Session Information

Constance_Steinkuehler is the former Senior Policy Analyst at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the U.S. President where she advised on policy related to games and learning/impact. She has now returned to her position as an Assistant Professor in the Educational Communications and Technology (ECT) program in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Her research on cognition, learning, and literacy in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) has been funded by funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Spencer Foundation/National Academies of Education, the Academic ADL Co-Lab, and the UW-Madison Graduate Program and includes such commercial titles as Lineage I, Lineage II, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, and RuneScape. Her current work focuses on the potential of virtual worlds to function as sandboxes for the reconstruction (perhaps, reinvigoration) of a new form of twenty-first century citizenship - a "pop cosmopolitanism" marked by the willingness to engage in an increasingly globalized and therefore diverse socio-technical world and the development of intellectual practices crucial to successful navigation within it. Such intellectual practices include informal scientific reasoning, collaborative problem solving, media literacy (defined not just as critical media consumption but also production), computational literacy, and the social learning mechanisms that support the development of such expertise (e.g., reciprocal apprenticeship, collective intelligence).