Publications – DML Hub

From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies

jpond — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 01:00:53 +0000

The growth of online communication, media, and gaming is driving dramatic changes in how we learn. Responding to these shifts, new forms of technology-enhanced learning and instruction, such as personalized learning, open online courses, educational games and apps, and tools for learning analytics, are garnering significant public attention and private investment. These technologies hold tremendous promise for improving learning experiences and outcomes. Despite this promise, however, evidence is mounting that these new technologies tend to be used and accessed in unequal ways, and they may even exacerbate inequity.

In February and May 2017, leading researchers, educators, and technologists convened for in-depth working sessions to share challenges and solutions for how learning technologies can provide the greatest benefits for our most vulnerable learners.The aim was to develop guiding principles and a shared agenda for how educational platforms and funders can best serve diverse and disadvantaged learners. These principles include inclusive design processes, ways of addressing barriers, and meth- ods to effectively measure impact.

This report synthesizes the research, learnings, and recommendations that participants offered at the two workshops. After framing the nature of the challenge, the report then describes promising strategies and examples, and it ends with recommendations for next steps in research and coalition building.

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By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of American Youth

jpond — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 23:11:52 +0000

There is a widespread perception that the foundations of American democracy are dysfunctional, public trust in core institutions is eroding, and little is likely to emerge from traditional politics that will shift those conditions. Youth are often seen as emblematic of this crisis — frequently represented as uninterested in political life, ill-informed about current-affairs, and unwilling to register and vote.

By Any Media Necessary offers a profoundly different picture of contemporary American youth. Young men and women are tapping into the potential of new forms of communication such as social media platforms, spreadable videos and memes, remixing the language of popular culture, and seeking to bring about political change — by any media necessary. In a series of case studies covering a diverse range of organizations, networks, and movements involving young people in the political process — from the Harry Potter Alliance which fights for human rights in the name of the popular fantasy franchise to immigration rights advocates using superheroes to dramatize their struggles — By Any Media Necessary examines the civic imagination at work. Before the world can change, people need the ability to imagine what alternatives might look like and identify paths by which change can be achieved. Exploring new forms of political activities and identities emerging from the practice of participatory culture, By Any Media Necessary reveals how these shifts in communication have unleashed a new political dynamism in American youth.

This book is part of the Connected Youth and Digital Futures series that explores young people’s day-to-day lives and futures. The volumes consider changes at the intersection of civil and political reform, transformations in employment and education, and the growing presence of digital technologies in all aspects of social, cultural and political life. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning (DML) Initiative has supported two research networks that have helped launch this series: the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network and the Connected Learning Research Network. The DML Initiative and the DML Research Hub at the University of California, Irvine, support production and open access for this series, published by New York University Press.

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The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age

jpond — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 22:58:21 +0000

Based upon fieldwork at an ordinary London school, The Class examines young people’s experiences of growing up and learning in a digital world. In this original and engaging study, Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green explore youth values, teenagers’ perspectives on their futures, and their tactics for facing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The authors follow the students as they move across their different social worlds — in school, at home, and with their friends, engaging in a range of activities from video games to drama clubs and music lessons. By portraying the texture of the students’ everyday lives,The Class seeks to understand how the structures of social class and cultural capital shape the development of personal interests, relationships and autonomy. Providing insights into how young people’s social, digital, and learning networks enable or disempower them, Livingstone and Sefton-Green reveal that the experience of disconnections and blocked pathways is often more common than that of connections and new opportunities.

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Game On! Connected Learning and Parental Support in the CyberPatriot Program

jpond — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 21:13:50 +0000

Over the course of six months in 2015, the author of this paper conducted a qualitative study of high school students who participate in Beyond the Bell’s CyberPatriot program, and their parents. CyberPatriot is an after-school program founded by the Air Force Association to inspire high school, middle school, and elementary students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. Students work in teams to compete in cybersecurity competitions at the local, regional and national level.

The aim of this study was to help identify factors that affect students’ interest-driven learning and their participation in the CyberPatriot program, especially those factors related to home life and parental influence. Students were recruited from CyberPatriot programs at six high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District as well as from three regional CyberPatriot events. A total of 12 families participated in the study. Students and their parents completed in-depth, semi-structured interviews typically taking place in their home. The families in this study represented a range of socioeconomic and educational levels and race/ethnicities. The majority reported an annual household income of under $49,000.

This report provides an analysis of the data collected from the families, as well as four case studies of particular students and their parents in order to offer a more in-depth picture of some of the emergent themes.

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Documenting and Assessing Learning in Informal and Media-Rich Environments

jpond — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 19:27:04 +0000

The principal finding and recommendation of this report is that the scope of valued learning outcomes for informal learning activities should include social, emotional, and developmental outcomes as well as content knowledge and should include learning by groups and whole projects as well as by individuals.

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Digital Youth with Disabilities

jpond — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Most research on media use by young people with disabilities focuses on the therapeutic and rehabilitative uses of technology; less attention has been paid to their day-to-day encounters with media and technology — the mundane, sometimes pleasurable and sometimes frustrating experiences of “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.” In this report, Meryl Alper attempts to repair this omission, examining how school-aged children with disabilities use media for social and recreational purposes, with a focus on media use at home. In doing so, she reframes common assumptions about the relationship between young people with disabilities and technology, and she points to areas for further study into the role of new media in the lives of these young people, their parents, and their caregivers.

Alper considers the notion of “screen time” and its inapplicability in certain cases — when, for example, an iPad is a child’s primary mode of communication. She looks at how young people with various disabilities use media to socialize with caregivers, siblings, and friends, looking more closely at the stereotype of the socially isolated young person with disabilities. And she examines issues encountered by parents in selecting, purchasing, and managing media for youth with such specific disabilities as ADHD and autism. She considers not only children’s individual preferences and needs but also external factors, including the limits of existing platforms, content, and age standards.

About the Author

Meryl Alper is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

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Evaluation and Credentialing in Digital Music Communities

jpond — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Professional and amateur musicians alike use social media as a platform for showcasing and promoting their music. Social media evaluation practices—rating, ranking, voting, “liking,” and “friending” by ordinary users, peers, and critics—have become essential promotional tools for musicians. In this report, H. Cecilia Suhr examines one recent development in online music evaluation: the use of digital badges to aid in assessment and evaluation. Digital badges have emerged in recent years as a potential credentialing method in informal learning environments. Suhr explores online music communities’ use of digital badges as a reward for both casual music evaluators and musicians.

Suhr examines the intersection of evaluation and gamification in Spotify’s “Hit or Not” game, in which players assess a song’s hit potential and receive digital badges as rewards, and considers the implications of turning music evaluation into a game. She then explores in detail the development of peer and professional critics on Indaba Music, a cloud-based collaboration platform where musicians earn badges through participating in contests. Suhr considers the emerging challenges and shortcomings of contest-based virtual communities and the value of badges, as perceived by Indaba musicians. She investigates to what extent digital badges can effectively represent and credit musicians’ accomplishments and merits; describes the challenges, benefits, and shortcomings of digital badges as an evaluation mechanism; and compares the use of digital badges in assessing creativity to their use in learning and credentialing institutions.

About the Author

H. Cecilia Suhr is Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Miami University, Hamilton, Ohio, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Art at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

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We Used to Wait

jpond — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Music videos were once something broadcast by MTV and received on our TV screens. Today, music videos are searched for, downloaded, and viewed on our computer screens—or produced in our living rooms and uploaded to social media. In We Used to Wait, Rebecca Kinskey examines this shift. She investigates music video as a form, originally a product created by professionals to be consumed by nonprofessionals; as a practice, increasingly taken up by amateurs; and as a literacy, to be experimented with and mastered.

Kinskey offers a short history of the music video as a communicative, cultural form, describing the rise and fall of MTV’s Total Request Live and the music video’s resurgence on YouTube. She examines recent shifts in viewing and production practice, tracing the trajectory of music video director Hiro Murai from film student and dedicated amateur in the 1990s to music video professional in the 2000s. Investigating music video as a literacy, she looks at OMG! Cameras Everywhere, a nonprofit filmmaking summer camp run by a group of young music video directors. The OMG! campers and counselors provide a case study in how cultural producers across several generations have blurred the line between professional and amateur. Their everyday practices remake the notion of literacy, not only by their collaborative and often informal efforts to impart and achieve literacy but also by expanding the definition of what is considered a valuable activity, worthy of dedicated, pleasurable pursuit.

About the Author

Rebecca Kinskey is a writer and video producer in Los Angeles.

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What Counts as Learning

jpond — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Open digital badges are simple tools that have the potential to change our current system of credentialing, creating ways to recognize more diverse learning pathways and opportunities for both learners and institutions for generations to come. How, then, do we go about building on this potential? How do we design relevant, innovative, and transformative badge systems that connect people’s multiple spheres of learning and link them to new opportunities?

This research is an early response to designing badge systems grounded in actual practice. It provides a building block for anyone interested in designing open digital badge systems, and also for educators, policymakers, technologists, humanists, scholars, and administrators who have a stake in how badge systems might impact learning, assessment, and opportunities for lifelong learners.

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Beyond Learning-As-Usual: Connected Learning Among Open Learners

jpond — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Open learning has emerged within the public imagination as a potentially disruptive force in higher education. It has attracted the attention of policy makers, venture capitalists and the technology sector, key functionaries in higher education, teachers, students, activists, progressives, futurists, and researchers. Despite the amount of attention it has received in popular media, there has been very little research on open learning from the perspective of learners. This case study was designed to provide that vantage point. Open learning pairs well with the core contexts and properties of connected learning. It is an analysis of connected learning within open learning, providing insight on how educators, designers, and technologists can continue to assess and design learning ecologies that promote the framework, designed with access and equity as foundational, of connected learning.

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