« Connected Reflections: Learning, Meaning, and Civic Engagement in the Digital Age | Reflections on AERA: Observations on learning, games, democracy, identity and education »

Friday 4th April 2008 10:16 am

Craig Wacker: Games, Digital Literacies and the Future of Learning Environments

Continuing our series on the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting last week, MacArthur Program Officer Craig Wacker reflects on day two of the Digital Media and Learning panels.

“Look through the eye candy,” argues Jim Gee, and you will see the underlying structures, tools, and affordances of games.  Players and game designers know this, of course, since understanding the system or systems at work in a game is the key to success. For example, the makers of the popular game Portal, says Gee, note that their product is “designed to change the way players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment.” Gee, who served as a discussant during the Epistemic Games panel, argues that to the extent games teach users to understand possibilities, they offer new visioning tools to understand the world as it is and as it could be.  These tools, he says, are critical not only to learning, but to solving many of humanity’s most pressing problems, including shortages in food, fuel and water.

The notion of possibility is perhaps the most compelling aspect of new media, yet some maintain that it is not an easy fit with traditional approaches to education, especially ones that rely on transfer of knowledge through a curriculum rather than promotion of knowledge seeking.  As Erica Halverson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison put it during the Digital Literacies and the Future of Schools panel, some in education “fear variation” and are simply looking for “what works.” This approach stands in contrast to what Halverson terms participatory media spaces—new, non-hierarchical learning environments that allow young people to collaborate in the context of diverse tools, venues, and products.  Yet Halverson recognizes the need to map participatory literacy to more traditional notions of literacy, a goal that underscores the challenge of integrating new media with school-based learning.

According to Katie Salen, participatory media spaces are powerful in that they connect, rather than replace, various concepts of literacy.  Salen, who also participated in the Digital Literacies panel, is employing game design as a mechanism for creating a new school that exploits four drivers of change—sociability of learning, networks of information, participatory practices, and games—to help children grow in traditional numeracy and language literacy as well as in the ability to collaborate, create, seek information and understand complex, data-rich environments.

Salen’s work, which is perhaps the most ambitious effort in the country to re-imagine schools as a bridging space between learning environments, also recognizes the inherent importance of schools.  And as Louis Gomez said during the Digital Literacies panel, “schools aren’t going anywhere.” Yet if schools are but one node in a world of 24/7 learning opportunities, how should we understand the future of learning that takes place outside of the education system?  According to Doug Thomas, the large-scale social systems that function within massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft and virtual worlds like Second Life offer part of the answer.  Thomas, who presented during the Games and Participation-Why Games Matter to Educators panel, argues that these systems, which allow individuals a sense of physical co-presence as they join communities and pursue common interests, blur the lines between competencies demonstrated “inside” the game and “outside” in the physical world since a wide array of skills are used in both environments and often at the same time.  In the context of education, argues Thomas, these new spaces may yield a “networked imagination” that combines the social elements of new media with the visioning of the gamespace to yield a persistent, innovative and evolving space for learning. 

Editor’s Note: For a complete list of the Digital Media and Learning panels at AERA click here. Also see posts from Connie Yowell and Ben Stokes from earlier this week. 

Category:

Tags:

Comments