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The New School

10:00 am - 12:30 pm
Theresa Lang Student and Community Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor

Hacking as Learning: A Slice of Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival [P; DIYU; W]
Last November's first-ever Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona was an interesting experiment: gather 400 educators, technologists,   "edupreneurs"/"edupunks" and innovators of all stripes to reinvent the future of learning in a  carnivalesque atmosphere that mixed thought  leadership with hands-on making, doing and hacking. Participants from over 40 countries and 30  different organizations gathered in a series of loosely-joined thematic groups or "tents" that  allowed them to get their hands dirty on  everything from designing new open educational  resources, to creating educational "hyper-videos," to designing educational badges, to building their own robot. The results were, in one participant's words, "collabtastic." This session will open with a brief report-back on what  worked, and then immediately move to a mini  version of the Drumbeat Festival itself, with participants breaking into small groups to do some hands-on making, learning and hacking of  their own.
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.

10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Orozco Room, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th St., 7th floor

Beyond Participation: Designing Local Engagement for a Mobile Culture [DF; L] 
Eric Gordon (Emerson College)
There is an important distinction between participation and engagement.  Participation represents action within a specific framework (i.e. clicking, texting, voting, reading); and engagement represents action within a specific framework that results in sustained attention to the subject of that framework. This distinction is even more important within a mobile culture, where people have near ubiquitous access to information and people and are perpetually poised to “participate.” The design of user engagement, therefore, entails the consideration of how user participation corresponds with user attention beyond the moment of participation. Occupied spaces are both networked and local.  This talk explores how technologies can be employed within a “net local” context to produce sustained attentiveness to the social, political and cultural specificity of a locality. This talk will seek to make the distinction between engagement and participation within a mobile culture and suggest some of the design implications.

11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Hirshon Suite, 66 West 12th St., 2nd floor

NYC Students Imagine the 2050 Classroom 
[DF; PD]
Philip Courtney (Urban Arts Partnership)
Katie Koch (Project: Interaction/pixelkated)
Stephanie Pereira (Eyebeam)
Lauren Brandt Schloss (The Queens Museum of Art)
Hsing Wei (Pixelated Learning)
5th grade students from PS 144 in Queens
12th grade students from New Design High School in Manhattan
What will the classroom look like in 2050? How will the traditional roles of  teacher and student be reimagined? How will the open web and digital devices impact the way we learn and share information? Through a series of fall workshops, our group will collaborate with a design agency to ask students K-12 these questions and more. We will invite students to  imagine community learning environments in 2050, thinking about the space, the people, and especially the tools. During and following workshops, a team of designers will work with us to create a design document that will visualize the tools and spaces we create, and embed them in a narrative about learning in 2050. A select group of students will be invited to  present their work at a panel during Mobility Shifts. 
12:30-2:30 pm
Orozco Room, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th St., 7th floor

Multimodal Survey Research Project [DF; L]
David Carroll (Parsons The New School for Design)
Michael Schober (The New School for Social Research)
This research project at The New School and University of Michigan endeavors to design a valid methodology and technology platform to deliver a multi-modal public opinion survey across the following mobile device modes: human-to-human over SMS, computer-to-human over SMS, computer-to-human over voice recognition, and human-to-human as a control. The study will be able to field test the very first trial of a public opinion survey using mobile phone contexts and affordances. Existing research finds that respondents can be more honest when they interact with computers, especially in replying to sensitive and potentially embarrassing questions. This project will expand upon these findings by correlating across survey modes. The implications of this study are far-reaching in terms of how government and non-governmental polling agencies shall measure the public, the electorate and otherwise. It will be the first government funded research project of its kind.

1:30-3:30 pm
Theresa Lang Student and Community Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor

Rigorously Unprofessional [DIYU; PD]
Liz Barry (The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science)
Matthew Lippincott (The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science)
Phil Silva (The New School)
Moderator: Ed Keller (Parsons The New School for Design)
Theory and practice. Teaching and learning. Expert and layperson. Civic science projects defy contradictions like these to come up with new ways of making sense of the world. Along the way, everyone involved gets a chance to experience the pleasure and pride of self-guided, open-ended learning. Civic science projects create opportunities for experts and laypeople to truly work together. Democracy suffers when governments rely exclusively on “experts” to help them make decisions. Civic science projects make democracy possible when complicated technical issues threaten the quality of public conversations about policy. Civic science projects are not merely “participatory.” They’re more than just a “way for folks to get involved.” They’re rigorous – and you might even say they’re rigorously unprofessional. This panel discussion between practitioners of civic science explores questions that, on the technical side, center on data authentication and legal chain of custody issues in an age where measuring with precision and recording with accuracy in shareable formats is no longer a barrier for good science or admissible evidence.

1:30-3:30 pm
Hirshon Suite, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor 

New Pedagogical Approaches for Learning with Mobile Platforms [DF; PD] 
Alisa Berger (NYC iSchool)
Francesca Fay (NYC iSchool)
Christina Jenkins (NYC iSchool)
With Michael Wesch’s work as a precedent for “digital ethnography” in an undergraduate setting, The Sixteen Project aims to investigate similar themes with high school students. A project of the NYC iSchool, The Sixteen Project is a high school course that investigates culture and coming of age from an anthropological perspective. Students collect artifacts, video footage and writings that document the story of how “16” is lived around the world. Their final project, a documentary film, is screened at the conclusion of every nine-week class. The Sixteen Project proposes new questions about the high school experience. How might learning be more intimately connected to both personal and global questions? How do students engage with “other” communities and at the same time begin to see themselves as “other”? How significant is the physical classroom environment when these investigations occur across the globe via Skype, Flickr, Google Voice and Vimeo? This panel conversation will engage the participants in this course in a conversation about these questions.

1:30-3:30 pm
80 Fifth Avenue, room 802

Playful & Digital Literacy? How Digital Media Shapes Our Biographies and Fosters Transformative Learning [DF; W]
Konstantin Mitgutsch (MIT/University of Vienna)
This workshop will outline how learning in digital playful environments shapes the learning biographies of our youth, and will help designers and educators deepen their understanding of meaningful media usage. Participants will explore transformative learning experiences by analyzing their own personal media biographies. Based on this reflective investigation, we will introduce relevant scientific research on child development, media literacy and learning challenges in games by exploring related concepts of theorists such Piaget, Erikson, Bateson, Kohlberg, Garnitschnig/Mitgutsch, Buckingham, etc. The qualitative study “Meaningful Learning Experiences in Video Games” conducted in 2010 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be used to provide new insights into how games foster transformative learning, and following this will be a discussion of central patterns of technology-based meaningful learning. A key topic of this discussion will be the challenges to “playful literacies”. Participants will explore how the context, the biography, the body of experience, the community of practice and the interpretation of the content collide in young players’ lives.
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.

3:00-5:30 pm
Orozco Room, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th St., 7th floor

Digital Tools for Collaborative Teaching, Learning and Research: A Small School’s Perspective [G; W
Geoff Gilbert (The American University of Paris, France)
Mark Hayward (The American University of Paris, France)
Claudia Roda (The American University of Paris, France)
This workshop will examine how the integration of digital and mobile media into teaching and research has been experienced at smaller colleges and universities globally. While the horizontal and distributed nature of digital networks is often seen as making questions of distance and scale irrelevant, this workshop aims to provide a framework for discussion which recognizes that, while these technologies have changed our experience of the world around us, the institutions in which we work continue to condition the way in which we do or don’t make use of the tools available.
A smaller number of staff as well as limited financial resources for the purchasing and maintenance of information infrastructure on campus produces a very particular set of constraints when it comes to the adoption of digital media.  At the same time, smaller institutions are often defined by pedagogical practice that gives space for more personalized relationships between students and faculty as well as providing the opportunity of greater collaboration across departments and disciplines.  What, then, possibilities are there for digital scholarship and education at smaller institutions?
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.

4:00-6:00 pm
Theresa Lang Student and Community Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor 
Using Mobile Technology to Develop STEM Skills and Civic Engagement (Global Kids) [G; W]
Michael Foster (The American Museum of Natural History)
Barry Joseph (Global Kids, Inc.)
Anthony Negron (New York Hall of Science)
Daria Ng (Global Kids, Inc.)
In this workshop, Global Kids will provide an overview of several mobile digital tools and their educational affordances and potential for civic engagement. Innovative programs involving mobile technology will be highlighted including Global Kids and the NYPL’s “NYC Haunts”, where students created a location-based game on iPads to learn about local history and explore larger social issues. Another program involves the American Museum of Natural History’s “Urban Biodiversity Network”, where students used Android smart phones that were connected to a badging system to investigate the impact of intense human developments on urban ecology. In a third program involving the New York Hall of Science, called “C3 Pollution Patrol”, students used handheld smart phones to research and report on local environmental conditions in their neighborhood, as a means of advocating for change. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to build a hands-on location-based mobile game in small groups, using the platform SVNGR and incorporating challenges, treks, and rewards. Note: Workshop demonstration will work best if participants bring their own iPhones, iPod Touch, Android phones, or Ipads, with the free SVNGR application registered and pre-downloaded from www.scvngr.com.
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.

4:00-6:00 pm
Hirshon Suite, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor

Rights, Access, Power: Mobile and Wireless Access for the People and Activism [DF; PD]
Seeta Peña Gangadharan (Open Technology Initiative)
Carlos Pareja (People’s Production House)
Chance Williams (Free Press)
Betty Yu (Center for Media Justice)
Of the 37 percent of U.S. adults that don’t have high speed Internet access, the vast majority are people of color, rural, poor, migrants and refugees, and people who speak languages other than English. While some take this piece of technology for granted- for prisoners, low-income communities, immigrants, youth and communities of color—phone calls and mobile access are a privilege, not a right. In particular, Black and Latino communities are more likely than the general population to access the Web via cellular phones and need strong wireless protections. A new "digital divide" has emerged with Latinos and African Americans being the hardest hit by the recent FCC vote on net neutrality. During our interactive panel you can learn about the recent FCC vote and the laws and policies that most affect your community-and how they relate to jobs, housing, healthcare, immigration and education-as well as what tools you will need and what campaigns you can join to create social change.

4:00-6:00 pm
80 Fifth Avenue, room 802

Using Mobile Technology to Strengthen Civic Engagement Between Women’s Networks in Sierra Leone [G; W]
Elana Langer (UNICEF/The New School for Public Engagement)
This workshop is designed to support an ongoing learning exchange run by UNICEF Sierra Leone between government, NGOs, traditional leaders and women’s groups. The specific topic to be address in this workshop, the use of media and mobile technology as a way to support women’s networks and assist them in efforts to facilitate change, is a national focus and priority for UNICEF. The Wi Pikin (our children) network, is designed to empower women and give them a sense of agency and control over their lives and the lives of their children. By developing stronger channels of communication, these women can ensure more effective change will be possible.
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.

4:30-6:00 pm
Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th St., 5th floor

The Beginnings of The Free University Movement [G; ST
Kasper Opstrup Frederiksen (London Consortium, UK)
History of DIY Learning - This short talk will look at the beginnings of the Free University movement in the 1960s with two lesser-known art-activist examples, none of which were ever fully realized. This includes Alexander Trocchi's sigma project and William Burroughs's Academy 23. Their methods, goals, and obstacles for the realization of the projects will be presented, and their tactics and strategies will be compared to more recent initiatives like Copenhagen Free University, University of Openness and London Free School. This will sketch a double trajectory of alternative education and imaginary futures based on technological experimentation and innovation from the spectacle of the space age to the spectacle of cybernetic communism. Both initiatives were heavily preoccupied with knowledge sharing, pooling resources and new technologies and can be seen as predecessors to, on the one hand, tactical media interventions and, on the other, the internet and blogging activities. The talk will focus on how their ideas about changing the world and transforming the self through new technologies established a new kind of cultural practice and evaluate the relevance of this practice in struggles around education and free universities today.

Eric Kluitenberg (De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
ElectroSmog: The Quest for a “Sustainable Immobility” and the Tele-Presence Conundrum - The ElectroSmog festival was both a practical and theoretical exploration of the idea of  'sustainable immobility' - a response to global mobility out of control and the desire to use networked connections to counterbalance the exponential growth of global mobility. The aim was to investigate the possibility of staging a new type of international public gathering without the usual travel and mobility patterns attached. While the festival spurred a series of highly engaged debates, experimental projects, and remarkably few technical failures, it collided dramatically with audience dynamics. The outcomes raised serious questions about the importance of embodied encounter to galvanize public experience and exchange, and the limits of the tele-presence paradigm. Continued research focuses on a deeper understanding of the contradictions of emerging regimes of im/mobility and networked presence, which seem to hold important implications for on-line learning and distance education. The presentation aims to stimulate further discussion on the problems of networked presence in an educational context.

Respondent: Jeremy Varon (Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts)


4:30-6:30 pm
Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th St., rm. 510 

Using Mobile Technology to Promote Historical Understanding [G; W]
Anthony Cocciolo (Pratt Institute)
Debbie Rabina (Pratt Institute)
This workshop details an international collaboration between the Goethe Institute and faculty at Pratt Institute on the GeoStoryteller project. GeoStoryteller is a mobile application that brings library and archival collections to the streets to enhance student learning and promote historical understanding. The first application of this platform will be German Traces NYC, a learning experience that focuses on German cultural heritage in New York City.  Historical photographs and multimedia narratives detailing the history of German immigrants in New York City (1840-1945) are made available to high school students—particularly German language students—on the places where the events occurred. The aim of this project is to use the city as classroom and connect everyday places with historical and cultural contexts. The research related to this project looks to uncover if place-based learning can increase student engagement in historical topics. Note: Participants should bring smartphones or iPads and download the Layer augmented reality browser (http://www.layar.com/). Participants will be traveling to Astor Place and back to New School location within scheduled timeframe.
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.
5:30-7:00 pm
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center Orientation Room, 2 West 13th St., ground floor

Provoke: Fostering User Involvement in Social Media [DF; L]
Shlomo Dubnov (Univeristy of California, San Diego)
Provoke is a portal that combines semantic media and social networking to facilitate group discussions on a specific topic. Originally conceived as an artistic project (operaofmeaning.com), it was used in a service-learning course on social media production for a college TV station (live.ucsdmsmashtv.com), and is currently being adopted for educational and learning applications. The technology behind the system uses shared databases on the web for public recommendation and brainstorming system. The broad environment which we are addressing is one in which the participants freely interact with one another via text messaging, as in an online social network, or chat room environment. In terms of novel cultural practices mediated by technology, the system allows training of students in peer review and critical analysis, recreating exegesis traditions that put the audience in the role of “significance givers”, a practice that had shaped cultural and religious thought in the transition from oral to written collective texts in early scholastic practices.

6:30-8:30 pm
Theresa Lang Student and Community Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th St., 2nd floor

Out of My Hands: Models of Co-Creative Making in the Classroom and Beyond [DF; W]
Zvezdana Stojmirovic (MICA)
Aggie Toppins (MICA)
This workshop will explore collaborative learning opportunities emerging from the current shift toward bottom-up creation. Our workshop will begin by isolating qualities of professional co-creative projects that cross borders and continents, spanning both physical and digital arenas. The workshop will analyze the common structures of such projects—including modularity, inclusivity, accessibility, and criticality—considering how similar models can be used to establish co-creative learning opportunities in the educational arena. In the workshop participants will then co-create letterforms assembly-line style. After the initial letter start, each person will send his/her letter on a circuit of the room, opening it up to additional development. The resulting letterforms will reflect the authenticity of the crowd. Using mobile phones, letters will be photographed and posted to Flickr at each stage of creation. Immediately following the session, workshop leaders will compose an animated piece out of all the photos taken and post it on Vimeo for discussion.
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.

6:30-8:00 pm
Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th St., 5th Fl
Free Culture and the Launch of a Student Chapter at The New School [P; DF; PD]
Jessica Irish (Parsons The New School for Design)
Adi Kamdar (Yale University)
Jane Pirone (Parsons The New School for Design)
Michael Schober (The New School for Social Research)
Moderator: John Drew (Parsons The New School for Design)
Why does an allegedly progressive university subject its student body to expensive and outdated corporate technology such as Blackboard, particularly when select students and faculty members have demonstrated a capacity to build software that is already being used as a Blackboard work-around? Was it a good idea to hand over management rights of our inboxes to Google? And what exactly does the SafeConnect software do with data on our computers after the university forces us to download it to our laptops? This panel positions students alongside key New School stakeholders in a debate around these questions and more, and serves as a call to the student body to organize around these conversations and more formally challenge the institutional power structure using the free culture movement and open source education as a battle cry.

6:30-8:30 pm
80 Fifth Avenue, room 802 

Oyster City: AR and Place-Based Learning [DF; W]
Meredith Drum (Bronx Museum of Arts/ISSUE Project Room/HASTAC)
Rachel Stevens (Artist based in New York)
Phoenix Toews (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Oyster City, a game and walking tour enabled by an application for iPhone/iPad developed by Phoenix Toewes, makes visible, via an augmented reality browser, social, political and ecological histories of oysters in NYC. Presenters will give a brief presentation of Oyster City, and then talk specifically about investigative research into local spaces, making hidden histories visible and some basic technical and conceptual possibilities for creating media for an augmented reality, GPS enabled platform, including ways of structuring an active experience for the user/player/reader/actor. This would be in the service of creating a meaningful place-based venue for learning. Participants will be put together into small groups and be asked to make some media for augmented reality on the spot – still images, audio and text – that will tell stories of the immediate site of The New School. The media will then be integrated into the augmented reality platform.
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.

7:00-9:30 pm
Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th St., room 510

Global DIY U Case Studies [P; DIYU; L]
Juan Lopez Garduno (conecta2.com.mx, Mexico)
Back to Basics: Taking Education Beyond the Classroom to Restore the Social Fabric of Communities - At a time when Mexico faces community disintegration due mainly to the widespread influence of drug cartels, keeping children focused on the short and long-term purposes of education has become a major challenge for everyone involved. Any vision of the future becomes meaningless in a context of brutal executions no further than two degrees away, the rise of domestic violence, kidnappings and the never ending maze of small acts of corruption carried out at all levels of society just to make ends meet. From this critical perspective, an online resource will be presented that was conceptually designed in order to foster community values and help rebuild social capital.  -This online reading platform, defined as a digital education ecosystem, is meant to transform core academic social science content into a thought-provoking lifelong learning experience. In light of so many political agendas and corporate interests promoting the illusion of technology as the ultimate remedy for Mexico´s education woes, we will examine the need to slow things down so that we can avoid the perfect storm brewing due to global distraction and local destruction.

Kiko Mayorga (Escuelab.org, Peru)
Between Labs and Realities: Some Things to Consider While Designing For Andean Contexts - In this talk, Mayorga will review some anecdotes collected during the first three years of a school/lab called Escuelab.org in Lima, Perú.  The context of the diverse and complex culture close to the Andes brings forth an impressive set of obstacles and opportunities for the techno-social interaction design related to local needs.  Mayorga’s experiences reveal strengths between humanity, market and nature, and the path that design and learning through experimentation have to go through to significantly land on the ground.
Janek Sowa (Free/Slow University Warsaw)
Free/Slow University Warsaw - a DIY Learning and (Co-)Research Institution of the Common - Free/Slow University Warsaw (in Polish Wolny Uniwersytet Warszawy; "wolny" means both "free" and "slow") was established in 2008 by a group of theorists, artists, curators and activists to counterbalance neoliberal transformation of the public sphere in the domains of cultural expression and production of knowledge. It draws its inspiration from various traditions ranging from Joseph Beuys to clandestine universities run by Polish political activists in the 19th and 20th century to the ideas of Jacques Rancière and Ivan Illich. FSUW aims to combine autonomous learning/teaching with a construction of political subjectivity, referring strongly to the (post-)operaist practists of co-research (conricerca). Janek Sowa, a sociologist and activist associated with FSUW from its very beginnings, is going to present its past and current activities as well as its idealogical background. The case of FSUW will provide a context for a more general discussion of knowledge production and dissemination in the times of cognitive capitalism. 

8:30-10:00 pm
Theresa Lang Student and Community Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th St. 2nd floor

An Autonomous Alternative Accreditation Agency [DIYU; W]
Thomas Gokey (Syracuse University)
Respondent: Ed Keller (Parsons The New School for Design)
In an attempt to organize the creation of an above-board, rigorous and universally recognized alternative accreditation agency, it is important to note that at present most universities act as corporate mediators, which exploit both students (in the form of outrageously high tuition) and teachers (in the form of outrageously low wages for adjuncts and TA’s, etc.). The only value the university adds to this relationship is accreditation. What new liberal schools have shown us is that the corporate university is nothing but a vampiric bank exchanging one form of credit (tuition) for another (academic) and siphoning off the majority of the value for its own bureaucracy in the process. We aim to break the monopoly on credit, effectively weaponizing schools like the Art School in the Art School or the Public School to threaten the very existence of corporate universities. Accreditation is the corporate universities’ weakness, if we can take that away from them then we gain control of our own schools and our own educations. 
Workshops require additional registration at no extra cost.
Please visit HERE to register.
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