The new coviewing: Designing for learning through joint media engagement

Full text

the new
coviewing:
designing for learning through
joint media engagement
Fall 2011
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at
Sesame Workshop and LIFE Center
By Lori Takeuchi and Reed Stevens
with Brigid Barron, Erica Branch-Ridley, Mindy Brooks, Hillel Cooperman,
Ashley Fenwick-Naditch, Shalom Fisch, Rebecca Herr-Stephenson,
Carlin Llorente, Siri Mehus, Shelley Pasnik, William Penuel, Glenda Revelle

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 2
table of contents
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introduction
the new
coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies
of joint media
engagement
design guide
future
directions for
research and
development
closing
thoughts
appendix
references

introduction
We have grown accustomed to talking about
social media—those contemporary and ever-
expanding platforms that exist for people to
create and share content on the Internet. In a
mere decade, social media like Facebook, Twitter,
Second Life, and World of Warcraft have become
ubiquitous parts of our collective lives. There is
a sense, however, that all media use has always
been, at least in part, social.

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 44
Social is a word that can mean many things; one of
the things it clearly means—to borrow phrasing from
sociologist Howard Becker—is “doing things together”
(1986). When people comment on Facebook posts,
mount a collective quest in Azeroth, or report a tweet,
they are clearly doing things together. What of other,
more traditional media like
television, radio, console video
games, and personal computers,
not to mention books and other
print media? Contemporary eld
research about experience with
both new and older media show
that there are aspects of all
media experiences that are
social. In what ways are they
social? Are there ways we can design differently to
take advantage of neglected opportunities for social
interaction and engagement, beyond and in addition
to those innovations that have been built into the
platforms we are currently calling social media? How
can we design outside the interface?
One of the most basic senses in which all media are social
is that when people are engaged with them—perhaps as
individuals—other co-present people are often drawn to
get involved. If, for example, the medium is television,
conversations may happen during the program or during
commercial breaks. These interactions also may happen
“around the water cooler” after programs have aired and
people convene again together to discuss. This is a partic-
ularly common experience, we assume, with serialized
content (e.g., sci- mystery series
Lost) or sports. To take another
example: If you have ever watched
a young person try to play a video
game alone when other young
people are in the room, it quickly
becomes clear that others gravi-
tate toward being involved. Other
young people sometimes want to
play, but just as often they want to
comment or offer advice about how to play. These are
forms of social engagement around media that are not
visible in the media itself; they happen in the room and
are ephemeral. Their ephemerality, however, should not
be mistaken for inconsequentiality (Stevens, Satwicz, &
McCarthy, 2008). Indeed, these forms of joint media engage-
ment are no less social than those fostered by the epony-
mous versions. In fact, shared attentional focus on media
in real time is a powerful interactional resource not found
in most contemporary asynchronous social media, and
introduction
We need to better
understand how people use
media together and how
individuals interact with and
around all forms of media
Learn more
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references
The Joan Ganz Cooney
Center at Sesame Workshop

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 55
researchers across a range of disciplines highlight the
importance of joint attention for learning and meaning-
making (e.g., Barron, 2000, 2003; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008;
Bruner, 1983, 1995; Goodwin, 2000; Meltzoff & Brooks,
2007; Stevens & Hall, 1998; Tomasello, 1999, 2003).
The vast landscape of media use—inclusive of so-
named social media as well as a dizzying variety of
other media—calls for new focus on the ways that people
engage with media together. The stereotype of singular
engagement in media has inuenced how media are
designed—as if all users are isolated individuals. It is
time for that to change. We need to better understand
how people use media together and how individuals
interact with and around all forms of media, especially
those that dominate young people’s time and experience.
As we come to better understand joint media engage-
ment, our methods of designing will undoubtedly
change so that we may better take advantage of the
unique capacity of human beings to work, learn, think,
and make things together. That is the hope of this report
and the developing multi-organizational partnership it
represents.
introduction Learn more
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references
The LIFE Center

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 66
On November 10, 1969, the rst episode of Sesame Street
aired on public broadcasting stations across the country.
As the rst educational television program to base its
content on laboratory and formative research, Sesame
Street was often referred to by Joan Ganz Cooney, the
show’s creator, as an “experiment.” Researchers both
within and external to the Children’s Television Workshop
(CTW) studied, among other things, the roles that parents
and others in the room can play in enhancing the viewing
experiences of preschoolers. They discovered that children
learn more if parents coview the program alongside them
(e.g., Reiser, Tessmer, & Phelps, 1984; Salomon, 1977).
Nearly four decades later, in December 2007, Sesame
Workshop (formerly CTW) created The Joan Ganz Cooney
Center, an independent R&D organization whose mission
is to explore the potential of digital media in deepening
children’s learning. Keeping to its institutional legacy,
the Cooney Center is investigating coviewing as it may
occur on digital platforms through a series of projects
nicknamed “the new coviewing.”
The LIFE Center has also focused on social forms of
learning with media since its inception in 2004, albeit
through more basic forms of research than the Workshop’s
product-driven cycles. An overarching mission of this
multi-institution collaboration has been to identify and
investigate underlying principles of how people learn
socially by strategically sampling learning across settings,
domains, and ages, and by using multiple methodologies
to create an integrative synthesis. A subset of LIFE
researchers—Reed Stevens, Brigid Barron, Roy Pea, and
William Penuel—has been particularly interested in how
media can provide contexts for people to jointly create
about the initiative
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references
LIFE Center Principal Investigators
Brigid Barron, Reed Stevens, and
Bill Penuel

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 77
meaningful connections among representations, inter-
ests, and experiences. The term joint media engagement
(JME) was rst coined by these researchers to describe the
variety of spontaneous and designed experiences of
people using media together, including the coviewing
experience Sesame Street’s producers have been interested
in from the start.
With the realization that joint
media engagement and “the new
coviewing” describe essentially the
same phenomenon, the Cooney
and LIFE Centers joined forces in
early 2010 to explore this territory
together. The Cooney Center and
the LIFE Center applied for a grant
from the DML Hub to fund a multidisciplinary seminar
on the topic of JME. On November 9, 2010, the two Centers
co-hosted the Workshop on the New Coviewing: Promoting
Young Children’s Learning with Digital Media at Northwestern
University’s School of Education and Social Policy (SESP)
with additional funding from the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting. The daylong event brought together two
dozen learning scientists, developmental psychologists,
communication scholars, media producers, and philan-
thropists to identify key challenges in researching and
designing for JME. Participants made use of the School’s
state-of-the-art Baldwin Studio to engage the group in a
bit of JME during the event, projecting videos on the walls
for all to watch together and ground conversations in real
cases of JME. At the end of the day, participants prioritized
issues of concern and research questions to tackle, and
agreed to continue these conver-
sations into the future. Thus, the
rst cross-sectoral community
devoted to understanding and
designing for JME media was born.
(See Appendix for the workshop
agenda and list of participants.)
In the year following the
Northwestern workshop, the
Cooney and LIFE Centers met on three other occasions
to further build this alliance. In March 2011, the
Cooney Center led a workshop on The New Coviewing:
Supporting Learning through Joint Media Engagement at
the DML Conference 2011 in Long Beach, California.
The workshop opened the conversation up to a wider
group of stakeholders, including academics, leaders in
K-12 school settings and non-prot youth groups, as
well as media designers working in television, games,
and museums.
about the initiative
The stereotype of singular
engagement in media has
influenced how media are
designed—as if all users are
isolated individuals. It
is time for that to change.
Learn more
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references
Founding Members of the
JME R&D Consortium

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 88
In April 2011 and then again in December 2011, a subset
of participants from the Northwestern gathering (namely
Sesame Workshop, the Cooney Center, the LIFE Center,
Northwestern University, SRI, and EDC), met to map out
a series of research and development activities to enter
into together, in a manner reminiscent of the productive
collaborations CTW held with academic researchers back
when Sesame Street was still considered just an experiment.
This report captures many of the insights that have
emerged from this rst year of work together, as well
as from the collective decades of experience and wisdom
that all involved have brought to these conversations.
Here we give Sesame Workshop, Jackson Fish Market,
MediaKidz, Nokia Research Center, and others a chance
to share their words of wisdom regarding designing and
researching for joint media engagement. Future outputs
of this initiative will come in the form of new products,
systems, and environments that embody principles
of effective JME design, as well as new research that
uncovers foundational principles about the social
underpinnings of learning.
about the initiative
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing:
joint media engagement
Working definitions
“Coviewing refers to occasions when adults and children watch television
together, sharing the viewing experience, but not engaging in any discussion
about the program. Coviewing is considered a form of mediation, because it
has been shown to have positive effects on children.” (Valkenburg et al., 1999)
Joint media engagement (JME) refers to spontaneous and designed
experiences of people using media together. JME can happen anywhere and
at any time when there are multiple people interacting together with media.
Modes of JME include viewing, playing, searching, reading, contributing, and
creating, with either digital or traditional media. JME can support learning by
providing resources for making sense and making meaning in a particular
situation, as well as for future situations. (Stevens & Penuel, 2010)

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1010
The practice of watching/consuming media (most often,
television) with others has long been recommended as a
strategy for parents to mitigate the possibility of negative
media effects on their children. Coviewing also increases
the likelihood that children will learn from the media
they consume (Buijzen, van der Molen, & Sondij 2007;
Nathanson, 1999; Reiser, Tessmer, & Phelps, 1984; Reiser,
Williamson, & Suzuki, 1988; Salomon, 1977; Valkenburg,
Krcmar, Peeters, & Marsielle,1999; Warren, 2003). Although
television remains the dominant media in most homes
(Gutnick, Robb, Takeuchi, & Kotler, 2011), the concept of
coviewing warrants revision in the contemporary media
environment to encompass multiple modes of engage-
ment with diverse digital media.
To this end, the LIFE Center coined the term joint media
engagement (JME) to extend the notion beyond television
and to more broadly describe what happens when people
learn together with media (Stevens & Penuel, 2010). Joint
media engagement refers to spontaneous and designed
experiences of people using media together, and can
happen anywhere and at any time when there are
multiple people interacting together with digital or
traditional media. JME can support learning by providing
resources for making sense and making meaning in a
particular situation, as well as for future situations.
When it comes to young children, parents are key
JME partners. Parents indirectly inuence learning by
providing particular toys or media and by arranging
excursions that provide new experiences and opportuni-
ties for conversation. Provision of materials that match
a child’s interest can encourage sustained exploration
of a topic, which in turn can develop content knowledge
(Leibham et al., 2005). Parents more directly inuence
learning when they choose to engage in coactivity with
their children, for example, by watching a favorite show,
reading books, playing board games, searching for infor-
mation of interest online, or doing a project together.
In these contexts, parents can provide explanations spon-
taneously or in response to questions, children can learn
through observation, perspectives can be shared, and
performances can be scaffolded. Joint activities also
provide opportunities for parents to communicate the
value of specic activities, encourage a sense of efcacy,
and model productive dispositions.
This review focuses on JME between children and adults—
primarily parents, but also grandparents and teachers. To
a lesser extent, we have included literature that examines
JME among siblings and peers. Two questions helped
narrow the focus of this brief review:
review of the research on
joint media engagement
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1111
• What is currently known about the social, cognitive,
and emotional benets of joint engagement with digital
media? What remains to be discovered?
• What research and design methods are being employed
or should be employed to answer these questions?
Here we examine the emergent literature on joint
engagement involving newer forms of media, highlighting
six practices of interest: viewing, playing, searching,
reading, creating, and contributing. This group of literature
is small but growing, and tends to focus on particular plat-
forms—for example, e-readers or game systems. However,
our aim is to look beyond platform-specic features to the
types of interactions and relationships fostered by the
practices, ultimately unpacking the benets of different
types of participation as they relate to learning.
Television coviewing
Scholars have used the term parental mediation to describe
the roles that parents play in managing and regulating
their children’s experiences with television. Valkenburg,
Krcmar, Peeters, and Marsielle (1999) identied three
styles of parental mediation: restrictive mediation,
instructive mediation, and social coviewing. Restrictive
mediation refers to rules about the content and frequency
of children’s television viewing, while social coviewing
refers to parents and children watching television
together but not necessarily discussing what they watch.
Instructive mediation is the middle ground between
the two, in which parents and children watch television
programming together and talk about it throughout
the viewing process. Specically, instructive mediation
focuses on the pedagogical efforts of parents to ask the
child questions about what he/she is viewing, to solicit
the child’s reactions to the content, or to model media
literacy skills. Over time, Valkenburg et al.’s scale has proven
robust and has been adopted (with some minor changes
to terminology and denition) by other researchers inter-
ested in coviewing, including Nathanson (1999), Buijzen,
van der Molen, and Sondij (2007), and Warren (2003).
One of the earliest studies conducted on parent-child
coviewing of television involved Israeli mothers who
were asked to watch Sesame Street with their 5-year-old
children. The study was motivated by concerns that the
documented educational benets of the program (e.g.,
Ball & Bogatz, 1970) were skewed toward middle class
children who self-selected the program; encouraging
mothers in low-income families was proposed as a way
to improve the learning outcomes for less privileged
review of the research on joint media engagement
introduction
the new coviewing:
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engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1212
children. The research demonstrated that the “encourage-
ment of mothers had mainly an affective inuence for
the lower-SES subjects. For them, enjoyment, hence posi-
tive affect, may be conducive to deriving benet from a
program such as ‘Sesame Street.’ Indeed, it makes them
benet nearly as much as and sometimes more than
middle-class children” (Salomon, 1977, p. 1150). Further,
several other studies of coviewing and Sesame Street also
identied comprehension gains when adults and children
watch the program together (e.g., Reiser, Tessmer, & Phelps,
1984; Reiser, Williamson, & Suzuki, 1988).
Parental mediation and joint media engagement
New media present a number of challenges to the models
of parental mediation rst outlined by the research on
television (Clark, 2011). Not least of these challenges is the
reconguration of family entertainment and living spaces.
Whereas media use previously may have been restricted
to particular rooms within the home due to the place-
ment of a TV set or a desktop computer, mobile devices
and wireless Internet remove some of these limitations,
allowing media use to be an “anywhere, anytime”
phenomenon for families with the nancial means to
purchase such digital products.
Livingstone and Helsper (2008) note how the size of a
computer screen, how users face the screen, and users’
reliance on a single keyboard and mouse may complicate
parents’ application of existing mediation styles to use of
the Internet. For example, whereas large television screens
and ambient sound may allow parents to casually monitor
what children are watching from an adjacent space, small
screens on portable computers and mobile devices make
this kind of casual observation more difcult. Similarly,
children’s usage of mobile devices can be more difcult
for parents to monitor and mediate, as children can use
those devices in spaces that may not have been previously
associated with media consumption: the school bus, the
car, their bedrooms, friends’ homes, and so on. Despite
these difculties, Livingstone and Helsper reinforce the
value of parental presence when children use computers—
even when parents are not scaffolding computer use as
they might do with a television program—noting that
when parents are present and available in the context
of computer use, “conversation about the online activity,
including interpretive or evaluative comments or guidance,
is more likely” (p. 589). In a national survey, Livingstone and
Helsper found that parents use both “social rules (banning
or restricting activities) and technical restrictions (ltering
or blocking certain activities)” in managing children’s
Internet use and that “active co-use,” was a regular
review of the research on joint media engagement
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1313
occurrence, with two thirds of parents reporting talking
with their children about their Internet use, and almost
half coviewing when children used the computer.
Similar strategies can be seen
with video games. Nikken, Jansz,
and Schouwstra (2007) found that
parents, particularly those with
negative opinions of games and
gaming, used video game ratings
and content descriptors to inform
restrictive and active mediation
of games. Parents who were them-
selves gamers or who had positive
opinions about games tended to
play with their children rather
than restricting play. These nd-
ings echo earlier evidence that coviewing of television is
frequently motivated by shared interests and preferences
in programming (e.g., Austin, 2001).
Aarsand (2007) describes “asymmetrical relations” (p. 251)
between parents and children with respect to assumptions
about expertise with computers and video games as both a
challenge and opportunity for joint engagement with these
media. The so-called “digital divide” through which children
are considered to be experts with digital media while adults
are positioned as novices becomes a “resource for both
children and adults to enter and sustain participation in
activities” (p. 251). The resulting tensions can be a challenge
to joint media engagement if the
digital divide between adults and
children is reied with each group
engaging in separate activities, or
a valuable opportunity if adults
step out of typical authoritative or
mentor roles and allow children to
take the lead in guiding the activity.
As such, slight disruption of the
balance of power between children
and adults can be a powerful moti-
vator for sustained participation.
JME over distances
There are several examples of tools designed to support
families in JME when a parent travels or lives separately
from the child, as well as tools designed to connect
extended family through shared media experiences (in
addition to the tools described here, see pages 38 and 52).
Yarosh, Cuzzort, Muller, and Abowd (2009) reviewed several
systems designed to facilitate communication among
review of the research on joint media engagement
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1414
geographically distributed family members. Among them,
ASTRA, eKiss, Collage, and Virtual Box use PDAs and
mobile phones to enable capture and sharing of images
between family members. However, Yarosh et al. are skep-
tical about the benets of asynchronous communication
between remote family members, noting that currently
available modes of remote commu-
nication “rarely provide opportuni-
ties for the amount and type of
contact parents and children
require” (p. 97). One alternative
designed to address some of the
pitfalls of asynchronous remote
communication is ShareTable, a
system that “augments an audio-
visual connection with a shared
workspace created by projecting a video of one table
surface onto the other” (p. 98). The shared workspace can
be occupied simultaneously by both remote parties and
facilitates sharing of “normal” activities, such as working
on homework or show-and-tell.
In considering opportunities for joint media engagement
through contributing and co-creating, design consider-
ations become especially important. While not specically
looking at use by children, Lewis, Pea, and Rosen (2010)
discuss the intentional design of Moblitz, a mobile
application intended to allow users to go beyond simple
sharing of pictures to co-creation of meaning. Moblitz was
designed specically to allow production across distance,
share all types of media, support joint attention, and
share community context. As the authors note, “today’s
challenge is to build applications
that are global in reach, but local
in accessibility” (p. 358).
Beyond the technologies common
to kids’ everyday media ecologies,
other tools, such as augmented
reality (AR) systems appear to
offer distributed communities
unique opportunities to use media
together. For example, Pemberton and Winter (2009) exam-
ined the pedagogical effectiveness of an AR system called
Spinnstube for remote collaboration among adolescent
students. The system allowed distant students to communi-
cate via voice link and to work with 3D simulations of arti-
facts related to curricula about science or cultural heritage.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the simultaneous experi-
ence and synchronous communication facilitated by the
system create valuable opportunities for joint engagement
and learning from media.
As such, slight disruption
of the balance of power
between children and
adults can be a powerful
motivator for sustained
participation.
review of the research on joint media engagement
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1515
Learning together with digital media
There have been very few empirical studies specically
designed to evaluate children’s learning through joint
engagement with digital media. Penuel et al. (2009) report
ndings from a large study of preschool children (N=398)
whose teachers implemented a media-rich curriculum
including video, teacher-led activities, and computer
games. Teachers in this study led students in focused
viewing and whole-group activities related to the selected
video content. Findings indicated that integration of
media formats, opportunities for repetition of activities
and, of particular salience to this review, use of coviewing
and active mediation by the teachers, are associated with
students’ improved literacy skills. Also signicant is the
nding that these literacy gains were achieved by
students in low-income communities.
E-books in their many incarnations—websites, computer
software, electronic consoles (e.g., LeapFrog products),
and mobile “apps”—are an increasingly popular platform
for parent-child interactions around text. Parish-Morris,
Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, and Collins (in review) compared
dialogic reading on electronic console (EC) books and
traditional print books. Seventy-two dyads comprising
3-year-olds and their parents (N=36) and 5-year-olds and
their parents (N=36) were randomly assigned to read
either a Fisher-Price Learning System electronic console
book or traditional book together. Parish-Morris and
colleagues found dyads in the print book condition to
engage in more dialogic and content-focused reading
than dyads in the EC condition, where more behavior-
focused conversation was observed. With the growing
popularity of e-books apps on e-readers (e.g., Kindle,
Nook), iPads, and other tablet PCs, more research is
needed to understand the role that these devices can
and should play in supporting joint versus independent
reading sessions.
Peer and sibling JME
Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy’s (2008) naturalistic
studies of siblings and friends playing video games
together at home examined the spontaneous instances
of teaching and learning that players set up among
themselves during gaming sessions, as well as how
their in-room interactions connect with what’s going
on inside the game and in their lives outside the home
(e.g., school). According to Stevens and colleagues,
“collaborative interactions around video game play are
good learning environments [in] that ‘in-room’ interac-
tion provides opportunities for sociality, joint projects,
review of the research on joint media engagement
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1616
and empowerment through sharing one’s knowledge
and seeing it used for concrete success by others”
(pp. 52-3).
Research from the Digital
Youth Project (DYP) found
evidence of youths’ learning
through joint media engage-
ment with peers in each
of three genres of participa-
tion—“hanging out,” “messing
around,” and “geeking out”—
identied by the project
researchers (Ito et al., 2009). JME
appears differently within each
genre; whereas youth hanging
out with friends tended to
casually share media by
listening to music or watching
movies, television, or online videos together in person or
online, youth who engaged in JME while geeking out
engaged in more intensive activities such as critiquing
the media they were viewing, working together to mod
video games, or producing digital videos, music, or
podcasts. Further, the DYP ndings indicate that the
genre of participation that appears to present the most
possibility for learning is messing around; in terms of
JME, it is possible that messing around will be equally
important. Here, friends and mentors play important
roles in these activities by
introducing youth to tech-
nological tools, structuring
interactions with them, and
messing around together to
help troubleshoot problems.
This brief review was
intended to provide readers
with a basic understanding
of JME before delving into
the deeper issues covered
in subsequent sections.
Clearly, several questions
remain about the educa-
tional outcomes and possi-
bilities of JME, but these will be posed toward the end
of this report in Future Directions for Research and
Development (see page 54).
review of the research on joint media engagement
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
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for research and
development
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1717
the basic ingredients of JME:
watching tv together
This classic photograph of a
family watching TV together
depicts the basic ingredients of
joint media engagement. At its
core, JME involves:
Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references
1
1. At least two people, which we
refer to as partners. In this scene,
partners are co-located, or in the
same space together. However,
physical proximity of partners is not
necessary; JME may occur between
distant partners as long as they
can communicate and other basic
ingredients are present.

case studies of joint
media engagement
In this next section, six participants from the
November 2010 workshop share the work they
have been conducting around issues of joint media
engagement. We’ve classified three as “research
cases” and three as “industry cases” to distinguish
their origins, though it’s worth noting that all six
address the challenges of designing for learning.
Cases were selected for the diversity they represent:
one takes us into family living rooms to see how
preschool-age siblings watch TV together, and another
examines the roles that after-school mentors can
play in nurturing the technical skills of adolescents
living on the South Side of Chicago. Other cases
feature video games and e-books. All surface useful
insights that have been incorporated into the design
principles featured later in this report.

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 1919
Ethnographic field studies of joint media engagement
By Siri Mehus and Reed Stevens
Research questions
For children, the learning benets of interacting with
others and discussing television shows with others while
viewing have been well documented. But what do these
interactions look like when they occur in children’s
everyday lives? How are they initiated? What types of
media afford such interactions? Are there aspects of the
environment that foster or constrain them? And, most
importantly, what is it about these interactions that
support children’s learning? Do particular social arrange-
ments and ways of interacting produce different learning
benets? To answer these questions, we need to begin
with detailed understandings of concrete cases of JME
as they occur in the real lives of children and adults.
However, surprisingly few direct, observational studies
on JME in natural environments have been conducted.
The study
Our group has conducted ethnographic eld studies of
children’s learning from video games and television. We
record children in their home environments and simulta-
neously record the screen on which the video game or
television show appears, an action which allows us to
closely analyze the ways in which children interact with
others around media.
We report here on our recent study of young children’s
television viewing, which included 16 focal participants
from 10 families (half boys and half girls) ranging in age
from 13 months to 6 years. Children were observed and
videotaped in 1- to 2-hour sessions. We video-recorded
at times when children would ordinarily be watching
television, and the children watched the shows they
would be watching if we were not there. We used one
camera to record the children’s activity as they watched,
and simultaneously recorded the video stream from the
television. We then created a split-screen track including
both sources of video to facilitate analysis (see gure,
page 20). These methods were adapted from a previous
study on children’s video gaming (Stevens, Satwicz, &
McCarthy, 2008).
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Approximately 63 hours of video were recorded.
Researchers viewed and logged all video-recordings
and tagged phenomena of interest for close interac-
tional analysis.
Findings
By examining what happens when children watch television
in everyday life, we were able to gain insights that challenge
common assumptions about television viewing and expand
on what has been learned from other types of studies. For
instance, our study revealed that
• Joint media engagement is often initiated by children
rather than parents.
• Learning interactions do not always relate to the
learning goals of the show (and may occur even when
viewing “non-educational” shows).
• JME occurs more often when the television is kept in a
central area of the home, such as the living room or
kitchen, rather than in a separate media room.
• JME occurs with siblings and peers, not just adults.
As part of our analysis, we focused on the ways in which
children engage with one another when viewing partici-
patory (or “interactive”) shows, i.e., shows that include
prompts for viewer responses. We selected events in
which children watched one of four such shows: Go, Diego,
Go!, Dora the Explorer, Super Why!, and The Little Einsteins.
Thirty-two such events were identied, involving seven
focal children from ve families. For each event, we coded
the total prompts from the television and each partici-
pant’s responses to those prompts. These formed the data
for a quantitative analysis through which we sought to
nd patterns of response to prompts across the data set.
In order to pursue one hypothesis of how social factors
might inuence children’s actions while viewing, we also
conducted a quantitative comparison of one child’s rates
of response when watching alone and when watching
with his sibling. We then followed up with qualitative
research case 1
Split-screen track used in television viewing research.
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microanalysis, which allowed us to identify several
learning-relevant modes of interaction in which children
engaged with one another around responding to TV. We
found that
• Children do not respond to all prompts included in a
show (23% on average across our data). There is great
variation in rates of response between children and,
for individuals, between viewing events.
• One source of variation may be whether children watch
with others or alone; our data suggest that children respond
to prompts more often when watching with others.
• When children watch and respond to TV together they
are participating in a social interaction with one another
that is mediated by the television (they are not just
independently responding to the same show).
For instance,
o Children imitate each other’s responses.
o Children coordinate their actions to respond
in unison.
o Children elaborate on each other’s responses.
o Children engage in discussions triggered by
the prompts and responses.
• Children learn from one another how to respond to
television. Older children can serve as models and
even explicitly guide and encourage younger siblings
to respond.
These interactions offer opportunities for learning beyond
those “built in” to the show. As such, watching with others
not only makes children more likely to engage with a
show and benet from its intended learning opportuni-
ties, but also provides a way for children to create their own
learning opportunities.
Implications for design
Given the hectic pace of contemporary family life, parents
may be able to engage with their children around media
more often when media sources are kept in central areas of
the home, where viewing children are observable as parents
engage in other tasks. Technological solutions for remote
coviewing can also be developed. We further suggest that
parents can enhance the quality of JME interactions by
allowing children the opportunity to initiate them and guide
their direction; i.e., if, rather than pursuing their own
agendas for children’s learning (or those of the television
show), parents attend to their children’s reactions to the
television and elicit and respond to their comments.
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Children may engage more actively with participatory
shows (i.e., respond to more prompts) when they watch
with others who are also actively engaged—especially
peers. Our data suggest that television producers should
be challenged to design “interactive” shows to not only
facilitate interaction between a single child and a screen,
but to rather take advantage of the powerful learning
opportunities that arise when viewers interact with one
another around a television show.
Siri Mehus, PhD is a Research Scientist for the LIFE Center,
and Reed Stevens is Professor of the Learning Sciences at
Northwestern University.
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Active engagement with media in the Ready to
Learn/PBS Kids study
By William R. Penuel, Carlin Llorente, and Shelley Pasnik
The learning problem
Young children from low-income families are far less
likely to enter kindergarten with foundational early
literacy skills than are their more economically advan-
taged peers, putting them at high risk for later reading
difculties (Snow, Burns, & Grifn, 1998). Addressing this
gap early is critical, as longitudinal analyses show that
elementary schools do not close the reading achieve-
ment gaps between low- and middle-income children
present at kindergarten entry (Alexander, Entwisle, &
Olson, 2007).
Research question
The challenge for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and the PBS-led team of producers, curriculum devel-
opers, and researchers in the most recent round of
Ready to Learn (RTL) funding was to identify strategies
for integrating media content from the group’s
educational television programs into a curriculum
supplement intended for use in preschools. The goal
was to design and study materials that were both
highly interactive and effective in helping students
most at risk for later reading difculties improve their
early literacy skills. The overall goal of our research was
to address the question: Can integrating public media
content from different platforms into curriculum materials
improve literacy outcomes for young children?
One of the key design principles we followed was to
encourage and support teachers to be active social part-
ners when engaging children with media. We sought to
inspire teachers to direct children’s attention in ways that
could facilitate language development, including naming
and identifying objects, repeating new words, asking
questions, and relating the content to children’s own
experiences (Lemish & Rice, 1986). We also sought to
use activities that did not employ digital media, but
that provided children with additional opportunities for
practice so that we might actively promote media synergy
(Neuman, 1995). We also used theories of effective profes-
sional development to design supports for teacher
learning of active coviewing (Martin, et al., in press).
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The study
The Education Development Center, Inc. and SRI
International partnered to lead the study, which was
the culminating study of the summative evaluation of
the Ready to Learn Initiative. The study focused on a
media-rich curriculum supplement that incorporated
activities in which teachers
used digital video, online
games, and hands-on activi-
ties to provide children with
a motivating way to gain
letter knowledge, knowledge
of letter and initial word
sounds, and an under-
standing of print concepts.
These media-rich activities
employed digital content
from three public television
programs that aim to support
literacy learning among preschool-aged children:
Sesame Street, Between the Lions, and SuperWhy! Integral
to the design of the supplement was guidance from
coaches, who modeled teacher-led activities and
observed preschool teachers implementing the supple-
ment. As part of the evaluation of the supplement, we
conducted a cluster randomized trial with 436 children
in 80 preschool classrooms to estimate the impacts on
early literacy skills.
Design and methods
We used an experimental design to estimate the impacts
of the curriculum supplement
on letter identication, the
sounds letters make, the initial
sounds of words, and concepts
of story and print. We assigned
a total of 80 preschool class-
rooms—each serving primarily
low-income children—to either
a treatment or treated control
condition. In the treatment
condition, we provided
teachers with professional
development and necessary
materials to implement the media-rich literacy supple-
ment. In the control condition, we provided professional
development and necessary materials to implement a
supplement focused on science. We instructed teachers in
both conditions to continue to implement their regular
literacy instruction during the study.
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Findings
Children from classrooms assigned to the media-rich
literacy supplement showed positive impacts (+0.20 ≤ d ≤
+0.55) on the ability to recognize letters, sounds of letters
and initial sounds of words, as well as concepts of story
and print. We also found that student gains were related
to students’ initial literacy levels (students with the most
to learn gained more). Student gains, however, were not
related to teachers’ coviewing with children in the study.
Implementation ndings did show how frequently
teachers engaged in active coviewing during the study.
During sessions when coaches were present, treatment
teachers led activities in 72% of the sessions and co-partic-
ipated in activities 38% of the time, indicating that in most
of those activities, teachers mediated engaged coviewing
with children. In just 20% of the sessions when coaches
were present were teachers observed to engage in activities
unrelated to the intended supplemental activity.
Implications for design
The study did not identify which components were
critical for impact; however, our design adhered to
some core principles:
• Focus on a few core skills, rather than on literacy
more broadly.
• Provide intensity of exposure and repeated opportunities
to practice those skills.
• Establish a rhythm of moving between different
media-based activities and interactive classroom
activities.
• Consider the teacher a partner in implementation:
Provide both the technological and pedagogical
supports teachers need to implement supplements.
• Encourage adult mediation of media engagement
by embedding direction in media (e.g., “pause points”
presented on screen) and teacher materials (e.g.,
directions for things teachers can say).
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What next?
We are continuing as evaluation partners on the CPB-PBS
Content Alliance, where we will engage in a number of
studies that can inform the design of supports for active
coviewing—or as we refer to the phenomenon now, joint
media engagement.
• A need study conducted in preschools and afterschool
programs that will identify gaps and opportunities in
current literacy and mathematics practices that could
be addressed through joint engagements with media.
• A need study conducted with parents that will identify
gaps and opportunities for engagements with media
that could connect home and school literacy and math-
ematics practices.
• Implementation and efcacy studies in preschools and
afterschool programs of interventions that integrate
transmedia gaming suites into multi-week interventions
in reading and mathematics.
William Penuel, PhD conducted this research as Director of
Evaluation Research at SRI International, and is now Professor
of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences at the
University of Colorado. Carlin Llorente is a Senior Researcher
for the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International.
Shelley Pasnik is Director of the Center for Children &
Technology at EDC. Penuel and Pasnik co-led the research
for the RTL grant.
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Case studies of joint media creation as a form of JME
By Brigid Barron
Research questions
Over the past seven years we have been studying the
conditions under which young teens become involved in
digital media hobbies that involve designing and making
expressive and functional artifacts. These items include
activities like robotics, programming, movie making,
animation, game design, web design, and the creation of
visual art. We came to this work with a learning ecology
framework that directs our attention to how congurations
of activities, resources, and learning partnerships provide
opportunities for learning within and across settings, and
an interest in the ways that learners might pursue their
own learning once they became passionate about a genre
of production or content domain (Barron, 2004; 2006). We
sampled different communities and learning environ-
ments in order to understand the dimensions of spaces
and places that engage young people and can bridge
divides associated with differential access to tools and
learning opportunities. Thus, in this research case, joint
media engagement refers to the co-creation of digital
media artifacts rather than co-watching professionally
created shows or co-game play. Our research question
concerns how parents, peers, and mentors jointly engage
in the activity of making and creating.
The studies
We have carried out multiple longitudinal case studies.
Here we focus on two samples: The rst was an afuent
sample of eight youth from Silicon Valley, each of whom
had at least one parent involved as a knowledge worker
in the technology industry (Barron, Martin, Takeuchi &
Fithian, 2009). The second was a study of nine youth from
the South Side of Chicago attending a hybrid school and
afterschool program focused on providing access to
learning opportunities. In this group, no parents worked
as knowledge workers and family income levels ranged
from low to middle.
Findings
In our Silicon Valley samples, we found that the onset of
participation in these kinds of activities is strongly linked to
teens’ social networks and more broadly to their learning
ecologies. Friends, teachers, parents, museum staff, and
informal mentors were often instrumental in sparking and
sponsoring activities that become passionate expressive
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 2828
pursuits. Parents frequently co-engaged with their children
in these generative digital hobbies in a variety of ways,
ranging from collaborative work where both child and
parent learned as they went, to more distal facilitators of
activity when they chose to provide access to resources
that were needed for learning (other categories included
brokering, teaching, learning, employing, and consulting
on non-technical aspects of projects).
Once engaged and interested, young teens in both Silicon
Valley and Chicago pursued opportunities that advanced
their own learning by creating new learning opportunities
for themselves; frequently this happened across the
settings of home, community, school, and through online
and distributed resources. In Chicago, laptops were given
to all sixth graders in the DYN school, which made this
exploratory learning possible. Across the two sets of case
studies we also observed that
• The breadth and depth of parent or mentor joint
media engagement was correlated with child expertise,
suggesting it is consequential for learning.
• Parent and mentor expertise with technology was
correlated with the depth and categories of JME. Adults
with more expertise were able to teach and broker more
easily. Adults with less expertise found it easier to be a
learner or to collaborate.
• Mentors were attentive to the child’s level of commitment
when choosing whether to give them extra attention, and
learners were observed to actively recruit mentorship.
• Mentors and parents sometimes missed opportunities
for JME because they were unaware of a child’s digital
media-making hobby.
JME to critique and improve a live performance.
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In the Chicago cases, JME-Creation (JME-C) was sometimes
used as a learning tool in order to improve a real world
performance. For example, in the gure on the previous
page, we see a mentor and a group of boys jointly
studying a just-lmed spoken word performance. They
use this artifact to offer suggestions for improvement to
the young spoken word performer.
Implications for research and design
• Study ways that parents can be supported to engage in
JME-C, even when they don’t have expertise. Studies of
materials that help scaffold collaborative learning
around design-and-create projects would be useful.
• Carry out micro-interactional studies to better theorize
cognitive and relational aspects of JME-C. These should
include affective components of JME-C, including the
contagion of enthusiasm, interest, delight, and laughter,
as well as frustration or anxiety.
• Study processes and tools that make visible children’s
interests in building and making. These can be social
(e.g., engaging parents in discussions about their child’s
hobbies and pursuits as well as their own). Equally
important is the study of appraisal processes and roles
of stereotypes in occluding perceptions of interest.
• Study cycles of JME-C over time to better theorize
how joint work can alternate with solo work to build
expertise and interest.
Brigid Barron, PhD is an Associate Professor of Education in the
Learning Sciences and Technology Design program at Stanford
University, and a faculty lead of the LIFE Center.
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Electric Racer: An intergenerational gaming
experience designed to promote literacy
By Mindy Brooks, Ashley Fenwick-Naditch, and
Erica Branch-Ridley
The need
Technology can provide educational opportunities
between children and parents when the content, format,
and structure are designed in targeted and appropriate
ways. At Sesame Workshop, we continually seek to
design experiences to engage parents in their children’s
learning. The idea for an intergenerational computer
game originated with generous support from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a partnership
with the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie
Mellon University. Our mission was to develop, design,
build, test, and deliver a distribution-ready game that
engages children ages 6 through 9 and their parents or
other adults in interactive play, using curriculum and
content from The Electric Company (TEC). This project
utilized new 3D gaming technologies, as well as innova-
tive two-player game mechanics to “scaffold” learning
to support 6- to 9-year-olds’ literacy competencies.
The product
Electric Racer is a two-player downloadable driving game
designed for a driver and a passenger. The driver is
required to navigate through words containing a
particular target sound as displayed on the road, while
the passenger unscrambles words with the same target
sound for extra points.
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Screenshot of Electric Racer
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The game supports active participation for both child and
adult players through the use of mechanics that differen-
tiate their roles, taking into account the different sets of
knowledge and skills that each player brings to the game.
To reward the co-play, the more the team works together,
the more points the team will receive to unlock new (and
more educationally advanced) levels of game play.
The original intent was for the child to play as driver and
the parent to play as passenger; however it is possible
for the players to switch roles, or for two children to play
together. The child’s primary role as driver puts the child
in control of the racing vehicle, empowering him or her
to direct game play and to read and identify the target
words. When the parent plays as the passenger, he or
she simultaneously “unscrambles” the target words as
the child collects them. Although the co-play dynamic is
not integral to win the game, the driver is not able to earn
as many points without the presence and participation of
a passenger. Furthermore, if the players choose to do a
“role reversal”—having the child act as passenger and
parent play as driver—it is not detrimental to game play
should the child unscramble only one word during the
entire level.
Lessons learned
An integral part of the Sesame Workshop production
process is ongoing formative research. The focus for the
research team is to give feedback to production in ways
that will make the end product as educationally sound as
possible. During the formative research process for Electric
Racer, we became acutely aware that while excitement for
an intergenerational game seemed high, parents and
children needed more role clarication. Our initial user
test found that parents had a hard time understanding
that they had a strategic role in the game despite its basic
instructions. It often took multiple game plays and/or
researcher prompts for the parent to even realize they
had a role to play, as evidenced by body position and hand
placement on the mouse. Furthermore, even when parents
understood that they had a role, they were still uncertain
of how to play the game with their child.
The formative research process unveiled that the very
nature of a two-player game would not guarantee that
parents in particular would know what to do or how to
play—not to mention enjoy the actual game. The ques-
tions for the interdisciplinary team (producers, curric-
ulum specialists, and researchers), became “How can
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 3232
we structure an intergenerational game play experience
so that: (a) parents will know they have a specic role to
play, (b) the parent’s participation will further the learning
process for their child, and (c) there will be increases in
scaffolding and positive interaction with fewer directives
and passive observations (i.e., “Watch out for the word!”)?
Through additional formative research we identied
three major areas that helped address these questions
and that are applicable to Electric Racer as well as future
intergenerational games: (1) role clarication, (2) a point
system, and (3) additional instructional support through
added voiceovers, icons, and timeout prompts.
• Role clarication: We found that typical voice-over
instructions were not enough to grab parents’ attention
and engage them in game play. As a result of testing, we
found the interactive video tutorial adds an efcient and
even fun way to provide role clarity. The tutorial intro-
duces the players’ roles by letting the pair interact with
the game for a few seconds, and then follows with
further instructions. By initially establishing the roles
through an interactive tutorial, the video helped both
players feel more comfortable and, as a result, almost
100% of the participants were able to actively, not to
mention enjoyably, engage in game play.
• A point system: We drew attention to the point system
through a series of design considerations, such as making
the on-screen point tracker have corresponding sounds
that reinforced correct answers with both visual and
audio cues. In addition, points were highlighted through
the scoreboard (or a game summary screen) that clearly
delineated how each player performed. We also drew
visual and auditory attention to the in-game speed boost
feature, which allowed for more collaboration and verbal
communication between players, as well as an increase
in points. Clarifying the point system throughout the
game experience made it signicantly easier for players
to monitor their progress and to know that their actions
signicantly inuenced their progress.
• Instructional support: The third element that enhanced
role clarication was to provide additional support
through small but substantial in-game instructional
features. One such change to Electric Racer was to add
a clickable icon on the dashboard to remind players of
the target sound they were looking for. When clicked,
this icon repeated the target educational sound the
players were supposed to collect, which helped to
reiterate game goals and reinforce the educational
content. Another small change that made a signicant
difference was the addition of more timeouts during
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 3333
the driving course to prompt players to actively drive
through the target words. It was through these minor
design changes that we brought attention to role clari-
cation and ensured clear articulation of game goals.
What next?
The success of Electric Racer has prompted our team to
discuss how to expand the game to encourage further
intergenerational game play. In particular, the growing
presence of mobile technologies may encourage parents
and children to more frequently engage in game play
together in various settings. Furthermore, mobile tech-
nology may also support asynchronous collaboration
such that a parent and child might be engaged in
ongoing play even when they are not together. We look
forward to continual collaboration among producers,
educators, game designers, and researchers to ensure
that what we create is educational and entertaining for
children and their families and also provides a valuable
opportunity for them to spend quality time together.
Visit The Electric Company website on PBS to learn more
about Electric Racer and to download the game for free.
Mindy Brooks, Ashley Fenwick-Naditch, and Erica Branch-
Ridley all work at Sesame Workshop, where Sesame Street
and The Electric Company are made. Brooks is Assistant
Director of Research for Domestic Research, Fenwick-Naditch
is a Producer in the Digital Media Group, and Branch-Ridley is
Assistant Vice President of Platform Innovation for the
Creative Innovation Lab.
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Raising the (mommy) bar: Encouraging
parent-child interaction during preschool TV
By Shalom Fisch
The need
Research has shown that when parents share stories with
their children—whether those stories are in books (e.g.,
Whitehurst et al., 1988), on television (Lemish & Rice, 1986),
or in interactive storybooks (Fisch, Shulman, Akerman, &
Levin, 2002)—they don’t necessarily just read the stories.
In some cases, they elaborate on the stories in various
ways, such as by labeling objects in pictures, asking
children to predict events or infer characters’ emotions,
or by tying aspects of the story to children’s own lives.
Such interactions have the potential to contribute to the
development of children’s language and literacy.
The product
The fact that such interactions sometimes occur (at least
in some families) raised the question of whether televi-
sion production techniques could be designed in such a
way as to stimulate parent-child interaction that might
not have occurred otherwise. To that end, my colleagues
and I conducted a research study with 58 pairs of parents
and their 3- to 5-year-olds, using material from Cartoon
Network’s Tickle U block of preschool programming (Fisch
et al., 2008). When it premiered, the Tickle U block included
a feature that Cartoon Network referred to as the Mommy
Bar—a stream of text aimed at parents that appeared
across the bottom of the screen. The intent of the original
Mommy Bar was to engage parents’ attention with jokes
and information in an attempt to keep them in the room
while their children watched television.
Could this sort of approach be used toward more explicitly
educational ends? To nd out, we adapted the approach to
create three different versions of the same half-hour Tickle
U video. The only difference among the three versions was
the type of text that appeared at the bottom of the screen:
• No text: No text was shown at the bottom of the screen.
• Original Mommy Bar: The on-screen text presented jokes
and (to a lesser degree) general parenting information
aimed at parents (e.g., “You’re a preschool parent if…
you know exactly how long it takes to microwave four
sh sticks perfectly.”).
industry case 2
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 3535
• Educationally-enhanced Bar: The on-screen text presented
prompts that were related to the on-screen action and
designed to stimulate the sorts of interactions observed
in past research (e.g., “Does your room ever get messy?”
or “Why is Toto sad?”).
Each parent–child pair was observed and videotaped as
they watched one of the three versions of the video at
home. Results indicated that while watching the version
with the educationally-enhanced bar, parents were signi-
cantly more likely to make comments about characters’
emotions, connect on-screen events to the children’s own
lives, encourage viewer participation with on-screen games
and activities, and somewhat more likely to ask children
to evaluate characters’ actions. In particular, specic types
of interactions occurred during the segments in which
they were prompted, supporting the conclusion that the
on-screen text was responsible for the increased interac-
tion. By contrast, the original Mommy Bar did not produce
such effects.
Lessons learned
As our ndings demonstrate, something as simple as a
line of on-screen text can make a signicant difference in
parents’ (and children’s) behavior while watching. Still,
Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs produced
by CCI for Cartoon Network, U.S.
Images © Cartoon Network. Used by permission.
Educationally-enhanced Bar Original Mommy Bar
industry case 2
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 3636
not all forms of on-screen text are equally powerful in
prompting such interaction. Rather, interaction is more
likely to result if the text is tied to on-screen action and
suggests specic comments or behaviors for parents to
employ, such as:
• Labeling on-screen objects and actions (e.g., “That’s a
dog” or “What’s the girl doing?”)
• Retelling aspects of the story (e.g., “What happened?”
or “See, he cleaned his room.”)
• Making inferences about characters’ emotions or
motivations (e.g., “He looks surprised!” or “How do
you think he feels?”)
• Evaluating on-screen events (e.g., “Was that a good
thing to do?” or “What do you think they should do?”)
• Tying objects or events to children’s own lives (e.g.,
“That’s like the time we went to Grandma’s.” or “Ooh,
ice cream! Do you like eating ice cream?”)
• Encouraging viewer participation (e.g., “They’re
singing the alphabet song. Can you sing it too?”)
Of course, it is important to remember that the purpose
of the educationally-enhanced bar was not to force or
trick parents into interacting with their children. These
particular behaviors were chosen because they represent
types of interactions that some parents initiate naturally
while watching television with their children, regardless
of whether any text appears on the screen. Nor was the
bar intended to prod every parent into engaging in
every behavior all of the time. Rather, the educationally
enhanced bar was intended to serve as a tool that parents
could choose to employ—a reminder of the sorts of things
they could discuss with their children if they chose to do
so, and if they hadn’t already thought to say something
similar themselves.
Next steps
In this sense, the data from our study show that the
educationally-enhanced bar can be a highly successful
tool, from the standpoints of parents and broadcasters
alike. In fact, after we shared our results with the inter-
national TV production community at Prix Jeunesse,
producers in several countries experimented with
educationally-enhanced Mommy Bars of their own,
and research in Germany found comparable evidence
of its effectiveness there. If the content is designed
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 3737
appropriately, then on-screen text can successfully
stimulate important forms of parent-child interaction,
which is good news for parents and children alike.
Shalom Fisch, PhD is President and Founder of MediaKidz
Research & Consulting, a consulting rm that provides educa-
tional content development, hands-on testing, and writing for
children’s media.
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 3838
Coviewing: Just for separations?
By Hillel Cooperman
The need
With the mass adoption of the car, the (relative) price
accessibility of air travel, and the proliferation of inexpen-
sive long distance communications, families have become
more and more separated by signicant distances over
the last 100 years than at any other time prior. Moving far
away no longer means staying disconnected from one’s
family and friends to the degree that it did in the early 20th
century or even earlier. While adults can make their own
decisions about these types of separations, often kids are
affected by them in challenging ways. In addition to distant
grandparents and parents on business trips, in a country
currently ghting two different wars abroad, we have tens
of thousands of children who don’t see one of their parents
(typically their father) for as long as a year at a time.
The product
In November 2009, we launched a product that touches
on the issues of families separated over long distances.
It was (and is) essentially time-shifted coviewing. The
service—A Story Before Bed (www.astorybeforebed.com)—
lets one party record themselves reading an illustrated
children’s book so that another party can watch that
recording (see gure above). The recordings include audio
and video that are synchronized with the turning of the
pages of the book that autoplay so the viewer can watch
the pages turn automatically when the reader turned
them. The viewer can also turn the pages themselves,
going backwards and forwards in the story and resetting
the video to the appropriate location with each page turn.
The product works in a standard Flash-enabled web
browser on a Mac or PC and on Apple’s mobile devices
including the iPhone and iPad.
industry case 3
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 3939
We designed the product to address the issue of
separated families, whether their distance was caused
by work, military service, or just a Saturday night out
for Mom and Dad. We also knew that the service could
be helpful for families with divorced parents. When we
launched A Story Before Bed, we were pleased by the posi-
tive reception we received from a public that had never
experienced a product like this before. However, we were
surprised by a small number of vocal folks who had an
initial negative reaction and perceived our product as a
high-tech babysitter. Their sentiment: “Oh great! Another
tool for lazy parents to use to avoid interacting directly
with their kids.” We were taken aback, but our eyes were
opened. For some, there is romanticism and a higher
purpose around the act of reading a physical book to a
child. We felt that we were enhancing that experience,
making it possible where it hadn’t been before, and even
preserving the experience for the future. These critics
felt like we were trying to circumvent it.
Lessons learned
It’s been over 18 months since we rst launched the
product and tens of thousands of people have used it.
Through a random sampling of recordings made using
A Story Before Bed, we’ve been able to see how our
assumptions, as well as some of those early criticisms,
have borne out in the ensuing time.
• We underestimated that a number of teachers and
librarians would be interested in using the service, in
some cases having early readers practice their reading,
and in some cases having older readers record stories
for their younger reading “buddies” in lower grades and
kindergarten.
• Educators for the vision-impaired are using the service
to teach American Sign Language. Teachers record
themselves signing a book. Then, students can watch
the recordings, learn the signs, and nally record their
own signing of the story which can then be reviewed by
their teachers.
• Speech therapists are using the service to help students
practice their diction.
• It’s hard to know if kids are present when their parents
(or grandparents) record their stories. However, we do
get anecdotal reports of stay-at-home moms recording
several stories for their child to watch independently
while they get work done around the house.
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 4040
• Almost 18% of the recordings were done by a parent
and child (or children) combination. The service was
fostering not just time-shifted coviewing/reading
activities but fostering synchronous coviewing.
• An additional 24% of the recordings featured only kids
(sometimes in groups) recording themselves reading
the stories.
• In almost 5% of the recordings, Grandma and Grandpa
made the recording together.
• In only 53% of the recordings did individual adults
(Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, or a teacher) record
themselves solo reading to a child.
Based on this sampling, almost half of the usage of
A Story Before Bed was in patterns and congurations
for which it wasn’t intended.
Many of the knee-jerk instincts about how to integrate
technology into children’s content do not exist in our
service. There are no animations, no sound effects
or music, and no interactivity to speak of other than
turning a page (which is the same degree of interactivity
you nd in the physical books we all grew up with). The
only technology “enhancement” is time shifting the
storytelling by a familiar face.
While we haven’t yet studied the viewing side of the
equation, anecdotal evidence suggests that one reason
kids appear on more recordings than we expected is
that they love to play back videos of themselves.
What next?
If we’ve learned anything, it is that understanding how to
make a product an essentially seamless part of the fabric
of a user’s life is a long, slow, and difcult process. We are
always making small changes and polishing rough edges
to make the experience even easier to use. Enabling
recording of stories on iPad 2s created an entirely new
physical conguration in which to use our service: lying
down in bed. Unsurprisingly, this increased engagement,
given that in bed is often where parents read to kids.
Our main focus going forward is nding out just where
A Story Before Bed is nding its most receptive audience
and is as effective as possible in impacting customers’
lives. Right now we are studying usage in schools and
libraries, looking at how teachers integrate A Story Before
Bed into their curriculum and what we can do to help
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 4141
make it more effective. We will also be studying record-
ings created on our service and what role they are playing
in consumers’ lives. Finally, we will explore what role
feedback loops on consumption (e.g., Grandma can know
how many times her grandson watched the story she
recorded) could have on overall engagement with
customers.
Seattle-based entrepreneur Hillel Cooperman is co-creator of
A Story Before Bed and co-founder of Jackson Fish Market.
industry case 3
introduction
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joint media
engagement
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media engagement
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

design guide
In this section, we describe the ideal in JME, productive
joint media engagement, detailing the predictors of
such learning experiences and challenges to them.
What follows is constructed to inform the design of
future productive JME experiences: seven principles
that we believe can help foster productive JME and a
set of related factors that media producers should
consider in their designs. We end with a measure of
success—Story Visit is an exemplary product that
embodies many of the principles and factors outlined
in this guide.

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 4343
People jointly engage with media all the time. Couples surf
the web for shopping bargains, siblings work up a sweat in
Kinect Sports matches, and some families still watch
primetime TV together. But not all JME is created equal.
Certain media-based experiences can result in deeper
understanding, inspiration, greater uency, and physical,
emotional, or mental wellbeing than others. These types of
experiences are what educators and producers should aim
for when designing media for joint engagement. Here we
describe some of the conditions and processes that can
lead to productive JME as identied across the six case
studies. They are ideals and, as such, do not all need to be
present for productive interactions to occur. However, each
represents an important process that the Design Principles
later described (see page 45) were crafted to address.
1. Mutual engagement: Younger and older, more and less
knowledgeable, distant and near partners are equally
motivated to participate in the activity and nd it
sufciently appealing and/or challenging to sustain
engagement throughout. Neither partner is bored
nor participates out of sheer obligation to the other.
2. Dialogic inquiry: Activity should inspire collaborating
with others to make meaning of situations. As
suggested by the term coined by Gordon Wells (1999),
dialogic inquiry often takes the form of conversation,
but may be manifest in other communicative interac-
tions. Dialogic reading (Whitehurst,1992), as a specic
form of such inquiry that a more capable reader often
leads, prompts new readers to repeat words and elab-
orate on text content, giving them practice in
decoding and comprehension.
3. Co-creation: Partners don’t just consume media together;
they use media to build things, whether they are arti-
facts (e.g., comic strips, YouTube videos) or common
understandings. Intersubjectivity—shared understand-
ings constructed by people through their interactions—
also provides ground for communication and learning
(Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1987).
4. Boundary crossing: Productive JME spans time and
setting. More than just isolated, one-time events, these
interactions are stimulated and informed by partners’
past experiences, such as a child’s fascination with the
dinosaur exhibit at the museum. Similarly, they inspire
future activity, the way an anime tutorial on YouTube at
school might inspire coviewing partners to put pen to
paper and draw what was demonstrated later, at home.
what are we designing for?
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 4444
what are we designing for? productive JME
5. Intention to develop: At least one partner intends for
herself or a partner to grow through the activity. A child
may aim to level up in a game by closely watching how
their brother does it, or a parent may read her daughter
bedtime stories to foster her love for books. Intention
requires awareness of one’s own or another’s needs and/
or interests.
6. Focus on content, not control: Partners are able to see
through the delivery platform to the content. Technical
features and user interface neither distracts nor hinders
interactions between partners or partners’ interactions
with content. Language such as “Don’t touch!” or “Wait,
not yet.” are kept to a minimum, as are scolding gestures
and jockeying for controllers.
Challenges to productive JME
As the case studies suggest, it’s not enough to make media
content educational for partners to derive any benet
from it. There are challenges to achieving productive JME
that have little to do with the good intentions of media
producers or even media consumers, for that matter.
Here are some of the more salient ones that arose in
the case studies:
• Parents are too busy to sit down with their children
around media, or simply absent.
• Available parents may be unaware of their child’s learning
needs and interests or, even if they are, they may not
be versed in how to guide their children using media.
• For the most part, adults and children don’t enjoy
the same content.
• Desired forms of interaction don’t always happen
naturally around media.
• JME events have little continuity with or connection
to other family activities and experiences.
• Distractions arise that are either environmental
or presented by the medium itself.
Learn more
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Productive JME

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 4545
How can producers go about laying the groundwork for
people to engage meaningfully around media? How can
their designs address the challenges mentioned above?
The following design principles were conceived from a
series of discussions among the report’s authors and
further rened vis-à-vis the lessons learned from our
case studies.
These principles focus specically on JME among young
children and adults, and build upon other established
principles of effective learning design. As such, by no
means do we consider this list comprehensive in and
of itself. Rather, it’s a solid start to what will grow into
a more complete set of heuristics as we observe more
R&D work on joint media engagement across a wider
age span.
1. Kid-driven
Children naturally take initiative when it comes to learning
with media, whether by asking questions about a TV show
they’re watching, or pursuing a tech-based hobby. Adults
can help them achieve the goals they set for themselves,
but only if they’re aware of what these goals are. Build
tools and experiences that revolve around a child’s existing
interests, not just prescribed topics. To do so, producers
need to design mechanisms that make children’s interests
visible and can assist adults in responding to them.
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2. Multiple planes of engagement
With vast developmental differences between co-partici-
pants, one size simply cannot t all. All too often, media
is designed for the lowest common denominator to the
exclusion of all partners’ developmental abilities and inter-
ests—which merely patronizes and alienates. Keep everyone
engaged by offering content that suitably entertains and
sufciently challenges. Sesame Street has been using this
strategy for over four decades with proven success (Fisch
& Truglio, 2001). Children love Elmo and the cartoons, but
parents are drawn to sit down beside them knowing that
Jimmy Kimmel or Kobe Bryant may make a cameo appear-
ance. Sesame Street’s humorous allusions to popular culture
may y right over preschoolers’ heads, but they still learn
from the show, and learn even more when an adult watches
with them (Reiser, Tessmer, & Phelps, 1984).
3. Differentiation of roles
Assigning roles to participants so that tasks and content
match up to individual maturity is another way of ensuring
that everyone is suitably challenged and/or entertained.
This can also minimize confusion over who’s in charge of
what and mitigate the negative, controlling language that
usually accompanies such confusion. Have partners work
toward a common goal together, and force them to talk to
coordinate their efforts. Interaction often needs to be engi-
neered this way; less structure may fail to elicit dialogic
inquiry. Distinct roles, especially in team situations, can
also motivate individuals to try their best and not let their
partners down.
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 4747
4. Scaffolds to scaffold
Parents, teachers, and other adults may wish to share
educational resources with their children, but teaching
with media and new technologies doesn’t always come
naturally, not even for experienced instructors. Provide
guidance for the more capable partner in ways that don’t
require a lot of prior prep or extra time, actions that can
help ensure that the intended benets of the resource are
realized. In certain situations, however, explicit scaffolds
can turn the situation into something perceived as peda-
gogical, and can dampen a video game match or after-
school time in front of the TV. Subtler cues will sufce.
5. Previous/Next
Consider how a media resource can build upon a child’s
past experiences and existing curiosities—revealing
these experiences and curiosities to adult partners in
the process—and how it can motivate interest in or offer
knowledge for subsequent experiences. Design narratives
that span time and setting, and involve people from across
a child’s day (e.g., teachers, parents, siblings, peers). Also
consider using a variety of platforms (print, video, games)
to tell a single story. Transmedia storytelling, as this
strategy is often called, can deepen interest on focused
topics, and help children apply their knowledge across
settings.
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 4848
6. Co-creation
Give partners opportunities to make things together.
Consuming content together entails little interaction,
but creating a movie, story, game, or other artifact
requires quite a bit of dialog and coordination between
partners. Building upon #5, afterward, partners have
something to share with others who were not involved
in the creation process, such as siblings or grandparents.
The literacy, technical, expressive, and collaboration skills
children develop through these activities will prepare
them for school and work even further into their futures.
7. Fit
To get families to use a new platform with any regularity,
it should easily slot into existing routines, parent work
schedules, and classroom practices. There are, after all, only
so many hours in the day to accommodate new practices.
This may explain why mobile devices are nding pick-up
in households with young children: e-books on tablet PCs
can be taken to bed for story time and kids can play games
on handheld gaming devices in the back seats of cars and
supermarket checkout lines. If you want a particular popula-
tion (e.g., preschool teachers, Latino families) to adopt a
new platform, investigate their norms, values, and practices.
Don’t underestimate the importance of cultural factors in
getting people to embrace your resource.
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 4949
Purpose Technology
When creating media for joint
engagement, producers need to
make decisions about the design
of the medium (in-medium factors)
as well as what happens around
it (in-room factors; Stevens,
Satwicz, & McCarthy, 2008). This
table presents eight important
factors to consider when making
these decisions and, beneath
each, a set of specic issues
and questions generated at the
November 2010 workshop at
Northwestern.
Note that in-medium factors are
grouped on page 50, and in-room
factors are grouped on page 51.
other design considerations:
factors of JME
What is the intended outcome of
the activity?
• Fun vs. education
• Child-focused
• Shared vs. individual interest
development
• Antidote to boredom?
What technical features support
joint engagement?
• Asynchronicity
• Time shifting: replay-ability,
revisit-ability, pause-ability
• Record-ability
• Time and distance traveling
• Sustained learning/play over
multiple visits
• Size of screen
• Portability vs. non-portability
• Author-ability
• Connectivity
• Video teleconferencing
• Smart/just-in-time help
• Simplied setup
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 5050
What is the overarching narrative?
What topics and ideas are partners
exposed to?
• Connection to personal experience
• Production of media
• Working through stories and
concepts (where is the coherence
coming from?)
How do partners interact with content?
• Amount of interactivity
• Sitting back as a form of
participation (but being ready
to jump in)
• Stresses and supports
• Physical embodiment
• Number of access points to
control screen
What draws partners to participate?
What are the emotional consequences?
• Novelty of technology/platform
• Multigenerational appeal
• Use of merchandizing
(Star Wars, Harry Potter)
• Intergenerational in that both
generations are familiar with game
• Differences in affect (serious,
playful)
• For multiple ages vs. single age
• Customizability
Content Interface Appeal/Affect
other design considerations: factors of JME
In-medium factors
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 5151
Who are the partners? How are they
related? What are their individual
and cultural characteristics?
• Preexisting relationships between
co-participants
• Age and age differences of
participants
• Different levels of tech ability
• Comfort with technology vs.
comfort with content
• Tech savvy of parent (younger
parents)
• A ttention spans of individuals
Where and when does the activity
take place?
• School, home, afterschool center,
car, outside
• Which room in the house?
• Affordances of the physical space
• Drawing upon other resources that
support central medium
• Availability of manuals/other
resources in play experience
• Transmedia: Experiences across a
variety of media
• What happens before and after the
JME event?
• Media multitasking
• Length of time together
How do partners interact with
one another? What shapes these
interactions?
• Whose turf is it?
• Who drives the experience?
• How does turn-taking take place?
• How are attentions negotiated
through gesture/talk?
• Parallel activity
• Assigned tasks/roles
• Appropriation of controls
• Level of conict over control
• Face-to-face vs. side-by-side
• Physical proximity of participants
• Ease of determining joint attention
(knowing whether a partner is
looking in the same place)
• Language promotes sharing (or not)
• Content- vs. behavior-focused
language
• Legitimate peripheral participation
(Lave & Wenger, 1990)
other design considerations: factors of JME
Participants Interaction
In-room factors
Context
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 5252
story visit: coviewing
in a digital age
By Glenda Revelle
Story Visit (Rafe et al., 2011) was created by researchers
at Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto and the Joan Ganz
Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to facilitate joint
engagement among young children and adults over a
distance. Since preschool children have short attention
spans when talking on the telephone or over video chat,
Story Visit provides a familiar activity to engage them in
remote interactions: story time. Story Visit combines
video conferencing, connected e-books, and a beloved
children’s character overlaid in interactive video. Sesame
Street’s Elmo asks dialogic reading-style questions and
comments on story elements in the book, keeping
children entertained and providing a scaffolding model
for adults. Visit www.storyvisit.org to learn more.
Glenda Revelle, PhD is Associate Professor in Human
Development and Family Sciences at the University of Arkansas
and Principal Investigator and Cooney Center Project Lead for
ongoing research work conducted in collaboration with Nokia
Research Center.
Design principles
1. Kid-driven: Children can initiate interaction and
select the book.
2. Scaffolds to scaffold: Elmo models dialogic reading
techniques for the adult.
3. Multiple planes of engagement: Children love Elmo and
engaging picture books; adults love reading to their
young loved ones.
4. Fit: Reading books together is a familiar and cherished
routine in families.
Technical features that support JME
5. Video teleconferencing: Both parties see themselves
and their partners in equal-sized windows.
6. Simplied setup: Shared family user accounts allow
one person to set up online accounts for all remote
parties, easing the technical complexities of calling,
authentication, and hand-shaking.
7. Connectivity: The Internet enables real-time conversation
between family members who live around the block or
around the world from one another.
8. Just-in-time help: Elmo suggests context-specic
conversation topics on each page.
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 5353
story visit: coviewing in a digital age
Design principles
Technical features
that support JME
1. Kid-driven: Children
can initiate interaction
and select the book.
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

future directions for research
and development
At the most basic level, we have too narrow a
picture of how people are using media together
and what and how they are learning while doing so.

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 5555
Among the important areas for future research and
development are:
• The qualities of media design and deliberate use that
encourage productive JME. The design principles shared
above assume that there are forms of JME that can be
productive for learning and development, and that
we can design media and their delivery platforms to
encourage these productive forms. While these prin-
ciples address important issues that relate to who is
jointly engaging with the media, they do not address
the full range of the personal, social, and institutional
relationships of joint media use that matter. How, for
example, does a teacher or parent’s co-engagement
with media of a child’s choice (e.g., of a game, a
program, or an app) change its meaningfulness to
the child? What about peer or sibling variants of JME?
Surely those are likely to differ from JME between
adults and children. What about intergenerational JME
that spans more than one generation (e.g., grandpar-
ents and grandchildren)? Are there distinctly gendered
ways that JME happens among and between boys and
girls or mothers and fathers? And what happens when
we take advantage of the Internet and social media’s
potential for linking people who don’t have pre-
existing face-to-face relationships; what are the
opportunities, challenges, and even dangers of creating
contexts for JME among relative strangers who are
not bound together in other forms of traditional
community life?
• Families across a wide spectrum of American life. A partic-
ular emphasis belongs on the family as a locus of joint
media engagement, especially for young children. As is
so common with research in many areas, the bias has
been toward the study of middle-class families. That
leaves an incomplete picture of other families, including
lower-income families, non-traditional families, immi-
grant, and/or multi-lingual families. As we know
decisively from anthropology and the other cultural
sciences, everyday life differs greatly among American
families. As well, a lack of direct research on these fami-
lies sometimes invites stereotypes, such as those often
painted by surveys that associate lower-income families
with purportedly excessive use of commercial media. To
be sure, survey research can tell us how much and what
kind of media people report using, but it cannot tell us
what we most need to know: how people are using
media together and the outcomes of that use. Are chil-
dren learning with media? Are parents using media in
the context of a broader approach to cultivating their
children’s interests and development? How does media
future directions for research and development
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 5656
really t into family life, at home and in other contexts?
What are the culturally specic ways of using media
and integrating it into contemporary family life?
There are pockets of research that have begun to tackle
these questions (e.g., Ito et al., 2009; Takeuchi, 2011),
but more deep research
of this type on a greater
number and variety of
families is needed.
• The ecologies of time,
space, and attention. An
issue that intersects
with the quality of rela-
tionships among joint
media users involves the
ways that lives and
places are structured for
JME and how media use
is distributed across the
moments of our lives. Life has rhythms into which
media use ts or doesn’t. A better sense of the ow of
children and families across time and space would
surely give us a better sense of potential hot spots for
JME. As such, attention itself in our media-rich, multi-
tasking world becomes a critical resource to under-
stand; there can be no doubt that different forms of
media are competing for our attention in our homes
and in our public spaces. How should we respond
to that competition for our attention and our media
affections? These ecological questions also give some
substance to issues about
how different families
use media. For example,
differently resourced
families have different
available time and energy
budgets for supporting
or even observing their
children’s media engage-
ment. How do we take
that into account when
we try to design for
equitable opportunities
for JME?
• JME in schools and other designed learning environments.
A great possible benet in using commercial public
media for education is that young people have a rela-
tively shared knowledge of much of this content due
to signicant convergence of media in recent years
(Jenkins et al., 2006). As well, young people bring with
future directions for research and development
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 5757
them strong interests in these media in the form of
music, movies, television, video games, and so on.
Building on this familiarity and interest as a bridge
to more academic or disciplinary skills and knowledge
has been shown to be possible (Lee, 1997), but how
this could play out more broadly across educational
institutions is an open question. How should learning
environments be arranged for productive JME? How
do we select media that are appropriate for use in
educational environments? What kinds of new
training will teachers need to make this a reality?
• Developmental considerations. Finally, research into
JME should consider the changing needs of children
at different ages and developmental stages. As the
research has shown, certain forms of parental media-
tion have been found to be more prominent with young
children and others with school age children and teens.
Joint media engagement can be a useful support for
developing literacy, including basic reading ability,
cultural literacy, scientic literacy, media literacy, and
other 21st century skills. How might JME be conceptual-
ized less as a defensive tool and more as a way to teach
more critical literacy skills? Research has demonstrated
that children don’t develop a sense of competition until
they are out of elementary-school age (see Johnson,
1993). However, it may turn out that this and other
developmental rules of thumb are more exible than
existing research suggests. We still lack research that
tests these rules in every possible context or with every
possible media platform; variances may exist.
future directions for research and development
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

closing thoughts
A clear line can be drawn from early coviewing
interventions to the current initiatives to study
and design for joint media engagement.
In each case, the working assumption has been the same:
What goes on between people around media can be as
important as what is designed into the media. This, of
course, ies in the face of what we sometimes believe media
to be—namely, content that leaves a more or less determinate
impression on its audience. But context matters a good deal
more than that. In schools, it is an old idea to believe that a
curriculum’s enactment is impervious to local culture or can
be made teacher-proof. Such thinking should be put out to
pasture in the study and design of children’s media as well.
What children learn and do with media depends a lot on
the content of the media, but they depend perhaps as much
on the context in which they are used or viewed, and with
whom they are used or viewed. A focus on joint media
engagement—on what people do together with media—
highlights a different approach both to research and to
design. The ultimate goal of the emerging work represented
in this report is to better understand young children’s
everyday uses of media, in context, so that we may build
better media-based learning experiences for them.

appendix

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 6060
the new coviewing workshop
at Northwestern University
November 9, 2010
School of Education and Social Policy, Annenberg Hall
Sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
the MacArthur-UCHRI Digital Media and Learning
Research Hub at the University of California, Irvine.
Agenda
9:30am Welcome and workshop goals
9:45am A brief history of coviewing
10:15am Video provocation: What does coviewing
look like today?
11:15am The new coviewing: Joint media engagement
research demonstrations
12:15pm Break
12:30pm Lunch at the Allen Center: Demonstration
of Electric Racer R&D project
1:30pm Other R&D tools/products that support joint
media engagement
1:45pm Design goals and challenges: Designing for
different settings and populations
2:30pm Break
2:45pm Setting an R&D agenda
3:45pm Next steps and wrap-up
4:00pm Adjourn
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 6161
Participants
Alexis Lauricella, Northwestern University
Allison Druin, HCIL, University of Maryland
Angela Rudolph, Joyce Foundation
Bill Penuel, Center for Technology in Learning, SRI
International
Brigid Barron, Stanford University, LIFE Center
Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Danielle Keifert, Northwestern University
Denise Nacu, Urban Education Institute, University
of Chicago
Ellen Wartella, Northwestern University
Eva Lam, Northwestern University
Hillel Cooperman, Jackson Fish Market
Jim Gray, LeapFrog
Lauren Penney, Northwestern University
Lewis Bernstein, Sesame Workshop
Lori Takeuchi, Joan Ganz Cooney Center
Michael Levine, Joan Ganz Cooney Center
Mindy Brooks, Sesame Workshop
Pryce Davis, Northwestern University
Rebecca Herr-Stephenson, Joan Ganz Cooney Center
Reed Stevens, Northwestern University, LIFE Center
Rosemarie Truglio, Sesame Workshop
Roy Pea, Stanford University, LIFE Center
Ryan Blitstein, SGE Fund
Sara DeWitt, PBS KIDS Interactive
Shalom Fisch, MediaKidz Research & Consulting
Shelley Pasnik, Center for Children & Technology,
Education Development Center
Siri Mehus, Graduate Student, University of Washington
Whitney Stein, MacArthur Foundation
the new coviewing workshop at Northwestern University
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 6262
Malone and Lepper’s (1987) book chapter “Making
learning fun: A taxonomy of intrinsic motivations for
learning,” is a seminal work on design for learning. The
authors propose a straightforward set of heuristics for
designing intrinsically motivating learning environments
(e.g., games), which they argue yield deeper learning
than ones offering extrinsic rewards.
For human-computer interaction designers, web usability
guru Jakob Nielsen provides 10 Usability Heuristics (originally
developed in Molich & Nielsen, 1990) on www.useit.com.
Multimedia Learning (2001), by psychologist Richard E.
Mayer, goes beyond the purely verbal by combining words
and pictures for effective teaching. Drawing upon 10 years
of research, Mayer provides seven principles for the
design of multimedia messages and a cognitive theory
of multimedia learning.
Famed designer/psychologist Donald Norman’s The Design
of Everyday Things (2002) is a classic on the cognitive
aspects of design. It contains examples of both good and
bad design and simple rules that designers can use to
improve the usability of objects as diverse as cars,
computers, doors, and telephones.
Written for game scholars, game developers, and interac-
tive designers, Salen and Zimmerman’s (2004) Rules of Play
is a textbook, reference book, and comprehensive attempt
to establish a solid theoretical framework for the
emerging discipline of game design.
Wiggins and McTighe’s (2005) Understanding by Design
promotes the notion of “backward design,” a method of
curriculum design that sets goals before choosing activi-
ties or content in order to promote deeper understanding
for students.
Aleven, Meyers, Easterday, and Ogan (2011) provide a
brief but thoughtful examination of learning design in
their article, “Toward a framework for the analysis and
design of educational games.” It references and builds
upon established models and principles of sound
learning design.
7 reliable sources of design advice
introduction
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case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
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development
closing thoughts
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 6363
LIFE Center
Joan Ganz Cooney Center
at Sesame Workshop
The New Coviewing
Digital Media and
Learning Research Hub
relevant websites
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

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design guide
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for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
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the new coviewing: joint media engagement 7171
As Director of Research for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center,
Dr. Lori Takeuchi oversees research projects and partner-
ships. She started at the Cooney Center as a postdoctoral
fellow after earning her PhD in the Learning Sciences
and Technology Design program at Stanford University,
where she was a research assistant on LIFE Center
projects. Dr. Takeuchi spent more than a decade designing
and producing curriculum-based science software in the
greater Boston and San Francisco Bay areas. Before that,
she managed the Instructional Television Department
at New York’s Thirteen/WNET. Dr. Takeuchi conducts
research on how children use technology across the
various settings of their lives, and the implications
these tools hold for their cognitive, social, and identity
development.
Professor Reed Stevens is a Professor of Learning
Sciences in the School of Education and Social Policy at
Northwestern University. For the past seven years, he
has co-led the NSF Learning in Informal and Formal
Environments (LIFE) Center. In the Center and in his
prior research, Professor Stevens specializes in eld
studies of learning outside of K-12 schooling, often with
a focus on STEM topics. This has included studies in
interactive science centers, professional architectural
and engineering rms, early childhood learning centers,
and family homes. The goal of this work is to broaden
the eld’s understanding of learning and to better
understand learning as a trans-setting phenomenon
(i.e., across homes, schools, etc.). Much of his recent
ethnographic work has been focused on children’s uses
of and learning with popular media, including televi-
sion and video games.
about the authors
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 7272
Thank you to Brigid Barron for her thoughtful review of
the report; Ellen Wartella for her guidance in helping us
form the JME consortium; Lewis Bernstein and Rosemarie
Truglio for the wisdom of their experience and enthusiasm
looking ahead; and to Michael Levine for his unwavering
support.
acknowledgements
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

the new coviewing: joint media engagement 7373
The LIFE Center
LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) is a multi-institution
NSF Science of Learning Center hosted at the University of Washington in
partnership with Stanford University and SRI International. The LIFE Center
seeks to develop and test principles about the social foundations of human
learning in informal and formal environments with the goal of enhancing
human learning from infancy to adulthood.
www.life-slc.org
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop
The Cooney Center conducts research related to middle childhood (ages 5 to 11)
and strives to understand the relationships that exist between digital media and
the particular developmental needs of children in this age range. Our work seeks
to identify the essential knowledge, aptitudes, and attitudes necessary to chil-
dren’s success today and in their future adult lives, and answer related questions
about the tools, resources, assessments that best support learning and
achievement.
www.joanganzcooneycenter.org
introduction
the new coviewing:
joint media
engagement
case studies of joint
media engagement
design guide
future directions
for research and
development
closing thoughts
appendix
references

© The Joan Ganz Cooney Center 2011. All rights reserved.
This report and the November 2010 workshop that generated many
of the ideas included herein were made possible through a generous
grant from the MacArthur-UCHRI Digital Media and Learning Research
Hub at the University of California, Irvine. Any opinions, ndings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are
those of the authors and do not necessarily reect the views of the
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation or The Regents of the
University of California.
A full-text PDF of this report is available as a free download from
www.joanganzcooneycenter.org.
Suggested citation: Takeuchi, L., & Stevens, R. (2011). The new
coviewing: Designing for learning through joint media engagement.
New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.
1900 Broadw ay
New York, NY 10023
(212) 595-3456
cooney.center@sesame.org
www.joanganzcooneycenter.org
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