Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.10.08 | This was my first time at AERA, and it was quite an eye-opening experience. I went to two sessions: Can Computer Games Improve Student Learning? and Stories of Mathematics Instruction, Rich Media Technologies, and Their Uses to Understand and Improve Teaching. Together, these sessions made a strong argument that technological tools shouldn’t be what students learn, but rather be a central part of how they learn.

Both sessions presented work in math education. The first included work with a computer game, Math Pursuits, developed to improve middle school students’ math learning. In the second session, graduate students presented posters on their work with Dr. Patricio Herbst, who coordinates a study to help math teachers learn to analyze teaching moments using a computer simulation.

These projects were both about using technology to improve mathematics education, but their foci were different. Seeing how technological tools are being incorporated into math education in such different ways and at different levels made me realize that education is beginning to mirror today’s world, in which new technologies, rather than being their own isolated domain, are part of the infrastructure of all domains of knowledge.

My own research on the epistemic game Digital Zoo similarly looks at how the computer technology is a tool to achieve a larger end: a way to let players use information and skills that professionals in today’s world use. In Digital Zoo, as in Math Pursuits and in Stories of Math Instruction, the focus is not on learning how to use the software, but rather on using the software to learn how to create professional products that they would not otherwise be able to make. It is exciting to see the ways in which computers are becoming a foundational part of how education is designed. These sessions reminded me, though, that schools have some catching up to do. If we want to prepare students to be technologically fluent in the modern world, we need education to be at the forefront of the use of innovative technologies. Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of reflections on the AERA conference from members of the Epistemic Games Group at the University of Wisconsin. See the series index post here.