»YouthLab Papers
»MacArthur Digital Youth Project »NRC Report on Being Fluent with Information Technology
»deviantART
"... the work of documenting the social practices that nurture interest and learning can play a role in helping informal educators, parents, teachers, and policymakers redesign learning environments to be more supportive and engaging."
"Technological fluency certainly goes beyond content knowledge or skills to include a sense of seeing yourself as someone who is a creator and as someone who can collaborate with other people to produce something."
"If museums and schools want to encourage learning outside of their own setting, it would be important for them to broaden how they conceptualize working with the child. Rather than limit the learning experience to a single place or to the here and now, it can be productive to help a learner connect to other places where they can also pursue their interests."
"There are so many ways that technology can be used to learn and solve problems. To the extent that we have a very narrow group of designers—whether in terms of gender, prior socio economic status, or life experience—we are at greater risk for only creating technologies that reflect only the interests of a select group of people."
Interview by Catherine Eberbach and Debra Bernstein :: Spring 2009
Eberbach: What are you working on now that you find challenging and exciting?
Barron: In the last few years my research has focused on longitudinal studies of learning and development as a way to inform our understanding of how informal and formal learning opportunities interact to build expertise. In some of our projects we use retrospective case study methods that involve interviewing parents, mentors, and the students themselves about their learning histories. We also go to homes or community centers where students do their work to get a close up view of what they are creating and the tools they are using. In an ongoing study we are following children who are in middle school and who are attending a school that provides laptops and interest-based after-school clubs. We are following their learning for three years as they progress from the sixth to the eighth grade.
Our goal through all of these studies is to provide detailed portraits of social learning processes that sustain interest and engagement in activities and that drive conceptual development and that support identities as learners and creators. We want to understand how a child's learning ecology — the opportunities for learning across the settings of home, school, community, and virtual spaces — are organized to support development.
The data we are collecting suggests that a child's learning ecology can be quite dynamic. It can grow as a result of new learning activities that are created by a child or when new opportunities are offered by peers or adults. It can also become more restricted when learning opportunities disappear because of time constraints or when a learning partner moves away.
To help us see these patterns, we spend quite a bit of time making visualizations of our longitudinal data. When we map activities and learning resources in timeline representations we begin to see patterns of sustained learning activity that link formal settings like school with out-of-school learning opportunities offered by family or friends or through camps, clubs, churches, museums or online communities.
We see cases where interest in a topic or activity is sparked at school and continues informally out of school, and we see cases where out of school learning leads the learner to pursue an elective course in school. We also use these visualizations to map key learning partners involved in the activities and this helps us see the critical role of a child's social learning network in expertise development.
VISUAL Timeline Representation and Key
What's exciting about this approach is that it helps shift the conversation about expertise development away from the view that it is an individual process that is mostly dependent on knowledge accumulation to one that acknowledges the important role that other people, tools, and a rich array of learning opportunities play. Beyond making theoretical contributions, the work of documenting the social practices that nurture interest and learning can play a role in helping informal educators, parents, teachers, and policymakers redesign learning environments to be more supportive and engaging.
Eberbach: What kinds of expertise do you study?
Barron: Because our initial focus was technological fluency development, we have focused on children creating projects that use new media technologies. In our current sample we have programmers, robotics aficionados, flash animation based moviemakers, web designers, musicians, graphic artists, social activists, and quite a few entrepreneurs. The expertise that we are studying is broad—it involves technical knowledge and knowledge of the tools of production but goes beyond those to follow the development of other kinds of practices. Depending on the particular pattern or profile of interest we see children developing sophisticated ideas about new technology. For example, we see children who are knowledgeable about programming languages, robotics concepts, animation, filmmaking, web design, and the development of social networks. Because of their sustained engagement they are also developing a meta-sense that learning resources are out there and available, and that if they seek they shall find the websites or informal mentors that can help them learn. Finally we are paying close attention to the development of collaborative practices. We are interested in conceptualizing what develops as learners engage in collaborative production and innovation activities. While the technology is an important area to understand, what we are learning is that new media technologies are a vehicle for children's exploration of other interests, modes of self-expression, and ways of collaborating.
Eberbach: Would you describe these as examples of technological fluency?
Barron: Sure. In fact, when I began this research we used the National Research Council's (NRC) framework on technological fluency as a starting point for documenting learning opportunities afforded by projects that children were engaged in. One thing about the NRC definition of technological fluency is that it is a bit narrow. While the definition focuses on being able to use technology for one's own purposes, their three-part framework of intellectual capabilities, information technology concepts and skills is more techno-centric. If you were to simply accept the NRC definition, you might not consider someone technologically fluent unless they could independently build a website or use Flash to create something. A broader definition of technological fluency might also include the ability to work collaboratively with others who have technical expertise to create a technological project as an indicator of a type of fluency.
Bernstein: You've suggested other ways to think about technology fluency that go beyond equipment and software expertise. Are these related to identity?
Barron: Technological fluency certainly goes beyond content knowledge or skills to include a sense of seeing yourself as someone who is a creator and as someone who can collaborate with other people to produce something. Confidence in being able to learn and to troubleshoot is also important. Another major type of expertise involves being able to analyze and critique new media environments and expressions. The nature of the web requires that learners develop an awareness of the multiple authors who participate in creating resources and to develop strategies that will help them evaluate the credibility of information sources and potential learning partners.
Eberbach: What recommendations do you have for educators and designers who want to promote engagement with technology?
Barron: First, it is critical for policy makers and those who have responsibility for design to recognize the importance of providing a variety of places, tools, and learning opportunities that will allow children to experiment with creative activities and that are consistent with their interests. As a society we need to do a better job of making sure that every community has places where children and adolescents can go that offer them opportunities to learn and play. When young people have a certain level of interest in something, they can create an activity context if the tools are available. For example, the web allows for many kinds of explorations of interest and knowledge development. If museums and schools want to encourage learning outside of their own setting, it would be important for them to broaden how they conceptualize working with the child. Rather than limit the learning experience to a single place or to the here and now, it can be productive to help a learner connect to other places where they can also pursue their interests.
Second, educators frequently do not have the opportunity to see how children are using new technologies to learn. So I would recommend that educators take time to become learners. They need to find young guides that can help them understand what students find compelling and they personally need the opportunities to learn and explore. They should seek out colleagues that may know of useful and compelling games or virtual communities that they can share with students. When teachers become more familiar with what students are doing, they may be able to capitalize on their enthusiasm by opening up assignments to allow students to bring in their own interests or preferred mediums of expression. Likewise, students who are struggling with academic content presented in traditional ways often thrive in immersive environments or within projects where they can experiment in their own way and on their own schedule.
A third suggestion is to think broadly about one's role in helping learners learn. Our case study work suggests that parents, peers, and mentors can play a wide range of roles that help others learn. Although it became apparent that personal interests were a significant driver of the development and evolution of project-based activities, it was also the case that other people played important supporting roles in most projects. We chose to first look closely at parent roles and we were able to distinguish seven unique roles. For example, parents often played a learning broker role where they sought out learning opportunities such as a robotics club or found a specific person for their child to get advice from. The collaborator role was identified when parents worked with the child on a project in which both were engaged. Parents and children collaborated on a wide variety of projects including editing a soundtrack for a figure skating performance, putting together electronics kits, setting up a home computer network, and building robots. Other roles included employer, learner, resource provider, teacher, and non-technical support.
We also extended the analysis to a sample where children had low levels of access to computing resources at home but participated in an after-school club where they did have access. In this study we found that Computer Clubhouse mentors were more likely than parents to play some of these roles, including the teacher role, the lender, the broker, and the collaborator role. Parents were more likely to provide financial resources, informally employ their children by giving them technology-related chores, and learn from them.
From a research perspective we think that specifying types of relational roles that are significant for supporting conceptual development is important because it lays the groundwork for creating measurement tools and metrics that can reflect the richness of a learning ecology in terms of social learning networks. These metrics might be used for basic research that investigate the ways that social learning networks develop and can help us evaluate interventions intended to enrich a learner's learning ecology across the more and less informal learning spaces where they spend time.
From an educator or parent's perspective, understanding the range of roles that do not also require content knowledge is liberating. For instance, in the learning broker role, matching a child with someone who could help the child develop his or her interest can be incredibly powerful. There are many learning relationships that occur outside of school—perhaps at church, at home, in the neighborhood, or even online—and which become a context where learning, activity, and friendship occur. In one example, a teen constantly looked up to his church's upper balcony because he was interested in the video cameras that were filming the church services he attended. The person running the video noticed the teen's interest and invited him to help with the filming. This started a three-year relationship that became an informal apprenticeship. My point is that a powerful learning trajectory can begin because one person notices another's nascent interest and chooses to support it.
Eberbach: In a paper about interest and self-sustaining learning, you noted that, "it's possible to nurture learning by seeding informal learning environments with supportive resources that sustain a self perpetuating process." What kinds of resources might support an individual's developing interest?
Barron: Some good examples come from our case study work in which we survey and interview young people about what they are doing and we see what they're doing on their own time. There is something compelling and motivating about self-defined projects, the pursuit of goals, and sharing a bit of your own expertise. One girl who already had a strong interest in traditional visual arts became interested in digital art and began accessing a number of online communities, including deviantART. She helped us to see how many resources — examples and how–to guides — were designed by community members and already available. Models of work, explanations and examples, ideas for projects, links to other people and sites, and opportunities to share and get feedback can all be generative resources.
Eberbach: Some of your work has focused on equity issues in technology. Why is that so important, particularly in terms of technology and technological fluency?
Barron: If we don't pay attention to the equality of access to tools and learning opportunities there will be critical expertise differences that put less connected youth at a disadvantage. There are so many ways that technology can be used to learn and solve problems. To the extent that we have a very narrow group of designers—whether in terms of gender, prior socio economic status, or life experience—we are at greater risk for only creating technologies that reflect only the interests of a select group of people.
Fortunately, there are several examples of how we can intentionally design creative learning cultures. Nichole Pinkard's work in Chicago is helping us see what can happen when learners are given tools, a wide range of resources to spark their imagination and spaces, coupled with practices that recognize and showcase student work. In this example, a project-based approach is used but what is critically important is that it is facilitated by a creative group of mentors who bring their own personal portfolios of work to share with students.
Eberbach: Would you say something about LIFE Center's program of research?
Barron: LIFE stands for Learning in Informal and Formal Environments. As a center, our goal is to deepen our scientific understanding of social aspects of learning and to generate ideas for how technologies and learning environments can be designed to benefit from social processes that support learning. We recognize that the majority of time across a lifespan is spent out of school and we are working to conceptualize how learning occurs through social processes within and across more and less formal settings. Our studies range from the longitudinal studies I described earlier, to experimental studies that manipulate variables in order to better understand social mechanisms of learning, studies that use fMRI and MEG brain imaging techniques to advance our understanding of the functional systems and time course of the brain's engagement in social learning processes. Neuroscience methods can help us track the earliest expressions of learning, before it shows up in behavior as well as help provide more comprehensive explanations of learning phenomena.
Eberbach: How does your Youthlab work contribute to the LIFE center?
Barron: The YouthLAB (Youth Learning Across Boundaries) research group's classroom studies of children's learning and technology use began in the late 1990's. My 5-year NSF Career award laid the groundwork for the LIFE case studies and the subsequent work with the MacArthur Foundation. In our next phase of LIFE research we are planning for cross data set analyses that will allow us to systematically build knowledge across projects. For example, the findings and timeline representations that were developed in the context of our technological fluency development case studies will be used in studies by LIFE collaborators to understand learning in other areas such as science, math, and language learning. We'll also be generating joint analysis projects that will extend the parent roles and informal teaching frameworks to the other ethnographic studies led by Phil Bell, Reed Stevens, Shelley Goldman, and Roy Pea.
»Find references in the InformalScience.org database written by Brigid Barron