If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, , together with representatives from the and departments, to whip it into publishable shape.

The first of those ideas is understanding the long-term effects of play and learning. At DIGITEL, Mike Eisenberg spoke about toys and play as central to intellectual development. For instance, years into his architecture career, Frank Lloyd Wright continued to talk about how his play with blocks and toys – as far back as kindergarten – helped to shape his desire to become an architect. Even very simple toys can help kids project themselves into different worlds, with different constraints – blocks-as-cities, large refrigerator-boxes-as-caves, origami-as-zoo – and the worlds that kids create influence their interests years down the line. Ana Paiva spoke similarly about the projective quality of games and virtual worlds. Right now, her daughter creates imaginative stories about a glittery pink pencil which has been transformed into a magic wand that can cast spells and bring people luck. But as virtual worlds become more ubiquitous, kids will have more opportunities to create – and even realistically build out – similar kinds of fantastic stories and imaginative places through technologies like computer games, digitally-enhanced movies, and machinima.

The second big idea involves the importance of building models for learning. At AERA, I heard a group of math educators present a series of qualitative studies describing the processes of learning in several successful classrooms. In one setting, the question was what approaches helped students to better understand algebra? In another, how did a specific sort of classroom ecology help to foster productive learning? To me, though, the most interesting part of the session was the discussion, given by Ann Renninger. She pointed out that we, as education researchers, have many useful methods of thickly describing what happens in educational environments, but relatively few ways of understanding and theorizing about those happenings beyond the immediate context of that environment, this teacher’s approach, or those students’ work.

Both of these ideas got me thinking about my own work in epistemic games. When our middle-school kids come to play an epistemic game, they take on a projective identity as a journalist, or a biomechanical engineer, or an urban planner. While these identities are not fantastical, they are imaginative in that they let kids role play and act in ways that they never would have access in the real world. For example, very few kids ever get the chance to plan a city or interview a scientist about a topic of their interest in the course of their normal lives. Epistemic games give kids opportunities to create stories about themselves, their interests, and their possible future aspirations – and identities from which they can see the world in a different way.

Part of the interesting thing about all of this, though, is that letting kids step into an unfamiliar identity gives us as researchers an opportunity to build a better model of thinking and learning. We can begin to see what parts of the practices of engineers or journalists kids need to know about in order to successfully play that role – and how those things, epistemic frames, come together in at least a mostly consistent way across contexts and practices.

Young people already use web search services, wikipedia, blogs, and online news to learn about their world and complete their school assignments. When it’s easy to find thousands of hits on just about any topic – some fascinating, some irrelevant – with a simple Google search, it is not surprising that they report learning far more from the internet than they do from school, and enjoying that learning more. But are they getting accurate information from the explorations that they do on their own?

In the recent Macarthur session on games and learning, Jonathan Fanton reported that one goal of the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning project is to better understand how young people evaluate information that they find on the internet. In our work on Science.net, an epistemic game in which middle schoolers spend several weeks role-playing as science journalists and writing several stories for an online newsmagazine, we have found that our reporters begin the game feeling comfortable with the internet. They tell us about using web sources for school reports, for chatting, for playing games with their friends. They even report knowing that anyone with a webpage can publish opinions for the world to see.

The majority of them, however, don’t have a strategy for assessing the reliability of the information that they find. Here’s one typical pre-game interview response: “You never know, it’s the internet. If it’s like the first thing that pops up and then it looks pretty professional, then I’d use it…”

I wonder how much of this finding comes from the simple fact that young people don’t often need to check or even understand their sources: textbooks and teachers are the authorities, and they must be believed (even memorized!) in order to get good grades. A teenager questioning commonly-held information would likely be perceived as antagonistic in many classrooms, although the same behavior would be rewarded for a researcher developing a new theory or a doctor treating a pernicious ailment. These divisions between school and working-world occupations have led several education theorists to label most classrooms as “inauthentic” – composed of facts to memorize and “test questions” to which teachers have set responses – rather than “authentic” explorations of complex issues that may not have absolute answers.

In short, the tight strictures of state-mandated, achievement-tested knowledge don’t allow time for most teachers to delve into multiple answers (much less controversial issues) in classrooms, even when those issues are under lively debate in other settings.

Science.net players, on the other hand, role-play as reporters and thus take on clearly authentic tasks: (1) to learn about a scientific issue that is current and important, in order to (2) write a well-researched, balanced story that will help news readers form their own opinions about the issue. Along the way, they learn to do research on the internet and find credible sites that capture several different perspectives on their issue. They interview scientists for expert opinions on (for instance) stem cell research, nanotechnology, or avian flu. They learn journalism techniques – like writing in the neutral voice and sourcing all opinions – from journalists, and they come to understand why those techniques are important in writing news for public consumption.

More importantly from a media literacy standpoint, however, is that Science.net reporters become more critical consumers of the information that they encounter. In the post-game interviews, 83% of them told us that it’s important to check a source’s reliability or verify the information before using it somewhere else: “[I'd use information] from a reputable website… You have to think about why they’re giving you the information. You can’t [trust it] if it’s to sell a product or something.”

In this age of constant information and advertising, that perspective is important to everyone – not just middle school students.

One of the things we know about creative thinking is that creative thinkers these days use sophisticated tools: graphic designers use Photoshop and Illustrator, architects and engineers use CAD (Computer Aided Design) software, urban planners use geographic information systems, managers use gantt charting tools, accountants use spreadsheets, and everyone uses word processors, Web browsers, and email.

So it makes sense that to learn innovative and creative thinking, you need to use these tools and you need to learn to use them.

In my research, I look at how middle school students can become better writers by playing journalists in the game science.net. As players take on the role of cub reporters in the game, they also take on the responsibilities that go with being a journalist. And to help them do that, I designed ByLine, a software tool authentic to the practice of journalism, but custom-developed for the game.

ByLine lets players create authentic products. The tool was designed to work like other professional web-based newspaper management software, such as CoFax (developed by the Knight Ridder news organization). Through a web browser, players compile notes from online research and live interviews, write and copyedit story drafts, and ultimately get published in an authentic-looking online newspaper. In other words, players of the game can have the expressive power of real professionals, a power they discover when they can Google their own stories, which is itself a powerful motivator of performance within and after the game.

But ByLine isn’t designed to do what journalism software does. It is designed to simulate what journalism tools do. In some places (layout of the paper, for example), the tool simply handles complex work that contributes to publishing a newspaper but doesn’t especially help players learn to think like journalists. To successfully use the tool, however, players have to organize their work the way a journalist would. In key places–choosing a lead, for instance, or identifying sources–players have to express their ideas using the language of journalism.

As players work through the different stages of each story, they use specific sets of journalism markup tags to organize that work. The tool responds graphically to focus the player’s attention on particularly important journalism features of the story–from the presence or absence of sources to the organization and display of the story’s headline, lead and body elements.

As part of my research, I’ve studied this interaction between player and game, and these studies show that players get statistically-significant increases in their understanding of journalism practices and values from playing the game. As players progress through the game, they use more of the journalism tools built into ByLine, and they use them earlier in their work on stories. This use of journalism concepts goes hand in had with better stories, in which players write like journalists, presenting multiple perspectives, attributing sources, and writing in the neutral voice of the newspaper.

More important, these effects transfer to their writing outside the game as well: They get better at understanding and analyzing newspaper stories. In this sense, as players in science.net use ByLine they have to think like a journalist to play as a journalist. Because to learn to think about real problems they way people do in the world you have to use tools that let you think the way people do in the world.

Filled with interesting video clips that flesh out an investigative story of corporate greed and wrong-doing, BtR simplifies many of the challenging complexities of reporting to ensure players can in fact complete a round in minutes. When interviewing non-player characters, players can only choose pre-defined questions to ask (as opposed to creating their own), the only ‘people’ available to interview are people with useful information, and ‘filing’ the story means simply choosing a predefined title (and not writing a single word).

At the same time, BtR retains some very important challenges – such as deciding when do you have enough info (and that your sources have been properly confirmed) to actually file the story, or even deciding amongst the different possible sources which you feel are most important. The game also shows players important values for the profession in multiple ways, partly through an ethics handbook (a list of do’s and don’ts) and, more entertainingly, through intermittent feedback from your editor, such as “Remember to confirm your facts; follow up on what people tell you.”

Not actually doing any writing–or having to decide from a blank notebook page what questions you ought to ask during an interview–makes this feel more like an interactive movie about being a reporter than an immersive simulation. But with that important caveat, BtR does show some interesting ways that the a game engine for journalism role playing can incorporate some of the “human interactions” and other challenges of the profession.

In other words, BtR is a good example of how an epistemic game can pack more and more elements of a professional practice into the computer simulation–and thus potentially make these kind of games easier to play for more people.

Thabo, 12, said: “Normally in class, we record information in writing. Today, we wrote scripts and used technology, so it was a good balance.”

BBC News Interactive journalist, Lucie Mclean, who specialises in mobile phones, added: “Using phones meant students could gather news quickly as they were already familiar with the technology.”

While cell phones often don’t have a place in schools – for instance, the New York City public school system has banned them completely from school property – they are a powerful technology for collecting and sharing current information and a vital tool in many professions from journalism to business to medicine. The BBC project seems to understand this notion of phone-as-tool much better than New York City does. Since kids already know something about the social aspects of cell phones, why not teach them how to use the technology as a tool for learning new information and transforming it into something that many people might find interesting or useful? You can easily imagine kids using those skills later in life.

Even further, why not encourage kids to reach more deeply into community happenings? It seems to me that a project like this could become even more powerful if kids continued with it for more than one day and were encouraged to become expert in topics of their interest – something like our Journalism.net and South Madison Times players have done in their time as journalists. Would kids begin to dig into events or people or places that they currently just accept as parts of their lives? Find history or science or art in community happenings? Hopefully we’ll be able to get a better sense of that transformation in the future Neighborhood.net project – I’m excited to see where a project like this might go when it’s given more time to develop.

In the WSJ games, we investigated whether the practices of professional journalists could provide a framework for middle and high school students to develop scientific and technological literacies. These games also provided pilot data that helped us build a better 45-hour science journalism game: Science.net.

“The Web Science Research Initiative will chart out a research agenda aimed at understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web.

Of particular interest is the growing volume of information on the web that documents more and more aspects of human activity and knowledge.

The project will examine how we access this information and assess its reliability.”

Journalism.net players become media and web literate by learning how journalists assess information reliability – through being critical of sources, cross-checking information, and examining documents for authors’ intent and opinions. This critical view of information will surely be useful to them as they attempt to make informed decisions, whatever the context.

As the study of the web expands and becomes more mainstream, it will be interesting to see whether this idea of media literacy begins to join print literacy in the basic, core skillset that children are expected to learn and practice from a young age.

Combining the excitement of scientific discovery with the thrill of publishing their own work to inform the public, young people in science.net work as reporters publishing a weekly online science newspaper. During the game, they work with professional journalists, learning skills like interviewing and copyediting. And they use these skills right away, working on and publishing stories about breaking scientific issues that matter to themselves and to their community.

Science.net is our latest and most complete Journalism.net game. This game has been played twice by Madison-area middle school students during the summers of 2005 and 2006. While playing this series of 45-hour games, players met with professional journalists, worked at each of three desks (Environment, Health, and Technology), researching stories around current science topics, interviewing UW-Madison scientists, and producing three complete sections of the Science.net newsmagazine.