More than 400 researchers, scholars, educators, practitioners, and youth experts from the emerging digital media and learning field have just returned from our first Digital Media and Learning Conference. We’re still trying to wrap our arms around the riveting conversation and probing questions that bubbled up at the conference, held at UC San Diego. Meantime, here’s an initial batch of raw tweets from the conference with insights, ideas, observations, comments, questions, takeaways, and resource referrals that might be compelling both to those who were there, but also to those who were not. By most accounts, it was a unique event that brought together people from many countries around the theme, Diversifying Participation. Thanks to conference participants, the Twitter feed was (is) robust and provocative. It can be found on Twitter at #dml2010.
Main cast of characters: (in order of appearance)
S. Craig Watkins (keynote speaker/opening)
Henry Jenkins (HJ…conference chair)
Sonia Livingstone (SL…keynote speaker/closing)
Katynka Martinez (presenter)
Lisa Nakamura (presenter)
Reed Stevens (presenter)
Heather Horst (presenter…conference organizer)
Yasmin Kafai (presenter)
Liz Losh (presenter)
- S. Craig Watkins: “Is all participation good participation? Are there problematic forms of participation?”
- How does the political economy of new media industries reproduce structural racism and unequal employment, ownership, and reprsntn?
- Henry Jenkins urges “not throw away each others’ business cards” collaborate with someone new
- Sonia Livingstone advocates adding “playing with fire” to the list of need skills for kids in her talk http://bit.ly/98p4v9
- Sonia Livingstone: “We [academe] must be tougher on ourselves in our projects, more critical stop being nice to each other”
- S.Livingstone keynote: risks and opportunities are inseparable “learning involves risk taking”
- @derekeb: There needs to be a convergence of the various 2.0 Tribes. We’re still in the silo, only talking to our own community.
- @reneehobbs: Online media reproduce/challenge racial meanings. What is expressed in one context gets understood differently in another context.
- @steeletupe: Pacman as ideal template through which kids can think critically about power, race, their neighborhoods – Katynka Martinez SF State
- nakamura: calling out racism in games is dangerous given fan reactions; suggestion those who play them are racist too.
- reed stevens: what is the evidence of the impact of in-game activities on the real world?
- Heather Horst on raced videos of Jamaican Dutty Wine dance – what’s normative changes as it circulates transnationally
- @CatinStack: When 5 year old AfAm girls choose white avatars is it embodied racism, looking for power and/or nascent activism?
- Yasmin Kafai: “programming should be part of the discussion about media literacy”
- @lizlosh: Note that ETS made “information literacy” a big issue only to develop a standardized test
- @cassidycody: youth will use digital media in an ideologically different ways than expected by their “benefactors” (teachers, etc.)
- @lnakamur: I’d like to see an insurgent new media academic community
- @sophia07003: “41% of colleges & univ are using blogs as admissions tools”
- @jenksbyjenks: How long are schools going to pretend that putting a computer in a classroom is meeting today’s needs?
- (Henry) Jenkins: Quoting Fisk–New media offers new opportunities to struggle
- @mcdanger: role of teacher in networked age http://is.gd/8YXj8
- @lanalana: by some accts, “digital natives” start w those born in mid70s. structuring youth dev and learning is not ab historical determinism
- @desconcentrado: does glorification of youth by adults (“wasted on the young”) keep kids stuck in prolonged adolescence?
- @saurili: Digital Higher Ed Project http://www.virtualpolitik.org/dhighered/ portal to some great work
- HJ, quoting John Fisk, “In Early modern Europe, everyone had a larynx but not everyone had the opportunity to speak.”
- @reneehobbs: Should we support digital ML literacy if it’s tied to a deregulatory, depolicitized policy framework?
- Sonia Livingstone: “Digital participation is not the same as engagement” – like connections is not same as connectedness
- @schock: social background bigger key to youth political participation than the net. umm, yeah.
- SL: Child is at center of intrusion of state, school, parents, commerce.
- Sonia Livingstone: Backgrounds of the children shape their digital use more than the digital technology affordances itself.
- HJ: Perfect end: critical call to passionate interventions & optimism for change, not sanguine belief it has changed.
- (henry) jenkins takeaway: as scholars and practitioners we have obligation to “reduce the suck” in the world.
