DML: Working Examples: New and Improved

Whether we make policy, design things, study an emerging issue, or implement programs,
we all know there is great instructive power in good examples. In today’s complex world,
where major problems require pooling knowledge from a variety of perspectives and fields, it
is crucial to compare and contrast examples of different solutions using different tools and
approaches.  We need safe spaces to test and explore new ideas and help them succeed,
fail, and improve.  We need new ways to network people across traditional boundaries of all
sorts in the service of knowledge building and problem solving, and we need to leverage the
power of markets, crowds, and collaborations to make new discoveries and break out of
traditional molds.

The Working Examples site responds to these needs by providing a form of social media for
ideas, not just for people, that enables ideas to go viral and rapidly push the field’s
development while connecting its members through their work.  Working Examples functions
as a “market place” for ideas where they can jostle, combine, and compete for prominence,
which is determined by the community. In this way, it is also a site for discovery and a forum
where crowd sourcing and experts come together in a way that is fundamentally different
and, we contend, more productive than existing mechanisms for sharing knowledge and
ideas such as refereed journals, conferences, and traditional publications.
 
The innovation at the heart of Working Examples is that it is designed to invite people to
break through the micro-communities within the field of Digital Media and Learning.  The
open-access, collaborative model of idea-sharing fosters interdisciplinary collaboration that
is critical to large-scale innovation and development: without it, an individual researcher,
producer, or developer can innovate, but innovation does not achieve critical mass. The
model also fosters growing and diversifying membership in the field of Digital Media and
Learning. We believe that Working Examples can be an important platform to help advance
all areas of learning. There is much good research—even just good ideas—that are never
fully developed or implemented.  The Working Examples site provides a way for ideas to be
heard and evaluated, and it provides a platform to describe not only the development of
those ideas, but also how people are implementing them.
 
This workshop will illustrate the newly redesigned system for creating working examples. It
will also provide a hands-on overview of how the system works and how it can be used to
help document your projects in their development process and unpack the design decisions
a team makes as they try to develop a digital media and learning project. The goal of the
workshop will be to give attendees the information they need in order to use the system and
create working examples around their projects and provide input into features to help
continue improving the site.