Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.11.08 | Previous to my life here at UW-Madison as a graduate student and researcher, I lived in New York for eight years and helped run an arts-education non-profit organization called the DreamYard Project. As a result, AERA this year was a bit of a homecoming for me. While visiting old friends from DreamYard competed with the happenings at AERA, in some ways the mish-mash of worlds made AERA all the more poignant.

DreamYard places teaching-artists in public schools in the Bronx for yearlong residencies, where they collaborate with classroom teachers to co-design, co-plan, and co-teach art projects that support the teachers’ curricula. But the true power of DreamYard is that beyond the arts and curricular skills and knowledge, students develop the particular values of the artistic community that they create in their classroom. For example, when a social studies classroom is transformed into an art studio, the students learn the values of respecting one’s tools. When an English classroom becomes a theater company, the students learn the value of trusting and listening to each other. The values are what make the skills and knowledge usable. In a rapidly developing technological world, it follows that ethical norms are also changing.

So I was glad to see that ethical issues were on the agenda at AERA. One session I attended, Making Choices with Digital Media, run by researchers from the GoodPlay Project and Project New Media Literacies, was focused on complicated issues of privacy, ownership, authorship, creation, and sharing. While many young people have breathtaking capabilities within the virtual world, schools have been pitifully slow to equip kids with values that will help them make decisions in that world. It is heartening that the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning initiative is taking on that issue.

The issue of values even came up in my own session at the conference. Our session on epistemic games looked at a model of learning based on professional practices. In epistemic games learning is not a simple picking up of unrelated skills and knowledge. These skills and knowledge are bound to particular values (and identities and epistemologies) which combine together to create a way of seeing the world and solving problems in it. During the question-and-answer period, one audience member-a pretty senior scholar in the field-pressed for more robust data that showed the impact of the games we design on students in schools. Happily for us graduate students, another respected scholar in the audience pointed out that looking to measure how epistemic games impact students in school is rather beside the point. Epistemic games aim to prepare young people for life. Just as the art skills and knowledge are tied to associated values in DreamYard’s residencies, professional skills and knowledge are bound to the particular values of the profession upon which the epistemic game is modeled.

A few days later, visiting a classroom in one of the schools I used to work with on 172nd street in the Bronx, found myself thinking about these conversations at AERA. The society in which these particular young people live is anything but smooth. It has serrated edges, and their schools are not doing a very good job of helping them navigate through it.

As the world becomes more digital, these young people in the Bronx are in ever greater danger of being left even further behind. Their schools are not teaching them high tech skills, to be sure. But equally important, schools today aren’t teaching kids the values of the digital age.

I’m proud to be associated with the Macarthur initiative, because we’re not looking at how to raise test scores, but rather at how we can give kids the skills, knowledge, and the values they need to navigate an ever-changing, digital society.

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. For more discussion of ethics and values in the digital age check back next week when Spotlight runs posts from the unique collaboration between Harvard’s GoodPlay Project and MIT’s Project New Media Literacies mentioned above.