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Category Archives: Literacy & Citizenship

Media, tech and social literacy

Why not a gazillion ‘likes’?: Getting wise to gamification in social media (& life)

16-May-13

Likes in Facebook and Instagram, +1′s in Google+, (potentially) “HISCORE(s)” in Snapchat are fun to get (though there isn’t much evidence having a HISCORE is a big deal for Snapchat users yet). They’re a great example of gamification, a word that’s increasingly heard in pop culture as much as education. There’s nothing wrong with liking [...]

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‘Healthy divas & divos’ good for social media culture too

30-Apr-13

They’re “healthy divas,” not drama queens, people. Two very different things, the Wall Street Journal points out. The distinction and the reported emergence of this positive kind of diva in media culture might be a positive for kids who, when they have time for entertainment, lean toward the celebrity-watch variety – not to mention for [...]

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Tech & media intelligence-gathering in Sydney

27-Mar-13

“Intelligence” is the word that has come to mind most frequently as I’ve participated in conversation after conversation with Australians about kids in digital media over the past 10 days. Here’s just a sampler of examples: “Cybersafety education saturation”: A government is really “hearing” young citizens in Australia. Rosalie O’Neale of the Australian Communications & [...]

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Designing students: Check out these contests (learning opps)!

12-Mar-13

These are projects that get young people and classrooms participating in the digital maker movement: Current or aspiring videogame designers and videographers have about a month to submit their creations to three different contests: The National STEM Videogame Challenge, Whyville’s game design contest, and Trend Micro’s What’s Your Story video producing contest. Design a videogame [...]

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Learning life, communication & app development all at once

05-Mar-13

One of the most interesting comments I heard from in the “Making Apps with Youth” session here at the SxSW EDU conference was from Kurt Collins, tech strategist and lead developer at Youth Radio in Oakland (he also started a nonprofit called the Hidden Geniuses Project aimed at “teaching young black men how to code”). [...]

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Invaluable social literacy lessons from an anti-bullying conference

04-Mar-13

This is genuine progress. My thanks to Lisa Jones at the University of New Hampshire for pointing me to the recent Beyond Bullying Summit‘s “top three takeaways.” Notably, they’re all about social literacy: “SEL [social-emotional learning] is not adding to your plate. It is the plate,” said clinical psychology Ed Dunkelblau, director of the Institute [...]

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More signs that what works offline works online too

22-Feb-13

I keep seeing research evidence that “what goes around, comes around” online too. We think of it as common sense in the face-to-face world, but it’s becoming pretty evident online too. There’s safety in respect for self and others wherever it’s shown, including in digital spaces. Here are three examples in the research, starting with [...]

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EduCon 2.5 & helping kids learn in ‘a landscape with no maps’

30-Jan-13

As parents, we’re now beginning to accept this, I think: “We live in a world that is re-creating itself one life and one digital connection at a time … a landscape for which there are no maps,” as Krista Tippett said it in her introduction to a timely radio conversation with Seth Godin on American [...]

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A social media company’s social-emotional learning

25-Jan-13

One of the fascinating impacts of our now very social media environment is technology companies having to learn a whole lot about the best and worst of humanity – and, for their own and their users’ sake, about how to foster the best of it. Facebook, for example, has an engineering team working with empathy [...]

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Young readers and e-readers: Study

23-Jan-13

Despite their love for digital technology, 80% of kids and teens who use ebooks “still read primarily print books for fun,” a new Scholastic survey of readers aged 6-17 has found. But we are seeing a shift in the way kids read: “58% of 9-to-17-year-olds say they will always want to read books printed on [...]

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