Category Archives: Digital studies

Biometric Banality

  By laurelfelt | February 13, 2013 - 6:31 pm | , ,
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Reading this article about PayPal+Lenovo’s nascent scheme to eliminate online passwords via, among other things, fingerprint identification, I was reminded of my old rant against quotidian biometric data capture. I wrote this silly (yet wicked smaht) post over 5 years ago and my position on the issue remains the same. Of course I’m interested in protecting property (financial, intellectual) and I’m more likely than not to forget my online passwords. But is our best and/or only recourse to give up our bodies? Surrender our skins to registration, classification, and verification? Unlike my 5-years-younger self, I now have the benefit of Foucaldian study behind me. And this physical intrusion just doesn’t, for lack of a better term, feel right… HOWEVER. For fans of irony, check out my postscript that follows this blast from the past.

Stealing Cybersouls 

(originally published online, 10/04/07)

Check my yard for bombshelters– you won’t find a one. I bank online, date online, and fly worldwide. All of this is to say, I’m hardly an alarmist. I let all sorts of personal data/”personal data” (wink wink nudge nudge) mingle with real and virtual strangers. It’s the post-9/11 twenty-first century, and I feel fine.

But I could feel finer.

And that is both the cause AND the effect of my registration with a new gym.

I was finally fed up, literally, with my excess paunch. So after work on Monday, I marched myself straight down to the gym I associated with the 1980’s. Obsessed with brushed steel, black leather, and conspicuous consumption, this is the gym where jagbag consultants self-possessedly sweat.

You read me right. They’re jagbags.

Approximately one year ago, this gym sent me scurrying to the kinder, gentler halls of the YMCA. The only thing is, the YMCA also has a kinder, gentler personal training program. And when you’re hoping to annihilate a lifetime of habits and accumulation, “kinder, gentler” just ain’t gonna cut it. If I were a small-town girl with big dreams, and my weight was a go-nowhere high school sweetheart, I would tell myself (in an unnecessary Southern accent) “Honey, ya gotta ditch that nice, aimless fella and hitch yourself to the cutthroat, ruthless guy high-tailing it outta town. And God forgive you.”

So I sold my soul to XSport Fitness.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that, in so doing, I also surrendered my identity.

Guess the method to cash in your personal training sessions. Is it:

A) Sign your name in a book

B) Swipe your membership card

C) Display photo ID

D) Answer a security question

E) Fingerprint scan

If you guessed A, B, C, or D, congratulations, you’re sane.

But if you answered E, then you’re correct.

A very matter-of-fact employee informed me of this horrifying system. I stared back at him blankly, waiting for him to say “Just kidding!”, trying to figure out an alternate meaning for the string of syllables that he just uttered… to no avail. Slowly my face registered horror and confusion. His remained blank.

The next day, I unwittingly surrendered my prints. My trainer asked me to tap my finger on a digital disc. No explanation, nothing, just tap your finger four times. I complied. Heck, the previous day I had held a digital device that measured my body-mass index, so I figured this disc was going to calculate my bone density or guess my cup size or something.

Not so. Its job was to steal my identity.

Dismayed, I brought my concerns to the gym manager.

Where and how is this data stored? I asked. What happens if hackers get a hold of this information? You’re a gym, not a high-security data haven. People worry hardcore about their credit cards, but they can always cancel their account and get a new string of numbers. This is not the case with fingerprints. I have been and will continue to be stuck with my fingers for life. If somebody lifts my prints, then I’m permanently screwed.

The gym manager went on the defensive. These are actual sound bytes:

“All the gyms are doing it!”

“It’s the only way.”

The only way?

Let’s say my lawn had a weed problem. Would the only way to address it be dousing it with Agent Orange?

No. There’s some middle ground between the status quo and “the nuclear option.”

So then he recommended that I call corporate. And when he gave me the number, he admitted that I wasn’t the first person to question the fingerprinting. Maybe they’ll repeal the system, he speculated.

Well, he didn’t say “repeal.” But that’s what he meant.

After the evil digital disc had captured my fingerprint, after I had completed my series of squats and lunges, I hit the showers. The report on the television in the locker room (pause to process “the television in the locker room”… and moving on) showed an adolescent girl named Alyssa whose Facebook profile had been stolen. In the Valley Girl tones of too many female adolescents, she bemoaned the obscene speech that had been posted in her name and bleated that her username and password had been changed, locking her out of her own account.

If the commercials of old men talking like bimbos with bustiers hadn’t done it, then perhaps this saga of a socially un-networked preteen will drive the message home: Identity theft is rampant! Even Web gurus are getting played. And my gym thinks it can keep fingerprints safe?!

I started to do some research on this topic and discovered that the use of sensitive biometric data for completely frivolous ends is on the rise. They’re introducing biometric measurement tools in school cafeterias, Walt Disney World lines, and airport security counters.

I listened to a podcast of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, originally broadcast on August 8, 2007, entitled “High-Tech Spy Tools Aren’t Just for James Bond.”

Host Neal Conant interviewed Walter Hamilton, director of the International Biometric Industry Association. In a nutshell, Walter loves employing biometrics. He thinks it’s great, safe, efficient, delicious. Eliza Du, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Indiana University, also loves biometrics. She’s trying to manufacture the recognition technology that astounded/freaked the s*#$ out of us in Minority Report.

Then Neal and Walter took some phone calls.

Mark from San Francisco, a member of the Air Force Reserve, extolled the merits of the “Clear System,” or registered traveler program that provides a fast-lane security option for frequent fliers who have undergone background checks and submitted biometric samples (fingerprint and iris recognition).

For Mark, this amazing technology represents a “20-30 minute savings on a typical morning.” He opined, “It’s kinda a risk-benefit ratio. I think the convenience here, for me at any rate, far outweighs whatever concerns I might have that information will be misused…”

Sure, of course. 20-30 minutes… the integrity of your persona… potato, potahto.

Then Jim from California called in. He just got back from the Blackhead Defcon Conference in Las Vegas (don’t know what that is, but they use the term “Defcon” in War Games, so I’m impressed) where he had seen a demonstration of a new technology. It’s familiarly referred to as the “passport Smartchip” and basically, it’s a microchip loaded with biometric data that each person could put in his/her passport. At this demonstration, the data on the chip was cloned and, thus, compromised.

Here is an interchange between Jim and Walter:

JIM: Digital data can be copied readily. Once that digital blob is compromised, anybody can use it in the appropriate application by sending it into the system that wants that response from the reader… Biometric data, while it’s very sexy, is also very dangerous, so I have great concerns about it. And, having watched the source being cloned, and having biometric data on the passport, I think it’s a real danger.

WALTER: Biometric data, like any personally identifiable information, needs to be adequately protected in terms of how you design a system. It should be encrypted when it’s stored, wherever it’s stored. It should be sent over secure communication channels whenever it’s transferred—

JIM: It’s not, that’s the problem!

WALTER: When it’s not, that could be a problem.

…

JIM: The bottom line is the encryption method that is being used is inadequate for the purposes for which it’s intended and the systems in general are not really designed to take into account the sensitivity of this data. So it’s a matter of convenience rather than a matter of security. It’s a matter of system design, it’s a problem of implementation and understanding of consequence, and I don’t think we have a clear understanding of that yet…

So there you have it. Mark’s a tool, Walter’s a flunky, and Jim’s a prophet of truth.

Ironically, my fingerprint-greedy gym is the reason my print is currently impaired. Not that that’s gonna save me, the whorls are still readable, they just ain’t pretty. And THAT I blame on the gym.

I had risen at an ungodly hour to kickoff my new, early morning workout routine. Bleary eyed, I made my way to the kitchen, shoved a few soy bacon strips into the toaster oven, and shuffled back to my bedroom. Either squeezing into my Spandex took more time than I had anticipated, or I had torqued up the toaster setting too high. In any event, that bacon burned, baby. That bacon burned.

And I wasn’t about to watch my bean curd-based breakfast go up in smoke. I thrust my hand into the inferno and pulled out the charred remains. The fingertips of my right index and middle fingers paid the price. To this day, i.e., one and a half days later, they sport horizontal slash marks as if they’d been sliced by a Gillette Venus Razor For Ladies.

Now, I wouldn’t have been toasting that bacon, incinerating that bacon, or swiping that bacon if it weren’t for the gym. And frankly, I’m not sure how that bodes for my new stab at fitness.

On the bright side, if all of this working out doesn’t, well, work out, at least my identity will be gone. So that slightly pudgy girl won’t really be me.

POST-SCRIPT: I moved to Los Angeles in 2008. My gym in Glendale, CA, instituted fingerprint check-in almost immediately after I joined in 2009. And guess what? I’ve been giving them the finger — literally, the index — ever since. So much for living your values…

Digital Equity

  By laurelfelt | November 12, 2012 - 7:29 pm | , , ,
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“Digital equity is the social-justice goal of ensuring that everyone in our society has equal access to technology tools, computers and the Internet. Even more, it is when all
individuals have the knowledge and skills to access and use technology tools, computers and the Internet”
(International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Digital Equity Toolkit – Working Draft, 2006).

Nora Fleming recently queried me on digital equity. After writing back an extremely long response (see Q’s and A’s), I decided to plunge deeper — and probably more responsibly — into Nora’s specific area of interest and the work that she previously has done to that end. I wish I had done this digging first — and I hope any/all readers will do as I say, not as I did; from this point forward, I will do my homework first and pontificate last. Lesson learned.

So today I searched for a definition of digital equity and, to my relief, it is as I had conjectured — a state in which both the digital divide and the participation gap are bridged. I wonder if the term digital equity has fallen out of favor, as the definition and other articles I found that used this verbiage were not current; indeed, the piece I cite above (a working draft at that!) is six years old, which is a lifetime in the digital realm. If this is indeed the case, then Nora might want to consider adopting a more relevant label.

I would argue for a different term in any case because I’m wary of limiting our scope to just digital. Do we really wish to focus exclusively on the digital, I wonder — just 1′s and 0′s, only what’s written on microchips? Is that the characteristic of interest? Or do we wish to consider media and communication more broadly? This would encompass beneath its wide umbrella all things digital, as well as information products and communication processes that qualify as analog. Rather than digital equity, then, perhaps we need to call for communication equity... That doesn’t sound as catchy but maybe it’ll catch on…

I read Nora’s 6 November 2012 article, Schools Are Using Social Networking to Involve Parents, and was struck by a number of things. First, Nora already knows a lot of what I spewed in last night’s email. In fact, she had a few things to teach me; all the way from Washington, DC, she discovered and reported that I have a colleague in my backyard: “Wendy Lazarus, the chief executive officer and co-founder of The Children’s Partnership, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based nonprofit that helped launch a school-based digital education initiative for parents in the Los Angeles area several years ago” (Fleming, 2012, para 28). Overall, I found this article extremely interesting and full of useful information.

If I were to offer any constructive critique, it would be to consider some of the (1) human, (2) professional, (3) commercial, and (4) environmental impacts of this pursuit of equity. Often, good-intentioned interventions fail to deliver unqualified benefits — or even any benefits at all — where these dimensions are concerned.

1. Human

In terms of human impacts, I would challenge us to consider the toll that unremitting digital access can exact. According to Michael Searson, the executive director for the School for Global Education and Innovation at Kean University in Union, N.J., and the president of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, “It’s unethical to provide a robust digital learning program in school for kids who don’t have access in their bedrooms and family rooms. As schools begin to integrate mobile devices and social media into education, the out-of-school equity issues have to be considered. Education leaders need to understand equity is not only access to devices, but access to the networks that allow people to get information” (cited in Fleming, 2012, para 38).

I disagree with the first part of Searson’s argument. A robust digital learning program can certainly be utilized in classrooms, and skilled educators there can help their students to scaffold their development of digital/new media literacies. It’s unfair to expect students to work on digital projects at home if they don’t have digital access at home — I agree with that. But what are the ethical implications of working towards online access in kids’ bedrooms and family rooms? The body of research on televisions in children’s bedrooms demonstrates that the presence of this media fount is correlated with impaired sleep (e.g., see this most recent write-up of a study from the University of Alberta). Humans need sleep. Humans need respites from any given activity, and certainly from more passively-oriented, visually stimulating activities. I happen to find it unethical to introduce powerful technologies into sensitive contexts, such as children’s bedrooms and families’ spaces for togetherness, without thoughtful, deliberate processes for establishing boundaries, and without offering some sample guidelines for reference and remixing.

Without these conversations and limits, some (most?) folks will struggle to appropriately portion control and will inevitably overuse. They’ll send infinite messages, spend excessive amounts of time managing Inboxes, bury their noses in their smartphones whenever there’s a lull in the action, and keep their mobile device at their bedsides, to jar them from sleep when an email comes in and to consult with immediately upon waking. We all know people like that, don’t we? And we cannot dismiss them all as addicts run amok, slaves to frivolity.

2. Professional

My partner, for example, is one of these embattled individuals. He’s accountable to notices that beep their way into his iPhone (which he pays for himself) at all hours of the day and night. I plead with him to just turn it off, but it’s not that simple. If Mike doesn’t react to the communique, he’ll soon hear about it from his boss in three other mediated ways (e.g., text, phone call, skywriting). And it’s not as easy as sitting down with his boss and saying, “Ease up.” If they institute a company policy to ignore the late-night notices, then another company will scoop up the notices’ embedded opportunities. Then this other company’s clients will ultimately land the jobs that will help them feed their families — these other company’s clients, not his. And Mike’s clients have hungry families too.

So we have a systemic issue here, which requires an industry-wide solution, perhaps a multi-industry solution, to give adequate amounts of time during the workday for the execution of professional labor, and to recognize that a limited workday does exist — all time does not equal work time. As Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park reminded us, Just because we can [in this case, work around the clock], doesn’t meant that we should. And arguably, we can’t — see my humanness argument above.

These rules and realizations extend to teachers and parents too. They deserve a manageable slate of tasks and expectations so that they aren’t consistently set up to fail, and/or internalize the sense that they’re always falling short. In her article, Nora explained “Mr. Vodicka [Superintendent of Vista, CA] started a Twitter account and began making the rounds to schools, with the goal of reaching every classroom in the district and tweeting his experiences at each to his Twitter followers. Other administrators in the district have followed Mr. Vodicka’s lead—now, 60 administrators have school-related Twitter and Facebook accounts, and around three-quarters of the schools now have some kind of social-media presence” (Fleming, 2012, para 18).

I applaud this administrator’s transparency and accessibility. But I worry about the implicit — or explicit — demands this introduces for his staff and the parents in his district. Avoiding Twitter could frame teachers and parents as less conscientious, less communicative, and/or less contemporary than they should be. This is unfair since attending to Twitter and other social media accounts doesn’t come from a vast wasteland of time — teachers and parents aren’t thumb-twiddling, they’re phenomenally busy. So how does introducing accountability to social media add more (unpaid) labor to already teeming job descriptions ? And how does this detract, if at all, from quality of life and family time?

3. Commercial

In terms of commercial impacts, I’m wary of private enterprises’ encroachment into public domains. I studied commercialism in schools when I was working towards my Master’s degree in Child Development, and I worry about the growing prevalence of commercial messages in taxpayer-funded spaces, especially those frequented by youths. Some people say that these partnerships are win-win; for example, when as a kid I participated in Book It!, I was encouraged to read and rewarded with free personal pan pizza. But was this less of a win for reading, which arguably should be intrinsically motivated in order to sustain lifelong engagement, and more of a win for Pizza Hut (since only my meal was comped, not my brother’s, sister’s, mom’s, or dad’s)?

Nora wrote, “With donations from the Microsoft Corp. as well as $25,000 from the local school endowment, the district created “parent super centers” on five school campuses” in Houston. I appreciate this, but I can’t help but notice the business opportunity in this “philanthropy” which brands it as much, if not more, of a PR endeavor and chance to establish a brand relationship with a new market of consumers. Computers for Youth facilitates the receipt of a refurbished, personal computer by parent enrollees of computer training workshops; they also guide parents in how to get broadband Internet in their homes, which they can typically access at highly discounted rates (Fleming, 2012). Again, I appreciate this assistance, especially in terms of negotiating the complicated processes of subscribing for services and obtaining low-income discounts. But which company’s computers are they distributing? Which internet service providers are they promoting? How, if at all, do non-profit and public institutions operate as middlemen for multinational corporations, and what is the net benefit for citizens?

4. Environmental

In terms of environmental impact, let me back up and say, I had the good fortune of studying political economy with Dr. Ellen Seiter. In her course, we read Vincent Mosco’s The Digital Sublime, an eye-opening look at how increased digital consumption via personal devices contributes to inhumane labor conditions, massive amounts of e-waste, and dangerous scavenging through these mountains of chemical-dripping refuse by folks desperate for income.

Some research also identifies how increased demand for tin, tungsten, and tantalum — the elements that power our digital devices — has transformed them into “conflict minerals.” Like “conflict diamonds” (made famous by the 2006 film Blood Diamond), pursuit of these minerals has inspired brutal conflicts between rival militias in eastern Africa, resulting in widespread slaughter and rape (for a dramatized explanation of this situation, see Law & Order: SVU’s 2010 episode “Witness,” written by Dawn DeNoon; an analysis of this episode’s impact, written by Sheila Murphy, Heather J. Heather, Sandra de Castro Buffington, and myself will be published in a forthcoming edition of The American Journal of Media Psychology).

Mosco also challenges us to consider how, if at all, this increased access to information (some of it credible, some of it spurious, and few of us able to distinguish the difference), and increased access to communication (some of it useful, some of it banal, and few of us able to control our predominant engagement with the former), actually makes our lives better. It undoubtedly does sometimes, but not always. So should our goal be to increase round-the-clock access universally, or to identify the qualities of and conditions under which more information and communication delivers benefit?

My belief: the latter. Let’s identify the qualities of and conditions under which more information and communication delivers benefit. This will help us to recognize when it better serves us to disconnect from the screen and plug in to each other. And this will imply a less drastic product-fix: not a portal in every bedroom, necessarily, or always-on internet, but household access, peak hour availability.

As we struggle for equity, we must simultaneously fight for humanity.

The Power and Importance of Play

  By laurelfelt | October 2, 2012 - 1:34 pm | , , , , , , , ,
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Today I had the honor of participating in a conversation organized by DML Central‘s ConnectedLearning.tv about the power and importance of play. The featured guest, Nirvan Mullick, is the innovative filmmaker behind Caine’s Arcade and Caine’s Arcade 2, and architect of Imagination Foundation and Global Day of Play, among other things. His groundbreaking work — sharing the creativity and passion of a young Angeleno boy’s cardboard arcade, leveraging its mini-viral popularity, creating a scholarship foundation for Caine, and building a global movement — is inspirational to say the least.

This conversation was organized by Jon Barilone, Community Manager of DML Central, moderated by Tara Brown, Technology Director of DML Research Hub, and enriched by contributions from Isaiah Saxon of DIY.org and Monika Hardy of the be lab. Of course, chatty ol’ me also said a thing or 10. And I would have said more if I was following the webinar’s LiveStream chat! Great backchannel conversation.

The webinar’s collaborative document listed the following as key quotes:

  • “This was lightning in a bottle in my world. This tremendous opportunity, but also this tremendous pressure to try to make the most of it.” – Nirvan
  • “There should be a seamless gradient from their naive play to what adults would recognize as work.” – Isaiah
  • “We have to create a culture where play is not only acceptable, but valued. Where we’re demonstrating that we care about play and creativity.” – Laurel
  • “Making/playing is a platform for kids to have the confidence to try a new skill they don’t have yet.” – Isaiah

———————-
For me, interesting points of the conversation include (but are not limited to): playing vs. making; values vs. rewards; capacities vs. checkmarks; practice vs. philosophy; today vs. tomorrow.

  • Playing vs. making

I’m interested in creating a Venn diagram for these two concepts, playing and making, because I find them to be interrelated and even overlapping at times yet not synonymous. Isaiah said that in order to make, one must play; I agree. But in order to play, one does not have to make — that is, unless we define “making” more broadly to encompass making narratives, making interpersonal connections, making characters, making decisions, etc. I feel that makerspaces and hackerspace are havens for tangible tinkering — taking an object and transforming it in some way. But by definition, play does not require any objects. In fact, my favorite way to play — improv — insists upon no props, no sets, no nothing.

Isaiah elaborated that to earn a Skill badge on DIY.org, one must complete at least 3 challenges that incorporate play. So play is in the DNA of making. But what is in the DNA of play? USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project will pilot a badge system in which service-learners can earn badges in play. Designing challenges that support play proficiency is on my To-Do list for — now-ish, I suppose :-), and by “now-ish” I mean NOW, since we’re launching this in February 2013. I’m looking forward to demystifying (and complicating) a process/concept we all thought we already understood: play.

  • Values vs. rewards

I characterized badges as expressions of values, ways to show community members what we care about. By recognizing Attendance Award winners, schools show that they care about kids coming every day. By letting a student walk to lunch first because she raised her hand without calling out, a teacher shows that he cares about turn-taking and orderliness. Do these rewards motivate and incentivize behavior? Perhaps, to a point — extrinsically. We all know that the value of such methods is limited and we do not want to create a generation of individuals who require external validation.

I care much less about people working for the reward, and much more about the symbolic value of giving time and attention to a certain set of values. I like what badges express. When an organization supports a play badge, it says, “We care about play.” When an organization connects a group of badges to its program, it says, “These are possible outcomes of your work. These are some goals we find worthwhile.” To learners — who may understandably assume that this learning context is just like the rest, and that their job is to sit passively and spit back the expected responses — it declares, “This time, it’s different.” Badges show what you can explore, do, become. “Welcome, current and budding Players, Zoologists, Engineers. This experience transcends an A in who-knows-what. This experience is open for you to grow.”

Maybe this sounds idealistic and naive. Maybe that’s my specialty. ;-) I just think we need to unambiguously show learners that the world is rich with possibilities, and have our learning contexts reflect and honor that richness.

  • Capacities vs. checkmarks

Educational standards have become (or were they always?) a dirty word. Our American educational system is not federal but wide adoption of The Common Core moves us closer towards national norms. Is this a hollow affair at best, a time-sucking or even sinister situation at worst?

It depends on what you believe standards do. From Monika, it sounded like she believes that standards superficially designate “good” and “bad” where such qualifiers don’t exist — there is just difference.

So far, I can only think of examples where I disagree… I’m struggling to play devil’s advocate with myself and find a case that will support her point. Perhaps I’ll get there as I  share my own position.

I think there are basic skills that allow people to play the game. If you don’t know how to dribble, you can’t really play basketball. You can make up your own game with different rules and not have to dribble at all, or only dribble in a certain kind of way. That’s fine. But that’s not basketball. Whether we want to transition to this new game becoming THE game and replacing basketball, that’s a separate issue. But this new game is not basketball. To play basketball, you have to be able to dribble.

So that’s what I think of when I consider standards. To be able to read, you have to understand phonemes. To be able to subtract, you have to understand the number line. Teaching these skills to children is an important task we give to schools. Standards articulate this expectation, this part of schools’ job description. By the end of the year, the students should understand X, be able to do Y.

Standards become problematic when the learning goals they outline are: 1) irrelevant; 2) beyond students’ zone of proximal development (either too easy or too hard); or 3) chained to inappropriate instructional methods. If/when any of these criteria describe standards, then the standards should be rewritten. But in my opinion, the phenomenon of standards should not be dumped all together.

I want our children to be able to engage with challenging texts. I want them to be able to express themselves so that comprehension is not limited by writers’ poor grammar but by listeners’ own willingness to engage. I want our children to be able to look at a pie chart and know what it means. I want our children to be able to calculate which carton of orange juice at the grocery store is a better deal per milliliter. And of course, I want our children to love themselves, treat one another with respect, and dream of what never was and ask why not (to borrow a phrase from the late, great Bobby Kennedy).

Isaiah said that his ideal middle school would consist of two required courses in character-building and five electives whose content would authentically integrate standards/basic skills. Amazing idea. To that integration end, I encouraged educators to identify the basic skills already embedded in creative projects, and to discover diverse subjects’ interrelationships, e.g., a social science standard within the scope of a science project.

Let’s help school enable, rather than prevent, education.

  • Practice vs. philosophy

What we believe is one thing; what we do is often another. How can we make our teaching reflect and support our philosophies? What can we DO? Fabulously time-strapped teachers legitimately ask for this concrete guidance; in many cases, educational advocates are preaching to the choir instead of giving them a hand. Of course teachers want to support their students; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have gone into this (largely thankless) profession. But how are they supposed to get the job done? Even though I know better, sometimes I catch myself teaching in the same way that I was taught (didactially) and taught to teach (by the book/standard/standardized test). I need a model for another way; I need practical guidelines; I need an example. I think we all do.

In terms of a model, in today’s conversation I presented participatory learning (which is similar to connected learning). In a playful participatory learning context, educators surrender some classroom control in order to honor students’ self-directed learning and creativity, embrace technology and digital media even in the absence of personal expertise/mastery, and value process over product – that is, escape the tyranny of perfection (Vartabedian & Felt, 2012, p. 62).

In terms of practical guidelines, I shared the five characteristics of participatory learning (hereafter referred to as the “5 CPLs”). Our research from USC Annenberg Innovation Lab’s PLAY! project and, previously, from Project New Media Literacies, found that rich learning flourishes with the establishment of these values and practices:

The 5 CPLs

● heightened motivation and new forms of engagement through meaningful play and experimentation;
● an integrated learning system where connections between home, school community and world are enabled and encouraged;
● co-learning where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning;
● learning that feels relevant to the students’ identities and interests; and
● opportunities for creating and solving problems using a variety of media, tools and practices (Project New Media Literacies 2010; cited in Felt, Vartabedian, Literat & Mehta, 2012)

The following tool might help educators and their students to discern whether and to what extent their learning contexts qualify as participatory. Areas of weakness are simply spaces for development and innovation.

4 C’s of Participation Inventory

  1. How do we provide mechanisms to CREATE?
  2. How do we offer opportunities for media [which can be understood as messages and information] to CIRCULATE across platforms, disciplines and ages?
  3. How do we help learners to COLLABORATE and build upon others’ knowledge?
  4. How do we encourage learners to CONNECT with counterparts and establish productive networks?

(Reilly, Jenkins, Felt & Vartabedian, 2012)

In terms of a sample activity or curriculum, I suggested improv games. Improv establishes a context in which to develop essential and versatile skills, and improv’s respectful implementation helps to co-create a culture in which risk-taking is encouraged, “failure” is acceptable/impossible, collaborating is key, and gift-giving is just how we roll.

I think we’re still figuring out the HOW. But I think that getting down to these brass tacks, discussing practice rather than philosophy, is necessary in order to avoid old habits and move forward.

  • Today vs. tomorrow

A ConnectedLearning.tv community member shared a question via chat. While this query set off our riff about standards, it also inspired my final comment about who we reach out to and how we conceptualize our goals. We would be remiss if we focused exclusively on either today or tomorrow; we must consider both.

Exchanging concrete practice is very today-oriented, extremely here-and-now. The task of identifying standards across one’s teaching is also contemporary. It speaks to what’s currently on the books. For today, let’s do all we can to hack/mod the system, establish standards crosswalks, and connect our ideals with our realities. We can’t abandon today to rhetoric of tomorrow. And, institutionally, we can’t abandon formal education to the potential of informal learning. Our children are in school for many hours every day; I refuse to surrender that time and just invest in the outside. Nothing against the informal! But a formal does exist. Let’s dig in and fix a thing or two NOW.

In terms of tomorrow… We we all know that our educational system is sick. We all know that a lot of renovation is required. So let’s also reach out to the funders, architects, and contractors of that system — in other words, government officials and representatives, school board members, and curriculum developers. Let’s ask them to build school spaces that look less like factories and more like labs, libraries, coffee shops, and meeting rooms. Let’s ask them to write standards that are neither irrelevant nor beyond students’ zone of proximal development nor chained to inappropriate instructional methods. Let’s ask them to offer professional development workshops that model and encourage playful participatory learning.

Let’s work better today. And let’s build a better tomorrow.

I’ve embedded today’s webinar below and welcome the opportunity to continue this conversation on Twitter! Please talk back to me via @laurelfelt and/or hook this up with the communal discussion via #connectedlearning. Thanks again!

Digital Kids 2012

  By laurelfelt | April 24, 2012 - 10:33 pm | , , , , , , , ,
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Excited to volunteer tomorrow for 6th annual Digital Kids Conference!

Now in our 6th year, Digital Kids Conference 2012 takes place April 25-26, 2012 in Los Angeles, CA. at the Pasadena Convention Center. Digital Kids provides companies the critical information they need to build successful online and mobile products and services for kids. The show features 95 speakers in 5 conference tracks, including:

Safety, Content, Operations, Business and Market Research.

Speakers include industry leaders such as Disney, Wizard101/KingsIsle, Activision, LEGO Group,Rovio/Angry Birds, Spin Master, National Football League, Cartoon Network, Ubisoft, Cookie Jar,Sony Online, KIDZBOP, Mind Candy, Peanuts, Google, Yahoo! Kids, The NPD Group, Federal Trade Commission, California Atty General and many more.

These experts will share their insight on building, managing and monetizing services, products and interactive content for digital kids and connected youth. This is your opportunity to gain the latest insight on mobile and iPad apps, social games, social media, virtual worlds, and more – all targeting kids and youth.

I combed through the schedule and am particularly interested in these panels…

Wednesday:
***1. National Geographic, Smart Bomb & Microsoft: Gaming for Good (this relates directly to my research)

I’m sure that any/all assignments I receive will provide rich opportunities for edification and networking. What fun!

Annenberg Innovation Lab Summit

  By laurelfelt | April 6, 2012 - 2:07 pm | , , , ,
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On Friday, March 31, 2012, I participated in the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab‘s 1st Annual Innovation Summit.

The event gathered folks from multiple industries to explore such cutting-edge projects as rethinking urban spaces, experimenting with participatory cultures, nurturing industry-academic-government collaborations, remixing environmental data, designing innovative technologies, and imagining 700+ solutions to complex future challenges. Here is the agenda for the Summit’s day-long plunge into theoretical and practical innovation.

In the Henry Jenkins-led session “Experimenting with Participatory Cultures,” I presented/demo-ed the PLAYground, our online platform for the curation, creation, and circulation of user-generated learning. Here is the session, which runs roughly one hour and 20 minutes. I speak from 1:06:50-1:17:15, and my presentation showcases the playful spirit one must bring to working (and presenting!) in the real world.

It was a privilege to learn, play, network, and help myself to sumptuous food! I am a lucky scholar indeed.