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Thursday 3rd April 2008 5:41 pm
Connected Reflections: Learning, Meaning, and Civic Engagement in the Digital Age
Four provocative ideas from a recent AERA panel are highlighted by MacArthur Program Officer Benjamin Stokes, who connects each idea to the profile of a leading thinker on this website.
Last week, New York played host to almost 16,000 scholars at the 89th annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Against the backdrop of this enormous gathering of educational scholars, there was a distinctive cohort of grantees of the MacArthur Foundation working on Digital Media and Learning, who presented at more than 15 distinct panels.
One of these panels matched well with this year’s AERA thematic focus on civic engagement. Entitled “Learning, Meaning, and Civic Engagement in the Digital Age,” the panel was overseen by MacArthur’s own Connie Yowell. Below I have highlighted four ideas that struck me as particularly provocative:
(1) Howard Gardner noted that achieving mastery in disciplines (such as chess) typically took 10 years—but these days mastery is often accomplished in half the time. His question: is digital media responsible for much of the decrease in the number of years needed to master a discipline?
(2) Nichole Pinkard emphasized that schools are increasingly just one node in a network of learning that includes parents, libraries, and after-school programs. One implication she raised is that today’s teacher professional development may need to focus increasingly on more than just teachers.
(3) James Paul Gee raised the importance of systems thinking in solving the major problems confronting the modern world. Curiously, in discussing the learning power of digital media, James positioned systems thinking as an approach which is in opposition to that of traditional academic disciplines. One can’t help but wonder if this means that the evaluation of learning in digital media should look beyond the yardsticks of traditional disciplines.
(4) Henry Jenkins made a bold historical assertion: that the shift toward participatory learning in education may be as difficult and profound as that of multiculturalism. If the comparison holds, what can we fairly assume about the kind of political struggle that lies ahead around a substantive adoption of digital media into traditional educational institutions?
Finally, I was particularly impressed with the power of the “civics" theme in bringing the panel’s diverse experts into deep dialog. I suspect that this power of civics is about more than the election year immersion of the panelists. Perhaps participatory media, when considered from a learning perspective, reveals more in common with participatory democracy than with most classrooms. As we consider the role of participatory media in learning and media, we may find ourselves increasingly asking questions using the language and metaphors of civics.
Editor’s Note: For a complete list of the Digital Media and Learning panels at AERA click here. See additional AERA posts this week from Connie Yowell and Craig Wacker.
Category: Civic-Engagement, Ecology-of-Games, Unexpected
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