Very few independent animation studios exist outside the empire of thethree major children’s players

distribute their content to third-party broadcasters, sell DVDs and consumerproducts licences, and have made major online investments. Viacom acquiredan important position in casual gaming with the acquisition of Atomfilms andNeoPets, while Disney owns the Club Penguin virtual community

Digital “badges” might be tied to these portfolios to provide an additional support for this kind of support for assessment

Often civic educators focus only on schools.

n contrast to conventional wisdom regarding Internet “echo chambers,” our findings revealed that few young people, 5 percent, report interacting only with those whose views align with their own.

Similarly, as iPads and iPhones gain popularity, companies steer users toward the use of “apps” (applications) – standalone sites dedicated to that company’s services.

one in which peer-to-peer exchange and mentorship is common

For the month of April 2011, for example, “Gaians” were encouraged to equip their avatar with a daffodil to support cancer awareness as a form of onsite engagement.

as well as their exposure to media literacy education.

conventional wisdom

Thus, in addition to recognizing the many ways civic and political life rely on digital media, it is important for civic educators to think about risks and challenges as they consider ways to engage with the digital dimensions of civic education.

The Internet is where funds are raised and individuals are mobilized.

“town squares” of yesteryear for young people, allowing them to grapple with their fears and hopes and providing a significant space for political commentary

18!29 year-old Internet news consumers say their voting decisions are influenced by what they learn online

Half (50 percent)

provocative

But they are also called upon to facilitate roundtable discussions, write opinion pieces and news spots, produce public service announcements, and learn to spread all this youth-generated content via social media

This kind of immediacy and social connection, which is at the heart of fan and game activities, can also drive contributions to causes that are more explicitly civic in nature.

multi-directional

The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) is a non-profit organization, uniting fans and activists who take inspiration from the characters and events contained within that blockbuster series to mobilize for literacy, equality and human rights, all the while asking “What would Dumbledore do?”

But as a result of open, online infrastructures, these networks are often visible and accessible to those outside the tight-knit community.

ephemeral

“hashtag activism” campaigns inviting peers to share first-person experiences with racial profiling or violence against women.

Simply circulating civic content among peers does not necessarily do much of anything for the people who hit “share,” nor does it necessarily advance the set of concerns they aim to address (though it can, and sharing information can sometimes be anything but simple and carry serious risk).

Young people producing these practices are often expressing and in some cases organizing resistance to institutions and ideologies they deem problematic, obsolete, or oppressive.

micropolitical

through shared civic practices, young people lower barriers to entry and multiply opportunities for young people to engage in civic

“connected civics” as 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.

“participatory politics”

onsequentialism?

prohibitive.

But for some reason, when it comes to games, many teachers are confused about the difference between “cool” and “fun.”

They would likely struggle with the complexity of the language and we would hardly be able to address the thematics.

Check out the entire series Teaching With Games: Video Case Studies to get an idea of what other teachers are doing with games in the classroom.

finding support remains difficult.

Are not meant to be robot teachers, replacing the human-to-human relationship

imagine a generation of children that grows up believing that YouTube videos replace books.

Although the iOS and Android app stores are both full of content labeled as “educational,” it is not all good content.

Some moms and dads believe that screen time will ruin their children. Others see tablets as an exceptional parenting gadget, a tool that can teach, distract, and educate.

No wonder gameplay YouTube videos are so popular.

74 percent of teachers report using digital games in the classroom and 55 percent of students play games at least weekly.

when digital games were compared to other instruction conditions without digital games, there was a moderate to strong effect in favor of digital games in terms of broad cognitive competencies

acts in isolation

but perhaps not as efficiently

Though I’m not a fan of violent video games, studies have shown that there are even positive benefits from playing these types of games.

kids who play multi-player games online are more likely to have a positive attitude toward people from another country:

Motivational benefit:

all you have to do is engage

Mafia

enables educators and parents alike to explore the use of games in learning contexts that matter to them and the young people in their lives.

pedagogy

emphasize outcomes like standardized test scores, rather than a love of learning, and which result in experiences that are efficient (e.g. metrics driven) yet rarely child-centered

design.

might be another such gaming literacy, while learning how to navigate a complexsystem of out-of-game resources—from game guides, FAQs, walkthroughs, and forums topeer-to-peer learning—might represent another

McGonigal notes that as massively social experiences, alternate reality games are espe-cially well suited to encouraging metalevel reflection on the skills and processes that playersuse to meet new challenges.

ach of its four chapters offers a case study of aspecific type or genre of video game—sandbox or simulation games, alternate reality games,online casual games, and virtual worlds

procedural rhetoric, the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and inter-actions.

Learning Ecologies,” “

As to the issue of girls and women playing games, they are quickly catch-ing up with the boys and men, though they often play different games (e.g.,The Sims).

How?

Socialpractices and social groups are always changing, some slowly, some at a fasterpace

Neither way is “right” or “wrong” in general.

For example, it turns out that botanistsand landscape architects classify and think about trees quite differently.

social achievement

social isolate

These groups work, through their varioussocial practices, to encourage people to read and think in certain ways, andnot others, about certain sorts of texts and things.

There are, of course, lots of other typesof video games

different media

But we also need tounderstand the importance of graphics, music, and cinema, which are just as powerful andin some ways more deeply intertwined with young people’s culture

Kress advocates moving beyond teaching written composition to teaching design literacy as thebasic expressive competency of the modern era

own systems of representation,

contemporary mediafranchises.

multimodality.

including face-to-face contactwithin local communities and mediated contact online with a more dispersed population

information can betransferred between media (or platforms)

He has four computers at home:

the most important spaces for messing around took place at school or in after-school settings.

More recently, Michelle has been giving her mom lessons on how to pay bills online and how to create birthday cards.

in a game is important when friends are in different locations and time zones.

a distinctive youth culture that was tightly integrated with commercial popular cultural products targeted to teens.

they typically go online fi rst, since that is where they are most likely to be able to connect.

By contrast, our genre-based approach emphasizes modes of participation with media, not categories of individuals.

youth engage with more than one type of media at the same time,

6.5 hours with media per day:

ethnographic

The genres of participation—hanging out, messing around, and geeking out—refl ect and are intertwined with young people’s practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied and dynamic media ecologies.

but rather these forms of participation are defi ned in relation and in opposition to one another.

We emphasize that there are a diversity of ways in which U.S. youth inhabit a changing and variegated set of media ecologies.

digital media production are com-monplace among their peers and in their everyday school contexts.

exploring the extras, sketched and storyboarded movie frame ideas, received feedback on his work,

zipster.com.

and [the clubhouse coordinators] didn’t know either,

how they evolve over time and place, and who is involved.

A l t h o u g h t h e s e c u l t u r e s o f p a r t i c i p a t i o n a r e b e c o m i n g m o r e c o m m o n , t h e y a r e not equally accessed.

high-end technology equipment, including a full digital recording studio, new computers with professional design software, digital animation supplies, and the latest gaming technology.

Online communities that re fl ect “cultures of participa-tion” (Jenkins, 2006, 2009 ) a l l o w c r e a t o r s t o s h a r e t h e i r w o r k , r e c e i v e f e e d b a c k , and expand their social networks.