Assistant Professors Rachel M. Magee and Deborah Stevenson will present research on youth and technology at the Digital Media & Learning Conference 2017 from October 4-6 at the University of California, Irvine. The conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the UC Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.
On October 5, Magee and Stevenson, director of The Center for Children's Books, and doctoral student Melissa Hayes will present "App Authors: Kids Designing, Creating, and Sharing Apps in Informal Learning Settings." The App Authors project connects youth with skills and tools to design, create, and share apps, introducing learners to coding and the design process. The project is developing curricula for app-building in school and public libraries. The talk will discuss the App Authors framework, current curriculum and findings, and opportunities for future work in the area.
On October 6, Magee will present, "Centering Teens as Authorities for Understanding Youth Social Media Use," which is based on her Young Researchers work with doctoral student Margaret Buck. The Young Researchers project works with teens to co-design, implement, analyze, and share research that examines youth interactions with information and communication technologies and what those practices mean for learning and information literacy. In 2016-2017, Magee and Buck worked with a group of young researchers on a study of how teens engage with social media, the ways and kinds of information that are shared in these spaces, and how teens connect with learning. The talk will present their findings and the opportunities and challenges for future work of this kind.