Blog

Diana Rhoten of Startl kicked off the MacArthur Foundation's DML 2012 conference in San Francisco on March 1st with a bold challenge: have audacious goals. For this group of practitioners, researchers, and other interested stakeholders, pushing for rich learning experiences that allow learners to explore, create, experiment, iterate, and collaborate, we have to be audacious: for all of the fawning over Finland's and Singapore's educational successes (where testing is far less frequent and is used to facilitate student learning, not punish schools), our educational policy is still clutching standardized tests and back-to-basics drill-and-kill pedagogies--despite the fact that research tells us these are not effective practices.

I’m packing my bags, and this Sunday, I’m getting on a plane to move from San Francisco, CA to Cambridge, MA to get my master’s degree in education at Harvard Graduate School of Education as part of the Technology, Innovation, and Education program. I’m not leaving the New Learning Institute behind, though—I’m taking the NLI along with me. Starting the first week of September, I’ll be blogging about the concepts, people, theories, and policies from my program of study as they apply to New Learning. Get an inside line to how one of the nation’s top education schools explores transforming practice, research, and policy through innovating where and how we teach and learn.

This post is part of a series of interviews highlighting leaders in the field of New Learning (what we call “NLI at Inquiry”). Recently, we interviewed danah boyd—Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Visiting Researcher at Harvard University’s Law School, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales—on subjects including how youth develop online identities, social norms, and privacy issues. Here, in excerpts from Part II of the interview, she discusses how young people control private information in public online spaces by “hiding in plain sight.”

This post is part of a series of interviews highlighting leaders in the field of New Learning (what we call “NLI at Inquiry”). Recently, we interviewed danah boyd—Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Visiting Researcher at Harvard University’s Law School, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales—on subjects including how youth develop online identities, social norms, and privacy issues. Here, in excerpts from Part I of the interview, she discusses how youth navigate online privacy issues.