...One More Thing (or Why DML 2010 is the Conference That Never Ends)

I thought I would take a few hours to revisit all the content generated by attendees of the Digital Media & Learning: Diversifying Participation conference last week, but a few hours became a nonstop after-party bender of great discussion and several days later I am finally sitting down to write. DML peepulz are amazing!

Many participants pulled together URLs of DML 2010 blog posts, archived tweets from #dml2010, linked social bookmarks and the like, so thank you everyone -- this tells me librarian tendencies are alive and well in the informal sphere. (Organize, sort, and share: my kind of people.) And to keep the links going, I have pulled together conference-related links for the HASTAC network and pasted them below. To borrow from Twitter: RT @lnakamur: "Henry Jenkins urges to 'not throw away each others' business cards,' collaborate with someone new #dml2010." Maybe you'll find something in the links that will lead to those business-card-type collaborations. (See way below for links to funding opportunities)

I was at the conference on behalf of HASTAC as Director of Social Networking for the DML Competition (good luck to everyone who has an application in!), but I'm also a doctoral student attending UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science studying social informatics (shorthand for: I don't have an elevator speech about my research yet). I'm also a parent with a child in the public school system, which allowed me to experience fear and anxiety (can schools respond quickly enough?) and exhilaration about digital media and participatory learning nearly nonstop during the conference. There's nothing like familial worry to focus the mind.

For many of us, DML 2010 was the first gathering where game designers, anthropologists, educators, social psychologists, political scientists, artists, information scientists (at least one!), and all kinds of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners with a stake in learning came together. That alone was worth it, not least the chance to hear what innovative and inspiring ways people are using networked, participatory, distributed, new media for learning, many of them such brilliant examples that text can't do them justice: hence James Paul Gee's suggestion to create "worked examples," a hard-science concept that we need to embrace, something that allows educators to show a step-by-step demo of how a task or problem is performed or solved. Anyone working on digital media and learning can see the benefit and importance of worked examples (here's an example of Sasha Barab's Transformational Play worked example).

Today, Pew Research Center's "How Millenial Are You" quiz is circulating Facebook in high gear (my score was 92, even without tattoos), and I would not be surprised if most of my parent friends were nowhere near the Millenial high scores -- they are intelligent, informed, and want the best for their kids. They have smartphones and can't imagine life without the Internet, but participatory learning? Sometimes I struggle to find the language to explain what we do. Same goes for many of my son's teachers. The higher our Millenial score, the harder we need to work to explain what we mean by 21st century learning.

What does this mean for the future of digital media and learning? When I talk about digital media and learning outside my highly Millenial (by score and not by age) network, they think of Excel and Powerpoint, or, if they are on School-in-Transition committees, maybe SmartBoards. Technology gets talked about a lot, but not learning. Worked examples may be the most promising way to demonstrate how digital media learning works, not only for academics to communicate with each other, but for adults who have their own anxieties and fears about new media, or lack alternative mental models for what we mean when we say participatory learning.

Which raises another important theme at the conference: assessment. How do we measure digital media learning? I agree with other participants that it would be great to see more teachers attend, but if we want to think about our work from the perspective of policy makers or working for change on a large scale, we need measurement, assessment, evidence, and research. This doesn't mean we exclude teachers, but it helps remind us why academics matter, even if the language can come across as esoteric and high-brow. Sorry I can't remember who said this, or who tweeted it at the conference, but it's true: government doesn't deal in "anecdata," they want quantitative research to back decisions involving millions of dollars in taxpayer's money. I'm on board with that! That means there is a place for practitioners, researchers, academics, designers, teachers  -- all of the different groups with a stake in 21st century learning for K-20.

I have to quote Cathy Davidson here, who was summarizing her very unusual and interesting presentation at UNC Chat prior to attending DML 2010: 

"The conversation then turned, with urgency, to the way all of the tedious forms of assessment we have evolved over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st--from IQ tests and achievement tests and No Child Left Behind and standards-based school reform and multiple choice testing and disability testing to annual assessment forms and tenure committees (they all go together)--take a passion for teaching and learning.  These externalized and mechanical measures turn teaching (the most idealistic as a profession) into a mechanistic and detached process of "gaming the system."  It kills the spirit by increments. If assessment is not geared to learning, it replaces learning. Teaching to the test (NCLB or tenure). That's what grinds the soul."

Connie Yowell, Director of Education for the MacArthur Foundation, wrote in "Re-imagining Learning in the 21st Century" that "education is what institutions do, learning is what people do." And if I understand Cathy and Connie correctly, we are assessing learning using standards that satisfy educational goals, which means we are measuring the institution more than we measure what a child has learned. Focusing on assessment may be the bridge that brings 21st century learning into the 21st century, to demonstrate where it out-performs bubble-test multiple-choice exams.

The other (unofficial) theme that grabbed my attention was networking. It's in my job description, so maybe its the nail to my hammer. But throughout the conference, I thought about "participation" and "collaboration" and "networking," and of course they are constructs that mean different things to different people, even among our birds-of-a-feather group. (I even looked up those terms while I was in one of the sessions, in case my nerd cred was in question.) To me, those words are bigger and older than anything technology has made possible, which means that we need to rely on the human motivations to make the technological innovations happen. We did participate in many-to-many virtual forms of participation during one-to-many panels and presentations that took place face-to-face. Some of us, those who want digital media conferences to be deeply dipped in digital media, wanted a common gathering place where we could tweet, post, share, ask, stream, network, follow, friend and participate together in a way we can with all the affordances of social media. Not loosely aggregated, but collaboratively, streaming back to the virtual world to those who aren't there in person. Or, if you're me, for those of us who want to repeat the conference online so we remember what just happened.

So let's do that next year -- let's find out who wants to participate and create that infrastructure for the conference. I saw the amazing Shane, (the sole person providing tech support for the entire conference), doing the duty of 10 people, figuring out problems in two places at once, something only an avatar should undertake. Contact us at HASTAC to help us think about ways to do this, so we participate, collaborate, and network our efforts. It was fantastic to attend a conference where everyone had heard of HASTAC and understood what we do. (Cue the music): One day, I hope I have a similar experience when I walk into an elementary, middle or high school (or tenure committee!) and have the same experience when someone says "21st century learning."

And now, (if you're still here!), are some of the fantastic live-blogs, post-conference reflections, and resources from conference participants: 

HASTAC Live-blogging:

Digital Media & Learning: State of the Field
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/digital-media-and-learning-state-field

From Fan Activism to Political Activism: Participatory Democracy around Popular Media Affinity Groups
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/fan-activism-political-activism-part...

The Worked Example: Invitational Scholarship in Service of an Emerging Field
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/worked-example-invitational-scholars...

Digital Media Production for Social Change
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/digital-media-production-and-social-...

Orality, Pedagogy, and New Media
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/live-blogging-orality-pedagogy-and-n...

Diversifying Mobiles: Participatory Learnings
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/diversifying-mobiles-participatory-l...

Last Bastion: Promises and Perils of Digital Media & Learning in Higher Education
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/last-bastions-promise-and-problems-d...

Participatory Learning in Schools: Square Peg in Round Hole?
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/particiaptory-learning-schools-squar...

How Race, Ethnicity and Class Shape Digital Media Practices and Activism
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/how-race-ethnicity-and-class-shape-d...

Sonia Livingstone: Closing Session
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/slgrant/closing-session-digital-media-learni...

MacArthur Spotlight Blog:

http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/toward_ecosystem_learning_refle...

DML Central

http://dmlcentral.net/blog/jeff-brazil/remix-digital-media-and-learning-...

More blogging, tweeting, commenting from DML Attendees:

http://www.theamericancrawl.com/?p=500

http://www.mobileed.org/mobileedwp/

http://saurilio.blogspot.com/2010/02/digital-media-and-learning-conference_21.html

http://markdangerchen.net/2010/02/21/digital-media-and-learning-conference-resources/

http://delicious.com/tunabananas/dml2010

http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy6MLaNUBVU

http://mediaoptimist.wordpress.com/

http://queergeektheory.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/digital-media-and-learning/

http://digitalparenting.wordpress.com/?p=87&preview=true

http://prezi.com/1zfnjr5bqa3l/mangle-of-play/

http://reelchangefornonprofits.blogspot.com/2010/02/dml-2010-day-2-sessions-45-computer.html

http://caseinsights.com/index.php/2010/02/21/dml-2010-s-craig-watkins-on-black-and-latino-youth-remaking-the-participation-gap/

http://reelchangefornonprofits.blogspot.com/2010/02/dml-day-2-session-2-diversifying.html

http://www.olpglobalkids.org/2010/02/gk_at_dml_2010.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/texterritory-dml#utm_campaign=hootsuite.com&utm_source=3068028&utm_medium=social

http://jennamcwilliams.blogspot.com/2009/04/writing-with-mouse-in-hand.html

http://newmedialiteracies.org/educators/

http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=220

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/fair_use_at_diversifying_participation/

Last, but not least, a few funding opportunities uncovered during the conference:

National Science Foundation: National STEM Education Distributed Learning:
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10545/nsf10545.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_179

Office of Innovation & Improvement, Dept of Ed
http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii/funding.html

(Plus the innovation portal for Dept of Ed, with additional funding sources):
https://innovation.ed.gov/my-portal/

Community Information Needs: Knight Foundation
http://www.informationneeds.org/

Social Innovation Fund: National & Community Service
http://www.nationalservice.gov/for_organizations/funding/nofa_detail.asp...

Institute of Museum and Library Services
http://www.imls.gov/applicants/project.shtm

Cooney Center Prizes for Education
http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/initiatives/prizes.html