Connected Learning Summit 2018

Reviews Matter: How Distributed Mentoring Predicts Lexical Diversity on Fanfiction.net
John Frens, Ruby Davis, Cecilia Aragon

Online fanfiction repositories attract millions of writers and readers worldwide. The largest repository, Fanfiction.net, accumulated a rich corpus of about 61.5 billion words of fiction over sixteen years, rivaling the Google Books fiction corpus. An important informal learning environment for young writers, the site affords networked giving and receiving of feedback, termed distributed mentoring. To quantify the effect of distributed mentoring on writing, we longitudinally tracked lexical diversity among authors’ fanfiction texts. The Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity (MTLD) captures the author's range of vocabulary usage; previous research has shown MTLD correlates with language ability, writing ability, and human judgments of textual quality. We examined MTLD changes among texts by 1.5 million amateur writers, finding increased scores as they accumulated reviews, even when controlling for fandom and maturation. Our results support the theory of distributed mentoring and legit.

Writing Game Journalism in School: Student Voices on Games and Game Culture
Thorkild Hanghøj, Jonas Nørgaard

In this paper, we explore how students engage in journalistic writing activities relating to video games and game culture. The paper is based on a pilot study with student texts and interviews relating to the development of the online learning resource spiljournalist.dk, which allow Danish secondary students to publish journalistic articles through game reviews, columns and feature stories. The analytical findings indicate that students position themselves as writers through three different voices. The “gamer” students primarily based their articles on their own knowledge and experience as gamers. By contrast, the non-gamer students tended to write more critically about games and game culture from an outsider’s perspective. Finally, a third group of students primarily positioned themselves as journalists.

Networked Inquiry and Performative Knowledge
Magdalena Day

The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for the analysis of knowledge production in networks of students. The theoretical approach includes sociological developments related to networks (Castells, 2005), combined with philosophy with children and youth's pedagogy (López, 2009); which we apply to educational research. To begin with, we consider inquiry as the starting point of the learning process. This process occurs in a context denominated the “community of inquiry” (Lipman, 2009), that implies technology-enabled relations through connectedness. Therefore, this community is viewed as a network. In this regard, the question is not how a certain device, platform, software or app could change the interaction between students and already defined educational materials, but rather, how students can find problems to be answered creating a different type of knowledge.