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I had the pleasure of giving an Ignite Talk last week at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Conference on the topic of “mixed-ability maker culture.”  By mixed-ability maker culture, I mean a collaborative culture within which people with and without disabilities can co-exist and co-create as they work to maximize and develop their own skills.  I’m at the early stages of this work, so it was a real gift to be able to share some of my thoughts with the brilliant and critically engaged DML community.

(Re-posted from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop blog)

by Rebecca Herr-Stephenson, Ph.D and Meryl Alper

Today we are thrilled to release a new report, T is for Transmedia: Learning through Transmedia Play. This report, which we have co-authored along with Erin Reilly, and which begins with an introduction by Henry Jenkins, is the product of a year-long collaboration between the Cooney Center and the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California.

Transmedia is an idea that has evolved over the past decade to describe the complex relationships that exist between media texts, media producers, and media audiences who actively and resourcefully engage with characters, plots, and events.  Transmedia storytelling, as our collaborator Henry Jenkins has put forward, is a way for audiences and producers to shape media content and negotiate meanings across multiple platforms, with each unique element contributing to a fuller story world.  We, along with other scholars, media producers, and educators, see great potential in transmedia for supporting learning and literacy development.

In this research, we looked carefully at numerous children’s media properties, play spaces, and play and performance-based programs to tease out the characteristics of transmedia that seem to best foster learning. From Harry Potter to Project Lamp, Story Pirates to Minecraft, we surveyed numerous opportunities for transmedia play currently available, focusing on those designed for children between the ages of 5 and 11. One of the key characteristics we observed in our review of transmedia experiences is the existence of rich story worlds that encourage reading across media and digging deeply into narratives and topics of interest.

T is for Transmedia is our attempt to summarize, synthesize, and spark discussions about children learning through their engagement with transmedia.  As media producers increasingly look to transmedia as part of a strategy for incorporating new media into new and existing properties and as educators look ever more to new media as a site for meaningful learning opportunities, we suggest ways in which transmedia can be a resource for learning in various contexts, including schools, expanded learning programs, and at home.  We promote the idea of “transmedia play” as a way of thinking about children’s experimentation with, expression through, and participation in a transmedia experience that acknowledges their cultural engagement, respects their thoughts and feelings, and builds up and upon 21st century literacies.

While it is clear that transmedia is a regular part of many children’s media ecologies—and, to a growing extent, their learning ecologies—this report is the first to document the characteristics of transmedia play and to consider its role in children’s education beginning in preschool. We hope that the research we present in T is for Transmedia will spark cross-sector, interdisciplinary conversations about the pedagogical promise of transmedia play and welcome your feedback on the report!

Last month, the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, made possible by grants from the MacArthur Foundation, published a research report on the findings of the Connected Learning Research Network, a group led by scholars such as Mimi Ito, Sonia Livingstone, S. Craig Watkins, and Katie Salen.  The Connected Learning Research Network, according to the report, is “an interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers, designers, and practitioners to advance an evidence-driven approach to learning, the design of learning environments, and educational reform that addresses contemporary problems of educational equity.”

The report summarized an international investigation into the ways that new media, embedded within a strong network of social relationships, can support young people’s interest-driven learning and direct that learning towards traditional educational, economic, and political opportunities.  The Connected Learning report provides a number of case studies on how learning communities develop, and how intergenerational partnerships and mentoring programs can be really powerful for young people who might otherwise have limited opportunities for participation and mentorship.  The authors use the term “non-dominant youth” in the report instead of minority youth, diverse youth, or youth of color, explaining that “non-dominant explicitly calls attention to issues of power and power relations than do traditional terms to describe members of differing cultural groups” (Ito et al., p. 7).

While synthesizing a wide range of research on educational reform, the report also creates a space for ongoing conversation about the best ways to provide all children with opportunities to pursue their passions, and to do so with the support of peers, parents, and other caring adults.  In the spirit of that provocation, I’d like to continue the discussion sparked by the Connected Learning report, and talk about an example of connected learning that builds upon the cases described in the report.  Specifically, this example of connected learning centers on young people with disabilities, a group that adds another dimension to the discussion of “non-dominant youth.”  This “group” though is loosely defined as a category as disability takes many forms and intersects with issues of economic, cultural, and institutional equity in complex ways.

Augmentative and alternative communication devices as “new media”

I came across this particular case of connected learning this past weekend when I attended the annual Assistive Technology Institute in Costa Mesa, CA.  The one-day conference convened parents, teachers, therapists, and people with disabilities to discuss and learn about the latest in assistive technology services, tools, and products.  “Our goal,” states the Institute’s website, “is to help enhance opportunities for learners from preschool to adult in order that they may compete and contribute in the twenty-first century.”  I attended the conference as part of my ongoing research on how contemporary families incorporate new media and communication technologies into their homes, and in particular, families with children with disabilities.

“Assistive technology” (or AT for those unfamiliar with the term) is legislatively defined by the 1994 US Individuals with Disability Education Act as “any item, piece of equipment or product system whether acquired commercially off the shelf, modified, or customized that is used to increase, maintain or improve functional capabilities of a child with a disability.”  At the conference, AT consultants Zebreda Dunham and Martin Sweeney offered up an alternative definition of AT, as “any thing or any tool that can make life easier and more productive for people with (or without) disabilities.”

One kind of AT is an augmentative and alternative communication (or AAC) device.  The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association defines AAC as “all forms of communication (other than oral speech) that are used to express thoughts, needs, wants, and ideas.”  There are many different types of AAC and many types of AAC users.  Some AAC relies on the users’ body to communicate (for example, sign language), while other AAC requires the use of tools or technological equipment in addition to the users’ body.  These “aided” forms of AAC can range from “no-tech” items such as paper and pencil to “high-tech” mobile devices that produce voice output.  The price range then for AAC can be mere cents or tens of thousands of dollars.  Some high-tech AAC devices are essentially portable computers with the sole purpose of providing AAC, while other AAC devices have other functions too (for example, iPads loaded with AAC apps).

People who use AAC need it because they have severe speech or language problems, and this includes people across the lifespan.  Adults and children may use AAC due to a developmental disability (e.g. autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy), an injury or illness that impacts their communication (e.g. stroke), or a progressive neurological condition (e.g. multiple sclerosis).  People who use AAC need different ways besides or in addition to oral speech to express themselves.

One way that AAC use is supported is through AAC user groups, which are meetings for people who use high-tech AAC devices to use them among one another.  Research indicates that AAC users can often feel isolated from others who communicate in the same manner, and that this lack of opportunity contributes along with many other factors to inconsistent AAC use and less social, cultural, and civic participation.  AAC users, young and old, tend to know few other AAC users.  For example, a child might be the only AAC user in his or her entire school, which has implications for their sense of belonging.

Disability and diversifying “connected learning”

Getting back to the issue of connected learning, one of the panels that I sat in on at the conference was entitled “The Mentoring Program: Adult AAC Users Mentoring Child AAC Users.”  Kathleen Rausch M.S. CCC-SLP, a speech-language pathologist at the Assistive Technology Exchange Center at Goodwill Industries of Orange County, CA, and Kim Vuong, an AAC user and mentoring program participant, presented the results of a recent pilot program: an AAC group that brought together adults and children who use high-tech AAC devices.

Intergenerational AAC groups are novel; such groups typically consist of either adult or children only for a number of reasons including topics of conversation and levels of parental involvement.  The mentoring program presented paired adults and children who use the same AAC device to communicate.  This pairing is important since AAC devices and systems can vary greatly.

Rausch and Vuong reported that the program provided adults and children in the group with opportunities for increased social engagement.  While the young AAC users enhanced their communication capabilities, the older AAC users gained mentoring skills.  Rausch and Vuong’s work, like the Connected Learning research, was about digital media and adults mentoring children in the pursuit of a common interest.  Work with children with special needs is notably underdeveloped within the growing body of Digital Media and Learning Hub research.  In a recent article in the International Journal of Learning and Media, Peppler and Warschauer (2012) point out that little attention has been paid to how children with disabilities, too often poorly served by educational systems, are marginalized from research on interest-driven learning, out-of-school learning, and learning with digital media.

This gap in the research not only omits the work of practitioners like Rausch and Vuong from the conversation on digital media and learning, but may actually be to the detriment of those generally interested in studying connected learning.  For example, in their presentation Rausch and Vuong discussed takeaways that while specific to a particular form of mentorship under the specific conditions of the AAC users group are highly relevant and generalizable to connected learning as a model:

• Perspective taking: The child and adult AAC users in the mentoring group, particularly those in wheelchairs, encountered differences in seat elevation that made one conversation partner unable to view the screen of the other person’s communication device.  It can be helpful for a conversation partner not only to hear the speech output coming from an AAC device, but also to see the visual symbols on the screen as well.  The interpersonal skill of “perspective taking” in this sense encompasses both the physical and the metaphorical.  In order for the adults and children in the AAC users group to engage in connected learning, they had to find common ground and learn how to share space in ways that are similar but also different from the examples of intergenerational perspective taking in the Connected Learning report.
• Adults are learners, too: Even proficient adult AAC users in the group did not always know how best to initiate and sustain communication exchanges with child AAC users.  While children and their parents gained more confidence about AAC through the program, the adults gained experience in mentoring and enjoyed leading activities with the children.  More generally, adults engaged in connected learning might be experts in certain skills or knowledgeable in particular areas, but learning to give appropriate help and feedback is part of adults’ learning process as well.
• Communities of practice:  The AAC users group provided children with unique opportunities to shape their identities.  The children had role models in and a shared purpose with the adult AAC users, role models that they can draw on to construct their sense of selves, both now and in the future.  It cannot be stressed how few the opportunities are for young AAC users to belong to such communities of expertise.

Conclusion

Young AAC users have complex communication needs, and thus need multiple points of entry and outreach to enter connected learning environments.  While advances in digital and mobile media have enabled a wider range of possibilities for meaningful communication among young people who use high-tech AAC device, these possibilities also exist among various institutional, educational, cultural, economic, and social constraints.  As the Connected Learning report notes, “Without a broader vision of social change […], new technologies will only serve to reinforce existing institutional goals and forms of social inequity” (Ito et al., p. 41).  As I’ve illustrated with my brief glimpse into the research presented at the Assistive Technology Institute on intergenerational AAC users groups, without a broader vision of connected learning itself, the current research agenda on new technologies will similarly isolate young people with disabilities from educational, economic, and political opportunities and prevent them from also competing and contributing in the twenty-first century and beyond.

References
Dunham, Zebreda, Martin Sweeney. Zen & the Art of No-Tech Assistive Technology. 2013. Presented at the Ninth Annual Assistive Technology Institute, Costa Mesa, CA.  http://www.zebredamakesitwork.com/trainings/

Ito, Mizuko, Kris Gutiérrez, Sonia Livingstone, Bill Penuel, Jean Rhodes, Katie Salen, Juliet Schor, Julian Sefton-Green, S. Craig Watkins. 2013. Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

Peppler, Kylie A., Mark Warschauer. Uncovering Literacies, Disrupting Stereotypes: Examining the (Dis)Abilities of a Child Learning to Computer Program and Read. 2012. International Journal of Learning and Media, 3(3): 15-41.

As part of my doctoral research, I’m deep into about 5 years of issues of Scholastic’s Family Computing magazine, which ran from 1983-1988.  I’ve been interested not only in the content of the articles, which are helping me understand how home computers shaped and were shaped by conceptions of family time and domestic space in the 1980s, but also in the ads.  Some of these ads are real winners, a gold mine for scholars interested in video games, expressions of masculinity and femininity, and how “lay” people came to understand computer piracy and hacking.

I wanted to point out one ad here, for “Pic.Builder” software – developed by Optimum Resource, Inc. for Apple and Atari computers, and released by Weekly Reader Family Software, a division of Xerox Education Publications.

The copy reads, “See how creative you can be with this unique picture-building program.  You build color pictures with blocks, one block at a time – like a construction set. You can build pictures of outer space, castles, farms, trucks, and much more.  Or, you can be even more creative and invent your own pictures. The possibilities are endless.  Plus… you can save your pictures and use them!”

Sounds (and looks) a lot like Minecraft, doesn’t it?

A collective of Minecraft users built this re-creation of the castle from Disney World’s Magic Kingdom: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-04/11/minecraft-magic-kingdom

Certainly, Minecraft is distinctive from Pic.Builder in various ways: Minecraft’s relationship to user-generated content, its evolution within a network society, its unprecedented commercial success, just to name a few.  The sandbox game’s blocky 80s perpetual-beta aesthetic though, as well as the way it both collapses and reinforces the categories of “educational” and “fun learning” games, definitely had me doing a double take at this Pic.Builder ad.

(This post originally appeared on the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop blog.)

This past Saturday, October 6, kids in over 30 countries in 6 continents participated in the Global Cardboard Challenge, the next chapter from the folks that brought you the short film “Caine’s Arcade.”  The fanfare around the film, featuring a 9 year-old Hispanic boy named Caine’s elaborate handmade cardboard arcade, was the impetus for the formation of the Imagination Foundation.  The non-profit, founded by “Caine’s Arcade” filmmaker Nirvan Mullick, aims to “help find, fund, and foster creativity and entrepreneurship in kids.”  The Foundation is currently developing programs supporting kid-friendly makerspaces and providing opportunities for STEAM education (which means placing the arts & humanities very much into the center of STEM education).

The Foundation launched the Global Cardboard Challenge, an annual worldwide day of play and tinkering coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the flash mob Nirvan organized to surprise Caine with a big group of people eager to play his inventive games.  Each Global Cardboard Challenge event this weekend was organized by local organizations and community groups in schools, museums, libraries, churches, and even in kitchens and backyards, all sharing information via Facebook or the event’s online hub.  From Hong Kong to Homer, Alaska, friends, families, and community members came out to celebrate kids’ imaginative creations made out of cardboard and other recycled materials.

I spent a few hours on Saturday at the flagship Global Cardboard Challenge event in Boyle Heights, across the street from the original Caine’s Arcade.  I’ve posted about Caine’s Arcade on this blog before, both the film and the physical location in East LA.  I met Nirvan, Caine, and Caine’s dad George a couple weeks after the flashmob, when Nirvan screened an early version of the film at the DIY Days conference, and I have also been volunteering as an educational advisor to the Imagination Foundation.

Earlier this year, upon the worldwide release of the film on YouTube and Vimeo, I wrote, “Caine’s Arcade is a timely and brilliant example of how our society needs to rethink the ways of doing and thinking that connect children to larger bodies of knowledge and allow them to share their creations with a larger public.”  Having spent a great deal of time walking around the event on Saturday, talking with kids and their parents about what brought them there, I want to slightly tweak my earlier observation.  I think this Caine’s Arcade transmedia universe not only can support children’s learning across media, but also help to connect parents who might not otherwise have the opportunities to participate as well.

One conversation in particular stuck with me, emphasizing the importance of diverse types of parent engagement, in school and out-of-school contexts.  I walked up to two little girls working on building handles so that they could walk around with a large handpainted cardboard Caine’s Arcade sign.  I asked one of their mother’s how she had first heard of the event.  Realizing that English was not her primary language, I tried again in Spanish, asking if perhaps they had watched the “Caine’s Arcade” movie online at home.  She told me that they do not have internet access at home, and then called her daughter over to speak to me.  Her daughter’s English was much better than my Spanish, and I worried that I might have made the mother uncomfortable by asking first in English.  The girl eagerly said that she had seen both the first and second follow-up “Caine’s Arcade” short films at school, and had told her mom about the Global Cardboard Challenge event.

The exchange recalled for me the dissertation of a 2007 graduate of my Ph.D. program in Communication at USC Annenberg and current Asst. Professor of Communication at Rutgers, Vikki Katz.  In particular, I thought of an article of hers, based off of her dissertation work, published in the Journal of Children and Media and entitled “How children of immigrants use media to connect their families to the community: The case of Latinos in South Los Angeles” (2010).

In it, Katz describes how while most research on children and media in the home focus on majority culture, middle-class families, little research focuses on immigrant families and the ways in which children in those families “broker” new and traditional media forms to connect their families to local resources.  Most of these children speak both the majority and minority language while many parents are monolingual.  Thus, the children not only translate information from media artifacts such as newspapers and TV, but also advocate on behalf of their parents and help connect them with community resources.  Writes Katz, “For parents who are unable to interact in the majority language, children broker connections to media to compensate for their parents’ limited traditional and new media literacies” (p. 299).  Katz’s research “highlights the need for serious explorations into how race/ethnicity, immigration status, and class may affect children’s media worlds and relationships to communication technologies”  (p. 331).  The little girl I talked to would never have watched the “Caine’s Arcade” video at home, and thus through her internet access at school and her teachers’ interest in “Caine’s Arcade,” brokered her mother’s inclusion in this community event in Boyle Heights, which was also attended by other community arts groups and youth outreach organizations.

The “Caine’s Arcade” film has engaged many parents through its spread across the internet, and indeed, I talked to many parents living in East LA and South LA who saw the film on YouTube and heard about the Global Cardboard Challenge event through using Facebook.  In order to engage all kinds of families in children’s formal and informal learning opportunities, such as the kinds proposed by the Imagination Foundation, it is of vital importance to understand the media worlds of language minority groups in the US, and to recognize the multi-faceted nature of the kinds of resources parents have access to and feel most comfortable engaging with.