SCS 2012 Mimi Ito: "Helping to Fix Educational Opportunity"
1Social Computing Symposium 2012 - Ignite Session - Mimi Ito, Digital Media & Learning Research Hub, UC Irvine
Mimi Ito - a cultural anthropologist and the MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning - presents an "Ignite" talk on how the "learning elites" can help produce educational opportunities for youth. Below are some excerpts.
"So what we have here is a problem of a disconnect, a gap, between the kinds of things that kids are really socially engaged with and interested in...and what adults and parents want kids to be interested in, which is: the academic stuff, the civic and political engagement, and things that open doors to economic opportunity." (1:05)
Mimi shares a story of a college student named Dave, a subject from her Digital Youth Studies research, who started creating webcomics on his own, made connections with a broader online community, and eventually. "What made Dave different from almost all of the other kids that we interviewed in our study was that he was able to take that interest and expertise and advocate towards relevance and sites of power that mattered for his professional identity [...] This is the experience that more kids deserve to have and they're not having it right now." (2:53)
"It's important to recognize the fact that every social media platform is a learning platform, is an education platform." (4:00)
You can view more SCS 2012 session videos at fuse.microsoft.com/events/scs2012