Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.6.09 | MacArthur grantee Brigid Barron sits down with Informal Science for a wide-ranging interview on looking for learning in unexpected places.

MacArthur grantee Brigid Barron sits down with Informal Science for a wide-ranging interview on looking for learning in unexpected places.

Barron is completing a three-year study of how informal and formal learning intersect in an afterschool program for middle-school students. In this interview, she talks about how digital media allow youth to learn anywhere, anytime, and what that means for teachers, parents, museums, and kids themselves.

She also discusses her work mapping the “social ecology” of learning in a child’s life—all the places, from home to school to afterschool to online games and virtual worlds, where they build on what they know. The map helps identify those sparks that ignite curiosity and set kids off on a quest to learn more.

For example, this timeline features a 13-year-old who began creating web pages and became interested in HTML. This interest led her to take classes at school in web design, industrial technology, and programming. At home, she did most of her online work. She was involved in an online art community (http://www.deviantart.com/) and participated in Myspace and Xanga. In the community, she participated in a museum-based technology design challenge and did some work for her church. She has several learning partners, including adults and peers.

“These learning timeline maps,” says Barron, “have helped us see several patterns that we are following up on in different studies.” The timelines, for example, can help researchers:

1) See where learning occurs, both in school and out, and who (parents, friends, teachers, social networks, etc.) creates the opportunities. For many children, projects take place in more than one setting. Others only do work in one place.

2) Show whether interests that are sparked at school continue informally out of school, and whether out-of-school learning leads to an elective course in school.

3) Identify learning partners and the critical role of a child’s social learning network in expertise development. It is through maps, Barron says, that they have realized just how influential a child’s social network is.

4) Compare the learning timelines of those children with more and less access at home, and identify the possible roles that other places (such as churches or community centers) can play in bridging this divide.

In her interview with Informal Science, Barron also discusses how these informal learning sites and self-directed learning can help kids form identities as creators and experts. She also discusses how the ability to collaborate and contribute thoughtfully to that collaboration is emerging as an important proficiency in the digital age.

Barron calls for parents and museums and teachers to think more broadly about their role in fostering learning. Parents might not know how to play Spore, but they do know how to become a learning broker for their child. Likewise, teachers may not know how to introduce digital media in a classroom, but they can ask a student to help them explore a virtual world or a social network together.

Visit here for the full interview.

Brigid Barron is the principal investigator of a project studying the afterschool Digital Youth Network at the Urban Education Institute in Chicago. The study, funded by MacArthur, is analyzing how the program leads young people to seek out new learning opportunities, develop the skills necessary to work in a digital environment, and support their identity development. She is on faculty at the School of Education at Stanford University and also co-leads the LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments), which works to deepen scientific understanding of social aspects of learning. A paper that reports the research on parent roles in learning will appear this summer in the International Journal of Learning and Media.