New Media Technologies and Student Learning
Reblogged from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning blog:
This was my first time at AERA, and it was quite an eye-opening experience.
I went to two sessions: Can Computer Games Improve Student Learning? and Stories of Mathematics Instruction, Rich Media Technologies, and Their Uses to Understand and Improve Teaching that together made a strong argument that technological tools shouldn’t be what students learn, rather they are a central part of how students learn. Continue reading »
Reblogged: Navigating Digital Society
Reblogged from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning blog:
Previous to my life here at UW-Madison as a graduate student and researcher, I lived in New York for eight years and helped run an arts-education non-profit organization called the DreamYard Project. As a result, AERA this year was a bit of a homecoming for me. While visiting old friends from DreamYard competed with the happenings at AERA, in some ways the mish-mash of worlds made AERA all the more poignant.
DreamYard places teaching-artists in public schools in the Bronx for yearlong residencies, where they collaborate with classroom teachers to co-design, co-plan, and co-teach art projects that support the teachers’ curricula. But the true power of DreamYard is that beyond the arts and curricular skills and knowledge, students develop the particular values of the artistic community that they create in their classroom. For example, when a social studies classroom is transformed into an art studio, the students learn the values of respecting one’s tools. When an English classroom becomes a theater company, the students learn the value of trusting and listening to each other. The values are what make the skills and knowledge usable. In a rapidly developing technological world, it follows that ethical norms are also changing.
Reblogged: Consequential Identities
Reblogged from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning blog:
Trying on different identities via new media was hot at this year’s AERA conference. Elisabeth Soep spoke about her work with Youth Radio. Participants learn the basics of broadcasting, and in the process, they explore identity through authorship of new media stories for local and national outlets. What is especially powerful about Youth Radio is that young people have a specific role from which they can complete consequential tasks and explore new identities. Instead of merely writing a news piece for a grade in social studies class, the Youth Radio journalists write pieces that are broadcast on local and national media outlets. Their writing becomes consequential to a larger community, affecting people outside of their school and reinforcing a new way of being for the journalists themselves. Continue reading »
Reblogged: Games, Diversity, and Democracy
Reblogged from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning blog:
In the frequently rancorous debates of high-stakes politics, it’s easy to think – why shouldn’t they just shut up? – and to forget just how important discussion with people who disagree can be. At AERA last month Diana Hess, an associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provided a useful reminder, sharing her latest work studying high school students engaged in ‘deliberative democracy.’ As Mansbridge argues, ‘Democracy involves public discussion of common problems, not just a silent counting of individual hands. And …, the discussion can some times lead the participants to see their own stake in the broader interests of the community. … Thus a ‘deliberative democracy’ does not simply register preferences that individuals already have; it encourages citizens to think about their interests differently.’
Continue reading »
David Williamson Shaffer on Fox News
David took some time out from attending the American Educational Research Association conference in New York City to do a brief spot on Fox News. He closes the segment with advice for parents that those of you who have read How Computer Games Help Children Learn will recognize: it’s important to play and talk about computer games with your children, because it’s in those reflective conversations that some of the most important learning happens. You can see the Fox News segment here.
Watch for the interesting shots from video games and simulations in the background, and the “creattive” spelling in the graphics–all of which only points out that innovative professionals need basic skills too. Or perhaps just that everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
