ethnography forum 2012: focus on digital discourses

i have fond memories associated with the ethnography forum. it was the venue where, as a relatively new master's student, i first presented an academic paper based on my involvement in an adult literacy practitioner inquiry group. and it is the venue where i have brought my own graduate students so that they, too, could experience a gentle yet generative entry into the discourses of academic presentation. held on the last weekend in february each year, the forum has a rich tradition of bringing history together with innovation in the domain of ethnographic research. and the 2nd day of the annual two-day conference is dedicated to a focus on teacher research and the often illuminating work of educators and those who assume a practitioner role in the space of research and inquiry. and almost without exception, the plenary speakers have consistently pushed to the fore those threads that start to bud as q&a sessions spill over into the hallways of all four years of the school where i spent many hours, days, and years. this year looks to be following in the same direction with a conference theme that promises to be stimulating and groundbreaking, and invited speakers each of whom embodies a unique mix of passion for the work, innovative scholarship, pedagogical creativity, and eloquence. be sure to check it out!

exciting new direction for the penn annual ethnography in education forum. the theme: Digital Discourses: Education and Ethnography in the 21st Century

proposals due: october 1st

a bit about the theme:

Technology and electronic media today are developing faster than ever, and change the ways we communicate, teach, learn and research. We now live in a digital world where new forms of interactions, social relationships, and identities are generated, thus transforming the very meaning of education. Learning and educating now occur in contexts shaped by Facebook, Smart Phones, Texting, Twitter, online learning, and Skyping—creating new resources and new challenges to our educative worlds. One now needs to draw on ever more diverse semiotic resources when traversing across different virtual and real spaces. As ethnographic researchers, our toolkit has greatly expanded: our briefcase-sized tape recorders of the past have been replaced by pocket-sized digital recorders, smart technology, hand-held video recorders, and online chatting from opposite corners of the globe. These tools have opened up greater possibilities for ethnographically capturing and exploring digital discourses and also for collaboration among ethnographers from a distance. Reciprocally, ethnographic and qualitative research provides keen analytical tools to capture and understand the complex and vibrant realities in which fast-changing technology affects the lives of students and teachers.

fantastic plenary speakers:
Angela Reyes, Hunter College
John Jackson, University of Pennsylvania
Linda Christensen, Lewis & Clark College
Glynda Hull, University of California, Berkeley

Complete details here

call for entries - extended

what are you passionate about?
are you the person to tell that story?
what does the world need to hear?
how can 3 minutes change something?



get inspired. and pass it on...

Media festival -- Call for entries

It's out!  The Call for Entries for the 2nd Annual Social Issue Media Fest.

Learn more here.

Watch last year's films here.

And pass it on!

literacy practices a generation apart

things i spend way too much time thinking about (that many of my youth participants and younger friends - or those who appear to be aging backwards - seem to be able to handle without much drama or trauma):

- subject line of an email
- title of playlists
- caption when posting a link to facebook
- the title of anything public, really - e.g., flickr album, picasa album, photo caption,

ok, i'll admit it - grooveshark playlists and plain ol' email subject lines give me agita with a chaser of huge insecurity complex.  how do others do it, i wonder?  this isn't just a split of 'natives' and 'immigrants' of the wonderful wide web; there's something uninhibited about young people's acts of making themselves public that astounds me... still.  a carefree-ness, a willingness to recognize and embrace the fleeting temporality of such literacy acts; acts and practices that, perhaps unintentionally, create a different sort of generational shift.  not necessarily chronologically generational, but perhaps demarcations according to when one joined the smartphone revolution?  the points along a timeline when one jumps on the social media bandwagon - a conscious decision for some; as natural as cool august weather in maine for others.

the video and the visual breakdown of the lyrics - remixed remixing

DJ Earworm - United State of Pop 2009 (Blame It on the Pop) - Mashup of Top 25 Billboard Hits





Color-coded lyrics
(so much fun!!)

new issue of digital culture and education is out! "beyond new literacies"

New Issue online now! Volume 2, Issue 1 http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/

Special themed issue: Beyond ‘new’ literacies 
Edited by Dana J. Wilber


from Wilber's intro:
"Ten years ago the term “new literacies” was only used by those prescient researchers who perceived that new technologies were going to shape language and literacies, such as Lankshear and Knobel’s (1997) early work on literacies and texts in an electronic age. Others, such as the New London Group (1996) through their work on multiliteracies, were instrumental in evolving the idea of literacies shaped by technologies and contexts; setting the stage for new literacies to become the vibrant field it is today. While the field has grown over the past decade, the central concern of new literacies research remains the same; researchers scrutinize and analyze how the rapid development of new tools and technologies are shaping language and literacy practices. In this special themed issue of Digital Culture and Education (DCE), we begin a conversation that compliments how we think about conceptualizing, viewing and talking about “new” literacies."

Screening: Media that Matters @ Maysles Cinema

Media That Matters
Presents
Immigrant Heritage Week 2010 Screening
 
Wednesday, April 21   7:30 - 10:00 pm
Maysles Cinema
343 Malcolm X Blvd/Lenox Ave
(Btwn 127th & 128th Streets)
Suggested Donation $10

Celebrate Immigrant Heritage Week 2010 with Media That Matters as we host an evening-long screening at Maysles Cinema on Wednesday, April 21 from 7:30 - 10:00 pm!  In partnership with the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, Media That Matters will be showcasing films that focus on the immigrant experience, American identity and international communities.  The evening will also feature Arts Engine staff facilitating discussion with guest organizations--Safe Horizon, New York Youth Leadership Council, NYU Center for Human Rights & Global Justice, Caribbean One and African Services Committee--available for questions and conversation.

Here are just a few examples of the films on the evening's lineup:

Vision Test (Wes Kim)
Who would you feel most comfortable with as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company?  What begins as a routine eye exam turns into an examination of people’s subconscious attitudes towards race, gender and power.

Slip of the Tongue (Karen Lum & Youth Sounds Factory)
What's your ethnic makeup? A young man makes a pass at a beautiful stranger and gets an eye-opening schooling on race and gender.

Exiled in America (Angela Torres Camarena)
Five siblings struggle to support their American livelihoods after their mother is deported to Mexico.

Why Do White People Have Black Spots? (Anya Kandel & Momentus International)
Youth in Ghana pose questions to people outside of their borders and spark an ongoing dialogue through film.

The Next Wave (Jennifer Redfearn & Tim Metzger)
The Carteret islanders struggle to relocate as some of the world's first climate change refugees.

Please visit the Maysles Cinema website for a complete schedule and to RSVP for the night's events:  Maysles Cinema Calendar <http://www.mayslesinstitute.org/cinema/calendar.html>
Also, check out Arts Engine's Media That Matters website <http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/>  for more information on our film collection, ways you can hold your own screening and how to take action on issues that matter!


We hope to see you there! 


Contact: Weisi Li  |  weisi@artsengine.net <mailto:weisi@artsengine.net>

Arts Engine, Inc. supports, produces, and distributes independent media of consequence and promotes the use of independent media by advocates, educators and the general public.

new book about adolescents and online literacies

Adolescents Online Literacies: Connecting Classrooms, Digital Media, & Popular Culture

New volume edited by Donna Alvermann

Description:
A compilation of new work that makes concrete connections between what the research literature portrays and what teachers, school librarians, and media specialists know to be the case in their own situations. The authors (educators and researchers who span three continents) focus on ways to incorporate and use the digital literacies that young people bring to school.

CFP: Visual Interpretations conference at MIT

humanities + digital conference 2010

"Visual Interpretations" - Aesthetics, Methods, and Critiques

Of Information Visualization in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

May 20-22, 2010 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology/HyperStudio

http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/h-digital/

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? 
And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research?

HyperStudio’s Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as "humanities tools in digital environments.” (Johanna Drucker)

We welcome submissions from practitioners and theorists of digital humanities as well as such connected disciplines as art, design, visual culture, museum studies, and computer science.

Topics include:
·       Expressive and artistic dimensions of visualizations
·       Subjectivity and objectivity in information visualization
·       Dynamic/multidimensional visualizations and user collaboration
·       Social media and contextualized visualization
·       Cultural history of visual epistemology
·       Limits and affordances of the translation from data to visualization
·       2D and 3D visualizations of historical/social/political data
·       Visualization across media and the archive
·       Digital visual literacy & accessibility
·       Relationships between database and interface
·       Alternative modes of data representation.

Submissions:
We are inviting submissions for the following conference formats:
·       Papers with 15 minutes of presentation and short discussions (12 slots)
·       Short presentations, so called “6/4s” with 6 minutes of presentation and 4 minutes of discussion (18 slots available)
·       Mini-Workshops, 30 minutes each (6 slots)
·       Demos and Posters (30 slots)

Deadline for submissions:  March 31, 2010
Organizers:
MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities (http://hyperstudio.mit.edu)
MIT Communications Forum (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/)

For more information: http://hyperstudio.mit.edu/h-digital/ or contact: h.digital@mit.edu

images of youth - the year behind, the year ahead

we live in a moment of unparalleled communicative accessibility and information dissemination. youth, so often the object of maligned commentary and political concern, are leading the charge in new modes of expression, purposes for communication, and representations of self.  yet, all too often, the stories we see in the popular press about young people are ones that highlight the exceptions and not the norm.  that is, we see reported several instances of youth using social networking to plan mass chaos and ultimately inflict harm on others.  yes, this does happen and yes we hear about it.  but how often do we hear about the use of media and technologies by youth to engage in social action?  for inspiring stories, see below:

A positive face of youth in the media - Today's Youth-Led Media Summit brings together enthusiastic young people from around the UK who want to determine their future role – and dispel the image of dangerous hoodies

Youth Radio - Youth Radio was founded in 1990 on the deeply held belief that underserved youth, ages 14-24 years old, have the creativity, technical skills and entrepreneurial spirit to become leaders in the multi-media industry and the community and to serve as mentors to other youth.

new book about harlem, youth, and multimodal literacy - In her new book, Valerie Kinloch investigates how the lives and literacies of youth in New York City’s historic Harlem are affected by public attempts to gentrify the community.  Kinloch engages the perspectives of two young men who use documentary and video making to guide their collaborative inquiry.

Adobe Youth Voices/ Listen Up! in India - In November the Listen Up! team traveled to India with our Adobe Youth Voices partners to to work with teachers and students in documentary and animation filmmaking.

America's Youth Speak Out - America's Youth Speak Out is the only youth produced national public service campaign. More than 4000 young people across the country are producing public service messages dealing with issues that are important in their lives and communities.

Youth video conference highlight: The Choose to Be the Change youth video project highlighted the Northern Ontario First Nations Communications Conference


what i hope for in the year to come are what michelle fine has referred to as "audiences that are worthy" - an interpretive context for the words, images, stories, and storying by youth that embraces a generous and generative posture.  having worked with youth to produce numerous of varied artifacts in which young people make themselves vulnerable, i am particularly committed to seeking, finding, and creating meaningful audiences for the narrative insights embodied by these artifacts.  may 2010 be the year to start/continue this work more effectively...

...

digital media and learning conference - call for papers, deadline: 10.30.2009

DML: First Annual Digital Media and Learning Conference
Conference Theme: "Diversifying Participation"
Call for papers - Deadline: October 30, 2009


Conference Committee: Henry Jenkins, David Theo Goldberg, Heather Horst, Mimi Ito, Jabari Mahiri and Holly Willis

Keynote speakers: Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins

(from the call)

DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION
A growing body of research has identified how young people's digital media use is tied to basic social and cultural competencies needed for full participation in contemporary society. We continue to develop an understanding of the impact of these experiences on learning, civic engagement, professional development, and ethical comprehension of the digital world.

Yet research has also suggested that young people's forms of participation with new media are incredibly diverse, and that risks, opportunities, and competencies are spread unevenly across the social and cultural landscape. Young people have differential access to online experiences, practices, and tools and this has a consequence in their developing sense of their own identities and their place in the world. In some cases, different forms of participation and access correspond with familiar cultural and social divides. In other cases, however, new media have introduced novel and unexpected kinds of social differences, subcultures, and identities.

It is far too simple to talk about this in terms of binaries such as "information haves and have nots" or "digital divides". There are many different kinds of obstacles to full participation, many different degrees of access to information, technologies, and online communities, and many different ways of processing those experiences. Participatory cultures surrounding digital media are characterized by a diversity that does not track automatically to high and low access or more or less sophisticated use. Rather, multiple forms of expertise, connoisseurship, identity, and practice are proliferating in online worlds, with complicated relationships to pre-existing categories such as socioeconomic status, gender, nationality, race, or ethnicity.

We encourage sessions that describe, document, and critically analyze different forms of participation and how they relate to various forms of social and cultural capital. We are interested in accounts of the challenges and obstacles which block or inhibit engagement to different forms of online participation. We also encourage session proposals that engage with successful intervention strategies and pedagogical processes enabling once marginalized groups to more fully exploit the opportunities for learning with digital media. Conversely, we are interested in hearing more about how marginal and subcultural communities find diverse uses of new and emerging technologies, pushing them in new directions and navigating a complicated relationship with "mainstream" forms of participation. Specifically, we seek to understand the following:

• What can research on more diverse communities contribute to our understanding of the learning ecologies surrounding new media?
• What are the technologies, practices, economic, and cultural divides that lead to segregation, "gated" information communities, and differential access?
• When and how do diversity and differentiation in participation promote social and cultural benefits and opportunities, and when do they create schisms that are less equitable or productive?
• What strategies have proven successful at broadening opportunities for participation, overcoming the many different kinds of segregation or exclusion which impact the online world, and empowering more diverse presences throughout cyberspace?
• Are there things occurring on the margins of the existing digital culture that might valuably be incorporated into more mainstream practices?

In addition to these questions directly addressing the conference theme, we welcome submissions that address innovative new directions in research and practice relating to digital media and participatory learning.

Read more on conference website.

.

bar code art

taking something meant to be invisible or what goes unnoticed and repurposing it by (re)imagining it as a modality for creating art. fantastic!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

trolling the web... a text rendering of cme09 haps.

i've been reading posts and tweets from members of this fall's culture, media, and ed class and thought i'd do a virtual text rendering - a collection of phrases that stood out to me, in no particular order:


But what about the stereotyping?
the therapy of production is part of the intangible value that comes out of that work/process of creation
I also want to spend a moment defending teachers

this wondering just led me to go to twitter ... and be met with my school's filter/firewall.

I think I’m in between phase I “Honeymoon” and phase 2 “What am I doing?”

Globalization is irreversible and nobody is in charge of it.

Abt ten min into watching the video, The Day My God Died, a mascara commercial popped up

Holy Twitter Batman! Kanye went there!?!

connected/disconnected, isolated/related, and openheartedness/a bunch of lies

structured through styles and voice long forgotten

Suddenly, I began to miss Nankai...

Who says texting has to be the enemy of the 21st century teacher?

how young people who have no role models in their lives use figures in the media as role models

loooved fam guy. cleveland show... not so much

Crowd Sourcing: Internet as democratizer or impersonator.

Now I know why IronChef can run right after knowing the secret ingredient

i need a hug.

good stuff happening in cme this semester.  makes me think more about the collective work we're trying to do, especially with this year's focus on social issue media.  in other words, what stories are we trying to tell?  who are we storying with? who are we storying for? and about?

...

knowing by doing?

as fears about the dark side of social networking abound, one question continues to persist for me: to what extent does someone (a researcher of adolescents' literacies, for example) benefit from participating in the digital communicative landscape when aiming to make sense of that landscape within the lives of aforementioned adolescents?

i recall having a similar conversation about gaming and literacy research and wondering whether one had to play video games in order to research gaming in the lives of youth. thinking back to that conversation now, i am reminded of a video i saw recently on edutopia in which mimi ito is being interviewed about her digital youth study. in it, ito describes three ways that she observed youth engaging in informal learning outside of school with technologies:
hanging out
messing around
geeking out

each of these "ways in" - what ito and her colleagues refer to as "genres of participation" - is associated with various sets of practices and postures and social communities. as i thought about these distinctions (see video and full report for on these genres), i began to wonder about how researchers fit into (or don't) these participation genres. and to what extent and in what ways do we locate ourselves within these already hybrid spaces and moments of digital participation...

youth voices on michael jackson

it's hard not to be moved and overwhelmed by the outpouring of reflection, sadness, memories, and testimonials in response to the sudden death of michael jackson. what i've been particularly struck by, however, have been the responses of adolescents, many of whom were born within the last two decades and whose current music artists claim to be influenced by the musical stylings pioneered by a true individual.

here's a taste of what i've heard and read, from a youth perspective:

• youthradio.org - "Remembering the King of Pop: Audio Montage"
• eric (18) texts: "James Brown- December 25th. Aaliyah- August 25th. Left Eye- April 25th. Micheal Jackson- June 25th. How Random is dat...Pass It On" ... "that line-up is just saddening & ridiculous"
• LA youth - "Teens remember Michael Jackson"
• earth times - "Lebanon's teens mourn Michael Jackson"
  

new (literacies-related) reads on my summer 'must read' list

The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (Routledge) - Edited by Carey Jewitt - out July 2009

Assessing New Literacies: Perspectives from the Classroom (Peter Lang) - Edited by Anne Burke & Roberta Hammett (and part of the New Literacies & Digital Epistemologies series edited by Colin Lankshear & Michele Knobel)

The Word and the World: The Cultural Politics of Literacy in Brazil (Hampton Press) - Lesley Bartlett

Handbook of Adolescent Literacy Research (Guilford Press) - Edited by Leila Christenbury, Randy Bomer, & Peter Smagorinsky

any other suggestions??

at a glance: writing and literacies sig sessions at aera, 2009

1. Genres and Structures in Writing
Session type: Paper Discussion (formerly known as Roundtables)
Time: Tue, Apr 14 - 10:35am - 11:15am Place: San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina, Marriott Hall Salon 4

2. Hybridity, Multimodality, and New Forms of Composing
Session type: Symposium
Time: Wed, Apr 15 - 8:15am - 10:15am Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28D

3. Literacies Between Borders and Across Contexts
Session type: Paper Session
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 8:15am - 10:15am Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28B

4. LitScapes: Mapping the Terrain of Youth Identities, Spaces, and Texts
Session type: Symposium
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 10:35am - 12:05pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28B

5. National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy Presents Authors of Its Series “On…” Series
Session type: Interactive Symposium
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 2:15pm - 3:45pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28B

6. Sociocultural and Historical Perspectives on Literacy
Session type: Paper Session
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 2:15pm - 3:45pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 25B

7. Theorizing and Implementing New Directions in Writing and Literacy Research
Session type: Interactive Symposium
Time: Wed, Apr 15 - 2:15pm - 3:45pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28D

8. Twenty-Five Years of New Literacy Studies: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
Session type: Symposium
Time: Wed, Apr 15 - 10:35am - 12:05pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28D

9. Writing and Literacies SIG Business Meeting
Session type: Business Meeting
Time: Thu, Apr 16 - 6:15pm - 8:15pm Place: San Diego Convention Center, Room 28B

10. Writing Identities
Session type: Paper Discussion (formerly known as Roundtables)
Time: Tue, Apr 14 - 11:25am - 12:05pm Place: San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina, Marriott Hall Salon 4

CFP: Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission

it's baaaack! another call for papers for the 6th media in transition conference. i thoroughly enjoyed the 2005 meeting, which focused on the "work of stories," and this one looks like it will generate yet another excellent collection of papers and presentations

Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission

International Conference
April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts.

Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes. His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore's Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace.

What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast enlarging universe of words and images generated by new technologies?

How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers, writers and visual artists on these broad themes.

Potential topics might include:

• The digital archive
• The future of libraries and museums
• The past and future of the book
• Mobile media
• Historical systems of communication
• Media in the developing world
• Social networks
• Mapping media flows
• Approaches to media history
• Education and the changing media environment
• New forms of storytelling and expression
• Location-based entertainment
• Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
• New modes of circulation and distribution
• The transformation of television -- from broadcast to download
• Cosmopolitanism backlashes against media change
• Virtual worlds and digital tourism
• The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital transformation?
• The fate of reading

Submissions
Abstracts of no more than 500 words or full papers should be sent to Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu no later than Friday, Jan. 9, 2009. We will evaluate abstracts and full papers on a rolling basis and early submission is highly encouraged. All submissions should be sent as attachments in a Word format. Submitted material will be subject to editing by conference organizers. Email is preferred, but submissions can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
MIT 14N-430
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

visualizing data

i saw this a while ago in nytimes and facebooked it, but have begun exploring it anew this week:

Many Eyes: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home - presents ideas about how to visualize sets of data, including using wordle.net and other nifty apps.

school 2.0?

colin and michele are giving their keynote at the learning 2.0 conference, being held today at montclair and co-org'd by dana & michele. their talk is focused on the "twoness" of "learn 2.0" and they've begun with a review of the leap from web 1.0 to web 2.0 - highlighting the participatory nature of this shift, and raising the issue (esp with relevance to sites built of collective knowledge like wikipedia, etc.) of truth... and later, credit (as in, whose idea is it?)... and the significance of

so the issue of school 2.0 - as it connects with learn 2.0 - comes up. michele is talking now and wondering about how our teaching practices must change in a web 2.0 world. namely, how do create spaces for collaboration - true collaboration? and not the kind found in lit circles where someone is the artist, the recorder, the this that and the other thing...

relatedly, i wonder: what is the relationship between learn 2.0 and school 2.0?? which is funny b/c i've thought more about the institution of school in the past 24 hours than i have all semester. hmmm....

for example, they teach a course in which students, in teams, have to engage in the following:
- learn how to program a robot
- document the group's learning in this experience (using video, audio, print)
- analyze the data they have produced and collected
- prepare a scholarly paper/presentation
- present said paper/presentation at a full-on conference
all within the space of a few weeks, one of which they are sequestered at a lodge.

they, of course, explained this project much more eloquently - i'm especially excited about the teasing out of the ideas of collaboration, collective knowledge, truth... and what these ideas look like when they are actually embodied in daily practice.

"it doesn't matter if one person wrote it, or if ten people write it - the result is the same in terms of human benefit." --c. lankshear

re: the above project - participants learn to be researchers by being researchers, not students learning about research. the doing, being, embodying of learn(ing) 2.0 - not a pipe dream; a reality we can't/shouldn't ignore.