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Dear Reader,
In its early days, cinema was viewed narrowly as a form of entertainment and spectacle. It took decades before film was seen as a serious artistic medium that could be used to captivate, inspire, and educate people from all walks of life. In the past thirty years, video games have been similarly dismissed. But now, experts in many fields have seen the potential of digital interactive tools to foster new kinds of learning. Now, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, FrameWorks is pushing the envelope by taking these new educational and inspirational tools into the world of advocacy and adult learning.
 SWAMPED! is FrameWorks Institute's new interactive tool that shows how front-line communicators can take control of their messaging strategies, ensuring that communications goals can be advanced through the "swamp" of public opinion. The first installment of SWAMPED! addresses the dangers that lurk in the swamp of education when it bumps up against the ever-thorny issue of budgets and taxes. Drawing from the MacArthur Foundation's work on fiscal policy and the framing research it supported, FrameWorks is able to show that this topic requires careful framing when aligned with other issues.
The SWAMPED! framework is designed to be a fun, yet powerful, hands-on supplement to FrameWorks Institute's strategic framing research and toolkits. You will encounter toxic combos, navigate Crisis Creek, beat back a Near-Sighted Newt, and reframe your way through the swamp. Even seasoned framers will find SWAMPED! challenging, but we've built in plenty of materials to help you along the way.
Let's see how well you're able to navigate through the swamp. Stay tuned for the next two installments of SWAMPED! where we see what happens when health care and early childhood development bump up against budgets and taxes. And don't forget to share with your fellow communicators!
Sincerely,
FrameWorks Institute
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Games Go Back to School
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"Policymakers and educators are struggling to balance the educational opportunities that mobile technologies and social media can provide at school with legitimate concerns around providing a safe environment focused on learning. This document from leading education and state policy nonprofits aims to inform better decision making in state capitals and school boards and among educational leaders," said CoSN CEO Keith Krueger.
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Frames in Games
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 FrameWorks is pleased to be a partner with the Creative Media and Behavioral Health Center at the University of Southern California (USC). This powerhouse of creativity and new technology aims to increase public awareness of critical issues in mental health and behavioral science using transmedia storytelling. FrameWorks first collaborated with CM&BHC on Brain Hero, a project for the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, now surpassing 26,000 views since posted in May 2011. The three-minute game-inspired video shows how actions by parents, teachers, policymakers, and communities can affect life outcomes for children and the surrounding communities. Last summer, the center sent Interactive Media Division MFA student Yasaman Hashemian who, along with Matthew La Rocque (FrameWorks 2011 Summer intern and current student at Harvard's Kennedy School), worked on what was to become SWAMPED!. Another game prototype from CM&BHC, Brain Architecture, was featured at the National Science Teachers Association meeting this spring. Whether it's addressing spinal cord injury or pediatric obesity, this pioneering thought-leader has much to offer at the intersection of technology and public health.
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Games in the Field
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Can Advocates Learn from Games?
Yes, according to FrameWorks' pilot study of field interaction with SWAMPED!. We asked ten diverse advocates to play the game and give us their feedback. All had some familiarity with FrameWorks - through a Study Circle, workshop, or spokesperson training. So we asked them whether this way of delivering training served to enhance their already emergent framing skills. What we learned was encouraging for those seeking to use new technologies to engage advocates and enhance their learning.
From Fargo, ND to Spartanburg, SC, advocates said the game improved their understanding of how to integrate budgets and taxes into the framing of education; and that it made them feel more confident about doing so. They strongly agreed that playing the game made them more likely to use our framing recommendations in their subsequent messaging. A strong majority recommended that FrameWorks create additional interactive tools.
"I liked how fun and interactive this game is. In addition, it gets you to think on your feet and about how to apply the issues you learn about right away," said one advocate.
And, of course, they gave us good advice for improving future games: "I would love if this module did NOT require you to be familiar with FrameWorks' concepts already. I would want absolutely everyone to go through the training. Legislators, educators, students, my fellow staff."
FrameWorks will get a chance to test out this broader application this June, as SWAMPED! is used to background communicators associated with Voices for America's Children and the Kids Count Network of the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Council of Chief State School Officers at annual meetings.
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New Research in Communicating
Digital Media and Learning | |
One of the most important findings from this study is that there are prominent supporters of DML in the education reform field. The analysis finds, however, that the ways in which these organizations discuss DML, and learning and technology issues more generally, may actually hinder rather than build wider support for DML programs.
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FrameWorks Cultivates the Next Generation
of Framers
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FrameWorks believes that learning from and working with the next generation of researchers is key for framing scholarship. To this end, we joined forces with the DML Emerging Scholars group (led by Prof. James Gee). Four doctoral students in the learning sciences (from Stanford University, Indiana University, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Minnesota) contributed to the formulation, research, and write-up of our report "The Stories We Are Telling: How Digital Media and Learning is Communicated by Education Reformers." As part of this collaboration, FrameWorks provided framing research training in theory and methods to our fellows. Our fellows, in turn, contributed their subject matter expertise, and aided us in using a new software tool, Issue Crawler, to identify organizations active in communicating on a given issue.
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DML 2012: "Beyond Education Technology"
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How do you know when you are part of a movement? That is the question posed by Diana Rhoten at this year's 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference, "Beyond Educational Technology." As a veteran in this field, Rhoten remarked at the jam-packed conference that, "We have now arrived. We are a movement."
This year's conference focused on scaling innovations in digital media and learning. John Seely Brown, the conference plenary speaker, brought attention to the need to not only scale the use of technology for learning, but to also scale learning systems and institutional structures. In today's fast moving information economy, Brown says we should consider the "half-life of a skill." According to Brown, most skills today last about five years before they become irrelevant. So, education systems should move from a "fixed-asset" approach to an approach that equips students to learn within an ecosystem of information flows. In short, we should think of learning less like "moving on a steamship" and more like "white water rafting."
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FrameWorks Welcomes a New Director of Learning
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 Julie Sweetland, a sociolinguist with extensive experience in adult learning, will join FrameWorks in June as Director of Learning with responsibility for overseeing its expanding curriculum and extensive multi-media offerings. Julie is the founding director of the Urban Teaching Academy at the University of the District of Columbia and a Professorial Lecturer in Linguistics at Georgetown University. She served for several years as director of teaching and learning at the Center for Inspired Teaching in DC. Julie received her B.S. in Linguistics from Georgetown and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University.
"The big picture goals of FrameWorks - to increase the sophistication of public discourse, and thereby harness the power of democratic processes to solve social problems - mirrors my own philosophical leanings and sense of professional purpose," Sweetland says. "Upon taking my first linguistics class as a college freshman, I was immediately convinced that the methods and mindsets of sociolinguistic analysis held the potential to effect social change." In addition to contributing to FrameWorks' linguistic research, Sweetland will bring her extensive experience with adult learners to bear on FrameWorks' teaching practice, overseeing the development of curriculum and the implementation of Study Circles.
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FrameWorks Expands its Use of Social Networks to Train Advocates
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A national network of informal interpreters from zoos, aquariums and public parks became the latest experimenters in FrameWorks' online learning platforms. Using Ning, these Study Circle participants shared videos of themselves explaining climate change and its effects on oceans with peers around the country, providing insights and recommendations to improve their practice.
As part of the National Network for Ocean Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI), FrameWorks has conducted three Study Circles to date with more on the drawing board. Research shows the approach is working. An independent evaluation of participants' experience shows increased motivation to communicate about climate change in their jobs and through their professional and personal contacts. This study of participants and members of their social networks indicates that Study Circle participants are triggering positive responses when they use framing techniques to talk about climate change. They are also more likely to receive positive feedback; and those they talk to feel more hopeful that Americans can do something positive about reducing our impact on climate change. The groups draw from FrameWorks' extensive research on Climate Change and Oceans.
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Making Change By Widening the Lens - Junior Producer Erika Rydberg
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When I started working at FrameWorks I was both surprised and happy to see our work on Public Safety, continuing the need to map the communications gaps between experts, and thus bring more attention to the general public about issues of incarceration, and re-entry. In composing Released to Life, a documentary short I finished in 2010 as part of The George Washington University Documentary Institute's program, I had been struck by a comment from one informant who noted, "the public needs to know we're coming out one day." Our film is about the cuts made to criminal justice programs even as incarceration increases, and as the idea of "being tough on crime" primes the public's mindset about incarceration. As more programs focusing on rehabilitation disappear, and as budgets shrink, challenges have mounted against those previously incarcerated persons; most notably, news reports say some jails have made the decision to pass down the costs of incarceration directly to prisoners.
Within the context of the film, our crew was introduced to the complex network dealing with issues around public safety from the federal agency CSSOSA, to the head of the DC Jail, to non-profit leaders such as DC Central Kitchen. In 2012 we were declared winners of SnagFilms and the DC Office of Motion Picture and Television Development Washington's Best Film competition, which hopefully in some small way, brought a bit more attention to issues of re-entry and incarceration around our city. At FrameWorks, I combine the power of videography with the framing research that can help front-line advocates tell stories that move hearts and minds.
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Changing Paradigms: On the Framers Nighttable
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 How can teachers incorporate innovative programs for learning in their classrooms? By becoming connected learners themselves. This is the approach of the new book, "The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age."
The authors, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall, set out to reinvent traditional professional development for teachers in a way that gets teachers to think of themselves as learners first and educators second. It provides a step-by-step approach to leverage specific technology platforms for student engagement. While the book is light on theory, it is heavy on actual applications. This is the book you want to share with the time-strapped teachers in your life who need the tools without much of the talk. In a short amount of time, teachers can follow the approach outlined in this book and be part of the new network of connected educators that are leading the way forward for students. |
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