A classroom designed to foster distributed cognition encourages students to participatewith a range of people, artifacts, and devices.The various forms of participation compos-ing such cognitive activity might be understood more generally as the skill of knowinghow to act within distributed knowledge systems

Distributed intelligence is notsimply a technical skill, although it depends on knowing how to use tools effectively; it is also acognitive skill, which involves thinking across “brain, body, and world.”The term “distributedintelligence” emphasizes the role that technologies play in this process, but it is closely relatedto the social production of knowledge that we are calling collective intelligence

Humans are able to play much more complex games(and to solve much more complex problems) in a world in which keeping track of key dataand enacting well-understood computational processes can be trusted to the processing powerof the computer, and they can thus focus more attention on strategic decision making

Rather, wecan understand cognitive activity as shared among a number of people and artifacts, and cogni-tive acts as learning to think with other people and artifacts.

presence of artifacts or information appliances and that expand andaugment human’s cognitive capacities

intelligence is accomplished ratherthan possessed

the distributedcognition perspective holds that intelligence is distributed across “brain, body, and world”(Clark, 1997), looping through an extended technological and sociocultural environment(Clark, 2003)

hypothesisabout how the world works and the best ways of bringing itsproperties under their control.

Games follow something akin to the scientific process

ultitasking enters pedagogical practice when teachers recognize the desires of contemporarystudents to come at topics from multiple directions all at the same time or to maintain whatsome have called “continuous partial attention,” interacting with homework materials whileengaged in other activities

As we look to the future, one possibility is that schools will bedesigned to support both hunters and farmers, ensuring that eachchild develops multiple modes of learning, multiple strategies forprocessing information.

The farmer must complete a sequence of tasks that require localized atten-tion; the hunter must scan a complex landscape in search of signs and cues of where their preymay be hiding. For centuries, schools have been designed to create “farmers” (Hartmann, 1999)

Currently, young people are playing with these skills as they engage with games or social activ-ities that reward the ability to maintain a mental picture of complex sets of relationships and toadjust quickly to shifts in perceptual cues

Learners must filter out extraneous information and sharpen their focus onthe most salient details of their environment.

Perhaps one of the most alarming changes in adults’ view is the perceived decline in youngpeople’s attention spans with the rise of digital media

Appropriation enters education when learners are encouraged to dissect, transform, sample, orremix existing cultural materials.

Sampling intelligently from the existing cultural reservoir requires a close analysis of the exist-ing structures and uses of this material; remixing requires an appreciation of emerging struc-tures and latent potential meanings.

ost of the classics we teach in the schools are themselvesthe product of appropriation and transformation, or what we would now call “sampling” and“remixing.”

All artistswork within traditions; they all also violate conventions. School discourse, however, focuses onone over the other.

The digital remixing of media content makes visi-ble the degree to which all cultural expression builds on what has come before. Appropriationis understood here as a process by which students learn by taking culture apart and putting itback together.

Performance enters into education when students are asked to adopt fictive identities and thinkthrough scenarios from their perspective.These identities may be assumed within the physicalworld or the virtual world

hese learning processes are likely to sustain growth andlearning well beyond the school years.

Educators have for too long treated role play as a means to an end—a fun way to introduceother kinds of content—yet we argue that role-play skills may be valuable in their own rightand are increasingly central to the way adult institutions function.

role playing enables us to envision and collaboratively theorize about manipulating entirelynew worlds.

Role play, in particular, should be seen as a fundamental skill used across multiple academicdomains.

Assuming this new identity requires a close analysis of the originating texts, genreconventions, social roles, and linguistic codes

Performingthese shared fantasies (such as the scenarios that emerge in superhero comics) allows children tobetter understand who they are and how they connect with the other people around them

Children acquire basic literacies and competencies by learning to manipulate core culturalmaterials.

In con-structing and inhabiting these virtual characters, participants drew together multiple sources ofknowledge, mixing things they had read or learned in other educational contexts, informationexplicitly contained within the game, and their own introspection based on life experiences tocreate characters that were more compelling to them than the simple digital avatars the design-ers had constructed.

et, game play also is one of a range of contemporaryforms of youth popular culture that encourages young people to assume fictive identities andthrough this process develop a richer understanding of themselves and their social roles.

Engendering true procedural literacy means creating multiple opportunities for learn-ers—children and adults—to understand and experiment with reconfigurations of basic build-ing blocks of all kinds

Students need to learn how to manipulate and interpret existing simulations and how to con-struct their own dynamic models of real world processes

Students who use simulations in learning have more flexibility to customize models andmanipulate data in exploring questions that have captured their own curiosity.

we must know how to interpret this information.

Second,students experience what they have learned from a robust simulation as their own discoveries.

First, students oftenfind simulations far more compelling than more traditional ways of representing knowledge;consequently, they spend more time engaging with them and make more discoveries.

ontemporary video games allow youth to play with sophisticated simulations and, in theprocess, to develop an intuitive understanding of how we might use simulations to test ourassumptions about the way the world works

We learn through simu-lations by a process of trial and error: new discoveries lead researchers to refine their models,tweaking particular variables, trying out different contingencies.

Newforms of simulation expand our cognitive capacity, allowing us to deal with larger bodies ofinformation, to experiment with more complex configurations of data, to form hypothesesquickly and test them against different variables in real time.

build on this intuitive and experiential learning in theclassroom, introducing equations, diagrams, or visualizations that help them to betterunderstand the underlying principles that they are deploying and then sending them backto play through the levels again and improve their performance

Such questions also haveno right and wrong answers; they emphasize creative thinking rather than memorization;they allow diverse levels of engagement; they allow students to feel less intimidated byadult expertise; and they also lend themselves to the construction of arguments and themobilization of evidence.

Play in the context argued here is a mode of active engagement, one that encour-ages experimentation and risk-taking, one that views the process of solving a problem asimportant as finding the answer, one that offers clearly defined goals and roles that encouragestrong identifications and emotional investments.

Some have expressed skepticism that schools should or could teach young people how to play

We suspect that youngpeople who spend more time playing within these new media environments will feel greatercomfort interacting with one another via electronic channels, will have greater fluidity in navi-gating information landscapes, will be better able to multitask and make rapid decisions aboutthe quality of information they are receiving, and will be able to collaborate better with peoplefrom diverse cultural backgrounds

Games not only provide a rationalefor learning: what players learn is put immediately to use to solve compelling problems withreal consequences in the world of the game

Part of what makes play valuable as a mode of problem-solving and learning is that it lowersthe emotional stakes of failing: players are encouraged to suspend some of the real world conse-quences of the represented actions, to take risks and learn through trial and error

activi-ty is deeply motivated

fun (which in our sometimes still puritanical cul-ture gets defined as the opposite of seriousness) to engagement

When children are deep at play they engage with the fierce, intense attention that we’d liketo see them apply to their schoolwork

“He learned the meaning of expertise, of knowing aboutsomething well enough that you can start a conversation with a stranger and feel sure of hold-ing your own”

Through play, children tryon roles, experiment with culturally central processes, manipulate core resources, and exploretheir immediate environments. As they grow older, play can motivate other forms of learning

ystematically and creatively about the many different waysthey might build these skills into their day-to-day activities in ways that are appropriate to thecontent they are teaching

mastering these skills remains a key step in preparing youngpeople “to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] andeconomic life

Schools are currently still training autonomous problem-solvers, whereas as students enter the workplace, they are increasingly being asked to work inteams, drawing on different sets of expertise, and collaborating to solve problems

how meaning emerges collectivelyand collaboratively in the new media environment and how creativity operates differently in anopen-source culture based on sampling, appropriation, transformation, and repurposing

new media literacies shouldbe seen as social skills, as ways of interacting within a larger community, and not simply anindividualized skill to be used for personal expression

our perceptions ofthe world; the economic and cultural contexts within which mass media is produced and cir-culated; the motives and goals that shape the media they consume; and alternative practices thatoperate outside the commercial mainstream.

Students also need to develop technical skills.They need to know how to log on, to search, touse various programs, to focus a camera, to edit footage, to do some basic programming and soforth.Yet, to reduce the new media literacies to technical skills would be a mistake on theorder of confusing penmanship with composition. Because the technologies are undergoingsuch rapid change, it is probably impossible to codify which technologies or techniques stu-dents must know

. Among other things, they need to knowhow to access books and articles through a library; to take notes on and integrate secondarysources; to assess the reliability of data; to read maps and charts; to make sense of scientific visu-alizations; to grasp what kinds of information are being conveyed by various systems of repre-sentation; to distinguish between fact and fiction, fact and opinion; to construct arguments

Even traditional literacies must change to reflect the media changetaking place

new media literaciesshould be considered a social skill

textual literacyremains a central skill in the twenty-first century

A definition of twenty-first century literacy offered by the New Media Consortium (2005) is“the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap

we must rethink which core skills and competencies we want ourchildren to acquire in their learning experiences.The new participatory culture places newemphasis on familiar skills that have long been central to American education; it also requiresteachers to pay greater attention to the social skills and cultural competencies that are emergingin the new media landscape

yberspace’s ethicalnorms are in flux: we are taking part in a prolonged experiment in what happens when onelowers the barriers of entry into a communication landscape

media education should be to encourage young people to becomemore reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and theimpact they have on others.

participants in theseworlds understand the same experiences in very different terms and follow different ethicalnorms as they face off against each other

Ethics become much murkier in game spaces, where identities are assumed and actions are fic-tive, designed to allow broader rein to explore darker fantasie

How should teens decide what they shouldor should not post about themselves or their friends

Their writing is much more open to the public and can have more far-reaching consequences.

Now, consider how few of those qualities might be applied to the emerging participatory cul-tures

Their work was free of commercialconstraints and sheltered from outside exposure.The ethical norms and professional practicesthey were acquiring were well understood by the adults around them

This is where the transparency issue becomes especially dangerous.Seiter (2005) concludes, “The World Wide Web is a more aggressive and stealthy marketeer tochildren than television ever was, and children need as much information about its businesspractices as teachers and parents can give them”

ncreasingly,opportunities to participate online are branded such that even when young people produceand share their own media, they do so under terms set by commercial interests.

This research suggests some ten-dency to read “professional” sites as more credible than “amateur” produced materials, althoughstudents lack a well developed set of standards for distinguishing between the two

issues of format and design areoften more important than issues of content in determining how much credibility young peo-ple attach to the content of a particular website

Determining thetruth value of information has become increasingly difficult in an age of increasing diversityand ease of access to information

how young people (or indeed, any of us) assess the quality ofinformation we receive

coupling the pedagogical use of new media technologies with agreater focus on media literacy education

Students were adept at formulating “what if ” hypotheses, which they tested through their gameplay.Yet, they lacked a vocabulary to critique how the game itself constructed history, and theyhad difficulty imagining how other games might represent the same historical processes in dif-ferent terms

the young people took thegame’s representation of historical evidence at face value, acting as if all of the information inthe game was authentic

a differ-ence between trying to master the rules of the game and recognizing the ways those rulesstructure our perception of reality

exploit the rules of the system in order to beat the game

e limited in their ability to examine the media them-selves

another leg up to youth on one side and another disadvantage to youth on theopposite side of the participation gap

ontemporary industry values our “portfolios” as much as our knowledge

“Increasingly, as computer use is ever less a lifestyle option, ever more an everydaynecessity, inability to use computers or find information on the web is a matter of stigma, ofsocial exclusion; revealing not only changing social norms but also the growing centrality ofcomputers to work, education and politics” (

game systems make their way into a growing number of working-class homes, even iflaptops and personal computers do not.Working-class youth may have access to some of thebenefits of play described here, but they may still lack the ability to produce and distributetheir own media

Closing the digital divide will depend less on technology and more on providing the skillsand content that is most beneficial

Increasingly, children and young people aredivided into those for whom the Internet is an increasingly rich, diverse, engaging andstimulating resource of growing importance in their lives and those for whom it remains anarrow, unengaging, if occasionally useful, resource of rather less significance

help youth and adults learn howto use those tools effectively

Tempe, Arizona, charge users a fee: others, such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Cambridge,plan to provide high-speed wireless Internet access free of charge

assumes children, on their own, candevelop the ethical norms needed to cope with a complex and diverse social environmentonline (the ethics challenge)

The second isthat it assumes that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thusarticulate what they learn from their participation (what we call the transparency problem).

young people’s access to new media technologies and theopportunities for participation they represent (what we call the participation gap)

Children and youth doknow more about these new media environments than most parents and teachers. In fact, wedo not need to protect them so much as engage them in critical dialogues that help them toarticulate more fully their intuitive understandings of these experiences

The Kaiser reports collapse a range ofdifferent media consumption and production activities into the general category of “screentime” without reflecting very deeply on the different degrees of social connectivity, creativity,and learning involved

Beck and Wade conclude that gamers were more open to takingrisks and engaging in competition but also more open to collaborating with others and morewilling to revise earlier assumptions

Today’s children learn through play the skills they will applyto more serious tasks late

political debate is conducted almost entirely ‘over theirheads’” (pp. 218-219)

A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging whichcould lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.

highly generative environment

We can move in and out of informal learning communities

peer-to-peer teaching with each partic-ipant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge

Gee (2004) calls such informal learning cultures “affinity spaces,” asking why people learnmore, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do withthe contents of their textbooks.

Participatory culture is reworking the rules by whichschool, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate

Affiliations— memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered aroundvarious forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, gameclans, or MySpace).Expressions— producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning andmodding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).Collaborative Problem-solving— working together in teams, formal and informal, tocomplete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative realitygaming, spoiling).Circulations— Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)

participation is a property of culture

participatory culture as one:1.With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement2.With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others3.With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced ispassed along to novices 4.Where members believe that their contributions matter5.Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least theycare what other people think about what they have created).

; how to program computers and runa business; how to make a movie and get it distributed—are the kinds of skills we might hopeour best schools would teach.Yet, none of these activities took place in schools. Indeed, manyof these youth were frustrated with school; some dropped out and others chose to graduateearly.They developed much of the skill and knowledge through their participation in the infor-mal learning communities of fans and gamers

participate fully in pub-lic, community, [Creative] and economic lif

Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solvingPerformance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisationand discoverySimulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-worldprocessesAppropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media contentMultitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salientdetails.Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expandmental capacitiesCollective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goalJudgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different informationsourcesTransmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and informationacross multiple modalitiesNetworking— the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate informationNegotiation— the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respectingmultiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

fostering what we callthe new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people needin the new media landscape

technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to developthe cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement.

The Participation Gap— the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, andknowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.The Transparency Problem— The challenges young people face in learning to seeclearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.The Ethics Challenge— The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training andsocialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as mediamakers and community participants

Affiliations— memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centeredaround various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards,metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).Expressions— producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning andmodding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).Collaborative Problem-solving— working together in teams, formal and informal,to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternativereality gaming, spoiling).Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)

According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt &Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced.

For the current generation, games may represent the bestway of tapping that sense of engagement with learning

Much writing about twenty-firstcentury literacies seems to assume that communicating through visual, digital, or audiovisualmedia will displace reading and writing.We fundamentally dis-agree

As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention, we must keep in mind three coreconcerns:• How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences neededto become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future ofour society? • How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understandingof how media shapes perceptions of the world? • How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical stan-dards that should shape their practices as media makers and as participants in online communities?

What constraints, if any, apply to in online realms? Do young people feel thatsame level of investment in their gaming guilds or their fan communities? Or does the abilityto mask one’s identity or move from one community to another mean there are less immediateconsequences for antisocial behavior?

children’s experi-ences online are shaped by a range of social factors, including class, age, gender, race, nationality,and point of access. He notes, for example, that middle-class youth are more likely to rely onresources and assistance from peers and family within their own homes, and thus seem moreautonomous at school than working-class children, who must often rely more heavily onteachers and peers to make up for a lack of experience at home.The middle-class children thusseem “naturally” superior in their use of technology, further amplifying their own self-confi-dence in their knowledge.

What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatoryfiltering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to whatperson can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high band-width, and continuous connectivity. (Current legislation to block access to social networkingsoftware in schools and public libraries will further widen the participation gap.)

young people who create and circulate their own media aremore likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stakein the cultural economy

Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also sup-ports them

Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecologi-cal approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communicationtechnologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they sup-port.

Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute whenready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued

The Pew study did not consider newer forms ofexpression, such as podcasting, game modding or machinima.Nor did it count other forms of creative expression and appro-priation, such as music sampling in the hip hop community

Contrary to popular stereotypes, these activities are not restricted to white suburban males. Infact, urban youth (40 percent) are somewhat more likely than their suburban (28 percent) orrural (38 percent) counterparts to be media creators. Girls aged 15-17 (27 percent) are morelikely than boys their age (17 percent) to be involved with blogging or other social activitiesonline.The Pew researchers found no significant differences in participation by race-ethnicity

For the purpose of the study,a media creator is someone who created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photogra-phy, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Mosthave done two or more of these activities. One-third of teens share what they create onlinewith others, 22 percent have their own websites, 19 percent blog, and 19 percent remix onlinecontent

reflection on strategy,

practice and time on task

Schools operate by the bell curve. In a bell curve, the great majority of people are in the middle range of achievement, with a few much better than

he rest and a few much worse. Game-related affinity spaces, and other interest-driven spaces like Flicker(a photo sharing site), for example, tend to operate by the principle called the ―80/20‖ or Pareto Principle

80/20 organization means such groups can recruit everyone‘s contributions while allowing the most dedicated to produce a great deal more

There must always be some students who have lower scores than all others, and some who have higher scores, even if the actual difference in their performance is quite small. In addition to how tests are designed, the way that schools design instruction contributes to an artificial view of people‘s abilities to learn

More Awesome than You(MATY). This is a site whose participants pride themselves on being at the ―cutting edge‖ of Simshacks and mods

However, its failure to accommodate a wide diversity of skills and backgrounds, and its treatment of newcomers, make it by our definitionnot a nurturing affinity space or, at least, only a partial one

How these communities behave is ultimately a matter of the culture a group grows and attempts to sustain

Problems are too complex today to trust individual experts. They tend to trust their knowledge too much and pay too little attention to what they do not know, and to what others, perhaps those quite unlike them, do know. We need to grow not expert individuals but knowledge communities

we need to understand how affinity spaces are tied to other aspects of the metagame (Game or Game+) that play a significant role in learning associated with games, and how these spaces might lead people to other spaces and types of knowledge that are not specific to games.

affinity spaces have much to teach us about fostering people‘s passion and commitment to learning

True innovation is as likely, or even more likely, to grow in a space that allows and encourages diversity of skills and backgrounds, than one that is more narrowly defined, no matter how high its status

When this focus on discovering and making good choices lessens, affinity spaces deteriorate

Affinity spaces are organized to help people make better choices. They are organized to share information so that new and better choices can be discovered. They are organized, as well, to share information about choices that work and ways to learn how to make better and better choices

choose how to ―go on,‖ or how to proceed on a trajectory of actions that will, eventually, lead to succes

In an affinity space, people do not judge what other people know by asking them to list what they know and to write down the facts, information, and principles theyknow (i.e., what they have stored in their heads)

Indeed, affinity spaces are, in a sense, knowledge communities.

people, children and adults, learn more important things in their lives out of school than in it

Here is the sad fact: Humans do not learn anything deeply by force. Humans do not learn anything in depth without passion and persistence.

―motivate‖) students to do things they may not want to do.

while schools are expected to force (or

We need to know a great deal more about how they are initiated and sustained

nurturing affinity spaces are miracles of human interaction

The list above is based on the onlineSimsaffinity spaces we have studied. Other affinity spaces have these features as well. It is possibleto implement these features in face-to-face groups, but it is likely to be more difficult, due to institutional constraints, pre-existing status differentials, and even geographical boundaries that prevent people with common interests from coming together

The list above is based on the onlineSimsaffinity spaces we have studied

In school, children rarely have an audience who really cares about their work other than the teacher

Peopleget encouragement from an audience and feedback from peers, though everyone plays both roles at different times

n school, students are expected to be dependent on teachers and textbooks for information, yet getting help from other students often counts as ―cheating.

A view of learning that is individually proactive, but does not exclude help, is encouraged

In school, roles are not reciprocal.

Roles are reciprocal

In school, teachers are leaders and bosses, and often are expected to see their role as telling, rather than resourcing learners‘ learning and creativity

Leadership is porousand leaders are resources

being good at being a student, not necessarily being good at solving problems or innovating

There are many different routes to status

In school, by and large, everyone is expected to participate in the same way and do all the same things

There are many different forms and routes to participation

In school, unlike in many workplaces, tacit knowledge counts for little or nothing (at least in the more ―academic‖ –and valued –subject areas)

tacit knowledge in words (e.g., when they contribute to a forum thread or engage in group discussion about a shared problem)

Tacit knowledge is used and honored; explicit knowledge is encouraged

in the classroom, and restricted to general facts and principles found in textbooks or other ―sanctioned‖ material

Distributed knowledge, as described above, refers more to an aggregate of knowledge possessed by individuals associated with a community or within a space, and available for problem-solving. The concept of dispersed knowledge originated as way of describing economic systems in which the knowledge of the relevant facts (for example, on supply and demand for particular products) is dispersed among many people and localities (HAYEK, 1945).

The use of dispersed knowledge is facilitated

Students rarely are encouraged to draw on each other‘s knowledge to supplement their own in academic tasks; in school that is often called ―cheating.‖

In school, the development of individual knowledge is valued, and the useof distributed knowledge is given short shrift.

Both individual and distributed knowledge are encouraged

school, most children rarely become experts or specialists in anything

The development of both specialist and broad, general knowledge are encouraged, and specialist knowledge is pooled

School content is fixed by teachers, curricula, and textbooks

sensitive to the views, values, and interactions of other members of the group

comment on and negotiate over content

Content is transformed by interaction

content is not fixed

no sense that their own work might be used and appreciated by others.

they do what they are told because they are told to, not because they have chosen it

Nurturing affinity spaces enforce high standards through respectful and encouraging mentoring, based on the assumption that, no matter how expert one is, there are always new things to learn and people who know more than you do.

Everyone can, if they wish, produce and not just consume

School segregates newcomers from more expert students through tracking and grade levels. As a result, students are rarely exposed to the discussions and practices of more advanced learners; they have little sense of the possible learning trajectories available to them. Indeed, learning trajectories are,for the most part, determined for the learners by others, rather than by their own choices or passions.

Newbies, masters, and everyone else share a common space.

Knowledge is assumed to beassociated with age, and students are measured in terms of standards for their age group, not, for example, in terms of the opportunities they‘ve had to learn.

Affinity spaces are not segregated by age

Too often factors like race, gender, social class, or disability play a prominent role in school without the student‘s ability to choose how to define and use his or her own identity

A common endeavor for which at least many people in the space have a passion—not race, class, gender, or disability—is primary

They function in certain ways that we believe are good for learning and human growth. Since not all affinity spaces function this way, we will call these ―nurturing affinity spaces.‖

ideo gameplay is now hunkered down in our culture. And “what we do” is something that gets learnedsomehow and someway

One interpretation of why this happened would be to say thatthese kids were extremely “motivated” to learn to play video games, and so they learnedhowever they could manage.

Watching these kids lying around, talking,joking, and trying to figure things out in this ordinary way was very familiar.

This passage, taken in isolation, might support the separate worlds view; even worse, itmight suggest that these boys are learning from the game the idea that it is both okay tobeat someone up and it is a way to improve your pitching.

nother of our participants, Katarina, also made comparisons between in-game and in-world behaviors.