Yesterday was the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Inaugural Symposium, Logging Into the Playground: How Digital Media Are Shaping Children’s Learning, in New York City and thanks to the wonders of streaming media and virtual worlds like Second Life, I was able to take part in the action.
The site’s blurb described the event as:
Key leaders from the fields of research, industry, policy, philanthropy, and education will convene to examine how recent research and experimentation with interactive media such as games, mobile technologies, and other platforms can accelerate children’s literacy learning. We will also be releasing recent research and reports from the Center, including a national survey conducted with Common Sense Media that examines parents’ and educators’ attitudes regarding digital media use in young children. Another highlight is the early release of a white paper by noted games expert, James Paul Gee.
The whole day was packed with great speakers, from PBS, EA Games and many NGOs, each outlining their plans for engaging learners with digital technology from virtual worlds to talking books and everything in between.
For me, however, the most important part of the day was release of some great papers on digital learning, including James Paul Gee’s “Getting Over the Slump: Innovation Strategies to Promote Children’s Learning.” [pdf]
In the paper, Gee calls for the American education system to wake up and start some serious action to engage learners and prepare them for the digital future. In addition to calling for more funding of school programs and a revamping of how kids are assessed, Gee outlines a vision for “Digital Teacher’s Corp”, where teachers are “trained to help students learn to transform information for discovery and problem solving, not leave it inert in storage.” Gee also sees a role for the community in the learning of students through centres not unlike the Boys & Girls Club, where children can go to learn and build on their digital literacy skills. Personally, I see these centres working like the literacy tutoring centres, Once Upon a School Dave Eggers has helped create (and outlines in this fantastic TED Talk), but instead of magazine editors and writers, the place is filled with game designers who take the afternoon off to teach kids how to make video games.
Although the conference and the reports are all from US educators and based in the current education climate in the states, Canadian educators have the same lessons to learn. As our education system begins to move toward standardized testing, now is the time for provinces and school boards across the country to increase their funding of technology in schools and create innovative programming that is rooted in sound pedagogical theory but also designed for the future and the learners who will make that future.
Check out more about the symposium here.
Tags:
education,
gaming,
literacy,
media,
rezed,
technology,
teens
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