I’m leaving tomorrow for the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS ‘08) at Utrecht, the Netherlands.  This conference is held every other year, and it’s always very high quality.  I got accepted into the Doctoral Consortium, which is an exciting opportunity to network and meet up with more senior scholars and other doctoral students from around the world.  I’ll be presenting early work on my dissertation, called “Understanding How Identity Supportive Games Can Empower Asian-American Possible Selves.”  I’m also participating in a symposia panel on Web 2.0 Learning Opportunities.  In that session, I’ll be reporting a study on “Stereotypes, Identities, and Avatars for Success in Math,” in which we asked students to create avatars of themselves and avatars of what they envisioned successful math identities would look like.  This process elicited some pretty interesting stories about how students viewed themselves in relation to math experts — in some cases, students created ethnic- and gender congruous identities of success, which was fascinating.

I’ll be sharing more about the conference when I return.  This will be my second time to the Netherlands — hopefully everything will be copacetic and a fun trip!