GlassLab, a
leader in exploring the potential for digital games to serve both as potent
learning environments and real-time assessments of student learning, officially
joined the LRNG movement last month in a bicoastal series of launch
events in Washington D.C. and San Francisco.
LRNG’s goal is ambitious — to redesign learning
for the connected age — and GlassLab has been tapped to play an integral role. GlassLab
is merging into the LRNG work, envisioning an opportunity to scale up
its reach to classrooms, businesses, community institutions and
individual youth nationwide.
Under LRNG,
GlassLab will continue to design and develop Serious Games for 21st century
learning and assessment — only now it will have broader and deeper channels of
distribution. In addition, GlassLab will develop the nationwide LRNG
platform, a youth-facing website that will be the backbone of LRNG.
The LRNG
platform will enable partners to connect gameplay to real-world application
by putting "Serious Games" into playlists, which empower youth to make clear
connections between virtual gameplay and tangible real-world outcomes, such as
systems thinking, engineering and design.
In
addition, GlassLab Games expects to enable its partners to integrate, review,
publish and iterate products faster and easier than ever before. By the end of
this year, GlassLab Games will have published:
●
The developer CMS, allowing partners to
integrate the SDK, define reporting rules, and launch on GlassLab Games more
quickly; and
●
The developer portal, which will enable GlassLab’s
partners to view and analyze gameplay metrics.
About LRNG and Collective Shift
Via:
MacArthur Foundation - MacArthur Spins Off Digital Media & Learning Work with $25 Million
Seed Investment
Early October,
the MacArthur Foundation announced it had spun off its Digital Media and Learning
program into a separate nonprofit entity called Collective Shift, whose mission is to redesign social systems for the connected age.
With $25
million in seed funding, Collective Shift’s first endeavor, called LRNG,
aims to connect schools, businesses, libraries, museums, and city leaders in
efforts to build new "ecosystems of learning.”
The new
organization will seek to rapidly expand MacArthur-supported demonstration
projects in Chicago, Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Washington D.C. piloted over the
past three years and now dubbed Cities of LRNG.
LRNG is led by Collective Shift CEO Connie
Yowell, former director of education at MacArthur and COO Jessica Lindl, former
executive director of GlassLab.
“We
built a very strong North Star about where the future of learning needed to
go,” said Yowell in an interview with EdSurge.
“What we didn’t do was build an infrastructure to scale the future of
learning.”
Connecting
the digital and physical experience—one of the tenets of “connected
learning”—requires buy-in from local governments as well as companies, schools,
youth clubs and other community institutions. “This scale can’t happen with just
one foundation or institution. We need an entity that can sit at the
intersection of the for-profit sector, creative and entertainment [sectors],
and the nonprofit and public sectors”, she added.
GlassLab
will merge with Collective Shift, initially to build out the LRNG
analytics platform, and design and develop breakthrough LRNG games and
an engaging youth platform for accessing learning opportunities.
“The
backend that powers the data and analytics for GlassLab is the same platform we
are using for LRNG,” said Jessica Lindl in the same interview with
EdSurge. “We’re not looking at
just game-based assessment, but leverage data and analytics to personalize
experience outside the classroom.”
The Collective
Shift team, numbering roughly 30 people (including former GlassLab
employees), will be based in Redwood City, CA, with satellite offices in
Chicago and Los Angeles.