Transformed Learning Communities - Designing Connected Learning Environments - April 18

Transformed Learning Communities - Designing Connected Learning Environments


Join us this free presentation by noted researcher and speaker S. Craig Watkins!
Date: April 18
Time: 1:00 – 3:00
Location: Puget Sound ESD, 800 Oakesdale Ave. SW, Renton, 98057 or via webinar. (Registration information below.)

Dr. S. Craig Watkins studies young people’s social and digital media behaviors, and is the author of highly-praised book The Young and the Digital. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. Craig is also a Faculty Fellow for the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement and a Global Fellow at the IC2 at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan.


In the summer of 2012, Watkins worked with a high school teacher and his research team to create a new kind of learning experience for students from a low-income high school in Central Texas. After working with the school for nine months, Dr. Watkins and his team began to notice something: that even though the school offered students a variety of media technologies and opportunities to create digital media artifacts, some students still remained disengaged, de-motivated, and unable to realize the promise of the digital future.

In this talk, Watkins discusses the challenges the school faced, despite offering state-of-the-art technology, and how his team designed what they call a “connected learning” environment to realize the promise of digital media. The pilot and the findings it generated raises a number of intriguing matters regarding digital literacy, the digital divide, curriculum design, and the future of learning.

This free program is offered through a partnership with Pacific Lutheran University, the Educational Technology Support Center program and OSPI. Please note that you can participate by attending in person or via webinar. To attend in person, please register at http://cswatkins.eventbrite.com/# . To participate via webinar, please register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/351060010 .