cc  >> Well, I think if everybody  can take their seats,  we're ready to roll.  I'm Margaret Lewis, Executive  Director of the Wisconsin  Academy of Sciences, Arts and  Letters, and I'm delighted to  welcome you here this evening  for the fourth in our Wisconsin  2050: Pioneering the Future  series.  Tonight we have Erica and  Richard Halverson speaking on  "Digital Media and the Future of  Schooling, a Look at the 2050  Classroom."  I also want to welcome those  that are watching on computers  via streaming media tonight.  This is part of the Wisconsin  Academy's commitment to using  new communications technologies  and reaching audiences across  Wisconsin.  Please join, those of you  that are listening online,  in the Q&A by sending emails to  questions@WisconsinAcademy.org  And after our speakers there  will be a question and answer  period from the audience as well  as from those that might be  listening from around the state.  And that's  questions@WisconsinAcademy.org  For all of you that are here in  this room, I know many of you  have filled out those little  yellow cards, and we appreciate  that very much because it will  qualify you for several fabulous  door prizes, including,  Rethinking Education in the  Age of Technology, written by  one of our speakers tonight,  Mr. Richard Halverson, in  conjunction with Allan Collins.  So we hope that you will fill  those out and share your  thoughts about future speakers  and topics that you'd like to  hear about.  That feedback is very important  to us as we plan our next  season.  Important to planning our  season, this one and next one,  is Ronnie Hess who is over here  on the side.  Ronnie, raise your hand. 

 Jason Smith is down here taking  questions as editor of Wisconsin  People & Ideas magazine.  And you'll talk to Kathy  Dickerson probably out in front  who will be glad to take any  memberships.  A mere $25 to be a member of the  Wisconsin Academy.  And you get four issues of the  magazine a year and of course  notices of all these wonderful  events.  In addition to those programs of  the Wisconsin Academy, are the  Academy Evening Series which you  are part of tonight, and also  the James Watrous Gallery which  is in the Overture Center in  Madison devoted to Wisconsin  artists.  And right now it's showing the  Fine Art of Children's  Illustrations, and part of that  project inspired some Madison  school district, the Glendale  school district, children making  their own books inspired by the  art illustrators that are shown  up in our gallery.  So on your way out tonight you  may want to just go through the  lower level and see some of the  artwork from these books on your  way out.  I think you'll really enjoy it.  And then on November 28th the  children will be reading their  books, and the topic of these  books is Wisconsin 2050.  So it will give an idea of what  children are thinking their  future might be like and doing  it through art. 

 The Wisconsin Academy of  Sciences, Arts and Letters does  try to integrate our programs,  and we find a great enrichment  of the sciences and arts and  letters working together.  So we invite you to join this  special community of the mind.  But I won't take anymore time  tonight other than to thank the  sponsors that make this program  possible, and we have a number.  And I think that you have seen  those up on the slide, but  Wisconsin Academy Evenings are  sponsored by the Pleasant T.  Rowland Foundation, the  University of Wisconsin Madison  Chancellor's Office, the  Wisconsin Alumni Research  Foundation, M&I Bank, the Evjue  Foundation and Isthmus  Publishing, and we thank tonight  Public Television for taping  this which will then allow it to  be distributed to other public  television channels around the  state and also appear on Portal  Wisconsin if you have friends  that would like to view the  presentation later.  And we're very grateful for  that.  At this point, I would like to  introduce to you John Ashley, a  member of the Wisconsin Academy  Council.  The Wisconsin Academy is an  independent nonprofit that's  been around since 1870 with a  mission of connecting people and  ideas.  John has been executive director  of the Wisconsin Association of  School Boards since September of  2005, and prior to that he was  the Division Administrator for  Educational Services at the  Wisconsin Education  Communications Board.  He also worked for the  University of Wisconsin  Madison's Learning Innovations  program as Business Development  Manager, graduated from Harvard  College and did graduate work at  Northwestern and also at UW  Madison. 

 So please help me welcome John  Ashley who will introduce our  speakers.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Good evening.  Tonight's talk on "Digital Media  in the Future of Schooling:  A Look at the 2050 Classroom,"  is part of the Academy's series  exploring Wisconsin 2050:  Pioneering the Future.  The aim of the series is to ask  how what we are thinking about  and researching now can both  give us a window on the future  and guide us as we move ahead.  The idea for tonight's talk  springs from the idea that we  are in the midst of a knowledge  revolution.  But that while our society's  dramatically changing with new  communications and learning  technologies, our schools may  not be keeping up.  Using websites like Twitter and  Facebook, young people are  sharing photos, videos, music,  ideas and opinions online,  connecting with a large group of  peers in new and sometimes  unexpected ways.  They are always on, in constant  contact with their friends via  texting, instant messaging,  mobile phones and the Internet.  A 2008 MacArthur Foundation  report on digital media and  learning found that 83% of young  people between the ages of 8 and  18 play video games regularly.  Nearly 75% use instant messaging  with up to 96 messages sent per  day. 

 On a typical day more than half  of US teenagers use a computer,  and more than 40% play a video  game.  But how much of this activity  occurs in schools?  And how can educators utilize or  even keep up with all these  emerging forms of social media?  We're fortunate tonight to have  two speakers, Erica and Richard  Halverson, who are deeply  engaged in studying digital  media and its implications for  education and society.  Erica Halverson is an Assistant  Professor of Learning Sciences  in the Educational Psychology  Department of the University  Wisconsin-Madison.  She co-founded Barrel of  Monkeys, a creative arts program  that provides some of Chicago's  most under-served elementary  school students with the  opportunity to express  themselves through writing  and performance.  She is a member of the Games,  Learning and Society research  group where she studies how  people use new media ranging  from digital video to fantasy  sports to push the boundaries of  what we know about learning and  identity development.  She received her PhD  from Northwestern University.  Richard Halverson also holds  a PhD in Learning Sciences  from Northwestern University.  He is an Associate Professor of  Educational Leadership and  Policy Analysis at the  University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is founder and co-director  of Games, Learning and Society  at the UW-Madison, and in an  internationally known research  group that investigates how  cutting-edge learning  technologies can reshape  learning in and out of schools.  Richard Halverson is coauthor  with Allan Collins, Rethinking  Education in the Age  of Technology: The Digital  Revolution and Schooling in  America. 

 Please join me in welcoming  Erica and Richard Halverson.  [APPLAUSE]  >> So, let me see what we've got  here.  >> Starting out with a technical  difficulty is always a good way  to start a talk on digital media  and the future of schools.  So good job us.  [LAUGHTER]  >> If I can just get this  set up.  >> It's good we'll make up the  time.  I'm not so used to being  introduced.  So we can skip all those things  that we were going to say about  ourselves because we had such a  lovely introduction to who we  are.  Thank you so much about having  us this evening.  We're really delighted at the  opportunity to share our work on  digital media and its role in  schools and learning and even  more delighted at the  opportunity to present together. 

 We don't get that opportunity  very often, though we share  common interests in the roles of  technology and learning and  through our participation in the  Games, Learning and Society  research group here  at UW-Madison.  >> Some of the ideas that we'll  talk about today are expanded  more in the book that John  mentioned that I wrote  with Allan Collins called,  Rethinking Education  in the Age of Technology.  And many of them are insights  from Erica's research that she's  been working on as well.  >> So my background is actually  in the theatre.  I was an actor, Barrel of  Monkeys, which I co-founded,  is actually a theatre arts  organization in Chicago's public  schools.  And so I come to this world of  digital media and learning  through an emphasis on the role  of art-making in people's lives,  and particularly in young  people's lives.  And through my involvement with  the Games, Learning and Society  research group and from a grant  from the MacArthur Foundation  have had the opportunity to take  those insights into the digital  world.  And so my research on how young  people learn to make art about  the stories of their lives has  really, for me, been transformed  by asking that question in terms  of digital media.  And so for me, my sort of core  question that I ask is about the  power of digital media for  learning.  And what I found is that there  are really three core insights  that help us understand why  digital media are so powerful  for young people in the ways  that they think about learning. 

 The first is digital media as a  venue for young people to engage  in production.  And more broadly to construct  external representations of  ideas.  So in the arts, sort of the goal  of art-making is to create  something that we can share  externally to say here's how I  would represent this idea.  And in the theatre we do that  pretty regularly but to fairly  limited audience.  We're limited to whoever shows  up.  We're limited to whoever's  willing to come spend a night in  the theatre.  With digital media that's  transformed to an open audience  of whoever happens to access the  products you create and post in  any number of freely available  shared sites.  So that those productions and  representations are really made  live and vibrant by an authentic  audience both internal to youth,  so by your affinity groups folks  who are already interested in  the kinds of things you're  interested in, but also by an  audience who stumbles upon what  it is that you have to say and  that digital technologies really  facilitate access by an  authentic audience.  And that finally, kind of more  broadly, it allows learners and  the more general public to  understand literacy as beyond  reading and writing.  So one of the things that Rich  and I will talk a lot about is  this disconnect between the way  schools think about the role of  digital media and the way we  think about the role of digital  media in learning spaces outside  of schools. 

 And this understanding of what  is literacy and what does it  mean to be a literate person in  the 21st century is really at  the crux of this disconnect.  So for folks who create digital  media and literacy is about far  more than can you read at grade  level and can you write  something that reflects your  understanding of that which you  read.  But rather, literacy is  fundamentally about extending  our understanding to the  consumption, critique and  production of ideas using  multiple modes that include text  but also sound, image, video,  physical expression and the  interaction among those things.  So literacy becomes a  fundamentally multimodal task  that extends far beyond the  texts that we tend to think of  as literate texts in schools.  Let me give you an example,  because I think that's probably  the best way to understand how  we're constructing the value of  production and representation,  the ideas of authentic audience  and the notion of literacy.  I'm going to show you a clip  from a film that was produced at  a youth media arts organization  in New York that I spent about  two years working with.  The organization is called  Reel Works Teen Filmmaking.  The film is called  "A Girl Like Me."  It was produced over the course  of a six-month residency program  where teens come to Reel Works,  work with professional mentors  and construct short films about  the stories of their lives.  I'm going to show you about a  three minute clip from the film,  and then we'll talk a little bit  about why we think this is a  really good representation for  what we're talking about.  >> Every black female has a big  butt and big boobs. 

 >> Loud, obnoxious, ghetto.  >> Light skin being more  attractive than dark skin.  >> We're not smart.  We're this way, we're that way.  And a lot of times we have to  prove ourselves it not being  true.  >> At a young age I already knew  the standards for a girl like  me.  As I become older,  they become more obvious.  >> You have to have permed hair,  relaxed hair.  >> You know straight hair or  like blond hair, long weaves or  something.  >> And if it's natural, that's  good hair. 

 Like that hair is hair you have  to relax because it's kinky.  >> Like it's not appealing to  have natural hair styles or if  they are natural they have to be  the curly head light black  girls, someone who looks mixed  or something.  >> I remember when I first  started wearing my hair natural,  at first my mom was okay with it  and she thought it looked nice.  And then after the second day  she was like oh, stop that.  She was like you're starting to  look African.  I was like, well, I am African.  And that really pissed me off.  >> There are standards that are  imposed on us like you're  prettier if you're light  skinned.  >> I knew people in the past  that like just like wanted to be  light skinned, not for any  particular reason.  Because they love themselves, I  mean they love themselves except  for the color of their skin. 

 >> My siblings are all lighter  than me and my mom, she's dark  skinned but she's lighter than  me.  So I noticed and I was like how  come I'm the darkest and  everybody else is so light?  Since I was younger I also  considered being lighter as a  form of beauty or more beautiful  than being dark skinned.  So I used to think of myself as  being ugly because I was dark  skinned.  >> I knew people who actually  went out there and got bleaching  cream and everything.  They actually laid in the tub,  poured like cap-fulls of bleach  into it just so they could see  if their skin would get lighter.  >> My aunt that lives in  Honduras, she started using skin  bleaching cream when she was  about 25, and she started her  oldest daughter on it when she  was about 11.  And then she has an even younger  daughter that was about six  when she started using the skin  bleaching cream on her.  >> I've seen people say that I  would never marry a dark skin  man because I don't want that in  my gene pool.  >> I sort of felt that there was  not any attention towards me  because of maybe my skin color  or because my hair was kinky.  Or even also when I was younger  say there was, I don't know, a  doll. 

 I used to have a lot of dolls  but most of them were just white  dolls with long straight hair  that I would comb and I would be  like, oh, I wish I was just like  this Barbie doll.  >> She then goes on in the film  to reconstruct the Clark doll  experiment, the white doll/black  doll experiment where they asked  African American children which  doll was the nice doll, which  doll was the mean doll, which  doll looks like you.  And she got very similar results  actually where the African  American kids pointed to the  white doll as the good doll, the  black doll as the doll that  looked like them, and then goes  back at the end to these young  women to talk about the ways in  which young African American  women construct identities.  So you can see with very little  explanation this 17-year-old  young woman has produced this  film outside of school, right,  on her own time as a mechanism  for communicating a powerful set  of ideas about self, about  society and about the  relationship among those things.  Now she's at the extreme end.  This young woman has won  numerous awards for her film.  She's appeared on Oprah.  She's likely to pursue a career  in filmmaking.  So in some sense I'm showing you  an outlier, someone at the  extreme end.  And while her public successes  make her an outlier, she's  actually not alone in her  engagement with digital media  production in this way. 

 The National Alliance of Media,  Art and Culture in 2005 did a  survey of 59 youth media arts  organizations around the country  to demonstrate the scope of this  work and how this is happening  around the country.  And as you can see about 75% of  these organizations are working  in exclusively computer-based  multimedia or a combination of  analog and digital media.  So most of these organizations  are working with youth around  these really complex multimodal  mechanisms for communication.  Most of the organizations are  less than 20 years old.  That's not a surprise, right?  Since the ubiquity of digital  media in people's lives is about  that old.  And about 70% of them operate  with a budget of under $100,000.  Which I think is really  interesting given some of the  complaints about the use of  these digital technologies in  schools as being prohibitively  expensive, as being impossible  to maintain.  And most of these organizations  are working on, even by school  standards, basically a shoe  string.  So, for me, the natural question  is why aren't we doing this in  schools?  Why aren't all schools doing  this?  Why don't we have 8,000 Kiri  Davises all around the United  States?  And I think Rich is going to  talk a little bit about...  >> So our topic for tonight  is the classrooms of 2050. 

 The challenge that we have is  when we build the classrooms of  the future, which we are going  to build in the coming years,  one way to figure out where  we're going to go is to look at  where we've been.  To look at the classrooms  of the past.  And a really interesting  question for us is the initial  assumption that we're making is  what's happening out of schools  will come to shape learning and  teaching in schools.  And there's considerable  historical precedent for this.  As I'll talk about in a minute,  the rise of the current American  public school system grew out of  technological advancements from  the late 18th and early 19th  century.  There was a time in which our  schools were very receptive to  advances in technology.  The question that we ask here in  predicting the future for our  classrooms is why aren't more  schools experimenting with these  new technologies?  And the answer isn't simple.  We're going to try to capture  part of the answer in the  distinction that we'll draw  between technologies for  learning versus technologies for  learners.  And what we'll try to argue is  that schools, the way they're  currently constructed, are very  amenable to technologies for  learning, but they have much  more difficulty with  technologies for learners.  In our predictions about what  the classroom of 2050 is going  to look like we're going to pose  questions, and they're going to  rest on this dilemma. 

 What we have currently in the  landscape of education is a  school system committed to the  kinds of learning outcomes that  can measure and predict.  But kids and other people in the  world, wider publics, engaged  with these sort of combination  entertainment learning  technologies where they're  building their own worlds.  If we continue down this  developmental path, we'll have  a increasing fragmentation  of the landscape for learning.  And the big design questions  that we see is for schools, what  will it take for schools to  embrace a different model of  teaching and learning.  And that's what we'll talk about  in our prediction of the  classrooms for the future.  So our story about looking at  the past begins with the advent  of the American public school  system.  From a world historical  perspective it was a very, very  recent event that most people  started to go to school.  In the middle of the 1800s,  schooling was an elite phenomena  and teaching and learning in  schools consisted largely of  passing on information that was  a valuable resource.  So the instructional model that  was built into our schools was  teacher telling and student  listening and giving back.  If knowledge is a precious  resource you want to organize  your schooling system to safely  convey that message to the next  generation. 

 We had two forms of schools in  the pre-industrial world in the  United States.  There was the common prep  religious schools which were  largely for kids, for younger  kids.  And then a small network of  colleges that were to train an  elite for the future.  Most learning and most  occupational training happened  at home or an  apprenticeship-based learning  arrangement.  In the late 1800s and the early  1900s these two  technology-driven movements  transformed the world that would  give birth to the American  public school system.  These things of course went  together, industrialization and  urbanization.  Industrialization was clearly  driven by new technologies of  production and distribution, but  urbanization was driven by  technologies of planning and  information exchange.  And together these things  created huge metropolises that  had a whole bunch of kids.  And in the age of apprenticeship  learning kids had things to do.  They would work on the farm or  they would work in trades. 

 But now in urban environments  kids just ran.  So schools were emerged as  partly to talk about citizenship  and the new challenges of  citizenship but partially also  to figure out what are we going  to do with our kids.  And so the seeds of the initial  American public education system  grew out of these modest  beginnings.  The first big movement was the  development of age graded  schools, which borrowed a lot  of the industrial model of  how you organize manufacturing  environments.  There were age grading.  The disciplines were carved up  into Carnegie units.  You had disciplinary  distinctions.  And as the schools got bigger,  you had much more of a model of  what I'll call batch processing  where you give a similar kind of  intervention to a wide group of  kids and then you assess whether  or not they get that knowledge  and move them to the next level.  The colleges started to expand  and were greatly fueled in the  United States by the legislation  during the Civil War that  created the land-grant  universities.  And suddenly states were  strongly encouraged and required  to develop universities that  would handle both vocational  training and engineering  training but also liberal arts  education. 

 Colleges expanded into  universities.  The Germans, who are dear to the  heart of many people who are  from Wisconsin, gave us  kindergarten which was a  transition from family to the  institutional setting of schools  that focus on helping kids make  the transition from play to  learning.  There was the development of  vocational schools that would  handle the kinds of training  that we're seeing, especially  early in the 20th century, as  separate from college and  university training.  And the last link in the chain  was high schools.  It's hard for us to remember,  some of us to remember, how  recent the innovation of high  schools were.  In 1962 only 41% of kids in the  United States graduated from  high school.  And now it's 86%.  I mean, it's really a very  recent phenomena, and as we'll  talk about later, high schools  remain the weakest link in this  chain, this system.  David Tyack called this whole  thing taken together the one  best system that became the  American public school system.  And the really interesting thing  for me is how receptive this  initial system was to the  contemporary information  technologies. 

 Folks like Frederick Taylor and  I guess Max Weber also talked  about the information properties  of bureaucracies.  How bureaucracies exist to  exchange information between  organizations at a distance.  So bureaucracies, at least  originally, it's amazing how one  generation's innovation becomes  another generation's curse,  bureaucracies initially brought  these separate components  together into a common system.  And one advantage of this is  that once you could exchange  information and students across  levels of the system, then you  could have a robust system that  was adaptive to many different  circumstances.  But the disadvantage is it  became locked in place, and the  school system became committed  to the technologies that it  embraced in its origins.  And it made it very difficult  for this system to adapt to new  technologies.  We'll push the clock ahead a  little bit to the 1950s.  Howard Gardner wrote this  wonderful book in,  I think it was '84,  called The Mind's New Science.  He told the story of the advent  of cognitive science.  And the interesting thing here  is, a little story about the  history of psychology, by the  1950s in the United States, if  you wanted to do research in  psychology it was largely  behavioral psychology. 

 We sort of dropped the early  American and European interest  in introspection psychology and  what was going on in the mind  under the surface, and we  started treating the mind as a  black box.  So if you wanted to do  legitimate research in  psychology, you looked at what  people did.  You looked at their behavior.  The birth of cognitive  psychology was spurred by  computing.  The story that Gardner tells is  really interesting here.  Computing allowed researchers to  make model of complex cognitive  processes, to peer inside the  black box, and once cognitive  psychology started to take off  as a legitimate branch of  psychological research, it took  off everywhere.  It took off in economics and  sociology and physics, all over  the place, in agriculture,  researchers rushed to make  computer simulation models that  would help them see complexity  in action.  It wasn't too long before we  started to see similar kinds of  changes in education.  Seymour Papert in his seminal  book Mindstorms talked about how  computers could also radically  change the relationship between  students, teachers and learning.  And it went like this. 

 When I talked before about the  traditional model of learning  it was that there was a body of  knowledge that teachers needed  to transfer to students.  Here, computers allow students  to construct representations of  their own understanding.  This is a ground-breaking thing.  Students contribute to their  learning process.  It's an old idea in progressive  education but Papert and  advocates like Papert felt that  the personal computer would  finally break the strangle hold  of conservative instructional  practices in schools.  And there were lots of fans of  Seymour Papert and folks who,  in the 1990s, really ran the  education agenda in the United  States.  I was really fortunate to go to  grad school in the 1990s in a  program that talked a lot about  computing and computer  technology.  And I thought your own  experiences sort of become the  benchmark for what you think  reality is, right?  I thought that this was the way  it was in the world of education  research, and actually it was a  high water point.  In the 1990s there was a massive  investment of public resources  that attempted to create  universal access to technology  in schools.  The government plowed billions  of dollars, and this is my  favorite stat, in 1998, 2.7%  of all educational expenditures  went into technology. 

 That's an astounding number,  astounding amount of resources  that went into the development  of computing power, really.  Now on the research front there  were all sorts of agencies that  were making significant  investments in research that  could come up with a proof of  concept.  Show us how.  Show us how we can develop tools  for teachers to use in their  classrooms.  So there was all this ferment in  the 1990s building computing  capacity to bring about the  change that Seymour Papert had  foreseen, but it didn't happen.  And the reason it didn't happen  is complicated.  The question is why have  information technologies not  changed classrooms?  Why are students in the 11th  grade not making the kinds of  movies that Erica talked about?  And I think I want to start this  part of the story with a counter  narrative that's happening along  with the cognitive revolution in  schools.  And this movement I think is  much more familiar to most of  you.  Up until the 1950s in the United  States the discourse on  education and on delivering  education services to the  general population focused on  access.  Focused on buildings, programs,  resources, that you could have  schools for people to go to. 

 But after a long commitment to  the idea of access to education  resources, Americans started to  think there was something  incomplete about the issue of  access.  This found expression in the  '50s and '60s civil rights  movement, particularly  beginning, really, in the Brown  decision.  Where we started to understand  that simply providing access  wasn't enough.  If you gave schools to people  but they didn't have  opportunities to learn that were  similar, you could reinforce  social inequities.  The insights of Brown were built  into the war on poverty in the  1960s which threw millions and  millions of dollars into  improving outcomes for the  students who struggle the most  in schools.  And then in the 1970s a lot of  the education policy shifted to  students with special needs and  making sure that all students  had an opportunity to learn in  schools.    So what I want to point out here  is to look over 50 years how the  discourse in education shifted  from access to outcomes.  And once we start focusing on  outcomes, all of the sudden we  get very close attention to the  instructional practices that are  going on in schools.  It's not enough to give America  the American public schools to  go to, we have to also make sure  that they're good schools.  In a lot of ways, the No Child  Left Behind Act is the high  water mark of the civil rights  movement in education. 

 It includes high stakes  accountability policies--  The high stakes accountability  policies that holds all schools  accountable to their local  state tests.  But more interestingly, I think  is the disaggregated data  reporting.  Many of you have worked in  schools.  I recognize a lot of you folks  in the audience.  You know how relatively easy it  was before NCLB to hide  achievement gaps in your school.  If you just reported the  aggregate student learning  scores, you could hide  differences.  Well, not only did NCLB require  schools to report disaggregated  learning outcomes, it required  schools to make them public.  Many of you, some of you may  have seen the WINSS website.  If you haven't, it's something  to look at.  From a mouse click you can find  disaggregated test scores,  racial, demographic, grade  level, disciplinary information  on any school in Wisconsin and  almost any grade level, and you  can compare any school to any  other school. 

 You can imagine how valuable  this is to realtors.  And if you look at the Restaino  Bunbury websites, of course the  WINSS website is right there on  the top of the website for a  tool to help people figure out  where they want to live.  The public access to student  achievement data made schools  very conservative about  instruction.  But it also made them very  entrepreneurial with regard to  information technologies.  This was a paradoxical thing.  NCLB has utterly transformed  administrative practices in  schools.  For those of you who are  administrators in schools you  know that the availability and  responsibility to use data to  generate information and to use  it to make decisions about kids  has transformed your practice.  It's transformed schools.  What it hasn't done is  transformed the classroom.  Instead, student information  systems have made many schools  focus on what works. 

 And the phrase what works has  really replaced the idea of best  practice in the vocabulary of  schooling.  What works refers to  interventions that are known to  work across schools to produce  reliable results.  And there's a clearing-house,  a what works clearing-house of  practices that researchers have  found to work across all  different learning environments.  This has led many schools to  adopt a much more conservative  approach to instruction, at the  same time that they're adopting  a very ambitious approach  to information technology  implementation.  No Child Left Behind  really emphasizes low-risk,  efficient instructional  practices.  So as you can see, the road  has turned significantly.  At the one hand we have this  tremendous promise of  information technologies to  transform how we think about  learning, and on the other side  we get schools who are committed  to very conservative  instructional practices.  >> Sorry, I thought the next  slide was still in there.  My fault.  >> We try to capture this  distinction with a contrast  between technologies for  learning and technologies for  learners. 

 Should I do this part?  >> So, we hate to set up the  dichotomy of Goofus and Gallant  of technologies for learning and  technologies for learners, but  that really is the way our work  is split up.  Where Rich's focus has been on  the ways in which technology  have transformed administrative  and data disaggregation  practices at the school level  in order to track the learning  that's happening.  And the work that I do outside  the classroom really focuses on  the way learners engage with  technologies to produce the  kinds of tangible real digital  media products that they're  interested in producing.  >> The thing we want to capture  here is not that one approach is  good and one approach is bad.  That schools should be demonized  or glorified.  That digital media ought to be  celebrated or condemned.  What we want to say is that  there's a difference in the  target for the technologies and  the way that they're used.  Schools adapt technologies to  guarantee learning.  That's their goal.  And given our civil rights  agenda and our focus on  outcomes, there's a very  widespread public pressure on  schools to embrace learning as  an outcome. 

 >> And technologies for learners  have a much more just-in-time  feel to them.  Right?  Where students are asking what  do I need to know about this  tool in order to accomplish the  task that I'm interested in  accomplishing?  So with youth filmmakers, they  learn to use Final Cut Pro,  which is a computer-based  editing software, but there's no  exam at the end to say do you  all know what this button does,  can everyone demonstrate that  they know what this button does?  Somebody knows how to use that  button if that button helps them  make the movie that they want to  make.  So the technologies are learned  in the context of completing the  task.  Which means that the outcomes  are not so predictable.  You might learn it in the way  we want you to, you might not.  It depends on what you want to  do with it.  >> The last point of contrast  we want to draw here is the  difference between the  motivation of the technologies.  School technologies need to be  democratic.  We need to have tools and  devices that allow the greatest  number of students a chance to  succeed.  Digital learning technologies  are most often meritocratic. 

 You will find stories about  people who transformed their  lives by playing World of  Warcraft, or engaging with  The Sims, or engaging  with Fan Fiction.  But for every student or every  participant who transformed  their lives, there's a million  people who try it and go,  eh, it's not for me.  >> And there are winners and  there are losers, right?  There are people who are better  at games than others.  There are films that win awards  and films that don't.  And we have a hard time with  that in schools because the goal  of schooling is for everyone to  have achieved, the ideal goal,  for everyone to have achieved  at the highest level.  And in environments where  digital technologies are means  to a productive end, in some  ways that's explicitly not the  goal.  The goal is to find who's real  good at this and who's less good  at it.  >> So we're going to shift a  little bit in the talk now.  I talked a little bit about how  technologies for learning have  shaped our current school  system.  And Erica's going to talk a  little bit about the variety of  technologies for learners that  have been developed recently  that have sort of emerged out of  the entertainment world,  largely, but have come to shape  the way that people outside of  the institution of school  learn about their worlds. 

 The common thing, the thing that  is sort of a snarky point, but  what almost all of these things  have in common is that they're  banned by schools.  (LAUGHTER)  >> And I have to share.  Rich and I were  practicing our talk last night  and this is a slice of an email  that Rich got last night,  randomly, came into his inbox,  as we're preparing this talk, as  we're looking at this slide.  This is a seminar that you can  pay for online to think about  how you can avoid the really  serious consequences of engaging  with these digital technologies  in schools.  Ironic, I think, and interesting  that we were having a  conversation over dinner about  how the discourse in schools  tends to be dominated by those  sorts of conversations and hard  to get to sort of the ways that  we're talking about them today.  >> So we have a world where  schooling and learning formerly  were defined in terms of one  another, where if you wanted to  learn something you went to a  school.  What digital media are doing  is expanding the world of  learning beyond schools.  And in our book we talk about  the idea of a seeds of new  system.  It's not a system yet, it's not  a parallel system, it's not even  a threatening system, but it's a  system that has distinctive  characteristics about learning  that we think are powerful  mechanisms for talking about the  learning of the future.  And Erica will talk about some  examples of these things. 

 >> So let's talk about this  shift from thinking about  literacy as a consumptive  practice to a productive  practice.  What does it mean to think about  literacy as a productive  practice?  There are two ways that I've  thought about this.  One is production in what I call  in the wild.  And what I mean by in the wild  is in spaces that are not  regulated by explicit  instruction.  And the many uses of YouTube is  a really good example of that.    What do people do with YouTube?  They post videos and they post  videos for a variety of reasons.  They post them for entertainment  value.  They post them to make social  change.  We've seen that a lot with  people's cell phone videos and  the use of those videos to  explain to other parts of the  world what's happening in those  parts of the world.  People comment on other people's  videos. 

 You can do that in the form of  text.  You can say, hey, this was great  and here's why I liked it.  You can also post a response  video so you can use that  multimodal literacy not just to  understand what people are  saying but to communicate back  to folks.  You can search video content and  use that video content and remix  it, reuse it, for a different  purpose.  To say, oh, somebody already  made a film about this, here's  how I'm going to use that to  communicate.  In my research I tend to look at  spaces that look a little bit  more like schools.  In the sense that these arts  organizations work with young  people to structure these  learning experiences to produce  media for real audiences.  So don't just say here's a site,  have at it.  They say here's the way that we  think you should understand the  production process and the value  added of thinking about what you  have to offer in terms of  sharing your voice.  >> This is a common theme in  adapting new technologies to  conventional educational  outcomes is often the new  technologies are really good at  teaching themselves. 

 So filmmaking is good for  learning about filmmaking.  If you want to bridge the  lessons of filmmaking to more  traditional content, you have to  create what we call a third  space that explicitly connects  the process from media creation  to the outcomes of conventional  education.  And all of these organizations  are really good examples of  third spaces.  >> And they're local third  spaces.  So the goals are adapted to meet  the needs of local  practitioners.  So it's not the case that every  organization has the same goals  but that they use the context in  which they're situated to shape  those goals.  I'm going to show you another  film because I think that's the  best way to communicate what  we're talking about.  This is a film, it's actually a  remixed film.  It's a poem by a San Francisco  spoken word artist.  It's a live performance of his  poem in audio then a film, a  woman Karen Lum, a young woman,  made a film that you will see  that's overlaid on top of the  audio performance. 

 >> My glares burn through her.  And I'm sure that such actions  aren't foreign to her because  the essence of her beauty is,  well, the essence of beauty.  And in the presence of this  higher being, the weakness of my  masculinity kicks in, causing me  to personify my wannabe  big-baller, shot-caller, God's  gift to the female species with  shiny suit wrapping rapping  like, "Yo, what's crackin shorty  how you livin' what's your sign  what's your size I dig your  style, yo."  Now, this girl was no fool.  She gives me a dirty look with  the quickness like, "Boy, you  must be stupid."  So I'm looking at myself like,  "Boy, you must be stupid."  But looking upon her I am  kinda feelin' her style.  So I try again.  But, instead of addressing her  properly, I blurt out one of my  fake-ass playalistic lines like,  "Girl, you must be a traffic  ticket cuz you got fine written  all over you."  Now, she's trying to leave and  I'm trying to keep her here.  So at a final attempt, I utter,  "Girl, what is your ethnic  makeup?"  At this point, her glare was  scorching through me, and  somehow she manages to make her  brown eyes resemble some kinda  brown fire or something, but  there's no snap or head  movement, no palm to face, click  of tongue, middle finger, roll  of eyes, twist of lips, or girl  power chant.  She just glares through me with  these burning eyes and her gaze  grabs you by the throat.  She says, "Ethnic makeup?  First of all, makeup's just  an anglicized, colonized,  commodified utility that  my sisters have been programmed  to consume, forcing them  to cover up their natural state  in order to imitate what  another sister looks like in her  natural state because people  keep telling her that the other  sister's natural state is more  beautiful than the first  sister's natural state.  At the same time, the other  sister isn't even in her natural  state, because she's trying to  imitate yet another sister, so  in actuality, the natural state  that the first sister's trying  to imitate wasn't even natural  in the first place."  (audience applause)  Now I'm thinking, "Damn, this  girl's kicking knowledge!"  But, meanwhile, she keeps  spitting on it like "Fine, I'll  tell you bout my ethnic make-up. 

 I wear foundation,  not that powdery stuff.  I wear the foundation laid  by my indigenous people.  It's that foundation that makes  it so that past being  globalized, I can still vocalize  with confidence that I know  where my roots are.  I wear this foundation not upon  my face, but within my soul, and  I take this from my ancestors  because I'll be damned if I'd  ever let an European or American  corporation tell me what my  foundation should look like.  (audience applause)  I don't wear lipstick, for my  lips stick to the ears of men,  so they can experience in  surround sound my screams of  agony with each lash of rulers,  measuring tape, and scales, as  if my waistline and weight are  inversely proportional to my  value as a human being.  See my lips, they stick,  but not together.  Rather, they flail open with  flames to burn down this culture  that once kept them shut.  And I don't mess with eye  shadow, but my eyes shadow over  this time where you've gone to  ends to keep me blind.  But you can't cover my eyes,  look into them.  My eyes foreshadow change. 

 My eyes foreshadow light.  And I'm not into hair dyeing.  But I'm here, dying, because  this oppression won't get out of  my hair.  They form these highlights of my  past atrocities, they tangle  around my mind, this oppression  that manifests, it's stressing  me so that even though I don't  color my hair, in a couple of  years it'll look like I dyed it  gray.  So what's my ethnic makeup?  I don't have any.  Because your ethnicity isn't  something you can just make up.  And as far as that (####) that  my sisters put on their faces,  that's not makeup, it's  make-believe."  (audience applause)  >> I love that you can hear  the audience's reaction.  >> I can't seem to look up  at her.  And I'm sure that such actions  aren't foreign to her because  her expression shows that she  knows that my mind is in a  trance.  As her footsteps fade, my ego is  left in crutches. 

 And rejection never sounded so  sweet.  >> So we could probably have a  whole discussion about what's  going on in this film and how  Adriel Luis is interacting with  Karen Lum and what the audience  is sharing but we will go on to  another way in which we think  about the role...  >> Let me just say one thing.  >> Okay.  >> So the interesting thing from  a literacy perspective here, I  think, is that if you could look  at a film as something that is  produced and achieved and you  can look at its production  value, but a lot of the work  that Erica does is to break down  the production process as  literacy practice to understand  what it means to juxtapose  one scene with another scene.  What do you have to understand  about the way people communicate  to create a production that  conveys a coherent message.  It's a very similar process that  happens with the best of the  writing that we ask our kids to  do in schools.  It's seen as a new form of  literacy expression because it's    the manipulation and the  ordering of images and sounds  rather than text.  But it's a great example of the  kinds of new media production  that take place when kids have  ubiquitous access to new  information technologies.  >> And when they're shared in  the context of these youth arts  organizations. 

 One of the things that I've done  in my work is to look at these  spaces to see how instruction,  in the form of mentorship and  adult artists working with  youth, impact their capacity to  understand how to you juxtapose  images, how do you use sound,  how do you think about the  relationships across people and  across images and across time.  The second piece that we want to  talk about is not just that  something is being produced,  but that what's being produced  matters.  And we think about that in two  different ways.  One way that we think about it  is in the way that Jim Gee talks  about affinity groups.  And what is meant by affinity  groups is that these kinds of  practices tend to allow people  to gather around common  interests.  And it's that common interest  that forms both community and  identity for that group and for  individuals.  And so participating in these  kinds of practices means that  these productions matter to the  members of that group.  But they also matter to an  outside audience.  One of the inherent problems  with production in schooling is  that who is the audience for the  stuff that you make in school?  Your teacher, right?  And what happens when the  teacher is the audience?  They give you a grade.  Which maybe you care about  because you want to go to  college, but do you really care  what your teacher thinks about  your poem?  Maybe if you happen to have a  personal connection to that  teacher. 

 But what happens when the thing  that you make is integrated into  a community that's both an  affinity group and has an  external audience.  Henry Jenkins talks about these  as participatory cultures.  Where a participatory culture  has a series of features that  allows us to think about the  role for digital media and  learning that includes things  like low barriers for entry,  strong support for creation and  sharing, informal mentorship,  social connection among members.  Sorry, I thought there was  another one.  So a great example of this is  the Fan Fiction community.  Now, Fan Fiction has been around  a lot longer than the Internet.  But the explosion of Fan Fiction  is a result of the Internet.  And what is meant by Fan Fiction  is user created stories based on  already existing productions  that are shared with a public  audience.  So on this particular site  FanFiction.net,  which is the most popular one,  this screen shot was taken  in 2008, there were over 430,000  Harry Potter stories produced,  and that's just one of hundreds  of Fan Fiction communities that  exist.  Here's a particular user, who  happens to have had 624 reviews  of her writing, just hers. 

 And she writes in a genre that's  based on the interaction between  Harry Potter and something  called Gundam Wing.  I think she's English and I  think Gundam Wing is an English  novel series.  I don't know.  But the point being that she's  mashing up two already existing  genres, and the interesting  thing here is, "A-N" is author's  note, for me, what's interesting  about this is she assumes that  she's got readers.  Because she's giving you some  sort of background information.  I'm going to be honest with you.  Who's you?  It's a group of people who  actually have a stake in reading  what she has to say.  There's an inherent discourse in  here that she's assuming that  people know.  See where this says warning this  will be slash.  Slash is the term for mixing up  different genres. 

 She doesn't say that here.  She just assumes that if you're  reading this you know what slash  is, and that you know what it  means that you're going to be  reading something that's slash.  And then the other thing that I  think is interesting about these  communities is that they  bleed over into people's lives.  This is how you know this is  a young person.  She says to her audience,  "Something funny's going on with  my parents so you might not see  me to a couple of weeks."  Now, she knows she has enough  readers that she's got to put  that up there or somebody's  going to say something.  Where are you, why aren't you  posting?  But also that this is a  community with which she shares  some kind of personal  information about herself and  about her family so that these  communities clearly have a role  that matters, both for the  producer, but also for the  people that are engaged with  that producer.  >> We're going to make a last  comment about one last form of  media and touch on it,  and then move on.  The idea of embedded assessment.  The interesting thing about many  digital media production  activities is that assessment  happens at the same time as  production.  So that video games are  excellent examples of this. 

 When you play a game, the  success of your moves are  determined by your ability to  make the next move.  In schools, we think of  assessment often as distant from  the activity itself.  And we have a lot of concern  about aligning the assessment  with the instruction.  This is a screen shot from a  game called Rise of Nations.  And if you haven't played games  like this, I strongly encourage  you to do it.  It's a civilization building  game where, can you image having  this heads-up display if you  were a teacher?  All the resources that you need  to play are up there.  The game map is down here.  The possible moves are over  here.  The other folks in the game  space are up here.  Your state in the overall arc of  the game is up here. 

 This information display was  made to give you immediate  feedback on the consequences of  your actions.  And we feel that many digital  media learning environments have  taken advantage of these kinds  of assessment technologies just  as a part of participation in  the process.  >> And in terms of summative  assessment, games are a  particularly good example  because the question is did you  win?  That's the assessment.  If you won the game, you figured  it out.  >> We do research on fantasy  baseball and we have papers on  this if you'd like to look at  them, but we're going to skip to  talk about the classrooms of the  future.  This the greatest example of the  classrooms of the future slide  that I could find.  [LAUGHTER]  >> And as a way to get you into  talking about what we think  about the future, we thought  the best thing to do is go to  the source of much of this,  which is entertainment.  And I had been really struck,  I watched this movie again about  six months ago, "Back to the  Future II," and I was really  struck by the predictions that  they make about the future.  This movie was made in 1989  about 2015, about how they  thought we were going to use  digital technologies.  In some ways they get it right. 

 Here's a video conference.  That's pretty close.  And here's a lot of sort of  specific information about this  guy.  We don't do that now, but social  networking has made it so that  we have displays of ourselves  readily available for people.  >> There's still corporate  sponsorship.  >> Well, that was pretty new,  right?  Here's where they didn't quite  get it right.  >> I'm fired? I'm fired?  Ah!!  >> At this point they couldn't  have predicted the Internet.  And as a result you can only say  about the future what it is  that you know about the present.  >> So when we gaze into our  crystal ball, we find that  classrooms of 2050 are going  to be developed in light  of a couple of questions.  And we'll go through some of  these questions and make  comments on them. 

 We believe that the idea of all  children can learn is going to  be transformed.  It will be transformed from  proficiency measures of outcomes  to production measures of  outcomes.  If we start to change the  discourse from what people know  to what they can do, which  seemed really difficult if you  didn't have multiple ubiquitous  occasions for doing, then we'll  start to rethink what it is to  say that all children can learn.  >> Going to the assessment  question, this one is an open  one.  What will it mean to say that  all students have learned?  So currently our assessment  system is based on the idea that  everyone can get to the same  place.  What we've seen with digital  media production is assessment  is based on the completion of  the task of your interest.  And whether or not you learn the  same thing as the guy next to  you has to do with whether or  not you're doing the same thing  as the guy next to you.  >> There's many discussions,  contemporary discussions,  on the shift from outcomes to  performance-based assessments  for schools.  Currently, the assessment  technologies we use in schools  are pretty primitive.  They've been used for a hundred  years, at least. 

 Multiple choice, short answer,  essays.  There will come a time when, I  believe, led by folks in video  game development where we can  start to think about  performance-based, task-based  assessments of the kinds of  things we value in schools by  making a bridge between video  game technologies and learning  technologies in schools.  Will schools maintain a  commitment to traditional  academic literacies?  This is a big deal.  Many people wonder about whether  we're just becoming a wash in  information.  And how are we going to discern  what information is worth  following and what's not worth  following.  Will the liberal arts education  survive?  >> One risk of kind of  whole-heartedly adopting this  digital media production model  is that we devolve very early on  into here's the thing I'm  interested in, here's what I'm  going to pursue.  We can develop these islands of  expertise for individuals.  This is a debate at the college  level, as well.  Should there be a canon?  Should everyone have to take a  history class?  When you do these things outside  of schools there's no  requirements.  There's what do you want to do?  And so to figure out the balance  between a canon and an  interest-driven,  production-based model is really  an open question. 

 >> And we think the issue is  even stronger than that.  It's how will schools integrate  affinity groups into classroom  teaching and learning.  As we'll talk a little bit about  the fate of high schools.  Many people, by the time they  get to be adolescents,  are straight  interest-based learners.  And the question for schools is  how are we going to adopt  interest-based learning into our  curriculum?  How are we going to make that  happen because of course the  risk of affinity groups is  parochialism, is closure.  If you live in a neighborhood  where there's only people like  you, you get your own views  reflected back on you again and  again.  It's the problem of the  fragmentation of media and the  fragmentation of American social  life that we tend to aggregate  around people who are like us.  Schools are still one of the  only places where we're forced  to come in contact with people  who are not like us.  And as schools embrace the  concept of affinity groups it's  a big question about how are  they going to maintain diversity  of perspective and opinion.  >> In addition, we still operate  on this very individualized  learning model in schools. 

 Individuals are tested on what  individuals know.  Many of these production  processes are by nature  distributed.  Or if the production process is  individual, they draw on other  people's resources in order to  accomplish the task.  So this question of what is  cheating.  Is it cheating if you look it up  on Wikipedia, is that cheating?  It's available.    It's available to everybody.  But you don't have it in your  brain.  So if you need to recall it for  a test and you got to get it  from somewhere else, have you  cheated?  Did Karen Lum cheat on making  her film by taking Adriel Luis'  words and using that as the  soundtrack, did she cheat on  making her movie?  It doesn't make sense in that  context, but as soon as you try  to bring some of these practices  into schools, we have to  transform it into the language  that schools currently use to  think about models for learning  and we come to this question of  how do we negotiate the way we  think about learning as  distributed among people versus  learning as demonstrated by  individuals.  >> The best example of this what  is cheating is, of course, once  you individualize learning and  you see that learning is the  province of a person then any  sharing outside of the person  becomes a violation.  So you have this whole discourse  of cheating. 

 In the video game world,  cheat is a verb.  It's just part of what you do.  So it's the way that game  manufacturers create buy-in for  their games.  You publish websites with things  called cheats which are hints  for how to play the game better.  And you go to those websites and  you start talking to other  people who play the game and you  create a community around how to  play that game.  The conception of where do you  draw the line on what counts  as learning from the individual  to a distributed model really  shifts how we define malfeasance  and how we define legitimate and  illegitimate learning.  I want to make some comments  about the schools of 2050.  The first one is how long are  high schools going to last?  We talked about the rise of the  one best system.  High schools are the last piece  to the table.  And as we study adolescent  learning more and more, we're  clearly finding out that  adolescents are interest-based  learners. 

 They tend to join affinity  groups.  And new media technologies  provide them a wealth of  opportunities for affinity  groups to join.  The best example of this is you   watch 9th grade boys in a math  class going like this.  [LAUGHTER]  You see those same boys on  an overnight when they're all  playing Madden or Left for Dead  together in a basement  somewhere.  There is no sleeping.  [LAUGHTER]  There is active engagement.  And from an outsider perspective  you think it's just foolishness  that they're engaged in,  but there's cognitive  processing, strategic allocation  of resources, coordinated team  play, that if it was placed in a  math context you'd think these  kids are on to the Nobel.  And the interesting thing for us  is if high schools continue to  disassociate interest from their  program and relegate interest to  the fringes of their program, to  like band and extracurriculars  and out-of-school activities,  how long are they going to last  as a mainstream institution?  When they break down, what  alternatives are we going to  have?  Are we going to move to  certification-driven systems  where kids develop skills that  get certified in order so they  can move on to the next level of  skill development?  In a lot of ways high schools  are a default program for kids  who are either interested in  moving on to college or become  interested by affiliation with  an affinity group that's  legitimate within the context of  schools.  But for very many of our  students, they're neither.  And high schools and students  suffer as a result. 

 So the other interesting thing  is that I mentioned before about  No Child Left Behind assessment  capacity.  It's clear that schools are  developing tremendous capacity  to do summative evaluation of  kids.  Will this capacity be flexible?  Will schools be able to adapt  the considerable expertise that  they developed around assessment  to other kinds of learning to  performance-based assessment.  To different kinds of outcomes.  To try to measure what kind of  learning happens in affinity  spaces.  This is a huge challenge and I  think it can be formulated  pretty fairly in will our  investment in NCLB pay off in  terms of developing the schools  for the future.  >> So for me though the picture  is not quite so rosy as  participation in these affinity  groups all good, participation  in high school all bad.  One of the dangers of saying,  okay we're done with the  age-graded high school  is a return to what these  practices we're supposed to  eradicate in the first place,  which is certain people already  had access to these things and  other people didn't.  And there's a real danger of a  return to a tracking system  where we say by the time you're  14, great you're really good at  this, you're in this space.  You're really good at this,  you're in this space. 

 You, you're not so good at these  things.  We'll put you in this space, and  we'll figure out what to do with  you later.  High schools are really one of  the bastions for trying to  maintain some sense of equitable  access to practices across kids  regardless of the kinds of  features that they come into the  space with.  >> People will have ubiquitous  information technologies.  Will schools shift their  support, their focus to  application instead of equipment  support?  As school budgets strain with  replacing old technologies, will  they start to realize that  students are bringing  supercomputers with them to  school everyday?  And when these become the  technologies of choice in  schools, when kids bring the  machines and schools are in  charge of applications, how will  that change teaching and  learning?  >> And here's a prediction about  the future, in ten years,  pretty much every kid is going  to be bringing one of those  things to their high school.  >> Yeah, that's in too many  years.  >> Well, I'm being generous.  [LAUGHTER]  >> The final point we  want to make is will current  disciplinary boundaries collapse  in the face of knowledge growth?  We have the explosion of things  like citizen science  communities, pro-am communities,  Google maps is a great example  of sort of amateur cartographers  completely shifting how we think  about physical spaces.  These are all participatory  media.  And they completely subvert the  idea that there's a geography. 

 That there's a world view that  you can get in a school.  The degree to which schools  embrace these contributory  media, knowledge creating media  occasions will determine how  open they are to the world of  digital media development.  >> And in the spirit of the fax  machine.  >> Yes, right.  So one thing that we're hopeful  about is that Americans have a  very, very strong commitment to  public education.  They always have.  It's a headline story when  President Obama came to visit  Madison, he came to a school.  The education agenda has always  been something Americans believe  very strongly.  We are in sort of like a gap  right now where the technologies  that schools are committed to  and the technologies that have  promise for learning look like  they're running counter to each  other.  But as with all healthy vibrant  institutions, we're confident  that people who work in schools  and work outside of schools will  continue to pound at this issue  until we come up with a  resolution that leads us  to public satisfaction. 

 In the 1990s we couldn't believe  that we would have a common  accountability system in schools  that would pervade all schools  in the United States.  We got one now, ten years later.  If we gather our focus and  commitment to seeing how can we  change instruction in light of  new information technologies,  there will be good things that  happen there, too.  After all, this school of the  future looks like it's a pretty  conventional one.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Well, I think that energized  all of us, and I know there are  people online, too.  Again, I want to remind those  that are listening it's  questions@WisconsinAcademy.org,  if you want to email in  your questions, we'll answer  them.  Ronnie Hess is over here with  the microphone.  We do ask you to wait and give  your question into the  microphone so that it can all be  taped.  And we'll let you have at our  speakers here.  I know they're anxious to answer  your questions. 

 So take it away, questions.  >> Hi there.  Thank you very much for your  presentation.  I am a teacher in a small rural  school district and we're  struggling with this issue now.  My question is to you, the one  that I faced last week, when  dealing with these technologies,  how do you convince your  community, your district, even  the employees in the district  that these are not fun and  games, that there is an  educational purpose and that  students have to have access in  the school building in order to  guarantee equal access because  they don't all have it at home?  >> You want me to start?  >> Sure.  >> Okay, I mean, that's the  question of now.  So we tried to say what is it  this going to look like in the  future.  I think you're right on that  that's the question of now,  where we're at this sort of  interaction of what people think  of as learning and what we see  sort of coming down the pike.  So one answer that I have for  that is to use what kids produce  as evidence of learning.  So I pulled those two films, not  at random, but certainly from a  wide variety of digital media  products that young people made  using instructional practices to  say something about the world. 

 So I think the products  themselves and the youth  producers couldn't be, you  couldn't find better selling  points than what they've already  made and how they talk about  what it is that they do.  I think in terms of convincing,  well, okay I'll let you take the  second part which is the  in-school access part.  >> Yeah, I think there's a  definite generation gap here.  That students who are coming up  through the world are digital  natives.  They understand the technology.  They know  what to use Facebook for.  They know  what to use Wikipedia for.  They know  what to use Google for.  They know what games are for.  They know  what the things are for. 

 And very often the people who  are in charge of schools and  running schools don't have that  knowledge and they see risk.  One of my favorite examples is  some of you may know the game  Grand Theft Auto.  It's notorious among people who  don't play games.  It's also notorious among people  who do play games.  The people who don't play games  look at this sort of like ride  through this seamy underside of  the city of crime and  prostitution and so forth,  and say this is advocating  a criminal life.  People who play the game  understand that this is a really  interesting implementation of an  open space participation  environment where there are all  sorts of different missions you  can do, that you can explore the  virtual space, you can do it  with other people, it's sort of  a remarkable technological  achievement.  The digital gap, the generation  gap, makes, I think, folks who  are not familiar with the  technologies assess them in  terms of risk.  And the folks who are familiar  with the technologies assess  them in terms of potential.  And so doing the kinds of things  that Erica talked about, taking,  focusing the media use on  production of interesting things  that have universal appeal and  showing those productions to the  decision-makers in your district  will go a long way to say, yeah  these are legitimate learning,  these are legitimate learning  spaces.  >> And I want to say also, it's  a myth, I think, that urban  equals technology and rural  equals sort of technological  rube. 

 Two of the four youth arts  organizations that I spent two  years studying were in rural  places.  One in south-eastern Kentucky in  Appalachia and one in northern  Minnesota in reservations on the  Minnesota/Canadian border.  And the work that those folks  are doing around engaging with  digital technologies to preserve  and represent underrepresented  rural identities is pretty  phenomenal, and actually I've  learned through the Wisconsin  Idea that Native American  communities in Wisconsin have a  really rich history with digital  technologies, and particularly  radio, for representing and  preserving native identities and  so I also think there's a bit of  that myth.  Technologies are sexy, people in  the cities use them all the  time.  And there are many examples of  rural communities that leverage  the power of digital  technologies to preserve and  represent rural identities and  rural senses of self.  >> What are other countries  doing that are different from  America?  Why are they more successful?  >> Those are two different  questions.  [LAUGHTER]  And more successful with regard  to technologies?  >> Schooling.  I've heard some information that  we are slowly becoming  more of a stupider country.  (LIGHT LAUGHTER)  I'm just saying.  >> Well, the international  comparisons, you can use  international comparisons to  shock or to support, and I think  the international comparisons  between the American school  system and other school systems  in other countries are sort of  ambiguous results. 

 If you took the top quarter of  American schools and compared  them to the top quarter of  schools anywhere in the world,  American schools compare  favorably.  If you take the top half of  American schools and compare  them with the top half of  schools anywhere else in the  world, we do pretty well.  The problem is that we have  schools that are severely  under-resourced, both in terms  of people to teach in the  schools and the economic  conditions of the communities in  which those schools exist.  And the disparity between our  best schools and the schools  that struggle the most is kind  of shocking in the developed  world.  And so one of the reasons why  Americans have a difficult time  with the international  comparisons is compared to what?  Now with the technology issue,  there are, the European Union,  for example, fosters quite a bit  of technology-driven research of  how we can change schools by  using social networking  technology or video games  technology.  In the United States, most of  our research is driven by,  especially in the K-12 world, is  driven by NCLB related things.  So how can we provide what works  to schools at the biggest scale,  and how can we measure what  works?  And so just as the commitment to  equity of outcomes in the  schools limits the space for  good innovation with technology,  the commitment to policies and  programs that produce equity in  the research world prevents the  development of a lot of  interesting applications of  technologies in schools.  So I don't know if that hits  your question, but some of us  are just become stupider with  age, I think.  [LAUGHTER]  In my case I do.  >> I want to say another thing  too about that which is that I  actually think we do ourselves a  disservice by continuing to push  the traditional literacy format,  the United States, by continuing  to push the traditional literacy  format as the goal for  schooling. 

 Because that format is really  good a producing technicians.  And you know what?  We're going to lose that race.  There aren't as many of us.  We are not efficient at  producing technicians.  You know what we're really good  at producing?  Innovation and ideas.  American Idol.  We're really good at that.  We're really good at producing  cultural innovation.  We may not be as good at  programming the site that allows  users to write in, to vote,  the voting technology.  We may not be as good at  programming that. 

 But we came up with those ideas.  And I think by continuing to  push back and say no production  is not what matters, we need a  measure that everyone is as  equally as good a technician, I  think in the end we do ourselves  a disservice by downplaying what  it is we're really good at.  [INAUDIBLE]  >> We're more looking for  business in our country instead  of like Japan.  They're looking for a lot of  science researchers,  or anything like that.  >> It's hard to make  generalizations like that.  So for example, there's the  number of the engineers that  graduated at the BA level in  American schools has increased  25% over the last ten years.  And 96% of those are native,  people from America.  And so we, I think it may be  a cultural stereotype that there  are some countries who are more  interested in producing  scientist and engineers and  other countries less interested.  By almost all of those metrics,  the United States does really  well as a national education  institution.  >> Hello. 

 >> Hi, Andrea.  >> He even knows my name.  What advice can you give to  teachers and staff right here  and now about change that you're  speaking to, to 2050?  >> Play video games.  [LAUGHTER]  I'm serious.  In order to develop digital  literacies, you have to develop  digital literacies.  These are not easy things to  develop.  I am an ESL, a GSL probably,  video game player.  For me, this is a very difficult  transition.  I play games with my son,  who's 21.  He's in the Air Force. 

 He flies across the keyboard.  And I'm like Mr. Hunt-and-Peck.  So there's games called  first-person shooters which are  like you take a perspective that  you navigate through a world,  and my favorite move in a  first-person shooter is to run  away.  [LAUGHTER]  There are monsters, I'm going.  But what I see by playing is I  understand oh, that's what these  things are good for.  That's how they move.  That's how character and plot  get resolved into digital  spaces.  That's what they mean by  multi-threaded narratives.  I get that because I play it.  And just like any other literacy  it's really hard to learn. 

 So teachers need to do some  social networking.  Need to get on Facebook.  Engage in media production  activities.  If you're a writer, try out a  Fan Fiction site.  There's a phenomena and sort of  expertise across many domains  called postholing.  Where if you drive a stake into  something that you're good at,  and then you survey the world  from the place that you know.  And it's a really important  thing in the new digital media  world that you become good at  something so you can use that as  a way to shape your perspective  in other areas.  The fact that cyberbullying  occupies so much of the  bandwidth about how schools  think about web 2.0 technologies  is ridiculous if you're  a person who uses web 2.0  technologies.  And I think it's because it's  a lack of experience with the  capacities for these new  technologies.  >> Thanks, very much. 

 I have been in the digital media  business now for a few years and  your subject is something that's  very exciting.  We're producing products for  digital media literacy for  school districts.  And as I approach the district,  and the teachers, and the kids  themselves, have you got an idea  where to focus bringing tools to  districts, do you focus on  administration?  Do you focus on tools for  teachers or production tools for  kids as you empower districts?  >> So, that's a challenge for me  because, again, in terms of  these practices as the way  they're used outside of schools,  the technologies are secondary  to the practice.  So teaching somebody to use a  Ning, to do social networking  only makes sense if you're  trying to produce some sort of  social network that's shared  authentically across  asynchronous spaces.  So are you actually trying to  communicate with some kids in  Ghana?  Are you actually trying to do  that?  Well, then maybe learning how to  use a Ning is helpful.  The problem is because we try  and adopt things at scale, the  tool pushes.  And in authentic practices, the  tools get pulled in as needed.  And that's really hard for  communities at scale because we  want to know what are the tools  we should be using.  Right?  But for me the answer  is not what are the tools,  but what do you want to do?  Okay, what tools do you need  in order to do it?  And, unfortunately, that answer  is not always the same.  And even within a singular  practice that answer is not  always the same. 

 And so I think the tool push is  part of the challenge  and a current mistake, I think.  >> So one way to do a bridge  practice is to identify the  kinds of problems that people in  the school have a difficult time  solving.  So one of the problems that we  can point to is with current  assessment technologies and a  lot of summative information  about kids.  But the formative information  that teachers collect to form  their decisions about kids on a  day-to-day basis, that's really  not been routinized in any way.  Teachers take no survey or they  have a grade book or they put  sticky notes or they just  remember stuff.  And we haven't really gotten  around to developing tools that  would support teachers in their  practice to collect information  about student learning.  All teachers do it.  They don't do it typically with  the age of sophisticated  information technologies.  It's a great occasion  for design.  And once you find a niche, a  practice that can be supported  with new technologies, then  people who are trying to solve  problems in schools will  gravitate towards those  solutions because it helps them  do their work better. 

 So it's a version of what Erica  was talking about.  Instead of trying to create  literacy in the tool, find a  practice to design for that  teachers will likely see as  something they could use.  One of the interesting things  for me about the No Child Left  Behind story is that it's a  great success story for the  capacity of schools to change.  In 2001, like 80% of all the  teachers in the United States  hated the idea of  standard-driven accountability.  In 2009 they're all doing it.  And they've been ingenious about  it.  And they've created systems to  localize assessment technology  or assessment information  in literacy, in math, in high  schools, in elementary schools.  If you give teachers a guide and  some resources of how to solve a  problem, it will get solved.  That's the way it works in our  schools.  >> Okay, another question. 

 Recently it was in the news that  some school districts are asking  teachers or telling teachers,  mandating teachers  not use Facebook with students.  They do not like the idea of  students having social contact  with teachers via media.  So I'm curious,  what is the next step?  What resources are available in  relation to first amendment  rights and the out-of-building  classroom?  >> So I had mentioned the Ning  before as an example.  If the problem is framed  in terms of we like what this  technology allows us to do but  we don't like, for example,  that this bleeds into the world  outside of school, one answer is  to say are there technologies  that let us do the work without  the down side.  So social networking is a good  example.  There exist tools that are  social networking tools that one  can use that can be made  internal to its own system.  So you could say we're going to  do a Facebook-like thing, but  we're not going to use Facebook.  It looks just like Facebook--  because it has the same features  but it's not, it has no--  (indistinct PA audio)  I'm sorry, it doesn't have  some of the dangers.  So that's one, I think that's  one potential answer is then the  choice of tool is motivated by  something, right?  We know we want it to do this  but we know we don't want it to  have this.  So is there something we can do  that has that?  And I think in some cases the  answer is yes, already, we just  haven't thought of those tools  as serving those functions. 

 >> These digital media  technologies are sort of engines  of disruption.  They disrupt everything that  they come in contact with.  They disrupted copyright issues.  They've disrupted media  distribution issues, ownership  issues, communication issues.  I don't know, never mind.  >> I didn't read your mind  just now.  [LAUGHTER]  >> It's a good thing, too.  So they will also disrupt the  way that we think about social  interaction in institutions like  schools.  So schools have typically tried  to maintain gaps between social  networks which is harder in  a small town, because inevitably  you do see your students  at the grocery store.  But the creation of these third  spaces like virtual spaces that  efface the differences you see  in real life where all your main  representation is either an  avatar or a name. 

 And so the cues that you would  get to keep the social spaces  different in real world are lost  in many digital worlds.  And this is just something we're  going to have to cope with.  It's almost like, do you know  how closed captioning works for  TV programs?  There's always another channel  going on.  It's amazing to watch a football  game, or even to go to a law  school class now.  Students got three channels  open all the time.  They're taking notes.  They've got ESPN, Sports Center,  the fantasy sports updates  going, and they're checking  their IM at the same time.  And it's just like this is what  we do.  It's multiple channel stuff and  the social network media is one  of those channels.  It's utterly transforming the  way we interact with each other,  and it will have implications  for the kinds of spaces that  have evolved with a difference  that matters and trying to  figure out how we can negotiate  those. 

 >> And to be fair to K-12  schools, this is a challenge in  higher education as well.  >> The law school tried to  outlaw laptops two years ago.  >> Ban laptops because too many  people were checking their  email.  >> And then too many of the  students said excuse me,  I'm paying for this education,  I paid for the laptop.  And so they said we're bringing  them to class.  >> And so rather than, and so  going back to the thing about  looking at it is something to be  afraid of versus looking at it  as what are its affordances,  what does it allow you to do.  I've had conversations with  people who teach large lecture  classes where we've said like  what if you use Twitter as a way  to get people to ask questions.  You got 600 people in a class,  what if you have a Twitter  channel open and people are  asking questions and that way  you can actually use that  technology to interact with  something that you otherwise  wouldn't have the opportunity to  do rather than say, oh, people  are Tweeting during class,  that's terrible, take away the  technology so they can't do that  thing because they might say  something bad about me,  they might not pay attention,  they might get a bad grade.  What bad might happen, I think,  needs to be replaced by what is  this good for?  What does it let us do  differently that we can't  already do?  >> Good place to end, I think.  Thank you. 

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