13 September 2007
Digital Literacies
Digital literacy will be central to Studio School design work wherein students will be encouraged to read and write through movie making, web logging, discussion boarding, text messaging, song-writing, and other emerging digital technologies.
Based on the successful work Of Glenda Hull and colleagues at the University of California Berkley, likely Studio School’s most engaging literacy work will be in the form of digital story-telling. Hull operates an Oakland, California based program called DUSTY— Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth. The program brings together individuals and organizations—children, undergraduates, school teachers, community members, professors, schools, universities, and nonprofits— to learn, work, and play together through engaging in technology-based literacy activities. Studio School will build on the digital
literacy practices of DUSTY to mirror the goals as follows:
• to bridge the digital divide by providing children and adults in underserved communities with access to literacy and technology;
• to promote literacy learning with an eye toward determining how reading and writing can best be fostered in technology-rich settings;
• to push the boundaries between in school and out of school literacies, exploring how the literate and social development of out-of-school learning and play can be carried into students’ and teachers’ classroom worlds;
• to provide a forum for intergenerational communication and community building by bringing children and adults together to collaborate on the writing and sharing of digital stories.
We anticipate the digital storytelling work in Studio School will motivate reluctant readers and writers by allowing them to document (using high-interest, digital narrative) their job-specific research and work on the MSU campus and in the local community. These digital stories easily fit into the SBL
genre since this literacy work is carried out in a “shared learning environment” and is, in itself, an “ambiguous design case which will be addressed iteratively through multimodal analysis, proposition, and critique.” Using web-based portfolios; I-video podcasts; or simple, public video-sharing interfaces like YouTube, Studio Students can share their design work with critics across the globe. Students from UCSD’s campus school students will be critique partners with Studio Students in this digital storytelling activity realizing the importance of engaging students in regular, sustained writing for real audiences beyond the classroom (Project & Nagin, 2006). Digital storytelling coupled with the SBL practice of critique will provide a deep connection among Engineering Research Center partner sites and among higher education and p-12 settings.