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.

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.

Although I didn’t know much about them before this morning, Sky and Winter are the kind of kids whom I think about when I hear people talking about how media has the potential to transform education. The girls are being homeschooled during their trip: blogging on their laptops, going to museums in all of their tour locations, reading extensively from the comic / graphic novel genre, researching and interviewing well-known comic creators, and editing those conversations into video podcasts called Winterviews. Scott is, of course, the star of his book tour presentations, but Winter does behind-the-scenes camera work and Sky has her own talk. She regularly updates her Keynote (Mac powerpoint) presentation about the family’s year-long adventure and presents it at many of the lecture stops, including this summer’s Comic-Con International.

While kids in most traditional schools are largely taught to read their textbooks, find the correct answers, sit quietly in their seats, and listen to authority figures, these girls are learning the value of discourse by interacting with their parents’ colleagues, lecture attendees, fellow pop culture fans, other kids, and the internet at large. Beyond that, they are becoming experts in the genre of graphic novels. As experts do, they are learning to formulate opinions for public consumption, give public talks, and use software tools like Keynote and FinalCut to make professional-quality podcasts that are released on a schedule.

Similarly to what I’ve seen from many of our epistemic game players, Sky and Winter provide a clear example of what advocates of content-driven standardized tests seem to have forgetten: learning how to use media tools, produce creative content, debate opinions, and talk with people is central to our lives. Communicating well with a wide range of people (in person and otherwise) is a skill that will help kids learn how to learn, not to mention expose them to ideas and interests that they might take up later in life.

Kids are curious, smart, and opinionated, especially when given a chance to develop a specialty and act as experts do. Most kids, however, don’t have the chance to spend a year traveling, talking to the leaders of a field, and presenting their ideas to audiences across the country. In How Computer Games Help Children Learn, David notes that epistemic games make these kinds of valuable educational experiences – ones where kids can gain access to the machinery that makes society work – available to many more people. These experiences are powerful, identity-shaping ones, and so I hope that we will have the chance to play these games with many more kids in the years ahead.

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.

Instead, Dr. James Smith (a health economist at the RAND Corporation) and others say, what may make the biggest difference is keeping young people in school. A few extra years of school is associated with extra years of life and vastly improved health decades later, in old age.

As someone currently in her 19th year of school (yeah, doctoral program!) this is interesting to me. The article posits that the effects come partly out of educated people making better choices about their lives and preparing for the future more effectively, but also out of increased social networking. In other words, people who are socially isolated don’t live as long as people with many family members and friendships – many of which come directly out of school environments.

This is all especially interesting, though, in an era when sources of all stripes are pointing out rather urgently that school-as-we-know-it is an outdated Industrial Revolution invention – but still the norm in a digital world whose high-skill jobs demand communication and research skills, design literacy, innovative ideas, and the ability to engage with many technologies. Those aren’t the kinds of knowledge I think about as benefits of taking standardized tests and reading textbooks…

An article like this one raises so many questions for me: Will it soon become possible to assess the benefits of different kinds of schooling? Will kids who are educated in technology-rich environments (possibly through playing epistemic games) be more likely to develop stronger work skills and make better decisions about their bodies and their lives? Will people with up-to-date skills actually live longer or better? Will people with active digital networks – IM buddies, mobile phones, characters in virtual worlds – see similar kinds of long-term social benefits through technology?

I suppose for now that it is impossible to tell, but I would bet that it’s about to become a very fruitful line of research in this world that is changing so quickly. I wonder how long it will take for American schools to begin to realize these changes, too.

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.

“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.

We had a wonderful summer – a big thank you for playing to all of our young reporters and their families!

This fall, we have been excited to hear that many of our reporters have done additional research into their story topics, and that they continue to read the newspaper more regularly!

Watch this space for more specific results from this summer’s game…

Internet-based educators are seeking to convince the [College Board], and the public, that their virtual laboratories are educationally sound, pointing out that their students earn high scores on the A.P. exams. They also say online laboratories are often the only way advanced science can be taught in isolated rural schools or impoverished urban ones. Online schooling, which was all but nonexistent at the elementary and secondary level a decade ago, is today one of the fastest-growing educational sectors, with some half-million course enrollments nationwide.

While I’m in complete support of giving kids who live in districts without AP sciences the opportunity to take similar classes, the real question for me is what do kids who take any type of AP science courses learn?

Do they learn just what’s in the textbook, either in face-to-face courses or in an online format sans labs? Or are they given the opportunity to do what scientists do and use the resources that scientists use (many of them on the internet) to research different phenomena, learn about scientists (possibly by emailing or chatting with scientists?), find out about the impact of scientific discoveries…?

“Yes” on the second question would mean that kids taking science courses might have experiences similar to our Science.net players. In the course of acting as science reporters and talking with scientists (but doing no actual laborotory bench work), our players gain a better sense of how science works in the real world and how it impacts communities. And that, it seems, would help to prepare high school students to enjoy taking science courses in college – or even to think about pursuing a career in STEM fields – much better than textbook reading ever could.

In a world where very few middle and high school students go on to careers in the academic disciplines, though, is it important for school students to learn all of the intricacies of disciplinary epistemology? It seems that the real question for schools is not about how classroom teachers might better teach the literacy practices of academic disciplines – but instead, how might the epistemology of classrooms better reflect literacy practices that are valuable in the world outside of academia?

The Writing Beyond the Curriculum project looks at the effects of teaching real-world, authentic genres to the players of epistemic games. When players become journalists, what do they learn about writing and science literacy? Is this new knowledge useful to them as they navigate an increasingly complex sea of information and media?

I am interested in how the writing of these young journalists changes as they write and edit their stories, and how they think differently about information when they look through the eyes of a journalist.