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Field Building and Scholarly Publication
![[Engineering Play] Blog Image](http://dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/imagecache/blog_image/blog_images/EPbanner.gif "[Engineering Play] Blog Image")
As a new media researcher, I've struggled to find appropriate venues for publishing and disseminating my work. In the late nineties, when studies of online communities, cyberculture, and electronic gaming were still in their infancy, and when I was launching my scholarly career, my work was never accepted into the journals of my discipline of anthropology. Educational journals didn't recognize my work on new media and play as part of their charter. This reflected my personal failures in translating my research topics into the established idioms of my discipline and field, but I expect my experience is not unique for those who work in new and emerging areas of inquiry. … more
Empowering Youth-directed Learning in a Digital Age
Tashawna is a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY. In the morning she leaves home for school listening to MP3s, texting her friends about meeting up after school at Global Kids, where she participates in a theater program, or FIERCE, the community center for LGBT youth. On the weekend she'll go to church and, on any given day, visit MySpace and Facebook as often as she can. While she misses television and movies, she says… more
$2 Million Competition Seeks Ideas to Transform Learning
Today, in conjunction with an announcement by President Obama calling for new efforts to reimagine and improve education in science and math, we are announcing a $2 million open competition supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for ideas to transform learning using digital media. The competition… more
When Is an Art Museum a Workshop? A Field Report from Korea
Earlier this month, I participated in the Digital Natives Workshop hosted by KAIST, the MIT of Korea, and attended by researchers from the U.S. and across the Pacific Rim. My talk on adolescence and the science of attention (entitled “The Kids Are All Right”) has been recorded along with the other presentations and posted on Google Wave by Dave Sonntag, one of the organizers. I also live-blogged at www.hastac.org. After the workshop, we took the three-hour bus trip from Daejeon to Seoul where we had a field day at the Samsung D’Light interactive showcase and then, on Saturday, were part of a Bar Camp at the high-tech Daum University, in a room that came with a slogan: “Beyond Learning.” I’m still pondering that.… more
Sociality Is Learning
As adults, we take social skills for granted... until we encounter someone who lacks them. Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children. Perhaps it's precisely their passion for learning sociality that devalues this as learning in the eyes of adults.… more
eBooks and Learning
Now that the ebook industry has set its sights on the textbook and educational markets, it's especially important for educators to shape discussion of the benefits and potential impact of ereaders. Rather than bemoan the loss of wood pulp and glue that make up current texts, we are better served by asking how these physical objects serve learning, and what is lost (or gained) by replacing them with electronic texts. One doesn't have to abandon a love for print books to appreciate the unique affordances of new technologies. For example: how many would prefer poring through multiple volumes of a print encyclopedia to the clean, stream-of-consciousness experience offered by hyperlinks in a digital encyclopedia?… more
Apprenticeship 2.0 Could Fuel 21st Century Learning
In a recent New Yorker piece on cookbooks, Adam Gopnik observes that "the space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense." Although Gopnik is explicitly referring to cooking, this statement could be equally applied to most forms of learning since the nineteenth century.… more