PBS Frontline's 'Digital Nation': Presenting our generation with a crucial choice

Seems to me, Gever Tully's Tinkering School would be the perfect antidote for all the concern about kids and digital media expressed in PBS Frontline's "Digital Nation" – hands-on problem-solving, lots of tools, collaboratively learning by doing, giving kids time to work the problem, celebrating and analyzing failures, teaching that success is embedded in the process (watch his TED Talk about this). The thing is, so much of that sort of tinkering is being done by kids using the very digital media and technologies that are the focus of our fears. But more on that in a minute.

This time, Frontline, which airs on PBS this Tuesday night, is depicting the personal explorations of Digital Nation's writers themselves, those of Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, both parents. Last time, in 2008's "Growing Up Online," the stories were more those of the documentary's subjects. It's as if Dretzin, the producer of both Growing Up Online and Digital Nation, was shaken by what her reporting turned up in the last project. Thoughtful journalist/anthropologist that she is, she went in-depth and looked at all sides of those teens' stories, presenting the most balanced picture I'd seen anywhere to that point, having interviewed leading social-media researchers such as C.J. Pasco and danah boyd for depth and perspective.

In Digital Nation, at least the preview version I saw this past weekend, it seems the main story is two parents' concerns. We're on a 90-minute journey with them, wending our way through skillfully told vignettes (about everything from a South Korean boy at videogame-addiction camp to the US Army's shopping-mall-based videogame arcade/ recruiting center to a corporation's daily multinational staff meetings in a virtual world) and thought-provoking interviews, again with top academics (e.g., MIT's Sherry Turkle, USC's Henry Jenkins, Arizona State's James Paul Gee, educator Katie Salen, Emory's Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, and Marc Prensky, who coined the term "digital natives"). Important, if not particularly new, questions are raised – for example, about multitasking, etiquette, addiction, alienation, and the blurring of virtual and real.

Documenting an angst-ridden point in history?

Certainly we hear Rushkoff when he says "we need to know if we're tinkering with something more essential than we realize ... what it means to be a human being." But we also hear from scholars who have been studying that question very closely for years that, with societal and technological change, some things have always been lost and some gained. Prensky says on camera that "we confuse the best ways of doing something once [in our past] with the best ways of doing something forever." That's what so many of us are doing. Perhaps Dretzin and Rushkoff are Everyman, or Everyparent, and Digital Nation is documenting a point in history – here in the middle of this profound media shift Earth is experiencing – when we're fearing and mourning what's being lost a lot more than we're seeking and considering what is being gained.

Did the writers really hear James Paul Gee, when, in their interview with him, he told of how, in virtual worlds and multiplayer games, young people function in teams in which "everybody is an expert in something but they know how to integrate their expertise with everybody else's; they know how to understand the other person's expertise so they can pull off an action together in a complicated world"? That's what happens for home-schooled students and the teacher members of the Cognitive Dissonance guild in World of Warcraft – and with students at school on curriculum-grounded "quests" in an educational virtual world called Quest Atlantis developed by the University of Indiana School of Education.

Did they hear Gee when he said we have two school systems now – traditional school, fixated on delivering content via textbooks, and the informal school system of social media, where kids are problem-solving, researching, producing, etc. on their own because social media are largely blocked from schools?

How about Katie Salen – professor, director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, and executive director of the Institute of Play – when she suggests on the show itself that seeing young people's game-based learning and play only through the lens of our old media environment, where virtual worlds didn't exist, may be somewhat myopic for us and limiting for our children? (See "From chalk 'n' talk to learning by doing" about Quest to Learn, a new school of which the Institute of Play is a founding partner.)

Stick with 'chalk 'n' talk' or open our minds?

For our children's sake, we really need to dig past the legitimate but relentless, visceral, and politically correct questions with which all parents and mass-media natives struggle and seriously consider what these scholars are saying. And not only them! I can't wait to see what Digital Nation's producers come up with next, now that the work of more than two dozen social-media scholars – Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out – has been released by MIT Press. It's a mother lode of stories about how young people learn in and with new media.

Which brings me back to tinkering. I got that word from Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation Yes, who presented a workshop about it at Educon, a tech educators' conference, this past weekend. Reading through her past posts about it, in addition to references to Gever Tully, I found a profound 10-minute video interview with John Seely Brown, visiting professor at USC and former director of PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), about using digital technology to bring collaborative "tinkering" back to school. Digital Nation, please look into this next!...

Collaborative tinkering & social capital for kids

In the interview, Brown said: "I think we're moving into quite a different kind of world, one in which change is omnipresent, where we're beginning to find ways to bootstrap our own knowledge, tinker with ideas around us, find things we don't know, ask good questions, and be open to criticism." He calls for peer-based, collaborative learning, "because, from the sharing you begin to see how other kids use what you just created. Kids learn from each other as much as from an authority or mentor."

Brown talks about how to make school responsive to the pace of change and suggests thinking of schools in terms of "distributed communities of practice," which digital-technology learning tools allow. "With these powerful tools with which to craft things, tinkering has really come back big time.... This networked world is an open-source world, where I can make something, pass it back to the community, and have that community do new things with it." This is not just a shift for media or even education, but for identity and self-worth: "In earlier decades, a lot of kids grew up thinking, I am what I'm wearing, how I dress, what my parents own; my identity came from those material possessions. Just maybe we're entering a world where ... a sense of identity starts to get constructed for myself based on what I have done, what I have created, and others have built on, passed on to others, and they have been able to do wondrous things with as well. A whole new sense of reputational capital and social capital is on the move...."

Related links

"digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier" - the show's main page (the full 90-min show can be watched online right now here)

A review of Digital Nation by media professor Henry Jenkins (who appeared in Digital Nation and taught at MIT for 20 years, until moving to USC six months ago) offering a different take on "killer paragraphs" and multitasking MIT students (including his own)

The perspective of Duke University English professor Cathy Davidson, who wrote a book about the 19th-century panic over the destructive effect of novels on children

"PBS documentary questions tech and our future," by ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid

"Are you an Internet optimist or pessimist?: The great debate over technology's impact on society," by Adam Thierer

Of "Dangerism" at The Tinkering School blog

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective," where I blog about how James Paul Gee's Digital Nation interview got me to thinking about how what I call "the guild effect" – or online community social norming and self-policing – will be an increasingly key element of online safety going forward

Digital Nation interview: My thoughts on parenting our digital-age kids

The reality TV of school: Helping our kids with tech-assisted 24/7 school drama

My review of "Growing Up Online" two years ago – maybe a little biased; it's good I wasn't interviewed for Digital Nation

WoW: The guild effect for teachers

There are lots of good reasons why an assistant superintendent of schools would start a guild in World of Warcraft (WoW) – all laid out in a fascinating profile of the Cognitive Dissonance Guild and its educator members in The Journal this month. But the reason why Catherine Parsons, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction, and pupil personnel services for Pine Plains Central School District, N.Y., started the guild was "to uncover education's brass ring: student engagement." A lot of teachers' professional development happens in the guild as well (the name reflects the seeming disconnect between several pairs: public perceptions of videogames on the one hand and on the other hand: 1) what videogames can teach teachers about learning; 2) what massively multiplayer online games can teach teachers about education worldwide when they're all playing a game together; 3) the members' professional development and networking; and 4) traditional or formal learning.

But the members simply aren't feeling any such cognitive dissonance, and their ranks are growing. The guild now has 100 active members around the world – all in the field of education. Here are some things they've learned about learning in WoW: The game "draws on multiple skills across multiple disciplines," higher-order thinking, and problem-solving. Players have to be able to read, communicate, and use analytical and statistical skills (e.g., a statistical comparison of one weapon vs. another). They learn economic concepts such as supply and demand and budgeting. Parsons told The Journal that the four wars going on in WoW pattern conflicts in world history. So players learn concepts involved in social studies and history and "writing and lore." She says players even use a form of statistical analysis in building their characters - what sort of talents to use, what weapons to use. She said 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old students whom teachers can't get to do "those kinds of computations" in class have no problem doing them in World of Warcraft. Tech coordinator Lucas Gillispie, who runs the WoW in School site, "took inspiration from observing that a particular herb [in the game] that allowed his avatar to go invisible was always growing in a thick clump of weeds." He thought of a lesson plan for comparing WoW ecology to real-world ecology.

My own first piece about the guild effect – in terms of online/offline well-being and safety – is here. See also "The power of play" and "Play, Part 2."

My avatar, my self

Neuroscientists are looking into the relationship between self and avatar. A study of World of Warcraft players in their 20s (14 men and 1 woman) who spend an average of 23 hours a week in the game/world was recently presented at the Society of Neuroscience, NewScientist.com reports. From fMRI scans of the players' brains, the study found "next to no difference" in activity in the areas of the brain involved in self-reflection and judgment at times when the players were thinking about their virtual selves vs. times when they were thinking about their actual selves. "Disentangling how the brain regards avatars versus real individuals may help explain why some people spend large chunks of their life playing immersive online games," the study's lead author, Kristina Caudle, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth University, said. In future, she wants "to study volunteers who spend less time playing World of Warcraft to see if there are differences in how their brains discriminate between real and virtual worlds."

World of Warcraft, MMORPGs in school

At Peggy Sheehy's middle school in Suffern, N.Y., the introduction of World of Warcraft (WoW) is going like this: first it's the focus of an after-school club, then "others joining us will be implementing it with the 'at-risk' student population [and] the 'gifted' student group," followed by regular classes "for specific content-area projects," Sheehy, a teacher and media specialist, said in an interview at WoW.com. As a high-level player of this multiplayer online game (or MMORPG) and guild founder herself, she's been exploring what can be taught with the multiplayer online game because she has already done a lot of teaching of everything from literature to body image for a health class in and with the virtual world Teen Second Life, and she saw some new opportunities in WoW, for example the opportunity to increase student engagement by teaching within a graphically compelling virtual environment. When that happens, she says, even reading levels go up: "My kids, who are 13 years old, are reading on a sixth-grade or a fourth-grade level in school when tested, but ... if you test them with the same methodology that you would test reading a John Steinbeck novel in school ... on World of Warcraft content, all of a sudden their scores are higher." Here's a site, created by educators (a collaborative Web site called a "wiki," as in Wikipedia.org), that's dedicated to developing lesson plans and other instructional tools incorporating World of Warcraft - so far for teaching math, writing, social interaction, digital citizenship, online safety, and 21st-century skills. [See also "Play, Part 2: Violence in videogames" and "Homeschooling with World of Warcraft", and "Can World of Warcraft make you smarter?" at MSNBC (for more on the body-image project, see Sheehy's answer to Question No. 13 on this page at RezEd.org).]

Documentary on multiplayer online games

If parents want to understand what's so appealing about MMORPGs ("massively multiplayer online role-playing games"), they might check out a new documentary on the subject, Second Skin. Of the 50 million people who play multiplayer online games, 50% feel they are addicted, the doc reports. It offers insights into who plays these videogames, such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft (the latter grosses $1.2 billion a year, Second Skin reports). Viewers meet all kinds of players, from those who say they're addicted and how they became so to players who've fallen in love with each other in a game (before meeting offline) to "disabled players whose lives have been given new purpose to gold farmers, entrepreneurs and widows," its creators say, adding that "Second Skin opens viewers' eyes to a phenomenon that may permanently change the way human beings interact." On the subject of dating, the doc (which is about 90 min. in length), says one in three women gamers date someone they met in a virtual world and that, for every one female gamer, there are 10 single male gamers. The Guardian gives it a thumbs-up. If you have the time and interest, it's free for the viewing today here.

Play, Part 2: Violence in videogames

Last week I looked at what psychiatrist Stuart Brown says about the power of play and how it can mitigate aggression. This week a look at the videogame part of the picture....

Asked by a middle school teacher about violence in videogames at a recent media-literacy conference, Prof. Henry Jenkins said, "Every storytelling medium throughout the history of the world involves violence – the paintings in art museums, Shakespeare's plays, the Bible – have images of violence.... The question isn't 'Can we get rid of violence'" in art, civilization, or life? "We can't," said Jenkins, who has traveled around the US speaking at schools and talking with students, parents, and educators about the place of violence in the entertainment part of their lives, led research, held workshops for the videogame industry, and testified on Capitol Hill about videogame violence.

"What we need is for this storytelling medium to make sense of our aggression, trauma, loss, and violence in the way that art does this. We have to create a climate where the images of violence are not trivialized, where violence has an impact." Because the teacher was asking specifically about violence in World of Warcraft, which is set in medieval times, Jenkins mentioned a friend who's a medievalist, who told him that people "hacked and slashed all the way through medieval culture, but periodically medieval tribes would gather their dead and mourn them. That sense of mourning and loss gives awareness of the consequence of violence. We need to be asking, 'How do we build mourning into the games we play, how do we put ethics into them?... The deepest research suggests that media are least powerful when they seek to change our beliefs and behavior and most powerful when they reinforce them - those are the criteria we need to look at."

So I've been looking for signs of videogames becoming more compelling and sophisticated in that way - moving beyond random violence and shooting sprees for their own sake to story lines, character development, scenarios and conditions that powerfully convey the impact of violence. I saw one sign last year while reading a thoughtful review in Slate of Grand Theft Auto IV. He wrote, "I get the sense that freewheeling killing sprees will no longer be the main draw. This is partly because the central missions and story are so well-conceived and well-written compared with previous iterations of the game and partly because the violence is far more disturbing.... What makes Grand Theft Auto IV so compelling is that, unlike so many video games, it made me reflect on all of the disturbing things I had done" (see this for more).

The key consideration, Jenkins said, is whether the violence in a game, film, or any art is meaningful (again, does not trivialize the violence but rather gets the player or viewer thinking about its meaning and impact) or just a "media effect" (which has no educational value). "A focus on meaning rather than effects has helped us to identify some pedagogical interventions which can help our students develop the skills and vocabulary needed to think more deeply about the violence they encounter in the culture around them," Jenkins wrote in his essay, "The War Between Effects and Meaning."

Related links

Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, who I blogged about last week, recently told public radio host Krista Tippett that the research on videogame violence is "not very solid" and there is evidence that "a limited amount of videogames probably increases imaginativeness and skills."

Videogame numbers. US online gaming, which is growing at 10 times the rate of US Internet population, "attracted 87 million visitors [in May], representing a very healthy 22% increase over last year," comScore reported.

"Good game?: The behavioural effects of video games" in The Economist

Professor Jenkins's full talk, given at the New Media Literacies conference at MIT in May, is here.

Study on videogames and aggression released last year

New Media Literacies Project at MIT

Homeschooling with World of Warcraft

Actually, it's called "unschooling," but not many people know what the term means: basically, homeschooling "without the trappings of formal education," LiveScience.com reports, such as textbooks or even traditional subjects covered separately. Subjects that are covered unconventionally, e.g., in World of Warcraft, are "math, reading, sociology, economics, creative writing and communications." Unschoolers such as a mom mentioned in the LiveScience article, Jill Parmer, teach by learning about and fostering the interests of their children. One of Jill's kids' interests is World of Warcraft, so she plays the 10 million+-member game with them and "helps lead a group of homeschool kids and parents in a WoW guild called 'Horde of Unschoolers'." She has watched her 10-year-old "make his own learning connections between WoW and other areas in life," according to LiveScience. "One day he became interested in the mathematical concept of exponential increases after his WoW character encountered a disease cloud." University of Wisconsin researcher Constance Steinkuehler told LiveScience she has seen 8th- and 9th-graders playing WoW go from "barely stringing together two sentences to writing lengthy posts in their group's Web site forum, where they discuss detailed strategies for gearing up their virtual characters and figuring out tough quests." She gets a lot of surprised looks, even from players, when she tells them that "85% of the conversations [in the official WoW forum] showed that players had decent levels of scientific literacy. Players used reasoned arguments, backed up hypotheses and even brought statistics to bear on issues that they faced near the higher levels of the game."

Battle of the MMOGs?

With "MMOGs," I'm referring to massively multiplayer online games, and the "battle" that's shaping up is between 10 million-member World of Warcraft and just-launched Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. USATODAY says the newcomer might "siphon off" some of WoW's success, but there's probably room - if not in players' schedules, then - in the huge and growing MMOG market for a lot of new games. A few facts about MMOGs in general and WoW in particular: The US market alone (WoW has players in many countries) is "expected to amount to about $800 million this year," up from $700 million last year and $332 million in 2004," USATODAY reports, citing data from market researcher DFC Intelligence. WoW players spend $40-60 up front to buy the game's software, then $15/month to play. Warhammer is published by Electronic Arts and was created by Mythic Entertainment. [See also this item about when WoW passed the 10 million mark (about a quarter of those players are in North America).]

Virtual Worlds field trip

One of the most interesting comments made at the second-annual Virtual Worlds Conference I attended in L.A. this week was from Jon Landau, producer of Titanic and of a project-in-progress called Avatar. Landau said, "I grew up being taught to worry about 'big brother'; with the Internet we have to worry about little brother." I don't think anybody else heard that quite as acutely as an advocate of children's online safety would. Not only is little brother watching, little brother (of any age, basically everybody on the user-driven, fixed and mobile network) is commenting, uploading, producing, entertaining, collaborating, socializing, and exploring identity, as well as creating imposter profiles, gaming the game system, sending nude phone-snapped photos, etc. We're dealing with a new set of blended conditions, with online life not just mirroring "real life" but changing it as well, in subtle ways we don't yet fully understand.

One thing that's clear from the research but was confirmed (in my head, not yet by speakers) everywhere I turned at the conference: digital ethics and citizenship have to be central to the discussion as we learn how to negotiate this new space where – definitely for kids, in any case - the line between online and offline is fading. Learning how to behave ethically in community whether digital or physical is central to children's well-being online, right now and increasingly as we move forward.

Really exciting projects are going on in and with virtual worlds in schools around the US and world. Check out the collaborative work between schools in California, Japan, and Australia at PacRim Exchange; with libraries in Teen Second Life and youth librarians of the Eye4You Alliance; on virtual islands for public school students (Ramapo Islands) in Teen Second Life; and in Second Life and New York City with nonprofit Global Kids, which aims to help "transform urban youth into successful students as well as global and community leaders" (I want to zoom in on some of these powerful projects in future posts).

I spoke with a northern California principal, Patti Purcell of Bel Aire Elementary School, about Bel Aire's six-week pilot project teaching students digital citizenship "in-world" and in the classroom with the help of children's virtual world Dizzywood. Patti told me she felt students needed a space where they could actually practice what they learned in character education, which has long been part of the curriculum. One lesson was in collaborative tree-planting. Dizzywood co-founder Scott Arpajian told me certainly any child can plant a tree in Dizzywood, but the "game" is designed so that planting gets "exponentially faster [and a lot more fun] when they help each other out." Students are given time to explore the virtual world (they're given "agency," a sense of place and ownership in-world), but the experience is structured too, with in-world activities always followed by classroom discussion. "Graduation" included presentations by the students before an audience of parents who were very interested in how character ed was taught in a virtual world. Patti said, "It's very empowering for a 10-year-old to be able to explain their space to a group of adults." Two other cool elements: students participate in creating their own code of ethics, and Scott told me Dizzywood lets them look "under the hood" - learn about how Dizzywood's techies and graphic designers create its activities and habitat (something aspiring designers and software engineers would be fascinated with).

A few general virtual-world-industry themes I picked up on (signs of where things are headed): not making users download special software, but bringing virtual environments to them right through their Web browsers; whether kid virtual worlds should "grow up" with their users (as has happened with about 10% of Whyville.net's users, now in college); predictions of a merging of social networking and virtual worlds; your avatar going wherever you go on the Web (not locked into a single virtual world); and other signs of interest in or movement toward interoperability.

Going to this conference was a déjà vu kind of experience for me. Though it wasn't just about kid products and services, it felt a lot like Jupiter Media's "Digital Kids" conferences in the late-'90s: a very young industry trying to get a fix on metrics, markets, and competition folding in lots of start-ups, a handful of well-established B2B and B2C companies (Whyville.net, There.com, Second Life, Multiverse) and one or two old, giant media players (e.g., Disney) barreling ahead, seemingly announcing a new "world" about every six months (Pirates of the Caribbean, ClubPenguin acquisition, PixieHollow.com, forthcoming Cars world). Lots of numbers were tossed around (some admitted by the speaker to be educated estimates because research is limited): a current 100 million+ virtual-world residents worldwide, 75% between the ages of 8 and 24, with virtual worlds "about to collide" with the Web's 550 million social networkers worldwide, and a current $1.5 billion market in virtual goods (e.g., weapons in World of Warcraft, clothes and furniture in Second Life). One number that has been researched – by the conference's organizers – is that there are now more than 150 virtual worlds for youth 3-17 either available or in development (see this post).

Related links

"ClubPenguin's newest competition"

"Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users"

"Here comes social gaming"

"Xbox Live with avatars"

"Benefits from having virtual selves"

Virtual World News

'Law 'n' order' in virtual worlds

It's a fledgling concept, but there are some interesting community-policing efforts afoot in virtual worlds such as Second Life, VZones, World of Warcraft, and mobile-phone-based Cellufun for mobile phone users, the Washington Post reports. For example, "in World of Warcraft, a popular online fantasy game, a character who is acting out runs the risk of being attacked by a group of self-appointed sheriffs. While the avatar doesn't face official penalties, the interference from other players can deter future crimes." In one of Worlds.com's worlds, users created a novel sort of virtual scarlet letter: "an animated bird that drops an unpleasant [virtual] substance on the heads of outlaws, known as 'griefers' in virtual-world lingo." There needs to be a flip side too, of course. I love the way London-based Childnet International put it recently: "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It's about ... using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same" (see this item) - an important focus for parenting and schooling going forward along the lines of "an ounce of prevention," "a stitch in time," etc., etc.... Speaking of which, virtual world safety expert Izzy Neis recently blogged about how a kids' world itself will be used to teach civility. She wrote that Dizzywood.com for kids 8-12 was "selected by the YMCA of San Francisco to enhance the youth program’s technology curriculum ... to reinforce its program emphasis on activities that promote values such as caring, honesty, respect and responsibility."

China's videogame sweatshops

If someone at your house plays World of Warcraft and you want to understand the appeal or the ins and outs of this 8 million-player virtual world better, don’t miss “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer” in the New York Times Magazine. It’s one of those stories that transports you almost to another planet, because it’s about China’s “gold farmers,” usually low-20-something professional gamers making sweatshop wages to do the tedious in-game work that gets their clients (gamers mostly in North American and Europe) into higher levels in the game by earning them “coins.” “Every World of Warcraft player needs those coins, and mostly for one reason: to pay for the virtual gear to fight the monsters to earn the points to reach the next level. And there are only two ways players can get as much of this virtual money as the game requires: they can spend hours collecting it or they can pay someone real money to do it for them.” But that’s only the beginning of the story.