Kids' Online Pursuits are Key to Learning
by John K. Waters
T.H.E. Journal
March 11, 2009
A major study on the impact of digital technologies on learning argues that students' online pursuits are productive and edifying, and should be exploited by teachers for educational gain.
When the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched its $50 million digital media and learning initiative three years ago, the expectation was that research in this area would expand our understanding of the impact of digital media and communications technologies on how young people will learn in the future. By the time the first study funded by this initiative was underway, that expectation had shifted dramatically.
"We decided we would peer over the horizon to see if new digital media tools might affect how kids think and learn in, say, five to 10 years," says MacArthur Foundation Vice President Julia Stasch. "Then reality hit: It's not the future. It's not 10, five, or even two years. It's now."
The results of the first study, entitled "Kids' Informal Learning With Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures," were published earlier this year. As an ethnographic study, it was anthropologic in nature, inquiring into the texture and culture of youth life, and billed as "the most extensive ethnographic study of youth and new media to be conducted in the United States." A team of 28 researchers and collaborators at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed more than 800 young people and their parents over a three-year period. They spent more than 5,000 hours observing teens on websites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and other networked communities. And they conducted "diary studies," in which the youthful subjects documented their everyday use of digital media.
The researchers believe their findings fill significant gaps in our understanding of how young people learn and develop social skills online, and that the awareness gained in the study offers much that teachers can use to cut into the distance between them and their students that the digital age has lengthened.
"What we have been looking at are the properties of learning and participation that happen in networked publics of digital media creation and sharing," Mimi Ito told attendees at a Stanford University forum last year in a preview of the then forthcoming research. Ito, a research scientist in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), was a principal investigator on the study and the report's lead author. "When you have an ecology of culture and communication that supports peer-to-peer/many-to-many connections, how do kids exploit it for their own learning agendas?"
Need for Openness
A bedrock conclusion of the study is its defense of the constructiveness of the time kids spend online, whether they're on Facebook or MySpace participating in, as the study denotes, "friendship-driven" activities, or indulging their offbeat pastimes in "interest-driven" pursuits with other like-minded users. In fact, the researchers found that the internet is empowering a tech-savvy generation to pursue a central element of 21stcentury education-- self-directed learning, performed on kids' own terms and time schedules. It's a finding that compels educators to disregard any lingering notions that the internet is strictly unproductive playtime.
"One of the most important things I think educators should take away from this study is that they need to find a way to be open and receptive to the things students are doing online on their own," says Heather Horst, an associate project scientist at UCI and a researcher on the project.
Horst was part of a research group whose work identified differing degrees of kids' online involvement, which the group called "genres of participation." Together, these genres provide a framework for understanding youth participation in different social groups and their online cultural associations. Though they come with the rather unscientific tags of "hanging out," "messing around," and "geeking out" (see "How Invested Are They?"), they have an applicable teaching benefit, Horst asserts.
"I think the challenge for educators is to recognize the value of these levels of participation," she says, "to stop seeing them as distracting from school, and to find ways to exploit them in the classroom."
Horst explains that the MacArthur study estimates-- "We don't have hard numbers, but we expect to quantify this research in the next phase of this project," she says-- that 80 to 90 percent of young people are using new media tools and environments for peer-group socialization that is standard for the teen years. The internet simply extends these friendshipdriven interactions. But it's in the activities of the minority where the educational opportunities can be seen-- "that 10 percent or so who are geeking out on science fiction," Horst says, "or who love to learn how to build computers, or just really like an activity or subject and don't have a local community in which they can pursue those interests, to participate in communities in a way that feels comfortable."
