« Tené Gray: Artists as Teachers | Josh Fouts on Foreign Policy 2.0: Building Vibrant Communities Across Techno-Cultures »
Thursday 1st November 2007 10:00 am
Kim Gomez: Documenting 21st Century Learning
Concluding our series on the Digital Youth Network, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago chronicles the research component of the project.
Questions of digital literacy need to move beyond access and use. Teachers, designers, and researchers must examine the conditions in which students become critical consumers and producers of digital media technologies. This post chronicles the research effort around a program aimed at creating 21st century learners, The Digital Youth Network.This entry outlines the research project and previews some lines of inquiry.
The research revolves around an in school and after school program that offers classes, workshops, and other spaces for skill development for Chicago public school students. Students learn how to use a number of digital tools related to game design and movie production as they produce their own work.
The research hinges on the exploration of four questions:
- Under what conditions do new media design projects lead to a diversification and enrichment of students’ learning ecologies across school, home, and community settings?
- What 21st century capacities are nurtured through new media design projects and how can we assess these? and
- How do design projects support students’ current and future identities as creators, authors, and critiques of new media?
- What design principles can be derived that might be shared with other sites?
After a year of intensive data collection including surveys, interviews, and observations, analysis is preliminary but some early findings point to the importance of commercially produced artifacts as scaffolds for student learning. This occurred during all phases of work from conception (e.g., using Star Wars characters to create a narrative for a video game) to presentation (e.g., relying on the shared knowledge of the Star Wars mythology to communicate with video game users). Program mentors encouraged the use of such media and students also created openings for using these products. These artifacts helped students develop depth of software knowledge. Skill breadth and depth is just one of the lines of research we will follow in the coming year.
Editor’s Note: See the series index for more conversation about the Digital Youth Network.
Category: Unexpected
Like this post?
- Email this page using tell-a-friend, or
- Save it with one of these social bookmarking tools:
, or - View author profile for Kim Gomez.
