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I’m pleased to announce the launch of a blog that documents a new research effort that is just getting under way as part of the Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Futures of Learning is a collective blog authored by an international group of researchers.

For the next few months, we will be doing reading on research and practice in the area of new media and learning, as well as visiting different institutions and projects in the US and elsewhere that are innovating in this space. Along the way, we will be using this blog as a way to share some of what we are learning, and to solicit feedback on our work in progress. We will be posting book and article reviews and reports from our visits to various sites and conferences. Our goal is to help inform and grow a field of research and practice that is grounded in deep knowledge of the changing landscape of new media, as well as in an understanding of innovation in educational and design practice. We are focusing on two areas. One is an international review of research on how people are adopting digital and networked media. The second area is a review of learning institutions that are incorporating new media in innovative ways.

We welcome suggestions for literature and programs that we should be looking at!

Editor’s Note: Check out Mimi’s post on the recently released games and civics survey.

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By James Bosco and Keith Krueger

It comes as little surprise to even casual observers that digital media is central to the life of most American youth.  IM’ing, gaming, virtual worlds, and social networking are only a few of the ways that digital media play an increasingly larger role in the lives of kids. Yet, these resources which are key elements in what Henry Jenkins has termed as “participatory culture,” are seen by many educators more often as liabilities than assets in the school environment. 

The negative orientation of many school leaders toward Web 2.0 applications is particularly pernicious since many of these applications hold considerable opportunity for improved learning, particularly the ability to foster collaboration, creativity and critical thinking - skills that are particularly critical now and in the future.  It would be a sad irony if the increased knowledge and capability which has been developed about digital media and learning - much of which has come as a result of MacArthur sponsored projects—would remain on the other side of the classroom door.

The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) with support from the MacArthur Foundation, has begun an initiative to close the gap by focusing on leadership and policies that enable/inhibit adoption of these new digital tools in education.  We will gather detailed information to assess the current perspectives, policies, and practices of school leaders which impact on Web 2.0 applications particularly within the context of participatory culture within schools.  The nature of information and analyses which we accomplish will be specifically germane to the formation and implementation of an action plan to promote school policies and practices to close the gap.

Eric Hopfer wrote, “In times of change, learners inherit the Earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” We cannot afford schools that prepare kids for a world that no longer exists.  Now is the time for policymakers and educators to define 21st century learning environments and bridge the home/school digital gap.

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by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg

There is exciting breaking news: the second HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition is about to launch.

The first cycle this past year was a great beginning.  The application pool was vast and varied, creative and innovative, over a thousand applications. The 17 winners of the first Digital Media and Learning Competition are working on their projects, communicating on a social networking site, participating in online workshops. They are starting to post progress reports online so that others can learn from what they are learning.

So what’s in store for the 2008 Competition?  First, the overall theme will be “participatory learning.” We are going to push even harder this year to find innovative projects that promote interactive learning that takes place collaboratively, where each person builds on and contributes to the work of others, and where the learning process is as exciting as the learning product.  Second, we are hoping to foster even greater international participation and for the first time are accepting submissions directly from international applicants.  And third, a part of the Competition will be dedicated to young participatory learning innovators, people in the 18-25 age range who want to realize their innovative ideas for some new form of many-to-many learning, looking to take their ideas forward from “garage” to “market.” For all the details, visit http://www.dmlcompetition.net.

And please do help us spread the word!

We know that this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition will again inspire new ideas, new forms of collaboration, novel tools, and most of all new kinds of learning.  We’re thrilled to be partnering with the MacArthur Foundation in enabling these wonderfully creative learning possibilities. 

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by Douglas Thomas and Yasmin Kafai

Virtual worlds are experiencing incredible growth among youth, with a host of worlds having populations well into the millions. Over the next few years, we expect to see a dramatic increase in both the number of virtual worlds for youth and a significant increase in that age group’s participation in them. Because these spaces provide large scale social environments, they are often used as resources for peer networking and information sharing as well as a site of identity formation and exploration. This project aims to understand how tweens, an understudied but growing group of online players, approach topics pertaining to reproductive health in their online life.

Whyville, one of these virtual worlds, is an informal science site that has currently over 3.3 million registered players ages 8-16 with girls representing over 68% of Whyville participants. Our goal is to better understand the online practices of this group of tweens and to examine what kinds of resources they rely on for information about sexuality, reproductive health, and romantic relationships. This demographic is ideally suited for a project on tween reproductive health because it is a group that is prone to receiving misinformation primarily through social networks about these issues and it is a group which is difficult to reach through other venues. It is also a time period when tweens’ growing physical maturity is accompanied by an increased interest in sex and reproduction. This results in tweens exploring their curiosity about sex through talking, reading, and flirting with others. Virtual worlds such as Whyville serve here as a digital public for this exchange, perhaps because of the anonymity of chat and the perceived absence of adults. An interest in romantic relationships, also called pairing off, often accompanies these interactions. Based on online and offline observations of hundreds of tweens over several months, we will examine concerns about these issues discussed by the tweens themselves. 

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From June and July we bring you Sandra Day O’Connor, Digital Privacy, many extraordinary conferences, and more. Enjoy.

1. Logic+Emotion: Learning By Doing - Post on John Seely Brown‘s talk at the Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference held at the end of May.
2. Sandra Day O’Connor’s Plan for Joystick Justice. From The New York Times Bits Blog, discusses the Our Courts project and her address at last month’s Games for Change Conference.
3. CCDP: Computers & Composition Digital Press. New press committed to digital literacy and scholarship.
4. In virtual worlds, child avatars need protecting. From the Los Angeles Times, discusses the work of Professor Yasmin Kafai in Whyville.

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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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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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A musician and sound engineer who is head of technology at one of the major technology universities is in an intense conversation about cognition and information flows with an English teacher, a director of a humanities institute, a computer programmer, and a media arts student. The setting is an art gallery where a dj live-mixes ‘80s music and art cascades off the walls (literally, a gorgeous videoscape of a waterfall). A lovely Medievalist in a pale paisley scarf walks into the conversation and soon the media flows and migrations we’re discussing are happening in the twelfth century, not the twenty-first.  Someone else nearby is laughing about the fun of playing Byeong Sam Jeon’s laptop drums in the telematic drum circle and another person says they didn’t like the virtual member of the circle going so hard on the snare drums, disrupting the rhythms and making it hard to collaborate musically. And we haven’t even seen or heard the musical pogo-stickers yet! 

This is happening at the reception after Day 1 of the HASTAC conference, TechnoTravels:  HASTAC on the Move. 

As with the first HASTAC conference, HASTAC 2008 was a mix of demos, keynote addresses, and papers plus lightning-talks and performances.  There was even a three-hour bus tour from UC-Irvine to UCLA (the two sites of the conference) in which historian Norman Klein told of the migratory, technological, economic, and social history of the suburbs and the city, with a detour through Long Beach, the second largest port in the U.S.  Education and social issues were also everywhere.  One of my favorite conversations was with Allison Clark, of the seedbed initiative at University of Illinois, who has been researching the erasure of the term “digital divide” from government documents.  Has the digital divide itself truly been eradicated-or only the term?  That is the research project she hopes to embark upon next, and HASTAC will be involved.

The point: what an inspiration to be able to step out of the silos of academe, the discourses within discourses, and spend three days imagining the many ways of learning and contributing to those ways even as we are being inspired by them. 

Curtis Wong, in a preview of the new World Wide Telescope, emphasized that it is not just about the science but the stories we tell about the science.  The World Wide Telescope allows anyone to make a story through the solar systems and tell that story on the interactive interface.  Caren Kaplan asked in the audience if one story you could tell about the skies was militaristic.  Remember the “Star Wars” of the Reagan Era, she asked?  Caren and I talked later about how intriguing it would be to teach a course using the World Wide Telescope and having students add that recent social and military history to the inspiring images of the endless sky.

John Seely Brown said in the video shown by Curtis Wong that “awe” was what he felt when he toured the World Wide Telescope with Curtis. Later, when I talked with Curtis, we talked about how all education, on any level, has to be about that inspiring of curiosity that, in a word, is “awe.” When we think of our best teachers, we never think of the ones who trained us on how to achieve the best percentages for this or that kind of multiple choice test, on how you second guess a test to get the best score. We remember the ones who inspired us to think creatively and critically, to engage the world with insatiable curiosity.  We remember those teachers (inside the classroom and out) who inspired us to want to know all we could about the world, who inspired us to awe.

HASTAC 2008 felt inspiring in that way and critical thinking, deep engagement, and testing and questioning of technology and its role in our society were crucial to that sense of “awe.” Creativity and critical thinking go together in HASTAC.  We believe one reason to be an educator is to teach critical skills so our students can separate chicanery from inspiration, cheap flash from real brilliance. Critical thinking, in other words, is the opposite of a knee-jerk cynicism.

Technotravels, telemobility. What a trip! (Pun intended.) Thank you, organizers of HASTAC 2008.  For those of you who weren’t able to attend, you can catch some of the flavor from the various blogs and photos posted during the conference, all available at http://www.hastac.org.

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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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From the month of May we bring you Henry Jenkins attending a Harry Potter fandom dance party in teen second life, a fabulous new site from the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement at the University of Washington, and a podcast with Tara McPherson, co-editor of the new International Journal of Learning and Media, on multimodal publishing, and much much more. Enjoy.

1. Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Dumbledore for a Day: The Things You Can Do in Second Life
2. Connie Flanagin‘s recent interview on C-Span about “The Youth Vote”
3. CNI Podcast: Expanding the Scholarly Imagination: Vectors and Multimodal Publishing - An Interview with Tara McPherson
4. Online game teaches immigrant kids about rights of due process on Boing Boing
5. Wired Campus: A Sociologist Says Students Aren’t So Web-Wise After All - Eszter Hargittai in the Chronicle of Higher Education
6. Global Kids’ blog post about their work with kids in juvenile detention
7. John Palfrey on Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, in the MacArthur Foundation/ MIT Press Series
8. John Palfrey on Learning Race and Ethnicity, in the MacArthur Foundation/MIT Press Series
9. Lucy Bernholz from Blueprint Research & Design on Game Changers on The Huffington Post
10. Engaged Youth, a new site from the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement at University of Washington