By Juan Rubio Global Kids Youth Leaders launched the location based game they created using the platform ARIS. The game is the first on a series of games developed in collaboration with The New York Public Library and as part of the NYC Haunts program. The game which takes place in the Fordham area of the Bronx, is about a detective that must solve the mystery of a missing child. It was presented to other youth from the Fordham Library branch. The game deals with local history of the Bronx, with the author Edgar Allan Poe, and civic action around the issue of clean air. See the video for more details:
0 Comments
By Barry Joseph Yesterday we held our second B-FAT meeting (Badge Advisory Team), the small internal group of senior staff that is overseeing and consulting on the GK badging process. It was quite an enlightening meeting. All sorts of interesting issues came to the surface, we affirmed out and refined our badging process, and developed an interesting badging framework we could now test out. We started off sharing the results of our homework. First some staff “interviewed” their kids and spouses about the games they played and the badge-like features they encountered; we compare and contrasted that with our understanding of how our “badges for learning” plans related to game mechanics. Next I shared the results of taking a random Letter of Recommendation and then color coding it for every mention of an accomplishment, hard skill, soft skills, knowledge, roll played, or program within which they participated. It was an unexpectedly rich vein. Thirty different mentions were identified. Noticing how well the categories worked, and wondering if every Letter would offer the same balance amongst them, led to lots of interesting conversation. It suggested that working with GK youth leaders to code dozens of other Letters will be a useful entry point for them to engage in developing the GK badges. It also suggested that these categories were more than conceptual - they easily lined up to what we think youth learn in our programs. We were on the right track. We played with a slogan or title for the program: Show What You Know, or SWYK! As in, “Oh, that’s SWYK” or “That’s SO SWYK”. The acronym is an odd one, so we played with SWAG for awhile: Show What you are Articulating to the General public? Showing What you Acquired through Global Kids? It just didn’t have the same flow. We’ll see… We then moved on and spent the rest of our time with the third between-meeting task: building out from scratch a Google doc spreadsheet. Each tab in the sheet was one of the learning categories. We originally began with: knowledge, hard skills, roles, and soft skills. Activities was then added as well. It soon became clear that the list of knowledge areas was virtually endless - we tackle so many different topics in our programs - and could be allowed to grow over time. Yet, at the same time, we recognized we had created earlier in the year a group of 18 overarching topics that could shape the year’s programming (such as Structural Oppressions, Poverty, Globalization, Women’s Rights, etc.) and that this offered an excellent list from which to begin. Hard skills, roles, and soft skills were fairly easy to identify. Hard skill - public speaking. Role - facilitator. Soft skill - develop supportive relationships with peers. “Activities,” however, posed a challenge. We realized that activities like “speaking to a public official” is not the learning itself, but the evidence of the learning. “Activities” were either evidence to be submitted for a badge, or the descriptions of a mission to earn a badge, e.g. “To earn your public advocate badge, speak to a public official about an issue of concern.” It felt right to remove it but, by doing so, we realized we were still losing something important - anything directly about being in a GK program, such as attending 10 sessions in a row, or completing the entire program. The same was true for the badging system - we needed a way to recognize the first time posting a comment within the system, and other desired activities within the badging system. So we removed “activities” and replaced it with “Participation.” That left us with the following badge categories:
This led us to discuss a wide-range of issues. Should some roles be leveled, e.g. Junior and Senior Peer Educator? How would adding levels increase work for both youth and staff? Other questions were raised as well, regarding how a badging system might affect our practices. Will badges draw attention to skill differentiation and, if so, will that support more effective collaboration or skill inequity? Will seeing others with harder to achieve badges cause “badge envy” and make a youth de-value their own achievements? Will youth get distracted by the final badge and not appreciate the process it takes to get there? Something these issues had in common is that badging was forcing us to deal in a concrete way with underlying educational issues and tensions that have otherwise remained under the surface. It is not new that some youth achieve at different rates within our program, or that they bring different skills to the table. Each trainer has their own individual practice for dealing with this when it becomes a problem, but usually these issues remain invisible. Badges will bring these issues to the surface in both a visible and measurable way. Our next step was to figure out how they all fit together. Some badging systems develop themes, and then organize their badges by themes. We thought this would be a good place to start. After many years, we have developed a set of organizational Outcomes and Indicators. I had presumed this would be a valuable tool to suggest a structure to our badging system. To my surprise, I could not have been more wrong. We wrote the five outcomes on the board and considered if they could each be applied as a distinct category of badges, summarizing them as:
However, when we tried to figure out which badges would go under which of the Outcomes, it was not always clear. We ended up getting into semantics that said more about the Outcome process than the badging system, and it just wasn’t useful. We tried to make columns, with the Outcomes at the top, each with it’s own set of badging types (knowledge, skills, etc.). It just wasn’t working, not the Outcomes or organizing them into separate themes. Debating whether a particular skill belonged in any particular theme just didn’t seem that useful, if it could be avoided. Meanwhile, we were recognizing that the “role” badges were different from the others. They could cut across the themes, building a unique path to a particular role. So we decided to flip around the X/Y axis, remove some constraint and see what we got: In this image, you can see the Role is now at the top, but not in a way that organizes the other badge categories. Rather, each “type of learning” badge category - which it turns out were much easier to define that the “type of content” badge categories - is simply listed in an endless vertical line, one line next to another: the knowledge badges, the hard skills badges, etc. Each badge has value in and of itself. But Roles are constructed across these badges and categories, perhaps with alternative routes to the same role. This felt like it was all coming together. This could work for the entire organization (Global Leader) and for particular programs (Game Designer). It was constrained and clearly defined, yet could easily grow and expand with the programs over time. We decided to play with distinguishing amongst Role Badges and Achievement Badges (all of the others).
We left the meeting excited with the progress. The homework before the next meeting: flesh and further test out our badging framework by creating a clearer visualization - composed of Role Badges and Achievement Badges, along with Power-ups and Missions. Then create three different use cases, mapped atop the visualization, based on three of the Letter of Recommendations. By Joliz Cedeño A new article has been released discussing the programming Global Kids has led in virtual worlds. You can read the abstract and download the article below. There is renewed interest in out-of-school programs for informal learning as a way to complement or supplement formal classrooms. Compelling evidence of learning in the context of virtual worlds is emerging, but few empirically detailed comparisons of programs based on such technologies exist. This article presents a cross-case analysis conducted on two out-of-school programs based on virtual environments involving Global Kids' “I Dig Science” situated in the virtual platform Teen Second Life and Games, Learning & Society Program’s “Casual Learning Lab” based on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Ethnographic methods were used for data collection across both in-game and face-to-face contexts at both sites with virtual and face-to-face data collection techniques used in combination. Analysis involved a code set of eleven a priori themes based on the shared goals of each program, resulting in 44 codes total. In this paper, the authors detail contrasts between the two programs in terms of argumentation, problem-solving, information literacy, and workplace skills, highlighting differences between the two programs in terms of their contrasting “locus of intentionality” (designer versus participant) and concluding with a set of “petite generalizations” in the form of design heuristics for future virtual worlds based programs.
By Joliz Cedeño Nonprofit Commons posted a write up of a recent visit from Global Kids. Check it out!
Barry Joseph of Global Kids recently came to visit the Nonprofit Commons to discuss the potential of gaming for social change. It has become increasingly popular in gaming to blend fantasy-based solutions with real-life social issues. And organizations like Global Kids, Gamestar Mechanic,Games for Change, and the AMD Foundation have been leading the way. Global Kids' Online Leadership Program Global Kids is a nonprofit educational organization for global learning and youth development. They work "to ensure that urban youth have the knowledge, skills, experiences, and values they need to succeed in school, participate effectively in the democratic process, and achieve leadership in their communities and on the global stage." Joseph's initiative, the Online Leadership Program, integrates a "youth development approach when tackling international and public policy issues with youth media programs that build digital literacy, foster substantive online dialogues, develop resources for educators, and promote civic participation." The Playing 4 Peace Challenge The Online Leadership Program has been working with youth in New York City to design video games for 10 years now. This time around, they've partnered with Gamestar Mechanic and AMD to bring together the Playing 4 Peace Challenge. "Over March and April, youth can go to Gamestar Mechanic, design your own game, and submit it," explained Joseph. "In May, one youth will win a new laptop with other cool prizes. But more importantly, scores of good games will be produced, by youth, judged by youth, for youth, on the topic of peace." As academics, activists — and even gamers of old — harness and reinvent the power of gaming as a new medium for social change, kids will keep imagining and designing a better world for us all. For all of you awaiting the arrival of the next revolution to begin with a bang, behold! It just may begin with the sound of powering on a video game. Alexandra Bezdikian Online Community Coordinator TechSoup Global @alebez http://flavors.me/techsoup By Joliz Cedeño Each month for the DML Central we at Global Kids annotate a list of our favorite finds from the past month in regards to digital media and learning. Below is our latest from March. In a new report from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality, the authors set out to “map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities.” Their key findings: On Thursday May 22, the second session of the gaming series for the Brooklyn Public Library took place at the Kings Highway Library Branch. The session focused on storytelling and game play, and participants created a game prototype using different objects. You can read more details about the session by visiting Game Space Part II. By Joliz Cedeño The MacArthur Foundation highlighted the badge system work Global Kids is developing in their recent Spotlight post. Read the excerpt below. For the full article you can visit Spotlight. Along the lines of badge exploration, Global Kids is developing a new badge system for New York City and Chicago members of the Hive Learning Network, a group of civic and cultural institutions that encourage young people to explore their interests in virtual and physical spaces. By Barry Joseph This past friday, Global Kids was thrilled to host the first meeting for the new Hive NYC Badging System. Two dozen members of our local learning network had expressed interest in learning more about the system, amongst which 22 participants came from sixteen of the organizations: American Museum of Natural History, Bank Street College, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Common Sense Media, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, DCTV, DreamYard, Girls Write Now, Global Kids, MOUSE, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of the Moving Image, Museum for African Art, New York Hall of Science, New York Public Library, Parsons The New School for Design, People's Production House, The Lamp, THE POINT CDC, Wildlife Conservation Society, WNYC's Radio Rookies, WorldUP, and YMCA of Greater New York. In short, we talked about the current interest behind “badging systems” as a form of alternative assessment and youth engagement, explored the nature of our current grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and then discussed next steps and the various roles each organization could play. Many left with a great sense of potential and excitement for the impact this will have on youth across our city. We started the meeting, and introduced badges, by doing a go-around asking everyone to do one of the following: “Please share something you learned growing up that has since helped you in your life but you didn’t know you possessed at the time” “Please share something you knew you possessed but had no way to demonstrate to those in ‘authority.’” Everyone had something to share, and it would have been easy to go another round. We then asked everyone to imagine how their lives might have been different if they had fully appreciated their hidden abilities, or been able to share those abilities with people who counted. That, in many ways, is what we hope badging systems can offer to youth served by our programs: a deeper understanding of their abilities and a new way to leverage that knowledge to reach for their dreams. I was also struck by the graph we shared at the start of the meeting. In response to the question, “How would you describe your organization's current relationship with digital badging systems?”, we received the following responses from the participating organizations:
We were pleased that the concept had attracted such a wide diversity of experience with badging systems. But what surprised us the most is that experience did not necessarily match with expertise. With most any other topic - say Social Media, or Global Literacy - those who are more engaged with the topic tend to know more, separating the “experts” from the “newbies.” That was not always the case at the meeting.
One organization that had previously offered digital badges minimized their past experience, unable to rely on it to guide them towards something more robust. One organization that had never run one but had proposed one to the HASTAC competition still had no confidence that what they had described was even valid (as other than a rejection, they had received no other feedback). One organization who was interested in learning how to develop their own badges for the first time had come to the meeting to learn best practices. Without minimizing the expertise that certainly filled the room, across the board if was hard not to respond, “There are no best practices, as of yet. Whether you’ve previously built a badging system, described one in a proposal, or are totally new to the process, we all get to work together to develop best practices.” And that level of collaboration, working towards the high bar set by the HASTAC competition within which many Hive members so recently competed, is one of the key things this new grant will allow us to support. How exciting to get to work together with such creative individuals and powerful organizations to develop and implement such nascent practices. After the meeting, we spoke with one academic about the research opportunities available within this emerging badging system and the practices which support and surround it. How are we forming our badge design principles? How can that process, led by practitioners, be informed by evidence-based research produced in Universities? How do we use badges to build a learning pathway for youth to navigate learning throughout our city? How will the system developed in New York differ from the one being developed for Hive Chicago? There is so much for us all to learn. Below you will find some of the material produced for or about the meeting and its next steps. (Some are already available and some will be added when they become available.)
By Barry Joseph We recently produced this one-page recent history of badges for learning, to support our efforts to develop a badging system for the Hive Learning Network. We thought it might be of interest to others as well.
In 2007, Eva Baker, the President of AERA, gave the Presidential Address at their annual conference, entitled “The End(s) of Testing.” After exploring a wide range of problems with the current use of assessments within schools, she focused on her key recommendation: the development of Merit badge-like “Qualifications” that certify accomplishments, not through standardized tests, but as “an integrated experience with performance requirements.” Such a system would apply to learning both in and out of school and support youth to develop and pursue passionate interests. Baker envisioned youth assembling their Qualifications to show to their families, to colleges, to employers, and to themselves. Ultimately, Baker believed “the path of Qualifications shifts attention from schoolwork to usable and compelling skills, from school life to real life. In came the alternative assessment and games & learning academics, like James Paul Gee, who combined the two. They recognized that Baker’s “qualifications” closely resembled, using the parlance of the digital age, the “achievements” within digital games. They were inspired to transfer these powerful in-game learning tools into the real world. They combined “achievements” with “qualifications” to create “digital badging systems.” Work in this area remained largely under the radar until 2011, until the release of the White Paper, “An Open Badge System Framework,” authored by Peer 2 Peer University and The Mozilla Foundation. The paper provided some much needed definitions and an overall framework. Badges are explained as “a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest,” and the paper provides as examples uses by the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, PADI diving instruction, and the more recently popular geo-locative games, like Foursquare.
The report asserts that badges “have been successfully used to set goals, motivate behaviors,represent achievements and communicate success in many contexts” and proposes that when learning happens across various contexts and experiences, “badges can have a significant impact, and can be used to motivate learning, signify community and signal achievement.” The report also makes clear that the value of badges comes less from its visual representation than from the context around how and why it was conferred. The stronger the connection between the two, the more effective the badging system will be. “Badges are conversation starters,” the report explains, “and the information linked to or 'behind' each badge serves as justification and even validation of the badge.” For example, a badge should include information about how it was earned, who issued it, the date of issue, and, ideally, a link back to some form of artifact relating to the work behind the badge. In September, 2011, the HASTAC launched the Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, to fund $2m worth of new badging systems. The rest is history. |
GK Digital Learning and Leadership BlogCheck back in to find out what projects our DLL team is working on with Global Kids students! Archived Blog Categories
All
|