DLI: We Live Here: Youth Media Convergence, San Francisco Style

The San Francisco Bay Area is renowned globally for its innovations in technology and digital media—it’s no coincidence that the 2012 DML Conference is being held in San Francisco. But what you may not know is that the Bay Area is also hotbed of innovation for youth media. In this highly participatory workshop, five San Francisco-based organizations working in the youth media arena come together for a lively session on the art of collaboration, innovation and the digital dissemination of a generation’s voice.

Through a cross-cultural and organizational collaboration between The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), San Francisco Film Society (SFFS), KQED Public Media, Teaching Intermedia Literacy Tools (TILT) and the California Academy of Sciences (CAS), we will demonstrate how to cultivate a dynamic organizational network to support youth media and learning in a vibrant, but often disconnected, urban environment.  By bringing together resources and ideas from local organizations working in youth media, public media, public education, the arts, science and research, afterschool programs, the digital media industry, and the youth themselves, we’ll showcase how virtual connections can build identity and community that feels equally meaningful as in-person connections. The end result is an interconnected breeding ground for innovation that bridges the in-school and after-school arenas, leveraging the full potential of the broader digital and educational communities.

Through a brief overview of the collaborative work of these organizations and an explanation of their process, workshop participants will be tasked with developing citywide media based collaborations of their own, with the goal of creating connected learning opportunities that are both relevant and valuable to the end users: youth.  Additionally, Bay Area youth will actively participate in the workshop, providing valuable real-time feedback on participants’ ideas as they are developed, via Twitter and other online media resources available through KQED’s Do Now program.  We will teach, test and tweak all layers of technologies that can add an additional arena of learning, community feel and space for creative expression and civic engagement.