Ludic Engagement Designs for All (LEDA): Non-formal Learning and Rehabilitation

Educators who are eager to create networked learning environments are increasingly asking, ―How can I mediate my students‘ online activities to foster active learning?‖ Meanwhile, the internet is ripe with young people spending the bulk of their out-of-school time collaborating on creative activities in which abundant forms of learning take place—many of which overlap directly with educators‘ teaching goals. These organic activities appear to be successful and sustained precisely because they are self-motivated and participatory, in contrast to the compulsory nature of in-school engagement with the web. The goal of this paper is to analyze how participants in a highly active online collaborative space facilitate their own and their peers‘ learning through creative role-play and social interaction. This paper presents one dimension of an ongoing research project observing members of a fan-based role-play group called Warriors of the Blue* (WOB), formed on a larger website called Scratch (Scratch.mit.edu). MIT Media Labs designed Scratch as a youth-friendly introduction to computer programming, game design, and animation. Because the administrators of the site worked to cultivate a culture of open creativity, many unexpected uses of the site have emerged; WOB is a particularly active and long-lasting example of emergent phenomena on Scratch. WOB‘s members engage in improvised, text-based, realtime collaborative role-playing, accented by digital images and simple animations documenting the characters players invent. The emergence of hundreds of groups like this, given the lack of design affordances on Scratch to mediate such activity, provides a lesson in its own right to teachers: an appropriate degree of designed structure must be balanced by the freedom for peers to design and mediate their own online communities, if they are to remain genuinely engaged and involved over time. Taking a multiliteracies approach (New London Group, 1996) to this active subsection of participatory culture (Jenkins et al, 2006), the paper groups focal data into four main forms of peer-mediated learning observed in WOB. First, the complex textual practicesdeveloped and mastered by players offer a performative technique for engaging deeply with literature and composition. WOB is fan-based, in that it draws inspiration from a series of young adult fantasy novels called Warriors; role-players therefore ventriloquate (Bakhtin, 1981) the books stylistically, while building plots, developing characters, and crafting their own themes by imaginatively ―remixing‖ the books. Second, players‘ multimodal literacy practices generate new interpretive possibilities and serve to organize the dynamic relationship between written words and accompanying images. Third, players develop critical media literacies through artful references to and pointed conversations about elements of popular culture, cultivating alternative ―media identities‖ that contrast with the mainstream, gender-normative identities they describe as being forced upon them in school. Finally, players have co-constructed an DfL2012 – The third Designs for Learning conference, April 25 th -27 th 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark ©The authors 123 elaborate social structure that determines both the rules and privileges of game play, and general social status in the group. The latter form of mediating the WOB space cultivates rich opportunities for developing leadership skills and creatively negotiating one‘s position. Focusing intensively on literacy practices and communicative strategies on WOB, the paper illuminates valuable forms of peer-mediated learning emerging online, while providing a case study for educators interested in designing successful online collaborations among students. [Read from bottom to top] Practicing leadership in and out of gameplay* *players and group names have been protected with pseudonyms