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.

, members have created a toolkit of strategies to mobilize campaigns addressing issues as varied as voting, body image, marriage equality, fair trade, literacy, child slavery, disaster relief, and hunger. Some campaigns involve shared media production, such as the Body Bind Horcrux campaign that encouraged participants to blog, create videos, and share stories about acceptance of their body and different ways of staying healthy.

forming a hybrid content world that lies at the intersection of popular culture and social justice narratives.

“mechanisms of translation” that enable connections between the cultural and civic, which include tapping content worlds and communities, creative production, and informal discussion.

DREAM activists–young people who were undocumented and seeking immigration reform. Also known as the Developing Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, the legislation young people in Zimmerman's study were working towards at the time of her research would grant conditional residency rights to qualifying immigrant students who'd grown up in the United States with undocumented parents.

“Connected civics” is a way to describe the learning that takes place at the intersection of three realms of activity: young people's agency within peer cultures and public spheres; their deeply felt identities, interests and affinities; and civic engagement and opportunity.

how embedded the affinity is in direct experiences of inequality and marginalization, are among some fundamental differentiators.

Like affinity spaces, affinity networks include groups with tight-knit relationships that might be characterized as a “community,” or what Jenkins describes as “participatory culture.”

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.

how can we support young people's learning and development of deeply personal and culturally resonant forms of civic agency?

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]).

throughout the day and night

cross-cutting infrastructure

young people

the concept of “connected civics,” grounded in the idea that young people today are engaging in new forms of politics that are profoundly participatory.

Play is exploration. It involves imagination. It means investigating the world of the game and feeling the frustration, flow, and excitement that goes along with playing it. When you engage with the game, you not only try to see the game from the perspective of your students, you also understand how the game presents the material.

The promise of game-based learning lies in the premise that the technology provides an efficient and effective tool with which to replace a points-based extrinsic motivation system with a contextualized hands-on learning experience. Play is useful because it simulates real life experience—physical, emotional, and/or intellectual—in a safe, iterative and social environment that’s not focused on winners and losers.

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.”

kids who play multi-player games online are more likely to have a positive attitude toward people from another country: 62 percent of online gamers hold a favorable view of people from different cultures compared to 50 percent of non-gamers. Unlike school, where the diversity of the institution is rarely reflected by individuals’ peer groups, interactive online gaming correlates with a more diverse group of friends

Cognitive benefit: Games have been shown to improve attention, focus, and reaction time.

We know from research, however, that doing far outweighs both showing and telling when it comes to learning.

This strikes us as a fascinating social organization where adultswith particular interests/backgrounds/resources can serve as targeted learning brokers for the children.

“How, in heaven’s name, do they sell many of these gameswhen they are so long and hard?”

what I am doingplaying video game

We eachhave a core identity that relates to all our other identities

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

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

Will we continue to ban these technologies, or willwe come up with pedagogical models that leverage students’ constantconnectivity?

Recent news headlines tell of studentsusing cameras to digitize tests and send them via e-mail, or usingInternet-enabled cell phones to cheat in any number of ways

schools remain in a print-based culture

This way you can better help decide whether the central themes we see emerging ring true to you

Educators seek to free ideas that have been isolated through disciplinary walls and rigidly defined roles. They use MML to push back on the traditional boundaries of School to connect learning to the real world

Media delivered via a mobile device for the purpose of learning

now I’m thinking about multimedia and all the conversations going back to the 90’s about multimedia in education, like the promise of the CD-ROM. And learning, well at least I think I know what that is.

conversation that is evolving in pace with the swift embedding of mobile technologies into all aspects of life. Two years is a long time in the world of mobile. Newcomers are able to cheaply and quickly produce truly fascinating work that would have been hard to imagine emerging into practicality from inexperience two short years ago.

the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap

Beck and Wade conclude that gamers were more open to takingrisks and engaging in competition but also more open to collaborating with others and morewilling to revise earlier assumptions.

Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute whenready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

community involvement.T

Schools as institutionshave been slow to react to the emergence of this new participatory culture;

Some have argued that children and youth acquire these key skills and competencies on theirown by interacting with popular culture.Three concerns, however, suggest the need for policyand pedagogical interventions:

He also drew on Internet-based resources, professional movies, and storyboarding examples within videogames as inspirations and sources of learning.

Idea Generation, Feedback, and Revision

Digital technologies offer children and adolescents rich opportunities to design and create artwork, movies, games, animations, interactive robots, and other artifacts.

A teenage girl sits at a large green table with her head bent over a Venn diagram. A younger boy sits at a nearby computer searching for images on the Internet using Google. This familiar scene of after-school concentration can be found in any number of American community contexts, including a public library, a local school, or a family kitchen.

Buckets of screws, springs, nuts, and bolts line the shipping-container-sized room. In one corner, there are 5 3D printers and a Glowforge laser cutter; in another, an assortment of spray paint cans and filaments.