Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.1.09 | Constance Steinkuehler believes World of Warcraft shadow priests may have something to teach us about how to make mathematical arguments.

Steinkuehler and her colleagues have been studying the kinds of learning that young people do outside of the classroom, specifically in playing massive multiplayer online games, and how it intersects or fails to with more formal forms of education.

In a recent post on her blog, Steinkuehler presents her work with Caroline Williams about what they found when they looked more closely at a previous analysis of World of Warcraft discussion forum posts.

In their analysis, Math as Narrative in WoW Forum Discussions, the researchers found that one gamer used mathematical reasoning to prove his point not in the form of a standard proof, but rather in the form of a story. They use this example to help illustrate the fluid nature of academic genres that traditionally are kept very separate, in this case - a blend of math with narrative.

Another trait of the academic tradition is its slow pace in disseminating findings. Therefore, it may take some time for this work to find it’s way into a major journal so scholars doing similar work can build on it.

But in a new paper, games researcher James Paul Gee says that we needn’t wait that long.

In New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and “Worked Examples” as One Way Forward, Gee argues that through more informal and immediate sharing and discussion of pieces of work like Steinkuehler’s, scholars can begin to shape the emerging field of digital media and learning with research going on now.

Gee proposes sharing this kind of “worked example” in a website where pieces of work large or small can be transformed, extended and collaborated on and in this way build the shared elements of a new field. 

In such a scenario, commentary on the example—the working of it—could initially come from the author, but would then engender public debate and annotation from others. The examples, he argues, need not be “big” concepts, such as whole theories. They could be one application or aspect of a method or a theory, a bit of analysis, a way of combing a handful of ideas from different disciplines. Gee suggests scholars need to be overt with one another about their assumptions, influences, and approaches.

Gee says worked examples can offer a more immediate format for members to move the work forward in this rapidly changing environment.

“Rather than wait—however long it takes—for history to tell us what the exemplars of the new area were,” Gee says.  …  “We will propose what they might look like.” After all he continues, “transformative work in new areas or old ones often shows up at the margins.”

For more examples of worked examples see the work of Steinkuehler, Gee and colleagues in the Games+Learning+Society Group at the University of Wisconsin.

Gee’s paper is part of a series of MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, published by the MIT Press. The series presents findings from current research on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. They are published openly online (as well as in print) in order to support broad dissemination and to stimulate further research in the field.