2007 Colloquium Program and Agenda

 

Colloquium agenda ( .pdf)

 

Suggested session/paper  (.pdf)

 

 

Colloquium Session Abstracts

   KEYNOTE 1: "Fantasy Regnet" (.ppt)

Edward Castronova, Indiana University

    KEYNOTE 2: "Issues of Privacy and Information Security"  (.ppt)

Scott Ksander, Purdue University

 

Paper Title: MMORPGs and Synthetic Worlds: A ‘Second Life’ for Citizenship Education? (.ppt)

Author: Phillip VanFossen, Purdue University

At any given moment as many as 15 million players are participating in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, Second Life, or Asheron's Call.  James Gee (2004) stated that such “computer and video games are going to become the predominate form of popular culture interaction in our society”.  Mitch Kapur, CEO of Linden Labs, believes that MMORPGs have “the potential to fundamentally change how humans interact” and that MMORPGs may even “accelerate the social evolution of humanity.” This paper reports on an analysis of relevant literature and existing MMORPGs and COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) games to determine the potential of these for social studies and citizenship education and for social studies teacher education.  The paper concludes with suggestions for next steps and with recommendations to the field based on the results of the analysis.
 
Paper Title: Children, Economics and Casual Immersive Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds (.doc)

Author: John K. Lee, North Carolina State University  

Casual Immersive Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds (CIMMOW) are growing in popularity and sophistication among children and adolescents. These web-based online social spaces enable children as young as 3 or 4 and up to 13-15 years old to interact around like interests using a range of technologies. Most of these environments utilize two-dimensional virtual environments, avatars, text-based communication, and real-life like contexts. Virtual worlds such as Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Maple Story incorporate various levels of social interaction related to civic concepts such as rules, authority, and responsibility. Another common feature embedded in most CIMMOWs are local economies (virtual and real). This study examines how children use and understand civic concepts and local economies given their existing emerging practical knowledge. Three online players were interviewed for this study to develop an initial topography of the civic and economic interactions that these players have in targeted CIMMOWs. The implications of these children’s economic experiences are discussed given the aims and purposes of social education in the early grades.
Paper Title: Developing Real Teachers in a Virtual World  (.ppt)

Author: Brendon Calandra, Georgia State University   

This paper will suggest a novel, two-tiered approach to school reform that uses virtual worlds (e.g., Second life, There, The Sims Online, Entropia Universe) as spaces for creative, proactive, critical learning.

Affordances of virtual worlds and massive multiplayer online role playing games - i.e., the ability to create and *experience* virtual identities (Gee, 2003) - make these environments ideal for personal and professional development of teachers, especially with regard to reflective practice (Dewey, 1933; Schön, 1987; VanManen, 1977). A second related idea is to approach school reform and teacher development (or administrator development for that matter) through the creation of virtual schools and school systems. Systemic reform can be ponderous and difficult (Reigeluth, 1994). Rather than taking on the enormous, existing k-12 system, why not create a new system from scratch in a virtual environment? By taking advantage of the user-created content approach that has worked so well for the open-source software movement, a number of stakeholders (including new teachers under the guidance of experts) would participate in such an endeavor. The combined approach of developing new education professionals while they together with educational experts simultaneously develop this new educational arena could circumvent many of the limitations that have plagued systemic reform efforts in the past. The discussion will be framed using concepts and theories such as situated cognition (Lave & Wenger, 1991); cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989), discovery learning (Bruner, 1966), constructionism (Papert, 1980), and newer literacies (New London Group, 1996) among others. The presentation will start with a more general discussion and (with help from the audience) expand on these ideas using social studies/citizenship education as context.

 

Title: Using Technology as a Tool for Learning and Developing 21st Century Citizenship Skills: an Examination of Technology Use by Pre-Service Teachers with their K-12 Students  (.ppt)

 Author: Gayle Thieman,  Portland State University

The purpose of this paper is to report on the use of technology as a tool for learning and developing 21st century citizenship skills by  pre-service teachers with their K-12 students.  This longitudinal study examines the work samples of  223 elementary and secondary pre-service teachers in a graduate teacher education program.  The five year study addresses a central question in technology education: How do teachers transfer technology skills and knowledge into effective instructional practice with their K-12 students.   The study addresses three questions:  (a)  What are some expectations for the skills and knowledge of citizens in an increasingly digital world? (b) How is technology used as a tool for learning and developing 21st century citizenship skills among K-12 students?  (c) What are the challenges and supports for developing and teaching technology enriched lessons?

The data from pre-service teachers’ technology use surveys, reflections, and work samples are examined through the lens of the National Educational Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for Teachers  (ISTE, 2000), National Educational Technology Standards for Students: The Next Generation (ISTE, 2007) and the Framework for 21st Century Learning (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2007).  Findings indicate a sharp increase in technology use with K-12 students, beginning in 2006, and suggest implications for teacher preparation.

 

Title: Making Citizens, Making History  (.ppt)

Authors: David McDivitt, Oak Hill High School; Sarah Grafman, Muzzy Lane Software

Teachers are expected to mold students into good citizens and good workers; productive members of society.  What about developing thoughtful individuals, engaged in learning for learning's sake?  How can games serve all these goals?  David McDivitt, a "wired" social studies teacher from Oak Hill High School, shares his experiences teaching with games, student blogs, and his own personal blog (http://davidmcdivitt.wordpress.com/).  His use of games--specifically Making History and The Sims--has shifted from an innovation to a new standard.  In parallel, Sarah Grafman, the content producer and educational designer of Making History, explores how Making History has evolved as a game and an educational experience. 

 

Paper Title: What’s the Name of the Game: A Review of Video Games for Citizenship Education (.ppt)

 

Author: William Watson, Purdue University

As a form of entertainment, in the last few years computer and video games have reached an all-time high in popularity, becoming a regular part of many children’s lives. Games have become so pervasive that some are referring to the current generation as the "Gamer Generation" (Beck and Wade, 2004). Computer and video games are also gaining an increased advocacy for their adaptation for educational purposes. For example, the Federation of American Scientists recently declared that video games can revolutionize education and called for increased federal support for research. This paper will review current applications of video games for citizenship education as well as identify potential approaches for those interested in incorporating video games for citizenship education.

 

Paper Title:  Experiencing the Origins of American Democracy through a Computer Video Game  (.ppt)

 

Author: Joseph Feinberg, Georgia State University

This study investigated the designed experiences and classroom potential of Revolution, a multi-player computer video game. Computer video games potentially provide a means to engage students in thoughtful and worthwhile learning that is consistent with the contemporary goals of social studies and democratic education. The participants for this study were college level students from an American History survey course at a public university. Findings from this sample supported previous research results concerning affective learning. Yet, the cognitive learning results were mixed and showed a participant perception of limited learning.

 
Paper Title: Freedom Fighter: 1956

Author: Christian Mattix, Purdue University

 

Paper Title: An Analysis of Electronic Media to Prepare Children and Youth for Safe and Ethical Practices in Digital Environments

 

Authors: Ilene R. Berson, University of South Florida; Michael J. Berson, University of South Florida; Shreya Desai, Walker Middle School; Donald Falls, Southeast High School; John Fenaughty, NetSafe New Zealand

Students today are raised in a digital world where communication technologies are common in their everyday lives. In addition to the tremendous benefits that technology has afforded, including access to information and educational resources, the increased immersion of young people into a digital age has also contributed to the evolution of new participants in and witnesses to the emergence of social problems in the cyberworld. The permeation of the Internet into the lives of children and youth can expose them to information with questionable legitimacy, ideas that can be contrary to positive behaviors, and messages which are intended to manipulate their actions or beliefs. Digital communication is integrally connected with global understanding, multicultural respect, diversity, and tolerance. In order to adequately prepare children and youth for use of the Internet, curricular approaches to cybersafety must be fully integrated into the school content. These approaches optimize use of teachable moments in school. This presentation will provide an analysis of the use of electronic media in Internet safety initiatives in schools and discuss emerging research evidence on successful approaches to engage children in assessing risky situations, developing appropriate coping techniques, and practicing responsible decision making online.

 
Paper Title: Fostering Global Citizenship from a Spatial Framework with Geospatial Technology (.ppt)

Author: Eui-kyung Shin, Northern Illinois University 

Global citizenship education has been advocated to help students expand their global identification, in addition to their cultural and national identifications.  While there are many dimensions in fostering global identification of students, the discussion of integrating spatial perspective in global level has been limited.  The recent development of global level geotechnology, including web-mapping, virtual globes (e.g., Google Earth, etc) and Global Positioning Systems, provides the potential to inquire about issues and solve problems from a spatial perspective in global society.  Thus, the use of geotechnology is to improve critical thinking, problem-solving and decision making skills that students need to make informed decisions for the Earth and its people.  In this paper, the use of geotechnology to enhance global spatial perspectives and the need for forstering global identification from a spatial perspective will be discussed.  Additionally, the implication of using geotechnology to promote global citizenship education will be addressed.   

 
Paper Title: Open Source Software in the Support of Democratic Citizenship

Author: Daniel Stuckart, Wagner College 

Open source software (OSS) is both a product and a social movement predicated on openness and freedom. Coined in 1998, OSS refers to software with a transparent source code, which is usually free and modifiable. Although OSS originated from the exigencies of World War II, the rapid rise of the Internet since the early 1990s fueled its exponential growth. As a social movement, the development of OSS has been a microcosm of democratic collaboration and information access. As a technological product, it provides the tools and applications to promote democratic openness, address the digital divide, and advance citizenship education.

 

Paper Title: Scaffolding students’ construction of meaning from stories: Understanding and using narratives to support students’ inquiry  (.ppt)

 

Authors:  Krista Glazewski, New Mexico State University; Peg Ertmer, Purdue University

Stories are typically recognized as one of the primary means individuals make sense of and give meaning to their experiences (Jonassen & Hernandez-Serrano, 2002). Stories and narratives have been used in a variety of instructional settings from military training to professional education. Within these settings, narratives serve as a common context to help learners remember novel information, learn from others’ experiences, solve problems, and attain a deep level of understanding (Bruner, 1990; Jonassen & Hernandez-Serrano, 2002). As such, stories represent an integral part of the learning environment, though it is not clear how learners generate narratives internally when engaged in digital and synthetic worlds. The purpose of this paper will be to present a theory regarding how learners build internal narratives and to present a scaffolding model for effectively capitalizing on these narratives. In addition, we will present areas for future research on learner-generated stories and narratives within digital and synthetic worlds.

 

 Paper Title: A “Guilded” Future: Lessons in leadership from Massively Multiplayer On-Line Games  (.ppt)

 

Author: Nick deKanter, Muzzy Lane Software   

Leadership is alive and well in virtual worlds. This paper explores the meaning of leadership among gamers, and how it is developed. This initial study is based key literature about MMOG communities, blogs and personal observations. Finally, it postulates some hypotheses on what this might mean to the future of civic involvement.

Paper Title: Designing Online Social Networks to Ratchet up the Quality of Civic Discourse  (.ppt)

 

Author: Dan Zalles, SRI International

 

Web 1.0 has made it possible for citizens to access a wealth of information never before available to them. Web 2.0 has made it possible for them to produce content, organize, and engage in discourse online. Yet, to be constructively engaged about civic issues, they need capacities in information literacy, critical thinking, reflection, and communication. My paper explores how social networking environments have the potential to fill this gap. Embedded supports can be designed that enable more effective discourse through tools, templates, models, and peer review. The paper describes how we can leverage what we already know about effective classroom problem-based learning tasks when designing the supports. I draw from research my colleagues and I have conducted about how students respond to problem-based learning activities that prompt critical analysis of public data, scientific inquiry, and evidence based decision-making. The paper also discusses the challenges of prompting more constructive engagement around the more value-oriented, affective dimensions of civic deliberation.

 

Paper Title: Battle Gear in the Classroom? The Question of Elementary Publishers and Gaming

 Author: Christina Kapp

It is an exciting and chaotic time to be working with K-6 educational technologies. As a technology editor at a large elementary school publisher I see firsthand how the market is changing. We must negotiate the changing definition of a ‘text’ in the classroom, as well as how the digital divide affects our political and social roles (profitability versus innovation). Although the end result of this shift is still very much in question, one of the prospects I find most interesting from both a corporate and academic standpoint is the use of first-person player games in the classroom. As James Gee notes, mass-market gaming provides an opportunity for learning through ‘embodied stories,’ yet there are still few first-person player games designed to teach core curricula to K-6 students. Should there be? And if so, should we as publishers play a role in this market?

Quest Atlantis and Dimension M are two recent high-profile online game/worlds designed to create multimodal semiotic domains for K-6 students. I will attempt to define and contextualize these games in comparison to current educational and commercial games. For instance, the common standard in educational publishing is to create simple games such as Harcourt’s Online Adventures, which the student can be said to play only in the sense that the game has a simple narrative—there are no levels, no possible game ‘deaths,’ and only one set linear track. The highest tier of commercial gaming, in contrast, is composed of multi-world collaborative games such as EverQuest, which has its own economy, social order, and self-perpetuating narrative. Quest Atlantis and Dimension M fall somewhere in between.

 

 
Paper Title: Are we preparing young people for 21st century citizenship with 20th century thinking? Building a case for a virtual laboratory of democracy

Author: Joseph O'brien, University of Kansas

Virtual community…e-governance…online social networking…digital citizenship once were the lexicon of science fiction writers, but now are a significant part of the lives of a growing portion of the population.  As noted by Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, “’we are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become’” (p. 1, 2007 Digital Future Report), which is supported by the finding that “43 percent of Internet users who are members of online communities say that they ‘feel as strongly’ about their virtual community as they do about their real-world communities” (p. 1).  As a parent of an adolescent, my gaze is toward the future, which is one reason why the growing emergence of a virtual society that operates in real time fascinates me since I wonder how best to prepare him for this new reality.  Like any other adolescent though, my son largely lives in the present, which causes me to question how his schooling is preparing him for life in such a society.  In a school environment marked by limitations on access to this reality, in many cases for legitimate reasons, such as bans on cell phones, firewalls that prevent research into public policy issues, prohibitions against the use of social networking sites, I wonder how he is becoming prepared for citizenship in a virtual environment.  In turn, as an aficionado of history I often look to those of the past for inspiration and am reminded of the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice who wrote that within our federal system states are “laboratories of democracy.”  Reading his comment as an undergraduate many years ago caused me to wonder at the time and to still ask myself today, should not social studies classrooms serve as “laboratories of democracy” for young people?  Given today’s technology, is it possible for schools to prepare young people like my son as digital citizens by creating virtual laboratories of democracies?

In seeking to define what might characterize such an virtual lab, I first will address conceptions of citizenship with an emphasis on how states through their standards have defined what is necessary for life as a citizen, followed by what these conceptions of citizenship education might suggest about preparing youth for civic engagement in the political realm and the larger civic society.  Using this as a foundation, I will discuss the potential, practice and perils of digital democracy, youth empowerment in a digital world and close with suggestions about creating a virtual democracy for students to promote civic engagement

 

Paper Title: Reflective, competent, and concerned citizens in the history classroom: Seventh-grade students' inclusion of citizenship themes in digital history projects  (.ppt)

 

Author: Thomas Hammond, Lehigh University

Two Virginia middle-school teachers incorporated student creation of digital documentaries in their history instruction. The students' movies were short (1-3 minute) visual montages of primary source images accompanied by the students' voice-over narration. During these movie-making projects, the teachers instructed the students to explain a topic from the history curriculum and to identify the significance of this topic. This second component of the task addressed a curricular standard regarding historical thinking, but students' responses referenced themes from citizenship education (e.g., cultural pluralism, social criticism, national identification). More than 80 movies were analyzed and coded for themes. This study accomplishes two goals. First, it provides a student-centered counterpart to existing research on teachers' views of citizenship education (Anderson et al., 1997). Second, it provides a potential model for a civics-infused history education course (Brown & Drake, 2006).

 
Paper Title: Assessing Internet Use in Teaching for Citizenship Education: Developing an Inventory Based on a Review of Relevant Literature

Author: James Shiveley, Miami (OH) University


This study conducted a review of the literature related to the use of the Internet for general classroom teaching and, more specifically, for the teaching of citizenship education. The study first focused on three questions: what research is being conducted on defining best practice related to the use of the Internet, what is the impact of various types of Internet use on K-12 student learning, and what is the impact of various types of Internet use on powerful social studies teaching and learning leading to civic efficacy? The answers to these questions then served as a starting point for describing a set of holistic guidelines for Internet use in social studies classrooms. The recommendation from this study was to utilize the NCSS Position Statement on Powerful Teaching and Learning in the Social Studies as a guide to assist in developing a more structured and intentional use of this medium toward citizenship education. To this end an inventory of Internet use based on the tenets of "Powerful Teaching and Learning" was created (the Social Studies Internet Use Inventory) and pilot tested. The results of this pilot test and future recommendations on how to use the inventory are discussed.
 
Title: Mobile, wireless, connected. What learning while mobile means for Social Studies Education (.ppt)

Author: Mark van't Hooft, Kent State University

Digital technologies are making us increasingly mobile and connected. It is easier now than ever to access, aggregate, create, and share information in a variety of media formats, anywhere and anytime. For education, this means that learning is becoming more personal yet collaborative and networked, portable and situated, ubiquitous and durable. It also means that learning and formal education are increasingly at odds, as more learning is happening outside of the classroom than in it.

According to Sharples et al. (2007), there are three phases of mobile computing. The first phase focuses on handheld technologies for formal education and training and usually happens in a fixed location like a classroom. This is where many formal mobile computing projects in the United States would fit. The second phase focuses on learning outside of the classroom, and includes projects that use portable or fixed technologies to learn across locations and transitions. Many projects that include learning spaces such as museums, zoos, or historical sites fall in this category. Third, there is the concept of learning while mobile, where the focus is not on the technology or the learner, but on the mobile society as a whole. More specifically, it spotlights the mobility of the learner, the design of learning spaces, informal and social learning, and lifelong learning support.

Using the framework laid out above, this paper explores what it means to learn while mobile, how current digital tools enable this kind of learning, and what the implications are for teaching and learning. Specifically, the paper focuses on how learning while mobile is challenging established practices in social studies education with regards to learning with technology as well as learning about technology.