Title: Media, culture & curriculum in the context of online play
Speaker: Dr. Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin-Madison

MCC SIG Business Meeting Date and Location:
Tuesday, April, 14, 6:15pm to 7:45pm
Building: San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina,
Room: San Francisco

Keynote Speech Summary:
American schools largely remain locked within a Ford type factory model of industry and efficiency; games, on the other hand, are forward leaning, recruiting intellectual practices, dispositions, and forms of social organization that are aligned with many of today's "new capitalist" workplaces. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), in particular, function as naturally occurring, self-sustaining, indigenous online communities of learning and practice, and our study of them can tell us something important about how such communities form and function out "in the wild" (Hutchins, 1995). This presentation reviews the findings of a five-year investigation, funded in part by the MacArthur foundation, into the forms of cognition and learning that arise in virtual worlds. In it, I detail the constellation of intellectual practices that constitute gameplay in such spaces ranging from collective problem solving and digital media literacy to computational literacy and informal science reasoning. I highlight the ways in which this constellation of intellectual practices coalesce into a form of civic engagement I call pop cosmopolitanism and how such a disposition is shaping the everyday lives of today's adolescents and young adults. Games are incubators of a new pop cosmopolitanism–a discourse, or "way of being in the world" (Gee, 1999), marked by a willingness and ability to navigate an increasingly globalized, diverse, networked, socio-technical world. From this view, then, if our world is indeed becoming increasingly "flat" (Friedman, 2005), then gaming communities such as those found in commercial online games are, in some respects, our proverbial canaries in the coalmine.

Speaker Info:
Name: Constance Steinkuehler, Assistant Professor
Institution/Affiliation: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email: constances@gmail.com
Phone: 608-263-4669

Biographical Statement:
Dr. Constance Steinkuehler is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Communication & Technology program in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is on cognition, learning and literacy in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). Current interests include “pop cosmopolitanism” in online worlds and the intellectual practices that underwrite such a disposition, including collective problem solving, digital & print literacy, informal scientific reasoning, computational literacy, and reciprocal apprenticeship. Her work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. For more info, please visit http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/blog/

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American Educational Research Association, Media, Culture, & Curriculum Small Interest Group (AERA MCC SIG): http://www.aera.net/Default.aspx?menu_id=190&id=1209