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I lead a research team at Arizona State University called the K-12 Embodied and Mediated Learning group, situated in the Arts, Media and Engineering program. Much of our group’s research is done in something known as SMALLab - a scalable mixed reality learning environment where embodied action and multimodal feedback are integrated in support of powerful learning experiences. Within SMALLab, students use a set of “glowballs” to interact in real time with each other and with dynamic media through full body 3D movements and gestures. For example, students can be immersed in a complex physics simulation. They can hear the sound of a spring picking up speed, see projected bodies moving across the floor, feel a physical ball in their hands, and integrate how the projected ball moves in accordance with their own body movements to construct a robust conceptual model of the entire system. If this is hard to picture, you can see a video of a learning scenario that we recently developed in collaboration with teachers at Coronado High School here in Arizona. Students collaborate in SMALLab to investigate the nature of particle systems and various chemical processes.

SMALLab has proven to be a really interesting space for kids, and a new collaboration with Katie Salen and the non-profit she runs, the Institute of Play, will push at the question of what game design might look like within its borders. Our project—“Gaming SMALLab”—will focus on the design of a pedagogical framework for game-like, mixed-reality learning. The Institute of Play has developed a game-based pedagogy that will guide the design and development of a suite of standards-based learning scenarios for middle school students and teachers, using the SMALLab environment. This pedagogy frames learning as both situated and game-like. By “situated” we mean that students are asked to “take on” the identities and behaviors of designers, inventors, writers, historians, mathematicians, and scientists in contexts that are real and/or meaningful to them. By “game-like” we mean an approach to learning that draws on the intrinsic qualities of games and their design to engage students in a deep exploration of subject matter, with 21st century learning at its core. We kicked off the work earlier this summer in Tempe, during a workshop Christopher Martinez and I are running with 10 high school students in the SMALLab space. Excitement is high and we have a ton to get done. Katie and I will be posting updates on the work over the next year, so stay tuned for more missives from the SMALLab front!

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In June, our board met and approved a set of grants in our Digital Media and Learning portfolio.  Following on our previous announcement of grants, this was the seventh such quarterly round since we announced in October of 2006 this program and blog.  Several of the new projects examine a question central to our program - how, if at all, might learning environments change as a result of digital media?  Support to Professor David Birchfield at Arizona State University will enable he and his colleagues to develop a flexible, interactive, mixed-reality (i.e., both virtual and physical) learning environment called Smallab (Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab) that may represent the classroom of the future.  Arizona State University is also home to Our Courts, a new project on civic engagement.  In partnership with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Professor James Paul Gee and his ASU team are integrating social networks, virtual worlds, and games to engage youth in social studies, civics and history as they deepen their understanding of the role and importance of the judiciary in our democracy.

I am also pleased to announce that the Foundation is renewing support for the open-call Competition in Digital Media and Learning.  Under the leadership of HASTAC, two more years of the competition will ensure that dozens of new and promising digital media and learning projects are supported from a wide pool of national and international applicants.  HASTAC, led by David Theo Goldberg and Cathy Davidson, expects to publish details on the next call by mid-August at http://dmlcompetition.net.

To continue the Foundation’s exploration into the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds, a grant was awarded to Professor Doug Thomas and his team at the University of Southern California.  Building on their work over the past year, the team will investigate how philanthropic institutions can advance the public good and democratic engagement through a variety of activities in virtual worlds including events, discussions, and competitions.  Additionally, Professor Thomas’s research team will investigate how public health information can be communicated and understood through virtual worlds like Whyville.

Finally, to continue to support the emerging field of digital media and learning, two projects will advance the sharing and communication of research findings and media literacy to teachers, parents and school administrators, and a third project will support convening and collaborations. Common Sense Media will engage parents and teachers in a broader discussion of the implications of the emerging research findings on digital media and learning and effective practices in media literacy.  Similarly, the Consortium for School Networking will explore strategies for engaging school administrators in discussions of the diversity of learning opportunities that are increasingly available digitally to young people and the implications of research findings.  Both of these projects will pay particular attention to balancing the new opportunities of digital media with its unintended consequences for learning and society. Finally, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will facilitate a series of conversations to build the field of digital media and learning in ways that set the stage for further developments and bring coherence to a diverse range of efforts and findings.

Over the next several weeks I invite you to join the principal investigators of these projects as they post previews of their upcoming work to this blog. We look forward to the important work to come, as well as the collaborations and research findings that continue to emerge. 

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“ ‘The Ecology of Games’ is an excellent primer on where innovation is happening at the intersection between games and learning and where future avenues for research offer promise. ... “ Read the full post.

The open access version of this volume is available here. 

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NY1’s piece features several MacArthur-supported projects including Global Kids staff and youth leaders with their latest game, Colleen Macklin discussing PETLab and Suzanne Seggerman from Games for Change.  Watch the coverage below.

The festival was covered widely, with particular interest in the keynote address delivered by Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. To read more see the latest news summary from Google News. Also look for additional links on Spotlight at the end of the month.

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As researchers studying new media, it only seemed appropriate to let people know about our work using… well, new media.

This short video gives an overview of our work on Urban Science and other epistemic games as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

In these games, players have a chance to learn 21st century skills by playing as urban planners, engineers, journalists, and other professionals in the knowledge economy.

I suppose next we’ll need to make an epistemic game about making epistemic games....

Editor’s Note: See a few of Shaffer’s past posts on epistemic games here and here. 

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Consistent with the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning (DML) initiative, research by members of the International Communication Association (ICA) often focuses on various dimensions of how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.  To publicize the DML initiative among ICA members, in late May the MacArthur Foundation sponsored a reception at the ICA annual conference in Montreal.  The reception, hosted by myself and Miriam Metzger also from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was attended by representatives from the MacArthur Foundation and MIT Press, representatives from recent DML supported work, and approximately 300 ICA members.

ICA is an academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application of all aspects of human and mediated communication.  ICA currently has an active membership of more than 4,300 individuals in 70 countries who teach and conduct research in colleges, universities, and schools.  Other members are in government, the media, communication technology, business law, medicine, and other professions.  Through its 23 Divisions and Interest Groups, various publications, annual conferences, and its relations with other associations, ICA promotes the systematic study of communication theories, processes, and skills.  Despite its diversity, ICA represents a coherent discipline in which all different aspects of communication are linked by common processes, structures, theories, and methods.  Since 2003, ICA has been officially associated with the United Nations as a non-governmental association (NGO).

Over recent decades the field of communication research has grown rapidly all over the world, reflecting the need to seek answers to urgent social problems involving communication.  To provide these answers, ICA members conduct academically sound research that often results in policy-related solutions.  A cross-cutting concern of ICA members is the relationship between digital technologies and youth, reflected by the sessions, papers, and topics at this year’s ICA conference, which included research on the learning effects of interactive media, media literacy and the health and well-being of children, the perceived credibility of online information, the social impact of online games, and managing online acquaintances, among many other topics.

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Most agree that building a field like digital media and learning is an interdisciplinary effort informed by a variety of perspectives.  This series documents several recent conferences important to the emerging field, including the second annual conference of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), and the annual meeting of the International Communications Association.  In the following posts, Cathy Davidson of HASTAC reflects on inspiration, curiosity and awe; and Andrew Flanagin reports on a successful digital media and learning reception at the International Communications Association conference.

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What does it mean to build a field, catalyze a new industry, or develop a new profession? Philanthropic foundations have been involved in creating new domains of work throughout the last century. The Rockefeller Foundation helped build the U.S. public health system, Ford helped spark new academic departments such as women’s and ethnic studies programs, and philanthropic support has played a significant role in creating medical subspecialties, such as field of palliative care.

Blueprint Research & Design is working with the MacArthur Foundation to synthesize what is known about field building, contextualize it for the specific challenges of Digital Media and Learning, and deploy that knowledge to best effect. Here is just one example of what we have learned:  Infrastructure matters. The examples above of public health, academic disciplines and medical subspecialties all relied on philanthropic partnerships with institutions that can attract other financial support for the continuation of the work. The infrastructure challenge for the Rockefeller Foundation in building public health was to create academic departments and public systems.

Ninety years later the infrastructure challenge for building Digital Media and Learning is different - it is a question of working across existing institutions in the right ways. The Digital Media and Learning Initiative’s infrastructure challenge is to capitalize both existing institutions and new ones, draw in unaffiliated individuals, and unleash the power of networks, the global nature of ideas, and the dynamic nature of innovation and production across sectors, regions, and cultures. In addition to lessons from prior philanthropic efforts, we are also drawing insights from the history of capital markets, the creation of venture capital as an industry, and breakthroughs in design, the nonprofit sector, media and the science of learning.

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One of the salient characteristics of the learning environment for many youth today is that it is no longer fixed to a specific physical location-the formal school classroom, or even the after school program. While this may have always been true to some extent, with the use of digital media (devices, tools, and applications), the “learning environment” is now better understood as a networked environment that can be accessed from within different physical locations including in the home, on-the-move (with mobile devices), and in informal cultural sites.

I am leading up a new project called “Inspiring the Technological Imagination: Libraries and Museums as Networked Learning Sites” that will investigate how these cultural institutions might incorporate new digital media for the purposes of enhancing their informal learning objectives. The aim of the project is to contribute to a collaborative exploration of the future of libraries and museums in a digital age. One of the key topics the research team will investigate concerns the role of tinkering in the learning process. The project will examine a range of tinkering practices, from those that involve the use of physical materials to those that involve digital tools and applications. Over time, the research team will design and prototype examples of evocative learning objects that meld the physical and the digital that could serve as creative platforms for informal learning experiences within museums and libraries. The broadest aim is to consider how these important cultural institutions contribute to the cultivation of the technological imagination as a 21st century literacy. 

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by David Theo Golberg and Mimi Ito

As the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Initiative enters its second year, there is an impressive and diverse array of projects under its umbrella, including qualitative and quantitative research, and a range of technology and program design projects. The various researchers, practitioners and collaborators are coalescing into a loosely knit but robust intellectual network that reaches across a wide range of disciplines and domains of practice. Various meetings, public forums, publication efforts, and events--what we saw at AERA in March, for instance--are forging connections between those doing supported work, new collaborators, and the broader public.

To promote and facilitate this networking and collaboration between the DML initiative’s supported projects, and to extend the reach of this work into new areas, communities, and geographic regions, we are developing a “research collaboratory” on digital media and learning. 

Through the remainder of this year, we will be working together to conduct background research with the view to developing a plan for a hub of research and design activity, to be coordinated through the University of California Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

The ultimate goal is to develop an infrastructure for research communication and collaborative work that supports the DML initiative in a way that redefines research, paradigm building, and the role of philanthropy in a networked, digital era. How is networked knowledge created, organized both epistemologically and institutionally, and shared in appropriate ways to diverse, networked publics? How do we organize a distributed collaboratory of researchers, scholars, designers, computing experts, engineers, and end users for a rapidly changing field? These collaborative and field-building efforts need to recognize that important innovations are happening at the edges and outside of formal institutional structures. Approaching these issues requires new forms of interdisciplinary conversation and collaborative engagements that bridge academic institutions, industry, learning institutions, and a variety of networked publics. 

Our proposed infrastructure-what we are tentatively calling The DML Studio-will offer a networked forum for prompting and purposing, guiding and reflecting upon learning in, through and with digital media.

For the planning period, we will be conducting background research on the state of international research across this field, and on relevant efforts in industry as well as in various learning institutions. We will also be seeding a small series of pilot collaborative research conversations, and gathering input from individuals who are part of the extended DML effort. We look forward with considerable anticipation and excitement to learning what we can do to help catalyze and extend the research and innovation emerging from the DML initiative and consolidate the field.