http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/publications/workingPapers/Working_Paper_No_2010_10.php

As bloggers and mobile phone eyewitnesses increasingly supplement the “news,” understanding how professional journalists develop their expertise is more important than ever. This paper examines the learning processes within an intermediate-level reporting practicum course. Using epistemic network analysis, the authors explore emergent relationships within developing journalistic expertise. Understanding these relationships should be useful for journalism education as well as the design of research on learning environments.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/hatfield-ICLS2010-review.pdf

As bloggers and mobile phone eye-witnesses increasingly supplement the ‘news,’ it is more important than ever to understand how professional journalists develop their expertise. In this paper, we examine an intermediate level reporting practicum course to explore the learning processes therein. Using a new method called Epistemic Network Analysis, we also explore emergent relationships within developing journalistic expertise. Understanding these relationships should be useful for journalism education as well as the design of research on learning environments.

Epistemic games have been developed to help players develop domain-specific expertise that characterizes how professionals in a particular domain reason, communicate, and act (Shaffer, 2006; Shaffer & Bagley, 2009). Grounded in a sociocultural and sociocognitive approach to learning, epistemic games are designed to foster situated learning that leads to data structures with high levels of dependencies. As one might expect, traditional measurement models struggle to accommodate such contextual dependencies, especially when data are collected at smaller scales and epistemic network analysis (ENA) has been developed to provide a practically feasible modeling alternative (e.g., Rupp et al., 2009; Shaffer et al., in press). In this paper, we describe a research program that addresses key statistical considerations for modeling data from epistemic games using ENA with an eye toward representing different learning progressions of players within such games. Current approaches for representing learning progressions using ENA are juxtaposed with approaches for simulating such data using particular statistical constraints.

In this paper we look at educational assessment in the 21st Century. Digital learning environments emphasize learning in action. In such environments, assessments need to focus on performance in context rather than on tests of abstracted and isolated skills and knowledge. Digital learning environments also provide the potential to assess performance in context, because digital tools make it possible to record rich streams of data about learning in progress. But what assessment methods will use this data to measure mastery of complex problem solving, the kind of thinking in action that takes place in digital learning environments?

Here we argue that one way to address this challenge is through evidence-centered design: a framework for developing assessments by systematically linking models of understanding, observable actions, and evaluation rubrics to provide evidence of learning. We examine how evidence-centered design can address the challenge of assessment in new media learning environments by presenting one specific theory-based approach to digital learning, known as epistemic games, and describing a method, epistemic network analysis, to assess learner performance based on this theory. We use the theory and its related assessment method to illustrate the concept of a digital learning system: a system composed of a theory of learning and its accompanying method of assessment, linked into an evidence-based, digital intervention. And we argue that whatever tools of learning and assessment digital environments use, they need to be integrated into a coherent digital learning system linking learning and assessment through evidence-centered design.

This short video gives an overview of our work on Urban Science and other epistemic games as part of the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning Project and the National Science Foundation.

In these games, players have a chance to learn 21st century skills by playing as urban planners, engineers, journalists, and other professionals in the knowledge economy.

I suppose next we’ll need to make an epistemic game about making epistemic games….

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.’

To be successful like this, young people learning to engage with different perspectives need the right kind of context and guidance. Hess’s observations confirm this for high school social studies classes, but it is also an important aspect of games designed for civic engagement. In epistemic games, for example, the framework of working as a professional on important community issues can provide just this kind of guidance for young players. Professional journalists, for example, are trained to seek out and understand opposing viewpoints to responsibly inform the public (e.g., journalism.net). Professional urban planners are trained to seek out and understand the diverse and typically conflicting desires of community stakeholders to recommend compromises that best reflect that community (e.g., Urban Science). And in all of the epistemic games based on these professions, players are encouraged to see themselves as important members of the community and to develop new ways of thinking about community issues.

As Hess’s and Mansbridge’s work so powerfully points out, learning to engage with, rather than avoid, different perspectives is what Democracy is all about. Put another way, debate is good. It is rancor that is bad. And good games-like good civic curricula of any kind-help young people learn the skills they need to engage in the former and avoid the latter.

A common practice for initiating such games, and the reference for the article’s title, is to declare on a web page, for instance, that ‘This is not a game,’ (TING) while simultaneously embedding the opening clues within that same web page. As McGonigal points out, this express denial becomes “one of the most intriguing and lingering effects of TING immersion tactics: a tendency to continue seeing games where games don’t exist.”

ARGs blur the boundaries between what is in-game and what is outside the game by replacing the separate play-space many games use (e.g., soccer field, videogame console), with a particular mindset through which everyday communications tools can become components in the game regardless of where they happen to be located. In turn, as McGonigal points out drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, these games “provide ‘a model, a detailed pattern to follow, a foundation’ for later application to serious real world situations.”

By recruiting non-play spaces and things into the service of play, these games emphasize how game play can come down to a decision between different frames of mind.

While avoiding potentially creepy yet common ARG techniques like having game characters calling or emailing players at home, epistemic games are all about equipping young people with different frames of mind. Our studies show that engaging in professional practices within these games helps players think like professionals beyond the games.

So – to the extent that we want to engage players in these kinds of frame shifts, indeed – this is not a game!

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.