Elizabeth Bagley: Consequential Digital Identities
Filed at 8:00 am on April 10, 2008 in Civic Engagement, Credibility, Games, Identity, Digital Divide • Leave a comment
How can digital media help provide pro-social roles for young people? A researcher at the University of Wisconsin reflects on the recent AERA conference and explores how digital media is giving youth the chance to try on different identities through meaningful production and authorship.
Trying on different identities via new media was hot at this year’s AERA conference. Elisabeth Soep spoke about her work with Youth Radio. Participants learn the basics of broadcasting, and in the process, they explore identity through authorship of new media stories for local and national outlets. What is especially powerful about Youth Radio is that young people have a specific role from which they can complete consequential tasks and explore new identities. Instead of merely writing a news piece for a grade in social studies class, the Youth Radio journalists write pieces that are broadcast on local and national media outlets. Their writing becomes consequential to a larger community, affecting people outside of their school and reinforcing a new way of being for the journalists themselves. Erica Halverson and Damiana Gibbons discussed their collaboration with Reel Works Teen Filmmaking. In the class Reel Impact, teen filmmakers work with mentors and learn how to bring their stories to new audiences through broadcast, web-cast, film festivals and community screenings.
Designing such consequential identities for young people to try on is also an important part of my own work on the epistemic game Urban Science. In Urban Science, players role play as urban planners redesigning their city. Through the process of creating land-use plans and justifying their decisions, players explore what it’s like to enact a professional identity with responsibilities to represent a diverse community, while also gaining a new perspective on their own interests in that community. As in Youth Radio, these identity explorations then become consequential when players present revised plans to local planning officials and the mayor. Through projects like Urban Science, Youth Radio, and Reel Works, we can take up the challenge of providing pro-social roles for kids that let them use digital tools to produce meaningful work for an exterior audience-to let kids try on realistic, positive and consequential digital identities. 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.
Next: Aran Nulty: New Media Technologies and Student Learning > >
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