Media Studies Online

I am an instructional librarian by training and profession, in my current role I am an administrator coordinating and overseeing library services and instructional technology in a suburban school district in southern Maine. While I work directly with other professionals, including district leadership and building administrators, instructional coaches, librarians and classroom teachers, I also participate in discussions and decision-making regarding instructional technology implementation for students K through 12.

In order to frame my own strengths and areas for growth for both myself and my learners, I am referring to the ISTE Standards. I see my strengths in visionary planning, including evaluation and communication, and in connected learning, especially in staying current, reflective practice, and continuous improvement. I am looking at empowering leadership as a focus area, particularly building educator competency and ensuring the use of technology to meet student learning needs. I often worry about the tendency in educational technology to continually embrace the new and novel, rather than identifying student needs and learning goals and evaluating tools based on those needs.

A few topics I am interested in exploring further include:

• Models and strategies for evaluating instructional technology tools.
• Making the shift from technology integration to instructional coaching with technology.
• Delving into deceptive marketing strategies, exaggerated promises, fearmongering and anthropomorphizing of text-based generative AI.
• Video games, virtual environments, and ecoplay.
• Dark patterns and behaviorism in (educational) games and apps.
• Deconstructing “gamification” mechanics versus game design.

I really want to focus on some of the gaming elements I have highlighted here. I’m actually drafting this while I’m attending the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference in Tempe where I am participating and presenting in the Games Stream. I just want to start by highlighting that I like and am interested in games and video games. This interest has actually informed my critical approach to “gamification” in education.

While educational video games have existed for decades (many people of my generation may have fond memories of playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego [1985] or Oregon Trail [1990]), “gamification” as a concept has arisen just in the past ten years. Although “gamified” educational applications have been widely embraced in many school settings, in the gaming world and within the fields of games studies and user interface (UX) design, gamification has been quite controversial and subject to harsh criticism. For this project, I plan to explore some of the controversy and criticism of gamification, and in particular I want to delve further into examining how “Dark Patterns,” or manipulative design practices (see: Dark Patterns Games; Deceptive Design; UXP2: Dark Patterns) emerge in gamification practices and educational games and apps.

Educator and author Mike Ribble defined nine elements of digital citizenship as:

1. Digital access
2. Digital commerce
3. Digital communication
4. Digital literacy
5. Digital etiquette
6. Digital law
7. Digital rights and responsibilities
8. Digital health and wellness
9. Digital security

Which covers pretty much every aspect of our (digital) lives. So how can we provide adequate learning opportunities for our students in the traditional K-12 classroom environment? In my district, we have Common Sense Media lessons integrated into the curriculum K to 5, and all 6th grade students take two half-year classes in Digital Literacy and Digital Citizenship. Beyond that, instruction becomes more challenging as students begin to assume they know more than their teachers, which is not necessarily an unfair assumption.

A few years ago, at ALA Midwinter, I had the opportunity to hear Denise E. Agosto share details of her research into teens' social media attitudes and behaviors. One of the interesting findings of this research was that making wise choices online (especially regarding privacy) had a much stronger correlation to experience, rather than age. I often worry about the depth and nuance of our digital citizenship education when our teachers and staff often have very limited first-hand experience and comfort in digital environments and online communities.

All too frequently, I see digital citizenship education positioned as warning our young people of the dangers of cyberbullying, child predators, and other cyber boogeymen. And while I am not suggesting that we should not teach students how to stay safe online, but if this is our primary lens and frame of reference, we’re betraying a very limited viewpoint.

Similarly, I worry about common approaches to student privacy. We teach our students what to share (or not) online, we attend to our FERPA mandates, and then submit our students to constant surveillance. How can we meaningfully teach our students about protecting their privacy, when they are subject to the digital panopticon? Students are under constant scrutiny by tools like GoGuardian and teachers and staff feel completely authorized to review students’ web search and browsing history.

I am also concerned about the all-too-common fallacy of conflating legality with ethics. Yeah, OK, schools are arguably within their legal rights to spy on students, that doesn’t make it a wise or ethical decision (see: “Student Privacy Primer” from Future of Privacy Forum, 2021). Certainly, in the United States (and many other regions of the world), legislation pertaining to our digital lives very rarely serves to protect privacy, access, freedom of speech (see: Electronic Freedom Foundation). Even well intended laws, such as COPPA, have their unintended consequences (see: Schultz, 2012). (I also theorize that COPPA had the unintended consequence of kid friendly websites such as Neopets, Club Penguin, and others disappearing from the web, leading to an internet that is high on advertising, but not particularly friendly to either children or adults. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

References

• Agosto, D. E. (2016). Teens' Social Media Attitudes and Behaviors: What the Research Means for Library Services [Conference presentation]. ALA Midwinter Meeting, Boston, MA.
• Davis, M. (2016). What is digital citizenship? EdTech Digest. Retrieved from https://edtechdigest.blog/2016/06/15/what-is-digital-citizenship/
• Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish, Panopticonism. In A. Sheriden (ed.) Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (pp. 195-228). Vintage Books.
• Future of Privacy Forum. (2021). Student Privacy Primer. Student Privacy Compass. Retrieved from https://studentprivacycompass.org/resource/student-privacy-primer/
• Ribble, M. (2020). Digital citizenship is more important than ever. ISTE. Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/explore/digital-citizenship-more-important-ever?articleid=535
• Schultz, J. (2012). Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about their age: COPPA and the Unintended Consequences of Age‐Based Regulations. Berkeley Law Privacy Forum. Retrieved from https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/COPPA.pdf