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Friday 3rd July 2009 12:59 pm

New Issue of IJLM

Issue 2 of the new International Journal of Learning and Media is now out. 

The journal, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, is helping to build the field of Digital Media and Learning. Among other articles in Issue #2, grantee Jim Gee suggests using worked examples to establish the parameters of the field.

Often used in the hard sciences as a teaching and learning tool, worked examples, argues Gee in “Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Field, Part II,” can help get people in the field “to explicate how and why they had carried out their work…and how their approach compared and contrasted with the other cases … from different disciplinary backgrounds.”

Digital media make this exchange possible, and researchers in the emerging field of Digital Media and Learning should adapt this tool, Gee argues, to advance the field. Through worked examples, he believes, “shared exemplars” can emerge of what counts as good or accepted work. And given the field, why not, he says, make a game (albeit a serious one) out of it.

Taking up the call, Ben Devane, Shree Durga, and Kurt Squire, in “Competition as a Driver for Learning” offer a worked example questioning whether direct competition in a multiplayer environment can’t drive learning. This proposition is in direct response to the assumption that cooperation, not competition, spurs learning. The authors argue that “past research may have overlooked [that] how competition is framed and experienced is culturally contextual, so that competition in some frameworks (such as a gaming context) may be experienced very differently than a school context.”

Other articles explore parents as learning partners, assessment, Youth, Creativity, and Copyright in the Digital Age, among many others.

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