Education

#JITP5: Media and Methods for Opening Education

The “Media and Methods for Opening Education” special issue that I edited with the wonderful Suzanne Tamang has been published in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy!

Intro-Issue5-1The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy
Issue 5: Media and Methods for Opening Education
Editors: Gregory T. Donovan and Suzanne Tamang

Full issue: http://cuny.is/jitp5

Introduction: Media and Methods for Opening Education

Suzanne Tamang and Gregory T. Donovan

Special Feature: Questions of Authority: Academic Publishing, Anti-Art and Ownership

Elizabeth Bishop and Britney Harsh

Building a Place for Community: City Tech’s OpenLab

Charlie Edwards, Jody Rosen, Maura A. Smale, and Jenna Spevack

The InQ13 POOC: A Participatory Experiment in Open, Collaborative Teaching and Learning

Jessie Daniels and Matthew K. Gold, with members of the InQ13 Collective: Stephanie M. Anderson, John Boy, Caitlin Cahill, Jen Jack Gieseking, Karen Gregory, Kristen Hackett, Fiona Lee, Wendy Luttrell, Amanda Matles, Edwin Mayorga, Wilneida Negrón, Shawn(ta) Smith, Polly Thistlethwaite, Zora Tucker

Toward Digital, Critical, Participatory Action Research: Lessons from the #BarrioEdProj
Edwin Mayorga

Empowering Local Women through Technology Training:
A Sustainable Income-Generating Model in Hyderabad, India
Ioana Literat

Notes from Queer(ing) New York: Refusing Binaries in Online Pedagogy

Jen Jack Gieseking

Call for JITP5: Media and Methods for Opening Education

The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy
Special Issue: Media and Methods for Opening Education
Submissions Due: October 20, 2013

Editors: Gregory T. Donovan and Suzanne Tamang

JITP welcomes work that explores critical and creative uses of interactive technology in teaching, learning, and research. For Issue 5, we are seeking submissions under the theme of “Media and Methods for Opening Education.” This theme invites submissions that critically and creatively consider both media and methods that open up traditional educational settings to more democratic and diverse modes of learning and knowledge production.

We are particularly interested in papers that express intriguing and promising ideas, demonstrate new media forms or educational software tools, or focus on research methods for opening education. Possible submission topics include, but are not limited to:

  • The development, implementation, and/or evaluation of pedagogical practices that draw on Open Education Resources (OER).
  • Explorations of Open Access, Open Source, and/or Open Data initiatives that address matters of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.
  • Critical considerations of corporate or proprietary media in pedagogical practices.
  • Feminist media and methodologies for challenging patriarchal structures in education.
  • Analyses of both the educational media and practices of civic movements such as the Free University, Occupy Data, or CryptoParty.
  • Hackathon methodologies: tools and practices.
  • Critical and participatory approaches to facilitating MOOCs.
  • Engaging local communities in public research and/or education through civic media.
  • Interactive platforms and practices that queer traditional educational boundaries between teacher/student as well as inside/outside the classroom, unfixing these binaries so as to reconsider our norms and what they leave unsaid.
  • Critical appropriations of queer, feminist and/or radical praxis to address ITP matters such as universal access.
  • Visualizing research products for diverse publics.
  • Best practices for collaborating in heterogeneous spaces.
  • Anti-disciplinary approaches to problem solving and the public domain.

In addition to traditional long-form articles with a suggested limit of 8,000 words, we invite submissions of audio or visual presentations, interviews, dialogues, or conversations, creative works, manifestos, jeremiads or other scholarly materials. All submissions are subject to an open review process. Submissions received that do not fall under the specific theme of Issue 5, but do fall under the broader theme of JITP, will be considered for publication in a future issue.

Important Dates

The submission deadline for the Spring 2014 issue is October 20, 2013. When submitting using our Open Journal Systems software, under “Journal Section,” please select the section titled “Issue 5: Special Issue.” Submission instructions are here.

SMW Panel: From Citizen Journalism to Hacktivism

Simon Lindgren (Umeâ University) has posted audio from the Social Media Week panel I participated in with Shawn Carrie (OWS/OccupySandy/OccupyData), David Huerta (CryptoParty NYC), Gregory Rosenthal (Free University NYC), and Laura Scherling (Green Space NYC). The panel — “From Citizen Journalism to Hacktivism: How to successfully use social media in grassroots campaigns” — was moderate by Simon and focused on experience-sharing, networking, and identifying pitfalls as well as best practices for harnessing the power of social media in grassroots endeavors.

I spoke on my experiences establishing and co-coordinating the OpenCUNY Academic Medium at the CUNY Graduate Center:

 

Audio of my co-panelists discussing their impressive work here: Shawn Carrie on OWS/OccupySandy/OccupyData, David Huerta on CryptoParty NYC, Gregory Rosenthal on Free University NYC, and Laura Scherling on Green Space NYC.

Doing Participatory Research and Pedagogy in Proprietary Educational Environments

This Saturday (10/13/12) I’ll be presenting with Kiersten Greene at Northwestern University’s InfoSocial Conference. Info and abstract below:

Title: Doing Participatory Research and Pedagogy in Proprietary Educational Environments
Authors: Gregory T. Donovan & Kiersten Greene

Panel: Participation, Socialization, and Memory Online
Discussant: Prof. Kevin Barnhurst, University of Illinois at Chicago

Time: 10/13/12, 3:15PM – 4:45PM
Place: Annie May Swift Hall, room 102

Abstract: The ubiquity of proprietary technologies embedded within informational modes of pedagogy and research unsettles industrial understandings of privacy and property within educational environments. As educational institutions commit a growing portion of shrinking budgets to proprietary software and outsourced ICT services, their informational infrastructure intertwines with corporations from Google and Blackboard to IBM and Apple. We offer a multi-disciplinary analysis of this proprietary infrastructure, drawing on our respective dissertation research in the fields of Urban Education and Environmental Psychology, to articulate issues of privacy and property experienced by young people and teachers in these educational environments. We begin by summarizing the findings from two independent cases: The MyDigitalFootprint.ORG Project and The NYC Teacher Blog Project. Our first case, MyDigitalFootprint.ORG, is a participatory action design research (PADR) project interested in the concerns of young people developing in proprietary information ecologies. This project began by interviewing young people ages 14-19 in New York City to identify shared online privacy, property, and security concerns. A collective of youth co-researchers was then assembled to further research and take action in response to these concerns through the development of a youth-based open source social network. Through this PADR project, young people participated in investigating and reconfiguring how information is experienced in their everyday environment. Our second case, The NYC Teacher Blog Project, aggregates, stores, and anonymizes the blog posting of New York City teachers for qualitative analysis in order to examine the tension between the realities of everyday pedagogical practices and the tacit privatization of educational policy. Whether at the federal, state, or local levels, teachers’ opinions, local knowledge, and expertise count for naught in the policymaking process as K-12 public school teachers are provided little if any voice in the construction of education policy. The traditional isolation of the teaching environment has provided teachers with little opportunity to connect, reflect, or engage with this process. Yet, as our everyday information infrastructure grows so to do opportunities for teacher expression and research. Blogs have proven an enduring aspect of this infrastructure by providing a space where teachers can reflect, connect, and share local knowledge. We conclude our review of these two cases by discussing strategies for reworking educational boundaries, relationships, and flows towards the privacy, property, and participation concerns of young people and teachers. With the MyDigitalFootprint.ORG Project, we look specifically at the open source software and PADR methods employed to engage young people as producers of social media and participants in social research, rather than as social media consumers and social research subjects. With the NYC Teacher Blog Project, we look specifically at how its partnership with the OpenCUNY Academic Medium, a student-based open source medium at the CUNY Graduate Center, afforded both methodological and epistemological breakthroughs around teacher privacy and property in educational environments.

Growing Up Policed Vimeo Channel

The official Growing Up Policed Vimeo Channel is now live! This channel includes video of presentations, panels, and discussions from the Growing Up Policed: Surveilling Racialized Sexualities Mini-Conference that took place at both the University of Oregon and the CUNY Graduate Center on 12/01/2011.

Incited by the case of the felony conviction of a young woman of color for sexting with her girlfriend in Oregon and participatory research on criminalization among 1,100 young people in New York City, the mini-conference focused on the nexus of youth, technology, law enforcement, and constructions of racialized sexuality. Using a broad definition of “policing” that extends across jails, schools, subways, and cyberspace, the conference examined the tools that parents, professionals, and others use to watch over, intervene with, and attempt to “correct” youth [more info: opencuny.org/growinguppoliced].

Conference Opening by Michelle Fine:

Presentations, Panels, and Discussions:

Cybersecurity Cowrites Our Future

Cybersecurity Cowrites Our Future

OpenCUNY.org Roundtable on Fostering Student-Based Media @ CUNY IT Conference

12/2/11>>9:30AM-10:45AM>>John Jay College CUNY>>MORE INFO
OpenCUNY.org Roundtable on Fostering Student-Based Media @ CUNY IT Conference

From Turkle to Sesame: What’s a Computer?

From Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self,” p21:

… the computer is a metaphysical machine. Children too are provoked. The computer creates new occasions for thinking through the fundamental questions to which childhood must give a response, among them the question “what is life?”

From Sesame Street (h/t jgieseking, Aga Skorupka):

Senator Wyden on the Patriot Act, FISA, and the Knowledge Gap

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) of the Senate Intelligence Committee recently discussed the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments on Countdown with Kieth Olbermann.

Wyden made two notable observations:

  1. On the Patriot Act: “There is growing gap between what Americans believe the laws actually is, and the secret interpretation.”
  2. On the FISA Amendments: “This law was intended to deal with foreigners … and I’m concerned about the possibility … of innocent Americans having their communications swept up under it.”
What people think these laws do, what these laws technically do, and how these laws are being interpreted and enacted behind closed doors, are three entirely different things.
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