When Is it a Field? #uncCHAT + #dml2010 = ?

We talk about field-building and we say, over and over, that it isn't a field until there are disputes, different approaches, nay-sayers, reactionaries at the barricades.   (Academic definition of a new interdisciplinary field:  it isn't one until it generates resentiment.  Ouch.)   I return, a bit exhausted and ragged, from the CHAT Festival at University of North Carolina and the Digital Media and Learning Conference in La Jolla and the takeaway message from both, in very different circumstances and spirits, was "what is phase two?  what happens next?"   That's yet another definition of a field:  when it is feeling like there is enough earth under its feet, that it's ready to send out new shoots into new areas.

The CHAT Festival was a festival.  The array of arts, installations, interactive sessions, performances, and hands' on workshops was stunning.  A beginner in social media could go there and learn rudiments of Wordpress or how to make a website or other tools.  Someone who had no idea what digital learning is could go and be stunned by a beautiful and thought-provoking VR dance performance with state-of-the-art human/computer interfaces.   Or someone with minimal digital mastery could be part of engaged and challenging sessions about how learning may or may not be different for this generation of kids and what parts of that difference are about the digital and what are about the strange world of overprotective, fear-of-violence, and, worse, fear-of-lawsuit educational norms, all over-policed by standards-based reform known as No Child Left Behind. 

At the major VIP change-makers dinner last Thursday night, amid excellent food and conversation, we were each charged with answering the question of what will we do next--and how?   The emphasis was on how UNC, NCSU, Duke, NCCU, and other universities in the area could work with K-12 teachers and also with industry to think about institutionalizing digital educational innovation and research in the Research Triangle Park whose existence is predicated on imaginative, creative, thoughtful, inquisitive, well-educated new employees.    We have an agenda.

At the Digital Media and Learning Conference, the theme was "Diversifying Participation" and there were many demonstrations, often incredibly moving, of actual programs in Birmingham or Chicago or San Diego or LA or many other places where kids were learning in creative and important new ways.  They were learning what "future" means and what it means, against all economic and cultural odds, to believe you have a stake in it.   That 500 or, at the end, something like 600 people were there to be part of this was breathtaking and inspiring.   I'm not good at cyncism but even I would not have expected that so many academics, in particular, would invest their time in a non-disciplinary conference where policy, practice, pedagogy, and activism were as important as data, theory, research, and scholarship.  In fact, the relays back and forth between theory and practice were constant, challenging, and profound.

Throughout this DML Conference, the thought was on what next:  how to make policy, how to make more of an impact, how to spread the word beyond the conferees, and how perhaps to take on formal education itself more directly.   Many of the panels I saw were about projects in learning institutions outside of schools--either literal after-school or summer school programs or in the other learning institutions such as libraries and museums.  What about public schools themselves?  Can we take this momentum, this force for change, and use it to help reshape this moment in our national educational policy in a good and productive way?

Two conferences, different emphases, different disciplines, different modes of presentation, different areas of agreement and different areas of argument, but also similar commitments toward institutional change.

 #uncCHAT + #dml2010 = a field . . . and new visions, new plans ahead.  

As someone who was privileged to be at both, I want to offer my personal thanks to the organizers of both events.  There are too many of you to list here, so let me just say, collectively, thank you.  I return from an incredibly full and rich week a bit wobbly and bleary-eyed but also inspired.  I know that is the case for many who were fortunate enough to be part of this incredible bicoastal week.