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.
Another important aspect of this subject that we need to consider carefully involves the complex relationship between the “closed” world of the classroom and teaching tools, and the “open” world of the Web.
The vast amount of information now available can be either a benefit or an obstacle to effective learning, depending on how successfully users manage the challenge of evaluating the quality of this information and its relevance to their own work. While students clearly demonstrate a desire to explore freely the vast array of content and tools available through the Web, it is becoming equally clear that in many cases they need some level of guidance concerning how to select and evaluate the information that they find. In their web-based social environments, young people use sophisticated mechanisms for determining the credibility of an individual who wishes to gain access to a community. The community decides whether to allow a new participant the status that permits certain levels of access and its associated privileges (the ability to read and exchange profiles and messages, participate in conversations, etc.) Many students in high school and college are comfortable with this method of evaluating credibility, but the question of whether this model will translate to the assessment of educational content has yet to be answered.
Wittenberg’s observations in the Chronicle of Higher Education are spot on in their exploration of interesting developments in our use of interactive technology, particularly among young people, and the implications for scholarly/academic publishing. The notion that publishers and other creators of content designed for instruction should heed the social networking and gaming arenas in relation to their core materials is not simply a “no brainer” in terms of market objectives. There is also evidence that these applications represent a sound editorial direction in which to move, according to a large and growing body of theory from research in education and human computer interaction (HCI).
Last fall I took a course in HCI within a graduate program in education. Throughout the term, a significant portion of literature we reviewed considered such areas as learning in connection with computer-mediated communication [such as list services, bulletin boards, and IM] and learning in the context of distributed collaboration around an artifact [such as a wiki]. Investigators illustrated that various features of dispersed, mixed synchronous/asynchronous, transcribed interaction possessed unique capabilities to support learning–both in terms of simply achieving shared understanding and in terms on enhancing the compound efficacy of collaboration.
In an earlier course in the same program, devoted to learning, cognitive psychology and computers, we considered at length the significant scholarly interest in the dynamics of “gaming” and learning. I recall specifically the course examining fascinating work related to “teachable agents” within sophisticated gaming environments (e.g. Sim City). To cite a definition from a 2004 paper by the course’s professor, “[the] teachable agent is an autonomous cognitive character that can decide how to behave on its own, according to an explicit representation of some knowledge about its world taught by students [1],” where “students” are individuals using the game. Here the crossover from information- and process-laden worlds of imaginary games to similarly rich environments connected to academic domains seems quite a natural step. Indeed, educational gaming software packages along these lines already exist as stand alone applications, not [necessarily] connected to publishers’ traditional products.
I believe there are not only numerous ways in which publishers might enter into these community spaces in concert with their conventional book programs, especially in the case of academic publishers, but that indeed they are already moving in this direction.
There is probably around a 35-year history of college textbook publishers, for instance, striving for maximum currency by infusing core concepts in first and second year texts with the latest pedagogy and most user-friendly presentation, particularly in the natural sciences and math. (Consider the transition from the staid black and white science texts of 1960’s, with their simple line drawings and formal tone, to the increasingly more crafted, colorful volumes of the 1970’s and 80’s, up the present day where books include robust online companions, offering study aides, quizzes, and links to all manner of relevant outside materials.)
In the case of learning and game dynamics, domain-specific “worlds” could certainly be aligned to a range of multifaceted problem spaces in various academic fields. One example created by Columbia University’s Center for New Media, Teaching and Learning has created a simulation artifact, called Brownfield Action, where students acts as environmental scientists,
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/brownfield/
In the case of social interaction spaces, using the college textbook publisher example again, it seems there already exists a mechanism for publishers to float a curriculum-related venue that invites students to interact with each other. I am speaking again of the online text companion. In many cases, students must create an account with a code number printed on the cover of the physical book to access web-based supplements, and oftentimes the supplements *must* be accessed by students in order to complete assignments. In this content rich space, I think it would be interesting if a publisher created (or established a partnership to create) a social space focused on students’ academic majors, “MyMajor.com” if you will. Herein students working through online text components could be encouraged to post messages to a web forum accessible to all others across the world using their text. In an ideal situation, lively discussions might emerge related to the content of the text and the specific interests of the student users. Faculty could enter the discussion as well. There is already evidence of MySpace users willingness/interest in scholarly discussions in the social networking environment. If you need proof of this, simply go to MySpace and have a look under Groups/Science. There are hundreds of subgroups here with thousands of rapidly cycling posts.
[1] Bai, X. & Black, J. (2004). TALE: a Teachable Agent Embedded in an Intelligent Tutoring System. In G. Richards (Ed.), Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2004 (pp. 1070-1072). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
http://www.editlib.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Reader.ViewAbstract&paper_id=11011
There are some really interesting points here. I think a crucial thing to remember is that kids have an excellent nose for any attmept by “the man” to co-opt their space. Taking something they already like and making it “educational” is a surefire way to get them to ignore it.
So while I agree that there is a huge potential, for example, in educational applications of phenomena like social networking web sites, we have to be careful. We don’t want to push kids away right off the bat by making it look like we’re taking over their cool thing and making it “lame.” We can’t simply copy the surface features of mySpace, swap out the fun for curriculum, and expect them to stick around. We have to carefully look at what really makes kids interested, and copy THAT.
So why DO kids like mySpace? What aspects of it can we carry over into something with educational value?
One of the coolest ideas I’ve seen so far in this direction is some research being carried out at MIT media lab. They’re developing a graphical programming environment for kids called “scratch” (not yet publicly available). You can use it to make a variety of things like animations, games, and interactive stories. Now this by itself is pretty great. By they’re also developing a web site with collaboration features inspired by Flickr (photo sharing site). They call it Scratchr. Kids will be able to post their scratch creations and share them with other kids, and do various things like annotate their project, and use tags to categorize it with others. You can rate other kids projects, create your own blog on the site, and maybe even track the way other people’s projects make use of code from yours. Hopefully it will foster an international culture of collaborative scratchers.
I think this is the kind of thing we need to be thinking about- kids will be motivated to collaborate on the web if we give them a chance to create their own content and learn from each other without too many constraints.
Exactly! Only three percent of teachers play a video game at least one time a week. How CAN they understand the potential of the game console? So, what do schools need to do? Well, for one thing, they could ask the people who organize their corporate team building programs to teach them gaming and the skills needs to successfully enter into the spirit (and maybe the winning side!) of online, multi-member games. Teachers keep ahead of their students because they know more. To use gaming in the classroom, teachers need to “know” more about consoles than their students. I look forward to the day when 32 inch LCD gaming screens are standard in school rooms!
Some schools may have budgets for corporate team building, although there are more often funds for professional development programs which typically include incentives for teacher participation given that they are usually short on time. The fun, competitive, and interactive nature of gaming certainly lends itself to some unique ways to get teachers along with their students involved in using games for learning and discovery. It would be interesting to imagine what a collaborative national effort among schools, higher ed, government and private industry to establish new online spaces for scholarship in classrooms–including gaming–might look like.