[mm/teen/conf] MIT Conference
Hello again.
Today my blog will be about the conference at MIT I attended today.
As you may already know, MIT's Project New Media Literacies is actually a partner for the program of Global Kids I attend called Media Masters.
Two of the students who attend that after school activity were chosen to attend it.
We left New York at about four and made it to Boston at around ten that night where, after checking into our hotel were taken out for some Afghani food, which I actually found quite good.
We arrived at the conference at around eight the next morning and were assigned cameras which we used to video the conference and do brief interviews with people attending which we conducted in between workshops.
The conference revolved mostly around a project called New Media Literacy.
This is actually a program that focuses on how media can be integrated in the classroom and has an actual curriculum for teachers to follow should they choose to partake in the program.
The first thing that was done as the conference started was the introduction of the program to us. that introduction included a basic breakdown of its would be role as well as many examples of its uses and the skills that can be obtained by students through the use of this program, many of which Monel and I had already known through Media Masters.
We then broke apart to attend workshops that were done through out the day. I attended one in which the leaders of that particular workshop spoke of how the NML or new media literacy program could be used in the classroom and particularly in geography.
It was actually quite insightful to be given a focus upon which we could base our discussion though I do admit I forgot most of the intro to it but I do remember the discussion we had and it amazed me how much of what we do in media masters could be compared to the situations and topics we were given like appropriation and collective intelligence.
After lunch I went to a workshop held by Rafi and Shawna, who run the Media Masters program, in which they spoke of what media masters was about and of some of the projects we have done it our time in the program. Monel and I were really active participants in that one.
I then went to a follow up workshop of the first one I attended in which we discussed geography and mapping and the boundaries one crosses in media and how maps are actually interrelated to the prospect of play through board games which usually contain a map as the base of which one must follow though out the game.
The conference ended with another discussion on how New Media literacy can be used in daily life and in school, given by Henry Jenkins.
All in all it was fun and very informative.
