the door for youth to collaborate with and learn from established artists, authors, and experts. The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) has just completed a three-year study to document the program and whether and how it has fulfilled the designers’ aspirations.

4. Jonathan Marino, MapStory, Elizabeth Lyon, US Army Corps of Engineers (tentative) and Dr. Christopher Tucker, Founder of MapStory (tentative)

Empowering youth civic leadership through MapStorytelling

Maps are tools for reflection - especially when they also include time-encoded data and rich multimedia features so that they tell stories about change in place over time. At MapStory, were building an open source, nonprofit, global data commons where anyone (students, teachers, practitioners, researchers) can crowdsource and peer review openly licensed spatial-temporal data. What's more, users can then draw upon these underlying datasets (StoryLayers), combine them, and add their own voice through multimedia add-ons to tell rich MapStories about their world.

5. Canceled

6. Vanessa Sanchez, Hive Chicago; Christian Greer, Hive Chicago; Sandy Almeyda, YMCA Chicago; Melissa Bryan, Free Spirit Media; Hillary Cook, Art Institute of Chicago; Leah Gilliam, Hive NYC; and Joliz Cedeño, Global Kids

Honoring Youth Voice in Program Planning, Iteration, and Innovation - Mobilizing the HIVE Youth Councils

Can youth councils become a step for youth to lead advocacy projects within their communities? How can youth take on more active roles in the programmatic decisions within organizations that support them? How can we continue to build the next leaders in youth centered organizations and advocacy organizations? Although many organizations and groups have a mission of providing youth centered programming, the voice of the youth is often left out of the planning and decision making. The creation of HIVE Youth Ambassadors and HIVE Organizations’ individual youth councils has allowed us to explore new models for offering youth participants the agency to create their own projects, provide insight on programming, and be active ambassadors for the organizations in which they participate. Panel members will discuss the missions, visions, and roles the youth councils play in their organizations and in HIVE and how youth development is achieved throughout each one. Members of youth councils will also speak first hand on how their roles in youth councils are shaping them as young leaders, community activists, and innovators in youth programming.

7. Kristin Fontichiaro, Terence O'Neill, Shauna Masura, and Victoria Lungu, Michigan Makers, University of Michigan
Michigan Makers: A Middle School Makerspace

When a group of ambitious middle schoolers, an energetic librarian, an enthusiastic professor, and geeky graduate student mentors collaborated, they infused an existing programming club with makerspace culture. The resulting Michigan Makers after-school program runs on four basic principles:

1. A workshop model to balance skill acquisition with time for exploration.
2. Low-cost tools to democratize access.
3. Mentoring to develop positive relationships.
4. Focus on teaming to promote the development of social skills.

We’ll share our service learning model, discuss what we have learned about a “just-right” balance of structure and choice, and share how our middle schoolers define themselves and their makerspace. In the mood to tinker? We’ll bring along some of the low-cost computing options (like Raspberry Pi and Arduino) that we use to cultivate teamwork, creative thinking, and a sense of agency.

8. Jacqueline Vickery, University of North Texas
#FAIL: What can we learn from unsuccessful after-school digital media club experiences?

How can schools create more equitable opportunities and futures for students struggling to succeed? How might digital media provide new pathways for success for otherwise disengaged teens? What are the keys to participation and motivation within informal learning environments?

These are just a few of the questions addressed in my dissertation titled, ""Worth the Risks: The role of norms and regulations in shaping teens’ digital media practices"". Published August 2012, it is the first in-depth publication based on findings from “The Digital Edge” project (an ongoing research project within the Connected Learning Research Network, led by S. Craig Watkins). The ethnographic research focuses on a series of case studies built around the lives of 18 diverse teens within an economically challenged school in Texas. Data largely draws from interviews and observations from two after-school digital media and film clubs.

After-school clubs are often hailed as successful interventions for otherwise disengaged learners; however, this certainly is not the case for all teens. Drawing from data published in my dissertation, this discussion will focus on social, structural, and technical variables that hinder some teens from becoming motivated and engaged participants within informal learning environments. For example, I found that resiliency was a necessary skill that some participants lacked, thus they were unable to cope with failure and criticism. Even though they reported excitement about media production, negative social and technical experiences precluded their engagement in and motivation for after-school media clubs, thus they dropped out.

Based on findings presented from the study, the discussion will share why some teens become motivated while others do not. While success stories related to after-school media clubs are essential in shaping our understanding of learning ecologies, it is important to also study examples of failure. This round table will provide a space to identify barriers that hinder students’ participation and motivation within informal learning environments in order to contemplate possible solutions.

9. Nikki Navta, Zulama.com; Norton Gusky, Educational Consultant; and Bev Vaillancourt, Educational Consultant
Engage with Games

Explore how a dynamic, project-based curriculum using games designed and played from ancient times to the present, can expand your students' core content knowledge while building 21st century skills in a blended learning environment. Motivation. Collaboration. Connected Learning. All come naturally for students engaged with games. Capture student curiosity by using games in either after school or during school activities. Come join us for this energized round table conversation.

10. Geoffrey Gevalt and John Canning, Young Writers Project
Whoa! What we have learned from kids in digital spaces

Young Writers Project is a tiny nonprofit in Vermont that works with thousands of kids and hundreds of teachers in civil digital environments (out of school and in school). Facing a mighty headwind, YWP uses its digital platforms – and coaching models – to deepen youth engagement and connection and creativity, peer-to-peer learning, teacher writing, cross-curricula collaboration and authentic audience.

We want to talk with you about the power and promise of digital expression in kids' lives. We'll show a few things and get lost in new ideas, suggestions and feedback. Give us ideas! And feel free to steal ours! Some cool things youth have done with us: civil discussion of contentious issues; powerful podcasts; revisions from peer advice; community actions; creative collaborations (example: 2,500 six-word stories, +1 composer + 1 eager 15-year-old music student and one 75-piece orchestra = unique concert!).

Conversation will be guided by Geoffrey Gevalt, YWP founder, former award-winning journalist and innovator. With him will be John Canning, programmer, entrepreneur, YWP director and extraordinary facilitator of cool digital ideas involving kids.

11. Jennifer Masengarb, Manny Juarez and Christian Greer, Chicago Architecture Foundation
DiscoverDesign.org – Design challenges connecting teens, teachers, and architects

Many high schools across the country struggle to implement rigorous and relevant learning strategies where teens investigate their world through project-based learning. Yet to those in the architectural community, these methods of learning look very familiar – they are synonymous with the design thinking they use each day in their studios. To address this gap, the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) created a unique digital learning tool that connects teens, teachers, and architects across the country for 21st-century project-based learning.

Using DiscoverDesign.org, students investigate award-winning green school buildings through slideshows, animations, and video interviews with architects whose projects are featured. Then in a highly participatory and youth-led learning process, teens choose a real-world design problem and are challenged to create a sustainable solution for their own school. Social networking features give students the opportunity to post images, videos, text, and digital models of their built solutions and receive direct feedback from their teacher, their peers across the country, and architects who have volunteered to serve as online mentors.

Architects provide not only encouragement for the students, they also play a critical role in teaching design thinking and architectural problem solving. Aided by the structure of the website, these designers help guide the teens through the iterative design process steps.

In formal learning environments, DiscoverDesign.org is used in subjects ranging from Career and Technical Education fields to art, science, and cross-disciplinary project-based courses. Because DiscoverDesign.org is free and available 24/7, in school and out of school learning is connected as teens interact with peers and mentors via friendship-driven, interest-driven, and adult-driven environments. As a member of the Hive Learning Network Chicago, CAF is currently developing a new badging system for DiscoverDesign.org to foster this connected learning, giving teens more ‘hooks and triggers’ for engagement. Please join us for an interactive demo and hands-on design process activity.

12. Karen Jeffrey and Toby Kavukattu, Forall Systems; and Angela Elkordy, Eastern Michigan University
Digital Badges for K-12 Students

The goal of this presentation is to generate discussion at the DML Cafe as well as build a community for continued discussions around research and implementation of digital badges to design innovative, engaging and productive learning experiences for K-12 students in both formal and informal environments. This presentation will include hands on demonstrations of example badge system implementations.

Opportunities badges present: The use of digital badges to scaffold, assess and communicate learning in order to

* connect informal and formal learning environments,
* recognize skills that are not traditionally recognized,
* develop higher order thinking skills,
* foster independent learning upon individualized pathways,
* support reflection and planning in student learning,
* support communication between students, teachers and parents,
* leverage both interpersonal and intrapersonal intrinsic motivators such as challenge, curiosity, competition and recognition in order to stimulate deeper learning,
* incorporate best practices in assessment and pedagogy to design engaging and effective learning contexts,
* incorporate national and local academic benchmarks or standards to facilitate discussion and deeper understanding of pedagogies and strategies across learning environments and
* describe skill sets, competencies and proficiencies in a granular manner to ""unpack"" individuals' knowledge (and potential growth areas).

Challenges badges present: Considerations for implementing digital badges include how to

* integrate effectively into classroom learning environments,
* support teachers without creating an additional workload,
* work within technology limitations both at school and at home,
* avoid the pitfalls of external motivation,
* comply with COPPA and FERPA regulations,
* avoid the ""gold star"" effect whereby assessments do not assess true growth in learning,
* provide equitable technology access for students and
* make available appropriate professional development to teachers.

Join us at the DML Cafe and share your thoughts about how to take advantage of the opportunities and handle the challenges that badges create in learning environments for K-12 students.

13. Ricarose Roque, MIT Media Lab
A Family That Creates Together: Designing Creative Technology Workshops for Families

Design-based activities with computing, such as making interactive games and animations, can engage young people in creative learning experiences. As they create their own technologies, they learn computational concepts and practices and gain new perspectives into the dynamics and processes behind the technologies they use. However, opportunities to participate in these activities are unequally distributed and access to technology is not enough. Instead, young people must have access to resources within a supportive learning network. Parents and other family members can play important roles in this network, from acting as gatekeepers to serving as collaborative learning partners with young people.

In this session, we will introduce the design of Family Scratch Nights, a series of workshops to engage parents and their children to design and invent together with Scratch, a programming language where people can create their own interactive animations, games, and stories. These workshops aim to support design-based computing activities, foster creative collaboration, and build community. We especially target families with limited access to resources and social support around computing.

We invite participants to learn about the design of these workshops. We will share the co-creation activities we designed as well as our stories and challenges in implementing these workshops in urban communities within Boston, MA and Santa Fe, NM. Finally, we also seek feedback and suggestions from members of the DML community in engaging families to become co-creators and co-participants in today’s digital society.

14. Deren Guler, Carnegie Mellon University, and Nina Barbuto, Assemble
Invent-abling

The theme of our table will be based upon a project that I have been developing for the past year called Invent-abling. The heart of the project is to develop a young inventor's construction kit, filled of smart materials and electronics that can be used to make interactive craft project. Inventive learning and making are becoming increasingly popular, especially through the maker movement there is no educational kit that comprehensively explores different material. The concept behind Invent-abling is to explore the possibilities of interdisciplinary kits and the effect they can have on STEAM education. We also explore different gender responses and try to formulate activities. Our hope is to spark an interest in STEAM at an early age through interesting hands-on methods.

At the DML Cafe we will have participants play with several of the materials in the kit (which we will provide) and brainstorm activities of their own. Sample materials include, LEDs, hypercolor fabric, magnets, and shape memory plastics. We will also think and talk more deeply about the concepts behind Invent-abling and what is needed to design projects that promote learning and ""imagineering"". All of the projects are designed in hope that the participants will add their own twist and find an interesting way to personalize the result or take it to another level. We find that many similar initiatives are either focused on only one aspect of STEM (for example only mechanics), or that they do are too regimented and are accessible to beginners.

Presenting the project in this format would be ideal, as we would have the opportunity to brainstorm and playtest in an intimate setting. You can find more information about the kits and workshops on our website at www.invent-abling.com

15. Paul Oh, Christina Cantrill, and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, National Writing Project
Digital Is: Building the Argument for New Literacy and Connected Learning Practices

In an emerging field, how do we build a knowledge base of - and an argument for - the kinds of digital literacy and connected learning practices we know are taking place in a range of learning contexts? The National Writing Project established Digital Is to help do just that through contributions from a a growing and diverse community of formal and informal educators. Come see how you might participate in the co-construction of Digital Is - as a content creator, remixer, designer or developer.

16. Daniel Hickey, Rebcca Itow, Andi Rehak, and Katerina Schenke, Indiana University
Digital Badges Design Principles Documentation Project

The Design Principles Documentation Project is gathering the insights emerging from DML’s Badges for Lifelong Learning initiative. We are tracking the evolution of badge design practices as thirty DML awardees incorporate digital badges into diverse programs Our analysis of badging practices across these projects resulted in 20 general principles for recognizing, assessing, motivating, and evaluating learning. Our database and our presentation are organized these general badge design principles. Each of the twenty principles is linked back to specific practices and features from individual projects. For each principle, we are also creating a database of relevant research to help these projects and other innovators work more knowledgeably and eventually contribute to that knowledge.

Our poster will provide a quick overview of the twenty general badges design principles. Visitors will be able to peruse our growing database of principles, practices, and resources on our laptop computers. Visitors will also be able to speak with the project member responsible for documenting the principles, practices, and resources in each of the four areas. Because all of the DML badges projects will also be presenting at the Tech Cafés, visitors will be able speak with the innovators who are responsible for particular practices that they are interested in.

This event will initiate the second phase our project where we begin to make the principles, practices, and resources in our database available to the public, and invite others from outside of the DML competition to contribute to it.

Our poster will provide a quick overview of the twenty general badges design principles. Visitors will be able to peruse our database of principles, practices, and resources on our laptop computers. Visitors will also be able to speak with the project member responsible for documenting the principles, practices, and resources in each of the four areas. Because all of the DML badges projects will also be presenting at the Tech Café, visitors will be able speak with the innovators who are responsible for particular practices that they are interested in. This event will initiate the second phase our project where we begin to make the principles, practices, and resources in our database available to the public, and invite others from outside of the DML competition to contribute to it.

17. Paul Allison and Erick Gordon, New York City Writing Project; Jennifer Woollven, Westlake High School, Central Texas Writing Project; and Christina Cantrill, National Writing Project
Youth Voices: A school-based social network with badges

At our roundtable, we’ll discuss our work as teachers from local sites of the National Writing Project to turn a school-based social network, Youth Voices, into an ARG-like game, offering badges for to secondary school students for accomplishing tasks that are detailed on P2PU.

The object of “Play Youth Voices” is to become a social media power user through commenting on other players’ posts, responding to literary and informational texts, doing long-term research projects, composing, revising, and publishing with text and media, and becoming a self-directed learner.

Youth Voices is a site for conversations. We invite youth of all ages to voice their thoughts about their passions, to explain things they understand well, to wonder about things they have just begun to understand, and to share discussion posts with other young people using as many different genres and media as they can imagine!

Along with other National Writing Project teachers, we started Youth Voices in 2003 by merging several earlier blogging projects. We bring students together on this one site that lives beyond any particular class, because it’s easier for individual students to read and write about their own passions, to connect with other students, comment on each others work, and create multimedia posts for each other. Further, it's been exciting for us to pool our knowledge about curriculum and digital literacies.

Students publish multi-media, well-crafted products on Youth Voices, and we nurture, guide, and allow time for them to write comments and to develop conversations about each others discussion posts. Our mission is to be a place online where students from across the nation (and globally, when possible) can engage other young people in conversations about real issues that they see happening in the world. We want our students to be immersed in lively, voiced give-and-take with their peers.

18. Christina Timmins, Hive Chicago, and Annie Conway, Museum of Science and Industry
Strategic Gameplay: Using game design for strategic impact within the Hive Chicago Learning Network

Gamers often work hard to create a winning strategy to beat a game. However, in the Hive Chicago Learning Network, the game is the strategy. As our network slowly evolves into a platform for fostering connected learning, we are faced with the need modify the existing program design paradigms. With the increasing popularity of game design strategies being applied to learning activities in the world at large, there are a plethora of models to choose from. However, for Hive Chicago, it is the perfect opportunity to create new game-focused program models that engage youth in networked learning environments within urban settings.

Over the past year, Hive Chicago members have been exploring strategies that infuse game design in program innovation and network building projects.

The Museum of Science and Industry, as hosts of the 2012 Games Summit Series, built a common understanding about the importance and the potential benefits of incorporating game design in program strategy. The Games Summit was part large format panel and part intensive hands-on workshop that resulted in a shared network strategy for learning and engagement. Annie Conway and Christina Timmins will talk about the success of the event, how it has affected other Hive members, and the outcomes from MSI's 2013 Games Summit Series.

19. Sue Thotz, Common Sense Media
Consuming and Creating Gender: Teaching Kids about Gender Stereotypes in a Digital Age

Gender stereotypes are rampant in today’s media, overwhelming kids with messages about what it means to be a boy or a girl. Kids today are learning what’s “acceptable” and what isn’t through the lens of media, such as TV shows, movies, games, apps and virtual worlds. The problem is that the media often encourages narrow and rigid definitions of gender roles, giving kids little room to reflect on where these stereotypes come from, how we learn them, and how they can shape the media that we consume and create.

Previous media education programs focused on gender taught kids to critically analyze media messages about gender. But today, media education needs to teach kids to reflect on how they are agents in creating gender through every post, comment, and creation.

To address these challenges, Common Sense Media developed “Boys, Girls, and Media: A Gender and Digital Life Toolkit for Educators”, which includes lessons and tips on how to teach media literacy skills and discuss gender in the classroom, including reflection on media kids consume and create. When kids actively engage in discussions about gender stereotypes, and unpack “gender codes” early on, they may be less likely to re-create stereotypes and understand a larger, more ambiguous definition of gender.

20. Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine; Craig Watkins, University of Texas, Austin; Kris Gutierrez and William Penuel, University of Colorado, Boulder
Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design

Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design is a recently released report authored by the Connected Learning Research Network (http://clrn.dmlhub.net/content/connected-learning-agenda-research-and-de...). The report synthesizing existing research about today's problems in educational equity, and puts forward an approach to learning that leverages today's new media to broaden entry points and pathways to meaningful learning and opportunity. Researchers from the network will offer copies of the report,and would like to engage in discussion about the report and the connected learning approach.

21. Philipp Schmidt, P2PU/MIT Media Lab, and Vanessa Gennarelli, P2PU
Ceci n'est pas un MOOC - How to build awesome, open, dirt-cheap online courses

We'll talk about the work we have done on large online courses, including http://learn.media.mit.edu and http://mechanicalmooc.org - There is a lot of interest in (and criticism of) MOOCs these days, and we share most of the concerns. In this session we will talk about an alternative approach to supporting large online courses: using open source software and free services, using the web as the platform instead of building a new portal, and supporting group work and community engagement rather than delivering content to the maximum number of people. And doing it all on a next-to-nothing budget.

22. Emily Bonilla and David Cooper Moore, National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)
The Future of Privacy: A NAMLE Initiative

When young people talk about their privacy online, they often have lots of different definitions in different circumstances. Is a Facebook chat really “public”? Is a locked Tumblr really “private”? Sometimes it’s a challenge for adults--whether they are teachers, researchers, or youth media practitioners--to keep up. How can we explore communication among young people in a way that acknowledges the power of social media to facilitate learning while also respecting and valuing students’ sense of boundaries between public and private life?

This year, the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) is considering the role of privacy in media literacy education initiatives. Understanding what challenges and opportunities new forms of online interaction offer media literacy education and the empowerment of youth voices as digital citizens will draw on a variety of perspectives, and we want to hear from you!

Join members of NAMLE in a discussion about the implication of shifting definitions and realities of privacy online affects media literacy instruction. How can educators and students negotiate students’ rights to privacy with the empowering potential of sharing through digital tools and technologies?

Share your thoughts about unique challenges and opportunities to media literacy education as students, teachers, and practitioners grapple with the complex issues of social media and mobile technology integration in classrooms. Learn more about a year-long NAMLE initiative to raise the visibility of a balanced, empowering approach to online privacy with students that will bring together stakeholders in policy, K-12 education, higher education, and after- and out-of-school enrichment environments.

23. Cancelled

24. Cliff Manning, Makewaves; Tim Riches and Lucy Neale, DigitalMe
90 minutes to connect the world - Design an Open Badge for International Collaboration

Learning is now global and opportunities arise everywhere. Mozilla Open Badges enable learners to evidence and share their learning anytime anywhere.
Help us design a badge that supports and encourages youth to connect and collaborate internationally.

This hands on session is a chance to design an open badge, see examples of current projects from the UK and make connections with organisations and youth around the world.
We have 90 minutes to connect the world - help us to do it!

25. David Preston, Erin Tucker, Ian May, and Trevor Hudgins, Open Source Learning
Open Source Learning: Get On Our Level

Forget what you think you know about school and education policy: the unevenly distributed future is here. Open Source Learning enables learners to direct and document their experiences as members of a network. Learners are using open source values, organizing principles and tools to construct experiences and networks that inspire, support achievement and innovation, and create previously unimagined opportunities.

This session presents the model, a case study, and a call to action based on success you can see for yourself. Learn how 100 California high school students used Open Source Learning to transform a traditional English course into a hackspace, a microfinance operation, a digital research collaborative, a venture incubator, and a growing, soon-to-be-global personal learning network.

During this presentation you’ll hear from David Preston, who created the model and the first Open Source Learning community, and Eric Tucker, Ian May, and Trevor Hudgins, who created the first formal learner-driven venture: Get On Our Level.

26. Devorah Heitner, Raising Digital Natives
Collaborating with Parents in Connected Learning Environments

As a parent educator and school consultant, I help schools foster an atmosphere of digital citizenship that emphasizes the positive aspects of digital culture. As schools increasingly share student work online, use technology to enhance learning and curriculum, parents sometimes have concerns---sometimes expressed, but frequently un-articulated, or manifesting as a generalized anxiety!

I will lead a thoughtful and experience rich conversation at CMLabout how to bring parents in, recognize their crucial contribution to stewarding their children's digital, academic, and social learning.

I'll share ways to anchor parent communities with a confidence in social wisdom and lived experience they possess (even if their kids have more tech-savvy, parents' greater life experience is a crucial resource for kids.)

I'll share ways to empower faculty to work with parents when parents question the need or efficacy of connected learning. At the same time, I share methods for accommodating and including parents with highly divergent amounts of digital savvy and comfort.

I'll also share with educators the research I've done in my work with parents--connectivity places real burdens on family life that educators need to understand and acknowledge! Stories from real parents that I've worked with will help educators and administrators at day schools plan for 1-1 or bring your own device policies.

Parents need more than a list of dos and don'ts, and a financial waiver! They need to understand issues such as digital footprint and information literacy from a thoughtful and empathic perspective. It is helpful to go beyond the notion of ""screen time"" to share the research with parents about how to choose quality apps, and how to support their children as creators and not just consumers of media...Parents are sometimes curious about blocks, filters and ""safety"" which can cause them to underestimate their own role as mentors in nurturing informed digital citizens.

Devorah Heitner, PhD is an experienced speaker, workshop leader and consultant and an expert on the research on kids + media. Devorah has a PhD in Media/Technology and Society from Northwestern University and has published and spoken in the field of media studies for the past ten years. She has taught at DePaul University, Street Level Youth Media and Northwestern University.

27. Alexander Cho and Andres Lombana-Bermudez, University of Texas at Austin / CLRN "The Digital Edge;" and Adam York, University of Colorado, Boulder/CLRN "Longitudinal Study of Connected Learning"
Mapping Tech and Learning: Visualizing Young Peoples' Learning Ecologies

""Connected learning"" (Ito et al. 2013) posits that learning is never relegated to one space or context, that young people gain knowledge and skills through a complex ecology that spans nodes across school, after-school, home life, and peer interaction, all while utilizing multiple forms of technology and media. This presentation draws from two different projects from the Connected learning Research Network that aim to map and understand the relationship between learning and digital media. On the ""Digital Edge"" project, Lombana-Bermudez and Cho have spent a year in a majority economically disadvantaged high school in the “urban fringe” of Austin, ethnographically documenting young peoples’ diverse learning ecologies. For the ""Longitudinal Study of Connected Learning"", York has coordinated youth researchers working around the country to investigate sites for learning with media and technology, and map access to those kinds of spaces. Across these projects we have realized that relying on traditional text-based methods to describe and interpret these complex ecologies may leave out important details that can contribute to the richness of our research and representation of connected learning. Accordingly, following the research of Barron (2006), and Salen et al. (2011), this roundtable asks: How can we visualize the interrelationship between time, contexts, nodes of learning, and technology? What are the different approaches to mapping learning environments? What do we gain from visualizations of this sort that are missing from verbal or written accounts? How can we synthesize innovative methods to map the complex learning behavior that we see in the lives of young people today? What are the strengths and differences between qualitative and quantitative visualizations? Using several case studies from our own research, this roundtable will invite participants to engage in hands-on interactive drawing, mapping, and visualizing in order to experiment with a variety of research methods and begin a critical conversation on the potential rewards and drawbacks of visual mapping in research on learning ecologies.

Barron, B. (2006). Interest and self-sustained learning as catalysts of development: A learning ecologies perspective. Human Development, 49, 193-224.

Ito, M. et al. (2013). Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

Salen, K et al. (2011). Quest to Learn: Developing the School for Digital Kids. Cambridge: MIT Press.

28. Jessica Kaminsky, Jessica Pachuta, and Ryan Hoffman, Hear Me, CREATE Lab, Carnegie Mellon University
Viral Voices

Hear Me, a project of the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, amplifies kids’ voices using media and technology to create a world where they are heard, acknowledged and understood. Through informal discussion and hands-on examples, we will share best-practices for engaging students of all ages in creating media, using their media to connect with their schools and communities around issues important to the students, and allowing their voices to stimulate change.

Students bring an important perspective and unique ideas for improving and solving today’s problems. By helping them recognize the power of their voice, we are activating our next generation of leaders to ignite discussion and spark change. Join Hear Me to learn about ways students are using their voices to contribute to topical discussions at the local, state, and national levels, experience our student-produced media, and explore Hear Me’s tools for sharing youth voice including, our audio playback tin-can telephones (CanEx). Participants will react to student media and contribute to student-initiated conversations. Participants can learn about Hear Me’s new campaign initiative and how young people in their community can contribute to the student-led discussion on school climate.

Hear Me harnesses the power of storytelling to activate youth, then create unified narratives (in the literal voices of children) about crucial issues they face in education, well-being, and communities. Participants can listen to specific examples from previous projects, including listening to children of incarcerated parents discuss the struggles they faced growing up or watching a student-produced short documentary about a district’s contentious neighborhoods and the socio-economic disparity that prompted the students to explore whether demography affects your chances of success. Inspired by examples of youth-led change, participants will brainstorm with the Hear Me team ways to network communities of kids and to connect youth voice nationally around critical issues.

29. Adar Ben-Eliyahu, University of Massachusetts, Boston; Emilie Dubois and Luka Carfagna, Boston College
Connected Learning Research Network: How does digital media influence learning through self-regulation within the current socioeconomic climate?

A focus of the Connected Learning Research Network (CLRN), a MacArthur Foundation initiative, is to examine how learning occurs within the current social and economic climate and to broaden opportunities for connected learning (Ito et al., 2013). In the proposed cafe, foregrounding the constraints and opportunities shaped by the historical moment and particular sociocultural contexts, we present emerging findings from different research projects that are shaping the CLRN discussion. We will share examples of how digital tools intersect with the social organization of the household, and discuss the impact on youths' learning trajectories and possible implications for practice in academic contexts. By investigating the sociocultural and economic context we aim to unpack how social orientation and class simultaneously facilitate and constrain learning for different individuals, and how one sets the mode and tone of digitally enabled learning (Dubois & Carfagna). Moving to digital spaces, Dubois will discuss how learners draw on the practical experiences and the experiential knowledge of others as they learn new skills. Applying a psychological lens, Ben-Eliyahu focuses on the mechanisms through which digitized and face-to-face interactions support learning, with a particular focus on self-regulation of emotions, behaviors, and cognitions (Ben-Eliyahu, Bernacki, & Linnenbrink-Garcia, in prep; Ben-Eliyahu & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012). In applying a self-regulated learning framework, we will consider how co-regulation occurs through social interactions using technology (e.g., peers playing playstation or wii together) and digitized interactions (e.g., time trading or online forums). We invite a prolific discussion on how these three strands are connected.

30. Jeff Ritter, La Roche College
Creating digital education algorithms

With multiple online platforms for secondary, post-secondary and professional training in existence, it's time that these experiences and our digital footprints talked to each other. The creation of an online cognitive profile could be a part of the education model of the 21st century, leading to a better match between people and industry.

31. Chris Leeder, University of Michigan School of Information
InCredibility: An Online Learning Tool for Effective Information Literacy Skills

New pedagogical models are needed to teach the effective critical evaluation of online information sources. Research consistently shows that while today’s undergraduate students rely on the Internet as the first source for information when conducting research for class assignments, they rarely evaluate the quality of the information that they find online. Most students tend to prefer using popular open Web sources due to their perceived convenience and ease of use, even when they realize that the quality of online information may be inferior to scholarly resources. Ideally, all students would receive basic information Literacy (IL) training, however, K-12 programs are inconsistent in providing IL classes, and only a small percentage of higher education institutions with first-year experience programs include a required IL component. In light of these challenges, there is a need for new forms of IL training that are customized to the online information environment and relevant to the research habits of today’s students.

“InCredibility” is a prototype collaborative learning tool that situates IL instruction in the online environment where students actually do their research. It guides them through the process of evaluating online information in an interactive, learner-centered format. Using InCredibility, students learn key criteria of information credibility evaluation (authority, purpose, reliability, currency and relevance) and how to make these evaluations online, reinforced through repeated practice and reflection on their own work and that of their peers. InCredibility is intended to enable classroom-integrated IL training that is relevant to students, delivered at the point of need and in the real-life research environment that students use daily. This prototype learning tool explores a new pedagogical approach to teaching effective evaluation of online information, a critical 21st century skill.

32. Isaiah Saxon and Meghan Leppla, DIY.org
DIY.org – Become a Maker

DIY.org is a community where young people become Makers. They discover new Skills, make projects in the real world, and share their work online to inspire and learn from each other. The big idea is that anyone can become anything just by trying – we all learn by doing. Our company and our community strive to make it easier for Makers to build confidence in their own creativity.

At the DIY.org table, you can put yourself in the shoes of a young maker – explore, build, capture, and share your first challenge on your online portfolio. If you're really dedicated, you can earn a Skill patch by doing 3 challenges in one creative discipline. We'll have several iOS devices on hand running the DIY app, and enough cardboard, inner tubes, and duct tape to build something dangerous.

33. Tony Raden, Ounce of Prevention Fund; Rita Catallano, Fred Rogers Center For Early Learning & Children's Media at St. Vincent's College; Rob Lipincott, PBS; Patti Miller, Sesame Workshop; Chip Donohue, TEC Center at Erickson Institute; Ann Hanson, Ounce of Prevention Fund

21st Century Preschoolers @ Play! Digital Learning in the Early Years

While digital media and technology have transformed the way many K-12 educational settings approach learning, the early childhood field has yet to fully leverage the great promise of digital media to improve outcomes for young children from birth to age 8 – at home and at school. This DML Café will bring together five organizations currently working to promote digital innovation and quality media in early learning: the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media at St. Vincent College, the Ounce of Prevention Fund, the Public Broadcasting Service, and Sesame Workshop, and the TEC Center at Erikson Institute.

These five organizations joined together at the Clinton Global Initiative America summit in 2012 to plan a national alliance catalyzing innovation in early learning by connecting research, media creation, family engagement, and professional development. Attendees at this cafe will have the opportunity to play with high-quality digital media focused on the littlest learners, discuss how to spark innovation in the early learning space, and interact with leaders working to drive collective national impact to enhance the school readiness and 21st Century skills of our nation’s young children.

For those interested in background reading, please peruse the joint position statement from the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media at St. Vincent College: “Technology and Interactive Media as Tools in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8.” http://www.naeyc.org/content/technology-and-young-children

34. Janet Atkins and Ceci Lewis, The Bread Loaf Teacher Network
The Bread Loaf Teacher Network

The Bread Loaf Teacher Network has empowered young people in schools for the past twenty years by increasing literacy in both reading and writing through digital means and other venues. Both teachers and students are members of the Network. We strive to create community that is aided by technology, and is made up of teachers connected to their students and other teachers and students around the globe. We have found that online exchanges help students deepen their awareness of both local and global needs whether it’s the treatment of homeless people in their communities or the acquisition of literacy in the wider community. These practices provide authentic learning. We will share several projects that we have been engaged in that have caused students to take a new look at what it means to be a literate, global citizen working side by side with teachers who are learning with these same students.

35. Dawn Thomas, Jasmyn Castro, and Cody Coltharp, ArtLab- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Tricks of the HOMAGO Trade

Mentors and Cyber Navigators from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's ArtLab will be available to discuss challenges and best practices that they have encountered as they redesigned programming to take the ArtLab from a hangout spot to an artists studio. Tips on how to encourage the social aspect of creating while constructing an environment where teens can "geek out" will be highlighted. Facilitators will also be able to field any questions participants may have concerning how the ArtLab uses the HOMAGO model everyday and where we see that model taking us in the future.

36. Amie Williams, Tobie Loomis, Alexis Smith, Laquita Watkins, Tammisha Cross, Tanisha Cross, and Jammeka Davis, GlobalGirl Media

GlobalGirl Media

GlobalGirl Media (GGM) develops the voice and media literacy of young women in under-served communities by teaching them to create and share digital journalism designed to ignite community activism and social change. Through mentoring, training and access to a worldwide network of distribution partners, GlobalGirl Media harnesses the power of new digital media to empower young women to bring their often-overlooked perspectives onto the global media stage.

GGM empowers girls to make media that matters, improves news literacy, and encourages the promotion of healthier media messages about girls and women the world over. Our model is unique in that it pairs U.S. communities with international cities, creating a peer-to-peer global network of girls communicating via social media and co-producing content that informs, engages and challenges its audience to action. GGM presently has active projects in South Africa, Morocco, Chicago and Los Angeles, where it is headquartered. GGM firmly believes that working with young women around the world to find and share their authentic voice is an investment in our global future.

37. Meryl Alper and Henry Jenkins (tentative), USC Annenberg Innovation Lab

T is for Transmedia: Learning Through Transmedia Play

Come learn about Transmedia Play! We'll be sharing the findings of a brand new report co-produced by the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

Join the conversation about the strengths (and challenges) of transmedia play for learning and its uses in formal and informal educational spaces. Find out more about the three transmedia play experiences highlighted in the report: 1) Caine's Arcase, 2) The Story Pirates and 3) the Flotsam Transmedia Experience.

T is for Transmedia covers the basics of transmedia play, focusing on transmedia for children ages 5 to 11. Visit our table to find out more about the key characteristics of transmedia play and its relationship to transmedia storytelling.

Media makers be sure to stop by to review our design recommendations and discuss ideas for creating transmedia projects for children.

38. Nishant Shah, Hivos Scholars Table

39. Greg Merriman, Innovation Refinery LLC

From Content to Context

Emergent next-gen contextual computing paradigms need to be re-presented to the user via a mental metaphor as simple and evocative as the physical-desktop metaphor that 'puts you in the chair at the desk.' What will this 'mental metaphor' look like? What should we call it? Innovation Refinery is an Ann Arbor, MI based emergent technology design and development company currently working on a contextual cloud operating system.

40. Sophia Bender, Rafi Santo, Verily Tan, and Kylie Peppler, Indiana University Creativity Lab

Make-to-Learn Youth Contest

Supported by MacArthur and the DML Hub, Make-to-Learn is a thematic initiative that leverages DIY culture, digital practices, and educational research to advocate for placing making, creating, and designing at the core of educational practice. One of the first steps in this effort is the Make-to-Learn Youth Contest (http://m2l.indiana.edu/make-to-learn-challenge/) sponsored by Instructables.com, which is soliciting entries from young makers about what they made, how they made it, where they made it, and what they learned. Entrants will have the opportunity to star in a documentary about youth making, as well as win other prizes. The Make-to-Learn committee views this as a grassroots way to investigate learning within Maker culture. Come see some of the entries, and learn for yourself about the exciting creations that youth are making to learn!

One of the hallmarks of connected learning is building bridges among siloed dimensions of education: schools and informal settings, children and adults, affluent and under-resourced settings, physical spaces and online communities. 

Facing History and Ourselves is an organization devoted to combating bigotry and promoting a humane and engaged citizenry through deep investigations of historical case studies of genocide and prejudice. Over thirty-five years, our educational work has spanned diverse settings from secondary school classrooms, to public installations in libraries, to community conversations, to benefit dinners, to professional development for educators working in schools, NGOs, and other public institutions. In the last five years, this work happens not only in physical environments but in online settings as well. We view the connections—the bridges—between these initiatives as central to our organizational learning, our sustainability and scalability, and our mission of civic education.

In this presentation, we will focus on four of these critical bridges:

1)      Connecting Community and Educational Settings: We believe that engaging community members in our work is vital to supporting our broader educational mission. We’ll examine the impact of our public civic education installation, Choosing to Participate (currently in the Chicago Public Library), as well as the educational function of our benefit dinners and community events.
2)      Connecting Students in Schools Serving Different Populations: As residential segregation continues to produce increasingly homogenous schools, organizations that span diverse communities, like Facing History, have an important role to play in bridging class divides. Our Digital Media and Innovation Network provides a online platform for students to engage with diverse peers—an increasingly vital platform for civic education. 
3)      Connecting with Partner Institutions: In urban centers like Chicago and New York, multiple organizations share a commitment to nurturing civic engagement, and we’ll discuss how our affiliation with the MacArthur Hive network provides opportunities for a collaborative approach to urban civic education.
4)      Connecting face to face learning with online settings: Through online seminars, workshops, and webinars, we are exploring and evaluating how the deeply humanistic study of historical inquiry and moral development can be pursued in online settings.

The panel of presenters will include diverse stakeholders in our Facing History community: program staff who work with educators, development staff who work with community events, and practicing classroom teachers and students who are members of our Digital Media and Innovation Network. After short presentations on our four themes, we’ll engage participants in a discussion of how non-profit organizations can support connected civic learning. Participants will leave with new ideas, new examples, and new questions concerning how best to strengthen connections among nodes in their own networks.

Policy World, The Causal Claim Tutor and Playing Politics: Games and Tutors for teaching policy argumentation

Presenter: Matt Easterday

Civic education standards demand informed citizens but provide little guidance on the specific skills needed for civic reasoning or how to design engaging and effective digital media for teaching these skills.  In response, the Northwestern University (NU) Civic Media Lab is designing online games and intelligent tutors to teach the skills of policy argumentation.  

In the anime-adventure game Policy World, learners play a young policy analyst who makes policy recommendations to a senator.  Learners search for evidence including newspaper articles and scientific studies on topics like global warming, create causal diagrams that represent evidence from multiple conflicting sources, and debate against computer opponents.  Studies of Policy World show that it improves students’ ability to reason about policy, have identified specific skills that are challenging to learn and show how game designers can increase learning without decreasing interest.  

The Policy World studies also show that students have difficulty recognizing causal claims.  As a result, we have developed the Causal Claim Tutor that teaches students to recognize causal claims in prose by identifying variables and complex causal relations.

Policy argumentation also requires reasoning about political values, so we are now designing online, multi-player simulations like State of Nature where students attempt to invest, steal, or cooperate to increase their property under differing forms of government and levels of income to understand how political ideologies favor different government interventions.  

Taken together, these games help us understand policy argumentation and how to design effective and engaging learning technologies that help learners become well-informed citizens.

The MOJO Movement: How Youth Harness Mobile Journalism

Presenter: Alissa Richardson

In the digital age, with the help of mobile devices, youth use citizen journalism to rebel — and the cellular chant is rising. For the last two years, I have launched and led an international iPod journalism experiment that crisscrosses nearly two dozen cities in South Africa, Morocco and the United States. It is called the MOJO Lab. I train youth to become mobile journalists (MOJOs) who use devices such as iPhones, iPods and tablets to tell their stories.

These mobile media production skills are essential to youth participation in the democratic space. As we envision 21st-century civic education, we must arm young people with the technology to tell their stories, the ethics to report this news responsibly and the dissemination savvy to give it reach. This short talk will explain how I built my MOJO Lab project from a $25,000 Knight Foundation seed grant; how I scaled the Lab from a university-based curriculum to an international initiative; and how educators can replicate this pedagogical model to create youth-led MOJO projects of their own.

As new media becomes integral to civic and political life, we best support youth to become active, capable and committed advocates for their communities by harnessing the power of the devices in their pockets. Teaching digital storytelling with a mobile device allows educators to create an individualized learning experience, where students can acquire new media skills at their own pace. At the same time, the mobile device encourages collaborative learning too, when the magic of shooting and editing audio and film documentaries unfolds.

The best part about mobile journalism as a democratic tool is that the technology itself lowers the barrier of entry to participate, for both the educator and the student. Whereas professional journalists in the last century relied on expensive, intricate equipment, which inadvertently created an elitist circle of common voices, the inexpensive, user-friendly mobile device democratizes the process of journalism, making it available to any young person who has a cell phone, MP3 player or tablet. Teachers and mentors can empower these young people to make meaningful, responsible media that adds to the public discourse.

When young people innovate, we learn more about the world we live in and how it is changing. From the HIV-positive girls who participated in my MOJO Lab South Africa academy, I learned what it is like to live with the disease in post-Apartheid Soweto. From the Muslim girls I trained in Morocco, I learned what it is like to live under monarchal rule, in the time of the Arab Spring. Similarly, from young people living elsewhere in the world, we stand to learn how they see our most pressing problems. Their civic engagement and their willingness to tackle these problems correlates directly to our readiness to lift--and hear--their voices.

Down from the top, up from the bottom and making the most of the middle.

Presenters: Cliff Manning, Lucy Neale

“If you could make one law what would it be” The UK Parliament asked 7-16 year olds to answer this question by making their own online films and pitching them to Oscar winner, Lord David Puttnam

In the UK there are over 100,000 young carers looking after families affected by substance misuse and mental or physical illness. Young Carers in Focus connects these young people online, provides media training and gives them a platform to campaign for change.

Digital media can enable large organisations and policy makers to engage with young people, ‘top down’, in new creative ways. At the same time young people can use the same tools to more easily connect with policy makers from the ‘bottom up’. This presentation will explore these two models of civic engagement and youth empowerment, and find out what can happen when they join together.

The presentation will focus in on the story of a group of young carers affected by HIV who were supported by The Elton John Aids Foundation to create a film for the parliament competition. The teens went on to advise Ministers at an all party parliamentary group on the needs of young carers and had their demands discussed in the House of Commons.

What will delegates learn
We will demonstrate practical real world examples of how government can listen to young people in a creative way and how young people can be supported to use web technologies to be heard by policy makers more effectively. We will share the ups and downs of working with both government and youth organisations and showcasing how you don’t need seismic shifts in policy or revolutionary technology to start making real change today.

Links
Lights Camera Parliament
www.makewav.es/lcp

Young Carers in Focus
www.makewav.es/ycif

People Presenting
Cliff Manning @cliffmanning
The presentation will focus in on the story of a group of young carers affected by HIV who were supported by The Elton John Aids Foundation to create a film for the parliament competition. The teens went on to advise Ministers at an all party parliamentary group on the needs of young carers and had their demands discussed in the House of Commons.

Lucy Neale @LucyDMe
Developed and manages many award winning projects giving young people real world experiences to develop 21st century skills. Partners include Youth Sports Trust, Imperial War Museum and The Children’s Society. Lucy is leading DigitalMe’s Open Badge project.

Organisations
Makewaves (www.makewav.es)
DigitalMe (www.digitalme.co.uk)

Makewaves delivers online youth projects for government partners including: Ministry of Justice, Parliament Education Service, British Council and US State Department.
DigitalMe works with many non-profits and NGOs to enable young people from underserved communities to use social media to action change. Partners include: The Children’s Society, Youth Sports Trust, Nominet Trust and the Football Foundation.

Makewaves and DigitalMe are winners of DML Badges for Life Long Learning competition and are currently developing Mozilla Open Badges for a sports journalism/literacy programme Supporter To Reporter. www.makewav.es/s2r

As technology spreads into every corner of city dwellers’ lives, local technologists — or “civic hackers” — are stepping up to build new tools that re-engineer the relationship citizens have with their governments and communities. The results are applications of civic technology that tap our networked culture to create more engaged, collaborative communities.


Across the country, Code for America's extended network of volunteer Brigades are using these tools and processes to give local government the capacity to more relevant with technology. This will workshop will highlight some of the most impactful work being done in urban prototyping, hackathons, and broader open source communities and then demonstrate a strategic framework for realizing the promise of grassroots digital city in their own hometowns.

Using an asset-based grassroots pedagogy, youth and adults are working together to create media that exposes social justice issues in local and international contexts (Blikstein, 2008; Ginwright & James, 2002; Goldman, Booker, & McDermott, 2007; Pollock, 2004). This panel addresses youth produced original media and media as a resource for civic practice and social justice in three distinct settings: Summer of Service, Sacramento Area Youth Speaks, and the Youth Media Forum for Social Justice. Though there are programmatic distinctions between these groups, they all have common, overarching goals about social justice youth development, critical literacy, empowerment, education, and activism. The panelists will explore the common practices that unlock student’s learning and political development in each of these settings; the commonalities and distinctions in content (i.e., what are topics of concern and analysis vis-a-vis youth-produced media and spoken word poems?); and finally, how do the young people use their work to inform larger organizing efforts among their peers, their larger community, and abroad. The panel will be organized around a community case study approach (Harper, 1992), examining youth-produced artifacts developed alongside careful descriptions of each setting. Collected artifacts include poems/lyrics, videos, and narratives as well as analytical work generated in the process of production. The panel will address commonalities and distinctions borne out of shared pedagogies and unique cultural and programmatic positions (Becker, 1998). Youth engaged in each of these programs embody, inform, and embrace broader movements and social struggles. As they grow up grappling with social stratification and seeking their participation rights, it is vital that youth-serving organizations join forces, connect voices, and foster blocks without borders. Today's youth demand a pedagogy that is culturally relevant and allows them to think critically about the world and create their own counter-narratives that disrupt subjugation Watson, 2011). This is not simply about best pedagogical practices for urban students, but about promoting and protecting a public paradigm of participatory democracy.

Panelists will discuss and present these three distinct projects and the methods employed by each. We will also discuss distinctions across the projects as they vary in context, timescale, and project activity. Our discussant will organize dialogue that addresses a summary of findings from each project, a comparison across projects, and a discussion of the community-school nature of the projects.

In this session, educators and activists share examples of how youth have used different forms of media as tools to inform, educate, or organize around different social causes. Either through adult facilitation in informal education programs or through youths’ self-organized causes, media has given young people a chance to discover and amplify their voices about the injustices that they observe in their communities. In particular, minority youth in these examples, many who come from underserved communities, have been able to leverage media tools to report on, raise awareness, or create change in communities that have been neglected. These examples highlight issues that are only marginally covered by mainstream media, thus offering additional angles and more importantly, youth perspectives. However, like the diversity of youth and social movements that exist, there is similarly a diversity in how youth approach socially conscious media creation. This panel brings together three youth organizations that will share their approaches on how they have used digital media to address social issues such as racial profiling, environmental justice, and immigration reform.

Radio Rookies is a nonprofit youth media organization that teaches NYC teens how to tell true stories about their lives and communities. The stories are produced to air on WNYC Radio’s news program and NPR.  Radio Rookies gives teens the tools (from digital recording equipment to the integrity of journalism) to empower them to think critically and learn how to tell stories from different perspectives about important issues, ranging from immigration to sexuality to mental health. Teens recently reported on stop and frisk, covering stories about Trayvon Martin and vertical patrols (stop and frisk in public housing buildings).

Global Kids is an educational non-profit that educates youth about global issues. In the Human Rights Activist Project, youth climate activists in New York City use media tools to educate peers and organize around climate change issues. They created an online campaign and petition calling for President Obama to take action on speeding the transition to a green economy. Then, after participating at the Rio+20 UN Earth Summit in Brazil, they used social media, virtual worlds, and video production to champion their campaign and ensure that the voices of urban youth of color in climate change debates is not forgotten.

The Immigrant Youth Justice League is a Chicago-based organization led by undocumented organizers working towards full recognition of the rights and contributions of all immigrants through education, leadership development, policy advocacy, resource gathering, and mobilization. Through a strong online presence where organizing takes place and the use of social media to amplify their campaigns, youth have been able to make their voices heard about immigration reform. In addition, online petitions, story collections, and a website hub provide youth a safe space to ask questions, share experiences, and find community.

We hope these examples will highlight DML practices and innovations that are helpful for others in the community who are working at the intersection of youth media and youth movements.

Participatory learning, as a pedagogical model, underscores the urgency of facilitating educational experiences that help build the skills and knowledge necessary to contribute in today’s evolving socio-cultural environments, digital and non-digital alike. Unequal access to these skills and experiences can prevent young people from meaningful social and cultural participation, and put them at a disadvantage in terms of their personal and professional pathways (Jenkins et al., 2006). The participation gap, which Jenkins and colleagues (2006) identify as one of the three core challenges to participatory culture, goes beyond questions of technological access; it fundamentally concerns the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full and meaningful engagement in these new cultural spaces. This participation gap, nevertheless, cannot be fully and adequately addressed if teachers are not afforded these same opportunities to grow and learn. It is therefore crucial to acknowledge that the participation gap affects both students and educators, and that professional development for teachers is as essential and as necessary as the participatory learning initiatives directed at students.
 
The idea of establishing a working group on participatory models of professional development for teachers grew out of discussions that occurred during the Digital Media and Learning Conference 2011. The aim of this working group was to bring together those who are designing, developing and implementing initiatives to support teachers in understanding the affordances of digital media in learning, and to engage in a much-needed dialogue on culturally relevant professional development. We believe that, in order to generate effective models of participatory professional development, an engaged collaboration is needed between multiple stakeholders who bring a diverse set of ideas and challenges to the conversation. Our group is, thus, a mixture of researchers, teachers and school administrators from a variety of disciplines, schools, and states. Instead of working in silos on the same issue, coming together as a collaborative has led to a productive and important discussion of how to scale and sustain successful models of 21st century professional development in education.
 
This panel will bring together core members of this working group, to discuss their experiences in designing and implementing participatory models of professional development in diverse educational settings. The panelists will address the values identified by this working group as key elements of participatory PD: participation, not indoctrination; exploration, not prescription; contextualization, not abstraction; iteration, not repetition. These values – and the design principles that they inspire – offer a blueprint for an innovative type of professional development. By incorporating these values into the design of professional development programs, researchers and practitioners can efficiently craft initiatives that are participatory, non-hierarchical, personally and professionally meaningful, relevant, flexible and sustainable.


Due to the limitations of panel membership, only a few case study authors can be physically present on this panel. However, this work is fundamentaly collaborative, and we would like to acknowledge the co-authorship of the following contributors for this panel:  Rebecca C. Itow, Sarah Morrisseau, Isabel Morales, Vanessa Vartabedian, Henry Jenkins, Rebecca Herr-Stephenson.

Whose Change Is It Anyway? seeks to explore new entry points into the discourse on youth, technology and change, with a specific focus on (but not restricted to) the Global South and the last decade of citizen action. This conference track seeks to fashion frameworks and structures that provide new ways of interpreting and understanding outcomes that technology mediated citizen action has to offer, as well as the future of citizen led interventions: What enables, catalyzes and moves young people to reinvent themselves as citizen actors? What are the interventions and narratives of change that fail to fit into a ‘success’ rubric, but are still significant in the processes of change they initiate? How do we understand these ‘new’ events as hybrids, connecting with existing histories, contexts, media and technologies in their regions? Is there an alternative discourse that does not necessarily adopt frameworks arising from the knowledge centers of the West? Do these discourses help challenge and rework global vocabularies by offering new ways of looking at citizen action and change? The track will invite provocative hypotheses, in-depth analyses, dialogues and contestations around these ideas, through innovative interactive presentation formats. The dialogue will be informed by experimental and new methods of information and knowledge production, focusing on the Global South and its larger transnational contexts at the junctures of youth, technology and change.

The DML Cafe is an informal place for you to share your ideas. Ready to Hack? How about some report findings? Do we know about your program or school? Just published a book? Something you think is a must at DML2013?

Would you like to sign up? Check out the CFP here!

Look who is participating in Session II!

Saturday, March 16 at 2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Sheraton 4-5

*Participants are listed by table number. List is subject to changes/additions.

1. JJ Pionke and Kristin Fontichiaro, University of Michigan
A Climate Survey of Digital Badging

Digital Badging is the "in" thing right now, but what does that mean?  We did a survey to find out what digital badging teams were doing and how they felt about the digital badging movement.  Come share your thoughts with us and we'll talk about what we found out!  Results will soon be out in an ebook on the topic!

2. Jolene Zywica, Anna Roberts, Eric Keylor, Drew Davidson, Working Examples – Carnegie Mellon University; and James Gee, Arizona State University
Re)Introducing…Working Examples: A different kind of online community

Working Examples (WEx, www.workingexamples.org) is an online community where people working at the intersection of technology and education collaborate to solve problems, share their progress (and missteps) and make exciting things happen. Working Examples are demonstrations of ideas or what the author believes is good work (Barab, Dodge, & Gee, 2009). Gee (2010) argues that such examples can be used to collaboratively define and develop the field of Digital Media and Learning. Through posting examples and interacting on the site, we hope to collectively impact our world and shape the future of education and learning.

In the Tech Café, we’ll introduce the completely revamped WEx site and help new and returning members get familiar with the new site. During the last year of design and development we thought a lot about the needs of community members, using their feedback to create a site that looks different, feels different, and even works differently. We’ll introduce its major improvements, highlighting changes we’ve made to increase interactions among community members. We’ll provide tips to help attendees get the most from the community and their experiences on the site, including creating a high-quality example, setting up a group, and setting up a profile to get recommendations from the site. We’re also interested in hearing about how DML participants might want to use the site and its new features and how our team can support community members.

Moving forward, we believe that Working Examples can be an important platform in advancing all areas of learning. There are many examples of good research and design in DML that are never fully developed or implemented. Working Examples provides a way for those ideas to be heard and a platform to develop and build on them through interactions with others working in the field of DML.

3. Cancelled

4. Nicoletta Di Blas and Paolo Paolini, HOC-LAB, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
Interactive Digital Storytelling at School

OBSERVATION AND QUESTION
Many (if not most of) young people today create, edit and share multimedia “stories” over the internet, as a form of self-expression and participation to their peers’ community. Transferring this spontaneous interest into classrooms, for educational experiences, is more difficult than it may look at first sight. How should storytelling be organized? As a class activity ? as an individual activity? Which benefits can be expected?

FACTS
PoliCultura is a digital storytelling initiative that started in 2006 and has involved so far more than 23,000 students, aged between 4 and 18. In PoliCultura, whole classes (not individual students) create a multimedia “story” using 1001stories (a web based authoring environment developed by HOC-LAB at Politecnico di Milano). Classes work under the guidance of the teacher, developing the plot, the visual communication (pictures and drawings), the texts and the audio. The final story can be delivered via Web, YouTube, smart phone, Tablet and even paper. All the stories are hosted in an international portal (www.policulturaportal.it).

PURPOSE
Organizers would like to attract school districts, individual schools and individual teachers to engage in similar activities, creating a world-wide portal of multimedia stories, created with 1001stories.

THE MEETING
The meeting will be organized as follows: presenters will introduce PoliCultura, the evaluation data, example stories by students and eventually the 1001stories tool. Then, a discussion about the usefulness of digital storytelling at school, and the best way to conduct it will be started.
Participants will gain an insight on a well-assessed program of digital storytelling into schools, at all school levels. Moreover, cooperation possibilities will be discussed, in view of the creation of a worldwide community.

5. Vanessa Sanchez, Hive Chicago; Lindsay Muscato, Now Is The Time; Hallie Gordon, Steppenwolf Theater; and Taylor Bayless, Chicago Public Library
NOW IS THE TIME - citywide initiative in Chicago inspiring young people to make positive change in their communities and stop youth violence and intolerance

Youth violence has become a key issue among youth advocates in Chicago. With 319 young people lost due to gun violence last school year, youth organizers and cultural institutions found an urgent need to offer more programming geared toward this subject matter. Programs were needed that engage youth around the entire spectrum of violence and intolerance: the issues students face in school and their community.  Bullying, gangs, equal access to city resources and related issues around violence and intolerance formed the heart of a campaign created two years ago by the Chicago Public Library, Facing History and Ourselves, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and local Chicago theater companies.  The campaign has grown into a city wide initiative called Now Is The Time (NITT)  inspiring young people to make positive change in their communities and stop youth violence and intolerance.

With the support of Hive Chicago, Now Is The Time allows youth at more than 20 institutions to collaborate digitally, fostering youth expression around issues that directly affect them.  Using  ""explore, create, share"" throughout all of the program design, students explore NITT themes, create work based upon what they've learned and then share work with each other using the NITT interactive website.  

Programmatic efforts in the 2012-2103 season of NITT include hosting: events across the city, media-making for youth, an interactive exhibit, theater performances and classes for teens, literary events, visual arts activities, and workshops for educators.  NITT also utilizes an interactive website designed for youth and educators to learn more about the events and programs happening around the city, as well as a space to explore/create/share artwork and media created by youth around youth violence and intolerance. Panel participants will discuss their organizations’ roles in the NITT initiative and the impact they foresee as a part of a collaborative effort to inspire Chicago youth. 

Description of participant projects in NITT -
Lindsay Muscato, Now Is The Time, will discuss how NITT tapped into existing networks, partnerships and programs to raise the volume on youth voices; how many different organizations who serve different parts of the city collaborated effectively; and how NITT linked creative digital and offline experiences for youth engagement around civic action.

Hallie Gordon, Steppenwolf Theater, will discuss the genesis of this initiative and the urgent need for artists to create safe spaces (online and off) for youth to build their points of view, claim their voices and make themselves heard on a wide scale.

Taylor Bayless, Chicago Public Library, will discuss YOUmedia, a teen learning space housed in Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library Center. YOUmedia has been teaching and mentoring youth around Now Is The Time themes and creating graphic art, soundscapes and blog posts about their responses.

Vanessa Sanchez, Yollocalli Arts Reach, will discuss the creation of 5 new public art works created by youth as a part of NITT.  Art works are designed by youth and are initiated with a
workshop  by leaders of LuchArte, a community based art project that aims to provide a positive identity and and an alternative to neighborhood violence. 

6. Jeanie Austin, Sasha Kinney, Lucas McKeever, and Karen Barton, Mix IT Up!, GSLIS UIUC
Mix IT Up!: Youth Advocacy Librarianship in the Age of Technology

Mix IT Up! aims to increase the information technology (IT) skills of youth and library school students and shift attitudes about the traditional roles of librarians and libraries by positioning library and information services at the center of mutually beneficial and dynamic student-community partnerships.

Mix IT Up! actively recruits underrepresented library students to act as youth advocates through planned coursework in community informatics and in youth librarianship and mentorship in and oversight of long-term community-student partnerships, with the goal of creating a model for increasing the presence of information professionals engaged in youth advocacy.

Mix IT Up! was launched at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2011.  Community partners include Champaign County Juvenile Detention Center, Don Moyer Boys and Girls Club, Puerto Rican Cultural Center, TAP In Leadership Academy, and UP Center of Champaign County.

In this presentation, we will discuss efforts to engage youth with technology, to preserve community history, and to innovate information spaces at the above-named and new sites.  We will also share tips for navigating organizations and centering the information experiences and needs of youth in a variety of contexts.

7. Aaminah Norris, University of California, Berkeley
Teaching girls to value difference: 21st Century critical literacies and identity processes in an urban classroom

This chapter of my dissertation documents and analyzes ways that a history teacher guided her sixteen low-income sixth grade Latina and African American girls in developing critical literacy as expressed through the implementation of design thinking methodologies. This case study also examines the ways girls negotiated their gender and racialized identities as they were facilitated in using digital media to create projects with a focus on valuing difference within their formal schooling contexts. Design thinking is a conceptual framework that helps students develop mindsets that are important for learning that include human centeredness, empathy, and mindfulness of process. This research investigates the relationships between design thinking processes and the development of critical literacies. It also examines ways that design thinking informs the formations of racialized and gender identity processes. Data sources for this work include participant observations, formal and informal interviews with the focal teacher, informal interviews with students, and ethnographic field notes.

8. Laura Whyte, Stuart Lynne, Amit Kapadia, and David Miller, Zooniverse - Adler Planetarium
Zooniverse: Real Science Online

Hosted in the basement of the Adler Planetarium is a team of developers, educators and designers that build a collection of online citizen scientists that has drawn on the human efforts of nearly 800,000 volunteers. This team, known collectively as ‘The Zooniverse’, works with international science teams to provide them with an opportunity to put their massive data sets online, breaking the often complex analysis down into simple manageable tasks that can be completed by anyone, no expert training required.

Whether it be hunting for exo-planets (planethunters.org), measuring biodiversity on the seafloor (seafloorexplorer.org), transcribing ancient greek papyri (ancientlives.org) or classifying distant galaxies (galaxyzoo.org), none of the research projects found at zooniverse.org could be completed without the efforts of volunteers. Yet beyond the project sites, exist communities of engaged individuals, who have progressed their research beyond the remit initially outlined by the scientists. An entirely new type of galaxy, a planet orbiting as part of a quartet of stars and a new species of sea worm are only beginning of the discoveries that would never have been made if not for the democratization of science happening online at zooniverse.org.

Real data, freely available to anyone with an internet connection and the opportunity to make a contribution to science makes the Zooniverse projects a valuable resource for educators.  Their students’ efforts are needed by the community! In addition, new projects are currently being developed by the team to support access to citizen science in a classroom setting, so that a new generation of volunteers can join the scientific revolution. Join us to find out more!

9. Giuliana Cucinelli, Concordia University & MIT, and Leslie R. Shade, University of Toronto
Our Privacy Matters! Youth, Identity and Online Sociability

“Our Privacy Matters: Youth, Identity, and Online Sociability," is a 20-minute Creative Commons video documentary that explores young people’s digital media practices and privacy policies. It brings forward the voices of youth, media educators, and academics. It is designed to serve as both an introduction to the various issues related to privacy, social media and youth and also serve as a provocation for youth to become more involved in not only shaping the social media landscape but in educating policymakers about their insights and concerns about online privacy.

Our everyday lives are increasingly dependent upon the use of social media for communication with our friends, family, schoolmates, and colleagues. Social network sites such as Facebook, real-time information services such as Twitter, micro-blogging sites such as Tumblr, video-sharing sites such as YouTube or Vimeo, are used for creative, constructive, or even mundane uses.  In our ever-connected world, it is more than ever difficult to disconnect.

This presentation addresses the role of privacy policies in lives of young people and their digital media practices. This short video documentary explores these issues, and brings forward the voices of Canadian youth, media educators, and academics. It is designed to serve as both an introduction to the various issues related to privacy, social media and youth and also serve as a provocation for youth to become more involved in not only shaping the social media landscape but in educating policymakers about their insights and concerns about online privacy.

10. Daniel Schultz, MIT Media Lab, and Sasha Costanza-Chock, MIT Comparative Media Studies
NewsJack: Media Remixing for Great Justice

NewsJack uses Mozilla's Hackasaurus to make it incredibly easy to remix news websites and media content to add your own spin.  Come and explore how brand affects the way you consume information, give extra attention to the stories that haven't made it into the news cycle, change or remove language that you feel is biased or paints an unfair picture, or invoke détournement  to criticize the world around you through satire!

11. Christopher Rogers and Amy Stornaiuolo, PennGSE
Localizing the World Wide Web for Social Action

Drawing upon the research of The Kinder & Braver World Project, specifically Shock (2012)*, one must begin to recognize and uphold that young people have played a major role within every progressive social movement, engaging with many of the new media tools of their time to “create, circulate, and amplify movement stories” in concert with direct action.  With increasing literacy in using digital tools to enhance learning and exposure in educational settings, we must continue to stand in the historical legacy to unite our voices and stories with concrete strategies to actualize the transformations that drives our passion to speak. How do we begin to reconcile local action within globe-reaching digital spaces in regards to civic engagement and social justice curricula? What are effective techniques to emphasize the balance between the creation of digital media and the need for active reinforcement of ideas? What happens after the media? My research seeks to investigate the connection between critical digital literacies and actualizing the social justice aims within the local community. Christopher Rogers has a project in process for the city of Chester, Pennsylvania that will engage youth in a participatory action research project to determine and implement digital solution(s) to create a more responsive connection between community members and city services. This comes as an expansion of a pilot project where youth engage with digital music creation tools to create an album dedicated to uplifting youth perspective on critical social issues.  In the workshop, participants will be introduced to Chester, PA through behind-the-scenes footage of the “Chester Sound” digital music lab while engaging in an informal conversation about connecting the power and potential of digital media tools to drive community movements and the struggle to actualize change.

*Costanza-Chock, S. (2012). Youth and Social Movements: Key Lessons for Allies. Berkman Center Research Publication, (2013-13).

12. Sabrina Culyba, Schell Games
PlayForward: Designing a game to change risky behavior in at-risk teens ages 11 to 14

Ever hear the term “transformational games?” If not, think serious games, but fun! All kidding aside, transformational games are designed to positively change a person’s habits, attitudes or behaviors, or increase their knowledge of a certain topic, through fun, inviting game experiences. In this discussion, Sabrina Culyba, game designer at Schell Games, will explain this game genre and demonstrate PlayForward: Elm City Stories, an iPad game that exemplifies the concepts behind transformational games.

Developed in conjunction with Yale University School of Medicine, PlayForward aims to prevent HIV infection among ethnic minority adolescents. The game provides an engaging and informative experience that reinforces positive decision-making skills and instills strategies for averting risky behaviors. Players navigate though an interactive world encountering a series of life-altering choices along the way. Will their choices positively or negatively affect their character’s life? What happens if they could go back in time and change some of their choices? PlayForward uniquely focuses on changing behaviors, not just knowledge acquisition, with the hope that players will take what they have learned and apply it to their everyday lives.

Join Sabrina for an in-depth look into the design and gameplay of PlayForward and discover a whole new world of transformational games.

13. William McFarlane, Parts and Crafts

Hackerspaces and Free Schools -- Organizing for Informal Learning

The most important problems in education today aren't problems that are solved by pedagogy, they are problems that are solved through community building. Informal, and community-based learning environments create groups of teachers and learners who share common interests, social bonds, and, most importantly, trust each other enough to teach and learn effectively together.

Because problems of community-building are somewhat opaque to traditional analytical methods, don't lend themselves well to obvious lists of "best practices", and are, fundamentally slow and particular in the ways that interpersonal interactions are slow and particular, many conversations about education and learning jump to more abstractly analyzable topics.

But community, trust, and friendship are at the core of any educational endeavor -- whether or not you like and respect your teacher matters a lot more than what curriculum they use.

For the past 3 years, or so, Parts and Crafts has been running a series of programs that we alternately refer to as a "community workshop", "hackerspace for kids", "democratic school-alternative", and "homeschool resource center."

This is a project that's more like tending a garden than building a robot (though we do both!) -- we're never done, and the process tends to be very modest and incremental. We have endless conversations, meet with kids and parents about what they'd like to do/see and friends and neighbors about what they'd like to teach/share. We clean the workshop, meet with organizers and run small events, replace the soldering iron tips, clean the workshop again.

So what I want to share is not "best practices" -- there are no best practices when it comes to human interaction -- but stories and anecdotes and analogies and tips and ideas: things that we think we've learned in the last couple of years, even though most of these things don't take the form of replicable (or even disprovable) results.

14. Cecilia Suhr, Miami University
Digital Evaluation of Arts and Creativity as a New Emerging Framework: An Introduction to the Evolving Definition and Theorization of Digital Evaluations

With the rise of social media, the voices of amateur critics have risen. From news reports and blogs to video and music, anyone with access to the internet can critique, rate, and comment on the content being shared on the web. Given that the dissemination of a cultural product only takes an easy click of a mouse button, the digital environment has increasingly dramatized the overall activities of evaluations such as rating, ranking, voting and critiquing. In this context, this presentation introduces a current working group activity funded by DML Digital Media and Leaning Competition, called Digital Evaluation of Arts and Creativity.  As a principle investigator of this working group, I will introduce the overarching framework, as well as its aim and importance as it relates to in-formal learning and connected learning taking place in interest-driven environments. This presentation will mainly share the five evolving definitions and the theorization focused on by the working group: 1) the advancement of technology; 2) social networking; 3) power and politics; 4) aesthetic tastes and subjectivity; and 5) connected and peer learning.  As a whole, this presentation will briefly showcase contributing members’ ongoing research in artistic and creative fields (art, music, film, fashion blogging, TV, multi-platform theatre, and photography). In doing so, it will show how the framework of digital evaluations of arts and creativity sheds lights on the intersection between emerging evaluations in digital environments and alternative learning experience for artists, creative producers, and evaluators, thereby invoking the symbiosis of learning and evaluations. Overall, this presentation will offer an invaluable platform to engage in and receive feedback on current research initiatives.

15. Eric Pitt and Charles Perry, MentorMob
Help with Shoveling Manure

Imagine that you're shoveling manure in an effort to unearth a handful of diamonds buried somewhere underneath. That's more or less what it's like trying to learn online. High quality, free learning content is out there, but most of the time it's hidden behind mountains of junk in the ever-expanding online universe.

Content curation tools, like MentorMob, put the human element back into search by allowing educators, hobbyists, and self-taught experts to organize just about any online resource--articles, videos, blogs, info-graphics, and more--into Learning Playlists that arrange all the pertinent information on a particular topic into a sensible order.

But a crowdsourcing tool is only as powerful as the users who are doing the sourcing. So how do we put these kinds of tools in the hands of people who are doing and will be doing good work? And how does that work go on to help educate and inspire our next generation of leaders?

16. Ugochi Acholonu, Depaul University; Cassidy Puckett, Northwestern University; Caitlyn Kennedy Martin, Stanford University; Peter Wardrip, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Atul Varma, Mozilla; and Antero Garcia, Colorado State University
From Super-8 to HD:  Dynamic Approaches to conceptualizing, measuring, and, and showcasing student learning trajectories and capabilities with digital media

With the interactivity, speed, and storage capabilities of modern technology, new approaches to measurement are now possible. Even with large sample sizes, measures of learning are no longer restricted to static questions that only capture what a student can recall at a specific point in time. Instead, more dynamic measures and new ways of analyzing and understanding results can be created that highlight learning over time and across settings. Moreover, alternative paradigms that are important for the development of expertise, such as how an individual chooses to learn or the social networks an individual belongs too, are now viable through the use of digital media.

In this conversation we will present examples of new digital measures and visualizations meant to track and capture learning-relevant information, such as students' self-directed learning behaviors, pathways to expertise development, and alternative systems for highlighting students capabilities. The examples will include approaches to measuring digital competence, visualizations that highlight technical learning across multiple settings, badging systems, and new measures around literacy. These examples will be used to spark discussions about digital media's role in assessments for the purposes of:

    Addressing inequalities
    Changing what it means to be educated
    Developing tailored instruction

We invite educators, designers, researchers, and students to come and join this conversation. We look for a healthy exchange of ideas and intend to generate a series of practical solutions (e.g. technical aspects of creating and distributing such measures, encouraging buy-in from stakeholders, addressing unintended and unforeseen consequences from deviating from traditional measures) in the hopes of fostering new directions for work and potential collaborations between participants.

17. Brenda Butler, Kevin Obomanu, and Sue Laue, Columbia Links, Columbia College Chicago
Columbia Links: R_Voices

Columbia Links is a high school journalism and news literacy program at Columbia College Chicago, so why not give people a taste of what we do? Come take a brief quiz on news and current events and see if you're up to speed with today's hot topics. Then, view and hear select teen-produced videos, webcasts and podcasts. Of course, no person will leave empty-handed. Each will get a copy of our annual publication, R_Wurd, featuring stories written by teens, for teens, and our newsworthy "Don't Shoot, I Want to Grow Up" booklet of op-eds and letters addressed to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. And for our Chicago visitors, we also have delicious Frango chocolate mints!

18. Rhys Daunic, The Media Spot
Digital Accountable Talk -- Blending Participatory Culture with the Common Core

Some New York City K-12 teachers are developing online participatory environments in the classroom that require students to use Common Core-aligned, content-specific protocols for reporting, critiquing, and discussing use of varied media.  The Media Spot is currently working
with middle and elementary school teachers to experiment with online spaces that allow for students to engage in academic settings and demonstrate a blend of CCSS-based competencies, and digital and media literacy skills.  The teachers’ goal is to capture and observe students demonstrating understanding of content and concepts through thoughtfully crafted multimedia messages for peer audiences. 

Join Rhys Daunic of The Media Spot in a “blended” conversation that will incorporate Project New Media Literacies’ PLAYground, a social multimedia environment designed for facilitating multi-user conversations around user-driven themes. 

We will look at and discuss works in progress from NYC blended elementary and middle school classroom environments, critique and brainstorm around  the existing work, discuss experiences of workshop participants, and explore strategies for establishing and utilizing digital culture and production in traditional content areas.  You will be invited to interact with and contribute ideas to the PLAYground space that will be shared with NYC teachers whose work we are examining, and even remix the content contributed during the session into your own custom PLAYground inquiry.  Bring a web-enabled device!

19. Margaret Verre, Western Illinois University
Transforming Learning: Who will Lead the Educational Revolution?

Why is it that education is promoted as a life transforming step to great economic potential, yet many of today's youth are bored to tears at all levels of school and lack basic job skills in today's market? And what is worse, higher education has taken no real steps over the last forty years to transform how it develops courses that blend different fields together to better prepare students to face an ever changing digital world. What would true transforming education look like in this time of ubiquitous digital devices? Why not elect Siri by data tagging to become a symbol of the next learning revolution? What does it take to blend educational or instructional objectives of factual knowledge with basic learning skills? The possible answers might surprise you.