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The journal, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, is helping to build the field of Digital Media and Learning. Among other articles in Issue #2, grantee Jim Gee suggests using worked examples to establish the parameters of the field.

Often used in the hard sciences as a teaching and learning tool, worked examples, argues Gee in “Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Field, Part II,” can help get people in the field “to explicate how and why they had carried out their work…and how their approach compared and contrasted with the other cases … from different disciplinary backgrounds.”

Digital media make this exchange possible, and researchers in the emerging field of Digital Media and Learning should adapt this tool, Gee argues, to advance the field. Through worked examples, he believes, “shared exemplars” can emerge of what counts as good or accepted work. And given the field, why not, he says, make a game (albeit a serious one) out of it.

Taking up the call, Ben Devane, Shree Durga, and Kurt Squire, in “Competition as a Driver for Learning” offer a worked example questioning whether direct competition in a multiplayer environment can’t drive learning. This proposition is in direct response to the assumption that cooperation, not competition, spurs learning. The authors argue that “past research may have overlooked [that] how competition is framed and experienced is culturally contextual, so that competition in some frameworks (such as a gaming context) may be experienced very differently than a school context.”

Other articles explore parents as learning partners, assessment, Youth, Creativity, and Copyright in the Digital Age, among many others.

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By Constance Steinkuehler

A growing body of research suggests that video games–especially online gameplay in (massively) multiplayer environments (MMOs) like World of Warcraft or Quest Atlantis–have real intellectual merit.

Games engage players in digital and traditional literacy skills, informal scientific reasoning, collective problem-solving, and even forms of civic and social engagement.

Yet, much of the research has focused on adults playing commercial games. Studies of youth are limited to educational games or sites like Whyville or River City.

So what about younger kids playing MMOs?

This fall, my research team and I will extend our research originally funded by MacArthur by studying commercial MMOs populated nearly exclusively by tweens and teens. With the help of a Spencer Foundation postdoctoral grant, I’ll be examining RuneScape, the single most popular online game among children age 10 to 16.

This work will begin with a “cognitive ethnography” of everyday game play. An ethnography is a form of study that relies on careful observation and in-depth interviews with subjects. We hope to identify common practices, as well as the forms of individual and social cognition that these practices entail. “Individual and social cognition” means, in this case, that we will use as units of analysis both the individual and the group for studying cognition. This is to say, we don’t assume cognition is only located in the individual head but rather is also distributed across groups of people and their tools.

As part of this work, we’re also recruiting about a dozen gaming youth to assess the impact of game play over a longer period of time on their daily lives, social relationships, and school work. We will assess what youth learn through online game play, how that learning aligns or conflicts with educational standards, and how such games fit into the fabric of their everyday experience.

What’s so cool about RuneScape? It has six million active monthly players (making it the single most popular MMO title in the West), it’s browser based and can be played for free, kids love it, and adults hate it. In other words, it’s an ideal context for investigating whether the complex forms of intellectual work found in other MMO games also emerge in online communities that are, for the most part, youth driven, entirely accessible, and thoroughly mainstream.

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Spotlight blog reporter Cindy Richards covered the meeting and reports back on one issue raised during the daylong discussion: how mobile media can enhance learning and the current hurdles to gaining a foothold in classrooms.

Mobile media, such as cell phones and handheld devices, can engage youth in a variety of educational pursuits. For example:

• RE:Activism teaches history and civics by requiring players to answer questions about historic acts of civil disobedience, such as the Stonewall riots that launched the gay rights movement. The questions can only be answered at the site of that event. Players text the answer and get a return text that gives them the clue to their next activity.

• The Palmagotchi—developed for a Palm OS handhelds—is based on the evolutionary story of Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos Islands and requires students to keep virtual birds alive by learning about which flowers they can eat and understanding the genetics involved in mating to create new birds more likely to survive the hazards of the game.

At the core of this interest in mobile media is the belief that learning happens everywhere, anytime, in school and out. (See grantee Brigid Barron’s map of where learning happens with digital media). Mobile media expand the opportunities to amplify skills learned in school, or to build new skills in afterschool programs or other activities.

In fact, mobile media are likely to find their fit more quickly in out-of-school settings, given the hurdles they face at the classroom door.

Hurdle 1: Cells phones—a key device for delivering mobile media--are often barred from classrooms. Before they were allowed to bring mobile devices into a Milwaukee school, researchers had to turn off the web connectivity and disable the mics on the phones, Ironically, this occurred at the same time the City of Milwaukee was investing in free WiFi in part to support education.

Hurdle 2. Schools need to keep students in the classroom. In a game MacArthur grantee Kurt Squire and colleagues developed to teach students about water quality, the designers had to limit the learning activity to that which could be accomplished within the confines of the school. The game initially required students to gather water quality data from nearby Lake Michigan.

Hurdle 3. The effectiveness of mobile media is hard to document. Asking youth to keep activity diaries—a common research method for assessing effectiveness—is burdensome for students and requires them to remember small details easily forgotten by the end of the day. Interviews can result in different answers about cell phone use, depending on whether you ask a parent, a teacher, or the teen.

The Nokia Research Center is developing a possible solution that records everything the user does on a cell phone and uploads it to the web. It can be used in conjunction with a diary tool developed at Stanford University that allows participants to send a photo or text a quick comment to a service they can access later to remember what was going on at that moment. That project is open source: http://code.google.com/p/4l8r/

Despite the hurdles, research is moving forward. Kurt Squire and colleagues at The Mobile Media Learning Project, for example, are creating class activities using mobile media. See More Than Just Talk for more on their work. Their website is here.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop released a study in January outlining a national mobile learning strategy, and urging the Obama administration to make new investments in digital learning technologies and teacher training.

Finally, mobile media continues to grow as a tool helping youth engage in their communities. See, for example, a 2008 HASTAC winner, Nairobi-based Mobile Movement. HASTAC, with support from the MacArthur Foundation, sponsors the annual Digital Media and Learning competition.

For more on the digital media and learning convenings being hosted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, go here.

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Each month, Spotlight will feature a person at the vanguard, pushing the field of digital media in new directions for learning. This week’s featured podcast is part of Edutopia’s online library of the Digital Generation Project. Other videos in the library feature kids.

Edutopia’s The Digital Generation Project was produced with support from the MacArthur Foundation. Edutopia is published by The George Lucas Educational Foundation.  The foundation documents, disseminates and advocates for innovation and the redesign of K–12 learning environments, including how technology can transform teaching and learning.

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MacArthur grantee Henry Jenkins, director of Project New Media Literacies at MIT, argues that young people need to master an additional set of skills to be successful in today’s participatory culture. To help youth build these skills, Project NML produced a set of videos that offer insights into a day in the life of an artist or creator in new media. Select videos are used in learning activities, or “challenges”, within the Learning Library. These multimedia challenges incorporate tools and games from other websites, and offer opportunities for students to create their own content, and to submit that content to the Library.

In the videos, a DJ, for example, might discuss the ethics of sampling, which aligns with the identified new media skill of appropriation, or the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

In the challenge “Expressing Characters across Multimedia,” youth practice the skill of “transmedia navigation” by first learning about storytelling, and then watching a video with NBC’s Heroes creators Mark Warshaw and Jessie Alexander. The two discuss how they use the characters in the show across different media, such as in a graphic novel or even through toys. (To find this video and activity, go to the Learning Library and search “transmedia navigation.”)

Students then explore how the character Claire Bennett navigates and is featured in different media platforms, including the television show, in her Myspace account, and as an image in a graphic novel.

“Originally the video collection was somewhat static,” says Anna van Someren, Creative Manager, Project New Media Literacies. “But we’ve pushed it a lot farther now. We wanted to move toward a new framework - the Learning Library - that allows users to interact with the material. It’s a much more community-based, dynamic experience now.”

The video collection can be found here.

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Sam, age 13, from Illinois, is an avid gamer and video maker who believes that digital media is her second life.

Sam says her method of learning new software is just “trial and error. If something doesn’t work out just go back and try something else.” This ability to “fail” and to tinker is important to learning, and often distinguishes games and out-of-school learning from that in classrooms. Watch her portrait below or read more about her digital life here.

Edutopia’s The Digital Generation Project was produced with support from the MacArthur Foundation. Edutopia is published by The George Lucas Educational Foundation.  The foundation documents, disseminates and advocates for innovation and the redesign of K–12 learning environments, including how technology can transform teaching and learning.

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Back in 2004, documentary filmmaker Suzanne Seggerman, who had studied digital media couldn’t understand why games with a positive social mission weren’t part of the larger game eco-system.

After being rebuffed by gamemakers at the annual Game Developers Conference several years running, Seggerman founded Games for Change with Ben Stokes (now at MacArthur Foundation), Barry Joseph (Global Kids) and David Rejeski (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.)

Much has changed since those early days. This year, in fact, was a turning point, Seggerman said. In the past, people were brought together because they’d all had individual transformative experiences with games and knew in their guts that games ought to be used for advocating social causes and for learning.

But this year, Seggerman said, something was different. (And the change wasn’t just at Games for Change. Earlier this year also saw that Game Developers Conference in San Francisco host its first panel on positive social impact games and the creation by the International Game Developers Association of a special interest group devoted to the topic.)

In part, the change was the quantifiable results of the impact of games, as presented in one panel by MacArthur grantee Joe Kahne, and in part it was little things, like Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream wandering around the conference looking for help making a game, or Pulitzer-prize-winning New York Times columnist Nick Kristof delivering one of the keynotes and twittering about it to his tens of thousands of followers.

Kristof, by the way, is working on a game to go along with his upcoming book with Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky, about women in third-world countries. Kristof spoke at the conference about how games give people a sense of what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes, and thus motivate them toward social change.

Other session included MacArthur grantee Joe Kahne of Mills College discussing a study he’s doing on whether videogames foster real-life civic engagement; and grantees James Gee (Arizona State University), Constance Steinkuehler (University of Wisconsin), Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design), and Kurt Squire (University of Wisconsin) discussing new assessment methods allowed by digital media.

“The core idea behind games and assessment that Jim Gee’s been pushing for [that assessment should be incorporated into teaching], I think still has yet to be realized,” Squire said. “It would be great to see an interdisciplinary team get together and try to build something that integrates such an assessment.”

Gee spoke again the next day in a wide-ranging conversation with fellow MacArthur grantee Henry Jenkins (MIT) that spanned the necessity of passion in facilitating “deep” learning, how communities around games foster mentorships that cultivates learning, to Gee’s work on women and The Sims, to Jenkins’ growing interest in whether participatory culture leads to a participatory democracy.

Despite all the interesting conversations and thinkers gathered, there are still hurdles to overcome in the field.

For example, conspicuously absent from the conference were many new games. There is still no solid, consistent source of funding for getting learning or social impact games made. One new attendee to the conference, Stacy Abramson (Facing History), was surprised not only by the creative energy and enthusiasm at the conference, but also by the lack of any organized network of educators to facilitate distribution.

Independent game designer Eric Zimmerman pointed out another disconnect, this one between what experts such as Gee and Jenkins said learning games ought to look like and what nonprofits were actually planning.

“Literacy theorists like Jim Gee and Henry Jenkins were advocating approaches to creating games for change that were directly the opposite of what people in the room were actually doing,” Zimmerman said.

“The games created in the 101 Workshop, for example, were extremely literal and message-driven, whereas the learning experts said over and over that gameplay that made use of community and that let players come to their own conclusions were going to fulfill the promise of games on social issues.”

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By Gregg Behr

What started with a few colleagues brainstorming over breakfast has grown into an avant garde group of 130 education and technology professionals focused on enhancing children’s creativity through digital media.

The “Kids + Creativity Group” includes Pittsburgh’s leading institutions and innovators, from universities and museums to gaming companies and after-school programs. Much like Pittsburgh native Fred Rogers did with his television program in the 1950s, our members are using today’s cutting-edge technology to bring the joy of learning to kids’ lives. I like to call them modern-day Fred Rogers.

Besides sparking important dialogue, Kids + Creativity has led to collaborations that are generating new opportunities for children to learn and play. Here are a few examples:

• The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh worked with the company roBlocks to enhance its exhibits with robotics technology. The museum’s executive director will discuss the success of the project on a panel at the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children in Italy June 3-5.
  

• Carnegie Library and the Entertainment Technology Corporation at Carnegie Mellon University launched My StoryMaker. This interactive program advances early literacy by allowing kids to create their own characters and stories.

• The Sprout Fund introduced Spark, which funds small-scale initiatives that engage children up to age 8 through the creative use of technology and media.

• The Steeltown Entertainment Project partnered with Holy Family Institute in a youth and media initiative. It pairs Pittsburgh ex-pats who are now Hollywood film professionals with Holy Family students to tell their transformational stories.

• CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and UPCLOSE (the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments) developed Robot 250. Marking Pittsburgh’s 250th anniversary in 2008, this city-wide art and technology program gave children and others the chance to build their own customized robots.

• Group member Larry Berger, executive director of the family radio program The Saturday Light Brigade, built a website to track youth media resources. It features the MacArthur-supported Quest to Learn school, among other sites.

As this exciting field of digital media and learning continues to develop, we in Pittsburgh welcome comments and inquiries from the Spotlight community.

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How has the teaching of writing changed in the 21st century? How can teachers navigate the narrow definitions of writing in current national and statewide testing? How have teachers’ goals for student learning changed in the past 20 years?

Editors Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran from the Western Massachusetts Writing Project will address these and other questions in this interactive webcast on June 10th, drawing from insights and discoveries they made while writing their new book, Teaching the New Writing. The book pulls together teachers’ stories, practices, and examples of students’ creative and expository writing from online and multimedia projects such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and electronic poetry.

The authors gained many fresh insights during the process, and met with a couple of surprises. They were surprised, for example, that the changes in teachers’ goals and practices were so gradual, so evolutionary. They were not radical breaks with past practice, but assimilation over time to the forces of emerging technologies and the changes they bring to writing. Those changes include what seem to be new genres (for example, blog postings) that may be permutations of other genres (call-in radio shows). They include movement between electronic and paper media that prompt reflection on form and audience. They also include more social and collaborative classrooms and writing. 

The authors were also surprised that so few teachers complained about having to “teach to the test”—the statewide or national standards—despite being asked directly to comment on how teaching the “new writing” fit, or did not fit, with standardized testing in writing. Granted, the editors talked mainly with a special set of teachers. Yet these teachers generally felt that in teaching the new writing, they were giving students what they needed for writing in the 21st century, and that their students would not be at a disadvantage when taking the required standardized tests.

The webcast is part of “Teachers Teaching Teachers,” a weekly interactive webcast series that focuses on technology and teaching writing, hosted by the New York City Writing Project.  Teachers bring together other teachers from across the country and the globe to discuss issues of classroom practice with new digital technology and to think through shared curriculum projects.  See past webcasts here.

For more information on the event including how to participate click here.

The National Writing Project (NWP) is a professional development network supported by the MacArthur Foundation that serves teachers of writing.  Their mission is to improve student achievement by improving the teaching of writing and improving learning in the nation’s schools. For more on this grant click here.

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MacArthur grantee Brigid Barron, in a recent Informal Science interview, called for museums and schools to “broaden how they conceptualize working with children” if they hope to encourage learning outside of their own setting. “Rather than limit the learning experience to a single place or to the here and now, it can be productive to help a learner connect to other places where they can also pursue their interests.”

The WhyReef project, developed by MacArthur grantees Elizabeth Babcock, Audrey Aronowsky, Beth Sanzenbacher, Johanna Thompson, Krystal Villanosa, and Mark Westneat at Chicago’s Field Museum, is doing just that.

WhyReef is a coral reef in Whyville, a virtual world for younger children. Created and operated by Field Museum educators and scientists and Numedeon, WhyReef draws kids into a game of identifying the marine life they see swim by, and with each step in the game they dig deeper into information on reef species and the overall ecosystem of a reef.

With its launch on March 30, 2009, the reef has had more than 100,000 visits. Nearly 7,000 individuals have played the Mini-Food Web games, and within the first month, 2,000 visitors have watched a reef video. One-fourth of all visitors to the larger Whyville play on the reef at each login.  Their more than 150 posting and questions to the reef’s bulletin boards reveal their developing understanding.

The benefits of extending the museum’s resources in new ways, as Barron calls for, were evident when students in the museum’s Museology program played on WhyReef before seeing the real fish in the museum’s collections. The teens said that the virtual experience made them more confident to interact with the specimens and the researchers.  They also said that seeing the specimens made them eager to return to WhyReef for more information about the fish they had seen. This feedback loop of learning shows how virtual worlds can complement and reinforce on another.

The WhyReef experience has inspired the creation of the Kids Advisory Council (KAC), a focus group that will pilot additional innovative educational experiences to link WhyReef and traditional museum exhibitions and collections.  The main goals of the KAC are to gauge how kids learn in digital and real world environments, to understand how kids learn from each other using digital media and spaces, and to discover if these digital and real world experiences can become applied knowledge.

The next step in WhyReef is to begin damaging the reef with overfishing or pollutants and to monitor how the kids react. When the reef is at it’s “sickest” point, the team will launch “Save the Reef” activities.  Kids will be able to complete management plans to find solutions to bring the reef back to a healthy state, raise awareness by selling shirts, buttons, or hats, and making donations to help support the plans outlined in the petitions. 

WhyReef is a pilot project collaboration between The Field Museum and the virtual world of http://www.whyville.net to teach students about coral reef biology, ecology, and conservation. For more on the project click here. For more on museums and digital learning, see MacArthur grantee Anne Balsamo and colleagues’ series on the Futures of Learning Blog summarizing the state of research on the topic.