Connected Learning
Over the last ten years, as youth have flocked to the Internet and social media such as Facebook, text messaging, and networked gaming, the media ecology of children, teens, and young adults has changed dramatically.
We see a growing gap between the learning mediums with which young people engage in-school and out-of-school. New social media enables young people to have greater choice and autonomy in pursuing their interests—whether academic, creative, or social—in domains outside of formal learning institutions. While engagement with culture and knowledge outside the classroom has changed markedly in the past decade, schools have been slower to adapt to digital and networked media. This gap between the more engaging social learning environments young people encounter outside of school, and the top-down and standardized curriculum that they encounter in most classrooms, is the source of a troubling and growing generation gap that is leading to academic disengagement for many young people. Addressing this gap requires a reconsideration of how learning is organized between settings of school, after-school, home and peer culture.
This research network addresses this historical moment where we see the rise of social media, the Internet, and a growing disjuncture between formal and informal learning. We suggest a new paradigm for considering the promise of sociality and media and learning, centering on hybrid learning networks which support interest-driven learning, cutting across school, home, after-school, and peer cultures.
When informal and youth-driven interest-driven learning does cross over to other learning contexts, we see the opportunity for what we call "connected learning"—learning in a socially meaningful and knowledge-rich ecology of ongoing participation, self-expression, and recognition. Further, the connection of informal and interest-driven learning to more formal, community, and family-based learning supports the growth of "hybrid learning networks," where learning is supported and linked across different learning settings in a young person's life. The underlying hypothesis for our work is that social support for interest-driven learning and connections to multiple sites of learning activity drive individual learning outcomes of efficacy, engagement, and expertise, as well as a robust and high-quality public culture.
RESEARCH AGENDA
The work centers on three core research areas:
1. One of the first goals of this network will be conceptual synthesis on what constitutes the key principles of connected learning, and developing measures of collective and individual outcomes that can be used to document and track connected learning in a wide range of settings. We will produce collaboratively written documents and shared protocols and instruments that will be widely disseminated.
2. Our effort will be to understand the role of social media in the learning ecologies of diverse young people, examining contexts of school, home, after-school, and peer culture. We will conduct a national survey as well as surveys and interviews in local populations recruited through schools to gain a picture as to the contextual, technological, and individual factors that support or detract from connected learning.
3. The research network will also conduct in-depth case studies to identify the concrete mechanisms that make connected learning environments effective and sustainable, as well as the individual characteristics and trajectories of those who experience connected learning.
THEMES
In addition to these three core research arenas, our work centers on three cross-cutting themes:
Diversity and equity: New social media have a complicated relationship to issues of educational opportunity and equity.
Technosocial design: Our work is situated at the nexus of educational programming, policy, and technology design, which has become increasingly the design of communities. Rather than focusing solely on the creation of new technologies, this approach demands that the design of social systems is considered together with the design of technology.
Intergenerational relations: Today's social media represents a substantial challenge to existing forms of adult-youth relationships. By enabling early access to adult-like forms of autonomy, information, and social life, social media alter existing intergenerational relations and power dynamics.
NETWORK MEMBERS
- Mizuko Ito (network chair) is a cultural anthropologist of technology use, examining children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications. She is Professor in Residence at the University of California, Irvine, with appointments in the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Informatics.
- Kris D. Gutiérrez is Professor of Literacy and Learning Sciences and holds the Inaugural Provost’s Chair at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also Professor Emerita of Social Research Methodology in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also served as Director of the Education Studies Minor and Director of the Center for the Study of Urban Literacies.
- Sonia Livingstone is Professor of Social Psychology and Head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Having recently directed the research project, UK Children Go Online, she is now directing a 25-nation thematic network, EU Kids Online, for the EC’s Safer Internet Programme.
- Jean Rhodes is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A clinical-community psychologist, she completed her doctorate from DePaul University and her internship at the University of Chicago Medical School. Rhodes has devoted her career to understanding the role of intergenerational relationships in the lives of disadvantaged youth.
- Katie Salen is a game designer, Professor of Design and Technology, and Director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design. She is also the Executive Director of a non-profit called the Institute of Play that is focused on games and learning, as well as the founder and Executive Director of Design for Quest to Learn, a new 6-12th grade public school in New York City that uses a game-based learning model and supports students within an inquiry-based curriculum with questing to learn at its core.
- Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years, in the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Schor received her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Massachusetts. Her work spans the areas of political economy, time use, consumer culture, and environmental sustainability.
- S. Craig Watkins studies young people's social and digital media behaviors. He teaches in the departments of Radio-Television-Film and Sociology and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Watkins has participated in the MacArthur Foundation initiative on Youth, Digital Media and Learning, a collective of scholars, visionaries, thought leaders, and practitioners from across the globe exploring the intersection of digital media, learning, and society.
Courtney Santos and Mariko Oda at the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California's statewide Humanities Research Institute