The GoodWork Project

Digital ethics curriculum released by researchers at Harvard and USC

admin — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:52:36 +0000

Everyone is talking about the opportunities and risks of new digital media, especially for young people. Research suggests that young people often lack mentorship in their online lives, especially from adults who are savvy about the ways of the web and can offer them guidance into what it would mean to take an ethical course through their digital lives. Many young people want to do the “right thing” online, even as they are confronted with a range of dilemmas, but may need some help identifying good courses of action.

In an effort to address this gap, researchers at Harvard, MIT and USC spent three years developing a casebook of curricular materials called, Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World. Our Space is a curriculum designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments such as Facebook, YouTube, online games, and blogs. The curriculum contains role-playing activities and reflective exercises that invite youth to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people online, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These are raised in relation to five core themes and units in the curriculum: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation. All curricular units and lessons are free and available for download. For more information, visit: http://www.goodworkproject.org/practice/our-space/ or http://newmedialiteracies.org/our-space-being-a-responsible.php

With funding from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative, Our Space was developed by The GoodPlay Project and Project New Media Literacies. Led by Howard Gardner, the GoodPlay Project is a research project focused on digital ethics and housed at Project Zero, the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Led by Henry Jenkins, Project New Media Literacies was established at MIT and is now housed at the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, University of Southern California.

Our Space is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Interview with Howard Gardner in Huffington Post

Erhardt Graeff — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 17:03:36 +0000

“We need to focus on the kind of human beings we want to have and the kind of society in which we want to live.” –Howard Gardner

In the latest entry to her Huffington Post series The Global Search for Education, C. M. Rubin asks Howard Gardner “What Do We Value Most?”

Prof. Gardner goes on to offer his perspective on standardized testing, defining educational excellence, and citizenship.

Howard Gardner on Richard Heffner’s Open Mind

Erhardt Graeff — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:00:55 +0000

On the July 2 episode of Open Mind, Gardner talked about his latest book Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed and how his thoughts on these virtues have progressed from the original findings of the GoodWork Project and the more recent GoodPlay Project.

[HEFFNER:] Of course, I realized as I read this quite compelling attack on determinism – with its insistence that “Human agency matters enormously” – that today I must first ask my friend whether his new book isn’t in a most fundamental sense a sort of would-be antidote to the despair he and his colleagues in Harvard’s famous “GoodWork Project” must have felt in their discoveries about what really motivates so many of today’s professional workers. Fair … or not, Howard?

GARDNER: It is true that for 15 years my colleagues and I have been studying what we call “GoodWork” and it’s a study of what happens to professions when they’re under huge pressure from market forces. Whether it’s law, journalism, philanthropy, even the clergy … when accountability and profit and loss and degree of visibility become the dominating motivations for professions … then the kind of thing which I respect … namely professions that try to be disinterested, that try to do the right thing even if it may not be the most profitable thing … the, the professions are really in extremis.

And both my discussion of truth and my discussion of goodness really address this issue in the 21st century. Beauty is a separate question.

HEFFNER: I wondered about that, I wondered whether … seriously … whether this book was … as I say, an antidote to those awful, awful feelings you must have gotten from the responses to your Harvard inquiry.

GARDNER: Well, let’s be specific. Truth is being attacked in two ways. On the one hand there is the post modern critique which says, “Who decides what’s true?” It’s just a question of power … you know, who ever controls the microphone, whoever controls the press … they determine what’s truth.

On the other hand, there are the new digital media … the Internet, the web … things like Wikipedia … where anything can be put forth, whether or not has truth … “truthiness” or complete falsity.

And this makes the establishment of truth very, very difficult.

A video and full transcript are available online: http://www.thirteen.org/openmind/media/howard-gardner-on-truth-beauty-and-goodness/.

GoodPlay Research Presented to Journalists at Hechinger Seminar

Erhardt Graeff — Tue, 24 May 2011 16:10:40 +0000

Carrie James presented findings from the GoodPlay Project‘s recent study of tweens and digital life at two Hechinger Seminars in March and May 2011.

The Binder from the March 2011 seminar is available here: http://hechinger.tc.columbia.edu/what-we-do/training/march2011/

GoodWork featured at Upcoming Conference

Erhardt Graeff — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:19:58 +0000

GoodWork is one of the core themes of an upcoming conference hosted by CASIE, Harvard Project Zero, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Title: Educating for Today and Tomorrow: Perspectives and Practices from Project Zero Dates: April 8-9 Place: … Continue reading →

Howard Gardner on What’s Your Calling?

Erhardt Graeff — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:51:19 +0000

What’s Your Calling? explores notions of “calling” from both religious and secular perspectives. It pushes “calling” to explore all of the stuff that makes us human: our values, our passions, our doubts and hopes. Profiling individuals from diverse backgrounds–professional snowboarders, jazz musicians, tug boat captains, academics, improvisers, Muay Thai fighters, religious leaders, social workers, environmental activists, toy inventors–What’s Your Calling? shares what people have been called to do with their lives and how they hope to change the world. What’s Your Calling? is inspired by the PBS miniseries, The Calling.

Forthcoming Book: Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed

Erhardt Graeff — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 22:05:00 +0000

Based on a set of three lectures given by Howard Gardner at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this book discusses the challenges faced by traditional education in light of two forces: the post modern critique from the humanities and the disruptive potentials of the new digital media. Gardner describes how the core ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness can survive and even be strengthened in education across the life span.

Available in April 2011.

New GoodWork Toolkit Materials

admin — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 04:30:05 +0000

by Lynn Barendson
excerpted from the GoodWork Toolkit Blog

This past summer, Wendy and I reworked the GoodWork Toolkit. Conceived in 2004, piloted and tested for several years afterwards, from what colleagues and teachers told us, the materials were in good shape. But we had lots of ideas, new narratives, and wanted to devote some thinking to the design and structure of our work. We’re very excited by the result – and hope you will be too.

The GoodWork Toolkit now consists of three different components: A Guidebook, a book of Narratives, and a set of Value Sort Cards. The Guidebook is a resource manual that includes narratives, activities, introductory materials that explain our theoretical framework and guiding questions to help teachers bring good work to life in the classroom. The Narrative volume consists of just the GW stories, to be used as a text for classroom use or in a professional development setting. The Value Sort Cards are a hand-held version of the online sort available on this website. Over the years, Wendy and I have witnessed hundreds of people do this value sort. In our own course at Harvard, in high schools, and in many other settings, we’re always impressed with how much reflection is involved with this activity, and with how much enjoyment individuals derive from thinking through what they value.

Check out the GoodWork Toolkit on its publication page.

New Book: GoodWork: Theory and Practice

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:47:46 +0000

GoodWork: Theory and Practice is a collection of reflective essays by researchers who worked on The GoodWork Project.

Check out its publication page.

Meeting of the Minds

admin — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:41:36 +0000

The new “Meeting of the Minds” report, by Global Kids, CommonSense Media, and the GoodPlay Project, finds that young people need guidance from adults in navigating ethical
issues of online behavior.

From the MacArthur Foundation site announcement (12.3.09): “The report, “Meeting of the Minds,” (PDF) is the result of a series of cross-generational online dialogues about digital ethics involving more than 250 adults and teens around the world. Participants discussed how to behave in a digital world, from illegal downloading and the creativity associated with remixing, to the factors that go into deciding whether to meet an onlineconnection face-to-face”.

Download a PDF file of the report