The MacArthur Series On Digital Media and Learning

The MacArthur Foundation, as part of a five-year, $50 million initiative exploring how digital media is changing the way young people live, play, learn, socialize and participate in civic life, will soon be releasing a six-volume series, The MacArthur Series On Digital Media and Learning.

Each volume in the series will explore a specific topic related to issues facing young people in the digital world: Civic Engagement, Credibility, Ecology of Games, Innovative Uses and Unexpected Outcomes, Race & Ethnicity, Identity. The series is being published online and in print under the auspices of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education and the New Media Consortium.  It involves the commissioning of more than 60 essays by prominent scholars, and is a result of a 12-day symposium in Second Life (last October) and a 2-day online web conference and open online forum (now closed).

Larry Johnson, the dynamic CEO of the New Media Consortium has a truly fascinating article, Who’s Listening to the Avatars?, with insights on the process of the symposium conducted with 27 leading authors and researchers in the area of digital media.  Johnson concludes that there is a gaping void in the knowledge/acceptance within this expert group in an important area – the implications of massively multiplayer worlds.   He writes:

“Questions related to gender-morphing, role-playing, and identity extension in virtual worlds and game spaces are much on the minds of the residents of such spaces, as one might imagine.  Such themes were present only in the abstract in the “flat-web” online conference, and surprisingly rejected outright within two of the expert dialogs, and not considered at all in the third.

"The experts in one group raised a question about the relevance of group action in virtual worlds, and deemed it not relevant to the topic.  Similarly, questions related to formation of virtual identities and the expression of self through one’s avatar were also set aside by the identity experts. The implications of assessing the credibility of information conveyed in virtual worlds, where everything is a construct, was outside the scope of that volume.”

"At the same time, the dialog around these issues in Second Life was extremely rich and detailed.  Due to the way invitations to the event were distributed, a great many of the participants in the Second Life Symposium were themselves scholars and academics, so the educational background of the participants in all three forums was similar.  One can only conclude, even for those we regard as experts, that it is hard to conceptualize the impact of virtual worlds until one spends some time in them.”

According to the article the Second Life participants far outnumbered the other web-based approaches:  more than 1300 people from 21 countries participated in Second Life while the web conference drew 225.

Johnson muses that perhaps we need to reflect on the need to expand the definition of scholarship. 

It seems Wikinomics is striking even our most venerable of institutions and raises questions about who and where the experts are.

I encourage you to read the full article.

Find out more about the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning initiative here.

Photo credit: New Media Consortium

January 13, 2007