iCue

Today’s youth, especially high school students, navigate a rich, diverse, and increasingly complicated mediascape. They often do so with ease, developing skills that extend literacy, synthesis and other traditional school skills. There are challenges however – despite an unprecedented 24-hour flow of news and information, teens typically have little awareness of or regard for news and current events; students have difficulty determining the quality of online sources; frequent use of shorthand writing styles for text or instant messaging causes some students problems when later asked to write well-developed essays.

To address some of these challenges, MIT and NBC News have joined forces in developing iCue, a new media experience to support teaching and learning in AP U.S. History, AP Government and Politics - U.S., and English Language and Composition. iCue offers students and teachers access to NBC News’ coverage of important events and topics (along with the coverage of The Washington Post, The New York Times and news outlets), and reinforces students’ classroom learning by linking the media to the curricula for those classes. These stories are also used in games and social networking activities that allow teachers and students to explore these topics in unconventional ways.

TEA’s research for this project extends our work studying the ways that games can enhance a student’s understanding and experience of learning. We are working to extend some of the principles developed by Comparative Media Studies’ New Media Literacies project (funded by the MacArthur Foundation). In its recent white paper, Project NML developed frameworks to help teachers and corporate media-makers provide students with rich, powerful learning experiences in more participatory contexts. Once iCue is open to the public, our work will focus on evaluating the impact iCue has on its users, as well as the impact that the users have on iCue, with a goal of providing NBC News with the data they need to improve and enhance their initial offering.