Connected Play

Connected Play Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields

play not cut off from everyday life; kids transfer ideas and roles across spaces (4)

“Indeed, many researchers have argued that children figure out social roles and learn to negotiate with each other as they navigate and define the rules of games. Put simply, peer play helps kids develop socially, cognitively, and culturally. To cut children off from peer play is to cut them off from one of the most essential forms of learning and innovating.” (5)

“Like jumping rope, play in digital publics requires knowing how to play in a new domain, how to play well with others, and how to play creatively.” (7) Much like Papert’s Microworlds

“Kids need a variety of technical skills to become digitally lit- erate or fluent, but often adults focus on the technical over the important cultural and social forms of participation required for full membership in online communities.” (8) More at Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media

“Can virtual worlds offer an opportunity to engage kids in learning to treat others with respect and stepping into others’ shoes?”(9)  This could be the basis of reimagining Tech Lab. More generally, the totalitarian attitude toward digital publics in most schools is misguided. *** Find research on “classroom underbelly” discourse patterns and apply it to school wide conversation patterns.

Agency in shaping identity, but also in understanding the structure of the world (including the rhetoric of the game’s reality; who’s a stakeholder…) referred to as ‘transparency’ (10) *** Methodology: Could we create or install a browser add-on that tracks in-game behavior client-side, to get around commercial games’ reluctance to share user behavior?

Whyologist hats! (14)

*** We hope that other researchers will continue to explore the issue of governance in adult-, teen-, and child-focused virtual worlds, taking into account the specific needs and interests of each population. (75)

Cheating as a place where moral systems diverge starkly between online (identity play) and school (prosecution for academic integrity) (84)

“Cheating in fact has a connection to learning that is rarely considered, a connection that moves beyond the ethical fault lines of right or wrong, and questions cheating from an educational perspective of what is being learned. In other words, we wonder whether games can be designed in such a fashion that developing cheats could become an opportunity rather than a shortcut for learning.” (85) *** Consider cheat sites as an analogue to ‘teachable agents’ theory of ed-tech [see also 92-95] “turning boundary play into good play”

Community Science Games (99)      are immersive micro worlds!!!

     WhyPox conversation: other explanations for why things are happening (scarves protect you?)      engineering goals vs scientific goals (note on 167)      *** does this kind of folk science talk necessarily bubble up accurate paradigms?       Qualities of effective community science games (115):  a temporal dimension that defines the length of the community event (from one day to several days or weeks), an impact dimension that is based on the core features of community life (online appearance, online discussions), and an active choice dimension that describes the event par- ticipation as either by choice or by presence and indicates to what degree players can intervene. A possible fourth dimension would be the scale of impact, whether the whole community or just a subsection is affected and whether they participate by choice or experience in the event.

How useful are online worlds for teaching critical interpretation?      - See Replaying history: Learning world history through playing Civilization III and Revolutionizing history education: Using augmented reality games to teach history on findings that students learn to be in virtual worlds well, but do not learn to critique these realities.

In Whyville, this becomes more complex, as players contribute significantly to designs on the site, especially in regard to avatar parts and social inter- actions. Thus, tweens are in many ways the designers and social drivers of appearance in Whyville, with the implicit challenge that they often do not critique the society that they help to create. For instance, although many Whyvillians complain about how they were made fun of when they dressed as newbies (see chapter 3), as soon as they reach greater competence in dressing they often begin to make fun of others as well. (120)

Methodology (147 and on)

  • 600 participants in online Whyville study (logged tracking data)
  • 47 students in science class (WhyPox)
  • 20 students observed in after-school club (interviews, field notes, filming)
  • in-game media (Whyville times)

This all feels quite accessible to me. I could do this kind of research this spring! I want to do this kind of research in spaces that cut across the physical/digital divide.

(application/pdf)