Formulations and Findings Volume 1, Issue 1

Let Everyone Play: An Educational Perspective on Why Fan Fiction Is, or Should Be, Legal

This article makes a theoretical, legal, and moral proposition that fan fiction, a form of derivative writing based on existing media and popular culture, be considered fair use of copyrighted materials under U.S. copyright law. In our discussion, we draw from the U.S. legal system's definition of fair use and significant cases related to copyright in order to make the argument that fan fiction writing constitutes fair use because it is transformative, because it is noncommercial, and, above all, because it is educational. In making this claim, we are taking a stand against corporate attempts to stamp out the creative remixing and distribution practices enabled by new technologies and are positioning ourselves in support of online participatory learning and literacy practices engaged in by youth from around the world.

Virtual communities have been extensively examined including their history, how to define them, how to design tools to support them, and how to analyze them. However, most of this research has focused on adult virtual communities, ignoring the unique considerations of virtual communities for children and youth. Young people have personal, social, and cognitive differences from adults. Thus, while some of the existing research into adult virtual communities may be applicable, it lacks a developmental lens. Based on our work of designing and researching virtual worlds for youth, we describe six important aspects of virtual worlds for children, with each aspect manifesting itself differently at each stage of human development: (1) purpose, (2) communication, (3) participation, (4) play, (5) artifacts, and (6) rules. By understanding how these six aspects impact youth virtual communities, researchers will be better able to evaluate and design them.

 

Games and Learning: What's the Connection?

This article reviews how the relationship between computer games and learning has been conceptualized in policy and academic literature, and proposes a methodology for exploring learning with games that focuses on how games are enacted in social interactions. Drawing on Sutton-Smith's description of the rhetorics of play, it argues that the educational value of games has often been defined in terms of remedying the failures of the education system. This, however, ascribes to games a specific ontology in a popular culture that is defined in terms of its opposition to school culture. By analyzing games produced in school by 12- to 13-year-olds in the context of a media education project, the article shows how notions of what a game is emerge from conventionalized and historical relations within a setting, and that the educational value of games can therefore be re-thought in terms of the situated signification of game rather than games causing learning. The students' production work is analyzed using a discursive, semiotic methodology and focuses on changing principles of design across time. Changing notions of game and play are therefore highlighted and analyzed in terms of how students position themselves in relation to the teacher, researchers, and their peers. The significance of the study for conceptualizing the relationship between games and learning is reviewed in the conclusion.