Recent posts for Elizabeth Bagley
Epistemic Games Video
As researchers studying new media, it only seemed appropriate to let people know about our work using well, new media.
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….
When people get in the way
Bagley, E.S., & Shaffer, D.W. (2009). When people get in the way: Promoting civic thinking through epistemic game play. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations. 1(1), 36-52.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/ijgcms-bagley-shaffer.pdf
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 »
Literacy skills
‘Our system is, more than anything, an artifact of our Colonial past. For the religious dissenters who came to the New World, literacy was essential to religious freedom, enabling them to teach their own beliefs.’
I came across the above quote in a recent article by Matt Miller in The Atlantic. While volunteering in a 6th grade classroom, I got a close look at what passes for ‘essential’ literacy in schools these days.
The students were asked to read pages 79-84 in their Social Studies textbooks and answer questions 3, 4, and 5 at the end of the section. Sound familiar? Here’s the literacy strategy most of the students followed:
Epistemic games and school
I recently had an experience talking with one young player of an epistemic game that captured the distinction between epistemic games and school as most of us experienced it.
In How Computer Games Help Children Learn, David Williamson Shaffer describes how epistemic games are designed to do something very different than schools today. Today’s schools were designed, he points out, at the turn of the century to avert social strife in rapidly expanding cities by socializing young people to a new industrial order: essentially, they were designed to prepare factory workers. But we don’t need to train children to work in an industrial society anymore. Instead, we need children to be able to think in creative and innovative ways. And epistemic games are designed to do just that.
Maria was one of twelve students who played the game Urban Science this summer. As part of our study, I interviewed all of the players last month, after they had finished the game and were back in school for a few months.
In her interview, I asked Maria if she had thought about Urban Science during the last three months. She told me a really interesting story about an assignment she completed in school’ how she had thought like a planner, and what happened (or didn’t happen) as a result. Continue reading »
