DML Conference Day Two
The first full day of conferencing at DML 2011 kicked off today in Long Beach and it certainly gave off a much more organized air than yesterday’s upside down workshop and keynote affair. I began my day in the Novel Content track with a panel discussion of the ways in which new modes of learning are being explored at several different levels from K-12 in suburban Wisconsin to textbook publishing to higher education. Ideas of literacy were the primary focus, chiefly the concept of integrating “knowledgeable others” into the roster of accepted classroom information sources. Of particular interest to ETS was a staggering bit of information from the K-12 realm where a new game design course garnered enough buy-in from 9th through 12th graders to merit a full eight sections during its first year. The EGC will certainly have a large pool of interested students in the coming years if this is a national trend.
Next was a panel on living a Networked Public Life curated by danah boyd. I was probably the most starstruck at this session and for good reason. danah brought together researchers who were discovering ideas of persona, celebrity, access and agency from diverse groups like Bay area tech professionals, Appalachian Queer youth, Australian aborigines and Indian mobile phone users. My big take away from this session actually came from the work of Mary Gray with LGBT young people in rural environments, though peripherally. I realized that there were lessons to be learned that are directly applicable to how I – and the Media Commons – interfaces with rural campuses in western PA. Specifically, how we approach and assume values imposed by urban-oriented media and media creation. Having myself grown up in a very rural place, I do know that it’s highly important to many of these communities to be identified as local and to be part of the familiar as opposed to be an outsider or anonymous. It will certainly be a point to remember going forward with building MC communities at our less city-centric locations.
The day rounded out with a session on Emerging Platforms that covered the OLPC efforts in the West Bank, Twitter use in Philadelphia area elementary schools, inner city learning initiatives in San Francisco and New York and research from ETS’s own Heather Hughes. Later, I made my way to the plenary panel which prompted a feisty backchannel discussion about pop culture in education, privilege in creating learning ecosystems and licensing for music from Requiem for a Dream.
If you are starting to gather that DML is a really varied (and vaguely disjointed) conference, you are headed in the right direction with your assessment.