Audience in the Service of Learning: How Kids Negotiate Attention in an Online Community of Interactive Media Designers

Karen Brennan

Learning, Media and Technology Vol. 41, No. 2 (2016) pp. 193–212

Audience can serve as powerful motivation in learning--and network technologies have the potential to greatly broaden audience for the processes and products of learning. But these new opportunities for audience are accompanied by new challenges. In ...

Beyond right or wrong: Challenges of including creative design activities in the classroom

Karen Brennan

Journal of Technology and Teacher Education Vol. 23, No. 3 (July 2015) pp. 279–299

In this article, we explore challenges encountered by K-12 educators in establishing classroom cultures that support creative learning activities with the Scratch programming language. Providing opportunities for students to understand and to build...

Topics: Programming, Administrators, Culture, Middle School Education

New Media and Pre-Service Professional Development: Using Blogs for Student Teacher E-Portfolio Creation and Open Source Programming Curriculum

Karen Brennan

Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2007 (Mar 26, 2007) pp. 2513–2518

Despite advancements in web technologies that enable extensive aesthetic control and interactivity, very little had changed over the span of nearly a decade with respect to the layout and aesthetic of e-portfolios created in a course focused on...

Getting started with Scratch

Karen Brennan

World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2011 (Jun 27, 2011) pp. 2861–2862

With Scratch, young people can create their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations – and share their creations with one another online. The Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu), launched in 2007, has become an active online...

The Sources of Production: Open Source Philosophy, Policy and Practice

Soowook Kim; Karen Brennan; Stephen Petrina

World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2007 (Jun 25, 2007) pp. 4636–4639

In this paper, we offer an overview, if not a manifesto, of Open Source and Open Access philosophy, policy and practice. Open source offers an alternative model for software production and distribution while open access offers a model for...

Making Projects, Making Friends: Online Community as Catalyst for Interactive Media Creation

Karen Brennan; Andres Monroy-Hernandez; Mitchel Resnick

New Directions for Youth Development Vol. 128 (2010) pp. 75–83

To become full and active participants in today's technologically saturated society, young people need to become creators (and not just consumers) of interactive media. Developing the requisite abilities and capacities is not a wholly individual...

More than code: The significance of social interactions in young people's development as interactive media creators

Karen Brennan; Amanda Valverde; Joe Prempeh; Ricarose Roque; Michelle Chung

World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2011 (Jun 27, 2011) pp. 2147–2156

Being able to design interactive media is an important capacity for young people to develop in order to understand and negotiate our modern media landscape. Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) is a programming environment that enables young people to...

A Community of (New Media) Practice: Examining Learning Stories from a Videoblogging Collective

Karen Brennan; Hiroko Hara; Lana Trey; Lauren Hall

World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2007 (Jun 25, 2007) pp. 1734–1739

We live in a participatory culture, an environment that is characterized by the proliferation of production and sharing via computer-mediated communications. In this paper, we consider broader and local consequences of this culture by first...

Topics: Culture

Methodologies for Researching Cognition and Technology: Dynamically Responsive Learning Environments

Karen Brennan; Franc Feng; Lauren Hall; Juyun Kim; Dai Kojima; Stephen Petrina

World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2007 (Jun 25, 2007) pp. 4069–4073

In this paper, we explore methods for researching cognition and technology, with an emphasis on creating and researching Dynamically Responsive Learning Environments (DRLEs). We piloted the DRLEs as instructional environments and are currently...

Topics: Instructional Design, Cognition, Research Methods

Using lesson study to guide the development of technological pedagogical content knowledge among teacher candidates

Kim MacKinnon; Jim Hewitt; Andrea Black; Jason Brennan; Sarah Grace; Shawn Lennie; Karen Mann; Rod Missaghian; Amy Paradine; Kelsey Patton

World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2010 (Jun 29, 2010) p. 337

Although it is generally incumbent on teacher training programs to help their pre-service students develop the technological competencies important to teaching in the 21st century (ISTE, 2007; 2008), many programs have yet to resolve how to best...