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.
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.
This session is based on the Eyebeam's Playable Fashion youth program, developed by Eyebeam alum residents Kaho Abe and Ramsey Nasser. Playable Fashion explores the intersection between fashion, technology and gaming, where teens create their own games and custom wearable game controllers inspired by their personal narratives. The program's curriculum is modular, designed to have a low barrier to entry and to be adaptable by educators of various backgrounds in different learning environments. Eyebeam has hosted various focus groups of educators, game designers, artists, and engineers to capture best practices and models for teaching and scaling the Playable Fashion curriculum. The DML Conference hands-on session will be a learning experience for both participants and facilitators.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.
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.
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.
Paul Reynolds, CEO of FableVision, brings experience developing Fab@School Maker Studio, a web-based digital fabrication software that allows students to create machines, 3D models, and pop-ups with tools ranging from scissors to inexpensive 2D cutters and 3D printers; FableVision is collaborating with the Bay Area Discovery Museum to age down this software to be used with early elementary students and teachers.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.
Panelists include Vanessa Monterosa, Doctoral Candidate from the California State University, Long Beach, who will provide the research foundation for the panel by sharing her dissertation work on the analysis of digital citizenship efforts and why it is important to embed them across instruction rather than treat digital citizenship as a separate subject. Her work examines efforts from an organizational leadership perspective and will provide a context for the discussion. April Moore, Director of Educational Technology at Corona-Norco Unified School District, will describe the work her district is doing to embed digital citizenship across her district population through a comprehensive badging system. Corona-Norco Unified School District is the world’s largest issuer of digital badges using the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) and is committed to making digital citizenship a foundational part of their student education efforts, as well as a part of their staff and parent culture. Through the district’s badging system design, demonstration of digital citizenship skills unlock the opportunity for students to level-up in technology access upon certification. Keegan Korf, Lead Teacher of Digital Citizenship for Omaha Public Schools, is partnering with Do Space, a youth technology space in Omaha which promotes a “Technology for Everyone” mission. Keegan’s approach began by offering parents sessions on Digital Footprints, Selfie Culture, and Cyberbullying. Working with Do Space, Keegan provides relevant programming for parents who are watching their children grow up in the digital landscape to allay the fears that comes along with raising kids in this digital age. Parents are provided with knowledge and resources, but also a space to talk with other parents facing the same concerns as them. Sue Thotz, Program Manager for Common Sense Education works with both K-12 schools and after-school organizations within the Los Angeles region to create a culture of digital citizenship among youth. Sue will be sharing resources and examples of organizations that have proactively used a project-based approach to student media creation on digital citizenship issues.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.