As we get ready for the Mobility Shifts conference, I have been asked to see if I can provoke a conversation among attendees. <br><br>Here's what I have on my mind today:<br><br>For some time, those of us who work closely with educators observe a core paradox. The work of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative have focused attention on games-based, mobile, networked, connected, participatory, affinity space, geeked-out modes of learning (Hope I got all of the buzz words in there) and there's a great deal of research and experimentation exploring the value of these approaches. But the story on the ground looks very different with schools installing networked computers and then, in effect, disabling all of the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms from being deployed by teachers and students. So, federal funding comes attached with restrictions on access to social media and with the requirement of filtering software which makes it hard to use much of the web for instruction. Many teachers are blocked from using YouTube and other video sharing platforms. In Los Angeles, there are work arounds which allow the teacher to punch in a code and authorize the use of YouTube, but it has to be punched in for each clip and has to be done very quickly before the clip is accessed, so you can not even line up all of the clips you need for a particular class period at the start of the period. Teachers are discouraging their students from using Wikipedia, because they have not been trained in how the online project works. And of course, our hopes that librarians might become information coaches for their students have been complicated by the fact that whole school districts have fired all of their librarians or forced them back into being mostly full time classroom teachers. So, we are gaining ground conceptually and losing it on the level of policy. So, what are we, as a community of researchers, theorists, and educators, going to do about this? What are our prospects for a meaningful collective response to what is a set of policy decisions, partially made at a Federal level and tied to funding, partially at very local levels and thus highly fragmented?<br>
<br>Talk among yourselves.<br>