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via http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-minute-workout/

via http://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/2675665106/sizes/l/in/photostream/

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via http://flavorwire.com/391173/famous-authors-handwritten-outlines-for-great-works-of-literature/view-all

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via http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/01/03/games-that-help-us-wander/

via http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2013/04/art13-photography.php#.UWVo_ILR2Ph

via http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-enchanting-charms-of-this-sublime-science-reveal-themselves-in?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ButDoesItFloat+%28but+does+it+float%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

via http://purexpoison.tumblr.com/

via http://newgrids.fr/2012/08/31/william-branton/

via https://plus.google.com/photos/103488786418978849574/albums/5800977093583239329/5800977091400582450

via http://www.cornell.edu/

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via http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2013/01/30-of-the-most-beautiful-abandoned-places-and-modern-ruins-ive-ever-seen/

It took us 120 minutes to walk/draw the F1 track in east Austin, the underdeveloped area of the city and formerly segregated zone for African Americans and Latino/Hispanics (mostly Mexicans). In contrast, the wining race car did 56 laps in 90 minutes in the the F1 Austin Circuit of Americas track in November 2012.

We decided to trace and walk the silhouette of the official F-1 track on the ground of one of the forgotten zones of the 11th largest city in the USA. Jack Murphy and I, met on a Friday afternoon in order to do a situationist and psycogeographic walk, a sort of juxtaposition and performative urban collage. We had discussed and imagined before ways to appropriate, articulate, and criticize our experience of the city of Austin. A place that is continuously exploited not only by commercial and consumer culture, but also by technology evangelists, and more recently by luxury sport enterprises such as the Formula One. The myth of Austin as the capital music of the world, the place of the biggest interactive/film/music festival (SXSW), and the home of the only F-1 race in America is continuously recreated and promoted.

There are of course many Austins, many different experiences of what a the fastest growing American city could be. There are Texican Mexicans everywhere, coming back to what used to be their territory, working on different services, from gardening to cooking to cleaning. There are the high tech kids, coming from the USA north east coast, from asia and even from South America. There are hipsters, youngsters from all over the USA in search of a progressive, cheap, and musical and fashion oasis. There are the locals, who don´t quite understand very well the explosion, the crazyness, the grow. It is funny to be here, like a paradox of capitalism, American nostalgia, consumer culture, and globalization. Global cities are caricatures when they don’t really historically deserve it. They are just too much. Too much of a thing. Like Christmas trees filled with too many things. Like one of those Barroque church eccentricities Spaniards tried to create in South America in the 17th century.

We walked in an area of Austin that is very different to the one of the development, of the capital music of the world. We walked trying to draw and trace the F-1 race track. The same scale. Transposed to the Austin East Side. I never imagined encountering so much wilderness in Austin. But it is there. We jumped fences, entered deep agglomeration of trees, surrounded dried creeks, crossed high school stadium tracks and surrounded many churches. We also took pictures, some videos, and recorded a GPS trace. Using Zeega, a platform for interactive and multimodal storytelling we tried to recreate our experience. You can see our first attempt to narrate our walk/draw/situation by clicking here.

There is also a gallery of the photographs I created in Flickr with the best selection of pictures I took during the walk.

Media practitioners and theorists have sustained for many years a debate between the analytical/critical and the technical/practical approach to teaching media education. Because traditionally, production and analysis have been understood in opposition, there are many tensions between the two approaches to media education’ curriculum design. Even though in research articles, policy documents, and books, media education aims have started to acknowledge both analysis and production, in reality the two approaches remain separated and in conflict. There are several tensions among them due to their different conceptions of student agency, their different academic status, and their different epistemological supports.

The pleasure, enjoyment, and emotional investment of creating/writing/producing media texts constitute opportunities of agency for the students that do not necessarily involve or develop critical thinking and analysis. Scholars and researchers that condemn practical production have criticized this kind of expansion of students’ agency. As Buckingham explains, critics have argued that production work is “politically suspect and educationally worthless” (123). This negative view of media production is motivated by the fear that students are merely “imitating” dominant media texts in their productions. According to Buckingham, this position was common among scholars and researchers in the UK during the 1980s. “Imitation was seen to be an inherently unthinking process, through which the ‘dominant ideologies’ of media products would be simply internalized and reproduced.” (Buckingham, 124-125)

Since media production curricular approaches have encounter fertile ground for application in vocational courses, criticisms about their lower academic status, its mere technicism, and its economic motivations have been raised by some media educators. As Buckingham noticed, “vocationalism was seen as a recipe for reducing media education to a form of technical training, in which the ‘critical’ dimension of media theory would be lost.” (98) Scholars also criticized the economic logic behind vocational courses because in order to prepare students for industry jobs the courses had to emphasize the mastery of technical skills and the grammar of dominant media forms. Although the popularity of these classes reflects the believe that industries are offering job opportunities to people skilled in new media production, some media education scholars continue to be skeptic of it.

Furthermore, there is the issue of the low status of vocationalism in the school world. As Hobbs describes, “historically, in some schools, video production has been used as the lowest track in the English or vocational-educational curriculum (…) Low ability students are allowed to “play” with video-based and computer technologies, whereas high-ability students get more traditional print-based education.” (21) Regardless of its low status, vocational media production has been valued by educators who recognize “the value of collaborative teamwork, the growth of media production as an industry, and the ways in which many nontraditional learners may excel in tasks related to visual thinking, planning, editing, performing, or directing.” (Hobbs 1998, 20)

Although it could be said that almost all the tensions between the production and analysis approaches to curriculum design in media education are rooted in the different epistemological supports that each have, the one between rational and creative thinking is the one that best illustrate the opposition. The modern and rational structuralism framework that supports critical analysis and the decoding of media texts differs from the postmodern poststructuralism one that acknowledges the capacities of individuals to be productive and creative with language. As Dezuanni has argued, “structuralism underestimates individuals capacities to be productive and creative. It assumes that using language necessarily involves repeating and reinforcing the social and cultural norms established with language.” (126) Being creative, productive, and playful with technology generates fears and anxieties among modern media educators because this kind of agency operates under a poststructuralist logic that values freeplay in processes of signification. And because signification is not a stable process under this framework, meaning is never complete and remains always in a process of becoming. When the creative work with media technologies and the process of skills acquisition are understood as a form of language experimentation and play, they tend to collide with the acquisition of critical and conceptual understandings that usually consists on a mechanistic and abstract acquisition of metalanguage centered in the authority of a teacher.

Despite the multiple tensions, the potential for integrating the two approaches of production and analysis in the curriculum design for media education, has been recognized by several scholars and practitioners such as Buckingham, Tyner, Masterman, Livingstone, Goodman, and Hobbs. For instance, according to Tyner, “the most effective way to accomplish sophisticated analysis, critical literacy, and metacognition of various discourses is to encourage students to produce their own media, in a reprisal of the symbiotic relationship between alphabetic reading and writing.” (200) Buckingham has also called attention to the complementary aspect that analysis and production have. He points out that creative production can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how the media operate and “be a means of generating new and more profound critical insights,” (122). In a similar fashion, Masterman has argued that, “what media education aimed to achieve at its best was a fusion of practical criticism and critical practice.”(87) Although there are very few concrete examples of curriculum designs that integrate the two approaches, several strategies for innovating media education’s curricula have been identified by researchers and practitioners.

Perhaps the most classic strategy, especially popular during the 1980s in the UK, has been the subordination of production to analysis in order to demonstrate critical understanding. Advocates of this strategy used production exercises in order to systematically “deconstruct” the conventional norms of mainstream media. Hence, the curriculum consisted of exercises in style designed to apply critical readings and demonstrate understanding of the codes of particular genres. According to Buckingham, “this approach explicitly sought to oppose and subvert dominant forms of professional practice; and in the process, the ‘expressive’ or ‘creative’ potential of production was rigorously subordinated to the demonstration of critical understanding.” (125) The rationale behind this strategy, clearly based on the notion of “demystification,” is that knowing about production is useful for questioning the naturalness of the media texts.

Buckingham has conceptualized a compelling and innovative strategy that uses a dialectical and recursive approach. Dialectic in the sense that there is a dialogue between doing and analyzing, and recursive in the sense that there is a cycle of action and reflection that continuously repeats. According to him, “students might be able to learn by doing; but if they are not enabled to reflect upon what they have done, it will be impossible for them to generalize from their experience to future situations.” (138) In this strategy, reflection becomes an indispensable aspect of practical work, and it is built into the process of production, rather than simply enforced at the end. Students are constantly encouraged to distance themselves from their creations and are motivated to reflect upon the consequences of the choices they are making. In order to achieve that, students could have regular production meetings with the teacher, or could also do an ongoing self-evaluation and review the project as it unfolds. As Buckingham explains, in the context of media education “production must be accompanied by the systematic reflection and self-evaluation; and students must be encouraged to make informed decisions and choices about what they are doing. (84) As students evaluate their own production work (and the one of their peers), and the responses of the audience, they are “encouraged to consider the relationship between intentions and results, and hence recognize some of the complexity of meaning making.” (Buckingham, 84) In this strategy, debriefing at the end and during the process becomes a regular exercise of evaluation of the practical production work.

Another strategy for combining the curriculum approaches of analysis and production in media education is based on the use of genres. This strategy recognizes the value of working with a giving genre that the students are already familiar in order to facilitate imitation and intertextuality. The idea here is that students are allowed to follow generic models from existing media forms in order to facilitate the understanding of key analytical concepts such as matters of language, production, audience, and representation. Buckingham has exemplified this strategy with a classroom project developed in the UK by scholar and practitioner Julian Sefton-Green. In this project, students used the soap opera genre to practice media production and develop critical analysis at the same time. Because the students were aware of the conventions of the genre, they were able to use them in a self-conscious manner that facilitated processes of self-reflection. In the process of imitating the production of a familiar genre (soap opera), students discovered key aspects about meaningful narrative structures, character motivations, realism, and the representation of social issues. The differences between the limited resources that students had available in their classroom and the ones that could be identified in the models available on broadcast television, were used to facilitate reflections and analysis. The rationale behind this approach is based on the work of advocates of “genre theory” who have argued that imitation is an important aspect of learning and have claimed that students need to access dominant language genres.

Some of the best examples of curriculum strategies that combine theory and practice, reading and writing, analysis and production, come from the world of informal education, and in particular, from the contexts of community-based programs. The strategy of the Educational Video Center (EVC) documentary workshop in New York City is, for instance, an exemplary model of a learning experience that fosters at the same time analysis and production. According to Goodman, the leader practitioner behind this model, the creation of students’ own media is one of the most effective strategies for teaching critical literacy. For him, media production allows students to understand through their own experience how information is organized in media texts. As Goodman explains, students “can see for themselves how words can be deleted or added to sentences and made to seem as if they had originally been spoken that way; how causes and effects can be made into the opposite; and how perceptions of time, space, power and history can all be altered without seeming to be.” (6) Integrating pedagogical strategies such as cooperative learning, portfolio and performance-based assessment, student-centered learning, writing process and video-inquiry, the EVC model has been able to foster, at the same time, student engagement in production and analysis work.

The rationale behind EVC model relies, on the one hand, in Goodman’s understanding of critical literacy as “the ability to analyze, evaluate, and produce print, aural, and visual forms of communication.” (3) On the other, the rationale is based on video-inquiry as a methodology for teaching and learning. As Goodman has argued, “taking a video camera into the community as a regular method for teaching and learning gives kids a critical lens through which they can explore the world around them. It helps them to defamiliarize the familiar taken-for-granted conditions of life.” (109) Because under this rationale, learning about the world is directly linked to the possibility of changing, civic engagement and youth empowerment become also part of the motivations for integrating analysis and production.

One of the very few examples of integrative reading/writing curriculum designs from the formal education context that I was able to find in my literature review was the one elaborated and practiced by Dezuanni. This curriculum was created for a classroom-based video games project at an Independent Boy’s College (IBC) in Brisbane, Australia. As Dezuanni describes, the curriculum was “a combined media and technology studies unit that included a range of online and classroom-based activities focused on designing and producing video games and critically reflecting on some of the social and cultural issues associated with this popular medium.” (124) In the course of four weeks, students were able to engage both in decoding analysis activities that developed critical thinking, and production work and technology skills acquisition that fostered creative thinking and freeplay. Students not only were able to learn about video game genres, conventions, and design principles through design activities, game play, and decoding work, but also considered issues related to games such as game violence and gender representation in games. Furthermore, students conducted a survey in the school to find out the preferences of younger students, and then worked in teams to design a concept for a game targeted to a specific audience. In addition, students were trained in the use of professional software such as Flash, Game Maker, Bryce, and Wings 3, at an off-campus multimedia training institution.

The curriculum combined, as Dezuanni has explained, “the development of knowledge associated with media education with the type of technology training undertaken in multimedia courses.” (125) Such innovative combination allowed students to engage in a process of critical analysis and creative production that not always occurred at the same time. Reflecting about how the production processes focused on skills acquisition did not necessarily developed students critical capacities, Dezuanni has been able to point out that despite not being critical, rational, and modern, those processes provided student voice and led to empowerment. The rationale, for this kind of innovative approach is, therefore, somehow contradictory. On the one hand, it relies on a poststructuralist mindset that understands work with digital media and skills acquisition as a form of freeplay. It recognizes the work of students as digital bricoleurs, and values experimentation with both technological processes and generic norms. On the other, it also takes into account the structuralism stance of rational and analytical thinking.

In my literature review I was not able to find many examples of concrete curriculum designs that integrated reading and writing of media successfully. Innovative pedagogies such as the one of Connected Learning environments, therefore, might open the space to overcoming the tensions that characterize the analytical and practical approaches to curriculum design for media education.

In conclusion, integrating the analytical and production approaches in practice has turned out way more difficult that what has been so far discussed and theorized in paper. However, the increasing recognition of its possibility in both academic and policy contexts is a sign of what the future of media education and curriculum design has to offer in terms of innovation and experimentation. Embracing the multiple tensions between the two approaches, and experimenting with the integration of analysis and production, even if it seems sometimes contradictory, is the way to go. Multiple pedagogies and strategies such as the ones integrated in the Connected Learning model support this kind of endeavor.

References

Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning, and contemporary culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Dezuanni, Michael. “Youth Media Production and Technology Skills Acquisition: Opportunities for Agency.” In Fisherkeller, J. International Perspectives on Youth Media: Cultures of Production and Education (Mediated Youth). Peter Lang Publishing. 2011. 121-137
Goodman, S. (2003) Teaching youth media: a critical guide to literacy, video production & social change. New York : Teachers College Press
Hobbs, R. (1998). The seven great debates in the media literacy movement. Journal of Communication, 48(1):16-32
Hobbs, R. (2011) The State of Media Literacy: A Response to Potter, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 55:3, 419-430
Livingstone,S.(2003).The Changing Nature and Uses of Media Literacy. Working paper. London: London School of Economics. Retrieved in February from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/13476
Masterman, L. (1992) “The Media Education Revolution.” (1992) Canadian Jounral of Educational Communication. VOL 22. No.2. pp. 5-14.
Perez Tornero, J.M. and Varis, T. (2010) Media Literacy and New Humanism. Published by the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education. Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0019/001921/192134e.pdf
Tyner, K. R. (1998). Literacy in a digital world: Teaching and learning in the age of information. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

One week ago I was back in Cambridge for the Media in Transition conference at MIT. Returning to the constellation of cities that compose the metropolitan area of Boston is always great. I enjoy a lot the kind of conversations, encounters, and trajectories I can have there. It is an excellent place for net-weaving, for discovering, asking questions, and learning. It triggers my curiosity. During this visit I spent a few hours walking the underground system of tunnels that connects the buildings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I took many pictures as in a photo essay style. Or more exactly, as in a film style because I took hundreds of pictures. I will share some of them in this post. But before I do that, let me introduce the underground system of tunnels with a map. This system, reflects the interdisciplinary of this school, the interconnections of areas of knowledge. The underground architecture indeed reflects the freedom of linking that one can experiment there. I miss such power of connectivity, networking, and flow of information.


I went to the underground of building 16 in order to see the closet where Aaron Swartz connected a laptop to download JSTOR articles. I found an intersection after crossing the infinite corridor.

And then, I saw the underground corridor of building 16. It had at least 3 different closets or machine rooms.

In my memory, that underground 16 tunnel seemed to be long. However, it actually is a very short passage with few doors, few routers and dimmed lights.

dadada
dada fruits of the spirit
growing pains
random number generator
fact monster
running shoes
entering scientific notation in quest

I have been thinking about how autocomplete function in search engines box, specifically in Google, has the potential for generating poetry. Poems in the style of dadaists and their method of drawing cut-ups of words that have been cut from a newspaper or a book. Instead of drawing them from a hut, we do it from a search box. What is the result of playing with the autocomplete algorithm?

Typecasting is a hybrid media format for publishing content on the web, especially in blogs. To typecast means to post an image of a text that has been written using a typewriter machine. The image could be scanned or photographed and appears embedded in a webpage as the body of text of a blog entry. Hence, the typecast is a combination of website with digital text such as title and time stamp, and a digital image of an analogue typed page. The sort of remediation that occurs in the practice of typecasting is curious and surprising. A growing community of typewriter machine collectors are engaging themselves in this kind of format and an emerging “typosphere” seems to be emerging. The content of the format is diverse. For instance, some of the typecasts just refer to the qualities of the machines, such as this text that appeared at the Manual Entry blog on April 21, 2013 and that talked about an Adler special machine:

Other times the content of the typecast deals with the process of getting a machine. An entry from April 20 2013 at the Tiple Clack blog talks about the process of buying a 1950 Remington Ruper Riter:

There also typecast that besides including the typewritten text, also include pictures from typewriter machine catalogs, newspapers or magazines. This entry from I-dream-low-tech blog from April 2, 2013, talks about the Olivetti sidewalk typewriter, 1955, and includes scanned images from LIFE magazine.

Since the typosphere has become a dynamic networked public, there are also some typecast that talk specifically about the interactions of typecasters, such as an entry from To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth… on april 23, 2013, that discusses the next steps on the Revolution of the typosphere,

I personally find the typecasting format fascinating. I love the hybridization of analogue and digital formats. It is like a monster with beauty. The beauty of the typewriter machines can be seen in the typographic marks that are on those analogue pages turned digital by scanners. And then, of course, they are also amplified so much through the world wide web. I will typecast soon. Yes, I will.

This morning, Maria Jose told us an story that was quite cartoonish and has the potential of becoming an urban legend. She said that yesterday, after having lunch in the house of one of his professors in the Hyde Park neighborhood, she found a raccoon inside the engine of his car. She said that she wanted to see why the engine of her car was making noises and decided to open the engine compartment. When she opened she found a raccoon next to the engine, she looked at the its eyes and both got scared. The raccoon hided on the back of the engine. She tried to scare the animal using a long stick and also spilled water over the engine. However, she couldn’t make it leave the compartment of the car and she had to drive with the raccoon inside.

We were surprised by her story and decided to check out with our own eyes the engine of her car and see if the animal was still there. She opened the compartment but the animal was no longer there.

We found some footprints over the engine but still we are not sure if they are from a cat or from a raccoon. If somebody out there in the internet can help us determine the origin of this marks it would be appreciate it. Meanwhile, we just keep speculating about how that wild animal ended sitting next to an car engine.

The development and popularization of the Global Positioning System (GPS), satellite navigation, and digital mapping, are transforming the way in which we imagine, encounter, and experience the city. Before we used to navigate with the aid of physical landmarks, paper maps and face-to-face advise from other citizens. Nowadays we can navigate with the help of GPS data, real time computations, digital visualizations, and signals broadcasted by space vehicles that orbit planet earth. As a result of using GPS technology we are being able to geographically locate things, places, and people, with exact geodetic coordinates and universal atomic timing, scientific and military precision. We are rarely getting lost and our trajectories in space can easily be visualized in maps and recorded in digital logs. As we become familiar with finding places and directions with the help of phones, computers, and personal navigation devices that speak to us with automated voices and show us interactive maps in their screens, our practices of mobility change. How is our experience of urban mobility changing? What are the implications of this kind of navigation for surveillance and control? What are the consequences for freedom and play?

With GPS data, another layer of networked information has been added to the city increasing its complexity. As Kittler has pointed out, “in the city, networks overlap with other networks.” Networks that transmit energy (electricity, supply, highway, street) intersect with networks that transmit information (telephone, radio, television, Internet, GPS). Urban mobility is turning out into a hybrid experience of spatiality in where we navigate at the same time physical and data spaces. In an effort to explore the poetic possibilities of this kind of experience I have been developing a creative practice in the different cities I have lived and visited. I have imagined this practice as an urban ludic operation in where one draws, with the help of a GPS personal navigation device, labyrinth trajectories while moving through the city. In this entry I present a selection of five drawings performed in different cities around the world (Amsterdam, Bogota, New Orleans, New York City, and Prague).

Each of these drawings is a visualization of the digital logs I have recorded as I traverse and explore a particular city. They are visualizations of the GPS data I have generated while walking, cycling, or riding a form of public transportation. During the drawing performance I transform both the physical space of the city and the virtual space of GPS data (visualized on the screen of the personal navigation device) into a canvas for a labyrinth trajectory. Superimposed, these spaces compose a hybrid canvas where I can draw with my movement as if I had an Ariadne’s thread.

References.

Kittler, F. (1996) `The City Is a Medium’, New Literary History 27(4): 717-29.

Two weeks ago I did a presentation at the Digital Media and Learning Conference (DML 2013 : Democratic Futures) in the format of an Ignite Talk. This format is challenging. You have 5 minutes to tell your story, explain you idea, and ignite the audience. You have also 20 slides that change every 15 seconds, automatically. The format is inspired by the Pecha Kucha presentation style. Although it was first popular among designers and technologists, it is increasingly becoming accepted  in academic and professional conferences. In my talk, From Theory to Practice: Designing and Implementing a Connected Learning Experience, I told the story of DGZiN, a digital design summer camp I helped to create and run in 2012. I enjoyed very much performing this kind of presentation. Although it was a little bit scary, it was also rewarding. Lots of adrenaline happens when you are running against the clock and the changing slides. The pay off is that you get the experience of being on stage and talking to a big audience, and also have the opportunity to inspire other people with compelling words and images. As Mimi Ito said, after doing an Ignite Talk you are leveled up. It feels good to have done that. In this entry I share some tips about how I prepared this kind of presentation.

The most important advice I can give is to practice as much as you can. It is very important that you prepare the talk as if it was a theatrical play. You need to write a script of your speech and then, rehearse it as if you were an actor. Since time is short, you need to identify the main points of your story. In the case of my talk, I decided to focus in the four design principles of connected learning experiences (participation, hands-on learning, constant challenge, and interconnectedness). Once I identified the major points I plot them across 20 different slides. I divided a blank page in 20 different sections, and then fill them with one or two sentences. Once I have created a draft of the script I collected and edited the images I wanted to use.  The task of illustrating your talk could take different approaches. You could select images that are metaphorical, descriptive, or literal. Since I had lots of material from the DGZiN project I decided to have a combination of photographs, illustrations, and graphics. I also decided to use very little text in the slides. In fact, only one slide of my presentation had text. After you have put together the slides in a program such as Keynote or PowerPoint, you need to set up the automation of the slides so they change every 15 seconds. Then, you need to practice running the presentation and delivering the talk. As you rehearse, you will edit the talk and adjust both the speech (usually cutting it down) and the visuals. The final edit of my text, after many rehearsals is bellow.

Connected learning experiences seek to integrate three spheres of learning that are usually separated: peer culture, interests, and academic content. When students link their practices and identities across these spheres, meaningful learning happens.

Connected learning has the potential to transform educational systems and create enrichment opportunities for more youth, especially for young people from marginalized communities.

Today, I want to talk about a connected learning pilot experience I helped to design and implement at Texas City High School, a low-income, majority-minority, low-performing school in Central Texas.

Our intervention was a digital design summer camp we created in collaboration with a school teacher and a group of 16 students.
For this experience, we purposefully integrated new media tools for linking the classroom, community and home.

The major goal was to produce an interactive book about how the pervasiveness of sugary foods and beverages is creating an unhealthy environment.

This theme allowed us to tell a research-driven, community engaging, and interactive story about a social problem that affected the everyday lives of young people and their families.

We implemented 4 major principles in the design of our learning environment: participation, hands on learning, constant challenge, and interconnectedness.

We redesigned the space of a classroom in order to make it more participatory. A computer lab became our design studio, an environment of shared culture and practice where everyone could contribute.

Participants came to the project with a variety of interests and identities. Working in teams, they found out ways to translate their different passions into creative designs and productions such as hip hop songs and music videos.

Students researched the real world in order to validate what they were learning. They investigated their homes and identified added sugars in the foods and beverages that their families consume.

They also researched the environment at their own school, finding out several sources of unhealthy foods and keeping track of the contents of the cafeteria lunches.

Furthermore, through a series of field trips, students had the opportunity to map their neighborhoods and pinpoint the food swamps that exist in their communities.

We constantly challenged the students to create multimodal designs. The challenges connected what students were learning through readings with their real-world explorations and their interests in digital media production.

For example, they designed interactive info-graphics and animations explaining the effects that sugary beverages can cause on the human body and the industrial process of making high fructose corn syrup.

Students were motivated to take up the challenges either because the problem context was itself engaging, or because it connected to an existing interest they had.

Through a meme madness competition they connected their passion for Internet memes with the research on toxic foods. They used online tools, classic meme imagery, and their own photographs for creating a hilarious designs.

Finally, we embraced the principle of interconnectedness in two ways. On the one hand, we had a group of mentors and experts that helped students to find bridges across domains and contexts.

On the other, our studio had an open network infrastructure, that encouraged young designers to share their work with other publics online. Using Tumblr websites they documented their daily activities and discoveries.

The design principles of connected learning are powerful. Participation, hands-on learning, constant challenge, and interconnectedness work well in practice and foster meaningful and engaging learning ecologies.

I invite you to create and experiment with the design of connected learning experiences in order to learn more about their potential and expand enrichment opportunities to more youth.

The video of my Ignite Talk has been uploaded to YouTube. As you will see if you watch it, the delivering of the talk changed a little bit the script. I had to improvise at some parts of the talk because either I forgot the lines or I went to fast or I simply got distracted by looking at the audience. When you are speaking live and on stage, it is very easy to forget a fixed script. Therefore, it is important that you are prepared to improvise and to catch up with the slides in case you lost the timing. The best way to achieve this is to practice and to know the story of your presentation by heart. You can check out the video of From Theory to Practice: Designing and Implementing a Connected Learning Experience bellow:

When musicians march in the streets people is happy. Or at least that is what I like to think. I love parades. Walking, marching, dancing in public space is a sort of happiness. A collective performance that usually happens during carnivals. It could also happens during especial national or patriotic celebrations. Today, I joined the musicians that participated in the Honk! festival, a community marching band event that takes place in Austin every year. Participating of this event reminded me of Mardi Grass and as well of the Carnival of Negros y Blancos. It was a very participatory performance where people jumped to the streets to make music, noise, dance, and laugh.