The Connected Learning Alliance is looking forward to our community of progressive educators, researchers, and technologists gathering to exchange learnings and ideas in the upcoming Connected Learning Summit. It is an annual gathering of innovators harnessing emerging technology to expand access to participatory, playful, and creative learning.
This year’s summit will be held from October 26-28 as a fully online event in order to welcome attendees worldwide. Our keynote sessions will close our two separate time zone blocks – keyed to Asia/Australia and US/Europe.
Friday, October 27: Asia/Australia Closing Keynote
A day of in-depth learning and panel discussions wraps up with a stimulating keynote by Dr. Luci Pangrazio: Making the Familiar Strange: Critical Digital Literacies for Edtech. In schools, digital technologies have become the water we swim in. Yet as edtech platforms raise privacy concerns, intensify inequality and commercialize public-school systems, Luci proposes it is high time we stood back to ask, ‘How’s the water?’
Luci aims to ‘make strange’ what we know and think about edtech by considering the wider impact of digital technologies on the culture of the school and the relationship between teachers and students: “Now more than ever it is essential we stand back and ask how we can ensure digital learning is better for children and young people.” Drawing on her research projects over the last 10 years, Luci sketches out a picture of what we know about digital technologies in schools – from the digital platforms in schools and how teachers use them, through to students’ understandings of data and their thoughts on monitoring software.
Dr. Luci Pangrazio is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow (2023-2026), Chief Investigator on the Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, and a senior lecturer in language and literacy at Deakin University. Her research focuses on digital and data literacies, datafication in the home and school, and the politics of digital platforms. Recent books include Critical Data Literacies (2023, MIT Press), Learning to Live with Datafication: Educational Case Studies and Initiatives from Across the Word (2022, Routledge) and Young People’s Literacies in the Digital Age (2019, Routledge).
Saturday, October 28: US/Europe Closing Keynote
The three-day Connected Learning Summit concludes with a keynote by Diana Nucera aka Mother Cyborg, who will share an artistic exhibition of fiber works, addressing critical issues of surveillance, data collection, the redaction of love to likes, and the complexity of identity within it all.
Mother Cyborg’s work opens up analog and tactile spaces for audiences to reflect upon our collective relationship with internet technologies, identity, legacy, and the future. She draws from over 16 years of experience as a community organizer in Detroit, MI where individuals gained access and agency to (re-)build their neighborhoods, and run their own Internet service providers. Her work brings poetry, music, fiber arts, and the power of emotional connection together alongside personal experience and systemic analysis.
“By demystifying technology through performance, craft, objects, and media, I hope to create analog touchstones for those who are afraid of the digital world to experience it differently and to ultimately develop technical knowledge with these same people. Together, we can nurture, artfully shape, and invoke the future of technology — rather than being passively controlled by it.”
Diana Nucera, aka “Mother Cyborg,” is a multimedia artist who uses quilts, performance, music, DIY publishing, and installation to elevate a collective technological consciousness and agency. Diana taps into the power of art, media and technology to facilitate educational and emotional experiences. Her work draws from fourteen years of community organizing in Detroit, Michigan, during which time she wrote guides and devised organizing models to fight digital redlining. In 2019, Diana was recognized with a Kresge Arts literary fellowship; in 2021, she became a United States Artist Fellow in Media; in 2022, she was awarded a Knight Arts and Tech Fellowship as well as a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellowship.
In addition to these compelling keynotes, the Connected Learning Summit will feature two dozen workshops and roundtables, engaging plenary sessions, and affinity meetups. Register today for the Summit!
