today was the fourth day of our study trip to America.
i was tasked to be the note-taker for the second half of the day, so here are my preliminary notes :-)
we visited Erin Reilly at Project New Media Literacies (Project NML).
Erin is the Research Director at Project NML, and we were joined by Kelly Leahy (Project Manager), Anna van Someren (Creative Manager), Katie Clinton (Content Analyst) and Jenna McWilliams (Curriculum Specialist).
the team is presently transitioning from the foundational planning phase of the interventions to the implementation phase, with an aim to making tools available to the wider educational fraternity in the first half of 2009.
using their White Paper (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century) as an organisational framework, the team that hosted us represented each of the three main tools that they are presently developing.
after a brief introduction to the characteristics of participatory culture, an outline of three core problems / research questions, and an overview of core social skills and cultural competencies (including visualisation) associated with NML (which you can read from the White Paper), Anna took us through the first of these tools - the Learning Library. more than just a repository of learning materials online, a major goal of the Library is to support children in their co-construction of their own learning through exemplars, exercises, expressions (which are jointly created and shared) and engagement in ethical debates.
Anna gave an example of how this could be done, using the theme of Creative Commons ("Standing on the Shoulders of Giants"). for that particular module, the NML skill was 'appropriation', learners would then be taken through a video-based exemplar, be presented with exercises through which the skill could be explained and practised, and finally be presented with opportunities to express their understandings of the skill ("Your Turn"), during which ethical issues could be surfaced and discussed.
Jenna then talked about the Ethics Casebook. she briefly mentioned one example - "the Meaning of Bling", which encourages learners to think about the evolution of signs, signifiers and symbols, and how these are used in social networking.
the discussion then moved to how NML skills might be learned through classroom projects. Examples were the Teacher's Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture, Weaving the Thread (social mapping; social studies and mathematics), and Civic Engagement (history and civics education).
Katie talked a bit more on her work on the Strategy Guide. using the example of Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's theatre adaptation of Moby Dick, she talked about how traditional literary terms (such as 'allusion') might be used as a foot-in-the-door to help teachers (during, say, a two-day workshop) navigate between the familiar and less familiar (the latter being the relevance of NML to traditional subject domains).
this latter discussion of the Strategy Guide helped us consolidate our learning points from this visit. speaking personally, it helped remind me of how fundamental literacies (such as print literacies) are being redistributed across the much more expansive curriculum defined by the NML landscape.
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