Spotlight MacArthur Foundation

Jonathan Fanton: New Grants this Summer

Filed at 7:00 am on July 21, 2008 in Civic Engagement, Credibility, Games, Identity, Digital Divide

In June, our board met and approved a set of grants in our Digital Media and Learning portfolio.  Following on our previous announcement of grants, this was the seventh such quarterly round since we announced in October of 2006 this program and blog.  Several of the new projects examine a question central to our program -  how, if at all, might learning environments change as a result of digital media?  Support to Professor David Birchfield at Arizona State University will enable he and his colleagues to develop a flexible, interactive, mixed-reality (i.e., both virtual and physical) learning environment called Smallab (Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab) that may represent the classroom of the future.  Arizona State University is also home to Our Courts, a new project on civic engagement.  In partnership with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Professor James Paul Gee and his ASU team are integrating social networks, virtual worlds, and games to engage youth in social studies, civics and history as they deepen their understanding of the role and importance of the judiciary in our democracy.

I am also pleased to announce that the Foundation is renewing support for the open-call Competition in Digital Media and Learning.  Under the leadership of HASTAC, two more years of the competition will ensure that dozens of new and promising digital media and learning projects are supported from a wide pool of national and international applicants.  HASTAC, led by David Theo Goldberg and Cathy Davidson, expects to publish details on the next call by mid-August at http://dmlcompetition.net.

To continue the Foundation’s exploration into the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds, a grant was awarded to Professor Doug Thomas and his team at the University of Southern California.  Building on their work over the past year, the team will investigate how philanthropic institutions can advance the public good and democratic engagement through a variety of activities in virtual worlds including events, discussions, and competitions.  Additionally, Professor Thomas’s research team will investigate how public health information can be communicated and understood through virtual worlds like Whyville.

Finally, to continue to support the emerging field of digital media and learning, two projects will advance the sharing and communication of research findings and media literacy to teachers, parents and school administrators, and a third project will support convening and collaborations. Common Sense Media will engage parents and teachers in a broader discussion of the implications of the emerging research findings on digital media and learning and effective practices in media literacy.  Similarly, the Consortium for School Networking will explore strategies for engaging school administrators in discussions of the diversity of learning opportunities that are increasingly available digitally to young people and the implications of research findings.  Both of these projects will pay particular attention to balancing the new opportunities of digital media with its unintended consequences for learning and society. Finally, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will facilitate a series of conversations to build the field of digital media and learning in ways that set the stage for further developments and bring coherence to a diverse range of efforts and findings.

Over the next several weeks I invite you to join the principal investigators of these projects as they post previews of their upcoming work to this blog. We look forward to the important work to come, as well as the collaborations and research findings that continue to emerge. 

Next: David Birchfield: Gaming SMALLab > >

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