289 research outputs found

    Living and Learning With New Media: Summary of Findings From the Digital Youth Project

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    Summarizes findings from a three-year study of how new media have been integrated into youth behaviors and have changed the dynamics of media literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge. Outlines implications for educators, parents, and policy makers

    Media Ecologies

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    In this chapter, we frame the media ecologies that contextualize the youth practices we describe in later chapters. By drawing from case studies that are delimited by locality, institutions, networked sites, and interest groups (see appendices), we have been able to map the contours of the varied social, technical, and cultural contexts that structure youth media engagement. This chapter introduces three genres of participation with new media that have emerged as overarching descriptive frameworks for understanding how youth new media practices are defi ned in relation and in opposition to one another. The genres of participation—hanging out, messing around, and geeking out—refl ect and are intertwined with young people’s practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied and dynamic media ecologies

    Living and Learning with New Media

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    This report summarizes the results of an ambitious three-year ethnographic study, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. It offers a condensed version of a longer treatment provided in the book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (MIT Press, 2009). The authors present empirical data on new media in the lives of American youth in order to reflect upon the relationship between new media and learning. In one of the largest qualitative and ethnographic studies of American youth culture, the authors view the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States.The book that this report summarizes was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Reports on Digital Media and Learnin

    Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children's Software

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    Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning This chapter draws on ethnographic material to consider the cultural politics and recent history of children's software and reflects on how this past can inform our current efforts to mobilize games for learning. The analysis uses a concept of genre as a way of making linkages across the distributed but interconnected circuit of everyday play, software content, and industry context. Organized through three genres in children's software -- academic, entertainment, and construction -- the body of the chapter describes how these genres play out within a production and advertising context, in the design of particular software titles, and at sites of play in after-school computer centers where the fieldwork was conducted

    Toward the ultimate shape-shifter: testing the omnipotence of digital city

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    Supported by the latest flows of creativity and innovation, contemporary cities have gradually become multileveled interfaces between material and digital realms of urban reality. The process of technological upgrading continuously reinforces an assemblage of generated spatial segments, providing a connecting web for redefined urban landscapes. Composed of tangible and intangible urban segments, they are exposed to numerous environmental and social challenges of the 21st century - from global warming to social injustice and inequality. Searching for the best solutions, the concept of digital city and the framework of creative city have been highlighted and analyzed by different authors, but their efficiency and success have to be tested and verified by generations to come. Considering the current condition, this paper will inter-relate the digital and creative/innovative urban platforms in order to define possible areas of multidisciplinary crossover. The merging of ideas and tools, perceived as a new opportunity for increasing the resilience and adjustability of urban environment in the age of climate change, will be discussed on a level of information networks and their influence on urban space and community

    In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids' Lives

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    Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning The focus of this chapter is on how young people learn to play video games. We have approached this question ethnographically, studying young people playing in their own homes among friends and family. The primary data analyzed for the chapter are videorecordings of play from two perspectives -- in-game and in-room -- which we synchronized into a single side-by-side video record. By looking at in-room actions along with in-game actions, the chapter expands on a separate worlds view that holds video games as a world apart from the rest of kids' lives. Our case material shows instead how game play is quite tangled up with young people's lives, including relations with siblings and parents, patterns of learning at home and school, as well their own imagined futures. Our analysis also documents a remarkable diversity of what we call learning arrangements that young people create among themselves while playing together

    OPUS: an Alternate Reality Game to learn SQL at university

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    The project aims to test the effectiveness of applying the principles of experiential learning within a university course. In particular, the objective of the paper is to investigate the educational effectiveness of the Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and of their characterizing elements: the immersive storytelling, which blends reality and fiction, and the collaborative approach, which activates collective intelligence dynamics. The project combines the concepts of a Database course with the transmedial interaction techniques of a Transmedia course. The idea was to stimulate the interest of Databases course’s students in this subject and help them learn and consolidate SQL. The result was the creation of a playful experience that is classified as Alternate Reality Game, a realistic and highly immersive interactive storytelling, set in a likely fictional universe where the basic rule is “This is not a game”. The ARG was designed to complement the laboratory practice in the context of a Databases university course. In this way, students can practice, review and consolidate the skills acquired during the course. Furthermore, the playful component is accompanied by on-demand educational content, which players have the opportunity to request when they experience difficulties in solving puzzles that require querying the database

    Ontology of technology : Mobile technology in the Kathmandu valley

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    In contemporary times, modern communication technologies connect enormous amounts of different people from different cultures together. Yet, for all these different people to be able to utilize these technologies requires that they also share some kind a common understanding of them. Consequently, the purpose of this thesis is to study how a shared understanding of a technology is constructed and maintained among people who might otherwise have very different worldviews. It answers to this question through an ethnographic fieldwork which focuses on how the culturally very heterogeneous people of the Kathmandu valley are unified through mobile technology into a connected communication network. To analyse how the common understanding of mobile technology is achieved it conducts a comparison. It compares mobile technology to other different methods of establishing social unity in the Kathmandu valley described by anthropological studies of its cultural forms. By contrasting and comparing these different practices it elicits how the construction of a common understanding concerning mobile technology requires some ontological presuppositions concerning reality in general. Yet, analysis of the presupposed truths that are used to establish technological unity raises a theoretical and methodological problem. This problem is that the ontological truths concerning reality that connect the users of mobile technology together are similar to those which are often used as the basis of social scientific research. To solve this problem this thesis utilizes a method of science and technology studies known as actor-network theory. Consequently, by utilizing actor-network theory it constructs a method which enables to give an ontological description of mobile technology

    Sethive : creating a peer-to-peer online community for student filmmakers

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    Location is extremely important in filmmaking. Securing a location for filming projects plays a critical role in early production of the project. Although a number of companies developed online platforms that aim to help filmmakers to find filming locations, none offer a platform directly targeted to aid low-budget student filmmakers’ needs and expectations. The digital platform outlined is intended to provide an online community for student filmmakers where they can share and browse cost effective, available, and convenient locations within their campus area. This platform may also foster engagement and mutual support. I analyzed the current state of the art in online location scouting platforms to understand the problem space. Furthermore, I discovered and identified the specific location scouting needs and expectations of student filmmakers, and explored their existing level of trust toward peer-to-peer (P2P) digital platforms. The online and mobile platform resulting from this research allows student filmmakers to connect directly with local student and resident location owners to access cost effective, available, and convenient locations in their area.Thesis (M.A.)Department of Journalis
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