In this report, Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg focus on the potential for shared and interactive learning made possible by the Internet. They argue that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity for world-wide community and the limitless exchange of ideas. The Internet brings about a way of learning that is not new or revolutionary but is now the norm for …
In 'The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas', Roberto Simanowski wonders if we are on the brink of a society that views social, political, and ethical challenges as technological problems that can be fixed with the right algorithm, the best data, or the fastest computer. For example, the "death algorithm " is programmed into a driverless car to decide, in an emergency, whether to plow in…
Chiefly concerned with MMRPGs (Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games) and the communities that they give rise to.In today's complex digital world, we must understand new media expressions and digital experiences not simply as more technologically advanced forms of "writing" that can be understood and analyzed as "texts" but as artifacts in their own right that require a unique skill set. Jus…
"In 2006, young people were flocking to MySpace, discovering the joys of watching videos of cute animals on YouTube, and playing online games. Not many of them were watching network news on television; they got most of their information online. So when NBC and MIT launched iCue, an interactive learning venture that combined social networking, online video, and gaming in one multimedia education…
Interactive fiction--the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure--has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known as chatterbots. Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this…
"Davis addresses the "screen time" debate by recognizing that children's experiences of technology and social relationships are qualitatively distinct at different stages of development"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Scholars from communication and media studies join those from science and technology studies to examine media technologies as complex, sociomaterial phenomena. In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinc…
An examination of young people's everyday new media practices—including video-game playing, text-messaging, digital media production, and social media use. Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet t…
A proposal to move the academic area of digital media and learning toward more coherence. In this report, noted scholar James Paul Gee discusses the evolution of digital media and learning (DMAL) from its infancy as an “academic area” into a more organized field or coherent discipline. Distinguishing among academic areas, fields, disciplinary specializations, and thematic disciplines, Ge…
An argument that choice-based, process-oriented educational assessments are more effective than static assessments of fact retrieval. If a fundamental goal of education is to prepare students to act independently in the world—in other words, to make good choices—an ideal educational assessment would measure how well we are preparing students to do so. Current assessments, however, focus …