slgrant's blog

Two years ago, a haunting image of a 6-year-old Ghanian boy appeared on the cover of the New York Times. He was Mark Kwadwo, a child slave who lived the punishing life of a boat hand on Lake Volta in Ghana.

Steve Anderson and Holly Willis, faculty at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, believe that educators who work with digital media and film should be able to teach without worrying about being sued. But the copyright industry’s obsession with lawsuits has made most educators wary of teaching with any digital content they do not own or license.

Jessica Fraser is part of Mobile Movement, one of 17 HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media & Learning winners, and she posted a wonderful update over at the Digital Media & Learning Winners' Hub that we felt really captured the essence of what Mobile Movement is doing with digital media. Read on! And feel free to comment or ask questions.

 

In July of 2008, sixteen teens in Chicago and New York collaborated on a summer camp project that featured dinosaur bones, Tanzanian hip-hop and a virtual world. Instead of making a real-world trek to Tanzania to study paleontology and scientific field research, a team of Global Kids met virtually in Teen Second Life. "It felt like we were working side-by-side with scientists in the field," says one of the teen participants, describing how the group used digital media to learn about real-life paleontologists on a fossil hunt in Tanzania.

Years ago, my husband started cracking up in front of the computer. At night, our television was off, the house was quiet, and while my son slept and I studied, my husband sat alone at his computer and laughed.   

At 6pm in the newly renovated subterranean level of Duke's Perkins library, it is game time--literally. And virtually, too. Students of Dr. Natalya Mirovitskaya's Policy Analysis for Development course have gathered in a hi-tech classroom, where they will spend the next few hours engaged in Virtual Peace: Swords to Ploughshares.

According to TechEncyclopedia, teledensity is "the number of telephones in use for every 100 individuals living within an area." My neighbors, a family of five, have seven phones between them, not including phones at work and school. Tele-saturation, maybe?

In a recent article, Julia Morden of The Huffington Post wrote, "With all the turmoil in the markets, it seems time to write again about people who are doing good works..."