AERA, New Literacies and Gaming

Last week, San Diego was the destination for international scholars in education, where the learned elite gathered for AERA's annual conference. Having never attended an AERA conference before, I had only an inkling of what to expect from other graduate students, mostly that it was a over-hyped and overbooked spectacle at its worst, and a Las Vegas-style showcase for soon-to-be and newly-minted PhDs at its best. What I actually experienced was somewhere in between, a rarefied occasion for the rising stars of the academic world to commingle with already established supernovas of the world's colleges and universities, to learn, be inspired and possibly experience a paradigm shift in thinking. Well-attended, yes. But no more a spectacle than some of the K-12 tech ed conferences I have attended. In fact, the quality of the presentations far exceeded anything I had seen before. But that was probably to be expected. After all, this is the finest of the educational research community, flexing their collective intellectual and theoretical muscle. It was an exciting place to be. Some of the highlights included ...

• Meeting Chris Dede of Harvard University. I found him to be a charming, erudite person, who nailed the essence of the session (Teaching with Virtual Worlds and Multi-User Games) he presided over as discussant with an uncanny accuracy and perception of the issues inherent in the topic. Later, I talked at length with his doctoral student who was presenting a poster session on pedagogical agents in K-12 science classrooms in the main pavilion.
• Discussing creativity with the very few creativity researchers at the conference. When I glanced at the program, I became enthused to see Dr. Ai-Girl Tan to be presenting at a roundtable in one of the sessions. I hurried over to the Marriot Hall and found her table, only to discover that she was a no-show. I was disappointed, as were several other Dr. Tan groupies who had flocked to her table. However, later I happened to attend another rountable session where I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Eunsook Hong who is co-authoring a paper with Roberta Milgram at Tel-Aviv University, and also met a young doctoral student named Karen Rambo who conducted a project where she correlated 16 different creativity assessments and found that Torrance Average had the highest correlation (r=.91, p<0.001)>
• Discovering that the deadline for the IGI chapter had been extended until April 20. Still I am glad that I was able to get it in on the 5th.
• Discussing instant messaging as a new literacy with Sarah Mayer, Richard Mayer's daughter. It was interesting to see that the results of her study showed an increased usage of informal writing (e.g. abbreviations) in the texts produced by high school students, contrary to what Gloria Jacobs (2008) found in her research. Jacobs found that college students, in a reversal of what we commonly would expect, were far more unlikely to use abbreviations in their IM correspondences perhaps a result of the expectations of college level writing in general. I told Sarah about the Jacobs research, and she was quite interested since it conflicted with her findings.

Since the conference, I have had contact with both Dr. Milgram and Dr. Hong, both of whom sent me several recent published and in-press articles of their research. I am somewhat amazed that Dr. Milgram took time out her day to answer my email, and send me some current papers as well. Her encouraging words lead me to believe that I am in the right area of research, and that my questions concerning creativity and effective teaching are spot-on. I hope that someday I can provide some mentorship to an up and coming researcher, one who will carry the torch and further the work that her predessecors accomplished.