This panel looks at mobile learning technologies and programs that get students outside, envisioning a classroom framed by the sky, earth, and everything in between. The No Child Left Inside Act (NCLIA) now in Congress seeks to enhance the environmental literacy of K-12 students “to foster understanding, analysis, and solutions to the major environmental challenges” facing the nation. There is a tremendous opportunity to engage young people in science that connects their local environment to global problems, and technology is crucial to effectuate its promise. Five hundred million eyes looked on as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon; under NCLIA, with eyes trained on the environment around them, learners could now help address a problem as complex as climate change. By implementing a citizen science-based model that leverages mobile technology, NCLIA could help form a scientifically literate citizenry while researchers explore questions previously unanswerable. Richard Louv’s "Last Child in the Woods" explores how going outside improves the well-being of young people, and fosters what E. O. Wilson has termed “biophilia.” Programs that combine appropriate technologies with outdoor experience can give learners a new point of entry to scientific understanding beyond textbooks, and introduce new modes of assessment beyond standardized tests.
Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center – Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor of ETC Press.
Jared Lamenzo is a technologist and an artist interested in giving citizens superpowers to change the world. As co-founder of Mediated Spaces, he pioneered the use of smartphone technology in citizen science. In 2008, the company won the NAVTEQ Global Challenge for their bird sighting application “The WildLab,” and won the Grand Prize in the WHERE developer challenge for their Skymap application, a mobile planetarium that had hundreds of thousands of visitors. In 2009, the team won a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grant to develop a version of the WildLab for education, and deploy it in schools. To date, over 10,000 sightings have been collected. In 2010, collaborating with the Cornell Cooperative Extension, the WildLab released its Crab App, which engages the public in horseshoe crab monitoring. The data are of importance to the drug industry, fisheries, and migratory shorebirds. As an artist, his work has been shown internationally, and as a musician, he has worked with Grammy award-winning artists and Billboard artists. He is a graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where his work drew upon his scientific and artistic backgrounds, and of Harvard, in Applied Mathematics and Engineering.
In 2008 Richard Scullin founded MobileEd.org, an organization that helps teachers integrate mobiles with curriculum. MobileEd has run mobile learning pilots at local schools and colleges, helping teachers, administrators, and students understand how mobiles can be leveraged for inquiry based learning. Richard has also served as an advisor/contributor to groups such as W4D (Mobile Web for Development, a interest group of W3.org), MobileActive.org, and SIGML, International Society for Technology in Education’s mobile interest group.
Richard Scullin has presented at conferences such as Handheld-Learning 2010, Mobile Monday Boston, and MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning (DML) 2010. He is a reviewer for mLearn and a member of IAML (The International Association for Mobile Learning). Most recently, MobileEd organized and chaired the mobile learning panel for DML 2010 at UCSD/CalIT2. MobileEd was finalist for the MacArthur Foundation / HASTAC’s Digital Media and Learning Competition with its proposal for Open Mobile Learning, a web-based open curricular resource. Richard has taught English for over ten years at diverse secondary schools.
S. Craig Watkins is an Assoc. Prof. of Radio-TV-Film at the Univ. of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on young people's engagement with social and mobile media technologies. He is part of a MacArthur Foundation research network that will be studying youth, digital media, and learning. Craig is the author of three books including, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games,and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means For Our Future.
