Digital stuff

I had two people tell me about their very exciting work this week, which I thought I would share here as it is so interesting to those of us working in the digital literacies area. I met first with Jon, the director of Lovebytes, a festival of digital art and media held in Sheffield annually. They started in 1994, so have really been in the vanguard of everything digital and it certainly shows - for example, see the fantastic installation below, Bubbles. If you like that, you can find more like it on their YouTube channel, here. The second person to share their work was Ruth of Isaacs UK, who is working with Futurelab on a concept she has developed titled 'Dreamcatcher' - fabulous stuff! Creativity has always been around of course, but what's new about digital art and media production is the extent to which interactivity and networking can be embedded in installations and artefacts. These are two brilliant examples of what can be achieved digitally and we can only hope that this kind of creativity can be fostered in more schools in the future.

Travel Notes

I haven’t blogged for a while because first of all I was on holiday here (fab!) and then went to New York for the AERA conference. I attended some excellent sessions, including a brilliant symposium organised by Jabari Mahiri. Some great work on digital media production and youth is being undertaken by Jabari and his team. Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell talked about a project titled ‘Fractal Village’. In the project, students were presented with ‘Barren Island’ in Second Life which was, as its name suggests, completely barren, and they were then supported in using programming tools to create objects, buildings and avatars. It was pedagogically very exciting as the project was open-ended and student-led in nature and you can read more about it here. Will not blog again until I get back to England as I now want to fit a bit of shopping in this weekend before I get home. Apparently the Apple store on 5th Avenue is open 24 hours a day - could be dangerous...