[conf] Bringing Virtual Reality to the field of Media Literacy
This weekend I (Rafi Santo, that is. This blog has many authors... 
) had the honor of presenting at MIT for a conference titled Teaching and Learning in a Media Saturated World, a gathering aimed at bringing together k-12 educators who care about media literacy. Along with fellow talented GKer Amira Fouad, I was given an opportunity to speak about education in virtual environments, and specifically how these environments, when utilized correctly, are natural vehicles for the acquisition of new media literacies by teens. Thankfully, my presentation immediately followed the keynote of Henry Jenkins [mp3], so the audience of about 30 was well primed in regards to the conceptual framework of new media literacies. I've posted the video of our presentation, titled "Virtual Worlds, Real Skills", below.
Just to warn, it runs for about a half an hour.
For those of you reading this off of an rss and don't see the video, you can find a link to the video here.
If you're interested in seeing the powerpoint on its own, I've uploaded it in parts to Slideshare here:
Virtual Worlds, Real Skills (p1)
Virtual Worlds, Real Skills (p2)
You can also just download the whole presentation here.
"Virtual Worlds, Real Skills" was the first time I have ever presented at a conference period, but was also the first time I shared with a large group of professional peers insights about the work I've been doing at Global Kids for almost two years now. In many ways the presentation felt like something that had been developing since I started working at GK and was just now being reified. At least one segment of the presentation had popped into my mind over a year ago, but all of it was the result of paying close attention to the educational processes we've engaged young people in since we started using Second Life as an educational medium.
And while the presentation was in many ways the result of paying attention to and examining the way we structure our programs, the process of putting it together (something I relished working on in the past few weeks), was illuminating in itself. Since we chose to task ourselves with looking at how our programs teach new media literacies as laid out in Project New Media Literacy's white paper [pdf] on the subject, it required to us to look closely at our programs, see where they each had unique strengths in terms of teaching these skills, and, more importantly, where they could be improved. I never thought of preparing powerpoints as a form of program evaluation, but in a way, that's what this felt like.
We hope to use this as basis for future presentations about the strengths of this type of work, though the foundation that I helped to lay here can certainly be improved upon. We're in process of developing internal as well as student evaluations based on our programs that are aimed at measuring the acquisition of new media literacies, so hopefully the next time we do this presentation, we can provide not just examples but data to go along with it. We also got really good feedback from the Project NML team, present at the conference, about how they thought the presentation could be made more useful for educators.
Overall, I found the whole experience invigorating and gratifying. The audience was engaged and interested, and we got a lot of positive feedback about what we shared throughout the rest of the day. One of the things that became clear from conversations I had with people afterwards was how much they appreciated hearing about a new medium and how it can be used in dynamic ways to educate. This made me feel like we'd actually helped accomplished one of the primary goals of a conference like this: to contribute something substantive to a community of fellow practitioners and a broader field.
