Theory Into Practice, 47:128137, 2008

Copyright The College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University
ISSN: 0040-5841 print/1543-0421 online
DOI: 10.1080/00405840801992330

Kristina Woolsey
Matthew Woolsey

Childs Play

Emerging digital technologies enable teachers

and students to access and manipulate sights
and sounds in their school environments. The
challenge is to systematically include these new
media in academic environments, and to include
adults who are ill prepared in technical issues as
primary guides in this effort. This article suggests
that childs play should be the focus of these efforts, and that the Montessori classroom provides
a good model to guide these considerations.

HILDREN LOVE TO PLAY . They naturally

engage the new, and find ways to interact
with it. They joust. They explore. They spontaneously invent. They engage the moment, and it
engages them.

Kristina Woolsey is a Learning Experience Designer

at the Exploratirum; Matthew Woolsey is a reporter at
Forbes.
Correspondence should be addressed to Kristina
Hooper Woolsey, Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon Street,
San Francisco, CA 94123. E-mail: kwoolsey@
pacbell.net

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Theorists who have investigated childrens

playfulness have documented the importance of
play in childrens development and its productive results (Garvey, 1977; Sutton-Smith, 1979;
Vygotsky, 1978). Czikszentmihayli (1979) has
addressed playful engagement more generally,
suggesting that accomplished adults engage in
the general process of playfulness in their quest
for a state of flow that represents competency and
control in particular domains.
In todays emerging digital civilization, Prensky (2001) and others suggest that youth are
digital natives, naturals in the sea of digital
opportunities. They play with media-rich opportunities aggressively and develop skills in digital
domains by their spontaneous engagement. Youth
are identified as the experts in this new domain
because of their playfulness, whereas adults are
often left behind in this digital revolution; traditional patterns of enculturation are not available
as youth typically engage digital media on their
own, without adult guidance.

Youth and Digital Media

The observation of the strong connection between digital technologies and youth is not a new

Childs Play

Woolsey and Woolsey

one, nor is the observation that youth playfully

engage emerging digital technologies. This connection has long been central to the development
of technologies and the considerations of their
impact on our culture.
Videogame designers acknowledged this early
on, using the interactive capabilities of digital
media to engage youth to create substantial early
markets for engaging games; current theorists
argue for serious games where the playfulness
of videogames can be engaged to assist young
learners in understanding important concepts,
many of which are central to schooling (Gee,
2003). When Kay and Goldberg (1977) described
the Dynabookthe vision of a small device that
one could sit with under a tree to do work,
an image that has driven many technological
developmentsit was the image of young people
playing with ideas that drove this image, not
the current major market of business people
connected with wireless mobile devices. As Negroponte has advocated the development of a
$100 laptop for children in developing countries,
to encourage them to connect with the global
world, youth have been further identified as key
to the global adoption of digital media; their
playful attitude is central (BBC News, 2007). The
conventions of instant messaging and texting that
youth have developed serve as models for the development of general communications systems,
and youths playful participation in social spaces
like MySpace provide models for all of social
computing.
Anyone who has watched very young children
work with digital devices has seen the amazing
attraction of these lively devices to youth, and
the playful responses they engender. Even when
computer screens were dull yellow and black
cathode ray tubes, youth were pulled to the imaginative opportunities of devices that responded
to their actions. Reciprocal attention, the general
connection between ones actions and that of
another, seem universally compelling to youth
who are excited about just what might happen
in response to their inputs.
Mitch Resnick and his colleagues at MIT very
explicitly acknowledge the playfulness of youth
engaging digital technologies in their Lifelong

Kindergarten research program. In this program

they develop new technologies, that in the spirit
of blocks and fingerpaint of kindergarten, expand
the range of what people can design, create and
learn (http://llk.media.mit.edu) and encourage
playful learning (Resnick, 2004). Beginning in
1993, this program has developed an extremely
large number of Computer Clubhouses, afterschool centers where young people (ages 1018)
from low-income communities learn to express
themselves creatively with new technologies
(http://llk.media.mit.edu). And it initiated the PIE
(Playful Inquiry Environments) Network, where
a number of museums develop materials to encourage youth to play with physical and digital
objects that are integrated.

Digital Media and Schools

Although taking advantage of youths basic attraction to digital media and their natural process
in these areas seems a reasonable response to the
emergence of these media, this is not the response
of most schools to the digital media opportunity.
Sights and sounds are not natural elements in our
learning institutions, nor are highly interactive
materials. These sensory elements have traditionally been the domain of commercial enterprises
and entertainment contexts, or they have been in
the art and design traditions. They represent fun
or elective activities, not the serious worlds of
print that we have identified to be associated with
academic mastery. Although Tufte (2001) has
done an excellent job showing that still graphics
can be central for conceptual thought, images
and sounds are rarely engaged in representing
the theoreticthe primary domain of schools.
Making this tension more extreme, our learning institutions have been deliberately designed
around print. Reading and writing literacies have
been primary goals of public schools in the
20th century, and mandatory schooling for all
was established in large part to accomplish print
literacy. There is little room in schools left for
entirely new communication vocabularies, and
there is overzealous confidence in reading and
writing as the premiere communications systems.

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Digital Literacies in the Age of Sight and Sound

And so the innovative technologies and ideas

that have emerged from projects such as those
of Resnick, who works with interactive programming environments, and those who directly
encourage the incorporation of sights and sounds
in learning environments, such as the Alliance
for a Media Literate America (2007), have been
focused on afterschool programs and museum
contexts. They have not been widely adopted
by schools or specifically targeted to these institutions. In such contexts, the focus on these
programs has been on youth and their explorations and expressions, not on the adult mentors
or on any systematic curriculum for academic
development. In the best case, youth develop
their expressive skills outside the classroom,
much as they develop their first spoken language
at home, and then bring this proficiency into
schools. In the worst case, most students have no
exposure to these tools and adults take little role
in connecting these digital skills with classroom
activities.
Even when schools do engage digital technologies, they seem unable to deal with the
ambiguities of the use of new media and their
rapid rate of change. And so they clench onto
old paradigms of computer use, even as these do
not model even the patterns of todays adults, let
alone the adults of a decade from now.
One of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when
they exist in the developing world), is that
children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Mr. Negroponte said. I
consider that criminal, because children should
be making things, communicating, exploring,
sharing, not running office automation tools.
(BBC News, 2007)

When Dewey (1897) considered an unpredictable future, he argued for an ever increasing
premium on higher order skills, on directives
for encouraging creative capabilities, leadership
skills, and learning competencies in our youth.
Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for
any precise set of conditions. To prepare him
for the future life means to give him command

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of himself; it means to train him so that he will

have the full and ready use of all his capacities;
that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready
to command, that his judgment may be capable
of grasping the conditions under which it has
to work, and the executive forces be trained to
act economically and efficiently. (Dewey, 1897,
p. 77)

The challenge of distinguishing good and bad

arguments, of communicating clearly and effectively, and of making judgments will remain, he
suggested, even as the specifics change. Dewey
emphasized the importance of exploratory activities for youth in the face of uncertainty, where
currently schools often respond to uncertainties
with fear and an enhanced need to constrain
youth activities.

Montessori: Follow the Child

Like Dewey, working at the turn of the 20th
century, Montessori (1966) and her colleagues
in Europe focused on how youth could extrapolate abstract concepts from concrete experiences,
encouraging both detailed sensory rich experiences and their generalizations. She encouraged
adults to follow the child in their development of
abstract capabilities, by systematically providing
the materials that would let youth extend their
own development. She created numerous classic
simple exercises for youth, from which she allowed them to choose (with adult nudging and selective availability). She developed environments
that encouraged self-directed learners to explore
important ideas in rich sensory materials, with
the watchful guidance of unobtrusive adults.
These prepared environments provided a context for youth to learn to read and write, as well
as to become acquainted with skills in practical
lifesetting the table, folding napkins, pouring
water into a cup. The materials that Montessori
prepared for young learners of the 20th century
were highly sensory, but they were also static
and often disconnected from social contexts. The
activities that are appropriate for young learners
of the third millennium are dynamic, interactive, and interconnected. The practical life of

Woolsey and Woolsey

Montessori was centered in the home. Practical

life in the current era encourages connections
to the world, for example, the ability to e-mail,
to access maps on the Web, and to search the
Web to extend ones curiositythe digital air
of the 21st century. Reading and writing are
now extended to include blogging and podcasting and movie making and multimedia composing. The challenge of developing competent
citizens, however, is much the same as that
which Montessori addressed. The question is
What are the Montessori materials of the 21st
century?

Digital Montessori Materials

The Apple Multimedia Lab was established
in 1987 to explore how digital media might
be engaged to encourage learning. The intent
was to create demonstrations, technologies, and
products that took advantage of rich media and
hyperlinking in creating positive learning environments (Ambon & Hooper, 1990; Woolsey,
1991).
The Lab developed instances where images
were key to the learning that was already valued
in schools, providing new ways to do old things.
In a number of products and demonstrations,
using historic images and songs, great speeches,
animations of processes in science, and satellite
imagery, it was demonstrated how multimedia
computing could be valuable for classroom learning. One product, Life Story, focused on the
discovery of DNA, combining a powerful BBC
drama with descriptions of scientific phenomena.
A design example explored the U.S. Constitution
as it related to the Civil Rights movement, attaching documentary footage of James Meredith
desegregating the University of Mississippi and
speeches of Martin Luther King to this text.
In Voices of the Thirties, Steinbecks Grapes of
Wrath was connected to speeches by FDR and
pictures of Oklahoma dust storms to give students
a context for this novel. Ideas were sampled
across the K12 curriculum, connecting images
and sounds and movies to make important ideas
come alive for youth and their teachers.

Childs Play

In all of these contexts, it was demonstrated that concrete representations of objects

can very effectively encourage abstract considerations, countering the prevailing view that pictures and sounds are primitive, that text is central
for abstract considerations. As Vygotsky (1978)
had argued many years before in the context of
real world experiences, the ratio of meaning to
the surface form could increase with experiences
with mediathe abstract meaning of image sets
could be substantial. Images were not inherently
primitive; our cultures understanding of them
was. The surface form, rather than meaning,
overwhelmed most who had no visual training.
These demonstrations argued for a new respect
for the concrete (J. Gray, personal communication, 2006) and for constructivist traditions,
which Papert suggested in his work with LegoLogo and his Turtle Geometries (Papert & Harel,
1991).
One classic product developed at the Lab was
the Visual Almanac (see Figure 1). This product
was made up of more than 7,000 multimedia
objectsshort movies, still images, sounds, music, time lapses, animationsthat were judged
to be important for youths understanding of
the world around them. Examples of multimedia
objects varied greatly, from a set of stills of all
U.S. presidents to an animation of the moons
orbit, to weather maps, to a time lapse of a
starfish eating.
The model for the Visual Almanac was not
the traditional visual media form of television or
movies or even illustrated books. Instead it was
childs play. The Visual Almanac is intended to
be the first set of building blocks for people to
become fluent multimedia composers: : : : Lets
throw some blocks on the floor and let the kids
play. This time the blocks are multimedia objects,
the floor is a Macintosh, and you are the kids
(Hooper, 1989, p. 6).
The Visual Almanac emphasized the personal
use and reuse of sensory-rich mediacasual
multimedia. In contrast to professional media, or
formal media production, casual multimedia is a
kind of everyday activity that can be used for
spontaneous communications and school reports.
Where formal media require incredible amounts

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Digital Literacies in the Age of Sight and Sound

Figure 1. The Visual Almanac (1990) provided individuals with collections of images and sounds, a composition
workspace with tools for creating new sequences, and activities that demonstrated just how the images could be
combined.

of craft knowledge and refinement, casual multimedia is defined by a high ratio of content
to technical requirement. The compositions that
users of the Visual Almanac created were easy
to create technically; the focus on these compositions could be their content.
VizAbility: Exercises to Develop
Media Skills
The notion of a fluid, spontaneous, sensoryrich new medium was a very exciting idea in
the 20th century. Professionally produced mediarich interlinked materials were proving to be
valuable to encourage learning. Yet as handheld
technologies and wireless connectivity began to
become realities, one could imagine that visual
and auditory images could become central to
everyday communications. These digital images
would be widely produced and exchanged, as
well as viewed by everyone. However, it became
quite evident very quickly that most people,
including youth, did not have well developed
competences with image-rich materials.

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VizAbility (Woolsey, Kim, & Curtis, 2004; see

Figure 2) was designed to address this issue,
providing individuals with sets of exercises to
improve their visual abilities. These exercises
were guided by a design course at Stanford University, and a book by Professor Robert McKim
(1980). They focused on six topics relevant to the
use of traditional visual mediaseeing, drawing,
diagramming, imagination, visual culture, and
environments to support visual activities. These
exercises, which often required drawing on paper
or simple mental manipulations, were designed
to allow individuals to practice and develop their
own visual abilities.
As an example, the Magic Theatre (Figure 3)
activity required that users select nine different
images from a large set, connecting these with
text and available sound effects to tell a story
(composed of still images, text, and sounds,
which could be played back as a slide show).
The Hidden Images activity challenged viewers
to find a small piece of an image in a complex
scene. The Transformations activity assessed how
well individuals could mentally rotate shapes.

Woolsey and Woolsey

Childs Play

Figure 2. VizAbility (1995, 2005) provides a set of exercises to enhance ones basic visual literacy, including
sections on the skills of seeing, drawing, diagramming, and imagining, as well as experiences with environments
and a culture that support visual fluency.

Figure 3. This VizAbility exercise is designed to enhance ones fluidity in combining images, sounds, and texts
in a slide show.

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Digital Literacies in the Age of Sight and Sound

These activities were designed to contribute to

individuals visual literacy, to provide them with
skills of both understanding and creating visual
displays, to take advantage of new emerging
sensory-rich technologies.
VizAbility still provides a good introduction
to traditional visual media, something that most
students who are not involved in the arts do not
have otherwise. However, it is only a beginning.
It does not take advantage of digital media for
visual production, and it does not include new
media designcombinations of movies, sounds,
and stills combined in linear and nonlinear formats. It also does not take advantage of the
incredible array of new technologies that have become commonplace since VizAbility was initially
designed in 1995phones with digital cameras,
easy access to the Internet, iPods, digital video
formats, streaming video on the Web, iLife,
Keynote, PowerPoint, and more. With these new
capabilities, digital visual literacy spreads into
the dynamic domains of cinema, the interactive
realms of the computer, and the interconnected
and social context of the web.

New Media Thinking Project

To take advantage of these new capabilities
and to understand the opportunities they provide
for youth, the New Media Thinking Project was
established in 2006 to explore how new media
literacies might be developed as central for academic achievement (Woolsey, 2006).
Key to this project was the observation of
a number of middle school youth who were
engaging new media actively. In these observations, the enthusiasm that youth brought to
new media activities, their technical fluency and
general media awareness, were impressive. At
the same time, their compositional capabilities
(design) were not well developed, nor did they
have much experience in framing their messages
(intentionality) or in making choices among media alternatives (judgment). Youths excitement
in using new media did not seem matched to
their general understanding of more fundamental
concepts.

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Given these observations, new software

was createdprototype digital Montessori
materialsto enhance youths capabilities in
these areas. The driving idea for the materials
that emphasized design were exemplars of
digital compositions, and templates for these to
encourage compositional prowess (see Figure 4).
To develop youths experience with the idea
of intentionality, one prototype was designed
where alternative movies were used to record
events that illustrate the range of ways that a
story can be told, encouraging youth to think
of the purposes of their creations. To encourage
self conscious judgment of media materials, a
second prototype required youth to carefully
choose images from those available, reflecting
on ethical issues related to media productions,
their own and others. In the next phase of this
program, the New Media Thinking Project will
expand these prototypes based on feedback on
their use.
A Collaboration Between Adults
and Youth
Central to the goals of the New Media Thinking Project is the complementarity of the competencies of adults and youth in working with new
media, and the importance of the collaborations
between these two different groups in engaging
new media to enhance conceptual understanding
and expression. Indeed, the technical fluency and
media awareness of adults, including teachers,
are often quite low, particularly compared to
those of youth (see Figure 5). However, these
same adults are also typically quite aware of the
importance of judgment and the articulation of an
intentional purpose in communications; language
arts teachers are particularly skilled in these
areas. Working on their own, youths spontaneous media creations can often be appropriately
thought of as just childs play, endearing but not
significant in a broad context. However, with
adult collaboration, such as in the Montessori
tradition with adults providing mentoring and
prepared environments that include exercises and
new media examples, the natural playfulness of
youth can be taken advantage of, and enhanced,

Woolsey and Woolsey

Childs Play

Figure 4. The New Media Thinking Project design prototypes provided youth with templates to organize their
school reports and to expose them to reasonable graphic design. As the students became fluid with these templates,
these design constraints were removed and students designed their own report formats.

Figure 5. General observations of youth suggest that the digital media competencies of youth and adults are
highly complementary, with youth more masterful with technical issues and adults with fundamental principles.
This pattern suggests an excellent opportunity for collaboration.

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Digital Literacies in the Age of Sight and Sound

providing a level of sophistication for youth

activities.
The entry into new media communications for
youth is through the technical and the media.
The entry for adults is intent and judgment. In
a collaboration between youth and adults, these
competencies can combine in mutually challenging design contexts, in which emerging digital
opportunities can be engaged as appropriate to
enhance academic understanding and expression.
This can be accomplished in a playful and exploratory environment that is congenial to both
youth and adults, as well as to the nature of
this new media. This kind of collaboration is not
natural to many school environments. However,
its encouragement is required at this moment in
time, where the very different skills and inclinations of these two groups are both required for
success, and where the new media are dynamic,
responsive, and changing, and where playfulness
is required.

Looking Forward
In sum, the technologies for image and sound
manipulation are now extremely congenial to
exploration and play. Socially constructed visual
archives on the webGoogle Image, Flickr,
YouTube, and othersprovide ready access to
available images. Digital still and movie cameras
and microphones are inexpensive, and provide
fluid sources of personal images and sounds. The
tasks are now to create large sets of electronic
activities for youth to play with these possibilities, not for them to learn how to be media
professionals but for them to become effectively
expressive and analytic citizens, and for adults
to provide the big picture for these activities,
e.g., scaffolding youths understanding of design,
intent, judgment, and other guiding principles,
even as they, too, maintain a playful responsive
approach.
It is important to realize in doing this, that
images and sounds will ultimately not simply
provide new ways to do old things. New things
will emerge. Youth will begin to invent new
media forms and adults will see new possibil-

136

ities. Ideas that were complex to earlier generations will be simple to new ones. Language
arts will expand to include competencies in
Cyberspaceprogramming and simulation and
global collaborationas well as more readily
understandable ScreenTime media forms, such as
movies and podcasts and blogs and wikis. Youth
may begin to think very differently than adults
as a function of their new media-rich language
community. The changes have just begun, and
the technological changes that have caught everyones attention may soon be dwarfed by cognitive
and cultural shifts.
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