these results challenge the conventional notion that immersion in online communities are distracting or socially isolating and, instead, highlight the potential civic benefits of non-political participation in online communities.

is not meant to signal an individual or innate quality; we see interests as cultivated through social and cultural relationships and located within what we call an “affinity network” of commonly felt identity, practice, and purpose.

a form of learning that mobilizes young people's deeply felt interests and identities in the service of achieving the kind of civic voice and influence that is characteristic of participatory politics.

they can “geek out” together by swapping ideas, techniques and critiques related to projects that tap their deepest interests and aspirations (Ito et al., 2009Ito, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., boyd, danah, Cody, R., Herr-Stephenson, B., … Tripp, L. (2009). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: Kids living and learning with new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]).

This vision of teachers continually modifying and publishing docu-ments as an integral part of their professional practice suggests a radicallydifferent role for information technologists; it suggests that informationtechnologists might be in the business of maintaining knowledge-aggre-gating tools, creating and supporting knowledge-building communities,and providing tools for teachers to identify and organize usefulresources.

Because games are by definition associated with fantasy, many educa-tors quickly move toward highly fictionalized contexts for producinggames

Few students investigated the environment itself forclues. On occasion, students literally walked through piles of goose drop-pings (almost stepping on live geese in the process) because they were sofixated on the PDAs.

How do we provide students sufficient scaffolding that theyneed to engage in effective inquiry, while still giving them some agencyor sense of control over their actions?

Research on people who self-identify as gamers suggests that prolongedparticipation in game cultures may lead to a more active, problem-solv-ing orientation to learning.

the over-whelming majority of activity was dedicated to social knowledge construc-tion.

projective identities—identities that are a melding of ourselves andour game identities, possible selves that the game invites us to inhabit.Second, digital media are deeply participatory

In the meantime, although many students are alienated from school, other data show that their uses of digital media have increased

Youth are increasingly engaged in informal online communities that define themselves around shared interests and that often center around expressive activities

For example, DREAM activists have established multiple websites and networked organizations to build these connections. DREAMactivist.org was founded by students who only met in person several years after the site was established. It has grown over the years to become a coalition of 30 organizations that sponsor activities such as a new media intern program as well as campaigns such as the National DREAM Graduation, petitions, and fundraising (Zimmerman, 2012Zimmerman, A. M. (2012). Documenting dreams: New media, undocumented youth and the immigrant rights movement. Los Angeles, CA. Retrieved from http://dmlhub.net/publications/documenting-dreams-new-media-undocumented-youth-and-immigrant-rights-movement [Google Scholar], pp. 22-23)

What supports enable young people to move along a pathway towards learning connected civics? Three supports have emerged out of our research, which we take up in the following sections, centered on: 1. What young people produce when they engage connected civics (hybrid content worlds), 2. How they work together (shared practices), and 3. What conditions (cross-cutting infrastructures) render their activities increasingly sustainable and poised to achieve learning effects at scale

Much of this research is concerned with the relationship between in-school and out-of-school learning, puzzling over: how classroom learning gets applied (or not) to everyday life (Hull & Shultz, 2002Hull, G., & Shultz, K. (2002). School's out! Bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice. New York: Teacher's College Press. [Google Scholar]; Lave, 1988Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]); how children's home and peer cultures inflect school achievement (Carter, 2005Carter, P. (2005). Keepin' it real: School success beyond black and white. London: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]; Goldman, 2006Goldman, S. (2006). A new angle on families: Connecting the mathematics in daily life with school mathematics. In Z. Bekerman, N. Burbules, & D. Silberman-Keller (Eds.), Learning in places: The informal education reader. Bern: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]; Varenne & McDermott, 1998Varenne, H., & McDermott, R. (1998). The Farrells and the Kinneys at home: Literacies in action. In H. Varenne & R. McDermott (Eds.), Successful failure: The school America builds (pp. 45–62). Boulder, CO: Westview. [Google Scholar]); or how educators can intentionally design digitally-rich, production-oriented communities that bridge divides in access to robust learning environments (Barron, Gomez, Pinkard, & Martin, 2014Barron, B., Gomez, K., Pinkard, N., & Martin, C. (2014). The digital youth network. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]).

Commentators bemoaning youth apathy worry that digitally-mediated, expression-based forms of civic activity will make young people less likely to take part in institutionalized politics (such as voting), but recent research has indicated the opposite. Involvement in participatory culture

It involves imagination. It means investigating the world of the game and feeling the frustration, flow, and excitement that goes along with playing it.

Access to a network of both peers and mentors who can model what it might mean toparticipate in a gaming space affects kids’ entry into games and learning.

participation genres

how meaning emerges collectivelyand collaboratively in the new media environment and how creativity operates differently in anopen-source culture based on sampling, appropriation, transformation, and repurposing

young people were findingit increasingly difficult to separate commercial from noncommercial content in online environ-ments

focus on negative effects of media consumption

Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic context: we learnthe skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and gradually coming to understand thechoices we make in political terms

highly generative environment

Participatory Culture

While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat,games— and here they are already content producers.

We all need to be cognizant of what we share, how we share, and to what extent that sharing dramatizes preexisting racial formulas inherited from “real life.” The Internet isn’t a fantasy — it’s real life

If there’s one thing the Internet thrives on, it’s hyperbole and the overrepresentation of black people in GIFing everyone’s daily crises plays up enduring perceptions and stereotypes about black expression

Fieldwork

To evaluate membership to a community of practice by educators on Twitter, McLeay (2008) used three terms defined by Wenger (1998): mutual engage-ment (the negotiations among the members of the com-munity and how this participation binds them together), joint enterprise (the shared understanding of their goals), and shared repertoire (a set of communal resources used to reach the goals of the shared enterprise)

he concluded that the #MFLtwitterati feel they are part of a large group of like-minded colleagues where they can share their classroom experiences and be supported when experimenting with new ideas; can reflect on their own practice through informal discussion with others and feel they have become better teachers as a result, always open to new ways to improve; find it eas-ier to keep up to date with the latest resources, national news, government documents, Ofsted initiatives, links to useful blog posts, etc.;

participatory skills and norms

here is simply too much apathy and too much ignorance.

Researchonpeoplewhoself-identifyasgamerssuggeststhatprolongedparticipationingameculturesmayleadtoamoreactive,problem-solv-ingorientationtolearning.BeckandWade(2004)surveyed2,000employeesoflargecompaniesandfoundthatgamersweremorelikelythannongamerstobelievethatchallengesweresolvable,weremoredri-ventoaccomplishgoals,weremoreconfidentintheirabilities,caredmoredeeplyabouttheirorganizations,preferredtobepaidbyperfor-manceratherthanbytitleorsalary,reportedagreaterneedforhumanrelationships,believedthatconnectingwiththerightpeople“gotthejobdonemorequickly,”andpreferredcollaborativedecision-makingtoindependentproblem-solving.BeckandWadewentontoarguethatevenifeverymemberofthemillennialgenerationisnotagamer(justaseverybabyboomerwasnotatWoodstock),thesebasicvaluesarecom-montothegenerationandareamongthosethatdefinethem.

person,” a way of taking on a certain sort of identity. In that sense, each of ushas multiple identities. Even a priest can read the Bible “as a priest,”“as a lit-erary critic,”“as a historian,” even “as a male” or “ as an African American”(priest, literary critic, historian, or ethnic group member)

We humans have goals and purposes, and for some goals and purposessome groups’ ways of reading and thinking work better than do others.

Games, of course, reflect the culture we live in—a culture wecan change.

But they are very much there, nonetheless.

I predict that shooting will be less important and talkingmore important in many games, even shooter games.

gender

violence

multiculturalism

we can learn a lot from thoseyoung people who play games, if only we take them and their games seri-ously.

potentialofvideo games.

clear and explicit

right wing of the political spectrum, will findthis idea absurd.

they think best when they reason on the basis of patterns

“political”

often distrust psychology more

New Literacy Studies

thinking as tied to a body that has experiences inthe world

36

don’t much like school

cognitive science

principles oflearning

Marx called the “creativity ofcapitalism,”

the company that makes it goes broke

both frustrating and life enhancing

baby-boomer ways oflearning and thinking

profoundly difficult.

“Wouldn’t it be great if kidswere willing to put in this much time on task on such challenging material inschool and enjoy it so much?”

high-tech

even if he choosesto privilege one way of reading—one identity—over another.

ac-tive inquiry and deep conceptual understanding

psycholinguistics

There are no “private minds” either.

Different people can read the world differently just as they can readdifferent types of texts differently.

Litmus Test

This field of music just broadened my ideas to come

nationwide police-brutality protests and the subject of countless online think pieces and hot takes.

But if I'm challenging myself in the studio, I want to challenge you as well.

The Internet is where young peopleget much of their political information.Half (50 percent) of 18!29 year-old Internet news consumers say their voting decisions are influenced by what they learn online and 37 percent of those ages 18!24 obtained 2008 campaign information from social networking sites, compared to only 4 percent of 30!39 year olds.

having all students select an online game, app, or learning module from a pre-determined list is not really student choice—after all, someone else curated the list. While it’s a step in the right direction, allowing students time to explore and make choices for themselves bears a stronger connection to personalization