By Joe Riina-Ferrie, Associate Director of Educational Media & Kristin Gorski, Director of Operations

Welcome to Perspectives, the Digital Future Institute’s new online publication. Perspectives will reside on the DFI website and will share original pieces from DFI staff members and affiliated faculty. These pieces will include insights into fields of digital pedagogy, tech for social good, play, multimodality, and AI in education as seen throughout DFI’s work.

The first set of Perspectives posts offers a glimpse into what you can expect from this project: introductions to exciting work that you can read (or watch or listen to) in just a few minutes and that invite you to continue to dig deeper. To start, we feature original pieces on the practice of collaborative mediamaking and accessibility through the lens of a video project with the New York City Civil Rights History Project, a primer on using AI image generators, a look into a project aiming to use technology to improve mental health, and a piece highlighting podcasts that have been recorded in DFI’s Studio Hours. More will follow soon!

As the Perspectives’ Co-Editors, we have been given a great gift: We continually get to discuss people’s ideas about these topics with our colleagues at DFI, the wider Teachers College community, and across our fields. We are thrilled to be in conversation and speak with the authors about what they want to share, what the editorial process is about, what the piece means to our  various audiences, and how to shape it as part of the voice of this evolving digital publication. Sharing and giving space for creating through the composition process and related converstions is a way that we will make progress together, to write forward, and to tell our stories. 

We believe that highly communicative writing online is often co-produced and collaborative. As Co-Editors, we aim to support Perspectives authors’ voices throughout all aspects of this process as we work together on this new project. Welcome, and enjoy!