How Young People Develop Long-Lasting Habits of Civic Engagement: A Conversation on Building a Research Agenda

This report grew out of two meetings held by the Spencer Foundation to inform its Civic Action and Civic Learning initiative. This initiative aims to strengthen work about how and why individuals and groups become committed to civic action. It begins with the assumption that civic action matters for citizenship, that there are concerns about current trends in interest and opportunities for participation in civic activities, that education for citizenship is an important charge of public schools and higher education, and that there is limited research addressing how to foster civic behavior. Through the Civic Learning and Civic Action initiative, Spencer intends to support research studies that examine the commitments, conditions, and contexts that stimulate and sustain civic action, as well as those that constrain or discourage it. Three sets of influences frame their perspectives for examining the connections between action and learning: influences of civic motivations and other psychological processes; influences of learning experiences and environments; and influences of social, political, cultural, historical, and other contextual influences on individual and group action. (Spencer Foundation)

Virtual Worlds: Emerging Trends for 2009

MacArthur grantee Global Kids reflects on six trends in virtual worlds around learning and philanthropy. As RezEd enters its second year of funding from MacArthur, Barry Joseph thought it would be helpful to outline several trends we have seen emerging that affect learning and virtual worlds. Read more...

Web 2.0 Tools in Schools: Recent Research

2009 Ackerman Colloquium keynote speaker Anne Collier reports on her blog NetFamily News that:

"Lightspeed/NetTrekker sponsored some research to take a measure of where schools are with adoption of Web 2.0 tech such as online games, wikis, blogs, and virtual worlds (AKA virtual learning environments). The study found what we'd expect of user-driven media: In schools, too, adoption of these learning tools is from the ground up. Teachers are driving it, and their three top reasons are: to address students’ individual learning needs, engage students, and increase the accessibility of what they're teaching to their digital-native students. The study also found that, in 83% of school districts, very few or no teachers use online social networking for instruction; 40% of districts don't even allow use of social networking (I'm wondering why not Ning-style social sites that teachers create and control themselves?!); but almost half of districts have plans to allow teachers to share their content with Web 2.0 tools such as wikis (like using new-media tools to teach in old-media, top-down fashion, but it's a start)."

MIT's New Media Literacy Project

Project New Media Literacies (NML), a research initiative based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world.

The white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006) identifies the three core challenges: the participation gap, the transparency problem and the ethics challenge, and shares a provisionary list of skills needed for full engagement in today's participatory culture. In the video below, members of the NML team share their thoughts and perspectives on the skills we call the New Media Literacies.

8th Graders New Media Applications

What do you get when you cross Greek mythology with a media literacy class on paid political advertising? Well, if you're media literacy teacher Marianne Malmstrom, you get 30-sec. video ads about kicking various lesser gods off Olympus that end with "I am Zeus, and I approve of this message" (see "The Dog Ate My Homework" project at the Elisabeth Morrow School in Englewood, N.J. ). This is media literacy education 2.0. It can take many forms, but this approach teaches critical thinking about media messages by having students create their own messages collaboratively, using social media - in this case, the Second Life virtual world. Malmstrom's students created avatars, wrote scripts, and "filmed" and edited machinima (like video screenshots, or "movies" of what's happening in a virtual world).

Find more videos like this on The Elisabeth Morrow School

Research on New Media by Digital Youth Project

Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives.

Here's a conference presentation on the results of the study by lead investigator Mimi Ito:

Welcome to the 2009 Ackerman Collquium blog...

This blog has been created to support the 3rd James F. Ackerman Colloquium on Technology and Citizenship: Citizenship Education 2.0: New Media in a Networked World.

Participants are encourged to read and add to the blog before, during, and after the Colloquim.

The goal of the Ackerman Colloquium is to engage participants in discussions related, but not limited to: (1) the potential role of new media/Web 2.0 technology in the development of knowledge and skills required by citizens in an increasingly digital and global world, (2) the knowledge/research base on new media in K-12 social studies classrooms; (3) defining a research agenda on new media in K-12 social studies; and (4) demonstration of the application and use of new media technologies in the K-12 social studies classrooms.

The colloquium will also provide a unique opportunity to interact with a relatively small circle of scholars and researchers working in this area in order to discuss our common interests and take stock of the current state of this field of study.

The colloquium is sponsored by Purdue University's James F. Ackerman Center for Democratic Citizenship.


Colloquium Co-coordinators:

Phillip J. VanFossen
Director, Ackerman Center and
Ackerman Professor of Social Studies Education
Purdue University
vanfoss@purdue.edu


Michael J. Berson
Professor
Social Science Education
University of South Florida
Berson@coedu.usf.edu