Barab and Thomas on their Project, “Learning in the 21st Century”
Filed at 4:02 pm on December 23, 2006 • Leave a comment
Douglas Thomas and Sasha Barab discuss the need and promise of their project, recently funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
Educating students for the 21st century requires us to think beyond standard, traditional pedagogical practice. As new media impacts almost every aspect of students’ lives, our institutions need to adjust and integrate digital learning into educational experiences. We need to begin taking advantage of the possibilities and potential that new media offers for education by examining how we can use technology to teach in areas that have been difficult or impossible to address in the traditional classroom. “Learning in the 21st Century” does just that, by placing students inside a virtual world to help them learn about issues of science, technology and ethics, raising issues which have been exceedingly difficult to teach in brick and mortar classrooms.
Building on the existing Quest Atlantis multi-user virtual environment platform (http://QuestAtlantis.org), this project allows students to interact and collaborate within a fictional, virtual world. Students participate in ethical decision making, exploring the world and making choices. Then, students actually experience alternative options and see consequences unfold with real and immediate impact on virtual characters in the game. Guided by teachers, with supplemental classroom discussion and reading material, students confront a series of ethical dilemmas in which they are required to make choices which open up or close off possibilities for future actions.
The multi-user environment will feature non-player characters and interactive narratives that position children as actors in stories in which they and their peers are protagonists. Students will be able to “level up” on important citizenship values (e.g., environmental awareness, social responsibility, diversity affirmation) providing a new kind of game that entertains and educates, helping advance our understanding of how we can use simulated worlds to help in the formation of knowledgeable, responsible, and empathetic adults.
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