Microworld Writing: Making Spaces for Collaboration, Construction, Creativity, and Community in the Composition Classroom

In order to create a 21st century pedagogy of learning experiences that inspire the engaged, constructive, dynamic, and empowering modes of work we see in online creative communities, we need to focus on the platforms, the environments, the microworlds that host, hold, and constitute the work. A good platform can build connections between users, allowing for the creation of a community, giving creative work an engaged and active audience. These platforms will work together to build networks of rhetorical/creative possibilities, wherein students can learn to cultivate their voices, skills, and knowledge bases as they engage across platforms and genres. I call on others to make, mod, or hack other new platforms. In applying this argument to my subject, teaching writing in a college composition class, I describe Microworld Writing as a genre that combines literary language practice with creativity, performativity, play, game mechanics, and coding. The MOO can be an example of one of these platforms and of microworld writing, in that it allows for creativity, user agency, and programmability, if it can be updated to have the needed features (virtual world, community, accessibility, narrativity, compatibility and exportability). I offer the concept of this MOO-IF as inspiration for a collaborative, community-oriented Interactive Fiction platform, and encourage people to extend, find, and build their own platforms. Until then and in addition, students can be brought into Microworld Writing in the composition classroom through interactive-fiction platforms, as part of an ecology of genre experimentation and platform exercise

Media and Education in the Digital Age

This book is an invitation to informed and critical participation in the current debate on the role of digital technology in education and a comprehensive introduction to the most relevant issues in this debate. After an early wave of enthusiasm about the emancipative opportunities of the digital «revolution» in education, recent contributions invite caution, if not scepticism. This collection rejects extreme interpretations and establishes a conceptual framework for the critical questioning of this role in terms of concepts, assessments and subversions. This book offers conceptual tools, ideas and insights for further research. It also provides motivation and information to foster active participation in debates and politics and encourages teachers, parents and learners to take part in the making of the future of our societies

Examining ‘digital disruption’ as problem and purpose in Australian education policy

Young people’s relationship to the digital economy is a key site of popular and policy attention within the context of shifts in labour market conditions globally. The massification of digital media and rapid growth of digital markets globally have brought significant challenges for policy makers in what counts as work, and how best to prepare young people to engage with it. This has manifest in a proliferation of initiatives and policy orientations across much of the global north which have tended to focus on the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics occupations, and in particular, computing aimed at preparing young people for ‘jobs of the future’. The formalisation of learn to code programs in school curriculum has been one such initiative. Despite the proliferation of coding and computational thinking curriculum across many countries, there remains a relative paucity of scholarship examining their embedding in educational policy debates. This article follows the announcement of ‘coding in schools’ policy in Australia since its formal announcement by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in his Budget Reply speech in May 2015. The announcement followed similar moves in other countries and has cemented ‘coding in schools’ as a literacy of ‘the future’ in the Australian political landscape. This article suggests that while a policy focus on technical and instrumental skills such as computer coding may help young people to interact with dominant technologies of the present, they also risk weakening a more substantive conversation around educational participation and purpose in the present, and for the future