DML2016

An all new conference “geek out” day offers deep dives into hands-on workshops, mini-courses, and working sessions with top experts in the field. Topics range from courses in media making, learning analytics, program evaluation, and game design, to working sessions focused on delving into cutting edge problems in research and practice.

Each workshop will accept a limited number of participants.  Main Conference passes do not include workshop registration.

You still have time to purchase your pre-conference workshop registration pass! The deadline is August 8, 2016.

SCHEDULE • OCTOBER 5 • WEDNESDAY

9:00am – 9:30am Welcome Pre-Conference Workshop Attendees (Foyer)

Half Day Workshops - Morning  

9:30am – 12:30pm Transmedia Worldbuilding for Civic Engagement (Separate Registration Required)
Speakers: Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, Sangita Shresthova

Full Day Workshops:

9:30am – 5:00pm Capturing Connected Learning When and Where it Happens: A Workshop on Program Evaluation (SeparateRegistration Required)
Speakers: Vera Michalchik, William Penuel, Nick Wilson

9:30am – 5:00pm Crafting Connected Courses (Separate Registration Required)
Speakers: Alan Levine, Justin Reich

9:30am – 5:00pm Designing Youth Participatory Action Research Pathways: Toward Collaborative Inquiry, Participatory Culture, andSocial Justice (Separate Registration Required)
Speakers: Danielle Filipiak, Antero Garcia, Nicole Mirra

9:30am – 5:00pm Learning Analytics in Informal Spaces (Separate Registration Required)
Speakers: Charles Lang, Caitlin K. Martin, Nichole Pinkard

9:30am – 5:00pm Power Brokers: Building Youth Social Capital through Connected Learning (Full)
Speakers: Brigid Barron, Philip Bell, Dixie Ching, Mimi Ito

11:00am – 11:15am Break

12:30pm – 2:00pm Lunch (Included with Pre-conference registration)

3:00pm – 3:15pm Break

Games and learning expert Constance Steinkuehler will discuss the promises and tensions around game-based learning amid the larger context of educational change. While the use of games in learning has become more accepted in some places than it was a decade ago, it remains controversial in many places because of larger debates around screen time and the relative importance and place of out-of-school learning. All the while, young people are using games to engage in compelling intellectual, interest-driven forms of learning. What is the intellectual life of games online? Young people can pick up valuable skills useful in the classroom, but will game-based learning become more broadly accepted in formal education?How do games play a role in interest-driven learning? How will these issues get resolved?

Constance Steinkuehler is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-directs the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) center at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery and chairs their annual GLS Conference. Her research is on cognition and learning in commercial entertainment games and games designed for impact.

Constance’s current research interests include neuroscience and games (particularly in the areas of attention and emotional and social well-being), learning analytics (informal scientific reasoning, problem-solving, and the role of failure), and mixed methods (game community discourse and literacy).

Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Join this hands-on session to find out how you can engage youth in creating their own interactive projects based on their hobbies and interests. Try a new way to get started with coding using a Scratch “microworld” - a small set of coding blocks you can snap together online to program your own interactive projects. Choose from a variety of interest areas, including dance, fashion, comedy, music, and sports. After exploring Scratch microworlds, share your experience and brainstorm ways you could adapt these activities to connect with the interests of young people you work with. We will share what we’ve learned introducing Scratch to young people within libraries and other environments. Bring a laptop to dig into Scratch during the session.

The Coding for All team (Scratch Team at the MIT Media Lab, DML Research Hub at University of California Irvine; and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University) are exploring and creating more interest-based pathways into computational fluency, both on- and offline, particularly for youth from underrepresented groups in computing. Because informal learning spaces, like libraries, are powerful spaces for providing access and a supportive social context to cultivate the connected learning of youth, informal educators are ideal facilitators for workshops on Scratch and other digital media projects. Computational fluency is widely recognized as a key digital literacy, and Scratch can enable youth to create, design, and express themselves in new and empowering ways and can expand future career and life opportunities. And by tapping into the expertise of teens who may already be experienced with Scratch, informal learning spaces can empower youth to take on greater roles in their library communities.

The purpose of this presentation is to help educators develop a more sophisticated approach to technology integration in the classroom known as the Invisible iPad approach, which places emphasis on thoughtful and intentional uses of technology that lead to significant learning outcomes for students. The approach employed, known as the Invisible iPad approach uses a series strategies to allow educators to better understand how various technology processes can best support students and their learning experiences. Attendees will gain knowledge to better assess the purpose of technology, and then the focus on what types of iPad applications will lead to more meaningful learning outcomes. Moreover, participants will learn how to create learning experiences that transcend the four walls of their classroom.  In this presentation, attendees will be shown examples of various lessons that use the Invisible iPad approach in grades K-20 with artifacts of learning that demonstrate how technology can help develop and enhance 21st-Century skills such as Verbal and Visual Communication, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Language Acquisition, Organization, Collaboration, Creativity, and Higher Order Thinking. The final products of learning shared will clearly demonstrate how technology increases engagement, personalizes learning, and make student’s educational experiences more meaningful, memorable, and relevant to their lives.

During the presentation, we will review the TPACK and SAMR models to help the audience understanding how technology integration can positively impact them on both a professional and personal level. Both models will be critiqued for their lack of focus on student learning. The talk will then shift to the Invisible iPad approach which places student learning at the center of the integration process rather than solely on teacher behavior and practice, and the application of technological tools. The audience will be shown artifacts of learning from various K-12 classrooms to show the process and practical applications of the Invisible iPad Approach.

As the presentation progresses, attendees will engage in a design thinking challenge - how can we facilitate learning experiences that better support student voice and choice?

2016 is an interesting moment to consider the role of media in public life. Deciphering the sea of competing messages, engaging in public discourse, and mobilizing people and resources--practices of participatory politics (Kahne, Middaugh & Allen, 2015; Soep, 2014) all require digital literacies--the ability to access information, and analyze, generate and reflect on online content (Hobbs, 2011).  

For urban youth, the urgency of participatory politics at a time of national conversations about immigration, economic inequality, and police brutality is clear. While some find their way to participatory politics through informal means--interest driven communities (Kahne, Lee & Feezell, 2013), for others, opportunities need to be cultivated. The considerable inequity defining Internet use, with higher income individuals more likely to produce media and lower income individuals to consume it (Schradie, 2011), reinforces this need. The tendency of under-resourced schools to use technology to practice basic skills may further exacerbate this divide (Gray, L., Thomas, N. & Lewis, L., 2010).

This panel considers three efforts to cultivate the skills and motivations for youth engagement in participatory politics and highlights three critical components of the process of moving towards empowered engagement. All take place in urban settings with constrained technology and educational resources. The first study examines digital civic literacy interventions in Oakland high schools. The second describes Youth Radio Interactive’s work engaging teams of youth to develop and launch civic apps. The final study introduces the importance of imagination as a critical link between literacy and action. Each project explores an entry point--literacy, imagination, action--into participatory politics.

The panel’s work challenges the notion that youth civic development follows a linear trajectory from literacy to action. These phases of digital civic engagement are both autonomous and speak to each other over time, contributing to the development of empowered civic identities. In each phase, the integration of digital media into learning environments produced common themes. First, we observe shifts in attitudes toward learning, with youth at each phase noting the importance of persistence. Second, these practices created opportunities for agency, with students at each phase noting a stronger sense of ownership and responsibility for their learning. Third, in each phase iteration was a critical component of effective practice, with educators often working within numerous constraints.

During the panel, the projects will highlight how each relates to the three key themes and will share key strategies for integrating education for participatory politics within the constraints of urban learning settings. The presentations will speak to the importance of providing these opportunities and share lessons for practice. A youth participant from Youth Radio Interactive will provide commentary on the benefits and challenges of such efforts.   

Discussant Nicole Mirra will lead a discussion of how these projects inform our understanding of promoting equity in participatory politics.  

Presentations

1. ""The Impact of Small Scale Digital Literacy Interventions in Urban High School Classrooms”

2. “iImagine New Civic Realities: Building Digital Civic Imagination in Urban Classrooms”

Abstract
‘Formal’ learning environments are often rife with tensions between everyday expertise and school-based knowledge, particularly for youth from nondominant communities. The scholars in this session approach learning as a syncretic process that brings together everyday and academic learning (Gutiérrez, 2014). To develop an understanding of how syncretic processes of connected learning develop in youth and adults, we examine connected learning “as movement” (Gutierrez, 2008) across multiple sites, ways of knowing, relationships among peers, mentors and family members, and youths’ interests.  We find that nondominant communities in our study employ creativity and ingenuity to expand the possibilities of their current circumstances and shape new participation trajectories.

Objectives of session
This structured poster session consists of poster presentations from a MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network project that studies how youth and families develop and leverage their repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) across the home and within an informal learning context. The objectives of this session are to understand:  1) how to design ecologies that include learning practices that are organized around both everyday and school-based forms of expertise; 2) how children and families engage in joint activity with digital media, 3) how the social organization of activity in multiple contexts shapes and mobilizes media use, interests, and practices, and 4) how home media, language and literacy ecologies and ideologies affect connected learning.

Overview of presentation
This presentation is the first time that collaborative research stemming from this long-standing Connected Learning Research Network project is taking a case study approach, by family, to highlight the variations and regularities of the learning and movement across homes whose youth participate in a designed afterschool program. To develop an understanding of how syncretic processes of connected learning develop in youth and adults, we examined connected learning “as movement” (Gutierrez, 2008) across multiple sites, ways of knowing, relationships among peers, mentors and family members, and youths’ interests. ‘Formal’ learning environments are often rife with tensions between everyday expertise and school-based knowledge, particularly for youth from nondominant communities. The scholars in this session approach learning as a syncretic process that brings together everyday and academic learning.. Such an approach seeks to hold the tension between the everyday and the formal to underscore the idea that expansive and meaningful learning relies on their mutual relation.    

Scholarly Significance
This study provides important new insights into the ways we have traditionally understood varying participation structures in youth media engagement, particularly within families in “tight circumstances” (McDermott, 2010). In our work, we examine the ways in which interactions and social practices with others shape participation with digital media - or what researchers are terming “joint media engagement” (Takeuchi & Stevens, 2011) - as a fruitful way of understanding how to broaden and expand digital media practices for connected learning. We find that nondominant communities in our study employ creativity and ingenuity to expand the possibilities of their current circumstances and shape new participation trajectories.  We attended to the ways youth and families reorganized ordinary practices with digital media to re-purpose tools and their possibilities. We attended to the ways youth and families reorganized ordinary practices with digital media to re-purpose tools and their possibilities. To better understand these phenomena, we employed the analytical concept of “inventos” (Gutiérrez, 2013; Jacobs-Fantauzzi, 2003; Schwartz & Gutiérrez, 2013), or the ways in which nondominant communities engage their creativity and ingenuity to create everyday objects for learning.

Our session will include select IMLS grantees to be identified that can illustrate for attendees compelling models for engaging youth through connected learning models.  Since 2010, IMLS has supported more than $10 million in discretionary grants for participatory programs in museums and libraries across the nation, as well as related research and professional development.  Selected projects might include the  Making and Learning framework (Pittsburgh Children's Museum),  YouMedia online professional learning community (National Writing Project), or others.  All grantees have undergone a rigorous peer review process.

IMLS program officers and grantees will share emerging models and promising practices of how our nation's museums and libraries are engaging youth through hands-on, minds-on programs.  We'll share on a new model for the intentional design and execution of makerspaces developed in cooperation with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, as well as an online professional learning community for practitioners working with youth managed by the National Writing Project.   Ample time will be provided for questions and discussion.

IMLS program officers and grantees will share emerging models and promising practices of how our nation's museums and libraries are engaging youth through hands-on, minds-on programs.  We'll share an emerging model for the intentional design and execution of makerspaces developed in cooperation with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, as well as an online professional learning community for practitioners working with youth managed by the National Writing Project.

Learning Objective 1: The participants will learn about the scope and nature of support that IMLS provides for participatory learning and connected learning in libraries and museums nationwide and how that aligns with the agency’s mission and funding priorities

Learning Objective 2:  The participants will understand the three components of the framework to support learning in library and museum and library makerspaces.

Learning Objective 3: The attendees will discern the link between the framework components and the learning opportunities in which libraries and museums in hope to engage participants, as well as how to engage with peers in an online professional learning community to refine their practice.

This workshop will introduce the concept of our Engagement Lab learning playlist, which explores how to use three technological tools to playfully engage communities and classrooms in civic interventions. The three tools, DataBasic, Emerging Citizens & @Stake, are positioned to engage users in playful processes around data, exercise, and deliberation. Each tool will be introduced through its pedagogical framework, technological development, and learner application. Participants will then engage with each tool, and we will conduct reflections of their experiences. The goal for this interactive session is to share how game and data based methodologies can engage students’ expression, creation, and sharing of civic media that contributes positively to daily life. We will specifically focus on how these three game and data based interventions can create powerful community-centered, maker-based learning experiences that harness simple web based modes of communication to teach about expression, agency and voice.  The three tools in our playlist are:

@Stake is a digital role-playing game that fosters democracy, empathy, and creative problem solving for civic issues. Players take on various roles,  create questions based on real life issues, and deliberate over solutions that incorporate multiple stakeholder appeal. All participants pitch their ideas under a time limit and one of the players, “The Decider” chooses who has the best idea, awarding points to the winner. @Stake facilitates creative ideas, empathy, and learning about local issues through a playful, safe approach.

Emerging Citizens is a suite of digital multiplayer games and media literacy curriculums that teach students how to critique and create civic media. Through play, students develop skills to engage with a changing media landscape that blurs the lines between public and private, entertainment and advocacy, and information and advertising. Each game incorporates content that encourages students to engage with culturally and politically relevant topics that affect their daily lives while focusing on a specific 21st digital modality (Hashtags, Memes, and Hyperlinking). Emerging Citizens is accompanied by activity guides and curriculum materials to help educators connect the games to real-world skill-sets and pressing cultural issues.

DataBasic is a free suite of easy-to-use web tools that introduce concepts of working with data to beginners. These simple tools make it easy to work with data in fun ways, so you can learn how to find great stories to tell. WordCounter analyzes your text and tells you the most common words and phrases. WTFcsv provides the first step in CSV analyzation by characterizing each column's data type and contents so that you can ask more questions. SameDiff compares two or more text files using a cosine similarity algorithm to rate whether the documents are really similar or totally different. DataBasic includes video tutorials and activity guides to help teachers and community leaders introduce the platform to their participants.

Abstracts are available here: http://dml2016.dmlhub.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Building-Informal-Learning-Networks.pdf, and are attached as a resource file below. 

Individual Session Compelling Models
241 Squad Goals: How Youth Connect, Learn and PowerUp!
Ariam Mogos | Global Kids| @aamogos

Individual Session Compelling Models - 
194 Mentoring 20%: A new model for brokering expertise in Connected Learning spaces
Wade Berger | John G. Shedd Aquarium | @wadeatshedd

Individual Session Compelling Models
198  We’ll bring the bagels: The real work of starting, building, and sustaining collaborative networks
Ryan Coon | The Sprout Fund | @sproutfund

Individual Session Compelling Models
221 Computational thinking development in programming clubs: a project design for public elementary schools in Brazil
Carolina Rodeghiero | Universidade Católica de Pelotas (Catholic University of Pelotas) & UCPel and CocTec (research group) | @CarolRodeghiero

Individual Session Research
142 Connected Learning in Public Libraries
Katie Davis | University of Washington | @katiebda

Individual Session Compelling Models - museum games
217 How to Organize a Serious Game Jam in 87 Easy-to-Follow Steps
Rik Panganiban | California Academy of Sciences | @riktheranger

Abstracts are available here: http://dml2016.dmlhub.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Researching-Inclusive-Program-Design-.pdf, and are attached as a resource file below. 

Individual Session Research
80 Making Innovators in Formal and Informal Learning Environments
Matt Rafalow University of California-Irvine @mrafalow

Individual Session Research
158 Gaming the System: Connected learning and parental support among non-dominant families in the CyberPatriot program
Melissa Brough | California State University, Northridge |  @broughest

Individual Session Research
72  Early, Often, & Different: Fostering Inclusive Spaces for Supporting Diverse Learning Pathways in Games & Technology
Amanda Ochsner | University of Southern California | @AmandaOchsner

Individual Session Research
238 Twine Workshop: Youth Making Games and Digital Stories
Kelly Tran | Arizona State University | @kellymtran

Individual Session Research
146 Mexican Boys and Digitally-Mediated Learning Interactions
Carlos Martínez-Cano | University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education | @hyperopic

Individual Session     Research      
157 “Everyday” Making and Engagement with STEM
Priyanka Parekh | Arizona State University    

This session provides lessons learned from five years of mixed method fieldwork documenting a set of technologically-enhanced, educational interventions funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The initiative was advanced based on the assumption that technologically enhanced informal educational opportunities could potentially address challenges associated with the structural relationship between social background, including neighborhood context, and educational and occupational opportunities.  Progressive pedagogical approaches enhanced by new forms of digital technology were argued to be capable of improving outcomes of disadvantaged youth. The initiatives centered on schools, after-school enrichment programs and drop-in centers in Chicago and New York City. Over time, the programs in particular adopted a pedagogical model, Connected Learning, which stresses the importance of engaging under-resourced, non-dominant youth in ways that help them connect segments of their learning ecologies that are traditionally disconnected: interests, peer relationships, and opportunity. We present findings on positive outcomes associated with connected learning practices as well as opportunities and challenges around connected youth programming. The questions that we examine around technology, youth and education are arguably central to addressing the challenges and needs of 21st Century youth. In this session we’ll address the following themes: 1. Participation in the MacArthur Foundation's multifaceted educational initiatives exposed educators and administrators to new ideas, concepts, and tools that were designed to enhance their instructional practices. We’ll address how on-the-ground educators - operating as street-level bureaucrats - understood and implemented the core elements of the initiative. In particular, we’ll focus on their discourses and observed practices with respect to progressive pedagogy, technology and the intersection between technology and pedagogy. We’ll also unpack barriers to implementation and supports educators reported as important. 2. Youth participants in these programs as well as schools they attended are situated in particular neighborhood contexts that differ in structural characteristics, including exposure to crime and violence.  These neighborhood contexts structure youth access to formal and informal educational opportunities. We’ll explore the relationship between program participation, neighborhood context, social background, and educational opportunity. 3. We will address the extent to which youth who engage in these types of programs and schools have varying educational outcomes, including how these relationships vary by social network relationships and social background.  For example, we explore whether students from families with fewer resources, and neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and exposure to crime and violence, are particularly sensitive to the relationship between educational outcomes and the connected learning practices we observed. We will also identify how different measures of educational outcomes (e.g., self-reported attitudes and behaviors, traditional standardized tests and alternative assessments) are suggestive of the possibilities and limitations of the capacity for technologically-enhanced, progressive education to shape educational outcomes.

As current momentum grows around expanding Computer Science education at the K-12 level, associated public policy narratives assume that we’ve addressed the core question: Why teach CS to all students? The presumed answer in public debates has been simple: Making sure kids are “job ready on day 1,” as President Obama stated in his announcement of the national CS for All (CS4All) initiative. In this panel, we present a project that aims to expand the vision of “Computer Science for All” to go beyond ‘job readiness’ rationales to include a range of purposes, including those currently receiving less attention in public discourse such as creative computation and critical or social justice-oriented approaches to technological production.

The current growth of K-12 CS education is arguably unprecedented. The federal government has increased funding through its Computer Science for All initiative, and cities across the country including Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles are following suit. Problems currently being discussed by stakeholders in CS4All initiatives are generally “technocratic” in nature (e.g., How do we find and train enough teachers? What tools should we use? What does the scope and sequence for the curriculum look like?) While those are important concerns to consider in order to meet the ambitious access-oriented goal driving these initiatives, those more “technocratic” questions cannot be answered fully without first addressing underlying questions about ideology: What are the purposes of bringing computer science education to all students? Why is CS ed important? How might it improve the futures of a wide-range of youth?

In this session, presenters will introduce a framework that can be used to analyze the purposes of a CS education program, curriculum or initiative, and create throughlines between how purposes line up with enacted pedagogies and policies. Developed through a participatory knowledge building process in collaboration with leading CS educators and organizations involved in the CS4All initiative in New York City, the framework provides a well-defined set of purposes for CS learning that can allow educators, administrators and policymakers to carefully consider how their current initiatives reflect different ideologies and assumptions.

The framework outlines the various arguments used to justify CS education, and the general rationale behind them. It then details what each argument implies in terms of enacted pedagogy, intended outcomes and envisioned future pathways for learners, providing examples that emerged through discussions with CS leaders and educators. Finally, the presenters will consider how different visions for computer science education relate to and might support each other within a larger ecosystem around CS learning, and make recommendations as to how robust CS learning ecosystems that speak to the range of CS purposes might be achieved.

The Hive Mapping Cooperative (HMC) developed in Chicago in the spring of 2014 as an effort to facilitate collaborative youth-led inquiry into human ecology and urban ecosystems by developing shared systems for teens from across the city to collect, analyze, visualize, and share georeferenced data using free and open-source mapping, data collection and data sharing tools. HMC was proposed to address the fact that many youth-serving organizations expressed interest in using digital mapping with students but lacked the resources or technical knowledge to do so. HMC sought to identify existing digital technologies that met three criteria: free open-source software, ease of training and use, and functionality allowing for meaningful data analysis. Partners desired to integrate collaborative mobile data collection, mapping, and visualization technologies to enrich (rather than replace) existing program foci.

This project has engaged multiple out-of-school time programs across a network of organizations and urban spaces (i.e. neighborhoods, parks, urban farms, forest preserves, and restored natural areas). HMC partners identified a range of technologies and developed curricular strategies for teens to collaborate on locally-relevant issues. HMC has worked to integrate open-source tools to allow teens to collaboratively document, make sense of, question, and imagine alternatives to existing nature-human, nature-nature, and human-human relationships and recognize maps as contested spaces. This session will provide an overview of the project, the range of digital technologies used, and the impact on youth engagement and learning.  Attendees will learn how the project has increased teen collaboration and relationship building across programs and organizations. The presenters will share how attendees can freely access project resources and begin integrating these resources into programming.

How can slowing down be used as a guiding principle for meaningful engagement on social media? How can slow looking, listening, and storytelling activities support both self-exploration and cross-cultural sensitivity and understanding? These kinds of questions are at the heart of Out of Eden Learn, an online global education program that connects youth (pre-K through high school) to take part in shared learning journeys.

The Out of Eden Learn curriculum consists of a series of offline activities and online exchanges between students on our custom-designed social media platform. These activities are designed around three core learning goals:  slowing down to observe the world carefully and to listen attentively to others; exchanging stories and perspectives related to people, place, and identity; reflecting on how individual lives connect to bigger human stories.  Out of Eden Learn is an educational companion to journalist Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk - an epic, "slow journalism" project in which he is retracing on foot the migratory pathways of our ancestors out of Africa and across the globe. 

In this session, Carrie James will share an overview of Out of Eden Learn’s design principles and curriculum and selected examples of student work.

How do educators, artists, and technologists design a learning experience around ideation and brainstorming in order for youth to develop a successful collaborative project and narrative?  We invite you to explore with us how we can democratize the creative process using engaging game mechanics, structures, and constraints in order to create a starting point for collaborative projects as a component of project-based learning.  Participants must have a laptop (preferred), tablet or smart phone with internet.  

Sixties activists insisted, the personal is political. Change-makers in the digital age get that idea, and one-up it with another rallying cry: the political is social and cultural. This principle brings opportunity and peril to young people seeking to be change-makers. Platforms, digital strategies, and individual civic agents need to take this principle seriously so that young people can learn to engage each other, and their allies, in high-quality, equitable, and effective participation in digital-age civics, activism, and politics. Young people need practices for navigating digital environments that actively support the secure development of their identities as participants in public spheres, so their civic and political engagement today doesn’t harm or haunt them later.
In this hands-on and interactive workshop, participants will learn about the Youth and Participatory Politics Action Framework, developed by MacArthur Foundation’s Youth Participatory Politics Research Network. Comprising ten principles, the goal of our framework is to help both educators and ordinary civic actors design successful–– i.e., effective, equitable, and self-protective––participation one step at a time Participants will discuss essential goals and strategies concerning the action framework against their concrete contexts. Multiple perspectives are welcome. This workshop is open to a wide audience, not only to researchers but also to platform designers, educators, and other practitioners.
1. Why does it matter to me?  (equity)
2. How much should I share?  (self-protection)
3. How do I make it about more than myself?  (equity)
4. Where do we start? (efficacy)
5. How can we make it easy and engaging for others to join in? (efficacy)
6. How do we get wisdom from crowds? (equity & self-protection)
7. How do we handle the downside of crowds?  (equity & self-protection)
8. How does raising our voices count as civic and political action?  (efficacy)
9. How do we get from voice to change? (efficacy)
10. How can we find allies? (efficacy)
WORKSHOP FORMAT
The workshop includes minimal lecturing for the introduction and maximal interactive sessions for inquiry practice among participants.  Participants will be asked to post any questions to an ad hoc online space, like Hackpads (http://www.hackpads.com), or on the wall using post-it sheets.  The overall structure involves the following:

• Introductory presentation on Youth and Participatory Politics Action Framework

• Breakout sessions

• Participants form small groups by shared issues regarding the action framework.

• An action-reflection rubric is distributed. The rubric can guide participants to connect their contexts and experiences effectively to the action framework. It can be also used to visualize their practice in a 3-D graph.

• Participants discuss how they can redesign or improve their practice, what challenges are expected in such processes, and how to overcome them.

• Group Presentation and Q & A

• Participants review the questions contributed thorough the session, pick a few important ones (or, they can vote for the most desired questions), and discuss them.

• Reflection and evaluation

As the education system makes steps forward in rethinking our outmoded ways of assessing learning, portfolios stand out as the strong option for providing real evidence of learning. More than that, they allow for youth voice to shine through. Whether portfolios serve as a true alternative to grades and test scores or as a supplement, they have caught traction and promise to serve as a means to broaden access for all learners to new college and career opportunities. And just as importantly, they reflect back one’s learning and growth.

Join Maker Ed's workshop session on open portfolios and engage in an opportunity to make, capture, and document. Consider how these experiences translate to the classroom, integrate with new and existing multimedia tools, and form the foundation of portfolio practices across the board. The workshop will include discussion around facilitation and offer up examples of what youth portfolios can look like. Learn more about our ongoing research as part of the Open Portfolio Project, in collaboration with Indiana University’s Creativity Labs, and together, we’ll design strategies for how youth can best showcase their learning.

This session, Launching the Mission: Admission Challenge, outlines the one-year process of deploying an online game-based intervention to improve college-going practices for low-income high school students in communities throughout California. One of the primary motivators behind the Mission: Admission Challenge was to harness students' daily engagement with games and social media and to apply those influences to motivate, educate, and support students in applying to college and for financial aid. This panel brings together the diverse project partners in the gaming, college access, and research fields to discuss the many components that went into launching and sustaining the Mission: Admission Challenge. The panel highlights lessons learned through project implementation, research activities, student engagement, and project evaluation.

Panelists:
Researcher Perspective: Conceptualizing, Recruiting, and Iterating (Pullias Center for Higher Education, Los Angeles, CA) Dr. Amanda Ochsner will present a brief overview of the Mission: Admission Challenge, beginning with key motivators for the project and how the lead investigators initially conceptualized the research design. She will then describe the team's strategies for recruiting schools and making iterations throughout the initial implementation phase based on feedback from principals, counselors, and teachers. Ochsner will also share preliminary qualitative and quantitative findings from the first year of data collection.

Game Designer Perspective: Designing, Debugging, and Troubleshooting (USC Game Innovation Lab, Los Angeles, CA) Game designers Elizabeth Swensen and Sean Bouchard will describe the process of designing an updated version of the Mission: Admission game, highlighting changes made to ensure that the game was accessible and engaging for students across a diverse spectrum of access. Throughout the duration of the project, schools in the research sample experienced a variety of technology challenges, including limited access to reliable broadband, not having adequate supply of working computers, and inability to schedule students into computer labs. Swensen and Bouchard will describe their strategies for play testing, debugging, and troubleshooting with participating schools.

Digital Engagement Perspective: Incentivizing and Engaging (Get Schooled Foundation, New York, NY & Seattle, WA): Nourisha Wells from the Get Schooled Foundation will describe their group's role in engaging and incentivizing student and school participation in the Mission Admission Challenge. She will share information about how their organization's regional and national school-based competitions are designed to increase educational outcomes such as attendance, college application, and FAFSA completion rates. She will also discuss the process for integrating a game-based research intervention into its Challenge model to incentivize student and school engagement in research participation and data collection.

Evaluator Perspective: Advising and Evaluating (APA Consulting, Denver, CO): Abby McClelland from the evaluation team will outline their strategy for measuring the impact of the intervention and examining the effects the Mission: Admission Challenge had on students college-going efficacy, college knowledge, FAFSA completion, and college enrollment. In addition to analyzing key outcome measures, the external evaluation team is also responsible for designing the evaluation study to meets the What Works Clearinghouse standards.   

Which uses of technology in schools help create equity, and which don’t? Our answers may surprise you. Our educator-led initiative, called Smart Tech Use for Equity, is engaging a diverse group of K-12 teachers who teach San Diego’s low-income students of color. Our goal? Identify uses of technology in schools that promote student learning, development and success versus uses that don’t.

The project asks teachers to be equity designers, exploring the potential and limitations of tech for enabling student thinking, learning, voice and achievement. We’re asking a critical question about our classroom efforts: Does this use of tech help support the full human talent development of every student and all groups of students? Or not?

In 2015, each of 10 founding teachers explored one tech use with their students, documented the effects for students, and shared their learning with other teachers. Our action research/documentation process, supported by Educator Innovator and Teaching Tolerance, was featured on the cover of Teaching Tolerance magazine this January. This year, leaders are engaging school-based groups of colleagues in the same process. We’ve developed this template for testing, documenting and publicly sharing the “smartness” of specific tech uses with equity in mind:
1. What’s your equity vision for students in your classroom?
2. What tech use did you experiment with to see if it could help achieve that vision?
3. What did you do with your students to test that use of tech, and how did it go? (Show the pros and cons for students.)
4. What’s your conclusion about how “smart” that tech use was for achieving your equity vision?

The process supports teachers to test and publicly share tech uses for equity. Founding teachers tested whether Explain Everything and iMovie could support English learners to communicate their scientific thinking; whether TodaysMeet and Padlet might support middle school students in deeper dialogues about literature (one did, one didn’t); and whether videoing/viewing third graders’ math explanations using an Ipad might build students’ ability to explain math concepts, for example (https://sites.google.com/site/smarttech4equity/). This year, teachers are testing/documenting whether hands-on or online “labs” in middle school science deepen scientific understanding; what counts as “smart tech use” in a library context; and whether a graphing app opens up or shuts down students’ understanding of graphs, for example. Beyond “glitzy apps,” we’ve realized something counterintuitive: Often, equity might require the simplest uses of tech that get students to talk, write and create.  

We think we’re on to a process supporting teachers to pursue big dreams for their classrooms that go far beyond more tech use. A key to making equity visions a reality is debating and documenting whether tech uses actually support students’ learning, participation, and deep comprehension in schools. In our presentation, educator leaders of Smart Tech Use for Equity will share our process, inviting more teachers to join us as equity designers.

Sociocultural research on young people’s literate practices with digital media have generally focused on literacy events and practices that are grounded in distinct online locations, such as affinity spaces, specific websites, particular video games, or virtual worlds. However, contemporary media landscapes have become networked to such an extent that a transmedial approach is needed to understand the social, cultural, and literate contexts that young people inhabit.

In this presentation we use qualitative content analyses of products and artifacts from the Hunger Games media franchise to explore literacy practices as embedded in corporate and fan-produced transmedia ecologies. Data for this study include Hunger Games-related texts (books, fan fiction stories, websites, fan videos), products (video games), and artifacts (curricular materials) produced by the publishing company Scholastic, the marketing company Lionsgate, and by fans of the franchise. Qualitative content analysis is used to compare and contrast patterns in relation to the following questions:

● What types of entry-points for literate participation are sponsored by the official producers of these transmedia products?

● What types of entry-points for literate participation are created by consumers or prosumers of these transmedia products?

● How might these entry-points shape and constrain young people’s literate participation?  

Such questions encourage us to look beyond spatial and structural boundaries to understand how flows of corporate and user-produced artifacts can shape, constrain, and expand young people’s literate repertoires.

Official Ignite Talks! 
Ignite Talks will be hosted by Gardner Campbell and will take place Thursday, October 6, 2016 and Friday, October 7, 2016.

Thursday, October 6, 2016
Kim Jaxon, California State University, Chico
Ana Maria Campos, SPARX NYC Parks
Bridget McGraw, Pilot City
Erhardt Graeff, MIT Center for Civic Media
Jason Engerman, Penn State University
Christian Friedrich, Hamburg University of Technology/Leuphana Digital School
Peter McPartlan, University of California, Irvine
Robin DeRosa, Plymouth State University
Mark Deppe, University of California, Irvine
Annie Mais, Road Trip Nation 

The turn in learning sciences towards more sociocultural-oriented theories of development has no doubt spurred an interest in creating virtual learning environments that privilege peer-to-peer collaboration, discourse, and content sharing over more didactic, instructor-centered pedagogies. Join me in exploring software demos, course examples, and preliminary findings from the social learning software SuiteC, including a look at our unique 3D printed “Engagement Trees”- data objects representing student social participation in two online undergraduate courses.

SuiteC comprises three interrelated LTI apps that live inside our campus Canvas learning management system, and through custom API integrations, interact with native Canvas tools. The three apps include: 1) Asset Library for sharing, viewing discussing, and liking student-generated content organized by filters and hashtags; 2) Whiteboards for remixing Assets in the Library through individual/collaborative multimodal composing; and 3) Engagement Index for tracking and awarding social points displayed on a course leaderboard and visualizing this social participation in a weekly analytics report. Visit https://www.ets.berkeley.edu/suitec for more info.

Drawing from a social learning analytics toolkit and an assemblage approach, this project reports preliminary findings from SuiteC implementation in two online learning courses, visualizing patterns and trends in social participation in relation to SuiteC features and the pedagogical orientations of the courses.  

Common Sense Education's community helps preK-12 educators discover, use, and share the best apps, games, websites, and digital curricula for their students. Since its launch in 2013, the ratings and reviews site (previously known as Graphite) has provided unbiased, rigorous ratings and practical insights from an active community of teachers. In this talk, reviewer and assistant editor Patricia Monticello Kievlan will discuss her experiences as a member of Common Sense Education's founding writing team and her work scouring edtech for the best tools to support learning experiences for a wide range of student needs. This talk will explore how Common Sense Education reviewers evaluate edtech for engagement, pedagogy, and support, and it will discuss key insights for how teachers and edtech developers can use digital media to design and build a flexible, supportive, and sustainable learning environment for every child.

As a classroom teacher and administrator, Monticello Kievlan has worked to connect students, teachers, and school learning specialists with the best edtech tools to support teaching and learning. As a community builder with The Sprout Fund in Pittsburgh's Remake Learning Network, she investigates ways to use digital media to help formal and informal educators improve their practice and better serve their students. She's critically interested in how edtech breaks down barriers to access, whether it's helping a dyslexic reader access the curriculum or helping families combat the summer slide. This talk explores how Common Sense Education's critical lens offers a helpful focus for understanding what works in digital media for -- and what work still needs to be done.

“Annotate” is a word previously confined to the pedagogy of the humanities classroom, but now there is an “Annotate” button on a rap lyric website that allows young people to comment on and discuss the language and ideas of their favorite pop songs. For the 2016 State of the Union, presidential speech writers past and present officially annotated the text of the speech on the White House website, offering their thoughts about rhetorical strategy and social context in the margins of the address. In the informal educational space we know as the Web, we are entering an Age of Annotation. Classroom educators can leverage this technology not only to help students develop digital literacy skills but to empower them to become thoughtful and responsible digital citizens.

For teachers and students in particular there is nothing new about the age-­old learning practice of annotation. Marginal note-taking has been proven to encourage active reading and critical thinking and writing skills. Online, though, this practice becomes social, collaborative, and multimodal. Reading closely means not only paying careful attention to the words of an author but to the responses of one’s classmates. Critical “writing” might take the form of images or videos added in the margins of a text under study. Even as students work together to create meaning, the work of individual contributors can become more apparent: a student might distinguish themselves as having a keen ear for historical context or an eye for graphic design. Further, web annotation enables students to explore independent lines of inquiry more dynamically, leaving a trail of their thinking as they navigate the Internet.

Jeremy Dean, Director of Education at hypothes.is, an open source, non-profit software group developing web annotation technology for the classroom, will lead off this session by giving a practical and historical introduction to the hypothes.is tool. Three practicing teachers, Mia Zamora, Larry Hanley, and Joel Garza, will then discuss the use of the hypothes.is tool in their respective classrooms, ranging from high school to college to graduate education. Finally, the group will discuss the role of annotation in the National Writing Project’s Letters to the Next President 2.0 initiative, in which hypothes.is is being used by teachers and students across the country to discuss the 2016 election and “write back” to the candidates themselves.

We will thus conclude by broadening the conversation about web annotation as simply a powerful teaching and learning tool to web annotation as a means of online civic engagement. While web annotation can and does activate the 21st century learning skills emphasized in curriculums across the country, as a digital technology that is in use beyond the classroom, it has the potential to empower young people as responsible and engaged thinkers in the real world too. Participants will leave this session with a practical understanding of how to use the hypothes.is tool in their classrooms as well how they might incorporate a practice of web annotation into their own intellectual inquiries and conversations.

“World languages” is one of the key fundamental subjects for 21st Century students (P21, 2015). However, resources—human and materials alike—for children learning non-English languages are often scarce. Existing learning materials are often designed for older audience or adapted from those written for native speakers (with more advanced languages and sometimes culturally irrelevant references). Interactive Tales (I-Tales) aims to address this need and engage young world language learners and their parents, extend their exposure to and practice with their world languages, and thereby improve their world language oral proficiency, reading competence, and vocabulary knowledge. In our presentation, we will introduce the I-Tales project. Informed by research on games and digital media, I-Tales is a tablet app functioning as a combination of games and “choose-your-own adventure” stories. The prototype we will use in presentation is designed for enhancing and helping children’s language development in Mandarin Chinese. We will highlight the design and learning principles behind the app. For example, the learners create their own avatars and progress through stories with different language difficulty levels. As the avatars advance in the stories by choosing their own paths, they also pick up various tokens that may help them unlock additional story contents. Each level will highlight key vocabulary words and sentence structures. The tokens for unlocking new contents and building the avatar character can be acquired by encountering new materials in the stories and in practicing them in mini-games. Future implementation plans of I-Tales will also be discussed.

What happens when making software is fundamentally shifted, away from interpreted computer languages, to a tactile and visual programming medium?  Building on some of the groundbreaking thinking by theorists like Bret Victor in his seminal demo “Stop Drawing Dead Fish,” Ready is the product of two years of deep R&D with students and schools in the USA and Canada, rethinking how software is made from the inside out.

This session presents findings from schools and camps using the Ready system (getready.io), in particular, how motivation to learn coding changes when the emphasis of memorizing syntax as pre-condition for creativity shifts towards an emphasis to understanding systems theory and logical constructs.  What does software as a form of “self-expression” look like?  How can software, rooted in the grammar of games, be constructed to tell stories that reflect the unique perspective and experience of the child?  How can educators, who often lack direct computer science education, be empowered to confidently teach the architecture of software?  How are students from dramatically different socioeconomic backgrounds expressing themselves in this medium?  

Findings from the Ready pilot programs in privileged independent schools and camps, low-income public schools, and charter schools focused on neurologically challenged students, provide a fascinating view of the “democratization of software creation,” with deep implications for making “code to learn, learn to code” relevant across diverse communities and experiences.  Join us for a an exploration of the new frontier of creation.

The session will focus on the ongoing development of an open source tool and specification, which is being developed at Penn State that enables the production of content for online learning according to principles of remixing. The tool is being designed to enable amateurs and experts alike to produce modular learning content, which is important for Open Educational Resources (OER), an emerging educational area that is still in its early stages.

OER is loosely defined as any resource that enables teaching and learning with minimal usage restrictions. However, OER production has yet to become popular with the majority of faculty in higher education for reasons including lack of awareness, technical inhibitions, policy confusion, IP concerns, time constraints, and a lack of incentives.

The purpose of our presentation is to create awareness and infuse interest in the possibilities of transformative OER authoring tools. To achieve this, we will demonstrate how anyone using remix principles can now search, fork, combine, alter, publish, and share OER specified materials to produce an online course with relative ease. By displaying the tool’s powerful recombinant capability, we also aim to show how a standard OER specification can impact the growth and availability of educational materials. Our presentation will include, both, the practical aspects of the tool as well as its cultural and theoretical importance for open education.

Our goal at the Laboratory for Social Machines is to create technology that empowers learners by providing self-expressive, socially collaborative, and playful literacy learning opportunities. We have developed an early literacy learning app called SpeechBlocks, where children can manipulate letter blocks to hear the sounds their words and letters make when they are constructed and deconstructed. Through this app, children are exposed to emergent literacy practices that teach alphabetic principles in personally meaningful ways. We piloted SpeechBlocks with 16 preschool students and found that it is an effective literacy learning tool that inspires creativity and supports organic social interactions. During the pilot, we instrumented the mobile devices and classroom environment to collect a corpus of rich qualitative and quantitative data. We are using the results from this pilot to explore how we can go beyond learning analytics in early education by introducing what we are calling play analytics, data-driven analysis of free play. We are examining the potential for open-ended, child-driven technology, like SpeechBlocks, to serve as an unstructured playground to collect and combine contextual and behavioral data. The analysis of this data, through play analytics, may have implications for researchers, educators, and parents by providing a more descriptive view of children’s learning processes and literacy skills. Such analysis may also help us build automatic scaffolding tools into our apps to provide personalized learning activities that are child-driven, machine-guided.

Biotechnology is the transformative technology of the 21st century. Bioengineered Food, Fragrances, Medicine, Energy, and Materials industries are used by billions of people across the world every year.  Learning genetic engineering and biotechnology hands-on will make you and your students the leading innovators of the 21st century!

Specifically conceived for new learners, The Amino One Personal BioLab is part of a complete ecosystem of hardware, software and wetware. By introducing application-based DNA kits like the Artist App to create Pigments for paint and dyes, and the Glow App, a ready-to-engineer living nightlight, the Amino One kit allows individuals of all levels and ages to experience bioengineering hands on from concept to useable product... in a few days.  In the future, anyone will be able to engineer their own flavor of bread, of beer, of yogurt, make smells and pigments, materials, cosmetics, even medicine. This workshop-style talk will allow you to become familiar with this new teaching/learning system for science, and even try your hands at bioengineering too!

Virtual reality (VR) is one of the most exciting emerging technologies today, especially for the education sector. The opportunity to immerse students in different environments and provide novel experiences has tremendous potential for developing empathy, sharpening critical 21st-century skills, and sparking a desire to engage with the world. And yet, just like any other cutting-edge tool, VR’s ability to actually enhance learning hinges on high quality content and implementation. How, then, can we harness the power of this innovative technology for educational purposes and advancing social good?

Global Nomads Group (GNG), a nonprofit with proven experience in virtual exchange (technology-enabled, sustained, people-to-people educational programs) and a leader in developing VR’s applications for the global education field, will lead an interactive, results-driven workshop to address this question. Participants will have the opportunity to explore GNG’s innovative program model, experience VR technology, and brainstorm ways in which they can integrate these principles and practices into their own contexts.

During this workshop, participants will:

- Learn about GNG’s innovative virtual exchange programs, including the accompanying curriculum, facilitation and classroom implementation techniques, and monitoring and evaluation practices

- Explore how VR can be used for educational purposes, especially to develop socio-emotional learning, global awareness, and the 21st-century skills necessary to succeed in today’s global economy

- Experience VR technology

- Review concrete examples of GNG programs and hear testimonies from students and educators  who participated in virtual exchange programs at View Park High School (located in South Los Angeles)

- Brainstorm how to integrate virtual exchange and VR into participants’ current or aspirational activities, programs, and/or classrooms

At the end of this workshop, participants will understand how innovative technology, when combined with quality content and implementation, can have powerful effects on students’ learning and capacity to bring positive change to their communities. They will also have the tools and techniques to apply the power of virtual exchange and VR for their own educational and programmatic goals.

When we seek opportunities to leverage existing digital spaces and communities, we open up the possibility for constructing new curricular structures. Project V-LIFe (Virtual Language Immersion in Foreign LanguagEs) is part of the Multidisciplinary Design Program at the University of California, Irvine. This interdisciplinary project utilizes the immersive language environment afforded by foreign-language servers of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft (WoW). Leveraging this immersive setting, custom in-game tasks enable second language (L2) learners to negotiate meaning in real time by engaging with the L2 and making themselves understood in culturally appropriate ways. This pedagogical strategy provides access to areas of communication and cultural competency not feasible in traditional classrooms. During the initial 1-week pilot of our ongoing project, students participated in researcher-designed quests intended to facilitate  communication (reading, writing, listening, speaking). Additionally, in scaffolded debriefing sessions students were given the opportunity to explore the confines inherent in their own cultural frames as well as notions of the ‘real’ German-speaking world. In this presentation we will share challenges and benefits we encountered in designing “learning quests” for use within a platform developed without L2 outcomes in mind. Successful strategies are highlighted which leverage the native game design and storyline to embolden L2 use with native speakers on an individual, collaborative, learner-learner and learner-native speaker basis.

The Digital Youth Network (DYN) at DePaul University is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating learning environments that support all youth in developing the skills needed to actively participate in a democratic and globally networked society.  Critical to our design process is our collaborations with community organizations. In this panel we present five projects that differ in scale and the mode of the learning experience (online, blended, face-to-face).  We share our co-design process, and the opportunities and challenges faced creating meaningful experiences for diverse youth, while balancing the needs and constraints of participating organizations.

1) Transforming Chicago into a Citywide Campus for Interest-Based Learning

The Chicago City of Learning (CCOL) initiative is a partnership with the city of Chicago, DYN, and over 130 youth-serving organizations to provide low-cost, informal STEAM learning opportunities to all youth.  To transform Chicago into a campus of learning, we provide trainings, visualizations, and frameworks to build and make visible to all the living learning ecosystem of Chicago.   We discuss our approach and the challenges we faced supporting this citywide innovation.

2) The Young Author Playlist: Collaborating Across Spaces to Support Writing

The Young Author Playlist is a learning pathway designed to support youth's interest in writing.  The playlist was co-developed by writing mentors in Chicago's informal education space using a design process based on the DYN Learning Pathway Framework. This presentation describes the role of partnerships across informal and formal learning spaces in both creating and implementing an equity-based approach to supporting youth engagement in writing.

3) Digital Exchange Society: Connecting Youth in Chicago and Morocco Virtually

Under the J. Christopher Stevens Initiative, DYN has partnered with school and community organizations to engage youth from Chicago and Morocco in cross-cultural exchanges through the co-creation of digital artifacts. Key to taking this impact to scale is the collaboration across countries and sectors. Participants in this presentation will learn how we facilitated compelling learning experiences for youth and how virtual exchange utilized new media technologies to link young people across cultures in sustained and meaningful ways.

4) “We’re doing some cool stuff on there”: Designing a Collaborative Blended Learning Culture in the Classroom

We share a case study based on a collaboration with a school to develop an online social learning network to support interest-based and academic learning. This presentation will cover the successes and challenges of designing, implementing, and maintaining an active blended learning community through collaboration with teachers, students, researchers, designers, teaching artists, and administrators.

5) Minecraft Citywide Server - Creating an Gaming Ecosystem to Support Youth Exploration of Computer Science.

DYN is leveraging the popularity and extensibility of Minecraft, an online, multiplayer game, to expose and connect underrepresented youth to long-term computing pathways. Working closely with community partners, we are designing computing-related worlds and automatic digital badges to help youth translate their computing experience in Minecraft to other learning spaces. We also use badges to connect youth to relevant informal programs in Chicago. We discuss our design and collaboration process to implementing this initiative. We also discuss how we overcame challenges related to unequal technology infrastructures.

Jordan Natan Hochenbaum is a co-founder, Chief Creative Officer, and Vice President of Engineering at Kadenze, the art MOOC platform. He also serves as faculty in the Music Technology and Digital Media programs at California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches creative coding, engineering, computational & generative graphics, music production and performance. His work involves leveraging machine learning in the arts, designing novel interfaces for musical performance, and playing and composing in a wide range of musical genres. As co-founder of FlipMu, Jordan has explored large-scale interactive environments (such as the recent 4-story multitouch performance space for RedBull and Vita Motus), real-time data sonification, generative audio-visual systems, and musical interface design with open source aesthetics. Co-founding the Noise Index, he has exhibited installations and public artworks that question our relationships with technology, in New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles.

Combining their considerable and complementary backgrounds in designing learning experiences for and with the arts, Jordan and Deborah will deliver a workshop that is participatory, inclusive and informed by best practices at all levels All interested in online learning are welcome, regardless of previous experience.

In this discussion, we explore youth interest discovery and their opportunities for imagining possible futures. We look across multiple scales, ranging from three youths’ experiences playing Starcraft to over 3,000 afterschool programs for youth in one large city to explore questions of what ignites youth interests and what conditions surround their pursuit of possible futures and desired outcomes. Through sharing this Connected Learning research, we hope to spark a conversation about ways to support youth in such interest-related pursuits.This panel includes the following presentations, discussant remarks, and a conversation:

Mapping and Modeling the Abundance, Diversity, and Accessibility of Summer Learning Opportunities at the Scale of a City. We explore the abundance, diversity, and accessibility of out of school learning opportunities by taking advantage of a unique dataset for the City of Chicago that includes information on the 3,844 organized summer learning opportunities for youth in the city. Using a combination of data mining techniques and Geographical Information Systems tools, we map the ecology of learning opportunities in a large city, showing the variability in program abundance, diversity, and accessibility across the city.

Supporting interest discovery in a free-choice making and tinkering environment: Not what you might expect! FUSE aims to provide a fun and relaxed way to explore STEAM topics in both school and out-of-school spaces, by providing an environment in which students can pursue diverse ‘challenges’ in areas such as robotics, electronics, graphic design, or 3D printing. Evaluation of FUSE reveals that interest development is characterized not only by sustained engagement into a particular activity, but from the space and opportunity to explore and try out various activities.

“We are all scientists here”: How museum program design supports youth’s science-linked identities. Learning environments play a critical role in shaping youth’s views of science, their interest-development, and their pursuit of science careers. Drawing on youth interviews and museum artifacts, we examine three separate science museum internship programs to understand the relationships among program design, youth’s conceptions and pursuit of science, and their identities within these fields.

Disruptions and Redistribution of Practices: Examining Suspensions of Youths’ Interest-related Activities. Although understanding what sustains engagement in interest-related activities is integral to the field, understanding what disrupts engagement has been largely ignored. We seek to expand and complicate the notion of “conditions of practice” for the youth and their interest-related pursuits. We found that some youth suspended their participation due to loss of access to resources, and other youth suspended pursuits due to competing educational commitments and future desires.

The “Armchair Philosopher”: Learning in StarCraft and Supporting Possible Selves. Research on videogames and learning has typically focused on features of games, and how these can be leveraged to promote deeper learning. We examine how playing StarCraft, and learning within the StarCraft gaming community, influenced three players’ development of “possible selves” as they consider post-secondary aspirations. Our findings indicate that the players envisioned linkages between the game’s skills, strategies, epistemology, and the work they hoped to find—or avoid—in the future.

This panel presents research and practice around the persistent challenge of achieving equitable youth access to digital learning opportunities in informal contexts. Researchers report stubborn disparities that run along all-too-familiar socioeconomic lines, with youth from wealthier communities enjoying more opportunities to learn important skills and dispositions related to digital media production and design (Hargittai & Walejko, 2008; Margolis, 2008). In an effort to help address this complex problem, we offer a holistic frame that organizes underlying factors impacting equitable access and uptake along three, interconnected levels:

(1) Micro or individual, e.g., factors pertaining to youth and educators and the interactions between them, including youth interest level and developing identities, youth help-seeking orientation and adult orientation toward brokering.
(2) Meso or organizational, e.g, factors related to the development of program models and institutional structures that promote youth access to programs and create viable links to other experiences.
(3) Macro or ecosystem, e.g., factors that may include the availability of programs in a given neighborhood, issues of safety as impinging on access, and discoverability of information about opportunities.

To further illustrate this frame, we have organized a diverse panel of researchers and educators who will speak to each of these levels.

First, Dixie Ching from Hive Research Lab / New York University will present case studies at the micro level, describing youth and Hive educator experiences involving brokering, efforts to make opportunities more accessible, interpersonal challenges that young people face and factors that attenuate that. In addition, she will bring needed attention to how attitudes and realities of informal educators impacts their brokering practices.

Next, Rafi Santo from Hive Research Lab / Indiana University will outline and present data from case studies of organizations within Hive NYC that relate to meso-level issues, offering a vision into the kinds of organizational practices, programs and structures that might be put in place to promote access to learning opportunities.

Following that, Eda Levenson from the Urban Arts Partnership will describe their Alumni Scholars Program (ASP), which seeks to close the opportunity gap by providing long-term support to UAP alumni that connects their programmatic experiences to college and or career goals. In addition to creative and artistic cultivation, ASP focuses on promoting academic persistence and life skills.

Finally, Caitlin Martin from the Digital Youth Network will present how we can utilize technology to address macro level issues such as identifying ‘learning deserts’ through city-wide mapping efforts, and designing programs and platforms that explicitly aim to address geographic gaps by connecting learners and families to digital and local resources and opportunities.

References:
Hargittai, E., & Walejko, G. (2008). The participation divide: content creation and sharing in the digital age. Information, Community and Society, 11(2), 239–256.
Margolis, J. (2008). Stuck in the shallow end: Education, race, and computing. The MIT Press.

In conversation with Henry Jenkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas will explore race, immigration, gender, and American identity. This event is free and open to the UCI community. For those unable to attend in  person, the talk will also be live-streamed free of charge. Check this link the day of the event to access the video: http://dml2016.dmlhub.net/ 

About Jose Antonio:

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker, and media publisher whose work centers on the changing American identity. He is the founder of Define American, a non-profit media and culture organization that seeks to elevate the conversation around immigration and citizenship in America; and the founder and editor of #EmergingUS, a digital platform that lives at the intersection of race, immigration, and identity in a multicultural America. #EmergingUS is the first-ever media property owned by an undocumented immigrant.

In June 2011, the New York Times Magazine published a groundbreaking essay he wrote in which he revealed and chronicled his life in America as an undocumented immigrant. A year later, he appeared on the cover of TIME magazine worldwide with fellow undocumented immigrants as part of a follow-up cover story he wrote. He then produced and directed Documented, a documentary feature film on his undocumented experience. It world premiered at the AFI Docs film festival in Washington, D.C. in 2013, was released theatrically and broadcast on CNN in 2014, and received a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Documentary.Documented is now available on various digital platforms.

In July 2015, MTV aired, as part of its “Look Different” campaign, White People, a television special he produced and directed on what it means to be young and white in contemporary America.

He is a very proud graduate of San Francisco State University (‘04), where he was named Alumnus of the Year in 2012, and Mountain View High School (‘00).

He lives in Los Angeles, California.

About Henry Jenkins:

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the past decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Cultureand From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. He is currently co-authoring a book on“spreadable media” with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Jenkins is the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group which originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Jenkins wrote a white paper on learning in a participatory culture that has become the springboard for the group’s efforts to develop and test educational materials focused on preparing students for engagement with the new media landscape. He also continues to be actively involved with the Convergence Culture Consortium, a faculty network which seeks to build bridges between academic researchers and the media industry in order to help inform the rethinking of consumer relations in an age of participatory culture. And he is working at USC to develop a new research project focused on young people, participatory culture, and public engagement.

While at MIT, he was one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. Jenkins also plays a significant role as a public advocate for fans, gamers and bloggers: testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee investigation into “Marketing Violence to Youth” following the Columbine shootings; advocating for media literacy education before the Federal Communications Commission; calling for a more consumer-oriented approach to intellectual property at a closed door meeting of the governing body of the World Economic Forum; signing amicus briefs in opposition to games censorship; and regularly speaking to the press and other media about aspects of media change and popular culture. Jenkins has a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Georgia State University, a M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Elizabeth Rood, VP of Education Strategy, and Tristan Schoening, Fab Lab Assistant Manager, from the Bay Area Discovery Museum bring experience prototyping programming in the world's first Early Childhood Fab Lab, a space for children aged 3 to 10 to explore digital fabrication and construction with a variety of materials.

Abstracts are available here: http://dml2016.dmlhub.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Activism-and-Civics-.pdf, and are attached as a resource file below. 

Individual Session Research
225 Our Voices Matter: Black Activist Media Makers in Austin, Texas
Krishnan Vasudevan | University of Texas at Austin | @kvasudevanIndividual Session Compelling Models

Individual Session Compelling Models
255 Building a Resource Together to Support Teaching and Learning about Race, Racism, and Participatory Activism
Diana Lee | USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism | @MsDianaLee

Individual Session Research
251 Dialogue and Disagreement in the Era of Facebook and Twitter
Ashley Lee

Individual Session Research
109 Regenerate Chicago Neighborhoods: A case study of youth and participatory politics
Kiley Larson | New York University | @kileylarson
Erin Bradley | New York University | @NYU_ErinB
Richard Arum | New York University

Individual Session Research
230 Musical Pathways: How youth explore civic engagement, critical self-awareness, and learning partnerships through music making
Erica Van Steenis | University of Colorado, Boulder

Individual Session Research
60 Carving Out and Constructing E-Spaces of Civic Praxis
Jill Koyama | University of Arizona | @Koyamawonders

Abstracts are available here: http://dml2016.dmlhub.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Participation-and-Inclusion-in-Digital-Practices-version-2.pdf, and are attached as a resource file below. 

Individual Session Research
65 Cultural Alignment Across Social Spheres and Differences in Adolescents’ Acquisition of (Technological) Human Capital
Cassidy Puckett Emory University @cassidycody

Individual Session Research
62 Digital Media, Disability, and the “Home Technology Divide”"
Meryl Alper | Northeastern University | @merylalper

Individual Session Research
84 Design, Connect, Learn: Best Practices for Building a Connected Open Online Course
Torrey Trust | University of Massachusetts Amherst | @torreytrust

Individual Session Research
148 A Mixed-Methods Study of College Students' Informal Learning on Facebook
Yiran Wang | University of California, Irvine | @yiranw2

Individual Session Research
199 Symbiosis Between Old and New Media in Online Quotation Culture
Kyle Booten | UC Berkeley

When you’re starting a youth makerspace in a library, you will encounter a set of common problems. They might include: how do we find and hire mentors? What kind of 3D printer or laser cutter should we buy? How do we design with youth input? Where do we find start-up funding? The questions that arise are well-defined because the path to starting a youth makerspace has been pounded flat by libraries that have gone before you, identifying and building resources to help you understand the common problems, needs, and challenges of starting a makerspace.

But four or five years later, when a library makerspace enters the ”post-emergent” phase, it encounters an entirely different set of issues and problems that go beyond hiring staff and purchasing equipment. Typically these problems aren’t easy to solve, and are highly nuanced. They might include: how do we get teens to move from hanging out to geeking out? How do we get buy-in from staff who work in other departments? How do we approach evaluation? This path has yet to be made, or established in an open, public way.

Since December 2015, five “post-emergent library youth makerspaces,” all connected to each other through the YOUmedia Learning Labs Network, have been engaging in action research that looks both institutionally inward, and across our community of practitioners and network of institutions to create this path. The YOUmedia Learning Labs Network, housed at the National Writing Project, brought together this group who included representatives from the Billings Public Library, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Lynn Public Library, Anythink Libraries, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. The goal of this action research/post-emergent initiative funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services is to identify the common issues that a library youth makerspace is likely to face in years four, five and beyond, through engaging in a cycle of regular observation, reflection, interventions, and iterations.

Identifying the potential problems that will arise on the road to being “post-emergent” is an essential key to the sustainability of a youth library makerspace. A blazed trail, versus a tangled forest, allows you to anticipate problems, versus being surprised by them. It allows your makerspace to grow and learn collaboratively, and move faster in response to your own community’s needs. It also frees up time to reflect, share, and contribute back to the larger library field and to the landscape of makerspaces in libraries. The Blazing the Trail DML program will introduce participants to the methods and framework that we used to guide us through this process, collaborating with and learning from colleagues in a community of practice. Though this group focused on improving professional development in library youth makerspaces, the potential for using action research and a community of practice model as a tool for problem solving and reflection is incredibly powerful, and applicable beyond the bookstacks to museum and classroom education.

Digital citizenship, the idea of being a safe, responsible and respectful user of media and technology, is a foundational principle of 21st century learning. To successfully navigate the online world, youth need the digital citizenship related skills and understandings of how to use media and technology to enhance their lives and be smart consumers and producers of information.  One issue is that the topic is so broad that it can be difficult to pinpoint who is responsible for conveying the concepts and necessary skills. Teachers? Parents? Mentors? The opportunity and obligation is ripe for all of the above. To integrate digital citizenship as part of youth culture, positive examples of social media, incentives to do the right thing, and direct instruction on relevant skills must be woven into the context of everyday life, not just isolated in a technology classroom.  This session will focus on why, where and how positive online expectations can be imparted in an engaging and authentic manner. We will discuss how intentional integration efforts are, in fact, more effective than standalone instructional lessons and could potentially act synergistically in ways to build culture and trust among community members.

This panel explores making from theory to practice, offering ways to think about making as support for emerging ideas, building worlds, and even repairing the world.
- The first presenter brings Elaine Scarry’s unmaking/making framework into conversation with Plato’s explanation of “making” (poeisis) to propose a rhetorically-invested approach to making. In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that pain does more than resist linguistic expression, it “actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language” (4). Pain unmakes the world. In response, making—artifacts, art, texts—can be a means of repair. Scarry’s examples of making include the construction of artifacts designed to take over the body’s labor or act as an extension to the self, including everyday objects, like chairs. The first presenter adds to this understanding by considering texts, digital and otherwise, that can indeed make the world. “Repairing the world” does not suggest that people can be simply healed or fixed or that the torturer’s damage can ever be undone; rather, through examples of making in the midst of destruction, the first speaker illuminates the possibilities for making the violence of rhetoric part of a process of repair.
- The second presenter explores making in relation to teachers’ professional development, specifically teachers at a site of the National Writing Project. The presenter shares program design that welcomes language arts teachers into the world of making. Inviting language arts teachers to make—hacking notebooks, inventing with MaKey MaKey, or exploring 3D printing—has created an affinity group (Gee) who build connections between the making of literacies and the making of artifacts. Through participation in maker culture, teachers reimagine what it means to fail and what counts as meaning making for themselves and their students.
- The third presenter explores the work of students who participate in a scientific inquiry class. The students make artifacts as a way to represent their emerging scientific ideas. However, the students are not making in response to an assignment, but instead describe feeling “compelled” to go home and make as a way to understand science and also as a means for sharing their nascent scientific ideas with their peers.  The presenter talks through the notion of emergent ideas (emerging as you play with things) and the affordance and constraints offered by the every day materials students use. The student artifacts offer a move away from ""maker as a disposition” to maker as a way to make meaning and content. It’s not just “maker” stuff (like rockets we make in hands-on science labs), but making woven into the ways in which ideas are developed and furthered.
- Across all the presenters, we think about the potential of making to invite participation and value a diversity of ways to make meaning. We intend to support participation in this session—and embrace maker culture—by asking the panel and participants to make artifacts, notes, tweets, mind maps, etc., as we work through the ideas in the session. We see this session as offering both research and models for our work, weaving theory and practice.

Today’s youth need more agency over their learning than ever before, yet intentional connecting learning opportunities remain elusive.  This session profiles three unique youth engagement programs that are rapidly evolving to produce platforms that allow youth to control both program outcomes and career trajectories.

Learn how a Science Center in the middle of the country is BUILDing an agriculture exhibit that is interest-powered.  Understand how a Presidential Foundation on the west coast has DESIGNed an experiential and academically-oriented national leadership development program in Washington, DC. Examine how a University Newsroom is researching and trying to SOLVE the national issue of ethical journalism in the face of digital media.  Hard to imagine the connection?  It’s because we need to reimagine how young people learn.  

LET’S BUILD: The Saint Louis Science Center is building a multi-million dollar indoor/outdoor agriculture exhibition that incorporates youth in its program design, interpretation, and the operation of an onsite greenhouse and hydroponics lab focused on urban agriculture. Addressing the issue of food deserts in St. Louis as part of the Youth Exploring Science (YES) Program, teens are able to cultivate DIY agriculture and create their own mini farmers markets. They also engage their peers from across the city at community recreation centers using a mentor-based model for learning.

LET’S DESIGN: Real History. Real Leaders. Real World.  The Reagan Foundation is designing an experiential university course, Leadership and the American Presidency (LTAP).  Reaching outside the traditional scope of museum education, LTAP is situated in the nation’s capital and aims to develop student leaders through the hallmark lens of the Presidential Leadership Journey.  Paralleling the leadership development journey of young people, LTAP utilizes historical sites, prominent speakers, reflective practice, and authentic real-world assessment.    - LTAP isn’t just designed for young people. It is designed with youth people.  Students are empowered as co-creators, leveraging their peer-supported network to ensure the program honors their learning interests, and prepares them for success in civic life.

LET’S SOLVE: Student newsrooms were traditionally spaces for students to learn storytelling using words, images and creative design. But nothing about journalism is as it once was, including ethics. As news has migrated to a digital platform supported by the legs of social media, student journalists are truly becoming story nomads. These nomads follow a story with passion and conviction with less need for a physical space to learn and share. However, their ethics, too, may be left wandering. Rather than blame technology, the Pepperdine University student newsroom is seeking to use social media to increase and create an innovative and dynamic system of media ethics. More importantly storytelling on social media platforms can create ethical journalism providing stories of hope and solutions.

CONNECTED: The panelists are practitioner-scholars who share learning from Pepperdine’s Education Technology Doctoral Program and a commitment to social learning, equity of opportunity, and theory-driven youth participation.  The learning landscape for youth is evolving rapidly and providers of youth learning opportunities will learn creative ways to link them together in cohesive ways.

Abstracts are available here: http://dml2016.dmlhub.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Identity-Making-In-Online-Spaces.pdf and are attached as a resource file below. 

240 - Individual Session Research

"#QueeringThePresent, #QueryingTheFuture: Digital queer gestures on twitter, transforming discourses, and performativities of new possible futures
Jose Lizarraga | UC Berkeley | @sapoverde
Arturo Cortez | UC Berkeley | @FineArturo

48 - Individual Session Research
Tumblr is a Place to Express Myself”: Digital Design Considerations for Queer Youth of Color Activism
Alexander Cho | UC Irvine

69 - Individual Session Research
Adolescents' Experiences of Co-Constructed Identity on Social Media
Susannah Stern | University of San Diego
Olivia Gonzalez | University of San Diego

112 - Individual Session Research
First in our Families: First generation college students, storytelling, and equity
Jane Van Galen | University of Washington Bothell | @jvg

Ignite Talks will be hosted by Gardner Campbell and will take place Thursday, October 6, 2016 and Friday, October 7, 2016.

Friday, October 7, 2016 

Laurel Felt, University of Southern California
Remi Kalir, University of Colorado Denver
Nick Ross, University of Minnesota
Rhianon Gutierrez, Boston Public Schools
Kate Green, University of Nottingham, UK