I was one of a handful of guests recently on the wonderful Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast, where the discussion centered on a white paper put out by The New Media Literacies Center at MIT. The paper, by Henry Jenkins, focuses in on the concept of how students can move forward, navigate and thrive in the new world of media and technology. (Oh, TTT is also up for an Edublog Award this year)

You can access the paper titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, by Henry Jenkins.

Listen to the podcast at Teachers Teaching Teachers

You can see a video put forth by the Project for New Media Literacies:

This is one list of skills that the white paper talks about for our students:

Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
Visualization – the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends

What do you think?
Peace (in sharing),
Kevin

The Common Craft folks are at it again. This time, the focus is podcasting. It’s made less with education in mind, but it still provides an overview of the technology.

Peace (in podcasts),
Kevin

Here is yet another intriguing video on why we should consider technology as integral to education:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/_A-ZVCjfWf8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Notice the desire to create, remix and use technology to explore the world.

Peace (in illumination),
Kevin

(Note: this is an old post that has been sitting in my bin. Doing some spring cleanup)

The 2008 version of the Horizon Report shows six possible trends in emerging technology that is worth a look. (You can download the full report here).

The report identifies:

• Grassroots video
• Collaborative Webs
• Mobile Broadband
• Data Mashups
• Collective Intelligence
• Social Operating Systems

Interesting.

Peace (in the future),
Kevin

Another great video has come out from CommonCraft. This time, the focus is on online photo sharing sites (such as Flickr).

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/vPU4awtuTsk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Peace (in clear and simple explanations),
Kevin

Happy New Year!

Matt Needleman is re-launching his Video in the Classroom website and if you are interested in exploring this world with your students, this site is a good place to begin. Matt has pulled together examples, links and ideas on how to get started. The site is still under construction but it remains a place to visit and learn from.

(disclosure: Matt has profiled me and the work of my students at his site, including this podcast that Matt has put together with three teachers who do claymation in the classroom. The podcast is great and Matt gets at the inside of creating a clay movie with students in the classroom from a variety of viewpoints. I got some nice tips on using tinfoil on the inside of the clay figures to keep them from falling over — we call it the “melting” of the clay.).

Thanks, Matt, for sharing your resources with the rest of us. He is also launching a Blog Carnival and seeks your submissions for blog posts or articles related to video in the classroom.

Also, Matt is going to be this week’s host for the Day in a Sentence feature and more information about that will be coming tomorrow.

Peace (in sharing),
Kevin