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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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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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By David Birchfield

In a series of recent pilot studies, my colleagues and I compared learning gains in SMALLab with those in a regular classroom among 72 at-risk ninth graders in earth science and chemistry classes. Results show that students made stronger gains in SMALLab.

SMALLab is a mixed-reality platform for learning. It is grounded in the belief that learning is effective when it is embodied (that is, engaging the body and mind in learning), multimodal (visual, sonic, kinesthetic), and collaborative. 

Like the Wii, SMALLab moves students beyond the desktop and into a hybrid physical-digital environment.  Students and teachers interact with digital elements via full body movements and gestures in real 3D space.

See it in action in this video at right.

To test the effectiveness of this approach, we divided students into two groups in a wait-list control design.  We wanted to compare achievement during SMALLab learning against regular classroom instruction and also better understand how SMALLab learning fits with existing curriculum. 

Group 1 received three days of regular classroom instruction followed by three days of SMALLab learning. Group 2 received three days of SMALLab followed by three days of regular instruction. Both groups completed the same paper/pencil test about geological evolution at the mid-point in the study and again at the end. We compared the mean scores for both groups. 

The results showed that students in both groups made significantly greater gains during SMALLab learning than during regular instruction. For example, the 34 students in group 1 gained 3.6 points (effect size = 0.38; statistically significant) after the regular instruction but 19.4 points (effect size = 1.34; highly significant) after the SMALLab participation.  The 37 students in group 2 gained 18.0 points (effect size = 1.44, highly significant) after SMALLab, but declined 1.6 points (effect size = -0.09; not significant) after regular instruction.

In a second, similar study, we compared SMALLab learning against a hands-on lab activity for chemistry.  The results held. Students made greater gains (again, statistically significant) in SMALLab than in the lab/lecture control condition.

Although these preliminary findings are promising, further research awaits before we can generalize beyond the current population.  Nonetheless, we are encouraged that the innovative nature of SMALLab learning can drive substantial improvements in student achievement within a school context.

The Digital Media and Learning grant to SMALLab and the Institute of Play funds a partnership between the EMLearning project and researchers and educators at the Institute of Play in New York City led by grantee Katie Salen. Gaming SMALLab unites work in mixed-reality learning with the Institute of Play’s work in games and learning. For more see http://ame2.asu.edu/projects/emlearning.

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Edutopia’s Digital Generation Project is the culmination of a year-long investigation into the media-rich, networked lives of today’s digital generation. Youth video portraits aim to help educators and parents understand how digital media are changing how this generation of young people “create, collaborate and teach.”

In addition to the biographical video portraits, visitors to the project’s website can explore links to each student’s games, projects, websites and video creations.

The excitement of the youth, and their ease in navigating their digital worlds, not to mention what and how they are learning, are truly impressive—and inspiring. 

• Eleven-year-old Cameron, for example, produces and edits music videos, short documentaries, and school announcements at home, at school, and on the road with his hockey team. He also films his own hockey swing, slows it down, and analyzes it.
• Thirteen-year-old Dylan collaborates with students from all over the world to make websites.
• Eighteen-year-old Luis teaches Lego Robotics to kids and helps his parents learn computer skills.
• Nafiza Akter, featured here, is a graduate of Global Kids’ Online Leadership Program, supported by the MacArthur Foundation. Nafiza works with other kids to make animated films on pressing social issues using Teen Second Life. Nafiza blogged about her work with Global Kids on Spotlight last year.
• Jalen Jackson is a participant in the Digital Youth Network afterschool program, also supported by the MacArthur Foundation. Jalen and his friends use the social networking site Remix World to critique their work before publishing on YouTube. Jalen also blogged on Spotlight last year.

Content also includes interviews with teachers, administrators, and parents who address the challenges and rewards educators face while striving to keep pace and support these digital learners. Interviews with “big thinkers” help frame the discussion. Visitors to the project’s website can watch MacArthur Grantees Mimi Ito, Henry Jenkins, Katie Salen, James Paul Gee, Howard Gardner and other leaders in the field discuss learning in the digital age. “We wonder why, when kids leave the classroom environment, they run home and jump on these new media,” says Sasha Barab, a professor of learning and cognitive science at Indiana University and a MacArthur grantee. “But online, they have agency. They have consequentiality. They have people responding to what they’re doing.” To hear more sign up to attend the upcoming webinar “Engaging the Digital Generation.” 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. ]]> 2009-05-29T21:18:00+00:00 http://spotlight.macfound.org/main/entry/webinar_digital_generation/ http://spotlight.macfound.org/main/entry/webinar_digital_generation/#When:23:21:00Z Teacher Vicki Davis and researcher Nichole Pinkard will be presenters at the upcoming Edutopia webinar on June 4th.

Teacher Vicki Davis and researcher Nichole Pinkard will be presenters at the upcoming Edutopia webinar on June 4th.

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Today’s students use digital media in ways hardly imaginable just a few years ago, revolutionizing how kids create, collaborate and teach. Join Edutopia for a stimulating discussion with innovative educators, parents, and students from the Digital Generation Project as they share practical tools and strategies for engaging the digital learner.

UPDATE (6/1/09): Spotlight readers can now attend the webinar at no cost by using this link to register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/837901689

This webinar is part of Edutopia’s Digital Generation Project produced with support from MacArthur. Edutopia, an initiative of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, works to spread the word about ideal, interactive learning environments and enables others to adapt these successes locally. Edutopia.org archives best practices, from classroom tips to recommendations for district wide change.

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The Obama administration continues its commitment to open government through digital media via in its “historic call to action” of citizens to take part in “an unprecedented process for public engagement in policymaking,” according to a White House press release.

As he did during his campaign, Obama and his administration are delivering online content in new ways, recognizing that technology changes how and where people consume information. In this newest effort, they are using digital media to ensure that government remains transparent, participatory, and collaborative (sounds surprisingly similar to key elements of new media literacies).

“In a sea change from conventional practice,” the White House announced, “we are not asking for comments on already-finished set of draft recommendations, but are seeking fresh ideas from you early in the process of creating recommendations.”

An online, collaborative brainstorming session kicked off May 21, 2009, for suggesting ideas on open government. The session closes May 28.

Some sample questions for the brainstorming session include:

• What strategies might be employed to adopt greater use of Web 2.0 in agencies?
• What is the best way to change the culture of government to embrace collaboration?
• What performance measures are necessary to determine the effectiveness of open government policies?
• What alternative models exist to improve the quality of decision-making and increase opportunities for citizen participation?

June 3, the most compelling ideas will be fleshed out on a weblog in an open discussion. June 15, participants can contribute to a wiki to collaboratively draft recommendations. DEMOCRATIZING DATA In addition to these efforts, the federal CIO Council is creating data.gov, which will open up the workings of government by making economic, health care, environmental, and other government information available on a single website, allowing the public to access raw data and transform it in innovative ways. Data sets collected by government, such as the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), are available in easily accessible formats for download and analysis. The site also provides rich supplemental information on the data set, such as its statistical details (sample size, methodology, nonresponse adjustment, weighting, etc.), frequency of collection, instruments, unit of analysis, and much more.  The site provides data extraction tools and various widgets to make managing the data easier. As the press release says, “The Data.gov catalog will allow the American people to find, use, and repackage data held and generated by the government, which we hope will result in citizen feedback and new ideas.” The site is unveiling a limited number of data sets but is asking for votes on which other sets it should make available. ]]> 2009-05-25T18:32:00+00:00 http://spotlight.macfound.org/main/entry/reconciling_media_sensation/ http://spotlight.macfound.org/main/entry/reconciling_media_sensation/#When:18:38:00Z Grantee Eszter Hargittai counters the claim that Facebook users have lower grades using data from her recent study.

Grantee Eszter Hargittai counters the claim that Facebook users have lower grades using data from her recent study.

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The recent press barrage about a supposed link between Facebook use and lower grades among college students came as a surprise to grantee Eszter Hargittai, who is studying how college students use social networking and other internet sites.

As she wrote on her blog, those stories ran counter to what she was finding in her study of college students’ use of social networking sites. She posted a riposte here.

As only social networking sites can do, she quickly found herself connected to several colleagues, with an invitation to coauthor (with Josh Pasek at Stanford and eian more at University of Pennsylvania)  a response in First Monday, an online peer-reviewed journal.

The article is called, Facebook and Academic Performance: Reconciling a Media Sensation with Data.

Here’s the abstract:

A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school (Karpinski, 2009). The report quickly became a media sensation and was picked up by hundreds of news outlets in a matter of days. However, the results were based on correlational data in a draft manuscript that had not been published, or even considered for publication. This paper attempts to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14- to 22-year-olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14-23. In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non-users.

For the full article, go here.