{"id":1703,"date":"2008-09-16T06:07:41","date_gmt":"2008-09-16T12:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/?p=1703"},"modified":"2020-06-16T06:19:45","modified_gmt":"2020-06-16T12:19:45","slug":"situating-the-nml-skills-in-scratch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/2008\/09\/16\/situating-the-nml-skills-in-scratch\/","title":{"rendered":"Situating the NML skills in SCRATCH"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last July I attended to the SCRATCH@MIT conference<\/a>\n that took place at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. \nPeople from all over the world met during three days to share their \nexperiences as players, users, teachers, developers, researchers, and \nfans of this new programming language and online community created by \nthe Lifelong Kindergarten Group<\/a>.\n It was very interesting to see how a worldwide community that usually \ninteracts on the internet can meet in a geographical location to \nparticipate in hands-on workshops, listen to diverse presentations, and \ndiscuss about what are children and youth learning when they create and \nplay with SCRATCH.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Before I tell you more about how the NML (New Media Literacy<\/a>) social skills and cultural competencies can be situated in SCRATCH, let me explain more clearly what SCRATCH is. First of all, it is a programming language made for helping children and youth create and design interactive projects and learn how to program with out having to deal with complicated syntax. Instead of writing code using many symbols and parenthesis \u2013as you do when programming in C++, java, or python\u2013 you can just snap and drag visual blocks in SCRATCH as if you were playing with LEGO and create projects such as games, maps and animations. Therefore, programming becomes more playful and fun with SCRATCH and allows kids and teens to think creatively and solve design problems. (The program works in Mac and Windows, is in many languages, and can be download it from: http:\/\/scratch.mit.edu\/download<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, SCRATCH is an online community<\/a>\n where all the members publish, remix, and share their projects, discuss\n and learn about their experiences in forums, and build networks of \nfriends and collaborators. In other words, the SCRATCH online community \nis an \u201caffinity space\u201d<\/a>\n like the ones described by James Paul Gee, in which people learn \n(informally) through participation. The community has grown very fast \nand after one year of being online has reached 149,286 registered \nmembers and nowadays displays 200,273 projects \u2013the 15% of these \nprojects are remixes of other ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As we can see, both at the community and the programming levels SCRATCH can be connected with the research and frameworks that Project NML is developing. SCRATCH is a technology of communication that is allowing children and youth to think creatively, to actively participate, communicate, and to informally learn. The presentation \u201cSituating the NML skills in SCRATCH,\u201d (download the slides in pdf format<\/a>) showed how the new social skills and cultural competencies can be learned while participating in the online community and while creating projects with the programming language. For instance, the \u201cplay<\/em>\u201d skill is learned while you build, debug, or tinker a SCRATCH project; the \u201cappropriation<\/em>\u201d skill is learned when you remix a project that has been made by another user or when you sample images or sounds in your designs; and the \u201cnetworking<\/em>\u201d skill is learned when you make friends in the online community, comment on their projects, and exchange ideas and critiques. In addition, the presentation showcased two NML learning activities that use SCRATCH as the basic tool to create a fan video (Manny Manny<\/a>) and community interactive maps (Lawrence maps<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[This entry was cross-posted at the Project NML blog<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last July I attended to the SCRATCH@MIT conference that took place at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. People from all over the world met during three days to share their experiences as players, users, teachers, developers, researchers, and fans of this new programming language and online community created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13,87,121,898,26,224],"tags":[1105,746,616,122,269,820,1104,926,829],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic","category-computers","category-education","category-learning","category-participatory","category-play","tag-competencies","tag-computers","tag-creativity","tag-learning","tag-literacy","tag-new-media-literacies","tag-programming","tag-scratch","tag-skills"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andreslombana.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}