This weekend I went with Shawna and two of the incredible GK Teen Leaders from the Media Masters program to the conference "Learning in a Participatory Culture", put on by our partners up at MIT, Project New Media Literacies.
For me, the event was characterized by a number of things that are marks of a great conference:
Great people. In addition to the great team at Project NML that we've been working with throughout the year on Media Masters, there were loads of other wonderful folks that we'd worked with or knew of coming into the conference, including people we've collaborated with from the Cooney Center for New Media, Harvard's GoodPlay Project, Common Sense Media and some great individuals in the field like Peggy Sheehy, KnowClue Kidd and Anne Collier that I've known from our work in the digital media and learning field. Even aside from all these great people, the participants generally were a special bunch. They were largely educators, which was a contrast to many of the conferences we often go to at GK, which always have some educators, but also can be heavy on game designers, coders, researchers/academics and non-profit folks. These were "educators on the edge", as I call them, people on the implementation end of participatory pedagogy and social media, and like us are looking for ways to change what learning looks like in either highly or somewhat institutionalized settings. In short, these were our peoples.
Great Participation. This was a group that was jazzed beyond belief. During the presentation we gave we couldn't even get to the more participatory activity we had planned as there was so much engagement during the Q&A session. And throughout the conference, many people were tweeting with great quotes, questions and general musings from the conference, and used the hashtag #nml09 on all of their tweets, creating a natural back channel for the conference. This was actually the first conference I've been at where there was a critical mass of people on twitter using a common hashtag, and I have to say that it was a lot of fun. (Kudos to project NML for training the crowd!)
Great Content. From the opening plenary with great presentations from the NML team through to the many panels and presentations throughout the day, all of the content of the conference was compelling. There was a lot of strategy sharing about how to bring new media into the classroom in meaningful ways, with ideas flying in every break out I attended. And, of course, Henry Jenkins sealed the deal with a thoughtful keynote based on recent writings outlining the natural relationship between new media literacies, participatory culture and civic engagement, which I hope to link to once it's up.
And more than anything else, I just enjoyed seeing the creation of a participatory culture of pedagogy. Educators coming together, connecting and sharing and participating in a movement that will hopefully change the way that education happens in the 21st century. I know that in many ways, it already is.
If you're interested, you can check out the presentation that Shawna and I gave about the Media Masters program below, which outlines a lot of the strategies that we've used to bring new media literacies into the afterschool setting. I've embedded it below, but to get the full context, view it here to see it with notes.
Also, check out the posts by GK Leaders Monel and Shonette with their thoughts on attending the conference.
