A team from the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) is traveling to Egypt to present at a week-long conference on educational technology. The conference is hosted by the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo (AUC), a leader in the use of technology in higher education in the Middle East. AUC director Aziza Ellozy and Frank Moretti, CCNMTL executive director, planned and developed the conference to offer a professional development exchange for educators from five Palestinian universities and to promote the creation of centers of academic excellence across the region.

The conference’s plenary session will be led collaboratively by CCNMTL senior staff Jonah Bossewitch and Mark Phillipson and three doctoral students from Columbia’s School of Journalism. Entitled “#celebrity #violence # resistance: Media Analysis and Social Pedagogies,” the Columbia team will present three approaches to analyzing contemporary social movements with a focus on the effects of multimedia footage and collaborative platforms on scholarship. In addition, CCNMTL will host workshops on models of collaborative learning environments and on Mediathread, an open-source multimedia annotation and composition platform developed at Columbia.

CCNMTL’s involvement in the conference is part of an ongoing collaboration with AUC, Teachers College, and the World Bank. In October 2011, Frank Moretti, CCNMTL’s executive director, gave a keynote at AUC entitled “New Media and Education 1990 to 2011: A Demonstration and Commentary.” In this presentation, Moretti considered uses of technology in education developed as the pre-web digital world transformed into the current state of social media saturation.

CCNMTL will post live updates from Bossewitch and Phillipson in Egypt on the Center’s Twitter feed.