DML Conference Day One: Day in Reverse
At least that’s how I’d term this first day of the Digital Media & Learning Conference in Long Beach. After traveling for what felt like an eternity yesterday, today’s laid back pace was welcome – at least at first. Registration started at 8:00 am on the second floor here at the Hilton with workshops following at 9:00. Each session was paired with four others, making choosing a track somewhat difficult, as many interesting title ran concurrently. This promoted quite a bit of room-hopping which did make the conversations between participants a bit difficult, as it seemed like quite a few attendees were plotting their escape midway through each two hour block.
My morning session on “Designing for Designers” was a good cross section of the participant backgrounds in attendance, though. In just my circle were two grad students studying social media and youth culture, a project manager from Google, a curriculum developer for a K-12 initiative, an media space coordinator from Singapore and a LA-based social advocacy programming producer. I learned a lot about how each of these different people thought of the questions we were asked, which included such topics as “how to negotiate designer vs. content creator rights in communities.” While I looked at this from a physical space perspective (Media Commons installations), the K-12 developer saw it as it related to the classroom, the Google employee saw it as online products and services, the woman from Singapore saw it as how interactive exhibits were developed, etc. And our session organizers from MIT’s Scratch project saw it as something entirely different, making providing an answer a bit of a challenge.
The conversations held between sessions with fellow attendees made up for the awkward workshops, though and the delightful keynote from Alice Taylor – former gaming content coordinator for Channel 4 – really made the day worthwhile. In fact, the entire welcome session this evening really connected the dots on how the day was conceived and made sense of the disparate tracks and presenters in each workshop. I hate to be traditional about it because I know what the conference organizers were going for by structuring the day as freeform as it was, but I would almost have preferred the day’s last formal session to be its first. In talking with other participants, I am not alone in this sentiment.
Oh well – onward into the first day of official lecture sessions tomorrow. If they are a fraction as compelling as Alice’s, I’m going to be pleased this time tomorrow.