The current spotlight in the Digital Media and Learning blog sponsored on the MacArthur Foundation site is of particular interest to those interested in new spaces for scholarship.

“What can adults offer to teen spaces? What does their presence take away? When is it not safe to have adults and teens interact? When are teens ONLY safe when adults are present?

Read posts from teens involved in Global Kids within Teen Second Life and add your comments

The podcast from “Meeting Web Kids on Their Own Turf: Expanding Online Social Spaces for Scholarship,” is available from:

http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/meeting/archives/2006/podcast.rss

http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/meeting/archives/2006/podcast.html

The Web Kids Panel discussion that took place during the National Science Digital Library’s Annual Meeting at AAAS in Washington, D.C., continues to spawn comments in this blog. The challenges and educational potential of “social media” such as group gaming, MySpace, and instant messaging are on the minds of many people who are exploring ways to engage students of all ages online. This blog includes back-up material submitted by panelists Jennifer Groff and Eric Rosenberg of MIT’s Education Arcade, and Julie Evans of NetDay/Project Tomorrow. NSF liason Dave MacArthur, Mike Luby, Carol Minton Morris, and others have also contributed comments. Please add your thoughts here.

Social media is turning education upside down. “Kids are coming to the Columbia University library now mostly to use the coffee bar,” says Kate Wittenberg, Director of Columbia’s Electronic Publishing Initiative (EPIC). “This upsets librarians. Yet the Columbia Library page on Facebook has over 1,000 friends. They are coming to the library in new ways.”

Wittenberg, who is also co-PI of NSDL, has been urging academic publishers and librarians to extend their operations into “social media,” which is the term for the places students visit to talk and play on-line. Her article on the subject is summarized in the post “Across the Generational Divide,” below. The vast and rapidly expanding world of text messages, instant messages, e-mail, multiplayer games, Facebook, and MySpace is too important for academics to ignore, she says. At the Thursday morning discussion Wittenberg moderated, “Meeting Web Kids On Their Own Turf,” four experts shared their thoughts about how the NSDL community might plug in.

(l-r) Kate Wittenberg, Julie Evans, Karon Weber, Eric Rosenbaum, and Jennifer Groff at the Webkids panel. Click for larger image.

“Students no longer believe that the teacher is the font of all knowledge and students are the vessels to be filled,” said Julie Evans, the CEO of NetDay/Project Tomorrow. Evans’ organization conducts large national surveys with K-12 students and teachers about educational technology. Here are some of the highlights from those surveys:
* The three most popular online applications for students are games, music, and communications.
* Sixth grade is the point when more than half of girls and boys report having weekly access to e-mail and instant messaging.
* Middle school students are more sophisticated users of social media than high school students are.
* Students say that instant messaging is their preferred means of communication with peers. They say that e-mail is a “storage medium.”
* Cell phones and text messaging are even more popular with students than are computer-based instant message programs.
* The most technically advanced students are the least likely to spend time updating a MySpace page. MySpace is for beginners.

Evans made several conclusions. First, grown-ups who send e-mail to students are signaling that they are not within the student’s circle of friends. Second, students view online research as more accurate, efficient, and fun than listening to teachers. They feel they can’t rely on school libraries because books are likely to be outdated. “Fifth and sixth graders told us they share web pages with each other at lunchtime,” said Evans. “They don’t have access to computers, so they write the URLs on their lunch bags.”

Students and teachers view social media differently, says Evans, and this difference reduces students’ access to information during school hours. When asked to name the biggest barrier to online communication in school, teachers said they needed faster Internet connections. Students said there are too many rules restricting access. The bottom line, said Evans, is that students are native dwellers in the digital landscape. While students grew up online, their teachers have to learn new habits. This means that many students are ahead of their teachers. They are shaping the digital environment outside of school while teachers struggle to learn and argue over the rules.

“I see a huge upticks in rules and regulations on use of the Internet at school, and it worries me,” said Evans. “Someone needs to show how these rules are handcuffing the technology. I was in an affluent high school that had a great laptop program, with ninth graders bringing their laptops from home and logging into a wireless network. But the network code changed daily and teachers had to waste enormous amounts of time putting the code into the computer every day. They were forced to do this because the principal wanted to keep kids from accessing the code outside of school. Other schools have filters that cut out all commercial .com sites.

“As a result of these rules, the relevance of the school as a learning environment is fading away. There are pockets of great things happening, but in most schools the power of this new technology is being squashed by the principal’s fear of the unknown.”

The second panelist explained how her company is helping social media expand. Karon Weber recently joined the Yahoo!’s Youth and Education Research Group after two decades of developing digital animation software. She said that social media operates at the intersection of people, media, and technology.

Karon Weber.  Click for larger image.

Yahoo runs three of the biggest social media projects on the web. Their site Del.icio.us allows users to store the addresses of favorite websites online. This allows users to access these bookmarks from any computer, add new bookmarks from anywhere, and share favorites with others. Since everything on Deli.cio.us is someone’s favorite, the site also serves as a user-rated web crawler. The second site, Flickr, allows users to share photos on a public or a private website. It has five million registered users, and eight out of ten photos are public and searchable. Weber did a search on the day of the panel and found that Flickr offered 47,000 free photos of Giant Pandas. Many of the photos are tagged with information such as the latitude and longitude where they were taken, so a teacher who uses a panda photo from Flickr can show where the photo was taken on a map.

The most social of the projects is Yahoo! Answers, which allows users to ask and answer any question. People who answer questions are ranked with points as if they were sellers on Ebay, with a similar feedback system. This means that people who give good answers gain status and become popular on the site. Yahoo! Answers has dealt with 65 million questions so far, and each question hatches a story. For example, the question, “Are there trips to see Giant Pandas?” yielded the answer, “I am in Chengdu now and will check out conditions at the zoo today and at the base camp research center tomorrow.” Learners on these sites create and share content as they are consuming it, said Weber.

Handheld technologies are emerging as powerful educational tools for six reasons, said the third and fourth panelists, Jennifer S Groff, Program Manager, and Eric Rosenbaum, Research Manager, from The Teacher Education Program at the Massachusetts institute of Technology (MIT). Game Boy game consoles, cell phones, play stations, Tamagachi toys, Palm Pilots, and pocket PC devices work for education because they are portable, ubiquitous, have connectivity, offer social interaction, are content-sensitive, and can be customized for the individual user.

Jennifer Groff, Education Arcade.  Click for larger image.

Groff and Rosenbaum work with the MIT Education Arcade, which develops educational games. A game called “Big Fish, Little Fish” teaches ecology: you can either take on the role of a big fish searching for food, or a school of small fish working together for protection. Another game, “Sugar and Spice,” teaches the concepts of microeconomics. And a third game uses pocket PCs linked to a server to teach ecology and evolution, based on the journals Charles Darwin kept on the behavior of finches. Users can breed the birds, feed on pollen, and otherwise interact with the virtual environment. The game goes constantly, so that students can manage their birds and flowers outside of class and analyze the data to present to their teachers.

Rosenbaum described “augmented reality games” that connect a pocket PC to a Global Positioning System (GPS) to put a virtual overlay on a physical space. “Environmental Detectives” presents gamers with a satellite map of the MIT Campus with dots highlighted. A toxic waste spill has put chemicals in the groundwater. Students walk around the campus with their Pocket PC devices and conduct virtual interviews with characters who are professors and construction managers to find clues. They can also drill a virtual well to get the components of the spill. Students share their data and make inferences to ultimately write a remediation plan. Another game, “Outbreak@MIT,” simulates a disease outbreak. Students are connected to a network, so if one of them should pick up the “vaccine” it will disappear from the other players’ screens. Students get “sick” and collaborate as they try to stop the outbreak.

Julie Evans pointed out that teachers won’t use games in the classroom unless they include ways to measure learning outcomes. The inquiry-based learning that takes place in computer games is harder to measure, but it is compelling to children. Groff said that children who are used to pursuing answers through games are apt to disengage from the old lecture-based learning models. “When I taught school, I dealt with a girl whose parents fought to get her into an inquiry-based learning model,” she said. “I think we’re going to see more of that.”

Julie Evans is the CEO of NetDay/Project Tomorrow, an organization devoted to promoting innovation in the teaching of science, technology, and math.  Net Day is known for its “Speak Up” surveys, which explore the attitudes of students and teachers.  Julie is also a panelist at the “WebKids” session of the NSDL Annual Meeting, and she suggests these links for more information:

Click here for complete results from the NetDay Speak Up National Research Project.

NetDay’s 2005 National Report, “Our Voices, Our Future – Student and Teacher Views on Science, Technology and Education,” can be downloaded as a PDF file here.

Information about this year’s Speak Up for Students, Teachers and Parents (the surveys open on November 1) can be found here.

Click here to view this year’s survey questions from five different NetDay surveys – one each for students K-2, grades 3-5, grades 6-12, teachers and parents.

And here are the Top 10 Reasons to involve students in decision making about technology at your school — “because students are the real expert voices!”, says Julie.

Eric Rosenbaum and Jennifer Groff are on the “Meeting Web Kids” panel  at NSDL’s Annual Conference.  They work for MIT’s Education Arcade, which is a collaboration between MIT and the University of Wisconsin to explore the educational gaming space.  Its web site is about to undergo a major renovation, but you can see information there about a few past projects.  Eric suggests these additional links to resources on the subject of educational gaming:

The home page of the MIT Teacher Education Program, headed by Prof Eric Klopfer.  The MIT TEP offers a sequence of undergraduate courses leading to secondary-level teaching certification.  TEP is also home to several research projects under the theme of simulations and games for learning.

The home page for augmented reality games research carried out by MIT TEP.  Our augmented reality (AR) games run on location-aware handheld computers.  Students move through a real physical environment augmented by virtual information that they access through their handhelds.  They collaborate to solve problems, such as tracking down the source of a toxic chemical spill by taking virtual measurements and interviewing virtual characters.

POSIT is an augmented reality game designed to get kids engaged in science controversies.  It’s a role-playing game in which students move between real locations gathering information and using it to persuade each other toward their position.  In our first scenario, students must take a position on whether MIT should build a laboratory to perform boidefense research and study deadly infectious diseases.

The home for participatory simulations research at MIT TEP.  Participatory simulations are played on Palm handheld computers within the classroom.  “Virus” is a game that lets students perform experiments to learn about the spread of disease.  “Big Fish-Little Fish” puts students into an ecosystem and challenges them to form collaborative strategies in order to survive.   “Live Long and Prosper” asks students to decode a small genome in order to survive and reproduce.  “Discussion” asks students to consider a single opinion question, and compare their opinion with classmates in pairwise interactions.

StarLogo TNG (the next generation) is the latest incarnation of the Logo programming language.  Students construct programs graphically, snapping together puzzle piece-like statements whose shape reflect syntactic constraints.  Their programs control characters in a 3D world.  Students can make a wide variety of science simulations and 3D video games.

Revolution is an multi-player online role-playing game that lets students play the role of a variety of characters in colonial williamsburg, on the eve of a violent revolt.  It was created by modifying (”modding”) a commerical video game.

In thinking about the promises and pitfalls of using new media in education I keep coming back to challenges associated with speed. 

How long has YouTube been around?  Well, three PayPal employees started it in February 2005 and less than 20 months later Google purchased it for more than $1.6 billion (that’s roughly $24 million per employee).  Obviously YouTube is a great attraction for teenagers, which is partly why Google acquired it.  So it’s natural to think about how this new medium, and other web environments, could be incorporated into learning and teaching. 

Unfortunately, it usually takes education developers, publishers, and practitioners around 20 years, not 20 months, to turn a new idea or technology into high-quality products and services that can be broadly disseminated in classrooms.  Between an idea and dissemination are steps like figuring out what students can actually learn with the innovation, testing and refining interventions, crafting professional development for teachers, and also revising standards that articulate what students should be learning — often a highly political step that sometimes seems to go backward rather than forward.

The trouble, of course, is that once educators finally figure out how to adapt a new technology or medium, like YouTube or online video games, any number of newer ideas will have come and gone.  So, for every opportunity that education capitalizes on, it may miss a dozen or more — and the lost opportunities may be increasing as the pace of innovation continues to accelerate on the web. 

There is no easy solution to this problem that I can see; new web-based technology innovation and business development will always move ahead more rapidly than educational reform.  But I think we can speed up the educational use of new technologies, and NSDL can be part of that change.

Take strand maps, a simpler technology than YouTube, for example. Strand maps, or concept maps, are visual representations that emphasize connections between ideas and processes, such as heat, the water cycle, and climate change.  On the surface, this technology ought to help learning in all sorts of subjects.  And there is some evidence that it does — but it is not very systematic and the ideas haven’t yet gotten into classrooms on a large scale.

One major reason for this is that a lot of researchers who’ve investigated strand maps have built their own tools and have often spent much less time testing and refining them in classrooms than developing them in labs.  Effective use of NSDL could change this in a couple of ways.

Imagine that NSDL included a single robust strand map service (which it may do, very soon).  Then, when a research team wanted to study learning using strand maps in a specific subject area, it could concentrate on experiments and avoid costly re-development of yet-another-strand-map-tool; in this way, results of the experiments from individual groups would be available to the community much more rapidly than before.  On top of that, groups interested in strand maps for other subjects or other grades could conduct their experiments in parallel — and they could all use the NSDL communication infrastructure to rapidly compare their results. 

This is one way that the NSDL could help educational technology research and development quickly test the effectiveness of new media, and keep pace with web kids — well, almost.

….A provacative idea that organizations involved in the Open Repostitories movement (and others) are working to address. Anyone who has ever bemoaned the state of their personal organization systems–I must clean out that file cabinet, or if I don’t get those photos organized and into an album they won’t make any sense to anyone, or that pile of disks was background for my book and now I can’t find anything on them–understands that the information trails humans leave along the way to some place else often contain nuggets that others might use if only they had access to “intellectual property left rotting.”

A quick inventory of the intellectual property, or “what’s inside of” almost any research university might uncover rich collections of historic objects, various types of media, books, and many different kinds of documents stored digitaly as well as on the shelves of libraries and other facilities. How should this institutional heritage be managed and made available? Or should it?

Clifford Lynch (Lynch C. A., “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.htm and others suggest that the most pressing reason for getting this collective knowledge into open repositories is to create new forms of digital spaces for scholarship. Scientists and scholars see an an additional opportunity to amplify and share research among consortia in a way that has not been possible in the past.

How does the content connection work? Do open repostitories intersect with new spaces for online scholarship like games and other forms of social media? Where are the cross points and what needs to happen to link increased access to all the world’s information to online spaces that could be incubators for new forms of understanding?

The Second Annual Open Repositories Conference will be held in San Antonio, Texas January 23-26 2007. Developers and potential developers will have an opportunity to find out how a global community of universities and organizations are leveraging repostiory architecture to make knowledge relevant, usable and accessible.

Kate Wittenberg recently placed a wake-up call that ought to jolt any sleepyheads who still think that publishing is the business of putting ink on paper. “Students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information,” she wrote in the June 16 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for creating online content and building peer communities, and – perhaps most important – that multitasking with various electronic devices, often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work. The implications of those changes must transform publishing strategies.”

Online tools have given students more power to get the information they want, and many of their gains have come at the expense of old-fashioned publishers. It is relatively easy for people who have basic web-surfing skills to get around copyright restrictions, for example, or to move seamlessly between academic and commercial sources of information. Instead of fighting these changes, educational publishers must embrace them and seek out new partners, says Wittenberg, who is the director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University(EPIC) as well as a PI of NSDL.

“The concept of competing with those other industries and players for dominance in the user market has become not only pointless but also destructive, to our own organizations and to the information environment as a whole,” writes Wittenberg, whose article “Beyond Google” is posted on the website Academic Commons. She follows up with several provocative ideas:

• MySpace: Biology. “We know that students are spending more time in social-networking environments like MySpace and Facebook. . . Let’s form a partnership with one of these companies to build a networking space focusing on the information needs of students.”

• Yahoo! For Birders. Publishers and commercial search engines ought to join forces and create edited, peer-reviewed sections on specific topics. Imagine what would happen, for example, if an NSDL partner like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology joined with Yahoo! to supercharge that search engine’s results on topics involving birds. The Lab, Yahoo!, and birders all over the world could all benefit from that partnership.

• Video Games In Class. “With their rich role-playing environments that fascinate so many players, games can be a powerful vehicle for learning. Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft require participants to develop skills in leadership, strategic thinking, team building, conflict management, and problem solving. [These skills are] valued in teaching students and training professionals in a variety of fields. A partnership with one or more of the gaming companies could shape the next generation of textbooks and professional publications.”

Most grade-school students use video game players at least once a week, according to Net Day’s 2005 Speak Up survey: 53 percent of students in Kindergarten through third grade say they do, along with 61 percent of students in grades 6 through 12. But only 3 percent of teachers use a video game console at least once a week. Maybe that is part of the problem. Many adults who live on the far side of the generational divide believe that “video game” is a synonym for “gratuitous sex and violence.” But this is a media-driven myth. Once you get past it, you can begin to consider the ways games, commercial search engines, and social media venues like MySpace might be put to good use for learning.

Wittenberg’s article started the conversation that became the Webkids panel at the NSDL Annual Meeting.  We look forward to your contribution.