AERA: Saturday 3

DBR: A methodological Toolkit for the Learning Sciences
DBR came out of Learning Sciences and has developed along with it. Moves away from the lab and into the classroom, where there's more messiness, but more authenticity.

• Tweaks design to better
• Cobb, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble ("Prototypically, design experiments....") is becoming the defacto definition of DBR.
• Within Quest Atlantis, we had four different designs at work

1. What makes an academic play space?
2. Meaning in the Digital Age
3. Socio-Scientific Inquiry
4. Assessment as a Formative Design

• Combines elements of role playing, chat,
• Salen and Zimmerman's "Magic Circle" the area around the game of what's game and what's not game.
• Tensions: Fantasy-Real; Play-serious; Academic-game,
• Blurring of real and virtual
• Luminating = leveling (badges for creative expression, diversity affirmation, personal agency, social responsibility, environmental awareness, healthy communities, compassionate wisdom)
• Website with papers: http://inkido.indiana.edu/aera2006

takeaway: explore and talk about the "magic Circle" of the FML ARGH

Academic Play Spaces -- Scott (Clawtruck hunter in WoW)

• Video games: not just a fad, but a defining part of childhood for many kids
• Every player plays a game in a different way.
• Game rules, academic content, framing narrative, legitimate participation used in different amounts in different academic play spaces -- some have more of one and less of another.

takeaway: how many different ways to play can I build in to FML's ARGH; how many are built into grad school?

Tyler Dodge -- Meaning in the Digital Age

• Components of identity: a sense of agency, goals and commitments towards action, Learning, and meaning
• How do they make meaning? how do they develop identity? How might we better design the artifacts to further encourage/develop things we want them to learn?
• Identities and Culture, CoPs and third Places, Media & Technology (deisgned affordances & opportunities, exemplars resonate with experiences)
• Data types: Site observations, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, ....

takeaway: what data types am I looking at, and how will I be analyzing them? I should write this out...

Sasha Barab -- Relating Narrative, Inquiry, and Inscriptions: A Framework for Socio-Scientific Inquiry

• Scientific literacy: Beyond Fact acquisition (Sfard, 1998)
• Content-Context Relations: Situation cognition Theory
• Book: How People Learn by the NREC
• Socio-Scientific Framework = Narrative, Inscription, Inquiry

(I really like that their diagrams are hand-drawn with a "casual" style compute typeface)
takeaway: How is the definition of "narrative" changing with new medias?

Steven Zuiker -- Assessment as Formative Design

• Assessment always has formative and summative functions
• Scaling is different for different stakeholders
• Multi-level framework: (TYPE - demonstrated by - Lemke's timescale) IMMEDIATE-interactions-minutes; CLOSE-activities-days; PROXIMAL-curricula-weeks; DISTAL-______-months; __-__- semester (THIS IS KINDA COOL -- LOOK IT UP AND USE IT!!!!)
• How to take a rich learning experience and squeeze it into narrowly-defined learning standards?

takeaway: The multi-level framework is a very cool tool!

Michael Young -- summary and comments

• we have multiple identities (disagree-- we have one multi-faceted, and constantly evolving identity)
• multiple level assessments allow us to live both in a world or deep understanding and test scores
• Lemke's timescales are actually time-space scales

takeaway: I think the one-vs-many identities is just a matter of definition/semantics.