Alecia Marie Magnifico (alumna 2004-2007, MEd) studied the relationships among writing, literacy, and learning – and how epistemic games can help players develop in all three areas. She worked with David Hatfield on Journalism.net, exploring how the professional practice of journalism can mediate both students’ science literacy and their knowledge about real-world writing.
Things are finally beginning to slow down (at least in terms of travel) after a very busy March and April, but many ideas from this year’s DIGITEL workshop (in Taiwan) and AERA annual meeting (in Chicago) have continued to bounce around in my head and in several different on-going conversations.
This piece was originally published by the Macarthur Foundation on their Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog (original link).
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?
Any Neil Gaiman fans out there?
If you follow Neil’s journal at all, you’ve probably seen him talk about his god-daughters, 13-year old Sky and 11-year old Winter McCloud. Recently, he linked a piece that names Sky and Winter fangirls of the year and details their travels around the country on their dad’s (Scott McCloud, comic writer & theorist)book tour.
From the New York Times (free registration required):
The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income.
Year after year, in study after study, says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, education ‘keeps coming up.’
And, health economists say, those factors that are popularly believed to be crucial, money and health insurance, for example, pale in comparison.
Over the holidays, the BBC reported that London middle school students are taking part in a BBC project that brings journalism into the classroom. The 8th graders researched local news in daily newspapers and websites, collected interview information with their cell phones’ mp3 recording capabilities, and took photographs with camera phones. Once they had gathered all of their source material, they used technology available in their classrooms to write broadcast reports on deadline and record audio/video the files (mpeg4) for placement on a BBC-affiliated website, School Report.
