WASHINGTON, D.C., September 7—The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has released 31 “Ed-Talk” videos that feature leading education scholars discussing cutting-edge research on a range of important education and learning issues. The videos, which are each roughly six minutes in length, are designed to convey key research findings crisply, quickly, and compellingly.
The videos are accompanied by 31 research fact sheets that the scholars developed to provide the underlying findings and cumulative research that frame the Ed-Talks.
The 31 Ed-Talks headlined AERA Knowledge Forum events earlier this year. Held as part of AERA’s Centennial year programming, the Knowledge Forum created an opportunity for leading education scholars and policy leaders to engage in an open, in-depth discussion of research on education and learning using Ed-Talks as catalysts for a series of compelling conversations.
Thirteen of the Ed-Talks were given at a forum held in February in Washington, D.C., on significant research clustered around three themes—how people learn, how we can optimize learning, and how we can foster equitable outcomes.
An additional 18 Ed-Talks were presented at AERA’s 2016 Annual Meeting in April, also held in Washington, D.C. These sessions touched on major issues including education equity, the use of research in policymaking, student learning, opportunities for disadvantaged students, and inclusive education practices.
“The AERA Knowledge Forum was driven by the aspiration to make visible and accessible high-quality education research that is relevant, powerful, and useful for addressing challenging issues facing practitioners, policymakers, and the public,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “By broadly making public the Ed-Talk videos and fact sheets, we are not only sharing a critically important research base, but also helping to expand the public’s knowledge and inform the environment in which decisions are made about policy and practice.”
The Ed-Talks and fact sheets—along with scholar bios, a list of funding agencies that made possible the research covered in the talks, and more—are available in the Knowledge Forum section of the AERA Centennial microsite.
To view the 31 Ed-Talk videos click HERE. To read more about the Knowledge Forum scholars and download research fact sheets click HERE. To learn more about AERA’s Centennial programming, including upcoming events, click HERE.
How the power of games inspires solutions to today’s biggest challenges
For Sasha Barab, professor of innovation in ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and professor of education in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, it’s “game on” as he and his team create virtual solutions to society’s challenges.
“We develop games, apps, and platforms to immerse learners in what it’s really like to be a scientist, a doctor, or an engineer by investigating real-world problems in a virtual world,” Barab says.
This type of learning is called transformational play, and it’s much different from memorizing facts for a test. In a game world, the power lies in taking on the role of protagonist and making choices that have consequences. It helps people learn and grow in a context where they can fail safely and come to appreciate themselves as people who can have a real impact in a world—albeit a virtual one.
The center recently launched My LifeLabs, its newest venture to unlock human potential through a growth and impact platform, thanks to grants from Intel, the National Science Foundation, and donations from entrepreneurs.As cofounder and executive director of ASU’s Center for Games and Impact, Barab has been harnessing the power of game-infused learning for five years. Grants from the Gates Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, and seed funding from ASU, gave the center its early springboard.
“ASU has the entrepreneurial spirit to manifest designs that can be researched and scaled to make positive change in the real world,” Barab says.
Now that’s a game we all can win.
With technology already an integral part of daily life, nonprofits are seizing new opportunities to incorporate elements of interactive games into their volunteer programs and fundraising campaigns. Some charities make games their mission but some charities simply incorporate the qualities that make games appealing, like competition and a sense of urgency, into their fundraising strategies, says Dale Nirvani Pfeifer, chief executive of GoodWorld. “We really believe nonprofits need to make giving fun,” Ms. Pfeifer says. “Make people feel they’re on a mission with you and the charity is cheering you on.”
Merely incorporating elements of games into a campaign rarely creates awareness or prompts changes in behavior, Ms. Pollack says. So she recommends creating fully immersive experiences that can raise both awareness and funds. There’s a lot of money to be gained by tapping into the gaming industry, which in 2015 had total revenues of $23.5 billion, according to the Entertainment Software Association.
“Games can really give you a position of empathy,” says Kathryn Dutchin, interim associate director at the Center for Games and Impact at Arizona State University. “They are opportunities to sit in the shoes of others and gain perspective.”
One potential drawback: True games can be expensive to design, ranging from $25,000 for a very simple mobile app to more than $3 million for a game with detailed animation and many levels of play, “We have big dreams of diving into the gamification world,” Ms. Schutes says.
Send an email to Rebecca Koenig.
Article was originally published in The Chronicle of Philanthropy https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Games-Add-Competition/237386
What does the future hold? David Guston, Founding Director of SFIS, encourages scientists and citizens alike to shape a desirable tomorrow. How? Through the development of innovative ideas that address both existing and foreseeable real-world problems.
As Founding Director, what motivated you to establish the School for the Future of Innovation in Society (SFIS) at Arizona State University (ASU), USA?
My ASU colleagues and I have been working on the societal aspects of science, technology and innovation since the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) moved here in 2004. CSPO was initially created by Michael Crow, when he was Executive Vice Provost for Research at Columbia University, to be Columbia’s science policy think tank in Washington, DC. After Michael became President of ASU in 2002, he made CSPO Director Dan Sarewitz an offer he couldn’t refuse to recreate the centre at ASU – and then Dan made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to join him.
So, in one sense, the founding of SFIS is the culmination of activities that we’ve been engaged in for more than a decade at ASU – just formalised in an organisation that is more recognisable as an academic unit than CSPO was. Over the years, we’ve hired new faculty, instigated the creation of new graduate programmes – namely, a doctoral programme in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology and the Master of Science and Technology Policy – and generated a lot of new research, especially in the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU, which the US National Science Foundation funded with an initial $6.2 million, five-year award in 2005 and renewed for $6.7 million in 2010.
But in another sense, SFIS is a brand new beginning because, first, as an academic unit reporting to the Provost, we are in greater control of our own destiny and, second, as a school embracing ASU’s particular mission of access, excellence and impact, we are taking on new challenges like creating an undergraduate major and minor. Like ASU’s School of Sustainability, SFIS is a school created from a problem in the world, rather than from a centuries-old tradition of scholarship or the coalescing of a professional community. For us, that problem is the complex and sometimes ambiguous role of innovation in society, and the role that we all have in making our own futures.
How is SFIS preparing students to build upon the incredible accomplishments of science and technology in years to come?
Our students pay a lot of attention to the so-called emerging technologies – like nanotechnology, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and so forth – that are characterised by high stakes, high uncertainty and what I like to call a ‘politics of novelty’, in which it is essentially impossible to say whether synthetic biology, for example, is not novel because it merely extends a millennia-old practice of husbandry and agriculture, or that it is novel because it introduces species that not only have not been, but could not have been, crafted by evolution.
With emerging technologies, we’re operating without much data and with multiple kinds of uncertainty, so the risk paradigm really falls apart. We’re teaching our students to pursue a vision of what we call ‘anticipatory governance’, in which they work toward three capacities. The first is understanding or generating anticipatory knowledge of plausible futures with an eye toward what can be done today to help better establish the path toward more desirable futures. We’re teaching them about upstream public engagement, in which substantive, two-way dialogues can be created between lay and expert communities at a point in time at which the differences between the two are minimised due to those great uncertainties. And we’re teaching them how to integrate knowledge across the traditional two-cultures divide, and not just work in, but lead, cross-disciplinary teams aimed at real-world problem solving.
But our students are also interested in legacy technologies – think in particular about large-scale systems like energy, water and food – in which contemporary innovation certainly plays a role, but the key factor is the interaction of numerous social and technical subsystems that have evolved over decades in complex ways. At SFIS, we challenge our students to think about how social change (like behaviour with respect to energy use) and technological change (such as smart metering of affordable roof-top solar panels) interact such that it makes little sense to speak of one without the other. In other words, we teach them to analyse socio-technical systems. We also focus on knowledge systems; that is, the connections among the various ways in which knowledge is produced, validated, disseminated and consumed across society. And we teach them in both national and international contexts, such as through our Master of Science in Global Technology and Development.
Read full interview here.