Bloggers
Akili Lee
Akili served for five years as the founding director of the Digital Youth Network. In that role, he helped to define DYN’s unique hybrid model to support youth in developing and applying digital skills in the classroom, out-of-school programming, and in the home.
Currently, as director of digital strategy and development, Akili leads DYN’s work in innovating new digital learning tools and supporting youth-focused organizations to develop models for successfully integrating digital media as a way to increase engagement and effectiveness.
Akili is the creator of the iRemix platform, which allows educators to leverage social networking in a safe solution for educational environments, leveraging social tools and integrating both recommended and custom goal and standard-based curriculum. He is the co-founder and serves as a board director and senior advisor for Remix Learning.
Akili received a B.A. in Computing and Information Systems from Northwestern University and is currently completing a MS in Business Information Technology at Depaul University.
Aleks Krotoski
Aleks is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. Her PhD thesis in Social Psychology (University of Surrey, 2009) examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Researcher-in-Residence for the British Library’s Growing Knowledge exhibition.
Read up on her academic and research activities and interests here. She completed the 4-part, prime time BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution in early 2010, about the social history of the World Wide Web. She blogged for the project here, outlining her manifestos about the social, political, economic and psychological impact of the 20 years of the Web. Aleks writes for The Guardian and Observer newspapers, and hosts Tech Weekly, their technology podcast. Her writing also appears in Nature, BBC Technology, New Statesman, MIT Technology Review and The Telegraph. Check out her words here. Finally, she’s the New Media Sector Champion for UKTI, the government department that promotes British businesses around the world. Find out more here. You can find Aleks all over the Web.
Antero Garcia
Antero is an Assistant Professor in the English department at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. Antero’s research focuses on developing critical literacies and civic identity through the use of mobile media and game play in formal learning environments. Prior to moving to Colorado, Antero was a teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Antero received his Ph.D. in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In 2008 Antero co-developed the Black Cloud Game. A Digital Media and Learning Competition award recipient, the Black Cloud game provoked students to take real time assessment of air quality in their community. Using custom-developed sensors that measure and send data about air quality, students critically analyzed the role pollution played in their daily lives and presented recommendations to their community.
Antero’s numerous publications and conference presentations address technology, educational equity, youth participatory action research, and critical media literacy. Updates about Antero’s work can be found on his blog, The American Crawl.
Barry Joseph
Barry is Associate Director For Digital Learning at the American Museum of Natural History. He has developed innovative programs in the areas of youth-led online dialogues, video games as a form of youth media, the application of social networks for social good, the educational potential of virtual worlds like Second Life, the educational application of mobile phones and alternative assessment models. In his position at the AMNH he works with out-of-school, on site youth programs to explore the intersection of digital media and museum-based learning, with a focus on science and cultural topics. His work can be followed at mooshme.org and on twitter at @mmmooshme.
Before his time at AMNH, he did all sorts of fancy pancy things. He served on the initial steering committee of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative and his writing appears in the Foundation's Ecology of Games volume. (In fact, his desk is just down the hall from the room where the Foundation first launched the initiative in October, 2006). He founded and directed for twelve years Global Kids' Online Leadership Program, when he combined youth development practices with the development of high profile digital media projects that advance 21st Century Skills and New Media Literacies. During his time at Global Kids, Barry also successfully launched Games For Change and the book project Give Me Seltzer.
Ben Williamson
Ben is a research fellow at the University of Exeter. His research is primarily sociological and focused on education and learning in the "digital age."
More specifically, his research examines how youth media are mobilized in formal education institutions and educational policies. He is especially interested in organizations that influence how technology and media are represented and understood within the education system (for example, by think-tanks, creative and cultural producers, and private sector organizations, as well as through research and policy). His research interests also include how ideas and ideals about children and childhood are produced, circulated and contested in curriculum design and classroom pedagogies.
Currently, Ben is leading a working group on innovation in the school curriculum, identifying how 21st century attempts to reimagine and redesign curricula are linked to seemingly global ideals concerning youth and media in relation to culture and economy.
Ben’s PhD focused on literary theory and pragmatist philosophy in the context of American literary production at the millennium. In particular he examined the fictions of David Foster Wallace, Neal Stephenson, Mark Z. Danielewski and Jonathan Franzen, querying their pragmatist concerns with supposedly postmodern literary and cultural problems.
Ben has written and published on a number of different areas of new technology, media and education, including: how technology and media are represented in science fiction written for children; how school curricula and teaching practices have been “remediated” through informal new media practices; how technology and media are represented in education policy texts; how technology and media are involved in the production of new forms of youth marginalization and exclusion; and how computer games have been constructed as classroom devices.
Previously, Ben worked as a researcher at Futurelab in Bristol. He has also worked in youth publishing and taught English literature and literacy at schools in Bristol.
Cathy Davidson
Cathy served from 1998 until 2006 as the first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, where she worked with faculty to help create many programs, including the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the program in Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS). Along with David Theo Goldberg and fifteen scholars from many fields, in 2002 she co-founded Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, HASTAC (“haystack”), a network of innovators dedicated to new forms of learning for the digital age. With Goldberg and HASTAC teams at UCHRI and Duke, she co-directs the $2 million annual HASTAC/John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions.
At Duke University, Cathy holds two distinguished chairs, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. She has published more than twenty books, including Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America; Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (with photographer Bill Bamberger); and The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (with David Theo Goldberg). She blogs regularly on new media, learning, and innovation on the www.hastac.org website as "Cat in the Stack" as well as on dmlcentral.net and PsychologyToday.com. Her most recent book, Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century, is now available in paperback. Her author blog, including the schedule of upcoming appearances on her extended book tour, is at www.nowyouseeit.net. In December 2010, President Obama nominated her to the National Council on the Humanities. You can follow her on Twitter at @catinstack.
Constance M. Yowell, Ph.D.
Connie is the Director of Education at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She oversees a $50 million program on Digital Media and Learning, one of the first philanthropic efforts in the US to systematically explore the effects of digital media on young people and its implications for the future of learning and education.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Dr. Yowell conducted extensive research on the connections among educational research, policy and practice. She was an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, where she published scholarly work on the complex interplay among young people’s emerging identity, their social context and achievement. Her research integrated the fields of adolescent psychological development and organization change to address the problem of high school dropout among immigrant students in the United States.
Equally committed to developing educational and social policies for young people, Dr. Yowell has worked worked closely with teachers and administrators in the Chicago Public Schools to develop and implement literacy curricula for Latino youth. She also served as evaluator and program coordinator for youth development programs in New York City.
Most recently, Dr. Yowell received the Distinguished Fellows Award from the William T. Grant Foundation, an award to support scholars seeking to bridge research and practice, under which she is working with the National Writing Project to develop approaches that integrate web 2.0 technologies into the social practices of teachers.
S. Craig Watkins
Craig studies young people's social and digital media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. Craig is also a Faculty Fellow for the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.
His book, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future (Beacon, 2009), is based on survey research, in-depth interviews, and fieldwork with teens, young twenty-somethings, teachers, parents, and technology advocates. The Young and the Digital explores young people's dynamic engagement with social media, games, mobile phones, and communities like Facebook.
His other books include Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Beacon Press, 2005), and Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Addressing issues that range from the social impacts of young people's participation in digital media culture to the educational implications, Craig has engaged a dynamic mix of communities. Among them: the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Drug Addiction, IBM Center for Social Software, SXSW Interactive, the National School Boards Association, Smart Mixed-Signal Connectivity, the Austin Forum on Science and Technology for Society, Facebook, iCivics, and the MacArthur Foundation,
Craig served on the conference committee for the 2011 “Designing Learning Futures” conference and was chair of the conference’s Youth, Digital Media, and Empowerment track.
He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation's research network on Connected Learning. Among other things his work in the network will include leading a team of researchers in an ethnographic study of diverse teens, participatory practices, and social ecologies. Craig is also developing a project that looks at the connection between mobile technologies, youth, and civic engagement. Finally, he is conducting a series of case studies that look at how educators are using social and digital media to redesign learning in schools.
For updates on these and other projects visit his website, theyoungandthedigital.com.
danah boyd
danah is a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She recently completed her PhD in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley.
danah's dissertation project, Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, analyzes how American youth use networked publics for sociable purposes. She examined the role that social network sites like MySpace and Facebook play in everyday teen interactions and social relations. She was interested in how mediated environments alter the structural conditions in which teens operate, forcing them to manage complex dynamics like interacting before invisible audiences, managing context collisions, and negotiating the convergence of public and private life. This work was funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning. The findings of the broader team are documented in a co-authored book: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media.
At the Berkman Center, danah co-directed the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to work with companies and non-profits to identify potential technical solutions for keeping children safe online. This Task Force was formed by the U.S. Attorneys General and MySpace and is being organized by the Berkman Center. Currently, danah is co-directing the Youth Media and Policy Working Group, funded by MacArthur.
danah received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brown University and a master's degree in sociable media from MIT Media Lab. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google, and Yahoo! She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide.
danah maintains a blog on social media called Apophenia - http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
Doug Belshaw
Doug is Badges and Skills Lead at the Mozilla Foundation. In this role he evangelizes for Open Badges, a new way to recognize skills and achievements, as well as heading-up work around Web Literacies. Prior to Mozilla Doug worked at JISC infoNet and is a former teacher and Senior Leader in UK schools. Doug holds a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from the University of Sheffield, an MA in Modern History from Durham University, and an Ed.D. (also from Durham). His doctoral thesis is online at http://neverendingthesis.com and his personal website is at http://dougbelshaw.comhttp://dougbelshaw.com.
Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan is the newly-appointed (June 22, 2011) director of MIT's Center for Civic Media. He is a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a fellow at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, the use of technology for international development, and the use of new media
technologies by activists.
With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Global Voices showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages, publishing editions in twenty languages. Through Global Voices, Ethan is active in efforts to promote freedom of expression and fight censorship in online spaces.
In 2000, Ethan founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer corps that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Previously Ethan helped found Tripod.com, one of the web's first "personal publishing" sites. He blogs at http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog and lives in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, USA with his wife, son and a small, fluffy cat.
Howard Rheingold
Howard's 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book has become one of the top 200 of the 8 million blogs tracked by Technorati, and won Utne Magazine's Independent Press Award in 2003.
In 2005, Howard taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that Howard undertook in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of his ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action.
He teaches Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism and VirtualCommunity/Social Media at Stanford University. He is a non-resident Fellow of the Annenberg School for Communication, and a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.
In 2008, Howard was a winner in the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and he used his award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. He has a very popular videoblog that covers a range of subjects.
Most recently, Howard has been concentrating on learning and teaching 21st Century literacies. Howard can be found all over the Web: howard@rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold http://www.rheingold.com http://www.smartmobs.com http://www.rheingold.com/university <---Rheingold U! what it is ---> is --->up to us
John Jones
John is an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing and Editing at West Virginia University where he teaches writing and digital literacy. He was formerly a Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas, and from 2007-2009 he was an Assistant Director of the "Digital Writing and Research Lab" at the University of Texas at Austin. While at the DWRL, John co-founded and served as Managing Editor for Viz, a website and blog investigating the connections between rhetoric and visual culture.
Liz Losh
Liz is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes and is the Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College in U.C. San Diego.
She writes about institutions as digital content-creators, the discourses of the "virtual state," the media literacy of policy makers and authority figures, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices. She believes the Internet and social media are redefining how people write, and how they present themselves. She challenges students to become active, critical users of social media.
She has published articles about video games for the military and emergency first-responders, government websites and YouTube channels, state-funded distance learning efforts, national digital libraries, political blogging, and congressional hearings on the Internet.
Her new book project is tentatively titled Early Adopters: The Instructional Technology Movement and the Myth of the Digital Generation.
Liz also blogs at the award-winning Virtualpolitik, a blog about digital rhetoric, government and subversion
Lyndsay Grant
Lyndsay is a researcher at the University of Bristol where she is working on a project to understand the ways teachers construct narratives about technology in the classroom. She is also currently working with a network of local teachers as they develop classroom practices using digital technologies.
Lyndsay’s research interests also include social justice in education, digital literacies, connections between learning in and out of school and participatory approaches to learning and design. Her research is informed by a commitment to social justice that aims to understand and value the voices and experiences of all learners.
Previously, Lyndsay worked as a Senior Researcher at Futurelab, a UK research and development charity exploring the role of digital technologies and media in education and learning. She has also worked as a publisher, commissioning digital and print literacy resources for Pearson Education.
monika hardy
monika gets to work with a district InnovationLab in Loveland, Colorado, where students have crafted, and just completed year one, of a four-year plan of disruption to redefine school. Based on findings that learning at its best is voluntary, per passion/choice, and self-directed, they are working towards "community as school." They are experimenting with personalization both within and outside the system, a connected adjacency, so that all benefit.
Embracing the chaos of differentiating to infinity, they are networking mentor(s) to create 1-1 relationships. A declaration of interdependence, found in researching homelessness. Focus and commonality, if need be, is on a process of learning, penned detox. In reiterating this process, no matter the topic, it becomes second nature. The more detox needed, the more vital a culture of trust. Within the natural state of imagination and play, learners are free to follow their fancy and share back in useful spaces. ie: youtube, wikipedia, community. Minds they are learning with and from. Lab updates. Facebook: tsd innovation lab. Youtube: 51295monk. Random findings and journaling.
Nishant Shah
Nishant is the founder and Director of Research for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. His doctoral work at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, examines the production of a Technosocial Subject at the intersections of law, Internet technologies and everyday cultural practices in India. As an Asia Scholarship Fellow (2008-2009), he also initiated a study that looks at what goes into the making of an IT City in India and China. He is the series editor for a three year collaborative project on “Histories of the Internet(s) in India” that maps nine alternative histories that promote new ways of understanding the technological revolution in the country.
Nishant’s current research engagement since 2009 has been with the possibilities of social transformation and political participation in young peoples’ use of digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts of the Global South. Working with a community of 150 young people and other stakeholders in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, he has co-edited a 4-volume book titled Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and an information kit titled D:Coding Digital Natives. Nishant writes regularly for The Indian Express and GQ India to give a public voice to the academic research. He is currently also engaged in a project that seeks to articulate the intersections of digital technologies and social justice within the higher education space in India.
Nishant designs Internet and Society courses for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Communication, Media, Development, Art, Cultural Studies, and STS, in and outside of India. He is a founding member of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and has also worked as a cyberculture consultant for various spaces like Yahoo!, Comat Technologies, Khoj Studios, and Nokia.
Raquel Recuero
Raquel is an associate professor at the Departments of Applied Linguistics and Social Communication in Universidade Católica de Pelotas (UCPel) in Brazil. Her research focuses on Internet social networks, virtual communities and computer mediated-communication in general, trying to understand the impact of the Internet in sociability and language in South America and Brazil.
She received her PhD in Communication and Information from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) for her dissertation on "Social Networks in Fotolog.com" in 2006, and has recently published her first book in Portuguese, Internet Social Networks (Redes Sociais na Internet: Sulina, 2009). She also has worked as a research consultant for several companies, including Google and UOL.
Raquel also maintains a blog on social media (in Portuguese) since 2001.