The DML Central blog is just over a year old, and the close of 2010 marks our first full year of publishing thought leadership from our featured bloggers and highlighting best practices in the emerging field of digital media and learning. It has been an inspiring adventure. Thanks in large part to our growing community, we have learned a great deal about collaboration, conversation, and exploration in digital media and learning in the past year — lessons we will apply in the redesign of this site and the creation of new Web resources in 2011. Meanwhile, we wanted to share the top five blog posts for 2010. Based on our Web analytics, which we track closely to help determine what is important to the practitioners, researchers, policymakers, parents, students and others who visit DML Central, these were the posts that were accessed the most during the course of this past year: 1. Digital Media & Learning Conference 2011 by Katie Salen In this post, Professor Katie Salen, the chair of our second annual Digital Media and Learning conference to be held in Long Beach, Mar. 3-5, 2011, introduces the theme of this year’s conference, Designing Learning Futures, and announces the keynote addresses by Alice Taylor, Commissioning Editor for Education at Channel 4, BBC, and Muki Hansteen-Izora, Senior Design Researcher and Strategist with the Product Research and Incubation division of Intel’s Digital Health Group. The 2011 conference theme is rooted in the deep rethinking in education and learning ushered in by the accessibility of digital and networked tools for young people. This new networked learning ecology has been cause of both concern and celebration, and it demands a transformation in how we think about, and design for, learning.
2. “Bullying” Has Little Resonance with Teenagers by danah boyd This post by senior researcher and social media scholar danah boyd dramatically calls attention to the disconnection and miscommunication going on between adults and teens in the conversation around digital-realm bullying. As danah writes: “The cultural logic underpinning bullying is far more complex than most adults realize. And technology is not radically changing what’s happening; it’s simply making what’s happening far more visible.”
3. Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight by danah boyd This post illuminates a common strategy teenagers use online, according to danah’s extensive research into youth digital culture, in which teenagers essentially use coded language that means one thing to adults and parents and quite another to their friends and peers.
4. If technology is making us stupid, it’s not technology’s fault by David Theo Goldberg In the wake of several controversial books and numerous media reports raising questions about the impact of technology on youth and learning, this post calls attention to the long history of cultural panics about the role of technology in our lives and, in particular, on youth. It makes the case for a higher-level, less reactive response and a recognition that it is up to people – us – to decide how to use technology for the greater good, especially when it comes to learning and education.
5. Librarian 2.0: Buffy J. Hamilton by Howard Rheingold Librarian Buffy J. Hamilton, known as “The Unquiet Librarian,” is a benchmark thinker and practitioner in the use of digital media for learning. This video interview and accompanying narrative contain a rich set of links to terrific examples of youth-created projects and actionable principles for educators and learners.
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