The Promise of Connected Learning

Craig has written three books, including, “The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future” (2009) and “Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement” (2005). His forthcoming book, “The Digital Edge: The Evolving World of Social, Digital, and Educational Inequality,” examines current debates about the digital divide, education and technology, and the future of opportunity in the United States.

We interviewed Craig in February 2015 to discuss the evolving function of social media in youth culture, the use of technological innovation for flexible pedagogy in the classroom, and the role of diversity and equity in digital media.

PIL: As a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s CLRN, you lead the network’s Digital Edge Project. This project studies how students, teachers, and families are engaging in digital media and connected learning in the face of significant social, financial, educational, and familial challenges. What is connected learning? How does connected learning encourage academic achievement, economic opportunity, and civic engagement? How does equity play a role in this learning model?

Craig: Connected Learning (CL) is a theory about the future of learning that the CLRN, through the visionary support of the MacArthur Foundation, has been developing over the last four to five years. The idea is that learning, in-school and out-of-school, must evolve to be more relevant in the rapidly evolving world that we live in. It is, quite frankly, a bold call to remake learning into something that is akin to how kids learn outside of more formal institutions. That learning tends to be powered by curiosity, creativity, and the capacity to leverage a variety of resources, physical and virtual, to try on new identities or explore new interests. When kids want to learn something on their own, they turn to their peers and also to more networked and ditributed forms of expertise like YouTube. The point is that in our knowledge-rich society, learning should connect the many nodes–school, home, peer networks, digital–in a young person’s learning ecology. As our ideas about CL evolve, it is clear that this is not a technology-dominant perspective. Rather, it is a perspective designed to better understand the larger social ecology that situates learning and how social, digital, and mobile platforms function as nodes in a more complex social system. Finally, it is the idea that for learning to be genuinely powerful and transformative, it must encourage students to be active makers of artifacts that reflect their ability to think critically and creatively about content and the world around them.

CL encourages academic achievement by realizing that in order for school to matter in the lives of young people, schools can no longer be isolated from the world that young people live in. Instead, schools must empower students to ask questions that encourage them to seek out answers that require inquiry, creative thinking, and problem-solving rather than memory and regurgitation of facts.

CL is essential to economic opportunity. We live in an innovation economy and that means that the skills associated with design, the ability to ask interesting questions, produce new solutions and prototypes, and communicate in dynamic and persuasive ways are fundamental. Any innovative idea is a connected idea–connected to rich social ties and information channels, fertile spaces of knowledge creation and spillover, and networked forms of expertise. A young person’s prospects for social and economic mobility are directly linked to the education they receive, the social connections they cultivate, and the ability to engage in what I would call creative thinking and making. CL opportunities are designed to help young people cultivate these kinds of skills, dispositions, and resources.

Finally, CL seeks to empower young people to see themselves as agents of change. If learning is relevant, connected to the world around us, and connected to a mix of resources and bodies of knowledge, young peoples’ sense of efficacy–the idea that my voice and my ideas matter–should grow immeasurably.

PIL: You recently received an innovation award from IC2 Institute, an Austin-based technology incubator that supports innovation and economic development. As part of the award, you will be developing game-based learning and assessment platforms for gamification that can “make learning a more flexible and personal experience.” Why has gamification become so important in education? Why should teachers and librarians being paying more attention to immediate, in-game feedback? 

Craig: The idea of “gamification” is perhaps a bit more controversial today that it was just two or three years ago. I’m not a big proponent of “gamifying” life, though we certainly still see elements of it today.

I think the main attraction to games in the education space is driven by three factors. First, games are widely viewed as a powerful medium because they are so immersive, that is, they are able to build worlds and experiences that encourage focus and tenacity. Before you can teach someone anything, you must engage them first, and game-based platforms, or at least good ones, tend to be able to do that effectively. Part of the immersive allure of games is the fact that game players are actively involved in problem solving (i.e., navigating their way through the game and toward a desired goal). Schools suffer, first and foremost, because they tend to be alienating rather than immersive. Students often feel dis-empowered, isolated, and not in control of what is usually happening to them in the formal learning experience.

Second, games can enhance the design of more robust learning environments by creating learning experiences that are more personal. Learning is a complex phenomenon and game-based platforms offer the opportunity to collect real-time and rich data about how students navigate a learning challenge. If a teacher can access data and find support to conduct the analytics, that teacher can begin to offer more relevant feedback and instruction.

Finally, game-based learning platforms, in theory, create learning pathways that can be accessed anytime/anywhere. As a result, learning can happen across time and spatial barriers. That means learning can happen in-school and out-of-school, across different social and peer networks, and in ways that are social and collaborative. I think that we are just beginning to learn how to make game-based learning truly social, experiential, and impactful, but this is certainly a challenge worth pursuing. 

PIL: In a trends report from PIL’s ongoing, two-year study of lifelong learning, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS), we were surprised to discover that young graduates place a high value on blogs and social networks as sources of lifelong learning. You’ve argued that social media is “a powerful node in [students’] learning network” and educators should encourage students’ social media behaviors. What needs to happen for this shift in thinking to happen? How might social media impact the ways in which today’s young people learn? With this evolution in attitudes and as more born digitals come of age, what might social networks look like in 2025?

Craig: I would say that social media is absolutely central to how young people learn today. When most young people want to learn how to do something you know what they do? They go online and find, for example, video channels. They understand that knowledge circulates in a variety of ways including through video, interest-driven blogs, and other social platforms. Google and Microsoft learned this a few years ago when they began studying how kids use their search engines. Kids were not that interested in text-based responses. Instead, they were mostly interested in videos. This resulted in the redesign of Google’s and Microsoft’s search engines–more video hits pop-up when you initiate a search now. The key takeaway is that teens understand that social media is a great platform for hands-on or do-it-yourself learning. We witnessed students turning to YouTube and other social platforms to learn, for example, a new language, how to build a gaming computer, play a new instrument, or use digital video editing software. Social media is especially important to kids who are looking to make something or cultivate a new skill (i.e., learn a language) but may not have physical access to an instructor, expert, or learning community that can support that desire to learn in a meaningful way.

I suspect that over five to 10 years social media, in some form or fashion, will be integrated into formal learning settings. We are already seeing this happen as designers build social platforms that are more school- and classroom-friendly, and as educators better understand that rather than block access to social media, we should be helping young people better leverage them to learn, enrich their networks, and do good work. 

PIL: The digital divide is often defined by people’s access to information and communication technology. However, as more minorities and lower-income Americans are getting online and adopting the latest social media platforms, how should we be defining the digital divide? What do you see as the greatest barriers youth face to accessing digital media, and how can we remove them?

Craig: Researchers and policy makers must redefine how we frame our study of the digital divide. It’s actually an intricate layer of divides, or formations, of social and digital inequality. I tend to think of the divide across four dimensions, each of them complex and multi-faceted:

1. Access (i.e., broadband, mobile carrier only);
2. Context (i.e., home, school, library);
3. Genres of participation (i.e., interest-driven, civic-driven);
4. Literacy (i.e., “tools literacy,” production-based literacies).

The digital landscape is changing and nowhere is this clearer than in the spread of mobile Internet use. In a November 2014 study, the U.S. Census reported that household computer ownership and Internet use are most common in Asian and white households and higher income and education households. But when they looked at the reliance on handheld devices only to access the Internet from home, black and Latino households were more likely than whites or Asians. There was once a thought that mobile would bridge the digital divide, but the impact is much more complex. Mobile-only Internet use reflects the extent to which the Internet-related practices of low-income communities continue to be structured by persistent forms of social inequality. Does mobile-only access lead to more consumption of content rather than production of content? Is mobile-only access associated with lower-income households and under-resourced communities?

There are many barriers to be hurdled. Let me focus on one. Research in the last ten years consistently points to one noteworthy trend when it comes to the acquisition of technology in resource-constrained schools: While schools do not always suffer from a lack of technology, they consistently suffer from a lack of vision in how the technology will be used. In high-poverty schools, technology is rarely used to promote the development of higher-order thinking skills, such as design, problem-solving, or coding. Schools must invest in highly-skilled instructors and curricula that cultivate the skills associated with innovation. This is not necessarily a technological barrier, but rather a social barrier. By expanding what we help students learn to do with technology, we increase the likelihood that they can begin to more fully leverage the power and possibilities of social, digital, and mobile platforms. I agree with analysts who argue that those who develop the skills that are a complement to smart machines will fare much better than those who do not in a knowledge-driven economy. 

PIL: There are conflicting studies about whether social media makes people feel lonely and alienated, or fulfilled and connected. In your book, “The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future,” you emphatically come down on the side that social media is social. How does social media encourage civic engagement and face-to-face interaction? How is it shaping the way that young people communicate? How can schools and libraries harness this power of social media to engage with youth on their level? How do the new projects you are working on help address these issues?

Craig: Despite our greater familiarity with social media in everyday life, there are many myths that prevail. For example, research consistently shows that most people go online to interact with people that they know, not strangers. This is certainly true of young people. While most young people still look at traditional civic engagement–electoral politics–through a jaundiced eye, they are more likely than ever to get involved in civic-minded activities, such as buycotts, online petitions, and citizen journalism. In many instances they are using social and mobile media to reimagine civic engagement.

It’s also true that young peoples’ use of social media is becoming more visual, hence the rise of Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms that offer novel ways to use pictures and video. As schools and libraries think about learning, engagement, and the role of social media, the possibilities for new kinds of learning pathways, research, storytelling, and sharing of knowledge are really exciting.

Our new project thinks quite seriously about the world that young people are transitioning into. We know that world is marked by uncertainty, labor precarity, and a bias toward those with higher levels of education and skill sets. These are some of the features of the creative economy. More specifically, we have been conducting a series of mini-ethnographies to better understand how young people cultivate a mix of assets–technological, social, physical, and human–to design new kinds of innovation ecosystems that reimagine the future of work and opportunity. We are excited about this work and believe that it will provide educators and policy makers with real world and compelling examples of the dynamic ways young people are mapping the geography of innovation.

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S. Craig Watkins is a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, in the department of Radio-Television-Film. He blogs for the Huffington Post, DML Central, and at his own site, The Young and the Digital. Craig’s forthcoming book is “The Digital Edge: The Evolving World of Social, Digital, and Educational Inequality.”

Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about the challenges of education and lifelong learning in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL).

PIL is an ongoing and national research study about how students find and use information for courses and for use in their everyday lives and as lifelong learners. This interview with S. Craig Watkins was made possible with the generous support of a research grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS), creating strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons.

“S. Craig Watkins: The Promise of Connected Learning” (email interview), by Kirsten Hostetler, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 23 (5 March 2015), is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.