Pop.Cosmo

Biography

Photo of Pop.Cosmo

The Pop.Cosmo research team, part of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, investigates learning in virtual worlds & massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). Leading a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers, Constance Steinkuehler conducts naturalistic, survey, and design experiment research related to individual and group cognition in popular play spaces such as World of Warcraft and RuneScape. This includes two lines of inquiry: (1) documentation and analysis of the intellectual practices that arise in such naturally occurring online learning environments for play, and (2), attempts to incubate those practices in an afterschool program conducted on UW-Madison campus that targets teenage boys, mostly from rural areas, who are disengaged and failing school (particularly literacy related subjects) but eat up games.

Constance was trained as a learning scientist and new literacy studies scholar, so the research team takes a sociocultural approach to learning with a focus on discourse and practice. The point to studying online games from this perspective is not merely to find new ways to accomplish the same old educational ends but just faster, cheaper, or with more verve. Rather, the point is to push back some on what the goals of education ought to be, how Pop.Cosmo should define evidence of their achievement, and what relationship classrooms of the twenty-first century should have to real life.

Constance's current interest is in the ways that MMOs function as sandboxes for the reconstruction (perhaps, reinvigoration) of a new form of twenty-first century citizenship — a cosmopolitan disposition marked by the willingness to engage in an increasingly globalized, diverse socio-technical world – and the intellectual practices that underwrite such a disposition: collective problem solving, digital & print literacy, informal science reasoning, computational literacy, and reciprocal apprenticeship. The science literacy stuff in particular has managed to jump start some great public conversations about the values of digital play.

Sessions