Emerging Citizens

Project Mission
To reimagine popular social technologies for civic action taking.

Project Site
https://emergingcitizens.org/

Funder
Sense About Science/Capital One

Description
Emerging Citizens is a suite of digital multiplayer games and learning content that teach
people how to critique and create media through playful, participatory games. Each game
incorporates content that encourages players to engage with culturally and politically relevant topics that affect their daily lives while focusing on a specific digital modality: Hashtags, Memes, and Hyperlinking. Through interactive play, the games are designed to engage young people in the act of creating, making and reflecting through connecting digital games to real-world skill-sets and pressing cultural issues.

This initiative emerges from research I conducted for my 2014 book, Media Literacy and the Emerging Citizen: Youth, Engagement and Participation in Digital Culture. A key finding from that work is that youth engage in social networking and cultural sharing in dynamic ways, but have trouble recognizing how their digital applications provide productive connectivity, vibrant communication, and diverse information consumption in daily life.

Therefore, if students are not able to understand how social and mobile technologies enhance learning experiences, it will be hard for them to see the value that comes from informal or alternative learning pathways. That’s why we created a platform that combines digital literacy learning, user generated content, and game-based structures that’s easy to set-up, fun to play, and educationally powerful.

These tools are also open source and widely available for the public to use. So please use and share.