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Make-to-Learn is an effort that leverages DIY culture, digital practices, and educational research to advocate for placing making, creating, and designing at the core of educational practice. The broader vision of Make-to-Learn is an educational ecosystem that incorporates these practices as a means to engage and inspire all young people towards lifelong collaborative learning, experimentation, and invention.

Make-to-Learn approaches this vision by bringing together Makers, educators, and researchers around the following questions:

– What are key learning outcomes of making and engagement in DIY culture
– What specific activities, tools, and environments help realize and enhance the learning potential of making?
– How has making and DIY culture been effectively integrated into educational institutions and practice?
– What further research is needed to effectively advocate for the educational value of making?

Make-to-Learn will investigate these questions through the following activities:

– Organizing events and public outreach aimed at enlisting support and raising awareness about the educational value of making. This includes a one-day symposium on March 13, 2013, the day before the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Chicago.
– Surfacing and empowering a community of young Maker-learners (and their parents and mentors) and connecting them with educator and educational research communities. This will include a challenge hosted on Instructables.com, inviting submissions that speak to the relation between making and learning.
– Facilitating collaboration between the Maker community, educators, and educational researchers in order to develop a research agenda centered on the educational value of making.

Through these activities, Make-to-Learn hopes to advance an ongoing conversation at the intersection of educational research and DIY culture and support a sustained research agenda to help advocate for improved educational outcomes for all through making.

Make-to-Learn is a thematic initiative of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California, Irvine and is supported by the MacArthur Foundation. Kylie Peppler and the Creativity Labs at Indiana University, Bloomington are leading this effort. For more information on this initiative, visit http://m2l.indiana.edu/.

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Participants receive guidance and support in developing a personal project such as a publication, grant proposal, dissertation, book chapter, or other relevant outcome. Participants have opportunities to engage with – and be mentored by – senior scholars working in the field of digital media and learning. Participants are expected to join in all of the activities associated with theprogram, such as reading and providing feedback on a variety of writings and projects, engaging with mentors from academia and educational practice, and developing a work-in-progress.  

The DML Research Hub welcomes applicants from all disciplines whose research touches on issues related to DML, including social scientists, humanists, legal scholars, technologists, and education scholars. We are looking to create a diverse cohort representing different experiences and perspectives.

For a complete list of past DML summer fellows, please click here.

To view the DML Research Associates 2013 Summer Institute call for proposals, click here. 

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Over the last year, a wide-ranging public conversation about the current state of research on recognition and accreditation systems for informal and interest-driven learning has captured the attention of researchers, educators, and technology makers in the digital media and learning community.

In the digital age, learning happens everywhere — in school, after school and at home — but it is difficult for learners to gain recognition for their skills developed outside of classroom settings. The Digital Media and Learning Research Hub strives to understand and examine how new and alternative forms of evaluation are emerging and displayed in digitally enabled environments in areas such as fine arts, literature, digital storytelling, films, documentaries, performances, animation, digital arts, and gaming.

Through its research network on connected learning and a newly formed working group, the Research Hub is analyzing alternative evaluating mechanisms in the digital environment and exploring the benefits and potential shortcomings/dangers of the new era of evaluations of creative productions in today’s world.

The Research Hub is supporting and highlighting research on a dynamic range of alternative evaluation systems including competitions, contests, rating, ranking, “liking”, digital badge rewards, and open critiquing and feedback, while taking into consideration how current and past research can inform these debates.

The Research Hub sees alternative credentialing as one intriguing model that supports an alternative system for identifying, recognizing and accounting for new knowledge, skills, and achievements and measuring the value of informal learning.

Following a similar trajectory as the Research Hub, the DML Competition has recently turned its focus towards a research badge development competition as an extension of its 2012 competition, Badges for Lifelong Learning.

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Awards were made to surface key questions and seed collaborations in the start-up years of the Research Hub, 2009-2011.

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Workshops are intended to generate and identify new areas of research relevant to the field of digital media and learning. Workshops may range from a single one or two day convening, to multiple events distributed over one year, and are ideal for identifying and exploring new research, policy or practices that have yet to be examined in the field.

Awards were made to support conversations and foster new ideas in DML in the start-up years of the Research Hub, 2009-2011.

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