Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

It's June 2009, and that means the program I've managed for three years is slowly coming to a close. I feel like I made this year a very special year for myself, and for the students, because it very well might be our last year running the Virtual Video Project. My heart is filled with laughter, vivid memories, and sorrow when I say that. I wanted everything this year to be done better, and right. Better than the two years before, and stronger than ever. I got to take the students on more trips and engage in more social outings than before, I pushed for a better story and for a stronger message that they wanted to share via their final film, and I demanded more from my co-facilitator, Shawna, who not only has to put up with my aggressiveness, but also keep me smiling. I think the life of the program ultimately lies in the level of commitment and dedication from both sides of the table. The students must explore the issues, albeit sensitive to some, and demonstrate full ownership and support for each other as a team. The facilitators must maintain an unambiguous sense of balance and high energy to carry the team. At the end of the day, I want the students to walk away knowing fully what they have learned each week with us, and be able to take away valuable lessons they can apply to their everyday life.

I've seen friendship among students that I never thought would find common ground, I've shared the same frustration when things are not going our way, and I equally rejoice, on every measure of success, when students rise up to the challenge and go beyond our expectations.

Continue reading "[staff] Towards the End for this Year's VVP" »

Posted by tabitha at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Post-processing my experience being a "mentor" at the BAVC Producers Institute in San Francisco last week, I've been realizing some of the unique aspects of my own personal journey and how that has shaped me into the odd amalgamation of activist / technologist / educator/ dancer/ Quaker etc. This past week has helped me to appreciate my own unique perspective in a way that I never have before.

What I now see is that while I have fairly thin expertise in any given field, I have a broad enough understanding of very disparate subjects that I am able to see links between them in ways that are less obvious to others. And I'm fairly articulate at communicating those linkages.  As my lifecoach says, I'm a "Connector."

Continue reading "[staff] Appreciating my role as a "Connector"" »

Posted by Rik at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The April/May staff reflections are now up!

A quick overview of what OLP thought about for these past two months: Rafi raves about his past conference experience and discovers a new course on creative, thought-provoking technology at NYU, Barry walks through his tweets and discusses six trends around education and virtual worlds, Rik talks about his experience in Chicago at the HASTAC meeting and looks at ways of conversing with non-techie audiences about digital media as a learning tool, Amira discusses the divide within learning and non-learning institutions using digital media, Krista looks at the uses of machinima and Tabitha reflects on her time with the Virtual Video Project.

Read the reflections below for a more in-depth description:

• In “Learning in a Participatory Culture”, Rafi reflects on the conference that culminated the yearlong partnership that Global Kids has had with MIT's Project New Media Literacies. (Bonus: Get to see his presentation too!)
• Barry creates a digital comic in “My Life on Twitter”, to demonstrate how he used Twitter at work during April.
• In “HASTAC Digital Media & Learning Showcase: a laptop orchestra, OLPCs in Chiapas, vloggers in Mumbai, and more”, Rik talks about his inspiring second time participating in the HASTAC digital media showcase, which featured amazing educational projects from around the world.
• Amira reviews the role of learning using digital media within non-institutions in “Important Conversations on Digital Media and Non-Institutional Learning Spaces.”
• In “Machinimania,” Krista reflects on how differently people view the uses of machinima, whether for educational or entertainment purposes.
• Tabitha shares a brief reflection on the Virtual Video Project program coming to an end, in "Towards the End for this Year's VVP."
• Rafi documents NYU's Interactive Telecommunication Program's Fall Show in his “Growing innovation, from the playful to the serious, at NYU's ITP”.
• In “Helping "digital immigrants" see Web 2.0 as an asset for youth,” Rik considers the challenges of talking about digital media and virtual worlds to a non-techie audience.
• Barry reflects on six trends in virtual worlds around learning and philanthropy in his “Virtual Worlds: Emerging Trends for 2009”.

Posted by Krista at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"There are many different ways to use machinima as learning and entertainment tools".

This is something my friend said to me the other day when I started to tell him about a program OLP runs, the Virtual Video Project [VVP]. Over the last few months, I have been helping out with VVP, helping with the editing process of the child sex trafficking machinima they are currently working on. Since this, though I myself have not delved deeper into how machinima can be used educationally than I already have learned here at GK, I have found many people have a lot to say about it over some hamburgers. Apparently, pro sports channels use machinima to show replays of various goals, baskets, et cetera, made that are considered "spectacular", which my friend vehemently stressed, helps other athletes learn different techniques.

Continue reading "[staff] Machinimania" »

Posted by Krista at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the last couple months, Rik and I have had the opportunity to present our work in the context of different informal learning programs and populations. First in showcasing RezEd.org, at the HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition in April in Chicago and then at the HUD Neighborhood Networks Technical Assistance Workshop in Dallas, Texas.

A few themes resonated as we presented our work and met with others who were in very similar ways, or at times, very differently considering the same challenges and opportunities that we consider in our work at GK.

Continue reading "[staff] Important Conversations on Digital Media and Non-Institutional Learning Spaces" »

Posted by Amira at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I only learned about NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program about a year ago, from my friend Sonaar that who had then just started a graduate degree there. I'd thought of the program as focused on engineering, and Sonaar, a fellow meditator, writer and tech enthusiast, didn't exactly evoke engineer. He was straight liberal arts to me. But then, I didn't know much about the program.

Since then, I've had the opportunity to check out their seasonal show, now for the second time, and gotten a real sense of the incredible spirit of creativity, innovation, experimentation, playfulness and collaboration that characterizes the program and its students. At the show there are tons of projects, ranging from innovative interfaces, tech art, pro-social technologies, mobile applications, wearable technology, robots making art, and much more. Some seem immediately ripe for either venture capital, application in the classroom, or installation in a museum. Others are more whimsical, and might never make it to a broader public, but will inform the discourse around interactive media. It's a real playground for those interested in the next generation of odd, interesting and thought provoking technology. You can check out the photos I took from the show in the slideshow below, but for full effect you should check them out with my notes on my flickr stream.

Posted by Rafi Santo at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last month, my colleague Amira and I had the opportunity to speak to several coordinators of Neighborhood Network sites around the country. Neighborhood Networks are onsite, multiservice technology centers aimed at promoting self-sufficiency for residents of assisted housing.

Giving this talk was a good reminder to me of how the older "digital immigrant" population sees Web 2.0 in relation to young people, and how innovative the work we do at Global Kids really is.

Continue reading "[conf] Helping "digital immigrants" see Web 2.0 as an asset for youth" »

Posted by Rik at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you haven't gotten a chance to read Barry Joseph's latest post to the MacArthur Spotlight blog on his thoughts on emerging trends in virtual worlds, you can check his post out below or on the MacArthur Spotlight blog.

MacArthur grantee Global Kids reflects on six trends in virtual worlds around learning and philanthropy.

By Barry Joseph

As RezEd enters its second year of funding from MacArthur, we thought it would be helpful to outline several trends we have seen emerging that affect learning and virtual worlds.

Trend 1: Media Tired...
The press grew tired with its love/hate relationship with Second Life, the preeminent virtual world in the public sphere, moving from wide-eyed adoration to cynical disdain. Recent signs, such as cnet’s ”Second Life Strives for a Second Wind” and Gigaom’s ”Second Life Starts to Grow Again,” suggest the pendulum might be swinging back.

Continue reading "[Staff] Virtual Worlds: Emerging Trends for 2009" »

Posted by Barry at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am constantly being asked by people either one of two things.

• People not on facebook: "Why do you waste your time on Twitter?"
• People on facebook: "I have no idea what half your updates are about."

In response, perhaps to throw fuel on the fire, I thought I would collect some of my favorite tweets from April and collect them in a bitstrip comic (so everyone can now ask: "Why are you making digital comics..."):

Now, on to some analysis of the "why waste time on this when I am suppose to be working," tweet by tweet:

This weekend I went with Shawna and two of the incredible GK Teen Leaders from the Media Masters program to the conference "Learning in a Participatory Culture", put on by our partners up at MIT, Project New Media Literacies.

For me, the event was characterized by a number of things that are marks of a great conference:

Here's a neat little clip of Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation welcoming the 2008 and 2009 winners of the HASTAC Digital Media and Learning competition, including myself and Amira from Global Kids. Connie always does such a great job synthesizing the broader historic trends, the cumulative impact of the various digital learning projects supported by MacArthur, and where we might be going in the coming years.  This is from the DML Showcase in Chicago on Friday, April 17 that I was honored to be at along with my colleague Amira. 

First off, congrats to all the winners of the 2009 Digital Media and Learning Competition, who are all gearing up to do really innovative and empowering digital learning projects around the world!  I'm blown away by the diversity of work -- from a project to empower civic engagement in Boston's Chinatown to an OLPC laptop-powered education project in rural Chiapas, Mexico, videoblogging in Mumbia, and 14 other amazing digital initiatives.

Continue reading "[staff] HASTAC Digital Media & Learning Showcase: a laptop orchestra, OLPCs in Chiapas, vloggers in Mumbai, and more..." »

Posted by Rik at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tabitha shares this month the process of video filmmaking with the teens in the Virtual Video Project.....

Posted by tabitha at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Turning to the adage "better late than never", the OLP’s staff reflections for March are finally up!

A quick overview of what OLP thought about for this month: Rik talks about his trip to DC and how new digital media and online audiences need to be taken into account, Krista discusses her time at various conferences she attended this month, Shawna relays her debate about pedagogical ideas and student voice and Barry reflects on his participation with a design charette held at the New School in NYC.

Read the reflections below for a more in-depth description:

• In “WebWise 2009: Museums and libraries pursuing the innovative edge in a digital age,” Rik reports on his experiences at the WebWise conference in Washington DC and how museums and libraries should be responding to digital media and new online audiences.
  


• Krista discusses her experience with various conferences that she attended during the month of March in “A Time of Conferences”.


• In “Defending Student Voice,” Shawna reflects on why criticism can be a good thing when it comes to defending student voice.


• Barry talks about his experience with the first design charette he attended that brought together various MacArthur grantees to explore how learning in NYC could be transformed if we built a cross-institutional, youth-centered network using digital media, in “Notes from Wakatta”.
  

As always, thanks for reading!

Posted by Krista at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Within the last month I have been to several conferences, both through work and on my own time. The first conference I went to was held in Philadelphia and was a working conference that looked at the taxonomy of virtual worlds. This conference had many different virtual world platform developers, researchers, and educators using virtual worlds, among others, who were present. The topic surrounded the different roles that virtual worlds should play, especially within educational environments. I went to this conference with a colleague and we were honored to be accompanied by two GK youth, who were invited so as to incorporate the youth voice into the conference. The two youth who accompanied us were amazing. They carried themselves with poise and interacted well with all of the other attendees throughout the entire conference.

Continue reading "[staff] A Time of Conferences" »

Posted by Krista at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently attended a conference on youth development in which a debate emerged around pedagogical approaches to teaching young people about serious issues. I was asked whether using youth-designed games to talk about serious issues trivializes the lives of those effected by the issue. Later in the conversation, it was said that Tempest in Crescent City, the third Playing 4 Keeps game about local heroic efforts in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, is nothing short of offensive. While my gut reaction was to get defensive, I soon realized this was actually a good thing. And this is why:

The goal of Playing 4 Keeps is not about the games. It is not about determining what's reality and what's not, or whether games can ever be used for learning. Playing 4 Keeps, as I see it, is about student voice. The game serves as a platform for these young people to speak out on an issue they feel passionately about. Taking a step back, and reflecting on the backgrounds of these young people brings to light another point. Traditionally, the adult demographic, let alone high school students, from such ethnic and/or socioeconomic backgrounds have been a silenced part of the population when it comes to civic engagement.

So what happens when they, or anyone else, has the chance to have their voice heard? They may choose to speak out about issues that seem too personal or too uncomfortable. They may say things that are deemed offensive or perhaps even flat out wrong. But that's ok. Part of having a voice and speaking out with that voice, is about having others listen and being able to listen to them. Listening to feedback, both positive reinforcement and negative critiques, is not only a part of the learning process, but civic engagement as well.

While I initially wanted to defend the participants in Playing 4 Keeps, I know this is the wrong response. The young people at Canarsie High School who participated in Playing 4 Keeps, have indeed succeeded. We see this through the group of forty adults who spoke up and engaged in an emotional conversation about their experiences and reactions to our nation's response to Hurricane Katrina as a result of Tempest. And this is just one example of one group's reaction...no one knows where the conversation will spread from there. These young people should be proud of themselves for taking the risk to speak out and know that people are listening, even when they disagree.

My takeaway from this conversation is that as educators, when we work to create opportunities for student voice, we need to be mindful of also creating opportunities to listen, not only for the young people we work with but for ourselves as well.

Posted by Shawna at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Friday, Global Kids held its Annual Conference at Baruch College, gathering 600-some students and educators from around New York City to examine critical social issues, meet each other, and get activated.  This year's theme was "Global Health -- Be the Vaccine," featuring speakers and workshops on a wide variety of health-related topics. 

An important aspect of the Global Kids Annual Conference is that the day-long event is entirely youth-led.  Our Global Kids teen leaders are in charge of nearly every aspect of the conference, from the selection of the overarching theme, to the workshop facilitating, MCing, and entertainment.

This year, we tried something new: enabling a team of Global Kids teens to film different parts of the conference using Flip cameras and editing the best clips together into a mini-documentary about the conference that is shown at the closing plenary of the event.

There are a lot of aspects of how this was organized and created that my colleagues Barry and Joyce and I could talk about.  The one lesson that I want to focus on here is how the act of filmmaking got our youth more engaged with the event that they were at.

Continue reading "[staff] Youth-led filmmaking of the Global Kids Conference and virtual simulcasts" »

Posted by Rik at 6:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below are my notes with some background from the first Wakatta design charette, supported by some relevant Calvin and Hobbes strips my son asked me to read the following day:

On Thursday and Friday, March 12th and 13th, I was invited to participate in a design charette held at the New School (if you don’t know what a charette is, don’t worry - just read on). The university building supporting the event, once a popular department store, is slated to be knocked down any day. This was a perfect metaphor for the goal of the event - work with two dozen or so other learning institutions around New York City, such as museums, libraries, after school programs, etc., to explore how learning in our city could be transformed if we built a cross-institutional, youth-centered network using digital media.

The project, named Wakatta (“I get it” in Japanese) issued the following challenge to the illustrious participants in the room:

Continue reading "[staff] Notes from Wakatta" »

Posted by Barry at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From February 25-27, I had the opportunity to go to the WebWise conference in Washington DC, an annual gathering of 300-some professionals from libraries and museums to discuss how to keep their cultural institutions relevant in the digital age.  It was great getting to hear from some of the leading museums and libraries in America (The Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the US Holocaust Museum, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc) about how they are struggling, debating and at times innovating in this space. 

My overall sense was that this is still very much an untested frontier for these often conservative and stodgy institutions.  Most projects I encountered were in the initial planning or pilot phase. But there is also a lot of excitement in the air among these librarians, museum directors, curators, IT experts and web developers about the potential for digital technologies to help reinvent their institutions and reach new audiences with their content and knowledge.

More detailed notes after the jump...

Continue reading "[staff] WebWise 2009: Museums and libraries pursuing the innovative edge in a digital age" »

Posted by Rik at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click To Play

OLP’s staff reflections for February are up!

A quick overview of what OLP thought about for this month: Rik gives an overview of his b-boying, global arts for social change experience, Barry talks about why online communities don't get the respect they deserve, Rafi talks about scaling OLP programs, Shawna discusses the need to change the outlook on global issues, Amira gives a summary of an OLP program that is ending, Krista talks about her recent work at GK and Tabitha shares a special outing with the youth from one of her programs.

Read the reflections below for a more in-depth description:

• In “The Global Kids Retreat: Spoken Word and B-boying with 60 Teens in the Woods,” Rik describes how he survived (and even enjoyed) his first Global Kids retreat!
  
• Barry gives a reflection on the educational impact of treating online communities as pale imitations of the "real" in “No Respect: Devaluing the Consequentiality of Online Communities”.
  
• Rafi, in “Program Design Through Implementation and Iteration,” discusses the ways that educational program implementation iteration impacts the ways that Global Kids does it's work.
  
• In “Positive Approaches to Negative Issues,” Shawna reflects on the connotations of the word "issue" when it comes to addressing global issues and its impact on youth civic engagement.
  
• Amira talks about her experiences with the recently ended Dream It. Do It. Initiative., in “Empowering Youth Now: Incarcerated Social Entrepreneurs and the Dream it. Do It. Program”.
  
• Krista discusses her recent work experiences at GK dealing with creating websites for some of the OLP programs in “Creating a Social Network”.
  
• In “VVP's first social outing,” Tabitha shares on camera about VVP's first field trip and how a social-outing can make a difference for VVP students.
  

As always, thanks for reading! Hopefully the groundhog was wrong and Spring comes soon…

Posted by Krista at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two of my recent past projects have been to create a website, where participants in our OLP programs can communicate with our staff and each other, get information and download resources about the program they are participating in, as well as upload their own creative content to the site. When Barry [our fearless leader of OLP] came to me to ask me to do this, I have to admit I was not that excited about the project, mainly because I had never done anything like this before and was not sure I could actually complete the request. It turned out to be stellar.

Though I did not create either of the websites from scratch, but used a platform that already existed, the websites do in fact have the necessary information; they allow the users to upload their work, glean the information they need to actively participate in the programs and are pleasing to the eye. After I gave the basic skeletal layout for the website, my colleagues filled in the content with the program information. I have to say I am impressed with myself! It is definitely a skill that I would not have otherwise gained, as I have always put “creating websites” into a box that I thought I would never open.

Continue reading "[staff] Creating a Social Network" »

Posted by Krista at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Dream. It Do It. Initiative came to an end last Friday, after 18 months of exploration into the ways in which virtual worlds could be used in supporting young people around social entrepreneurship. The program was very much a process as we continued to adapt and shift the Initiative to better reach different populations of youth. The consistency remained in the core Dream it. Do it. model, as we sought to support young people with a intensive workshop series and up to $1000 USD for youth to identify issues they cared about and ultimately develop projects that would create change around them.

For me, the highlight of the 18 months was our partnership with the dedicated individuals at a jail serving juveniles in the U.S. Both the volunteer librarians and the young people exemplify what is possible through partnership and collaboration. In what I think was the most significant way to utilize new technology for social good, young people who were in great part physically discouraged from society were able to access resources, interact and learn from one another, and ultimately gain agency while incarcerated.

Continue reading "[staff] Empowering Youth Now: Incarcerated Social Entrepreneurs and the Dream it. Do It. Program" »

Posted by Amira at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tabitha shares on camera about VVP's first field trip and how a social-outing can make a difference for VVP students.

Click To Play

Posted by tabitha at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During the past few weeks in the Virtual Video Project, we have been busily working to pick a global issue that will be the central theme of this year's machinima. As the list has narrowed from twenty issues to one final one, I began to wonder does "global issue" inherently mean something negative by use of the word 'issue'. Through numerous skits and stories to develop an understanding of the issues in play, there was a stronger emphasis on the problem related to the theme rather than the solution. I question whether it is easier to engage with the problem than with the issue, or whether the problem and steps toward a solution, are a step-by-step process. My concern is that by use of the word 'issue', synonymous with 'problem' or 'question', we are creating an inherently depressing story.

This then leads me to ask what is the impact on the individual, who is developing their own understanding of civic engagement and role as a global citizen, when they are confronted by repeatedly negative situations developing in the world around them. For some, it will spark a passion that will not allow them to sit back and let a form of atrocity or tragedy occur, becoming something of an empowering development as a young person civically engaged in today's world. But for others, does the experience become disenfranchising to the point that, when confronted with problems in today's world that have seen their share of attempts to help and stop the issue at hand, does the gut reaction then become to back away and stand by in a more passive role? To me, there is a fine line between emphasis on problems in order to empower and emphasis on problems that ultimately just becomes depressing enough to put one's civic engagement on hiatus.

The question then is how do you walk that line?

Posted by Shawna at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the ideas that's been on my mind recently is the importance of developing educational programs through a process of implementation and iteration. This is a somewhat intuitive concept, but has been raised for me recently as I engage in program and curriculum design in the Media Masters program, and as I watch as we begin training New York Public Library educators to implement our Playing 4 Keeps gaming program, the first online program at GK that we're scaling.

With Media Masters, an experimental pilot program that we're partnering with MIT's Project New Media Literacies to conduct, every piece of curriculum and the entire program design is brand new. In each project we engage in, we're taking guesses (educated, of course, but still guesses) as to whether something will work. Will students be interested in creating a wikipedia pages themselves? How long should a process like that take? How do we motivate participants to work collaboratively? And then we try it out, see what happens, circle back around and talk about how it worked. That implementation informs the way that we design and put into practice new projects that work off of similar principles.

Continue reading "[staff] Program design through implementation and iteration" »

Posted by Rafi Santo at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Monday, I got to spend some quality time with 60-some teenagers in our Global Kids programs from around New York City -- kids who we call our “GK Leaders.”  Normally being stuck in the woods with 60 teens sounds more like a bad horror movie rather than a fun time to me.  But this was a really rewarding and cool experience.

Global Kids has been taking teens up to the lovely Clearpool Retreat Center up in Carmel, New York for a dozen years or so.  It’s got everything you could want in a youth camp: a large dining hall with a big buffalo head over the fireplace, a nearby pond (now frozen over), hiking trails, a basketball court, a soccer field, an art center... even wifi!

Continue reading "[staff] The Global Kids Retreat: Spoken Word and B-boying with 60 Teens in the Woods" »

Posted by Rik at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Global Kids’ recently featured interview in the RezEd podcast series on education and virtual worlds, focused on the results of the most significant study to date on youth and online safety. The results of the study, and how they were rejected by the very players who called for the study, provided me with some valuable insights regarding the challenges to using online communities for education and civic engagement.

Continue reading "[staff] No Respect: Devaluing the Consequentiality of Online Communities" »

Posted by Barry at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcoming in both the new year and the snow –woot! – to New York, OLP’s staff reflections for January are finally up!

A quick overview of what OLP thought about for this month: Rafi takes a look at an article written by Marc Prensky about including youth voices in educational reform, Tabitha and Shawna discuss their youth’s 30-second machinima and the lessons they learned from their students, Barry talks about the recently much-discussed Teen Second Life merger, Krista takes a glance at how connectivity matters and Rik gives his take on the importance of preparing our youth today for a different, ever-changing tomorrow.

Read the reflections below for a more in-depth description:

• Rafi responds to Marc Prensky's recent article in Edutopia, arguing that youth voice done incorrectly doesn't help conversations around educational reform in his “Prensky on bringing youth into the educational design process”.
  
• In “A Lesson in Teamwork from GK Teens,” Tabitha and Shawna share a joint video reflection on the lesson they learned from watching GK leaders in action in VVP!
  
• Barry gives a defensive statement of a youth-only Second Life on “On Plans to Turn Second Life from an Age-segregated to a Mixed-Age Virtual World.”
  
• In “Natural and Technological Connections,” Krista looks at how connections plays into GK’s work.
  
• In “Preparing youth for our rapidly changing times,” Rik discusses why the GK youth development approach is so relevant in our constantly changing, confusing information age.
  

As always, thanks for reading and have a great February!

Posted by Krista at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past Friday, OLP had a staff retreat, in which we spent part of the afternoon at the NY Hall of Science in Queens, to see the Connections exhibit that is currently on display. It is an exhibit that spans quite a large section of the museum, with different activities to show the public different ways our world connects, both from technological as well as natural perspectives.

While there, we visited an exhibit that had an anthill [along with bees, one of the "classic" examples of showing connectivity from a nature-perspective] inside three aquariums that were connected by tubes, which was surrounded by a low level of water. A medium-sized ant had managed to crawl up the side of the main aquarium and out of the small square-sized hole at the top. As ants do, it had crawled around the outside, looking for a way back in.

Continue reading "[staff] Natural and Technological Connections" »

Posted by Krista at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Krista at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was recently forwarded an article by Marc Prensky, a writer in the EdTech field famous (or to some, infamous) for coining the term "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants". Regardless of the helpfulness of this dichotomy, Prensky has views that often challenge educators to question their assumptions and was writing about things like games-based learning back in 2001, when there were far fewer voices on a subject that has now caught on.

In the article, titled "Young Minds, Fast Times", Prensky talks about the importance of bringing youth into the room when discussions about educational reform are happening. He makes very good points about both youth empowerment and how to create relevant educational design, but at the same time, I think his piece misses a lot about how youth voice really works when it comes to education.

Continue reading "[staff] Prensky on bringing youth into the educational design process" »

Posted by Rafi Santo at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)