What My Little Pony Can Teach Us About Interest-Driven Learning

With its roots dating to popular television shows of the 1960s such as Star Trek, fanfiction has blossomed into an extremely widespread form of creative expression. In the past 20 years, amateur fanfiction writers, often young people between the ages of 13 and 25, have published over 61.5 billion words of fiction in online repositories, an amount that rivals the Google Books English fiction corpus of 80 billion words covering the past five centuries. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is taking place online in novel and unexpected ways. Dr. Katie Davis will discuss insights from her book, Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring (Aragon & Davis, 2019). Davis will describe how young people are utilizing new forms of technology to mentor each other in writing fanfiction, and developing their writing skills in the process. Over the course of five years, Davis and her co-author Dr. Cecilia Aragon conducted original mixed-methods research of online fanfiction repositories, combining their respective skills in data science and education. During the course of their research, they discovered a new kind of mentoring, which they call distributed mentoring, that is uniquely suited to networked communities, where people of all ages and experience levels engage with and support one another through a complex, interwoven tapestry of interactive, cumulatively sophisticated advice and informal instruction. Davis will use the insights from this research to reflect on what it is, exactly, about networked publics that can so effectively support interest-driven learning, and she will consider whether it's possible to apply these lessons to formal education environments.