Tag Archives: Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism

Expertise

  By laurelfelt | December 20, 2012 - 3:29 pm | , , , , ,
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Child development:
I earned my Master’s degree in Child Development from the prestigious Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, specializing in children’s media.

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with children of all ages in multiple contexts. I taught pre-school for 3.5 years, conducted research with 1st grade English Language Learners, taught summer enrichment programs to 5- to 9-year-olds in India, studied 6th and 7th grade girls’ instant messaging and social aggression, facilitated after-school programs in new literacies and improvisation for high school freshmen in Los Angeles (Felt, Vartabedian, Literat & Mehta, 2012), and designed a social and emotional learning + new media literacies curriculum for 15- to 21-year-olds in Senegal (Felt & Rideau, 2012).

I understand how children’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development occurs over time, and appreciate how this development informs youths’ capacities and preferences in terms of play, study, and communication.

Games and learning:
I work with Henry Jenkins, one of the nation’s foremost experts in participatory culture and learning. Our research group, PLAY! (Participatory Learning And You!), has implemented several professional development initiatives oriented towards supporting students’ rich learning (Vartabedian & Felt, 2012; Reilly, Jenkins, Felt, & Vartabedian, 2012; Reilly, Vartabedian, Felt & Jenkins, 2012).

I am a co-founder of USC Impact Games, a cross-campus working group that unifies theorists, designers, engineers, and investigators from sundry disciplines. I also consult with Laughter for a Change, a non-profit organization that uses theater games in order to teach members of its workshops about “Playing agreement. Risk taking. Spontaneity. Changing perspectives. Opening up to moments of discovery and surprise. Making active, not passive, choices,” among other things (cited in McFarren, 2011).

I understand how games teach, and how good games can make a profound impact.

Social and emotional learning:
I’ve studied social and emotional learning theoretically and practically in multiple ways, such as by writing a 25-page analysis of empathy (Felt, 2011) and creating curricula that seek to scaffold interpersonal and intrapersonal competence.

I understand the components of social and emotional learning and am passionate about incorporating them as both means and ends of educational experiences.

Overall:
I am uniquely qualified to function as a bridge-builder and translator, helping members of multiple specializations to leverage other fields’ findings and best practices, with the goal of constructing the highest-quality, most impactful product possible.

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.

Q’s & A’s

  By laurelfelt | November 12, 2012 - 1:50 pm | , , , ,
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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!!!

Participatory Professional Development

  By laurelfelt | November 2, 2012 - 1:40 pm | , , ,
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Yesterday I had the opportunity to re-join my brilliant colleagues Erin Reilly, Ioana Literat, Sarah Kirn, and Sarah Morrisseau for a chat about our recent media-rich publication, Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education. Our talk was moderated by the accomplished S. Craig Watkins and took place via LiveStream ConnectedLearning.tv webinar. To my delight, this technology again allowed me to show up, in real time, on the computer screen of an international friend. Whereas my first brush with webinar-ing motivated my colleague Cathy Tran to proclaim on FB from Norway, “I see you on “TV”!!! :)”, this time my colleague Tidiane Thang posted on FB from Senegal, “Don’t worry be happy, you started a great presentation.”

Tidiane was comforting me because my computer connection went awry — I might have had too many windows open (I was trying to backchannel with listeners via LiveStream chat as well as answer a few emails and skim the PDF, then toggle back to the webinar screen and see if I’d missed anything in our internal chat). I spoke around minute 33, then got kicked off at 34:24 in a very tragic, abrupt fashion. The “hilarious” part is that I continued speaking for at least two more minutes after that! :) Oy. I spoke up again around 40:30, got all touchy-feely around 47:30 by throwing down the term “self-actualization,” then revealed my obsession with food by likening technology to dessert around 49:50.

Beyond navel-gazing, though, I appreciated the opportunity to acknowledge the complexities and constraints that teachers negotiate. I’m disappointed by the reductive rhetoric that is usually invoked vis-a-vis school reform and American achievement. Rather than respect teachers as professionals, stakeholders, and heroes, we villainize teachers as lazy, underperforming, or even lascivious. How many more stories about teacher-on-student abuse have we heard than stories about teacher-for/with-student uplift? If the teacher isn’t female, white, and cute, and if her students aren’t black, brown, and poor, then the extraordinary teacher story isn’t deliberately buried — it’s never pursued or located in the first place.

I admire teachers’ work. I value researchers’ knowledge. If we could bring together these two products and their respective producers by translating and collaborating, as well as welcome more constituents including administrators, students, parents, and community members, then what a dynamo we would have. Then just try to stop us! Who could stop us? Everyone would be on board, helping to push us along!

I’m a lucky human being (as I own at 55:42!) and a motivated partner. Let’s make some magic, mes amis.

Connecting, Co-learning, and Conference 2.0

  By laurelfelt | October 25, 2012 - 4:32 pm | , , , , , ,
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On June 23, 2012, I had the honor of joining Dr. Rosanne Cordell and Judy Kleinberg on a panel titled “Digital Literacy and Libraries: Designing What Comes Next,” organized by the American Library Association (ALA)’s Larra Clark and Marijke Visser. This panel was moderated by ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy Fellow, Founding Director and Professor in the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island, media literacy expert, and friend Dr. Renee Hobbs. Both attending and speaking at the annual American Library Association Conference & Exhibition in Anaheim, CA, was a phenomenal opportunity to recognize my love of libraries and, importantly, engage in some personal translation and interdisciplinary outreach. I tapped into my personal best.

As I briefly mentioned during the talk, my Grandma Elly was a children’s librarian at Chicago’s Linne Elementary School. My mom worked at the Northwestern University library when she was an undergraduate. In fact, my parents had just started dating when Mom was hired over Winter Break, 1971-72, to transfer the books from old, Hogwarts-esque Deering Library to the new, dystopia-inspired towers of terror; Dad used to visit her there. When I was a kid, the local library was a magical place of unlimited books and videos. One year for Halloween, I dressed up as the princess character from a Glenview Public Library-based reading incentive game. When I graduated from Northwestern University, I worked in the media section of the Northbrook Public Library. In Somerville, I adored the community library in Davis Square and the university library (with its new coffeeshop!) at Tufts. After my first roommate in Los Angeles flew the coop, my love of the Los Feliz Public Library motivated me to find a new apartment in the same neighborhood. And there’s no better place to hear the soothing sounds of a fountain (but not to plug in your computer or read from your sun-glared screen) than the courtyard outside Literatea at USC’s Doheny Library. I.LOVE.LIBRARIES. But that’s somewhat tangential.

During the digital literacy panel, despite the fact that I had hardly slept the night before out of excitement for an upcoming milestone (or because of my jittery joy?), I was on fire. I felt inspired by Renee’s concerted effort to connect with the audience and explain concepts in comprehensible, engaging ways — no jargon, no monotony. I also reflected on my dissatisfaction with conferences in general as they fail to honor and optimize the potential of the people present. Attendees sacrifice dollars, abandon families, up-end work schedules, and expend carbon — for what? Not to be read a paper or hear its highlights — they can read the text or abstract via PDF in the comfort of their own homes. Not to listen to a one-way presentation — they can be talked at via YouTube, once again, in the comfort of their own homes.

In the internet-less past, easy distribution of articles, lectures, and slideshows was impossible; thus, such a 1.0 approach to conferences was rational. But that isn’t the case anymore. Now we have the internet; moreover, we have a 2.0 internet. We have opportunities to be seen and to talk back via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Posterous, tumblr, etc, not to mention such niche-specific sites as COMM.init, TeacherTube, and DMLcentral.  So what is the point of gathering together in one room today? How do we justify the financial, familial, professional, and environmental impacts?

My answer: Connection. Give-and-take between the attendees and the presenters, and introductions and dialogue among the attendees. Let’s tailor and respond, let’s network and collaborate, let’s get out of going it alone and benefit from the power of collective intelligence.

I think that’s what we did. I invited participants — my preferred term to attendees because it implies less passivity — to show me and each other who they are. I encouraged them to talk with partners and join teams with other pairs. I welcomed them to share their discoveries with the group. Later, Renee requested at least six participants share their (realistic) magic wishes, then had every participant fill out an index card (or exit ticket) identifying their biggest takeaway and remaining question(s).

This was co-learning, I believe. This was conference 2.0.

Additionally, my extemporaneous speaking about my passion for play came out eloquent. Was I proud. I felt like I’d finally made a convincing, accessible case for the importance of play. And maybe all I’d needed all along was to speak to people who would listen, and listen to people who were (finally?) empowered to speak.

In deference to this magical experience, and in the hopes of articulating a dissertation prospectus, I transcribed Renee’s prompts and my improvised answers from a recording I began making after six minutes had elapsed, once I realized that Renee’s lecture was gold.

RENEE HOBBS, 15:15: And finally we have Laurel Felt, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. She was involved in developing the curriculum for the project called PLAY! — Participatory Learning And You! And she also does some consulting for the Shoah Foundation.

So I guess I’ll turn it over to the panel. Why are you interested in digital literacy and what’s your personal connection to it? Who wants to start?

LAUREL FELT, 15:50: I’ll start! Thank you. Thank you so much, Renee. Isn’t Renee an inspiring speaker? [applause] Well, I was struck, actually, by how powerfully Renee spoke and what a good job she did of being an educator, which made me think that I wanted to try my best to emulate. So I wanted to speak a little bit less about me — to learn more about me I welcome you to go to laurelfelt.org. I’d love to learn a little bit more about you. I think that participation is what digital literacy is all about. So let’s find out who we are.

If you identify yourself as a , please raise your hand.
If you identify yourself as a librarian, please raise your hand.
If you identify yourself as an educator, please raise your hand.
If you identify yourself as an artist, please raise your hand.
If you identify yourself as an activist, please raise your hand.
If you identify yourself as a government employee or somehow a vessel of government [laughter], please raise your hand.
If you’re part of the tech industry, please raise your hand.
If you’re part of the entertainment industry, please raise your hand. — It’s the hometown industry. (I came in from LA.)

Excellent, thank you so much.

If you feel confused [laughter] about digital literacy, please raise your hand. [pause] Yeah, that’s why we’re all here. I’m not sure you’re going to walk away with it all clear as a bell, but hopefully we’ll be further along and hopefully we’ll feel more empowered to engage in a conversation, to have a jumping-off point.

If you feel confused about what it’s going to take in order for your institution to be prepared for the 21st century, please raise your hand.

If you’re not sure how best to serve children, please raise your hand.

It’s murky, right? I was looking at the definition that Renee shared and it’s sprawling, and comprehensive, and inspiring. And I have to admit that as she was talking, I went to laurelfelt.org and I edited my homepage. [Previously], I had changed one of my terms from “digital literacy” to “new literacies” because before I thought I’d found a nuance and I thought that new literacies was a better umbrella to encapsulate all kinds of different ideas, but when she articulated everything that she found to be salient to digital literacy, I thought that was the best umbrella you could find. [And so I changed it back to “digital literacy.” POST-SCRIPT: I have since changed it to “new media literacies” in order to reflect my Jenkins-ian lineage.]

And I feel like those two things that occurred — this evolving idea of what we’re talking about and this ability to change our online representation, and to do it at a moment’s notice — is all part of a new culture that is remarkably different from even the one I grew up with, and I’m 32 — which is old to kids today. It’s even old to my college students; I’ve got 10 years on the oldest ones.

I think that when we’re evaluating digital literacy, what we need to remember at the same time is that people are people, at our hearts. And we sometimes feel intimidated by all of these tools. But people are tool-using creatures — that’s how we define “man” in a classical anthropology sense. And just because the tools have changed doesn’t mean that we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and that the world is falling apart. We just have to figure out how to master these tools for our own ends, and not let them rule us.

So I guess I’ll use that as my point of departure.

RH, 28:05: Okay, so let’s see if we can drill down on this issue of definition, which we said we would play with. I guess, my question to the panelist is, Do we really need a definition of digital literacy? Why or why not? If it is emerging, maybe we should just let it emerge. I’m curious about your take on what are the pro’s and con’s of nailing down this sprawling set of concepts. And my second question is, Should academic, school, and public librarians be responsible for all of this, or for part of it? What role should librarians play, given the diverse stakeholders coming to circle around this concept?

LF, 31:44: Hi, everyone. Renee instructed us to be provocative, and to make this lively, so I’m going to throw a few provocations out there.

I’m reminded of my studies in child development and, according to some, unless you have a word for something, unless you have language, you can’t see it, and you can’t remember it. And some people say that lack of language is partially responsible for why very young children have no memory. It’s not only that they’re developing cognitively but they’re not sure how to discern or distinguish one object from another and tag it and file it in their brains so that they can pull it up later. So if we don’t have a word for what digital literacy is, then how will we be able to see it when it’s happening? Or see it when it isn’t happening? Or begin to drill down on it?

Sometimes by calling out all of the constituent things that occur in a process, we’re able to give it more value. For example, sometimes people write off the occupation of housewife. But when you start to articulate what it takes to be a housewife, you’re actually a nurse, you’re a chauffeur, you’re a custodian, you’re a therapist, etc, etc, etc — well, that’s a heck of a job. So I think that it could be very productive to put out some guidelines so we have something to recognize and something to aim towards.

I recognize that language can be restricting and so now it makes me want to re-edit my homepage, to tell you the truth. Now I want to say “new literacies” acknowledges that there’s a march of progress that I think Renee threw up very eloquently on her slide. That literacies continue to emerge and perhaps that’s the umbrella term and digital literacy’s underneath it, and “digital” will keep on changing but “new” will acknowledge that we evolve.

In terms of what role librarians play, or what role teachers should play in part of this or all of it, I’d like to throw that back at you. So I invite you to take about 20 seconds to think about it. And then turn to your partner to discuss, so someone who’s on your left or your right. Ready to start thinking about it?

RH: What are we discussing?

LF: What role does a librarian play in supporting digital literacy? Okay, turn on your thinking caps. Okay and whenever you’re ready, turn to somebody next to you, maybe you already have, talk it out.

…

And if you’d like, you and your partner can find another pair and make it a conversation of four.

…

If you can hear me, clap twice. If you can hear me, clap three times. If you believe I taught preschool, clap four times. For four years! [laughter]

Thank you so much, I hope you enjoyed your conversations with each other, it looked so lively. I would like to invite you to do two things. One, for those who are bold and interested in sharing in this space, I’d love a representative from your group to come up, introduce yourself, and tell us what you were talking about. And for those of you who don’t have the time or can’t make it up to the microphone or prefer not to speak in public, do know that we have a hashtag on Twitter — it is #digilit – D I GI L I T.

RH: 12, digilit12.

LF: I’ve been doing it wrong! Oops. It’s all safe, I can just copy and paste. So you can do #digilit12, so that’s #digilit12, D I G I L I T 12, and share some of your impressions, your ideas in that space as well — this is the richness of the new digital world we’re in. But for now let’s maximize the fact that we’re all together in one space. Who would like to come up and tell us what you were talking about? Come on up. And there’s a microphone here.

PARTICIPANT 1 (Kim): Well I was just talking with one other person. I’m in a semi-interesting situation in that I work at… which is an all online, for-profit institution. I always feel a little bit alone in a crowd… As to the question, Do I feel like we have a responsibility? … Absolutely. As an open admissions, online, for profit… it’s not just that it’d be nice to have, it’s a must that we need to put it out there. But as my discussion partner was saying, it’s a shared responsibility, especially with adults like we have, they have to go out there, they have to watch the videos, they have to view the tutorials. … If you’re bringing people into the platform, you need to make available the tools so they can understand how to use other tools.

What gets difficult is when any kind of learner, when they need information, they get more overwhelmed the more information you give them. Question, How best to present the information in a way that is timely and manageable.

LF: That’s true. Thank you, Kim. So I’d love to invite someone else to come up and I’m just going to reiterate what I heard while that person comes. Who would like to be next? [pause] Great. So what I heard from Kim is this notion of shared responsibility, that we’re all in this together. But I feel like I also heard an ethic of, sort of, responsibility, of stewardship, “if WE are going to offer something to THEM…” It implies a sort of hierarchy, then we need to be able to sort of scaffold that experience, which is interesting. And then the question of pedagogy — so how best to teach and not overwhelm. These are great questions, thank you, Kim.

PARTICIPANT 2 (Nicole): Hello everyone, hi Kim, I’m Nicole, it’s nice to meet you all. So in our discussion group we talked about the fact that, because of the magnitude of what digital literacy is all about, and the role that libraries have, it’s something like you said, we cannot do it alone, and we discussed the importance of collaboration and working with our community partners, stakeholders, government, academics, schools, in order to make it happen. We also discussed the fact that, whether we want to take on the roles, we are forced to do that because of the demand we have in our libraries and institutions from folks who really need these services. And then I think the third aspect that we discussed was the fact that this is only one aspect of literacy. We work with lots of different populations who have a need for language literacy and helping folks first to understand the language and then, as a next step, understanding digital literacy. So it was those three areas that our group discussed.

LF: That’s wonderful, thanks, Nicole. I feel like everyone in this room could be up on this panel. Very brilliant ideas. So what I heard from that is the notion of coalition-building and trying to form vibrant relationships, hopefully steeped in understanding, respect, functional communication with all of the stakeholders who Renee enumerated. There’s also the idea of sort of being forced into a corner if you will, it’s not a question of want to, it’s a question of have to, that the ground is shifting beneath our feet and we need to respond. And I feel like I also heard the idea of preparation, that in order to be able to access some of these higher order skills most productively, there are some other skills that are necessary in order to get there. So you need to be able to use language and, my bias, is that you need to have social and emotional competence: self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. So those are the things that help to set the stage, intrapersonally and interpersonally, for productive work of all sorts. So, where does that fit into the mix? Does that happen while we’re doing digital literacy work? Before it?

Now I’m going on my own tangent, you didn’t say all of that.

RH: Take two more comments, Laurel, then we’ll move on.

LF: All right, well, Judy had a great question. Remember, your “a-ha”?

JUDITH KLEINBERG: Oh yeah, my question was for you. Did you, in your conversation, come to some clarity, some a-ha moment? What was that “a-ha” that you didn’t have before you started your conversation.

RH: Come up to the microphone and share your a-ha.

PARTICIPANT 3: Digital technology is changing the way we work… [difficult to hear]

RH: That’s a great a-ha moment. Thanks for sharing!

PARTICIPANT 4: So our a-ha moment wasn’t — the opposite of that…Tablet, book, scroll, CD-ROM, Internet… modes have changed, at our heart we’re still doing the same things.

LF: They’re with our program, Renee, they’re trying to be provocative.

RH: Are there any more a-ha’s?

LF: Take it, Mary Alice.

PARTICIPANT 5: …School librarian. Students know technology better than she does. I taught in a library school… I believe we have to do things… always ready to humiliate ourselves… Do something that you don’t have a clue how to do.

RH: Wonderful insight, last a-ha…?

PARTICIPANT 6: Mine is — my own, sorry — my a-ha moment is that we need to fight… We had to fight for banned books… I’ve been telling you for five years, SWe need e-readers. So you know what I did? I went out and bought them myself. So I could teach. And that’s sometimes what we have to do make it happen… So that became the most popular class, the library is … sometimes we have to scream and yell and kick our feet to get the tools we need to teach the things that people need to learn.

RH: Absolutely wonderful. So in a way now we want to address kind of the consequences of that a-ha moment which is, What are the gaps, the challenges, the silences, and the omissions around what we SAY about digital literacy and what exists in practice? So I think it’s important for us to be REAL, that’s there’s a lot of hype on this topic. The tech industry is telling us, Everything will be great and glorious if only you get that latest thing. And we all kinda want to believe that’s true. And we want to see ourselves as “in the game’ with digital literacy. But we all recognize the gap between our aspirations and where we are right now with the practice. So I’m going to ask the panel members to talk a little bit about how you see the gaps, the challenges, the silences, and the omissions. Because once we get some precision and clarity with that, then we can decide what to do about it.

LF, 55:40: I have to stand up. [laughter] I used to do improv comedy, I still sort of do, and so what I’m feeling like are some of the gap are passion and fun.

If you feel like we’re being too serious overall, turn to your partner and give em a high five. [laughter] Renee?

You know the way that every child learns is through play. And we spend so much of our time as adults seeking out entertainment and pleasure. And information can be a pleasure. And engaging in digital spaces can be a place where we experience flow, which is when you lose grasp of who you are, where you are, and you’re just immersed and you lose yourself. Isn’t that a great feeling? That’s how some people feel when they play a game, when they’re listening to music, when they’re reading a good book — you librarians, probably you guys –, when you’re watching a movie. And I think it can be how some people feel when they come to the library or when they’re sitting in a classroom.

But I feel like we’re making this really scary and we’re making it all really technical. And we need to lower the barrier a little bit and allow people to play more — to touch tools, to see what happens when you touch this, when you go here. And I think that in order to liberate the pedagogical process that you’d spoken about earlier, and avoid the information overload, what we need to do is to encourage people to play, and to go find the answers to their own questions, and trust that they’re going to do that in a way that feels safe and comforting and even enjoyable.

Maybe only 10% of us raised our hands when I asked if we’re artists. Every kindergartner is an artist! So what happened? And now that we all have these creation tools, what excuse do we have? I think that we can aspire to bring back some of the passion and the fun and the play, and that can be very meaningful and help us to collaborate better, to lead healthier, happier lives, and to optimize the potential of digital tools and of analog tools — because to get ready to interact in digital spaces, you don’t necessarily need one of these [holds up an iPhone]. And by the way, this costs $130/month, it’s ridiculous.

In order to do some of the things that are most important online, like seeing what happens if you do something different, you can do that with a peer, you can do that with a ball, you can do that with a book if you turn to any page and have to read the first line (so that’s sort of an improv game).

But you see what I’m saying — that in order to ramp up to use the digital space productively, there’s a lot of things that we can do with no money down, on the ground, in an analog way, and that can actually be harder — changing the way that we think and the way that we do things.

Some thoughts.

RH: How fascinating. So now I’m going to ask the panelists to pretend that you have a magic wand, here it is. But it’s a realistic magic wand in the age of an economic recession, double digit unemployment, and the realities, all of the realities of 2012. When I pass you the magic wand, you are granted one wish and it will come true. But it has to be a realistic, do-able wish. If you could wave your magic thing and do one thing, Judy, what would it be and why? -With the goal of making all Americans digitally literate — don’t ask for a million dollars here.

LF, 1:04:07: I wish for more wishes. [laughter] I’m thinking about libraries. I love libraries, I always have — my grandma was a librarian, my mom worked at the college library when she was a student, when I graduated from college I worked for a library…

I was at a really interesting panel this morning and they’re talking about how they’re striving to de-clutter their libraries, make their shelves lower, get rid of some of their reference collection because it’s online, and what that opens is space: space to do; space to connect with one another. I would love to see more spaces to play, with librarians being the champions of play. Because play is really the scientific process and it’s bathed in information.

One of my mentors, Henry Jenkins, and his colleagues define new media literacy play as “the ability to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving.” So seeing what happens when you do something. And I think that that’s inquiry. It’s, “Hunh, I wonder what will happen.” You examine it critically, you’re a keen observer, you note what occurs, you catalog it, perhaps that leads you to apply it in a certain way, to unpack it a little bit further, to ask another question — that’s research. It’s also play. The two reinforce one another.

In urban environments and rural environments, we’re seeing an erosion of playgrounds. And people worry that the entry of digital into our lives means that we’re becoming automatons — that we’re not using our bodies, that we’re not using our brains, that we’re just being dulled and passively consuming. It would be amazing to push back at that and to bring back play with our whole bodies, with our whole minds, and for libraries to be a haven for that, and for librarians to lead the way with tools that we can play with. That includes really serious technical things, like a computer, and that also might be kind of playful and that will help to unlock creativity and lead to questions, like toys and puzzles and sensory things.

I led a workshop with City Year and you wouldn’t believe what kinds of ideas people came up with when I gave them a whole bunch of animal figurines. Well, they were stunned — What am I doing with animal figurines, giving them to adults? But they used them to model some issues that they had with their communities and it helped them to think outside the box. [It also helped them to laugh together and bond as colleagues.] And that’s what we’re all trying to do, right? “Innovation, that’s the way forward”? So that’s what I would love for libraries to do, to really honor and embrace and forward play.

RH: Okay so now it’s your turn: You want every citizen, every person you reach in your role as a librarian to be digitally literate and I’m giving you the magic wand: one realistic wish. Come up to the microphone and share with us what you wish for, what would help you create digitally literate library patrons, learners, citizens, in the place where you do your best work.

[Participants share their wishes and the panel concludes.]