Quest to Learn

By Ashley Williams, Youth Radio

What if your extracurricular activities weren’t just extra but a part of your academics too? New thinking on education intends to bring students’ interests into the classroom. It’s called Connected Learning and promotes the idea that students will excel in school if what they are learning is relevant to their lives, experiences, and passions. This plan is spelled out in a new report, by Mimi Ito, the research director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California Irvine.

While students would still learn core subjects like math and science, Connected Learning provides ways for students to link their classroom lessons to their lives outside the school. Ito says the objective of Connected Learning is to, “meet young people where they are in terms of their peer culture, their interest in popular culture, social media, rather than say you have to meet us where we are as adults.”

Ito uses the Harry Potter Alliance to demonstrate how Connected Learning’s can be effective. She says, “the HPA connects young people who are inspired by the civic virtues portrayed in the Harry Potter books, and want to apply them to the real world.” This fan network organizes over social media platforms (Facebook, Livestream, Youtube, Twitter) to spread awareness and solutions to issues like, equality, and human rights, and to support of charitable causes. Literacy has been a central focus of the group. Their annual book drive has brought 85,000 donations since 2009 and contributions have helped build a library for a charter school in NYC.

Ito says another prime example of Connected Learning is at Youth Radio. The youth-driven media organization channels young peoples’ passions into education and job training. For instance, the poetry group inside Youth Radio, Remix Your Life, helps strengthen students’ writing skills, public speaking  and presentation skills while providing an outlet for us to express what we’re passionate about.

Here’s where Connected Learning could help close the opportunity gap. Ito says, “it’s important to diversify the kinds of entry points for the kinds of pathways that young people have.” She adds that “having their interests, their identities validated in the context of academic achievement, civic engagement” is essential to keeping students engaged. This could lead to better student performance.  But even more than improved grades, the goal for Connected Learning Ito states, is “not about individual achievement, it’s about contributing in the real world.”

EXCERPT FROM CONNECTED LEARNING: AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH AND DESIGN

CASE STUDY:

A toy replica of a 1950s pickup truck with a 100-gram cast iron weight in its bed races down a wooden plank and crashes into an upright textbook that rests precariously on the edge of a high stool. The book wobbles and then topples several feet before smacking the floor with a loud slap. As it falls, the book collides with the raised end of a yardstick whose middle rests over a makeshift fulcrum, creating a seesaw-like lever. The impact catapults a small bottle of hand-sanitizer a few inches into the air before falling and bouncing on the floor. “Hmm,” says the 11-year-old student who released the car. The student and her classmates have been challenged to build a Rube Goldberg machine—a complex machine that performs a simple task—that can dispense hand sanitizer from a bottle with a pump-top. One of the student’s teammates suggests, “Let’s try a larger stool.”

This is Boss Level, a special two-week period that takes place at the end of each trimester at Quest to Learn, a 6th- through 12th-grade public school that opened in Manhattan in the fall of 2009. Quest is the first school in the country to organize its entire curriculum to be “game-like.” It is also attempting to incorporate many of the connected learning principles into an urban public school. Boss Levels are the times during the school year when these principles are most fully realized. During Boss Level, regular classes are suspended, classrooms are rearranged into work spaces, teachers fall into the background, and students work in small teams on a single “challenge” that culminates in a showcase and party for the school’s educators, staff, and family members. In addition to Rube Goldberg machines, Quest educators have challenged
students to write and perform short plays based on fairy tales, to design and orchestrate a series of outdoor games for an end-of-the-year field day, to research and construct a travel website featuring three NYC neighborhoods, to build a sculpture from recycled materials, and so forth. In each case, Boss Levels attempt to weave together connected learning principles with the strictures of school-based practices.

PEER SUPPORTED

Students drive activity during Boss Levels more than at any other time during the year. While educators put students onto teams and define the challenges, students take the lead in designing, discovering, and evaluating possible solutions. Students provide each other with ongoing feedback about each other’s ideas and work styles. They engage in delicate, and often difficult, negotiations over what their team should try next, who should do what, and who can tell or ask someone else to do something. While failure is commonplace, and while conflicts sometimes arise, educators resist intervening extensively. In general, students are active and highly engaged, and the classroom is often vibrant and boisterous.

INTEREST POWERED

While Quest educators define Boss Level challenges, students have extensive opportunities for connecting Boss Level projects to their own interests, many of which are dissociated from conventional schooling practices. For example, when a Boss Level challenge asked students to write, stage, and perform short plays based on fairy tales, students wove numerous interests and cultural forms from their out-of-school lives into the productions. One scene took place in a medieval coffee shop called “Moonbucks”; plots and characters drew inspiration from popular books, video games, music, and movies; several students with an interest in fashion worked on costumes; a student who was enrolled in an after school program for gymnastics helped choreograph stage fights; students who participated in online fan fiction communities worked on scripts; students who were interested in media production helped with recording and mixing sound effects; all students produced daily podcasts that provided updates about their projects to family members. In doing so, Boss Level blurred conventional divisions between education and peer cultures.

ACADEMICALLY ORIENTED

Boss Levels confer academic legitimacy on creative activities that are typically absent or marginalized at conventional schools. By treating Boss Level as the culminating academic experience for every trimester, and by showcasing the students’ work to family members and members of the New York City design community, Quest bestows academic legitimacy on forms of work that are not easily measured by standardized assessments.

At the same time, Quest attempts to link Boss Level challenges to more widely recognized academic domains and competencies. For example, the Rube Goldberg machine challenge required students to put into practice knowledge about physics and simple machines that they had been learning about over the course of the trimester. Similarly, Boss Levels encourage students to approach design challenges from the perspective of “systems thinking,” a twenty-first century literacy that educators emphasize in their instruction throughout the year. So, for instance, when tinkering with a Rube Goldberg machine, or when writing a play, or when designing a game for the field day, educators encouraged students to think of each design challenge in terms of its components, rules, goals, feedback mechanisms, and other aspects of a dynamic system. In doing so, they connect hands-on activity with forms of knowledge that are recognized in various academic and professional contexts.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Realizing connected learning principles in a public school setting is not without its challenges. For one, Boss Levels can be seen as taking time away from preparing for state tests. While Quest hopes its students will score highly on tests, its students are evaluated against students who attend schools that place greater emphasis on testing. If the school cannot produce competitive test scores, many families will not apply to the school and the Department of Education could force it to change its leadership or even close its doors. Given these realities, Quest is under constant pressure to scale back on less canonical offerings such as Boss Level, and it has had to diminish the number and duration of Boss Levels as it has matured.

Additionally, the school has had to educate some parents about the educational value of experiences like Boss Level. Less-privileged families, in particular, have pushed the school to focus more on canonical pedagogic offerings, in part because their children’s options in the NYC school system largely depend on test scores. Further, families from various backgrounds have expressed unease with some of the student-centered aspects of Boss Level. The frenetic, messy, and often noisy character of Boss Levels can appear to some as chaotic and undisciplined rather than as engaging and invigorating.

Quest educators have responded to these challenges by attempting to educate parents about the forms of learning supported by Boss Levels, and over time many parents have come to see, and even celebrate, Boss Levels as important and unique educational opportunities. Educators have also had to make Boss Levels more structured and adult-managed as the school has matured, partly to ease parental concerns.

Despite these challenges, Boss Levels offer an encouraging example of how connected learning principles can be integrated into public schooling. Unlike most canonical schooling practices, Boss Levels organize students’ activity around a shared purpose, and they provide students with numerous opportunities for active and creative problem solving. Students, rather than educators, drive the process. Solutions are not defined beforehand and resources are not bound by the school’s walls. As a result, students have the opportunity to participate in the challenging, messy, collaborative, and open-ended processes that we believe characterize connected learning at its best.

Flickr:Shlala

Here’s the second part of my original interview with Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use in young people. Ito is co-author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, and has been studying the subject of how kids interact with mobile devices.

Ito talks about whether intervention programs and educational outreach make formal schooling more interesting or relevant.

“A lot of kids were doing amazing things around their interest, but very few of those kids were able to pursue that and translate that into context of adult world,” she says regarding case studies she observed.

Ito also addresses the difference between letting kids experiment and figure out what they want to learn on their own versus setting them on a specific course.

Q. Is there any research that shows mobile phones are raising literacy or reading skills? Does it matter?

A. I see opportunities that digital mobile devices can provide for learning in three ways: information access; social connection and peer learning; and expression and creative production.

A mobile phone does really well and delivers better in the first two than the PC does, because it’s ubiquitous and demand-driven. When we’re out somewhere with family, we have a question, whatever it might be, there’s instant ability to access information. The ability to access information within a social face-to-face context is actually a powerful enabler of learning. You don’t have to be locked into a screen in solitary mode to access this big ecosystem of information. You feel a pervasive connection to that. These devices become a way of connecting, ideally providing a social support.

What it doesn’t deliver as well on is the actual production of knowledge and culture and things like that. It’s not a platform that’s optimized for that. Most activated learning is making use of multiple platforms and learning opportunities in multiple settings. And the mobile phone is a device that could potentially knit together those multiple contexts. Whether it’s an iPad or a phone, it’s a stable platform that kids can carry from home to school or after school programs to cobble together resources and social networks.

But they do have to have those more intensive computing kinds of spaces to do more sophisticated forms of writing and production and self expression, and that’s the problem with relying exclusively on a mobile platform. It’s much more of a connector and enabler that can bring knowledge to more settings in daily lives, but not the platform you want to rely on exclusively.

Q. How do you think programs like the Digital Youth Network are making an impact on giving a leg up to low-income kids?

A. The results are still coming in intervention, but I can speak about what we observed in our digital youth study, and the differences these programs, certain forms of access, and new media opportunities have made.

What I saw that was interesting is that class and privilege are incredibly important.

We found that middle class kids had a wealth of opportunities, but had little space for autonomy and exploration, because their lives were over-scheduled. They were on a track to do a certain thing, and were parented in the context of risk and fear about what they should and shouldn’t be doing that worked against a certain kind agency and exploration and certain kind of learning because they knew what they were supposed to learn.

We found that when less privileged kids were given access to the tools and trust and space to mess around with technology, and it was often incredibly transformative for them. They would do incredibly creative things, and it wasn’t necessarily getting them to fast-track to something, they were just messing around and enjoying their sense of agency.

Q. What do you mean by their “sense of agency?”

A. So for example, we were looking at a high school that had an open-minded computer lab teacher and a local computer kids’ club. They’d get together and play network games, set up businesses on their own to refurbish computers and sell on eBay and take proceeds and do organizing and activating on multi-user games. They were doing creative and innovative and entrepreneurial activities, using new media. It was really interesting. It was a space where they could exercise a new kind of agency. And we saw quite a few of case studies.

Q. How is that kind of agency helpful in their lives?

A. It has the potential to ignite a transformative identity shift if it’s not in a context where kids are given a lot of agency in what they explore.

Flickr:Joi

Mimi Ito

For kids who are alienated from mainstream structures of schooling, they don’t feel like they have choices in their own identity and trajectory, so for them to be trusted to choose and have an interest is important. This is the foundation of  the model of interest-driven learning — the voluntary nature and the fact that kids have chosen what they want to specialize in and pursue has been incredibly important in fostering an authentic learning identity for kids.

A lot of kids in schools that aren’t structured around this more progressive philosophy of learning are not often given opportunities to allow their own voice and choice in learning. They’re either in environments that may be specialized already that kids have chosen, or they’re in environments like a computer lab where the teacher opens doors to kid and sets baseline rule for behavior, but allows them to do what they wanted.

Q. Do you have any sense whether these opportunities have a lasting effect?

A. You have to follow kids over a longer haul. In our case studies, we had a lot of kids who were young adults telling us their retrospectives.

A lot of kids point to some early experiences they have in connecting with other people who they respected who share those interests, and be able to choose the interests they have and mobilize their learning, instead of what they were told to learn. Somehow that set of factors was transformative in producing an identity in them that they were able to have a sense of efficacy that’s tied to their engagement in area of interest. They could mobilize learning and knowledge acquisition that set them on a different track in terms of how they approached learning.

Often a lot of kids will have the experience of empowered learner in an area of interest, but they won’t have the support to translate that into domains that are more formal or recognized by the adult world.

That’s where we feel like there’s a gap and our educational outreach approach and ecology and meeting kids where they are, but also making those things relevant to things like formal schooling and accreditation and career relevance trajectory.

Q. So does their interest-driven path lead to what we define as success in adulthood?

A. That’s the big question I’d have: a lot of kids are doing amazing things around their interest, but very few of those kids were able to pursue that and translate that into context of adult world. So that’s the question. It’s the kids who can make that translation who can become incredibly successful.

A lot of it is how we think of relation between play and work. I’ve also talked to passionate hobbyists who see work as something separate and want to keep it separate. It’s the characteristic of a particular cut of middle class who want to see their passions aligned with their work in a particular way.

At the level of childhood experience, the more even within the context of K-12 trajectory, if we can use these interest-driven contexts in a way to reduce alienation with formal schooling, even putting aside work issues, that would be a huge plus for the kids.

Lenny Gonzalez

A student at Napa New Tech High uses his mobile phone at school.

In my quest to understand how a mobile phone can be considered a learning tool, and whether it can actually help bridge the digital divide between low-income, at-risk kids and those with access to computers, I had an illuminating conversation with Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use in young people. Ito is co-author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, and has been studying the subject of how kids interact with mobile devices.

My conclusion: When it comes to the traditional definition of “learning” — studying a subject like chemistry or literature — mobile phones are not necessarily the best facilitators. Though kids are remarkably facile with phones — texting, researching, Facebooking, Tweeting — it’s hard to imagine anyone being able to focus on a complicated subject with any depth of thought using a four-inch device.

The potential magic of the smart phone when it comes to learning lies in its ability to provide instant access to facts and the ability to collaborate with others, as well as provide a fun, mobile platform for educational games.

Take Project K-Nect, for example. The program is a social-media-based curriculum that combines project and collaborative learning with new media learning for 3,000 high schoolers in three states. An Algebra 1 curriculum has been distilled into mini apps that include instant messaging and blogging, assessment tools for teachers, supplemental activities, project-based learning components, problem sets, and cartoon animation. “Students [take] control of the learning process and create personalized learning communities,” said the founder Shawn Gross.

But even Gross doubts that for very high-risk students — such as those who are homeless or are attending school primarily for a free lunch — the technology-integrated math class is as beneficial. In those cases, there’s much more to contend with than academics, and a mobile-phone curriculum alone won’t change that.

I asked Ito to put some of these different pieces of the puzzle into perspective.

Q. Do you see any evidence of mobile phones being a legitimate way for low-income kids to learn?

Mimi Ito: It’s really too early to tell based on technology adoption trends. It’s more like a glimmer on the horizon. We’re pretty early on the research trajectory. We don’t know empirically exactly what’s happening.

What we’re seeing is that things are trending a certain way in terms of tech adoption. The fact that black and Latino youth are leading the way in mobile social media is an interesting trend, because they weren’t the population who have  historically led on new technology adoption. What that means for learning and development, I don’t know if there’s any research on that.

Q. Based on your research and expertise, do you want to make any predictions?

A. I do think the next big trend in the digital technology space is going to be when we see widespread adoption of mobile social media by teenagers. We’re just starting to see the adoption curve, but it’s early. With Internet-enabled phones, we’re just at the tip of the iceberg for it to be affordable for kids. So we haven’t seen implications on the behaviorial level yet.

Adoption of things like texting, when you see a marginalized group adopt and pick up new technology, you often see interesting shifts and innovations. For example, text messaging in teenage urban girls in Tokyo. They were the first to ride this wave of technology and a way of communicating that’s now really ubiquitous. But the fact that suddenly young teenage girls were the face of technology changed the tenor of what it meant to be a technology user.

Flickr:Joi

Mimi Ito

You still have a very gendered landscape in terms of certain kinds of computer-based technology use. What you saw with text messaging and social network sites in the U.S., suddenly you have a high adoption of new technology that were led by girls rather than boys, and that’s changed the whole public face of what these technologies are and who these technology users are.

That’s where if you see technology trends defined not by stereotypical technology users or advanced technology users in this country, which is a white, male, fairly privileged profile, it’s going to be fascinating to see how that plays out. The early trends seem to show that we’re seeing shift in these country.

Q. In developing countries, where computers and broadband access have been scarce, mobile phones are said to be substituting or leapfrogging that entire step in technology advancement.

A. In countries that didn’t have existing telephone infrastructure much less universal telephone service much less Internet access, mobile phone service has been genuinely transformative in so many ways.

Mostly, it’s based on the bedrock that it enables social connection between people. Social connections are our primary platform for learning in everyday lives. It’s hugely transformative for that context of learning.

Because often in developing countries it’s the only portal that they have to the informational universe, people have been much more creative about using those kinds of platforms like texting and information access and retrieval and other kinds of things in the learning phase than what you’d see in countries like Japan or the U.S. or korea, where people have all these other pipelines and other avenues for information.

Q. Do you have any reservations about mobile devices as a learning tool?

A. One concern with relying heavily or exclusively on mobile platforms is that because of the structure of how mobile services are provided, it’s often more locked down than in the PC-based world. There’s much less overall opportunity for user-level reconfiguration and customization and user level control.

Most mobile services have the walled garden approach, and that’s my one concern with certain populations relying exclusively on mobile access and not having access to PC-based uses.

So the positive outcome of this phase of innovation is that we’re seeing new entrants doing creative things and developing systems that are driven by needs of populations that haven’t been historically well served by information industries.

But the negative scenario is that these systems are not open enough to allow a lot of innovation and learning from street-level knowledge that young people could be bringing to these systems, and it could bring on even more of a digital divide. You have kids who have persistent broadband PC –based Internet access at home, doing much more creative kinds of media production, and sharing and mobilization. And the kids who are reliant exclusively on their hand-held devices let them do a lot of things, but much more on the curated, consumer level experience rather than the activate one. It could go both ways, we don’t really know.

Read Part II of my interview with Mimi Ito.