Children’s Sense of Self: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age Keywords Educational Games, Identity Development, Media, Multi-User Virtual Environments, Video Games

This research began with the premise that video game play, especially as it relates to participation in persistent virtual worlds, provides fictional spaces where players engage in cognitive and communicative practices that can be personally transformative in pro-social ways. Players’ experiences with these worlds are as much defined by the technical design and construction of these spaces as they are influenced by the socio-cultural arrangements that develop. In support of this belief, we collected data on children’s experiences with a range of technologies germane to the Digital Age, including their participation in the Quest Atlantis environment, an immersive space for learning that is intended to engage children ages 9–12 in a form of dramatic play comprising both online and real-world learning activities. By enlisting this innovation to non-intrusively collect data about children’s participation as well as their engagement with media more generally, the research team was able to move beyond an ethnographic study of what already exists in the world and develop a grounded appreciation for what an innovative technology-rich context might make possible in the future. This research was supported in part by a CAREER Grant from the National Science Foundation, REC-9980081 and by the National Science Foundation Grant #0092831. Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 2 Children today are the most media literate of any generation, with a recent Kaiser Family Report finding that children spend an average of nearly 61⁄2 hours each day engaged with media (Rideout, Roberts, & Foehr, 2005), largely television and music but also including interactive media such as video games, which occupy children’s lives for 50 minutes per day—more than books, magazines, or newspapers. In fact, children spend more time with media than they do with parents, physical activity, homework, and chores combined. Advances such as broadband Internet access, low cost computers, and other devices are changing the landscape of how youth use technology. According to media scholar Henry Jenkins (2006, p. 290), these changes entail more than simply new forms of technology: we as a society are experiencing “technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes in the ways media circulates within our culture.” Specifically, media use has changed such that youth (1) engage in transmedia participation, (2) operate as both media consumers and producers of media, and (3) collaboratively interact such that local and geographically distributed affinity groups form around the media. Despite these transformations, schools continue to operate with a cultural logic that fails to leverage the technological changes that increasingly influence children’s lives (Squire & Jan, in press). Classrooms remain dominated by print-based materials produced by curricular experts and teacher-centered pedagogies, whereby students are positioned as passive receivers. In short, the world is rapidly changing, but schools are not. Given public consternation over media, especially videogames, some might argue that schools should continue heedless of the whims of the Digital Age. Our conviction, however, is that schools face difficulty engaging youth, with research consistently finding a decline in academic motivation from grades 3–9 (Lepper, Sethi, Dialdin, & Drake, 1996), and that children’s media use represents a powerful force that, if better understood and leveraged, bears the potential to usefully transform the activity of schools. At its core, this research is about understanding what learning and meaning in the Digital Age looks like and what it could look like in the context of schools. Toward this end, we collected data on children’s experiences with a range of technologies, including their participation in the Quest Atlantis program. Quest Atlantis is an immersive space for learning, designed to engage children in a form of dramatic play comprising both online and real-world learning activities, with a backstory inspiring pro-social commitments. Using this context as both an exemplar case and a data collection tool, we examined the following core research questions: (1) In what ways are children finding self through their participation in new media, and Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 3 (2) Can we develop a media environment to be engaging to students (entertaining), beneficial for classroom use (educational), and contributory to children’s character (pro-social)? To answer these questions, we closely observed four children, examining their participation in Quest Atlantis over the course of the year and conducting fieldwork to understand the nature of their participation. We also examined their use of other media in order to enrich our perspective of their technology-rich lives and to contextualize their participation in the program. The insights ensuing from the case studies helped us to move beyond an ethnographic study of what already exists in the world and informed our understanding of what innovative digital contexts, especially video games, might make possible in the future. Background Literature We first present our understanding of self as a transactive process involving individuals and the contexts through which the self takes on meaning, and then discuss contemporary media and technology in terms of their affordances. We believe that one’s participation in a group or community and engagement with media and technology gives rise to a collective resonance that meaningfully relates the experience to one’s sense of self; that is, people’s interactions and emergent interpretations significantly influence the identities that they form (Calvert, 2002a). More specifically, we are concerned with how children interact with others in a local or distributed group as well as with social and technical structures and processes that constitute a holistic context that may be appropriated and transformed by individuals. Jenkins suggests that media experience is not dictated by the medium or brand but, rather, ensues from the transactions among the structures affording the experience, the meanings established through resultant collaborative groups, and the idiosyncratic interpretations and productions constructed by the individual. We might say that media are produced not by designers and manufacturers but by the individuals who share an affinity and collectively make use of the media to enrich their sense of self, their lives, and their world. That is, and reflecting on the insights articulated by Jenkins, we wish to understand the transactions among (1) the self, (2) the affinity groups, and the (3) socio-technical structures around which these groups evolve, together giving rise to (4) the collective resonance characterizing the relationship among them. Below we elaborate upon the meaning of each of these process factors of media engagement. Transactive Self Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 4 Identity and Culture. The cultivation of self, or identity work (Turkle, 1994), involves participation in groups that foster a sense of agency, goals and commitments, meaning construction, and personal learning trajectories, focal components that have contributed to identity development throughout history but that entail new forms in the Digital Age. These focal components necessarily transact with each other, fostering the development of identity; indeed, “identity” and “community” remain in a necessary dialectic, with each mutually defining the other. Moreover, these components occupy prominent positions in the literature on identity and learning (Wenger, 1998), and our emphasis on one’s sense of agency and adoption of commitments serves to make salient the importance of intention in the cultivation of self. From the vantage of developmental psychology, the self or identity exists not a priori but as a consequence of experience. Erikson (1968) and others regard identity as a construction, but more completely, it may be conceived as existing through some action, in some context, with some intention. Thus Bruner (1990) argues for a self that “is defined both by the individual and by the culture in which he or she participates” (p. 116). Culture, too, is continually reinterpreted and reproduced; it is a type of narrative constructed by individuals (Clifford, 1986; Eisenhart, 2001). One’s sense of self, then, is situated in the contexts and practices in which one engages. Affinity Groups Community. Identity development occurs situated and distributed within a community of practice, that is, an ongoing union of people with shared values and a shared purpose (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996). The term community of practice conveys the significance of the practical aspects of community participation, including, for example, its problems, tools, and terminology, and, according to Lave and Wenger (1991), learning is essentially developing an identity of participation. Related to this is the concept of an affinity group, which likewise is characterized by common practices; both regard learning as a process of incorporation into an established community. Gee (2003) proposed that video games harbor affinity groups and can lead to mastery of domain knowledge and practices through participation and collaboration. Collaboration. Collaborations reflect the complementarity and integration of the group and allow for diverse and novel interrelationships (John-Steiner, 2000). Related to issues of identity and learning, Vygotsky’s (1933/1978) work bears relevance, most significantly his notion of the zone of proximal development, or the difference between one’s actual and potential levels of cognitive development, a difference that can be overcome through collaboration. Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 5 Informing such sources as Bruner, Lave, and Wenger, then, Vygotsky conceived of identity and learning as grounded in participation and collaboration within a socio-cultural context. Socio-Technical Structures New Media Potential. The assortment of social groups, activities, and places in which individuals engage may be thought of as socio-technical arrangements, or combinations of social relations and technology-in-use. This conception emphasizes that identities shift in response to local arrangements; indeed, socio-technical structures can be designed in ways that foster a sense of self—especially in the Digital Age. Long and Baecker (1997) categorize many of properties characterizing online communication tools, including synchronization, media, and membership: email can be described as an asynchronous, typically text-based, person-to-person structure; chat is real-time, typically text-based, and person-to-group; and multiplayer online games are realtime, graphical, person-to-group structures. Further, these structures can be characterized in terms of narrative, immersion, and interactivity. Narrative, that is, story, constitutes a context in which audiences can immerse themselves, acting as observers or even participants. Media afford the construction of narrative, and central to this experience is a sense of immersion, or “the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality” (Murray, 1997, p. 98). Related to immersion is the concept of interactivity, or “the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of [media] in real time” (Steuer, 1995, p. 46). Third Places. Family and school communities figure centrally in children’s identity development, but children also engage in less formal associations. Oldenburg (1991) discusses the importance of third places, or informal public spaces such as coffee houses, affording novelty, diversity, and learning. Unfettered by school protocol or family emotions, third places allow groups to meet in generous numbers, and while no individual constitutes the third place, close friendships can be developed unlike those found at home or school. Much has been written about online environments as third places because of the sense of place and community that they afford (Bruckman, 1998), including after-school programs and online video games. Collective Resonance Media and Meaning. As children’s worlds become increasingly mediated, children’s identities, too, will change because media, games, and other simulations effectively constitute the reality that children occupy and the meanings that they make of that reality. Indeed, the world of a game, like narrative, is in essence interpretive: it is constructed by the imagination (Szulborski, Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 6 2005). This content can be repurposed from one medium to another, affording different media experiences (Laurel, 2001) and significantly impacting children’s developing sense of self. Resonance. Exposure to media, especially media bearing a consistent message, cultivates in an audience a common world view, a shared reality; this impact is gradual but significant (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorelli, & Shanahan, 2002; Zillmann, 1999). One effect of this cultivation, called resonance, occurs when a group of people has an experience in both their media and real worlds: real-life experience is amplified because it resonates with the mediated one, even for virtual worlds, thus shaping one’s world view (Calvert, 2002b). Further, audiences experience both designer-intended and unintended resonances, sometimes overlapping the resonance experienced by the community and sometimes more individual. We consider identity development as a process in which one participates in groups as well as the socio-technical structures they afford, giving rise to a collective resonance that contributes to shaping the self. Quest Atlantis As a learning and teaching project, Quest Atlantis combines findings from educational research with strategies from the gaming industry to immerse children ages 9–12 in educational tasks embedded within a 3-D multi-user environment (http://QuestAtlantis.org). The project allows the 4,000 registered users from five continents to visit virtual worlds, perform educational activities, text-chat with other children and mentors, and develop a virtual identity. Developed for implementation in classrooms and after-school settings, the program enlists participation in standards-based inquiry-driven academic activities called “Quests,” instantiated chiefly as a virtual environment but extending into the community (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux, & Tuzun, 2005). The program is designed to be both entertaining and educational, and further, among the goals are “life commitments” or pro-social dispositions reflecting individual and communal welfare (e.g., Personal Agency, Diversity Affirmation, Environmental Awareness). Children are exposed to these life commitments in most aspects of the program, especially through the fictional backstory featuring seven teenage “Council” members on the planet Atlantis, who reportedly constructed the virtual space to communicate with children on Earth. Because the program centers on a multi-user virtual environment, when children log in from school or home, they can interact with other children around the world through a range of modalities, including avatar movements, text-chat, and email (see Figure 1). Students engage in Quests and submit their responses as essays, slideshows, and so forth. While many of the Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 7 activities take place online, the program also connects with the real world. For example, many of the Quests challenge students to engage with their communities, and similarly, augmenting the online presence of the Council are such artifacts as novels, posters, and trading cards, all of which interlace educational content with the Atlantis backstory and life commitments. Figure 1. The Quest Atlantis Interface The extent to which students demonstrate mastery of academic content and participate in the Quest Atlantis community is reflected through several venues, including exhibiting their achievements on their homepages and earning both status points (“Lumins”) and bartering points (“Cols”) with which to acquire tangible and virtual items such as trading cards and acreage for building in the 3-D space. Like most aspects of the program, this process of advancement through participation deliberately reflects the foundation of education, entertainment, and commitment. For example, each of the 400 Quests is associated with specific academic standards as well one of the commitments, and each relates to both the world of Atlantis and the real world. Quest Atlantis represents a form of digital media that involves a transmedia experience in which students are positioned as the true producers. Beyond a simple curriculum, Quest Atlantis was intentionally designed to connect children to a narrative backstory and engage them in a set of participatory opportunities in which they were both producers and consumers of the environment and the collective resonance that Quest Atlantis brought to bear upon their lives. Sometimes, this meant producing content that was used by other children, other times this involved signing up for a job as greeter, and still others this involved crafting alternative Toolbars Controls to • Move the avatar • Change viewpoint • Customize settings Avatar Use the keyboard or mouse to move the avatar through the virtual space Sidebar Pages Functions such as • Homepage • Quests • Email • Links Text Chat Share real-time messages with others in the space Virtual Space Explore the space with others and click objects to open activities Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 8 narratives, thus imprinting both the content and experience of the program. Together, the social and technical structures and practices of the program constitute an integrated and immersive medium and characterize the participants as members of a distributed collective. Moreover, participation is scaffolded but not defined by these structures, so children can foster their affinities, talents, and identities—hallmarks that carry beyond the domain of the program. Methods Our Role At one level, the role of researcher is that of an ethnographer, using the methods of interviewing, participant observation, and document analysis to understand issues of identity and culture, especially as they relate to new media. However, we also harbor an agenda as change agents with a goal of bringing about a transformational process, thereby creating ties to action research and critical ethnography. Moreover, whereas critical ethnography embraces a social critique, it does not usually package it in a manner that can be used by others who were not part of the original site, a notion central instructional design (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Squire, & Newell, 2004). This position allows us to build understandings not simply of what exists but of what could exist, so our work represents both a descriptive example of learning and meaning in nthe Digital Age and a potentiality for the types of participation that could occur in the future. Sample Selection The 4,000 registered students vary greatly in their participation: some have neither completed a single Quest nor posted a line of chat, while others have completed dozens of Quests and posted thousands of chat lines, telegrams, and emails through the system. For this study, focused on a subset of individuals in order to build in-depth understandings, we used a process of purposive sampling, or selecting an sample for their utility in better illuminating a phenomenon than would random selection—especially when the latter might prove unfeasible. Given our interest in understanding potential technology use, we first targeted participants active in Quest Atlantis since, in the future, these technologies will be commonplace. In addition to these 10, we selected 5 average and 2 inactive individuals. After examining these 17 participants, 10 case presentations were sketched roughly and 4 were fully developed, selected to illuminate the process factors of media engagement being advanced in this paper. These four participants were chosen from three different classrooms, two in the United States and one in Singapore. Data Collection Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 9 Each student’s class was observed several dozen times, with at least four visits focusing observation on the participant, two in which they were using some aspect of Quest Atlantis and two in which they were engaged in other school activities. Additionally, we conducted semistructured interviews with each child, lasting from 30 to 60 minutes, including questions focused on issues of agency, commitment, meaning, learning, and participation as they transact with children’s media use. We also examined such information as class performance and assignments, and we arranged personal documentaries, in which the children photographed and narrated important aspects of their lives. Questionnaire data were also collected for the participants about their understanding of and engagement in the life commitments; this occurred on two occasions, chiefly for a different study but analyzed separately for this research. Last, we examined artifacts and computerized records of children’s communications (e.g., chat, email), accomplishments (e.g., Quest responses, virtual building), and choices (e.g., avatars, places visited) in Quest Atlantis, a process involving searching database records and identifying themes; these records ranged from 100 to over 2000 pages. Together, these data served as a means of triangulation. Data Analysis During the research process, we held team meetings to debrief field notes, coordinate data, and develop grounded accounts of identity, agency, commitment, meaning, and learning, as well as children’s engagement in Quest Atlantis and other media in their lives. Consistent with constant-comparative analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), this involved interrogating and comparing the data and emergent hypotheses to generate interpretations so that the data and formative theory each informed the other (Lather, 1986). In organizing the data and emerging interpretations, we used a database program (NVivo) to code, analyze, and sort text based on emergent categories. Each researcher coded their data three times, each with a different focus. The first task was to sort the data into the five focal components of identity work: agency (having voice or power); commitment (devoting to a course of action); meaning (constructing significance); learning (developing understandings); and participation (acting within a community). To support us in this task, we developed questions for each foci to ask of the data. Two researchers coded each student’s data and continued to sort it until there was 100% agreement; still, numerous chunks of data were placed in more than one category. The next task involved shaping the data by analyzing not only spates of discourse but also “acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 10 positions, and clothes” (Gee, 1996, p. 127). Examining the sorted data, we built interpretations of three levels of meaning: situated meanings (what a word means in context); social languages of texts (the function and domain of the language); and cultural models utilized (the belief system underlying the text). Through this analysis, by asking such questions as “Who is the speaker trying to be and what is he/she trying to do?”, we could discern the situated identities adopted by students as they participated in different communities and engaged with different media and technology. From here, we discussed themes and collapsed them into broad categories that communicated the important specifics of each case yet also allowed us to look across cases. The third task was to determine what aspects of the children’s experience contributed to the development of the situated identities. Deliberating the emergent themes and data to identify ways that the children’s activities contribute to their sense of self, we examined the four main factors of the process of media engagement: transactive self (participation characterized by agency, commitment, meaning, and learning), affinity groups (communities of individuals sharing knowledge, values, experiences, and practices); socio-technical structures (opportunities for interaction supported by social and technical systems, including people, structures, and media); and collective resonance (the shared perception of a transformed reality by community members). We believe that these process factors interact in ways that cause them to transform and, more important to the present research, cultivate or even constitute the self. The next step was to construct the cases. Using all three analyses, case narratives were crafted to illuminate the nature of learning and meaning in the Digital Age. The narratives provided background information when necessary, characterized the children in terms of their interests and abilities, and described their technology and media usage as well as their academic and social behavior. Through evidence and interpretation, we made assertions regarding the role of media and technology in cultivating a sense of self. Building on the cases, one researcher then revised the four presentations with a unifying voice. These were reviewed with the original case developers and with the children when accessible to verify, critique, and substantiate interpretations, a process known as member checking. The narratives were then combined and examined to identify key assertions, initially made individually and then negotiated collectivity to support individual views while helping to make the emerging assertions more generalizable. Case Results Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age 11 The cases demonstrate that one’s sense of identity may be advanced through participating in communities through expressing agency, adopting commitments, developing meaning, and engaging in learning. Before presenting the cases, the following table overviews the four cases, some similarities and differences among them, and the characteristics leading to their selection from the 17 participants originally identified (see Table 1). By including cases with both similarities and differences, including occasional and intensive users of technology, participants in popular and high culture, and children of varied nationality and gender, we hope to provide evidence detailing the nature of meaningful identity work in the Digital Age.