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Category Archives: digital literacy

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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Self-definition in social media: I am not my online profile

02-Jan-13

Think about it. Media literacy no longer protects “only” the quality of the information we take in. It now protects our relationships and even our identities – on several levels. It’s an understatement to say we need to be media literate more than ever now. I’ve posted plenty about the relationships part (social literacy), so [...]

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Digital citizenship in process: Notes from the Baku IGF

05-Dec-12

I’m sure we’re all pretty aware that the Internet and social media are global, but do we think enough about how digital citizenship has to be global too, then – how, by definition, it’s more a process than a static concept that can be taught? “Digital citizens” of all ages all over the world are [...]

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6-year-old self-taught pre-readers & tablet users in Ethiopia

05-Nov-12

Earlier this year, some 40 digital tablets (the Motorola version of iPads) were packaged into two taped-up boxes with no instructions and dropped into two Ethiopian villages, each about 50 miles from Addis Ababa and each with about 20 “1st-grade-aged” children, MIT Technology Review reported. The goal in this experiment, which OLPC chair Nicholas Negroponte [...]

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Substantive followup to ‘Kony 2012′: Support Hope North

08-Oct-12

This article was originally published March 14, 2012, then my service’s server crashed, losing months of data. So reposting 10/8/12. Leaving all criticism in the dust because it’s more distraction than action, here’s the natural response to “Kony 2012,” the most viral digital-video campaign in history (so far): “This Thing That Happened” about Hope North, [...]

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What does ‘safe’ really look like in a digital age?

02-Sep-12

In Part 1 of this series, I pointed you to a recent talk by John Seely Brown on the whitewater-kayaking kind of learning we need today and in Part 2, examples of that in Marianne Malmstrom’s New Jersey classroom. Both touch on “safety” in and for the learning process. Here, Part 3: zooming in on [...]

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‘Save the Universe’: Clear space for learning

02-Sep-12

Last week, Part 1 about the “whitewater-kayaking kind of learning needed today”; here, in Part 2, a great example: An alternative headline might be: “A bucket of bricks for learning,” but I’ll get to the bricks in a minute. First the backstory. Marianne Malmstrom teaches the richest possible kind of media literacy to and with, [...]

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The whitewater-kayaking kind of learning needed today

02-Sep-12

This week: the first of a three-part series on two educators working in very different spheres – John Seely Brown at the University of Southern California, helping adults think creatively about learning, and Marianne Malmstrom at the Elisabeth Morrow School in New Jersey, helping children learn creatively Play is essential, says John Seely Brown, to [...]

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Advancing digital literacy in the US

07-Feb-12

There is little consensus on the definition of “digital literacy.” One participant on a panel about it here at a Safer Internet Day conference in Moscow threw everything into the definition – media literacy, online safety, computer literacy, etc. Wikipedia basically defines it as “the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and analyze information using [...]

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