Ignite Talks Call for Proposals Announced:
January 6, 2014
Ignite Talks Call for Proposals Deadline:
February 7, 2014
Ignite talks are radically different from traditional conference talks. We’re looking for humor, wit, energy and inspiration to be packed into one powerful five-minute talk. Visual and conceptual impact is also a must. To view ignite talks from last year’s DML Conference, click here.
If you haven’t seen an ignite talk, be sure to do a quick search for “ignite talks” to watch some of the thousands of Ignite Talks out there or check out these sites for a quick tutorial:
http://ignite.oreilly.com
http://www.speakerconfessions.com/2009/06/how-to-give-a-great-ignite-talk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_(event)
This year’s Ignite Speakers are listed below. Two sessions are scheduled, March 6, 2014, 4:00-5:00 PM, and March 8, 2014, 3:30-4:30 PM (both in the Grand Ballroom).
Thursday, March 6, 2014
4:00 – 5:00 PM
Grand Ballroom
Sam Dyson, Hive Chicago, Mozilla Foundation, @samueledyson
What Can a Learning Network Do?
Inviting people to learn deeply is hard and important. For those of us working to extend that invitation to more youth, especially those who might otherwise be disengaged, we encounter a complex mix of problems and mysteries. This talk is about the promise of communities like Hive Learning Networks (http://hivelearningnetwork.org/) to turn mysteries into problems and problems into innovative solutions.
Matt Rafalow, University of California-Irvine, @mrafalow
“Code-Switching”: ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’ at School
The use of the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant” have spread rapidly in society. Typically these categories refer to youths’ seemingly natural gifts with technology, while older generations have difficulty keeping up. Educators, technologists, and social scientists know these categories are complicated for a number of reasons. However, I find that teachers regularly use these terms to make meaning out of the relationships with their students. Through comparative research in middle schools that vary by race and class, I find that many teachers see students’ peer-centered tech skills as frivolous and even threatening to classroom lessons. One school, however, frames students’ skills and teachers’ roles differently: they teach students how to “code-switch,” or translate their peer-oriented skills with technology in ways that are valuable to school. In this way, teachers are positioned as mentors that can link young people’s skills from hanging out with peers online to educational institutions.
Michael Edson, Smithsonian Institution, @mpedson
Jack the Museum is a slam poem in the guise of an Ignite talk: a 20 slide/ 5 minute rhyming, rhythmic, smackdown and call-to-action for any institution – – anyone – – thinking about global learning. I have a fancy title: I’m the director of web and new media strategy at the Smithsonian Institution. I will rock this.
Jackie Gonzalez, Program Manager, Flagship Computer Clubhouse, Boston Museum of Science, @mmm_jackiez
An obstacle for teens entering STEM careers is the lack of explicit creativity and fun. Through presenting a range of obtainable but unique careers, I will demonstrate that there are better ways to encouraging STEM-based interests other than salaries. Creativity is important in each and every career, and educators/Mentors need to see beyond the fluff and truly explore why it matters, particularly in STEM. Creativity is not just about artistic expression, it’s about taking risks, seeing things in new ways, making connections and challenging assumptions – skills we can all benefit from. I would hope to inspire others to explore and foster the role of creativity in their lives and re-imagine the successes for our young people that can come from it.
Ariel Waldman, Science Hack Day, @arielwaldman
The Hacker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Don’t panic: the next big science revolution isn’t just for asteroid miners or CERN scientists. There has been a considerable movement in the last several years to make science more open between scientific disciplines and to the perceived “public”. But simply making science open – by placing datasets, research, and materials online and using open source licensing – is only half the battle. Science should be disruptively accessible – empowering people from a variety of different backgrounds to explore, participate in, and build new ways of interacting with and contributing to science. Just as science fiction has often shown the way to future inventions, the act of hacking is now generating prototypes that act as footholds for future explorations, discoveries and epiphanies in science.
Christine McCaleb, iEARN-USA, @intl_tina
Digital Storytelling: Building Empathy for Systemic Change
Digital Storytelling has been praised for its inter-disciplinary learning opportunities and diverse applications to promote 21st century skills and technology literacy. But it is rarely referenced for its contributions to psycho-social development or community building. I propose that educators leverage the affordances of digital storytelling to tackle bullying in schools and build more emphatic learning communities. Learning to tell the story of another can be a transformative exercise that requires empathy, team work, understanding and finding value in the “other”. Combine this with the creativity of multimedia, interpersonal communication blossoms. Reflecting on my experiences facilitating multiple digital storytelling workshops to groups of intercultural youth in Ghana, Qatar, and Turkey, I demonstrate how youth can begin to cultivate healthier learning environments, both in their own schools and their communities.
Jane Park, Creative Commons, School of Open, @janedaily
How “Open” is Transforming Communities
I’m going to talk about how “open” can change lives in unexpected ways. For example, who ever that that open resources could bring running water to a rural school in Kenya? (http://teamopen.cc/kasyoka/)
Or science skills to remote island kids off the east coast of China? (https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/41155)
This is the power of “open”, which has been demonstrated time (http://thepowerofopen.org/) and time again (http://teamopen.cc/). These online courses, training programs, and projects are started up by passionate volunteers all around the world as part of the School of Open (http://schoolofopen.org), and they are changing lives. The School of Open (SOO) is a community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and more. Anyone can join. I’ll provide incentives and quick list of ways the audience can partake, and to come talk to me after the talk or at the DML cafe session.
Taos Glickman, Communication PhD Student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Would The Breakfast Club be a bunch of Cyberbullies Today?: Investigating Where Screen Media Intersects in this Screen-Based Issue
This talk will answer the probing question: Would The Breakfast Club (1985) teens be a bunch of cyberbullies today? In recent years youth cyberbullying or, “the use of information and communications technology to intimidate, harass, victimize, or bully an individual or a group of individuals” (Bhat, 2008. p.54), has increasing garnered parental and public attention. However, missing from much of the discussion is the role screen media itself plays in this screen-based issue. Focusing on historical and current youth-targeted film and television, I discuss frequent representations and stereotypical depictions of “bullies” and “victims.” These often follow clique/cliché-based formulas like the ‘jerky jock,’ and the ‘loaner nerd.’ From the seminal teen angst of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), all the way to the Mean Girls (2004) for a new generation, this takes a humorous look at a serious issue.
Debra Kerr, YouthMuse, @YouthMuser
Build a Better Message
Teens and adults instinctually believe if we can just educate or explain well enough, our audience will take action. We are wrong. Recent research shows understanding and action are not connected. In fact, action leads to a desire to learn. Deb will awaken the audience’s intuitive response, prompting them to remember when their action led to deeper learning and share quick clips of what happens when she does the same for teen audiences.
Amy Storrow, Senior Advisor for Innovation, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State
Improvisational Theater and Virtual Exchanges: We’ve Got Your Back!
This ignite session will look at the creation of a new office within the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the Department of State, The Collaboratory. We use the principles of design thinking and “agreement” from improvisational theater as guides for programming and decision-making within the Bureau. How do these methods open up new possibilities in creating virtual exchanges? How can we all improvise together?
Yasmin Kafai, University of Pennsylvania, @katyaskit
Changing the Face of Computing, One Stitch at a Time
National and local competitions, such as Coding Wars, Google Science Competition, FIRST Robotics, Hackfest, Microsoft Imagine Cup—to name just a few of the ever-growing list—have become popular venues to engage and highlight hacking accomplishments. In recent years, online versions—such as the National STEM Video Game Design Challenge, Globaloria Awards, and Make-to-Learn Contest—have joined the portfolio. While these competitions, contests, and challenges are theoretically open to all, it is also clear that they are not broadening participation. Although actively engaging many youth, to date large-scale competitions have often encountered difficulties attracting and sustaining participation for students in groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields. To change the face of computing requires new ways of thinking about and doing computing and connecting to issues that are important to young people’s lives. We decided to join the nation’s largest college hackathon with over 1,200 hackers and propose StitchFest, a different type of hack, around the theme of wear and care. After all, it was fashion that inspired British woman Ada Lovelace to write the first computer program—the code for a mechanical loom that wove the complex patterns for the jacquard textiles that were in vogue at the time. And yet, the historical and intimate relationship between fashion and computing has largely been forgotten and ignored, even as Lovelace’s pioneering spirit lives on today in dresses that change colors, jackets that play music, shoes that light up, and necklaces that display Twitter feeds. The old saying goes that one stitch at a time saves nine in the future. Stitching and coding your own wearables is one step (or stitch) into broadening participation in, and ultimately changing the face of computing.
Constance Steinkuehler, Co-Director, Games+Learning+Society Center
Wisconsin Institute for Discovery
Associate Professor, Curriculum & Instruction
University of Wisconsin-Madison, @constances
Building a Corporation for Public Gaming
Since David Rejeski’s first proposal for a Corporation for Public Gaming in 2006, the field of games for impact has spoken of its need in hushed tones, all too aware of how unlikely such an establishment would be in today’s political climate. The idea of public media is under fire from both sides of the political isle, and the dream of anything close to $300M yearly appropriation for interactive media like games seems unlikely. After all, we’ve a hard enough time simply convincing Americans that not all games are the same, that not all games are violent, and that videogames, just like television, can be the medium of all sorts of expression and not just another “vast wasteland.”
As platforms for games diversity and rush into mobile devices (phones and tablets), however, so too does their audience diversify. And as a broader swath of the public engages with games of myriad forms, the nation is starting to wake up to the medium’s diversity and potential. To borrow a phrase from President Johnson when he signed legislation to establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) back in 1967 for television, “we have only begun to grasp the great promise of the medium.”
In this rant I want to talk about the critical functions a Corporation for Public Gaming (CPG) would serve and the efforts we can make to bring that entity into existence. The building blocks are already there in different sectors: academics, industry, philanthropy, government, and – increasingly, the public market. With some partnership and field building to remove critical barriers and frictions, I argue, we can create a new form of CPG that’s distributed across multiple entities working in unison and amplify the function of one another. Perhaps we should start with grass roots organization that leverages the efforts already in play, and then argue for appropriations after the fact rather than a priori. There is an old adage in Washington DC that, every good idea needs three things: resources, permission, and people who own it. And of those three things, its people who are the most critical ingredient. I argue we now have the people and passion we need to make a Corporation for Public Gaming possible. This is my call to arms.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
3:30 – 4:30 PM
Grand Ballroom
Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania, @amystorn
This Ignite talk will consider what it means to create opportunities for young people to be global innovators, defining innovation as making social change and expanding opportunities and access. I argue that this work is radically and quintessentially local, scaling up through interconnection and relationships and facilitated by new technologies. In a profoundly interdependent world, it is more important that ever to create opportunities for deep, connected learning with others globally, and to do so for all young people, not just the elite few who have access to global education. While many people are beginning to think broadly about how to accomplish this goal, a number of these efforts use frameworks that are ultimately limiting, particularly when our goals are oriented to social justice, youth voice and production, and inclusion/access rather than profit and consumption. In a particular example, I will illustrate how the metaphor of ‘exchange’ remains problematic, especially in locating agency and change within individuals rather than within systems or communities. To illustrate how a local, contextual model can move beyond exchange to consider the collaborative and connected dimensions of dialogue, I consider the work of the Global Youth Media Collaborative, a new partnership that seeks to theorize youth cross-cultural communication from a dialogic, participatory, and connected framework as it connects youth producers situated within local communities of practice to one another.
Armando B. Somoza, Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy, Urban Arts Partnership
How do you engage young people to become active participants and changemakers in their community utilizing digital media and the arts? You allow them to become stakeholders in the issues that impact them the most. New Yorkers were stopped by the NYPD over half a million times in 2012 and 5 million stops have been made throughout the Bloomberg administration as a part of the controversial Stop&Frisk policy. 90% of those stopped were Black and Latino between the ages of 14-24 and 89% of those stopped were completely innocent, neither arrested nor issued a summons. In 2012, students from The Youth Leadership Network of LatinoJustice and the Academy at Urban Arts Partnership created a 15 minute documentary, original soundtrack and social media campaign called “More Than a Quota” examining the impact of Stop-and-Frisk on NYC youth. In December 2013, students presented “More Than A Quota: Our Experience, Our Story,” a multimedia digital pop up exhibit at SOHO ARTHOUSE, 138 Sullivan Street, New York, NY 10012, to showcase creative responses to the experience of being stopped and frisked as a NYC youth. I want to share their story and tell you how we rocked police politics in NYC!
Scott Nicholson, Syracuse University School of Information Studies, @snicholson
Beyond Badges: A RECIPE for Meaningful Gamification
Gamification doesn’t have to be about rewards. Games are enjoyable without their point systems, and so gamification can also be created that doesn’t rely upon BLAP (Badges, Levels, Leaderboards, Achievements, and Points).
I’ll talk about my RECIPE for Meaningful Gamification, where I talk about using Reflection, Engagement, Choice, Information, Play, and Exposition as gamification tools to create a gameful or playful layer that helps participants find personal connections to another context for long-term change.
Anna Smith, NYU, @writerswriting
In these short five minutes, I’ll take the audience on a trip down the learning pathway a young man forged as he crossed multiple educational contexts both in and outside of school. The learning and growth this young man experienced is itself inspirational…and the lessons we can learn from it about planning for and expecting the “emergent possible” in our work to create alternative pathways to learning are promising. I’ll leave off with some critical questions about who we trust to have learning goals, what it means to pay more attention to the journey than the destination, and what we value and count as “learning” (even in our expanded, alternative definitions).
Nate Hill / Lindsey Frost Cleary, Chattanooga Public Library / Mozilla, @natenatenate
Chattanooga, TN has the first and fastest — and now one of the least expensive — high-speed Internet services in the United States. Our incredibly fast internet speeds have attracted start-ups and entreprenuers to our community and helped Chattanooga to reimagine how business can be done. Now in 2014, these entrepreneurs and businesses are joining with schools and nonprofit organizations to begin a city-wide effort to reexamine when, where, and how learning happens in the so-called Gig City. The Chattanooga Public Library is at the center of this reexamination – serving as a launching point and key partner for a new Mozilla Gigabit Hive, a Knight Foundation Community Information Grant, and dozens of other efforts focused on exploring how an Internet connection without boundaries can begin to break down longstanding boundaries between classrooms and community, between businesses and service organizations, and between formal and informal learning. A year ago, the 4th Floor of the Chattanooga Public Library was a forgotten 14,000 square foot storage facility in the middle of the “Gig City’s” otherwise thriving, vibrant downtown. Today, the 4th Floor is a central hub of community activity, featuring access to unrivaled connectivity, 3D printers, a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, design stations, and more. The 4th Floor is a glimpse of the community library of the future, now.
Krystal Meisel, Project Exploration/ C-STEMM, @euhedral
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Badges: Forging a Chicago STEM Pathway Across the US
This engaging presentation will share our experience developing and implementing a shared STEM digital-badging ecosystem for non-formal learning environments in Chicago. It will center on the process of gathering consensus around the adoption of Project Exploration’s Youth Science Matrix © as a foundation for standard implementation and assessment among six diverse STEM programming institutions (Adler Planetarium, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, After School Matters, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and Chicago Botanic Gardens) and two badging platforms (ForAll Badges and Youtopia). We will share student reflections and ideas for overcoming the technology gap.
Krystal Meisel, program manager at Project Exploration, Art of Science Learning Innovation Fellow and C-STEMM member, will igniting interest in the invention of an I-80 for digital badging. Come prepared to reimagine pathways, connect organizations, build bridges between cities and get our youth and communities to amazing new places. Listeners will be inspired to explore possible ways to get all students, parents and communities (including those who may not have reliable access to technology) to travel on our newly imagined super highway.
Jess Klein, Mozilla/ Rockaway Help, @iamjessklein
Badges During Times Of Crisis:
During times of crisis, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, relief work can be really complicated – even if people are really well intentioned. One of the hugest problems that I encountered with Rockaway Help (an org I started to provide aid in the aftermath of the hurricane) was a lack of a feedback loop between us (the grassroots organizers), the individuals in need and the volunteers. This is crucial for many reasons but to name a few : efficiency with task management, ability to acknowledge volunteer skillsets, the ability to match volunteers with appropriate tasks, and the ability to identify mentorship opportunities.
By connecting volunteers directly to members of affected population through Open Badges, we empower people who need help to engage in the relief effort, and maintain involvement before and after they have received aid. There are any reasons why this is valuable, including:
acknowledgement, verification of a task in a moment of crisis for the relief organization
acknowledgement that you have helped someone
the potential ability to self assign tasks based on skills
the ability to ask for mentorship based on expertise validated through badges
the ability to see your impact on a community in need
I am working to develop a platform independent and open-source SMS badging solution that can be built directly into other successful tools that already exist out in the world.
