Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.23.10 | Those who worry kids are spending more time playing video games than reading may be thrilled to hear about a new partnership to bring great literature to online spaces.

The Great Books Foundation is partnering with the virtual world of Whyville to create a new reading room for middle school students. 

Whyville has more than 5.8 million registered “citizens” age 8 to 15. These teens and pre-teens learn and play together in communities complete with their own elected officials, newspaper and destinations, including beaches and museums. Spotlight readers may remember Whyville’s efforts to teach kids about fragile ocean ecosystems or their plans to help kids design games around social issues.

Visitors to Whyville’s Great Books Roundhouse, which is set to open in January of 2011, will be able to read stories, participate in online discussions with other students, and engage in story-inspired creative activities such as costume design and themed parties.

The Roundhouse will be based on “shared inquiry,” a discussion method designed by the Great Books Foundation as a way to help young readers gain understanding of a text by sharing responses and insights with their peers.

Teachers will be able to use Roundhouse activities to supplement their language arts curricula. They will also be able to coordinate live discussions with other classrooms around the globe using the virtual space.

Online communities like Whyville may have a role to play in helping educators find new ways to bring literature alive for today’s young readers. (For more on how writing and reading are changing shape in the digital world, see Spotlight’s feature story on the future of the book).

“As a virtual world for learning, we are particularly excited about this partnership because it allows us, together, to explore how the very new learning technology of Whyville can engage young learners in the world’s great literature both in and out of the classroom,” James Bower, Whyville’s founder, told Spotlight.

Plus: Turns out kids may actually be doing a lot of reading while playing online games, according to new research being done at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

A new report, “Reading in the Context of Online Games,” (pdf) finds that kids are doing quite a bit of reading—mostly technical instructions and resources—in conjunction with their online game play. But kids are also reading while looking at fan sites and as part of “modding” - modifying games to make new versions.

According to the report, this reading is not easy, ranking somewhere between Sports Illustrated and Time Magazine in difficulty. It’s a good bridge to classroom learning because the vocabulary found in these technical texts is often on par with classroom vocabulary.

In a comparison of kids reading video games and school texts, the study’s authors, Constance Steinkuehler, Catherine Compton-Lilly, and Elizabeth King, find that the kids performed equally on each text. That is, the kids read and comprehended the video game instructions as well as they did classroom textbooks. And among one struggling reader and one strong reader, the struggling reader actually did better in comprehending the video game material, probably, they speculate, because he was so interested in the material.