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Thursday 1st May 2008 9:47 am

Constance Steinkuehler: Digital Montessori for Big Kids

An assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin responds to Connie’s post on the “affordances” of virtual worlds. She describes her work studying adolescent boys in an after school online gaming club.

I’m really interested in understanding the forms of academic play that people do in the context of popular virtual worlds and incubating those practices in after school programs for kids - especially working class and middle class adolescent boys from small towns and rural settings. These are kids who are often disengaged and failing basic coursework, who have with limited conversation with more urban, transnational, “hipster” media content and perspectives, and yet who eat up games.

In the wild, in the lab.

As part of this research, we document, analyze, and assess the practices and values that high-end knowledge workers in games like World of Warcraft engage in and then figure out ways to make it happen on our ongoing lab: An after school online gaming club for boys. We focus on things like scientific reasoning, argumentation, computational literacy (like mods), media production, and copious amounts of reading and writing both multimodal and print text. We closely examine them as they arise both “in the wild” of online gaming fandom and in the incubators we ourselves have designed. It is not straightforward (how do you map 504 AAAS science standards to unstructured, gamer forum conversation?). It is not easy (how do you use games as a motivating context for ‘work’ without totally colonizing their playspace?). But its also never boring or dull. And sometimes what we end up discovering (or rediscovering) in the process surprises us…

Its the community, not the technology.

By now, the idea that what matters most is people & relationships rather than game engines & photorealistic graphics is a truism in the world of games. But in the world of education, and educational interventions, its a pretty new idea. In practice, it means that the ‘treatment’ is participation in a community who shares certain key values and practices. Mere /play time within a particular virtual world, by itself, won’t do. So, in our work, features such as the presence of mentors, apprenticeship networks and norms, and collaborative (typically online) artifacts are the core characteristics we attend to, for example, rather than content materials, time-on-task, and one-way push media (like teachers and textbooks).

Mixed ability and maturity groups are good.

We’re so accustomed to silo’ing kids by age and ability these days that the mere suggestion of mixing in older or adult peers makes us somewhat uncomfortable. And yet, there is immense value in commingling experts and novices, learners and teachers, grown-ups and kids - especially in third places for informal sociability where one’s rank in terms of age or credentialing does not matter. Game communities are just such meritocracies. In the words of JC Hertz, “It didn’t matter what you drove to the arcade. If you sucked at Asteroids, you just sucked” (1997). And as such they can provide young people access to networks of distributed expertise where they can jointly solve problems with more able peers in a world with an assumed equal distribution of opportunities (but not necessarily outcomes). Crucially, this lets kids display (for themselves and for others) not only who they are now (based on the current limitations of what they can do) but who they are becoming (based on what they can do with more knowledgeable and able peers).  Game community relations flourish within Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.

Think: Digital montessori for big kids.

Virtual worlds are like digital montessori for big kids. Virtual worlds are interest-driven learning environments in which the learner is purposefully surrounded with well chosen and well-designed symbolic and material tools and artifacts. They enable the learner to pursue their own interests and passions (Barron) but which push back conceptually enough to enable the development of deep understandings of the system being explored. Even in our purposefully educational games-based program, we let students’ emergent goals motivate the instruction rather than expecting the instruction to motivate or engage the students’ emergent goals.

Category: Civic-Engagement, Credibility, Ecology-of-Games, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected

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