Reblogged: The power of authenticity

This piece was originally published by the Macarthur Foundation on their Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog (original link).

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.