Skill Composites

In 2009, I began examining the intersections between new media literacies (NMLs; Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Weigel, & Robison, 2006) and social and emotional learning skills (SELs; Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, n.d.). I was a student in Dr. Henry Jenkins’s first seminar at USC, and the final paper was looming. I had recently been introduced, via Dr. Michael Cody, to Alexandre Rideau, the director of Senegal’s non-profit Reseau Africain d’Education pour la Sante (RAES) (or, in English, the African Network for Health Education). Alex wanted a proposal for revamping his youth communication for social change program, Sunukaddu. So I completed my assignment in Henry’s class by pitching a NML-rich modification to Sunukaddu for Alex, and adding in the dimension of SEL, which happens to be my passion.

Felt, L.J. (2009). Participatory learning methodologies for enriching an HIV/AIDS intervention to Senegalese youth: The Case for social and emotional learning and new media literacies. Unpublished manuscript.

Both boys bought it, and two important, collaborative relationships were born.

In terms of Alex and Sunukaddu… During the summer of 2010, I traveled to Senegal and spent two months co-designing and implementing Sunukaddu 2.0 with a group of extraordinary colleagues: Idrissa, Tidiane, Charles, and Amadou. Later, Brock also joined our brigade.

There was innovation on the educator level.

Formation Curiculiu, 350
There was learning on the participant level.

IMG_0592

Among both populations post-intervention, growth and advancement:

“You gave me self-confidence thanks to these skills” (Educator Tidiane Thiang, personal communication, September 22, 2010).

“…I saw [Sunukaddu participant] Mami who told me that she’s working in a retail establishment right now and [Sunukaddu participant] Azoupi is enrolled in a computer graphics workshop to become an editor. So, the training awakened vocational interests but also gave youths courage, the courage to take their destinies in their own hands” (Educator Tidiane Thiang, personal communication, October 18, 2010).

And on the communicative/scholarly level, a fair number of works produced (NOTE: The following list just details my efforts, not the textual, multimedia, and programmatic products developed by RAES):

PUBLICATIONS
Felt, L.J., Dura, L., & Singhal, A. (in press). Cultural Beacons in health communication: Leveraging overlooked indicators and grassroots wisdoms. In D.K. Kim, G. Kreps, & A. Singhal (Eds.), Global Health Communication Strategies in the 21st Century. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Group.

Felt, L.J. & Rideau, A. (2012). Our Voice: Public Health and Youths’ Communication for Social Change in Senegal. In M.O. Ensor (Ed.), African Childhoods: Education, Development, Peacebuilding, and the Youngest Continent (pp. 201-217). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Felt, L.J. (2010, July 29). Making education (double) count: Boosting student learning via social and emotional learning and new media literacy skillseLearn Magazine: Education and Technology in Perspective.

PRESENTATIONS
Dura, L., Felt, L.J. & Singhal, A. (June 18, 2013). Cultural beacons: Grassroots indicators of change. Paper presented at 63rd Annual International Communication Association Conference, London, UK.
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Digital Equity

“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.

Q’s & A’s

Last week, I was massively flattered when my former classmate, Dr. Nikki Usher, asked me to advise one of her students. Nora Fleming is wrapping up her Master’s degree in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. She has done somewhat of a concentration in education policy, her area of interest, as she also works as a reporter for Education Week. Here are two of her recent stories:

Schools Are Using Social Networking to Involve Parents

Out-of-School Settings Create Climate for New Skills

[for my review of the first article, see Digital Equity)]

Nora asked me to pass along “any particularly noteworthy items (a few) on digital equity” and any “particularly interesting [pieces] on long term implications and challenges of tech integration and digital learning in schools.” While I did append some resources, I primarily interrogated the difficulty of defining digital equity and prophesying long-term implications. I found the exercise so stimulating, I’ve decided to share my response.

1. Noteworthy items on digital equity

Well this is somewhat difficult because we need to define digital equity. As you probably know, Henry Jenkins points to a participation gap complementing a digital divide, which implies that there are at least two dimensions to digital equity. The participation gap talks about access to skills and experiences — it might be partially understood in terms of cultural capital. It’s about knowledge that allows folks with technology to leverage it — create, critically analyze and comment, organize, conduct responsible research, network, etc. Some research reports suggest that even digital have’s are have-not’s in terms of savvy; they’re putting powerful tools towards relatively banal ends (e.g., Word processing, email, posting Facebook status updates, watching videos on Youtube) — which is not to say useless ends, just unremarkable. Old wine in new bottles. Very little game-changing.

Schools and libraries at present don’t go very far in terms of bridging this literacy gap. They often have old equipment and little time for individuals to really immerse, experience, and locate mentors and online communities who can scaffold their growth towards digital expertise. This item — New Grants Help 12 Museums and Libraries Plan and Design New Learning Labs — indicates the MacArthur Foundation’s acknowledgement of this shortfall. At the household level, ownership of computers and access to internet is less prevalent among the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Even when low-income families do have computers at home, they’re less likely to have high-speed internet, new equipment, and/or accessible mentors/guides.

In low-income communities (and internationally in developing contexts), online experiences increasingly occur on mobile phones. Some people characterize this phenomenon as “leap frogging” because users are jumping over the personal computer stage, going from nothing to smartphone (see my 2012 book chapter with Alexandre Rideau, Our Voice: Public Health and Youths’ Communication for Social Change in Senegal). What are the implications of this? If folks have data packages that are not unlimited — that is to say, that cost various prices according to megabytes used — then intense online engagement will probably have a positive relationship with income (as income rises, so does online engagement). Therefore, as in schools and libraries, income disparities expressed in time limitations constrain democratic growth opportunities.

The extent to which individuals engage in content creation, dialogic exchange, exhaustive research, etc, might also be limited by the robustness (or lack thereof) of apps. And again, always, there’s the question of access to mentors. I participated this summer on a digital literacy panel at the annual convention for the American Library Association. There I realized that supporting librarians’ own digital/new media literacies must be addressed in order for them to assume the role of digital/new media guides to library users. Recognizing this relationship between learners’ development and educators’ proficiency, my PLAY! (Participatory Learning And You!) colleagues and I supported teachers of grades 6-12 with their digital/new media literacies comfort (for an overview of this project, see my write-up with Vanessa Vartabedian in the edited volume Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education and/or our webinar on connectedlearning.tv).

I’ll mention a few other things, and forgive me for being gloomy, I’m just on a roll. ;-) I think there’s also an entitlement question. Do folks with less access to expensive things treat these digital tools more fearfully, negotiate the interfaces less freely, out of fear that they’ll break something and/or get punished severely? Are they less used to creative experimentation because their experiences in school and at home have been more authoritarian and didactic — has pedagogy been “old school” and discipline consisted of “These are the rules” instead of “Let’s figure out together how to solve this problem”? This is a question I’m airing right now — it’s untested in any way. But it makes me wonder…

Finally, let’s say that schools and libraries had stellar equipment and users could spend as much time as they wanted in the computer lab. They still couldn’t go on most social network sites, any game sites, Youtube and most video-sharing sites, perhaps they couldn’t even do research on breast cancer because the word breast would be flagged as inappropriate. I’m pointing to the issue of firewalls. Without access to these digital destinations, I believe that folks will be at a strategic disadvantage academically, professionally, culturally; thus, they will not enjoy digital equity (whatever that is — see Digital Equity for a definition and problematization of this goal).

So! There’s work to be done. :)

Education Superhighway wants to get American classrooms hooked up to high-speed internet, which is nice but will be toothless if we continue to lock up/deny potentially problematic content and behaviors instead of empowering users with ways to manage them.

You know that sites like TeacherTube and Curriki are potentially useful digital ways to address equity in terms of unequal access to up-to-date textbooks. Open educational resources (OER) are being rolled out by some textbook publishers now too; here’s a story about Pearson specifically. I know this isn’t the same as digital equity, but it’s related.

Jaron Lanier and others might argue that, without the ability to code and/or an understanding of how websites work, then we’re all at a disadvantage, perhaps being played. How many people understand what data is scraped from various sites, how trackable is our digital footprint? Who understands how cultural and social biases — deliberate choices — inform the design of digital products? Then, even if we’re whizzes with all sorts of doo-dads, how free are we really? Food for thought.

Let me know how well I’m answering your question, if at all. I’m here to help.

2. Long-term implications and challenges of tech integration and digital learning in schools

Well that’s a doozy. It’s hard to say — we’re not in the long-term yet. ;-) We’re also unable to hold all variables constant; as technology and teaching changes, so does civic, family, and professional life. Hopefully, we’ll be sensitive to context and prepare students to meet the challenges of a changing world. So it’s not like we’re introducing something novel (tech integration, digital learning) into a context that’s static (2012 norms). Everything’s changing — how do we isolate the impact of just one thing? I trust you get where I’m going.

But okay, another way to answer the question. A bunch of possible futures:

1. Consistent or even worsening digital stratification contributes to widening social inequality.

2. Unproductive technology is mistaken for pedagogically meaningful technology and…

2a. …significant gains/innovations are not made; we have old wine in new bottles; we have the same kind of learning only now you swipe instead of pincer grip to turn the page

2b. …important capacities atrophy, such as the ability to read facial and social cues, amuse oneself sans digital device, focus on a single task for extended periods of time, etc, which delivers a net social loss
2c. …dissatisfied pushback paints all technology/media with a negative brush and dismisses the utility of even pedagogically meaningful tools
2d. …anytime, anywhere access creates a new sort of accountability to extended work hours and deterioration of boundaries
2e. …ignorance in terms of digital ethics facilitates harm in multiple ways

3. Affordances of technology allow new kinds of participation to shape the ways in which we teach, learn, and create and…

3a. …previously disenfranchised folks (e.g., specially abled, geographically remote, etc) can find and enrich community
3b. …more collaborative and efficient ways to pool knowledge and distribute tasks will become normative
3c. …digital gathering spaces will resurrect a sort of “one-room schoolhouse” type of learning context

All of these possibilities and more are possible. Who knows, Nora? Who knows?

Renee Hobbs specializes in media literacy, has just opened a school for communication in Rhode Island, and is involved with the American Library Association. She’s also a dear friend. Let me know if you’d like to pick her brain.

The 2011 Horizon Report could be a good resource for you. John Seely Brown likes to think about the future; so does The Institute for the Future.

Again, let me know if/how this serves you. Good luck!!!

Entertainment-education vs/with Skill-building

Returning to my dissertation planning for the umpteenth time, found this year-old query (dated 10/4/11) from my advisor Henry Jenkins and my stream-of-consciousness manifesto of a reply. 373 days later — have I attained any more clarity?

Participatory learning & skills-based curricula approaches

HJ: Is your central goal here one of appraising educational interventions? Developing a model or approaching for integrating SEL and NML frameworks? Critiquing the limits of current educational paradigms? Or some combo of all of these?

LF: I guess some combo…

Thesis: Social change interventions, whether explicitly educational or otherwise, should employ strategies that are versatile/adaptable and address the whole person; such strategies include: creating a culture of participatory learning, and adopting means and ends oriented towards primary skills development.

First, I think that there’s an element of education in any social change intervention. If it’s about nutrition, or hygiene, or reproductive health, information is still given; the facilitators hope that people will learn and change their behavior.

Now, didactic messaging isn’t very effective. (And we know that didactic teaching isn’t very effective.) In terms of social change interventions and communication techniques, some practitioners have shifted from the left brain/information-driven/explicit approach and recommended right brain/emotionally-driven/subtle approach. They usually use narrative devices (either identification with characters or involvement with narrative); this includes but is not limited to entertainment-education.

However, this approach is still top-down — it’s still a group of people who know best (often outsiders, but not necessarily/exclusively) creating products for consumption by others. There’s been an analogy to “chocolate-covered broccoli” — embedding the “nutrition” (the information) in an attractive casing. You might not even know you’re eating broccoli!

The assumption is that people don’t want to eat broccoli — it isn’t their favorite food, they wouldn’t eat it without the mitigation or deception of chocolate. They won’t engage in “good-for-you” practice. But what if we harnessed audience member’s favorite food? What if we facilitated audience members’ preparation of their own nutrition, if you will — we put em in a kitchen full of produce and let them whip up any salad/stew/pie they wanted? The original appeal of the favored product plus the fact that they made it themselves predicts that the people will eat it. There’s another way to get your nutrition. There was no deception (and so discovery and rejection is not an issue), no dependence on external provision (while a produce-stocked kitchen and mentorship in terms of preparation do require outside resources, these might be easier to access than the exotic chocolate-covered broccoli), and less passivity…

Okay, so to bring that out of the metaphorical and back into the actual… What I’m talking about is empowering people to pursue their own interests and objectives, and that empowerment is two-fold: mentoring them to take on that task, and allowing them to do so.

So in the case of social change interventions…
I still think that EE programming is effective… But some research suggests that it’s interpersonal communication, the conversations triggered by these stories, that robustly predicts behavior change. And there’s always the question of self-efficacy, which is comprised of attitude towards behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. So, while stories are important for innumerable reasons, they can’t be the sole element of the intervention; indeed, they aren’t. EE programmers usually put out: transmedia properties (which are still stories, largely, but it’s a step towards expanding from a single-product “cure”); listening groups; curricula for schools and non-profits; contests; exposition at the end of the program (e.g., “If you or someone you know is suffering from depression, contact this hotline…”).

Not only is participation rich but it’s increasingly becoming the norm. People expect options for engagement and co-creation — commenting + creating (from creating outcomes based on texting votes to creating multimedia pieces). Even before the ICT boom, or in places where its reach is hardly felt, audiences send fan letters to EE programs. There’s something in people, I think, that yearns to speak up and control. We want to matter.

(Not everyone CAN and DOES engage and participate at the same level, and there’s the problematic participation gap. But anyway…)

What this boils down to is that we need to know how to deal with people — how to support them so that they can access the stuff we believe in as well as access the stuff THEY believe in. So let’s set the conditions for optimal learning and growth so that people can thrive. That’s what I’m saying.

I think that educational experiences should be structured so that this culture of participatory learning is present, and so that primary skill development is pursued and valued.

To come back to the original Qs:
Is your central goal here one of appraising educational interventions?
Well, I’m not sure what appraising means. I don’t want to do an evaluation, or a meta-analysis… I guess I’m building a theoretical case for restructuring educational interventions, and contributing a model, and sharing how it’s worked in practice.

Developing a model or approaching for integrating SEL and NML frameworks?
Yes, it does do that too.

Critiquing the limits of current educational paradigms?
Perhaps… Certainly we know the didactic “sage on stage” model is passe. This is a new way to think about culture, means and goals. “New.” Fits in with a lot of other folks’ thoughts, I’d imagine, but is still novel in some respects…

Pecha Kuchas at USC Annenberg Dean’s Forum

On October 14, 2010, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab‘s Project New Media Literacies and other USC entities/individuals presented a series of “blue sky” propositions at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism Dean’s Forum: Fostering Community for Robert F. Kennedy’s Legacy in Action. Attending representatives from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, and non-profit RFK-Legacy in Action — including LAUSD School Board president Monica Garcia, several RFK Community Schools principals, and Robert F. Kennedy’s son and daughter-in law — pondered how we might spark new forms of teaching and learning while honoring the social justice philosophy that inspired these RFK institutions.

I speak Pecha Kucha-style from 1:04:30-1:08:30. That means that my 12 graphically-oriented slides advance every 20 seconds, whether I’m ready or not, for precisely four minutes. You can see me in the flesh at the beginning and the end — in the middle, you just see my slides. This is the event that paved the way for the next year and a half of PLAY! research. And the rest, as they say, is history…

MIT Tech TV