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The Native Tongue of Teens: Social Media

June 5, 2009 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 1 Comment
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(This was posted June 5, 2009 on my blog “Positively Media” at PsychologyToday.com)

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

“No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby – so helpless and so ridiculous.”

Think of the tech-saavy younger generation as another country with a different language. Their lives are inseparable from technology and they are connected to each other and to information flows in ways many of us will never understand. We can learn to speak their language or we can look ridiculous and irrelevant.

No where is learning to speak the language of technology more important than when you’re trying to educate young people. At a time when one in five American students drops out of high school, we parents and educators need to work on our language skills. This is why I love to see educational institutions embrace media technologies. At Azusa Pacific University (APU), my friend David Peck is leading a team doing some really cool things to connect with this generation of digital natives by creating conversations in the language of the users. Sounds simple enough, but it is surprisingly rare.

APU is smartly and simply integrating game play and information delivery. Their website contains games starring Stickman Bob where you must protect the campus from comets and, although I am embarrassed to say that I destroyed the campus several times due to my lack of gaming skills, I now know what the Cougar Dome and Wilden Hall look like and I’ve never been to APU. After flattening the place, I also feel a little responsible for the protection of the campus. Pretty good emotional engagement for 15 minutes of play.

Games like Stickman Bob can also normalize experiences, such as the anxiety of the admissions and entry process, such as where you help Stickman Bob dodge crazed admissions counselors by leaping wildly and arming him with book bags. (I’m sorry to say that my Stickman Bob was resoundingly trampled.) This injection of humor allows APU to humanize their institution. They also invite engagement by letting you customize your own personal Stickman Bob avatar (in either gender) and keep track of your score. And they don’t stop there. You can “Join the Stickman Bob Facebook Group” or Twitter your opinions to @azusapacific. While marketers will be all excited about the website’s “stickiness” (ability to hold visitor’s attention), the real value comes in the brand perception of APU and in beginning to build a relationship with prospective students that will last long beyond graduation. These games are the equivalent of saying “Hey, we get you!” If it were my school, I’d put Stickman Bob on the home page.

As technologies emerge, the boundaries between platforms become more porous and things cross over. Think texting your Twitters and iPhoning your Facebook page. What many consider to be Internet applications are hitting the road. Mobile devices are an under-25 appendage and Blackberries and iPhones are no longer the tools of tech-dilettantes and Type A workaholics. In the summer of 2008, Hot Lava Software working with the Kauffman Foundation used the ubiquity of mobile devices to deliver Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education as a ‘Sports Bytes’ contest to teens’ mobile phones with the hope of sparking their interest in the math and science at a time when many teens turn away. They asked questions like: Which ball has the slower speed when thrown: a softball or a baseball? Over 70,000 teens registered to play over the series of sporting events.

Teaching mobile game development is also emerging as a motivational tool to engage students, according to researchers like Kurkovsky, and can help students see the connections between Computer Science and real-world technology.

Where many educators demand the incapacitation of mobile devices during class, schools like APU have faculty that say “Turn on your cell phones. Text me with questions.” They are actively going mobile with access to school information like sports scores and calendars available to students via mobile devices with plans to integrate administrative chores. Compared to India, however, the US is a bit behind in adoption of mobile applications. New startups are doing everything from introducing mobile-based English language classes to companies like Find Guru who developing online classroom where you can get connected with teachers, assignments and texts. Love me, love my technology.

The brilliance of these projects, and the hopefully many like them, is that they aren’t using technology to replicate current educational experiences. They are using the technology to support ways of motivating and connecting with kids in the language they use every day. Not only will using technology help motivate and engage kids, it is also the only way to prepare them for problem-solving for jobs that haven’t been invented yet in a world full of technology.

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Kurkovsky, S. (2009). Engaging students through mobile game development. SIGCSE Bulletin, 41(1), 44-48.
Photos: APU Public Relations, iStockphoto.com

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What Does a Media Psychologist Do?

April 5, 2009 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 11 Comments
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I get a lot of questions about career paths in media psychology, particularly among those thinking of pursuing a degree in the field. I certainly empathize with that confusion–and the desire to make sure someone will give you a job if you do all that work. Media psychology, as a new field, doesn’t offer up any quick and easy answers. It’s helpful to think about how to define media psychology broadly and then make it relevant to individual interests and goals. It the largest sense, media psychology is using psychological theory to understand how people use, consume, and produce media. It has applications to groups and individuals as well as nations. The word media is often assumed to be mass media, but media psychology looks at communication that is mediated by technology. Needless to say, the field paints with a pretty broad brush.

Some people start with their current or hoped-for career and then target their approach to the degree in a way that supports their needs. Someone who works with teens, for example, may be looking for ways to effectively communicate with or educate teens and therefore choose to focus on topics such as issues of developmental psychology, such as cognition, identity development, how teens are using technology, what narratives resonate, and how physical perceptions impact motivation and emotion. A designer or producer of media may focus on things such as perceptions, cognition, and how those are supported and challenged in different applications such as large screen/small screen. An educator may choose to focus on how different media applications interact with learning styles, multiple intelligences, engagement, self-efficacy, and individual strengths.

Other people start with a passion for an area and then seek a job that requires that knowledge set. For example, if you are skilled in using media to deliver factual information, there are roles in education (teaching teachers as well as teaching students), business communications (training internally as well as educating clients/customers), and healthcare (developing and promoting health education through media). Media psychology is relevant to advertising (for profit as well as nonprofit), applications and game developers.

Media psychology, like many other fields, requires some focus and specialization within areas of expertise. Much like a degree in any subject, from English to Economics (and I can’t speak the the hard sciences here, as I just don’t know), it gives you a good theoretical toolkit to apply to types of uses/development. But unlike a degree that is more vocationally oriented, such as education and teaching, there is not obvious immediate next step (like get a credential and teach elementary school.) To me, it makes the field very exciting. At the same time, it demands more of you to set your direction.

I’d be happy to talk about how any specific interests fit with my own experience in media psychology, as will most of my colleagues. There are different perspectives from different people, but we are all passionate about understanding how people and groups interact with media technologies and how that molds society. My own background has involved visual design, marketing, branding, country perceptions, health education, teaching, media messaging, and research on things like websites and digital games for kids. I love that it is always changing.

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Innovation in Education: Students May be Required to Think

February 24, 2009 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge Leave a Comment
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An Associated Press article in the Herald Dispatch article today says “Governor says Ohio schools need new focus.”

The news brief says:

Concepts such as problem solving, critical thinking, cultural awareness and media literacy would overtake memorization and pencil-and-paper tests in an educational overhaul trumpeted by Gov. Ted Strickland.

Strickland’s education aims in his two-year budget proposal would not only change how schools are funded, but also how students are taught. Ohio’s curriculum would be infused with so-called “21st Century Skills,” a buzz phrase in the education world whose framework has been implemented in 10 states and in individual schools across the country.

The goal is to move students away from the memorization and regurgitation of facts and instead require them to apply their knowledge in problem-solving situations, often with the use of technology.

American students have been performing poorly on problem-solving skills in comparison to students from many other industrialized countries. A growing body of research in cognitive psychology suggests that minds learn best when memorization of facts is blended with critical thinking exercises to use that knowledge, noted a recent report from the think tank Education Sector.

I’m not sure if the right response to this is “duh!” or perhaps from a more positive stance “FINALLY!” (Although does it trouble you that the reporter refers to this statement as being “trumpeted” by the Governor? Not exactly a vote of confidence there!)

One thing is clear, we have to get over being afraid of technology. If we put half the energy and resources that people current devote to finding the negative effects of media in developing ways to harness technology for education, we’d be a lot farther ahead. And more importantly, our kids would be developing the skill set they will need in a highly competitive, globalized world.

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Digital Media – School is just one node on a kid’s information and learning network

May 10, 2008 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge Leave a Comment
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A couple of weeks ago when I was at the Broadcast Educators festival in Las Vegas, I was struck by the words people use to talk about new media. Words like: inundated, overwhelmed, deluged, complex, confusing, and potentially dangerous. It struck me that many of us are trapped in our own brains and not able to think about how this all looks from the brains of kids and teenagers, who use words like cool, fast, and awesome. This is an awkward situation if the people who are feeling inundated and worried are designing media and curricula for the people who think fast is awesome and who are reveling in the new worlds and ways of being that new technologies have made possible. Personally, I like to think of us all as interacting in an information environment, where different media technologies are among many facets.

I was, therefore, incredibly excited (even discounted for my normal enthusiasm for cool media stuff) to listen to speakers at the Joan Cooney Ganz Center’s Digital Media conference “Logging into the Playground: How Digital Media are Shaping Children’s Learning.”

I was “attending” via webcast from the west coast, and it was also broadcast via Second Life (although I was unable to see the presentation on the SL screen, it was cool to sit with a group of avatars in the open-air auditorium who were all there for the same purpose.) Due to the time difference east coast to west coast and my desire to sleep in past 5:30 am, I caught the afternoon panels.

There were excellent discussions about what skills need to be taught, i.e. what are the 21st century skills that will enable our kids to have success in the new careers that will emerge rather than preparing them for old careers that will be replaced and outmoded. According to Bernie Trilling, Senior Director of Oracle’s Think.com and ThinkQuest programs, these are:

  • critical thinking and problem solving
  • creativity and innovation
  • collaboration and teamwork
  • cross-cultural understanding
  • communication and media fluency
  • computing and IT fluency
  • career and learning self-reliance

John Madden Football PlaystationThe audience was challenged: can you identify the ‘learning places’ in the game John Madden Football? If you don’t know, you need to. (If you needed an excuse to buy a game console, here it is!)

For me, the person right on the mark was Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation, who made the following points:

  • The commercial industry is driving learning far beyond educational textbook so must redefine the relationship between public and private because they are the innovators and setting the standard.
  • Will Right (developer of The Sims) and other American game developers like him are the pedagogical theorists of the new century because they have figured out how to harness emotions and attentions in learning environments
  • The “adults” and the paradigms we bring to this work need radical change–a new paradigm for thinking about new media:
  • We need to understand where learning is happening in new media
  • We need to not just ask questions but figure out what questions to ask
  • The reading and learning patterns are fundamentally different with new media and we can’t measure what is happening with old tools
  • Education needs to think past a model of consumption to one of participation, collaboration, and networked learning and this is not going to happen if you keep the old model with teacher up in front of 25 kids
  • Best of Show: School is just one node on a kids information and learning network.

This last point should be chiseled on the foreheads of all policy-makers, educators, and educational material developers. The implications are that schools do not bear the entire burden for educating our children and also that we should not expect them to. We need to make what is happening in school in keeping with what is happening in kids lives and ALSO what is happening around the world. It really doesn’t matter what used to work or what didn’t work; it’s time to put our egos and ideological fixations aside. What really matters is how we educate kids IN this new world FOR this new world.

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The Brain is a Muscle, too: Lifting too Little Isn’t Effective or Interesting

March 25, 2008 By Dr. Pamela Rutledge 1 Comment
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A recent report says that while cardiovascular strength adds up, lifting weights that are too light doesn’t do much to build muscle. It is important to tax the muscles to get them to respond. The same is true in learning. If you don’t have to try, you won’t get much result. Setting and measuring progress toward goals and targets–in life, education, and fitness training–are the way to build strength and ability.

We all know that to achieve learning you must have engagement. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high), the architect of the concept of flow and one of the fathers of Positive Psychology, studies engagement as an element of flow. People (of all ages) enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in an activity which challenges their abilities so that they are using their skills to the utmost (i.e. building brain muscles). The result is complete involvement, optimal performance and achievement, and great satisfaction. The next time you see your kid fully absorbed in a video game, ask yourself what is creating the engagement before you pull the plug.

One of our goals at the Media Psychology Research Center in our collaboration with Fablevision is to bridge the gap between positive psychology, new technologies, and education in the trenches. There are extraordinary opportunities to engage kids using technology but we need to start with educating the teachers. If teachers are not trained to integrate and appreciate what technology has to offer, it doesn’t matter how wonderful the technological opportunities are, they won’t get used. According to Plato Learning and Education World, only one-third of teachers report that they feel prepared to use computers for classroom instruction, and 77% report spending 32 or fewer hours on technology-related professional development activities. Anecdotally, my daughter Katie, who graduated from Columbia’s Teachers College was surprised at how few of her peers were interested or able to integrate technology in the classroom. I had assumed that the new generation of teachers would be both technologically savvy and chomping at the bit. Thus, if you can extrapolate individual experience, there is still a lot of work to be done. The good news is that there is huge potential on the upside once new learning models involving technology get in the system.

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