MacArthur and A Little Cash

    I received a press release in my e-mail on Thursday night, but I ignored it until yesterday.  Here ’tis:

On behalf of the MacArthur Foundation initiative
on digital
media and learning, we invite you, your colleagues, and your students
to join
us in two online forums which will run from Monday, October 23 through
Friday,
Nov. 3rd.

The MacArthur Foundation seeks to create networks
of
interested scholars and practitioners as they move toward a substantial
investment in the area of digital media and learning. Our specific
working
group is identifying consequences of digital media use that might be
unanticipated or unexpected, which we will examine in-depth in a book
of essays
to be completed next year.

We are undertaking two online discussions over the
next two
weeks. The first seeks to explore the
possibilities and limits of using digital media in the K-12 classroom
by
engaging with teachers who face such questions every day, particularly
since
this group is a significant stakeholder in the issue of digital media
and
learning. The conversation is framed
around three questions:

1. “If you were free to use digital media to teach
in any
way you wanted, how would you use it?”
2. “What currently limits your use of digital media in the classroom?”
3. “What has surprised you about you students’ digital media use?"

The second forum is designed to encourage youth to
respond
to ideas being formulated by our researchers. If possible, we’d love to hear from your students.

Responses generated through these forums will
enrich our
research and may be included in our published volume and in other
MacArthur
materials.

To join us, please go to one of our online
discussion forums
at:
For Teachers: http://community.macfound.org/openforum?go=z1082179
For Youth: http://community.macfound.org/openforum?go=z1082180
The first time you visit the site, you’ll need to create
a user name and password (simply click on “Join”); once you register,
you’ll be
directed to one of the forums.

Further background: The
John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently announced plans to
build the emerging
field of digital media and learning, committing $50 million over five
years to
the effort.  The Foundation will fund
research and innovative projects focused on understanding the impact of
the
widespread use of digital media on our youth and how they learn. See www.macfound.org/digital
for more information.

Please
circulate and/or blog this information as you see fit, with
apologies for any cross-postings, and don’t hesitate to contact me
should you have questions.
 

All best,

Tara McPherson

Editor, volume on Innovative Uses & Unexpected Consequences
Associate Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts

    Any time folks ask my students to participate in questions that might come back to directly affect them, I’m interested.  The timing on these fora (or it is forums) is also perfect — they’ll be running concurrently with the K12 Online Conference.  This MacArthur initiative is very, very interesting, although a bit confusing to navigate via their collection of sites and whatnot.  I’m trying to understand the implications, but I don’t.  Yet.  (I did, however, discover this interesting Spotlight blog.  Some pretty smart folks writing there, even if I don’t yet grasp why.)
    Tom makes some good suggestions about aims for educators in this endeavor:

I would propose that it should be our goal to extract two things from this initiative:

1. That future grant cycles include some teacher-initiated projects,
   with the initiative providing development and research support;
2. That those projects release any code written under an open source license.

He even offers to help write some software with folks.  I think I’ll definitely need to pay attention to the MacArthur initiative, even though I don’t yet understand what it all means.  Five years and fifty million seems, well, like there might be plenty of opportunities for good things to happen.