The Minecraft Generation

The Minecraft Generation Minecraft, Google Docs as socially-constructed school space http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html?_r=0  Minecraft “does’t really feel like a game; it’s more like “a destination, a technical tool, a cultural scene, or all three put together.” “Invites them to tinker” “As Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of media studies at Georgia Tech, puts it, Minecraft may well be this generation’s personal computer.” Alex Leavitt, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, children discovered it, and sales of the game exploded. Computational thinking enables new forms of placemaking Servers as physical situations of online worlds. (An abstract form of making concrete, especially since many cloud-based servers are within virtual machines, running on and across arbitrary physical sites.) Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine Robin Sloan has observed, is “a game about secret knowledge.” “In Minecraft, knowledge becomes social currency,” says Michael Dezuanni, an associate professor of digital media at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Dezuanni has studied how middle- school girls play the game, watching as they engaged in nuanced, Talmudic breakdowns of a particular creation.  The problems and challenges you face in Minecraft are, as they tend to be in construction or architecture, visual and three- dimensional. NORMS Most online games don’t require kids to manage the technical aspects of how gamers interact. A hugely popular commercial game like World of Warcraft, for example, is played on a server run by its owner, Blizzard Entertainment. Game companies usually set the rules of what is and isn’t allowed in their games; if you grief others, you might be banned by a corporate overlord. Or the opposite might happen: Abuse might be ignored or policed erratically. But Minecraft is unusual because Microsoft doesn’t control all the servers where players gather online. There is no single Minecraft server that everyone around the world logs onto. Sometimes kids log onto a for- profit server to play mini games; sometimes they rent a server for themselves and their friends. (Microsoft and Mojang run one such rental service.) Or sometimes they do it free at home: If you and I are in the same room and we both have tablets running Minecraft, I can invite you into my Minecraft world through Wi-Fi. What this means is that kids are constantly negotiating what are, at heart, questions of governance. Will their world be a free-for-all, in which everyone can create and destroy everything? What happens if someone breaks the rules? Should they, like London, employ plug-ins to prevent damage, in effect using software to enforce property rights? There are now hundreds of such governance plug-ins. Seth Frey, a postdoctoral fellow in computational social science at Dartmouth College, has studied the behavior of thousands of youths on Minecraft servers, and he argues that their interactions are, essentially, teaching civic literacy. Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize- winning political economist who analyzed the often- unexpected ways that everyday people govern themselves and manage resources. a crucial “third place” to mature, where they can gather together outside the scrutiny and authority at home and school. Digital spaces as “third spaces” where

Educators as curators, stewards