Teaching "Ahab": An Interview with MC Lars

Not terribly long ago, I made a blog post discussing the nerdcore performer MC Lars and his music video, "Ahab," as appropriations from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

We have been using Lars's video as a resource for our Teacher's Strategy Guide for "Reading in a Participatory Culture." I ended the post with a plea to help me get in touch with MC Lars and it's a tribute to the network which has emerged around this blog that a little later, I did hear from the performer (and ex-Lit major) who was excited to learn that we were deploying his performance in schools. Since then, MC Lars agreed to respond to a set of questions submitted to him by Rebecca Rupert's students from Aurora Alternative High School in Bloomington IN. It serves students who have not experienced success in traditional settings. Rupert's English Language Arts classes are part of the pilot program for our project. I added a few more questions in the mix myself designed to place the students' questions in a fuller context.

How would you define nerdcore?

To me, nerdcore hip-hop is a genre of music that has lyrical content of things "nerds" would typically be interested in: computers, Star Wars, Final Fantasy, Magic the Gathering, Lord of the Rings, etc. Culturally, nerdcore "trades on" the implied notion that "authentic" hip-hop artists from urban areas spend less time reading comic books and more time "doing drive-by shootings", hence the instanty novelty appeal of the genre to any one familiar with pop culture. One can also ascertain the implication that nerdcore is "4th generation hip- hop created by 3rd generation hip-hop's target audience", as a new generation of thousands of rappers who make beats on their computers can attest. Nerdcore can be viewed as hip-hop created by a generation of artists whose parents may have grown up listening to artists of the genre's golden age, such as Chuck D, KRS-One, and Eric B & Rakim (much like the punk generation grew up listening to the three chord progressions of the early Beatles and distilled it into a more distilled presentation). If one wants to be cynical and explore how hip-hop has transcended racial and class boundaries, there is an implication that nerdcore is "white hip-hop", in lack of acknowledgement of its African American cultural roots.

How did you get involved in the movement?

I started out playing guitar in punk bands as a teenager growing up on the Monterey Peninsula. When I started by undergraduate work at Stanford, I was drawn to KZSU, a station that proudly boasts having "the oldest hip-hop show on the West Coast". One of my projects was to alphabetize the vinyl library of thousands and thousands of records... and this gave me a quick education on every important performer in the first 30 years of hip-hop. I continued writing and performing my rap songs, and when I went to study in Oxford, I made friends with local indie rock bands who asked me to open for them. This led to me getting signed to a British label and everything else that followed. When "nerdcore" became an "authentic" genre in 2003/2004, I looked it up on Wikipedia and saw that I was officially part of the movement. Reading more about it I was happy to have the label as a description of part of what I do.

How do you see "Ahab" as part of the larger nerdcore movement?

There isn't an MC in the scene who raps about 19th century American literature. I

thought it was time to make waves, so to speak. Nerdcore is an important cultural

phenomenon because it gives voice to people who write songs about things they love, and nerdcore gives license to people to rap about very "un-hip-hop" topics. I enjoyed my literature studies in college and wanted to write a song about one of my favorite books, and because only people with a certain education and understanding will understand what I'm doing, that makes "Ahab" part of the larger nerdcore movement. My hope is to inspire kids to read more Melville and turn off their televisions (after watching my video, of course).

One of the students got very passionate in arguing that mc Chris was better at rapping than you. This raises the question: How do we evaluate appropriations and remixing of materials within nerdcore?

Great question. Chris Ward is a talented rapper with a strong flow whose success can be directly attributed to his voice work for Cartoon Network and his comedic blurring of the line between "real hip-hop culture" and "nerd culture". He trades on the notion, as mentioned in my response in your first question, that nerdcore is unique in its lacking of songs about "bitches, blunts, and 40's". But Chris surprises people with album titles like "Life's a Bitch and I'm Her Pimp" and songs about recreational drugs, to show that nerds can relate to comedic elements of gangsta rap culture in their own ways. One might argue that he is a better rapper than me because of this, but I would argue that his act plays on elements of mocking African-American culture and verges on being a minstrel show. His voice and grammatical choices emulate African American culture in a way that would make the typical person laugh, this being its primary selling point. We evaluate mc chris's appropriation of culture by his closeness to "authentic hip-hop" and his use of comedy in the blurring of lines between "gangsta" and "nerd" culture. Other elements for evaluation of appropriation and remixing include musical craftmanship in constructing "beats", vocabulary, and originality in subject matter in writing lyrics.

Can you share some of your own experiences as a reader of Moby- Dick? When did you first read the novel? Do you consider yourself a fan of Moby-Dick?

I first read Moby-Dick as a Junior in college. My professor Jay Fliegelman taught a class on Melville, and we read Moby-Dick and some of Melville's shorter stories. I remember being frustrated at first with the slow pacing of the novel, but found myself being drawn into it one chapter at a time. I love the metaphor of the Pequod as a cross section of 19th century American life, with all of the racial and class diversity of American society at the time, and the depth of the characters who reflected different elements of American life during that time. The layers of metaphor and allegorical references are dense, and the footnotes to the Norton Critical Edition were very helpful in discerning the meaning. I am definitely a fan of Moby-Dick, especially because of the overarching theme of mankind's hubris in the face of Mother Nature's sublime indifference.

You've sung about the so-called "iGeneration" in ways that are very similar to our concept of new media literacies. What do you think this generation is bringing to the culture and what do you see as the relationship of these new ways of thinking to the things we've traditionally taught through school?

The iGeneration is the generation that grew up with an innate familiarity with the

internet. Kids can instantly access music by any band, old or new, and can find

information and background info on any film or book ever written through any medium they want. We are used to hyper-stimulation, chatting on AOL instant messenger while

emailing friends while watching a movie while download torrents while updating our

websites. We are used to creating our own niches within the subcultures through which

define ourselves, through Myspace pages of our local bands, or YouTube videos of our

local comedy troupes. But technology has shortened our attention spans as well, to the

point where if we can't "Wiki" something and understand it instantly, we move on.

Students can now comprehend the world a lot faster than the previous generation, because we are used to old technologies and are adept at using new technologies more quickly. We are used to processing many streams of information at once and are more discerning about the sources and intentions of those preventing the information (.com, .org, .gov etc.). Basically the "iGeneration" is the "information / internet" generation who is bringing new technologies and creative ways of implementing them and has the

responsibility of using their powers to leave the world a better place when we go. With

all of the technology at their disposal, the iGeneration could come together and find

cures for AIDS and for global warming, if we put down the Wii controller and log off of

Myspace for an afternoon. It's an exciting time to be alive and affecting culture.

What follows are the student's questions and his responses, including Lars's advice to teachers who want to engage the "iGeneration" with excitement about traditional literature.

Why did you want to make this video?

To retell Moby-Dick in an engaging and exciting way and to promote my 2006 release The Graduate. With our media-saturated culture, videos are an important way to promote albums and "Ahab" was a fun single from the last record.

How long did it take you to make this video?

I was on tour in Australia for most of June of 2006 when preparation for "Ahab" began, but the set designers and artists spent three weeks creating the sets, ship, and fish costumes. When I got back, we rented a warehouse in Brooklyn and filmed for two hot summer days, from 6 am to midnight. The post-production lasted another two weeks, compositing such scenes as the boat floating in the sea, the transition between the sailors on-deck and below the ship, and and exiting of the whale's stomach to reveal a cast of students taking bows. The entire project took 6 weeks of very hard work.

Why was it so cheap?

We had a finite video budget of $3,000, which is why the aesthetic differs from a Kanye West video. That's why it looks "cheap", or quite conveniently, like a school play.

Why did you put people in fishy costumes?

I made the video to show students how books can help us explore worlds we've never been to before. I wanted to bring the world of Herman Melville's dark tale to light, as done through the eyes of a 4th grade production. Our aesthetic for costume design was that of the feel of 80's-era PBS learning programs, such as Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow, where the fantasy world of imagination and the real world were brought together with color costumes and low budgets. The entire video was shot in just a few conjoined takes, to give the feel of a live performance. Having kids reenact every aspect of the novel was a pivotal part of the framing device of the presentation is a children's play for adults, which is why the choreographed dancing in the fish costumes was a key part in the design and presentation. The charm of a grade-school production is meant to help emulsify Melville's weighty prose.

Why is the whale limpy?

I'd like to have an erudite, complex answer for you, but the truth is that we had a

relatively small service elevator we had to use to get the Moby Dick model up to the

third floor of the warehouse where we shot. Moby was carried by three very patient PA's on the set, who walked around with walkie talkies and listened as the director Sean

Donnelly shouted directions to them. The tail was originally designed to move up and

down by the people in the costume, but it was snapped in half when we crammed the

costume into the elevator. Hence its unintentional "limpy-ness" - giving it a relaxed,

limp appearance, and perhaps more charm.

What point were you trying to make--were you trying to make fun of Moby-Dick or what was the point behind it?

As a writer, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope are big influences on my work. Swift

reveals mankind's shortcomings through his portrayal of the human condition and Pope was a master of the satirical verse and social commentary. Both of these writers were

influences on me as I worked to retell Moby-Dick for a younger audience to remind us that hubris can be deadly, and until we learn that the sublime power of nature is nothing to be tempted, we will be doomed to repeat Ahab's fate. When I wrote the song in 2005, the Iraq War was in its relatively early stages and many people in the media were comparing Bush to Ahab, a crazed leader in search of the white whale of terrorism, seeking justice in a confused and self-destructive way. It made me think about how relevant the story still was, so I decided to retell the book for a new audience,

updating it with modern references (Steve Wozniak, Supergrass, etc.) and compressed it into a Wiki-Wiki version, the cliff notes version of the cliff notes. It serves as a

warning for future politicians who may become crazed with power, presented in a fun,

catchy way.

How would you teach Moby-Dick to make it fun for students?

Young people have been brought up in a postmodern cut-and-past culture, replete with pop culture references and media saturations. A steady beat and cadence draws listeners in, as they are used to hyper- stimulation. Hip-hop is a very, very effective way to pique students' interest, in any topic, since it is the platonic manifestation of postmodern culture. I am intrigued by the lineage between Chaucer and KRS-One, a tradition of verse that reflects our struggles and victories as human beings.

As a lesson plan, I would encourage students to read Moby-Dick and find characters with which they identify. I would encourage students to keep an eye open for some of the less famous characters, such as Daggoo or Tashtego. I would then ask them to each write an 8 to 16 line verse that interprets their characters' experiences in the novel, and ask them to explore how these characters could be translated to a modern context.... either through their similarities to modern celebrities or how they reflect struggles of notably personalities in current events. For instance, Fedallah's stowaway experiences could shine light on immigration policies, while Pip could shine light on child labor laws or the class struggle.

I would then have students get into groups of three to four people each, bringing their verses together and create a song. I'd ask them to find similar themes between themselves to find a "hook" for the chorus song. They could then think of a lyrical chorus that reflects these similarities between character, and perform the "rap" for the class. Some instrumental beats that could convey the cadences and rhythms of such a translation are as follow:

Hip Hop by Dead Prez

Shook Ones Part II by Mobb Deep

MC's Act Like They Don't Know by KRS-One

This would show students how the plights of the characters in Moby-Dick relate to current events, and through an updated presentation of the form, this exercise would also inspire them to find more similarities between works 19th century literature and postmodern life in the 21st century.

Speaking of Geeks

A little while ago, I mentioned that the CMS grad students had been reading The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in anticipation of a conversation with its author, Junot Diaz. Given the interest this generated for some readers, I wanted to add a pointer to the podcast version of that exchange. Diaz offers a masterful account for why he thinks comics, science fiction, and horror may speak truths that are excluded from official histories or from "serious literature" and explains how his novel was structured in part around borrowings from The Fantastic Four and Dune. Enjoy.

Youth, New Media Literacies, and Civic Engagement

Editor's note: I wrote this post originally for the Knight Foundation's Idea Lab blog where it appeared earlier this week. It has generated enough interest there that I figure it would also be relevant to my regular readers here. This fall, I am going to be teaching a course on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement, which is designed to help facilitate conversations across two of the projects we run through the Comparative Media Studies program: the Center for Future Civic Media, funded by the Knight Foundation as a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, and Project NML (New Media Literacies), which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. My goal in the class is to systematically explore a rapidly expanding body of literature which deals with the ways that new forms of "participatory culture" are impacting how young people think about themselves as citizens and community members. Most of this material is available online and so I wanted to share with you some pointers in hopes that it may help spark larger conversations around these issues.

I plan to open the course with reflections on the current presidential campaign season, the role of both old and new media, and signs of increased voter registration and activity by young Americans. To set the stage, I am having my students read from several recent news stories on the campaign, including:

David von Drehle, "The Year of the Youth Vote," Time , Jan. 31 2008.

David Talbot, "How Obama Really Did It," Technology Review, September/October 2008,

Marc Ambinder, "HisSpace," The Atlantic, June 2008

In the first class session, we will be looking at the images constructed around the two candidates through their advertising, websites, and official biography videos. The best online resource for these materials is realclearpolitics, a site which aggregates recent media coverage of the campaigns, including collecting current political advertising. I plan to discuss the roles which YouTube played early in the campaign season, a topic which I discuss in a new "afterward" to the recently released paperback edition of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. And I plan to explore the ways that the McCain campaign is taking aim at Obama's blurring of the lines between popular culture and politics, a topic I addressed in a recent post on my blog. We also will be placing these materials in a larger historical context by looking at earlier forms of political advertising. You can find such materials through the Living Room Candidate, an archive created by the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY, and through Project Look Sharp's curricular materials on studying presidential campaigns.

From here, the course will progress across a range of related topics including:

• New Media Literacies
• Civic Engagement
• Youth as Cybercitizens
• Digital Ethics
• Is There a Digital Generation?
• Children's Fiction and the Fiction of Childhood
• Expression and Participation
• Games and Virtual Worlds
• Collective Intelligence and Social Networks
• Identity and Community
• The Digital Divide and the Participation Gap

The only full book we are reading is Cory Doctorow's recent young adult novel, Little Brother, which deals with the politics of cyberactivism and homeland security. Check out my blog post on this important novel.

We will also be reading extensively from the recently published Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, written by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser from Harvard's Berkman Center.

We will also be drawing extensively from the new books, recently released by the MIT Press and the MacArthur Foundation, as part of their Digital Media and Learning Series -- Civic Life Online;Digital Media, Youth and Credability; Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected; The Ecology of Games; Learning Race and Ethnicity; Youth, Identity and Digital Media. All of these books are available online for free access and they include work by many of the most important contemporary thinkers on youth and media literacy.

I also anticipate working with the report out from an extensive ethnographic study of young people's online lives being conducted by Mimi Ito, Barrie Thorne, Michael Carter, and an army of graduate students from USC and Berkley; this document will be released later this term, but you can read about the research.

For a counter perspective on many of these issues, my students will also be reading from Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30).

And I will be having students look at parts of Ben Rigby's Mobilizing Generation 2.0. I recently interviewed Rigby for my blog.

Throughout the course, we will be looking at a range of recent white papers which offer cutting edge perspectives on these issues, including:

• Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century
• Twenty First Century Skills
• The Civic Mission of Schools
• Cynthia Gibson, Citizens at the Center: A New Approach to Civic Engagement
• Aspen Institute, Civic Engagement on the Move: How Mobile Media Is Serving the Public Good
• Carrie James with Katie Davis, Andrea Flores, James M. Francis, Lindsey Pettingill, Margaret Rundle and Howard Gardner, Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media

And we will be eagerly awaiting the report soon to be issued by the Pew Center on the Internet & American Life which deals with the ways young people's experiences as gamers might impact their lives as citizens.

Along the way, we will be exploring two significant PBS documentaries, both of which can now be accessed online -- Growing Up Online and By the People: Citizenship in the 21st Century

The Center will also be hosting two public events through the MIT Communications Forum this fall focused around the Presidential Campaign and the role of media. You can find out more information about these events and hear podcast versions of previous Forum events here.

I hope to offer some more reports on the class and how it is informing our work at the Center for Future Civic Media in the weeks ahead. But I'm hoping the above may introduce you to some materials you might not know about otherwise.

Mobilizing Generation 2.0: An Interview with Ben Rigby

This fall, I will be teaching a course on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement. The class is designed to provide a bridge between the research we are doing for the Center for Future Civic Media and Project New Media Literacies. It also hopes to explore in depth a range of current research about how the new media landscape is impacting how young people learn to think of themselves as citizens. Here's the course description:

New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement

What does it mean to be 'literate' and how has this changed as a consequence of the introduction of new communication technologies? What social skills and cultural competencies do young people need to acquire if they are going to be able to fully participate in the digital future? What are the ethical choices young people face as participants in online communities and as producers of media? What can Wikipedia and Facebook teach us about the future of democratic citizenship? How effective is Youtube at promoting cultural diversity? What relationship exists between participatory culture and participatory democracy? How is learning from a video game different from learning from a book? What do we know about the work habits and learning skills of the generation that has grown up playing video games? What impact are young voters having on the 2008 elections and why? What lessons can we take from the study of virtual communities which might help us enhance civic engagement at the local level? Who is being left behind in the digital era and what can we do about it? This class is designed to introduce students to a new wave of research which is bringing together scholars from many different disciplines to ask new questions, pose new models, and try new experiments to better imagine the future of American education and of democracy itself.

Much of the reading in the course will be drawn from a series of books recently produced by the MIT Press and the MacArthur Foundation. These books reflect a national push by the MacArthur Foundation to explore how young people are learning informally through the affordances of new media and what implications this has for the future of schools, libraries, public institutions, the workplace, and the American family. Researchers and guests from The MIT Center for Future Civic Media and Project New Media Literacies will play an active role in the course, sharing projects and curricular materials under development, grounding our more theoretical considerations with real world perspectives. Students will have an opportunity to explore these ideas through research papers but they will also be asked to get involved in the development of projects which are designed to have an impact on real world communities.

If you happen to be a student at MIT, Harvard, or Wellesley, I hope you will consider taking the class this fall. The class meets Mondays, 11-2 pm, and Weds, 3:30-5 pm. I am hoping to write here from time to time about some of the ideas that emerge from the class. We will also be hosting several discussions through the MIT Communications Forum this term focusing on the roles which new media played in the 2008 Presidential Campaigns.

To whet your appetite on this topic, I wanted to share here an interview with Ben Rigby, the author of a recent book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0, which offers case studies and insights for activists and campaigns as they think about how to reach and court young voters. The book includes discussions of blogs, social networks, mobile technologies, wikis, and virtual worlds, among other web 2.0 practices, and features contributions from a range of key thinkers including danah boyd, Seth Godin, Mitch Kapor, and Beth Kanter. Rigby, who has developed web and mobile strategies for a range of nonprofit and Fortune 1000 companies, founded MobileVoter.org, an organization dedicated to using new media to politically empower young people.

You organize your book around new technologies and platforms. Yet at every civic media event I've been at lately, the core debate has been whether the change is

being brought about by new technologies or by new social and cultural practices

which help to foster a greater sense of civic engagement. Is this a false

debate? Where do you fall in terms of the relative importance of technologies

vs. social and cultural practices?

It's absolutely a false debate. Technology is a social and cultural practice. It means nothing outside of the context of the people who use it. This question led me to re-read the paper that inspired me to pursue a thesis program in Science, Technology, and Society back in college. It's called "Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians" by Lauriston Sharp.

To summarize Sharp's brief ethnography: The Yir Yoront is a Western Australian aboriginal group that, by the early 1900s, had very little exposure to any social group outside of their limited radius (and virtually no contact with non-aboriginal peoples). The stone axe played a central role in their lives as a productivity tool, but most important, as a lynch-pin of social relations. Being difficult to manufacture, these axes were in short supply. While any Yir Yaront was permitted to use one, their use was controlled by adult men. Women and children who wanted to use an axe were required to get one from a man (usually a direct relation) and needed to return it promptly and in good condition. A man referred to his axe as "my axe," but women and children never did. The axe also figured prominently in trading relations with nearby groups. The Yir Yaront traded sting-ray-barb tipped spears for raw stone with their neighbors to the south (where quarries were located). Again, adult males figured prominently in these relations as they were the primary producers of spears and lead negotiators.

When an Anglican mission arrived in 1915, the missionaries set up a plan for "raising native living standards." In return for undertaking certain tasks or behaviors, the missionaries distributed incentive goods to the Yir Yaront. The missionaries quickly discovered that their steel axes were valued more than any other trading item. Thus, they'd give out these axes as incentives for participation in their programs and as gifts during holidays. They'd give them to men, women, and children indiscriminately.

Sharp describes the events that follow the introduction of the steel axe as "the collapse and destruction of all Yir Yoront culture." Wives and children no longer needed to defer to their superordinate male. Men, in turn, became insecure as they questioned their roles and masculinity. The hierarchy of 'ownership' melted, which resulted in the rise in stealing and trespassing. Trading links weakened as stone was no longer highly valued. Associated trade ceremonies took on less significance and became poorly attended.

Frustratingly, Sharp's ethnography leaves off there. It appears that he left the field just as these monumental transitions were taking place. I haven't been able to find any followup reporting. It's the ultimate cliff hanger (if any readers have additional information on this group, please send!). He reports, somewhat melodramatically, that the Yir Yaront's southern trading partners passed through a similar set of cultural transformations which resulted in an "appallingly sodden and complete cultural disintegration, and a demoralization of the individual such as has seldom been recorded elsewhere."

Even without the melodrama or the end of the story, it's clear that a technical innovation (or introduction of such) sparked the transformation of a society. However, because the technology in question is a simple axe, it's easy to disambiguate the tool from the social and cultural practice that surrounds it. Here, the tool gets moderately more effective at its ostensible task (chopping), but it's how the Yir Yaront wove it into their life that's critical. If it were any garden variety tool, that'd be one thing. But the axe was central to the Yir Yaront hierarchy and belief system. It's impossible to understand the axe without understanding its cultural context - it doesn't make sense.

Similarly, email, social networking, and YouTube don't mean anything by themselves. They are what we make of them - and how we believe in them. Peer production of media is significant because of the way that we value media. Technology is inherently social.

In fact, this question ties into my motivations for writing Mobilizing Generation 2.0. In order to make social change, you have to understand -a- what the axe does (chopping) and -b- how people value it (cultural context). Of course, there's a chasm in complexity between the axe and today's technologies such that even understanding -a- is something of a challenge. However, it's -b- that's really important. And you can't get to -b- without first getting to -a-.

So the book is organized around our most significant axes: blogs, social networking, mobile phones, wikis, video and photo sharing, online mapping, and virtual worlds. It intends to give readers a crash course in understanding -a-. Then, once that territory is covered, the book goes into -b-: how young people are using their technologies and how organizations are, in turn, using these same technologies to connect with youth.

We have a curious relationship with the word "technology." In common speech, we use it to define a subset of our tools which are unfamiliar to some, but not all, members our social group. Thus, tools such as tshirts, shoes, and axes are just "things"... things familiar to everyone. But microchips, cell phones, and Web sites are "technologies." Of course, they all belong to a kind of tool continuum - and it's helpful to understand "technology" in this context.

There's a moment when a tool stops being referred to as a "technology" and becomes just a thing. A light bulb, for example, has moved from being a technology to just a thing. However, a cell phone is still a technology. It will eventually move into the category of "thing" as it becomes more familiar to more people and as newer and less familiar tools take its place. The dividing line on this continuum differs among age groups - it sits forward for younger people. This rough diagram illustrates this idea.

Of course the continuum varies from person to person. But for an older person running a nonprofit or political campaign (as most director level people tend to be), it's helpful to imagine that most of their "technologies" are just "things" in the minds of young people - nearly as natural and thoughtless as putting on shoes in the morning (which is not to say, however, that they're insignificant).

All along this continuum (and back to your question), each of these tools is embedded in our cultural context. I can't imagine it being any other way until the point at which our tools take on an agency that's quite outside of our collective control. To my thinking, this point happens when we start having earnest discussions about civic rights for intelligent computer systems - which means that these systems will have evolved into something entirely different from what they've been. I think that this moment will eventually arrive, but that it's many years away.

Over the past few years, organizations of all kinds have begun to explore the

value of virtual worlds. Yet, virtual worlds still arguably reach only a culture of early adapters. What is the current value of virtual worlds as a political platform? Are we experimenting with something that will have a long term impact but may offer only limited short term rewards? If so, how can you justify putting energy there in what may turn out to be a tight political contest?

I don't know much about the inception of Second Life, but I imagine it went something like this:

[Scene: friends sitting around a poker table drinking beer]

Philip Rosedale: Have you guys read Snowcrash?

Friend #1: Yea, it rocked.

Philip Rosedale: Wouldn't it be cool if we built that thing?

Friend #2: What thing?

Philip Rosedale: The thing! The actual virtual world that Stevenson describes. I know some tech guys.

Friend #1: Phil, you should do it. That would rock.

Philip Rosedale: Yea, maybe I will.

Then Rosedale takes the book, hires some coders, and transliterates the book into pixels. And so, we've got Second Life, which is Snowcrash come to life - irony and all. Second Life was such an early sensation that it has, thus far, defined what is meant by "virtual world." In fact, it's gone further by defining the common understanding of character-driven 3D space (which is distinct from a "virtual world").

Second Life's early success and recent woes have, in fact, put a damper on innovation in the 3D space. Second Life and its imitators (of which there are now dozens, including Google's recent project called Lively) continue to replicate Snowcrash. They recreate fantasy versions of something that approximates real-life. And social change efforts in these worlds are doomed. They are shoddy replications of experiences that are better in real life: walkathons, tschotchke giveaways, museum exhibits.

But these efforts are only the first forays into what will eventually be the next world changing technical movement. Snowcrash is not where we'll end up. The potential of immersive 3D space is much greater than imitating and fantasizing about our existing reality. Remember in 1995 when businesses would scan their paper brochures and use the resulting JPG as their Web site? That's where we are today with the use of 3D space.

So, for anyone concerned about the 2008 Election, there's very little of interest. I wouldn't spend any time at all in today's virtual spaces. From the candidate perspective, it's not worth the effort. My advice for social changemakers is to keep a close eye on the space and to wait for it.

You end the book with a suggestion that "web 2.0" constitutes a "tectonic shift" in the political landscape. Explain. What's the nature of that shift? How quickly is its impact being felt? What changes will traditional political organizations need to make in order to take advantage of this new model for reaching voters? And what do you think will be the biggest points of resistance in moving in this direction?

Yochai Benkler describes this shift wonderfully in the Wealth of Networks. We (I) owe him a debt of gratitude for the book. Benkler describes the shift as nothing short of a massive redistribution of the means of production. That's tectonic. It's a dozen steel axes put into the hands of everyone. And it's a power grab right now between:

a) Those who are trying to prevent the redistribution (ie: RIAA)

b) Those who don't recognize that massive shifts are underway (ie: most large nonprofits and traditional political organizations)

c) Those who love their newfound axes (ie: most young people and Web2.0 business owners)

So -a- will fight it; -b- will lose (most of the time); and -c- will fight to make -b- join them instead of joining -a- so that -a- doesn't win, which is not at all a certainty at this point in time.

All signs are that a record number of young people have been participating in the current presidential elections and that voter registration for those under 30 have increased dramatically in recent years. What factors do you see as contributing to this increase in youth participation? Will these trends continue to rise as we look towards the fall?

I don't have anything substantively new to say on this topic, other than to echo what you and other smart observers have been saying for the past couple of years. Young people's media has become participatory - and they're reacting positively to a candidate (Obama) who has shaped his campaign in a similar fashion. Moreover, he's using language and speaking about issues in ways that give him the air of authenticity. For the sake of increasing youth political involvement, it's a good thing he won the nomination.

You begin the book by discussing your experiences running a nonprofit, Mobile

Voter, which you suggest failed to meet its goals for registering and

mobilizing young voters. Why did Mobile Voter fail and what did you learn from

this failure?

There's such a finality implied by the word "failure." I don't believe in it. It's too black and white.

To take a recent example - this spring, we entered our newest initiative, Volunteer Now!, into the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. The Challenge involved two rounds. To make it into the first, we needed to generate votes on Net2's web site. I emailed my list asking for votes and we made it in. The second round involved two days at a conference center in San Jose. At the conference we met dozens of enthusiastic social change activists and several potential funders. We also demonstrated the product dozens of times. In sum, we met a ton of people, honed our pitch, and got great feedback for the project.

We didn't place in the top three. Did we fail? Of course not. There's so much value in this experience. I'm unsure what historical events brought us to consider our efforts in Manichaean terms (win/lose, evil/good, fail/succeed), but I think it's a big problem. We're afraid of nuance.

So, instead of slinking away from not winning the Net2 challenge, I sent out an email to my list again with the subject line "We didn't win!!" And funny enough, that email generated a response that was 10x higher than the initial email asking for votes. There was a lot of value in looking at the "loss" as an opportunity for engagement.

So, that's a long entree to your question about Mobile Voter's 2006 "TxtVoter" campaign. In 2006, we raised funds from the Pew Charitable Trusts to register 55,000 young voters. By Nov 5th, we'd registered about 35,000 - of which only about 2,000 came through our text messaging system. The rest came via our GoVote.org Web site which we built and operated in conjunction with Working Assets (now Credo, who put the lionshare of the effort into generating traffic to that site).

It would be disingenuous to say that we weren't disappointed by the numbers - especially since we started the season with a Dean-like yell and aspirations to register many more than 55K. However, there's a rich context to this "failure." In addition to TxtVoter's registration component, we helped to implement a get out the vote (GOTV) campaign that was studied (and party organized) by researchers from Michigan (Dale/Strauss) which has since become the seminal study on the effectiveness of text messaging for GOTV. We also developed a list of best-practices which is now being used to replicate the most successful instances of the TxtVoter campaign (there were some events in which response rates surged to 46% versus the 1% overall average). To boot, the experiences of the '06 campaign led directly to the writing of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, which intends to address some of the pain points that I saw across hundreds of nonprofits and political campaigns during the TxtVoter initiative.

In sum, the learning is: there is no failure and we need to better embrace nuance.

MacArthur's Participatory Learning Initiative Goes International

I've been showcasing this week some of the work we've been doing with the MacArthur Foundation on new media literacies. If you are feeling inspired, you might consider submitting something to the second round of the foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition. Here are the details which were just released this week: MACARTHUR'S $2 MILLION DIGITAL MEDIA AND LEARNING COMPETITION FOCUSES ON PARTICIPATORY LEARNING, GOES INTERNATIONAL

Chicago, IL (August 18, 2008) - The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in collaboration with the University of California, Irvine, Duke University and the virtual network HASTAC, announced today a second annual open-call competition that will provide $2 million in awards to innovators shaping the field of digital media and learning. The Digital Media and Learning Competition, supported through a grant to the University of California, Irvine and administered by HASTAC, has been expanded to pilot international submissions and introduce a new category focusing on young innovators aged 18-25.

"Digital media are helping to make the world smaller, spread ideas, and encourage collaboration across borders and among people who otherwise might not have an opportunity to work together," said MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton. "To ensure support for the freshest thinking and most innovative applications of digital media to learning, we have expanded this year's competition to include international submissions and ideas from young people, who are often the pioneers of the digital space."

Awards will be given in two categories:

* Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards will support projects that demonstrate new modes of participatory learning, in which people take part in virtual communities, share ideas, comment on one another's projects, and advance goals together. Successful projects will promote participatory learning in a variety of environments: through the creation of new digital tools, modification of existing ones, or use of digital media in some other novel way. Submissions will be accepted from applicants in Canada, People's Republic of China, India, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, countries in which HASTAC or MacArthur have significant experience. Winners will receive between $30,000 and $250,000.

* Young Innovator Awards are designed to encourage young people aged 18-25 to think boldly about "what comes next" in participatory learning and to contribute to making it happen. Winners will receive funding to do an internship with a sponsor organization to help bring their most visionary ideas from the "garage" stage to implementation. For this competition cycle, submissions will only be accepted from applicants in the United States. Winners will receive between $5,000 and $30,000.

This year's competition will include an online forum where applicants can post their ideas, solicit feedback, offer their services, and connect with other applicants and potential collaborators. All material posted to this "Digital Media and Learning Scratchpad" is publicly accessible. Participation is voluntary and not required for application.

"Participatory learning allows people to work together online toward some collective purpose, sharing knowledge, insights, and expertise, and most important, learning together," said Cathy N. Davidson, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor at Duke University and HASTAC co-founder.

The open competition will be administered by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), which was founded and is primarily operated at two university centers, the University of California Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine and the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. Applications will be judged by an expert panel of scholars, educators, entrepreneurs, journalists, and other digital media specialists.

"With the digital media and learning initiative, the MacArthur Foundation is playing a leading role in reshaping both institutional and informal learning practices," said David Theo Goldberg, HASTAC co-founder and director of the University of California's Humanities Research Institute. "Traditional learning practices are being supplemented and supplanted by new digital media, which both enable and extend their reach through virtual institutions like HASTAC. This is a natural partnership."

Competition winners will join an existing community of 17 awardees from last year, including a mobile musical laboratory, a digital humanitarian assistance game derived from existing military simulation technology, and a mobile phone project hat connects young African social entepreneurs with young North American professionals. Winners also will be invited to showcase their work at a conference that will include venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, educators and new media experts seeking the best ideas about digital participatory learning.

Applications are due Oct. 15, 2008 and winners will be publicly announced in April 2009. Detailed information on the competition is available online at www.dmlcompetition.net.

How Fan Fiction Can Teach Us a New Way to Read Moby-Dick (Part Two)

Last time, I shared with you part of our teacher's strategy guide on "Reading in a Participatory Culture." Today, I am running the second part of our discussion of fan fiction. This time, we apply concepts from the study of fan reading and writing practices to talk about the teaching of Melville's Moby-Dick. I've received several questions off-line about the context of this material in the guide itself. We've heard two conflicting pieces of advice, which I think reflects two different kinds of teachers. On the one hand, we hear that teachers want lesson plans they can rip and read which are carefully calibrated to the standards and indeed, the first part of the guide provides precisely that. Because we are focusing on local schools for our testing phase, we've focused on our own state standards, though we are also attentive to national trends in this area. We've already started a small scale teacher training program for the folks field testing our guide this year. Teachers at our workshop were able to take some of our lessons, go straight to work, and produce good results without reading the rest of the guide.

We also hear, though, that certain teachers want to learn a new approach to teaching and want to understand more fully the philosophy behind the approach. While we are offering a wealth of resources specific to Moby-Dick, we also very much want the exercises and philosophy to be flexible enough that they can be applied to the full range of books that get taught in high school English and language arts classes. We've produced a seperate "expert voices" section that provides more detailed background. The material I am running on the blog right now is from that section. We have heard from some teachers so far that they do find this material very helpful but my bet, from interacting with them, is that other teachers won't ever look at it because the pace of their work life won't allow it. We've tried to design things so teachers can dig as deep as they want or work only on the top level.

One of the goals of the guide is to draw on several decades of ethnographic work on how and why people read in order to encourage teachers to be open to a much broader range of interpretations through their classes. One of the ways we do so is being very self reflective about the reading practices that shaped the guide itself. We have foregrounded four different readers who were involved in producing the guide -- Wyn Kelly as a literary scholar; Rudy Cabrera as a performer; Ricardo Pitts-Wiley as a creative artist; and myself as a media scholar and fan. I thought you might enjoy this video, created by Deb Lui, for the Guide, which introduces these four readers and the ways they approach Moby Dick.

Now, enjoy Part Two of the section on fan fiction and literature. And again, I would appreciate any feedback you may have about the approach we have taken to this section of the guide. Here, I introduce a new conceptual framework for thinking about what aspects of texts provide the most fertile openings for fan interventions.

Reading Moby-Dick As a Fan

Fans are searching for unrealized potentials in the story that might provide a springboard for their own creative activities. We might identify at least five basic elements in a text that can inspire fan interventions. Learning to read as a fan often involves learning to find such openings for speculation and creative extension. [1]

• Kernels -- pieces of information introduced into a narrative to hint at a larger world but not fully developed within the story itself. Kernels typically pull us away from the core plot line and introduce other possible stories to explore. For example, consider the meeting between the captains of the Pequod and the Rachel which occurs near the end of Melville's novel (Chapter cxxviii). Captain Gardiner of the Rachel is searching for a missing boat, lost the night before, which has his own son aboard. He solicits Ahab's help in the search. In doing so, he tells Ahab, "For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab - though but a child, and nestling safely at home now - a child of your old age too." The detail is added here to show how much Ahab is turning his back on all that is human in himself. Yet, this one phrase contains the seeds of an entire story of how and why Ahab had a son at such a late age, what kind of father Ahab might have been, and so forth. We may also wonder how Gardiner knows about Ahab's son, since the book describes him as a "stranger." The John Huston film version goes so far as to suggest that Gardiner was also from New Bedford, which opens up the possibility that the two men knew each other in the past. What might their previous relationship have looked like? Were they boyhood friends or bitter rivals? Were their wives sisters or friends? Did the two sons know each other? Might Ahab's wife have baby-sat for Gardiner's son? Soon, we have the seeds of a new story about the relationship between these two men.
• Holes -- plot elements readers perceive as missing from the narrative but central to their understanding of its characters. Holes typically impact the primary plot. In some cases, "holes" simply reflect the different priorities for writers and readers who may have different motives and interests. For example, consider the story of how Ahab lost his leg. In many ways, this story is central to the trajectory of the novel but we receive only fragmentary bits of information about what actually happened and why this event has had such a transformative impact on Ahab, while other seamen we meet have adjusted more fully to the losses of life and limb that are to be expected in pursuing such a dangerous profession. What assumptions do you make as a reader about who Ahab was -- already a captain, a young crewmember on board some one else's ship -- or where he was when this incident occurred? In fandom, one could imagine a large number of different stories emerging to explain what happened, and each version might reflect a different interpretation of Ahab's character and motives.
• Contradictions -- Two or more elements in the narrative which, intentionally or unintentionally, suggest alternative possibilities for the characters. Are the characters in Moby-Dick doomed from the start, as might be suggested by the prophecies of Elijah and Gabriel? Does this suggest some model of fate or divine retribution, as might be implied by Father Mapple's sermon about Jonah? Or might we see the characters as exerting a greater control over what happens to them, having the chance to make a choice which might alter the course of events, as is implied by some of the exchanges between Ahab and Starbuck? Different writers could construct different stories from the plot of Moby-Dick depending on how they responded to this core philosophical question about the nature of free will. And we can imagine several stories emerging around the mysterious figure of Elijah. Is Elijah someone gifted with extraordinary visions? Is he a mad man? Does he have a history with Ahab that might allow him insights into the Captain's character and thus allow Elijah to anticipate what choices Ahab is likely to make?
• Silences -- Elements that were systematically excluded from the narrative with ideological consequences. As Wyn Kelley notes in "Where Are the Women?," many writers have complained about the absence of female characters in Moby-Dick, suggesting that we can not fully understand the world of men without also understanding the experience of women. Some works -- such as the John Huston version -- call attention to the place of women in whaling culture, if only incidentally. Melville hints at this culture only through a few scattered references to the families that Ahab and Starbuck left behind. These references can provide the starting point for a different story, as occurs in Sena Jeter Naslund's novel, Ahab's Wife; we might imagine another version of the story where Ahab was female, as occurs in Moby-Dick: Then and Now, or we might use the plot of Moby-Dick as the starting point for creating a totally different story set in another kind of world where women can play the same kind of roles as the men play in Melville's novel, as occurs in the Battlestar Galactica episode, "Scar."
• Potentials -- Projections about what might have happened to the characters that extend beyond the borders of the narrative. Many readers finish a novel and find themselves wanting to speculate about "what happens next." As Pugh writes, "Whenever a canon closes, someone somewhere will mourn it enough to reopen it....Even though we may feel that the canonical ending is 'right' artistically, if we liked the story we may still not be ready for it to end, for the characters and milieu that have become real to us to be folded up and put back in the puppeteer's box." For example, we might well wonder what kind of person Ishmael becomes after being rescued. Melville offers us some hints -- even if only because Ishmael chooses to tell this story in the first place. Yet, in our world, someone like Ishmael might be wracked with "survivor guilt," feeling responsibility for the deaths of his friends, or wondering why he alone made it through alive. How might Ishmael have dealt with these powerful emotions? How might these events have changed him from the character we see at the start of the novel? Might we imagine some future romance helping to "comfort" and "nurse" him through his "hurts"?

The examples above suggest several additional aspects of reading a narrative as a fan. First, fans generally focus on characters and their relationships as their point of entry. Clearly, Melville's novel, with its digressions and fragmentation, raises many more character issues than it resolves -- for example, the richly drawn but only occasionally explored friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg or the comradeship between Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, or the relationship between Ahab and Fedallah or... Second, fans look for worlds that are richer, have greater potentials, than can be used up within a single story. They are particularly interested in back story -- the untold narratives that explain how the characters became the people we encounter within a particular story. Many contemporary television series reward this fan interest by parceling out bits and fragments of back story over time. Here, again, part of the pleasure of reading Moby-Dick is absorbing all of the incidental details about the ship, its crew, the other ships, and life in New Bedford, and through chapters such as "The Town-Ho's Story," Melville tells us again and again that this world is full of stories beyond the ones the novel tells.

For the most part, fan reading practices are directed at popular television series or films, but there's no reason why they can't be applied to works from the literary canon. Teachers might find that students respond well to being asked to look at Moby-Dick and other literary texts through this lens. Here's a process you might follow:

• Encourage students to find examples of Kernels, Holes, Contradictions, Silences, and Potentials.
• Ask them to consider what purposes these elements play within the original novel.
• Invite them to speculate on how these elements might provide the basis for additional stories.
• Tell them to find other passages that shed insight into the core character relationships here.
• Discuss what elements would need to be in place for a new story to feel like it belongs in this fictional world.
• Have students write stories reflecting their insights.
• Share stories between students, especially those working with the same elements, so that they have a sense of the very different ways writers might build upon these same starting points.

Ricardo Pitts-Wiley took a very similar approach with the students in the Rhode Island correctional program, asking them to select a character and explore the novel from their point of view. Students were encouraged to develop a character sketch which described what kind of person the character would be if he or she were alive today. These character sketches were then combined to construct a plot in which these characters met at the Spouter Inn and set out on a quest together. Such an approach might tap the techniques of fantasy role play games to sketch out the events of the story, and then the student writers might contribute to a shared narrative of the experience. Such techniques led to the writing of the Wild Cards series of fantasy novels, for example. [2]

The "Transformative Work" of Fan Culture

Fan stories are not simply "extensions" or "continuations" of the original series. They are constructing arguments through new stories rather than critical essays. Just as a literary essay uses text to respond to text, fan fiction uses fiction to respond to fiction. You will find all kinds of argumentation about interpretation woven through most fan-produced stories. A good fan story references key events or bits of dialogue as evidence to support its particular interpretation of the characters' motives and actions. Secondary details are deployed to suggest the story might have plausibly occurred in the fictional world depicted in the original. There are certainly bad stories that don't dig deeply into the characters or which fall back on fairly banal interpretations, but good fan fiction emerges from a deep respect for the original work and reflects a desire to explore some aspect of it that has sparked the fan writer's imagination or curiosity.

Fan fiction is speculative but it is also interpretative. And more than this, it is creative. The fan writer wants to create a new story that is entertaining in its own right and offer it to perhaps the most demanding audience you could imagine -- other readers who are deeply invested experts about the original work. The new story may operate within any number of genres that have emerged from the realm of fan fiction and which represent shared ways of reading and rewriting favorite works.

Novelist Michael Chabon is a fan of the creative works of fans and has written an essay discussing the value of fan fiction in relation to Sherlock Holmes. He argues:

All enduring popular literature has this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure....It creates a sense of an infinite horizon of play, an endless game board; it spawns, without trying, a thousand sequels, diagrams, and web sites....Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving -- amateurs -- we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers -- should we be lucky enough to find any -- some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

[3]

Not all writers would agree that writing fan fiction is a logical or legitimate extension of critical interpretation. Fantasy writer Robin Hobb has raised sharp concerns about how fan fiction impacts her own creative process:

Every fan fiction I've read to date, based on my world or any other writer's world, has focused on changing the writer's careful work to suit the foible of the fan writer. Romances are invented, gender identities changed, fetishes indulged and endings are altered. It's not flattery. To me, it is the fan fiction writer saying, 'Look, the original author really screwed up the story, so I'm going to fix it. Here is how it should have gone.'...The tragic ending is re-written, or a dead character is brought back to life, for example. The intent of the author is ignored. A writer puts a great deal of thought into what goes into the story and what doesn't. If a particular scene doesn't happen 'on stage' before the reader's eyes, there is probably a reason for it. If something is left nebulous, it is because the author intends for it to be nebulous. To use an analogy, we look at the Mona Lisa and wonder. Each of us draws his own conclusions about her elusive smile. We don't draw eyebrows on her to make her look surprised, or put a balloon caption over her head. Yet much fan fiction does just that. Fan fiction closes up the space that I have engineered into the story, and the reader is told what he must think rather than being allowed to observe the characters and draw his own conclusions.

[4]

By contrast, consider this statement from the introduction to an important anthology of scholarly essays about fan fiction:

Work in progress is a term used in the fan fiction world to describe a piece of fiction still in the process of being written but not yet completed....The appeal of works in progress lies in part in the ways fans engage with an open text; it invites responses, permits shared authorship, and enjoins a sense of community....Every fan story is in this sense a work in progress, even when the story has been completed....In most cases, the resulting story is part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced....When the story is finally complete and published, likely online but perhaps in print, the work in progress among the creators shifts to the work in progress among the readers....The source text in many cases are serial, in progress, and constantly changing, as are the fan stories set in these universes.

[5]

These writers see both the fan text and the source text as open-ended, subject to revision and expansion, providing raw material for further speculation and creative elaboration. This idea of the text as open and collaborative contrasts sharply with Hobb's notion that writers should have the last word on what happens to their characters and that any addition by fans is to be understood as signaling a flaw or error in the original work. Fans would find Hobb's suggestion that their stories tell the reader "what he must think rather than being allowed to observe the characters and draw his own conclusions" particularly baffling: since no fan story is regarded as in any way definitive or as precluding other acts of authorship. To the contrary, fans take great pleasure in reading and writing a broad range of different interpretations of the shared characters, and fan authors often may construct a number of mutually contradictory conceptions of the characters or situations even within their own body of work.

Some fans have adopted the legal term, Transformative Works, to defend their creative practices against such challenges. A transformative use is one that, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [source] with new expression, meaning, or message." Moby-Dick: Then And Now is a transformative work in so far as it revises and updates Melville's novel. Moby-Dick is a transformative work in so far as it takes sources, such as the story of "Jonah", as raw materials for its own storytelling. And fan fiction is transformative in so far as it transforms the critical insights we are discussing here into the starting point for new stories, developing new conceptualizations of the characters or expanding the narrative in new directions.

The Organization of Transformative Works (http://transformativeworks.org/) has emerged within fandom as an advocacy group defending the rights of readers to remix and rewrite the contents of their culture for the purposes of sharing their own interpretations and speculations. Here's part of the mission statement of the Organization for Transformative Works:

1. We value transformative fanworks and the innovative communities from which they have arisen, including media, real person fiction, anime, comics, music and vidding.
2. We value our identity as a predominantly female community with a rich history of creativity and commentary.
3. We value our volunteer-based infrastructure and the fannish gift economy that recognizes and celebrates worth in myriad and diverse activities.
4. We value making fannish activities as accessible as possible to all those who wish to participate.
5. We value infinite diversity in infinite combinations. We value all fans engaged in transformative work: fans of any race, gender, culture, sexual identity, or ability. We value the unhindered cross-pollination and exchange of fannish ideas and cultures while seeking to avoid the homogenization or centralization of fandom.

The Organization for Transformative Works has been developing a series of short documentaries in partnership with Project NML that are designed to introduce students to the basics of another fan remix practice -- vidding. Vids are music videos which combine footage from the source text with music -- sometimes original, more often also appropriated -- for the purposes of critical commentary or artistic expression. The tradition of vids goes back to the early 1970s when fan artist Kandy Fong first began to set slides of scenes from Star Trek to music. [6] Through the years, this production practice has spread across many fan communities and in the process, fans have refined their craft and embraced new technologies that support their production and distribution. In these videos, vidders talk about this kind of transformative work in their own words, explaining what motivates them to re-edit the footage, discussing what they see as good or bad practices, and sharing some examples of their work. The videos excerpted in these documentary segments reflect some current popular fandoms, including Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Will and Grace.

As with fan fiction, these vids start with a recognition of an unrealized potential in the original source material. While the fan fiction writer can create new situations for the characters, the vidder works with found footage, trying to use the images to illustrate a particular interpretation of the original text. The footage may be removed from context or shift perspectives to suggest alternative ways of understanding the characters. Some vids are playful and parodic, encouraging us to laugh with and sometimes at the original (see the Will and Grace video sampled here which has fun with the relationship between the music and the character's gestures); many others strive for a more serious and sometimes melodramatic tone.

The Organization for Transformative Works is seeking to document the history of this amateur media production practice and to provide a shared portal through which fan video makers can share their work. These videos are an extension of their effort to educate the public about their fan practices. The Organization for Transformative Works is mounting a legal and political defense of fan culture, one which acknowledges fan culture as a site of creative expression, as an alternative way of thinking about how stories get produced and circulated, and as a space which supports diversity and experimentation.

There has also emerged a strong set of arguments about the educational benefits of the fan community as a space of informal learning, especially for younger fans. [7] James Paul Gee has described the fan community, alongside other sites of informal learning, as "affinity spaces," asking why people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the content of their textbooks [8]. Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and motives, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine his or her existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others.

More and more literacy experts are recognizing that enacting, reciting, and appropriating elements from preexisting stories is a valuable and organic part of the process by which children develop cultural literacy. Educators like to talk about 'scaffolding,' the ways that a good pedagogical process works in a step-by-step fashion, encouraging kids to try out new skills that build on those they have already mastered, providing support for these new steps until the learner feels sufficient confidence to take them on her own. In the classroom, scaffolding is provided by the teacher. In a participatory culture, the entire community takes on some responsibility for helping newbies find their way. Many young writers began composing stories on their own as a spontaneous response to popular culture. For these young writers, the next step was the discovery of fan fiction on the internet, which provided alternative models for what it meant to be an author. At first, they might only read stories, but the fan community provides many incitements for readers to cross that last threshold into composing and submitting their stories. And once a fan submits, the feedback he or she receives inspires further and improved writing.

Many fan fiction website provide a process of mentoring, known as "beta-reading," through which more experienced writers critique and support emerging contributors. Fans learn both from the feedback they receive and from the process of sharing feedback with others. As a consequence, fans become better readers and writers. As educational researcher Rebecca Black argues, the fan community can often be more tolerant of linguistic errors than traditional classroom teachers and more helpful in enabling learners to identify what they are actually trying to say because reader and writer operate within the same frame of reference, sharing a deep emotional investment in the content being explored. [9] The fan community promotes a broader range of different literary forms -- not simply fan fiction but various modes of commentary -- than the exemplars available to students in the classroom, and often they showcase realistic next steps for the learner's development rather than showing only professional writing that is far removed from anything most students will be able to produce.

Much of what works here works because fan fiction exists outside of school and the people who participate do so out of deep personal and social motivations, rather than because they are assigned to write a story for a grade. Yet, this does not mean that educators can not learn a good deal from fan fiction, and this Teachers' Strategy Guide has been informed by our own research on fan cultures as sites for reading and creating stories. We believe strongly that there is a value in learning to engage with works of fiction creatively as well as critically, that the process of creating a transformative work often motivates much closer reading of the original text, that it is empowering for young people to think of themselves as authors and thus to find their own expressive voices, especially in the context of today's participatory culture. Pitts-Wiley's work with the incarcerated youth shows a similar understanding of how we might motivate reading by encouraging young people to look at established literary texts as the springboard for their own creative expression.

Sources

[1] Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyvania Press, 1992).

[2] George R.R. Martin, "On the Wild Cards Series," in Pat Harrington and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.) Second Person: Role Play and Story in Games and Playable Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

[3] Michael Chabon, "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes," in Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (San Francisco: McSweeneys, 2008)

[4] Robin Hobb, as quoted in Justin, "In Defense of Fan Fiction," Swifty, Writing, November 9 2005 (link).

[5]Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, "Work in Progress," in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds.) Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2006).

[6] Francesca Coppa, "Celebrating Kandy Fong: Founder of Fan Music Video," In Media Res, November 19 2007 (link)

[7] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

[8] James Paul Gee, Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling (New York: Routledge, 2004)

[9] Rebecca Black, Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

How Fan Fiction Can Teach Us a New Way to Read Moby-Dick (Part One)

I'm back after an extended time on the road -- most of it I was able to spend off line, recollecting my thoughts. This is the longest time I've spent off line in almost a decade and I consider it a major moral victory. Don't get me wrong -- digital technologies have dramatically expanded my productivity, the computer has become an extension of my mind, but it also means that I sometimes can't hear myself think or separate out my own priorities from those that others, more insistent than I am, want to impose upon me. For that reason, I have come to really appreciate time when I am not online, time when I am out in the natural world and engaged with my closest friends and family all the more. I have lots to report on both my thoughts and experiences during this downtime and it's going to take me several weeks to fully catch up.

The weeks before the trip were a mad frenzy. I have spent a good portion of my summer focused on developing a Teacher's Strategy Guide on "Reading in a Participatory Culture," which will be deployed by six schools in the coming year and will eventually roll out to a much larger public. My partners in crime on this particular project include Wyn Kelly, a Melville scholar and colleague in the MIT Literature department; Jenna McWilliams, Project NML's Curriculum Specialist, and Deb Lui, a recently graduated CMS Masters student who is our primary documentary producer on this project. The initiative is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The Project nml team is headed by Erin Reilly.

I've mentioned the guide here before. It is inspired by the remarkable pedagogical and artistic approach taken by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the Artistic Director of the Mixed Magic Theater. Ricardo worked to get incarcerated youth to read Moby-Dick by having them rewrite and update Melville's novel for the 21st century. Here's a section from an interview with him which I did for the guide:

I had an opportunity--and this was probably the best part of the experience for me--as a teacher to release their imaginations. Boy oh boy, no matter how much I write I'll never be able to fully capture the degree to which their imaginations were released and they released me, too, to say you don't have to play by the ABC game. You don't have to go by the numbers. You can rethink these characters and it's okay, and you can honor them and rethink them at the same time. When we started the writing process, I started by saying, "Pick a character and write a story about the character." They all chose their favorite character in the novel and wrote a story about just their character.

One of the young men who chose Ahab--it was a great story, too! Ahab was at home. He had just come back from a very successful voyage of drug dealing for WhiteThing, his boss. It was so successful that he worried that he was now a threat to the great omnipotent WhiteThing. He was making some decisions that it was time for him to either challenge the boss for control or to get out of the business. He's home, he's got this young wife, she's pregnant, and the drug lord sends agents looking for him. In looking for him, they kill his wife and unborn child. They don't get him. His revenge is based on what they did to him.

Another one chose Elijah, the prophet, and the awful dilemma of being able to see the future and no one believing or understanding what you're trying to tell them. "I'm going to warn you about this, but if don't heed my warning this is what's going to happen," and the awful dilemma that you face. His story was about 9/11. "I'm trying to tell you this is going to happen," and then nobody listened, and how awful he felt that he knew and couldn't stop it.

Another one chose Stubb, who is kind of cantankerous. He started his story, "I'm Stubb, linebacker, middle linebacker." That just was so right. I mean, you take a character and you sum it up just like that. He's playing a football game. His girlfriend, a cheerleader, gunned down on the sideline, drive-by.

Another one chose Queequeg and he made him a pimp. Wow, why a pimp? He says, "Well, when we meet Queequeg he's selling human heads, shrunken heads," so he's a peddler in human flesh. He's exotic. He's tall. He's good looking, and fiercely loyal and dangerous. That's a pimp.

Another kid chose Ishmael. He started off by saying, "Ishmael was a Navy Seal who was so high strung they kicked him out of the Navy." If you know anything about Navy Seals, I don't know how it's possible to be too high strung, but he was. Then you go back and you see he read that first chapter where Ishmael is saying, "I feel like I'm following behind funeral processions. I feel like I need to get into a fight with somebody. I better get out of here and go handle my own anxiety before I either commit suicide or lay a whole community of people to waste because I'm mad. Time to get out. Time to go to sea. I'll get away." It's a brilliant description: he was a Navy Seal who was too high strung so they kicked him out. That's exactly what Ishmael is. If you go back to Ishmael in the Bible, the discarded son, the one who got nothing, it makes a lot of sense.

Those are just examples. They were extreme, but at the same time the more extreme they got, the closer they got back to the root of the characters. And they met at the Spouter's Inn. Ultimately all these characters met at the Spouter's Inn and they rallied around Ahab who had been wronged and they knew it. In his story Pip was a soul singer, an entertainer, and they all came. He was there, but everybody thought Pip was crazy, but they took him on the voyage because they needed levity and entertainment even though they recognized that there was a message in his music, so to speak.

He later used these character sketches as loose inspiration for the creation of his own stage production, Moby-Dick: Then and Now, which remixed passages from the original novel with a more contemporary retelling set in the world of the drug trade. We are using the Mixed Magic Theater production as a point of entry into understanding the creative process and the relationship between readers and writers in new ways. When I first met Ricardo, I was taken by how much his approach had in common with what fan fiction writers do with more contemporary works. He was inviting his young students to become better readers by getting inside Melville's novel and reworking it on their own terms. What emerged might, in fan terms, be described as an alternative universe story, one where we understand the characters and their relationships better by inserting them into a new context. As the Strategy Guide has evolved, fan practices have come to play a larger and larger role in our pedagogical approach. We have, for example, been working with Laura Shaprio and Francesca Coppa (as a collaboration with the Organization for Transformative Works) to develop a series of short videos about fan vidding as part of the mix of materials we make available to teachers.

Today, I wanted to share with you a section from the guide which is intended to explain to teachers what fan fiction is and how it might inform their classroom practices. I am not so much advocating that they take existing fan fiction into the schoolroom. I suspect what is valuable to young fan fiction writers is precisely what would get lost if we imposed teacherly standards on their production. Rather, I am interested in drawing on the reading and interpretation practices that inform fan fiction to open up new ways for students and teachers to talk about fictional works. My hope is that we can teach students not only to read critically but also creatively and free them to make the books they read for school into resources for their own imaginative speculations.

I want to know what fans think of this material and so I am posting it here in hopes of soliciting your comments. There are so many teachers and librarians in fandom that I suspect you have a special stake in making sure we get this material right and a special insight into how we might bridge between these two worlds. We are in a process of iterative design with this material; we will be collaborating closely with the teachers and students involved in our study to refine and revise this material over the coming year. So, let me know what you think. Pass along your thoughts and suggestions -- through the blog comments or through personal e-mail at henry3@mit.edu.

Reading Critically and Reading Creatively

If there is a shared agenda within the diversity and fragmentation that has often characterizes the American media literacy movement, it has come through a focus on five core questions students and teachers have been taught to apply to a range of texts:

• 1. Who created this message?
• 2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
• 3. How might different people understand this message differently from me?
• 4. What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
• 5. Why is this message being sent?

Throughout the Teachers' Strategy Guide, we address each of these core questions, although not always in the same language. When we talk about context in our discussion of remix, we are really trying to consider who created the message and why; we also encourage students to identify the techniques deployed within the remix. Our discussion of Motives for Reading helps to explain how and why "different people understand this message differently from me," and that recognition of differences in interpretation and experience are central to our understanding of how to negotiate a multicultural space. Throughout, we have reinforced the value of close reading. Through various case studies, we've applied these skills and inquiries to a range of different kinds of media texts including music videos ("Ahab"), films (several versions of Moby-Dick, Pirates 3, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan), musical recordings (Oceana), and television shows (Battlestar Galactica) as well as our central texts -- a novel (Moby-Dick) and a stage production (Moby-Dick: Then and Now). Within various media, we have focused on different critical approaches, including considerations of narrative (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan), acting (Patrick Stewart in Moby-Dick), art direction (Pirates 3), and camera work/editing (John Huston's Moby-Dick). We have embraced the core goals of the media literacy tradition, but we are also expanding its vocabulary and introducing some new perspectives. We are trying to reflect through our pedagogy some significant shifts in the media environment at a time when more and more young people are entering the participatory culture.

In this section, we want to turn our attention to question 4 -- "What lifestyles, values, and points of view are... omitted from this message?" Here, pay attention to the word, "omitted." What's not in the text is seen here as consciously or unconsciously excluded; often there's a hint that certain ideas or perspectives are being silenced, marginalized, or repressed. This formulation sets the reader in ideological opposition to the text while maintaining a clear separation between producers and consumers. This understanding reflects a moment when the power of mass media was extensive and the average consumer had no real way to respond to the media's agenda except through critical analysis. In a participatory culture, however, any given work represents a provocation for further creative responses. When we read a blog or a post on a forum, when we watch a video on YouTube, the possibility exists for us to respond -- either critically or creatively. We can write a fierce rebuttal of an argument with which we disagree or we can create a new work which better reflects our point of view.

Schools have historically taught students how to read with the goal of producing a critical response; we want to encourage you to also consider how to teach students how to engage creatively with texts. Under this model, we should still be concerned with what's not in the text; the difference is in what we do about it. Yochai Benkler argues that we look at the world differently in a participatory culture; we look at it through the eyes of someone who can participate. [2] Just as we saw in the Motives for Reading unit, we read for different things depending on our goals, we also watch for different things if we want to use the experience of reading as the starting point for writing criticism or as a springboard for creative expression At its worst, reading critically teaches us to write off texts with which we disagree. At its best, reading creatively empowers us to rewrite texts that don't fully satisfy our interests. Keep in mind that we may rewrite a text out of fascination or out of frustration, though many writers are motivated by a complex merger of the two.

Reading Fan Fiction

Fan fiction represents a vivid example of reading creatively and critically. Fan fiction refers to original stories and novels which are set in the fictional universes of favorite television series, films, comics, games or other media properties. Some of the earliest fan fiction was inspired by Star Trek in the 1960s. Today, fans write thousands of stories each year devoted to hundreds of different media texts. The writers are often amateur; the stories are labors of love. Many of these stories are distributed online. Historically, women wrote the majority of fan stories, though men have become more actively involved as fan fiction has moved onto the Web. Some stories are written by teens; many more are written by adults. Harry Potter and various anime/manga fandoms have become central sites for youth expression.

Some of the stories are appropriate for high school students; some are more sexually explicit. Fans typically include some kinds of rating at the start of the story indicating its graphicness, often using the same G, PG, R, and X ratings used for motion pictures. There is no consistent relationship between the ratings of the "source text" (the original work which inspired the story) and the ratings of the fan text -- so one can imagine a Sex and the City story that only deals with shopping and a Harry Potter story depicting carnal relations between the characters.

Fan authors and critics have developed their own vocabulary for talking about these works with many of the terms reflecting fan-oriented genres or describing the complex set of negotiations between the fan text and the source text. Some of the terms reflect the desire of fans to be as respectful as possible to the original work, such as the distinction between stories that are "in" or "out of character"; others, such as "alternate universe," signal works which break more dramatically with the original material. Fans generally scorn "Mary Sue or Barry Sue" stories where authors insert idealized conceptions of themselves into the fictional world often at the expense of the more established characters. Fans often use Author's Notes (AN) to explain the relationship of their stories to the source text. Even the concept of the original work as a "source" tells us a great deal about the ways fans think about the creative process.

In her book, The Democratic Art, poet Sheenagh Pugh discusses what motivates large numbers of women to write fan fiction. [3] She suggests that some fans want "more from" the original source material because they felt something was missing and some write because they want "more of" the original source material, because the story raises expectations that are not fulfilled. Pugh discusses stories as addressing two related questions -- "what if" and "what else." Pugh's discussion moves between fans writing about science fiction or cop shows and fans writing about literary classics (for example, Jane Austen's novels). She focuses mostly on the work of amateur writers yet she also acknowledges that a growing number of professional writers are turning their lenses on canonical literature and extending it in new directions. She opens her book, for example, with a discussion of John Reed's Snowball's Chance (2001) which rewrites George Orwell's Animal Farm. Other examples might include Isabelle Allende's Zorro (based on a pulp magazine character), Gregory Maguire's Wicked (The Wizard of Oz), Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (Jane Eyre), Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Hamlet), J.M. Coetzee's Foe (Robinson Crusoe), Linda Berdoll's Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (Pride and Prejudice), Nicholas Meyer's Seven Percent Solution (Sherlock Holmes), Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone (Gone With the Wind), and Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife (Moby-Dick).

While such works are sometimes described as post-modern, such practices run throughout the history of literature and as Abigail Derecho notes, this mode of creative reworking of canonical literature has been a way some female authors have asserted their perspectives onto their culture. [4] If anything, modern conceptions of copyright have slowed down a long-standing tendency of people to retell existing stories. Fan fiction revitalizes that creative impulse, operating in a world where many different people might retell the same story and in the process, expand the range of potential interpretations of the source material. Here, for example, a veteran fan fiction writer speaks about what motivates her to read and write such stories:

What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It's like a living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each writer's reality bouncing off another's and maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation. A lot of people would argue that we're not creative because we build on someone else's universe rather than coming up with our own. However, I find that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them new life over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character and make him charming and sweet or coldblooded and cruel. We can give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their original creation. We have given ourselves license to do whatever we want and it's very liberating.... If a story moves or amuses us, we share it; if it bothers us, we write a sequel; if it disturbs us, we may even re-write it! We also continually recreate the characters to fit our images of them or to explore a new idea. We have the power and that's a very strong siren. If we want to explore an issue or see a particular scenario, all we have to do is sit down and write it.

[5]

This statement beautifully captures our participatory model of reading: the text as written is the starting point; readers may be motivated to respond to the work by creating new works. Literary works do not simply enlighten us; they also inspire us or perhaps more accurately, they provoke us.

To understand this provocation, we might consider two closely related concepts -- negative capability and the encyclopedic impulse. The term, "negative capability," emerges from the writings of the poet John Keats, who first coined the term by explaining: "I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." We use the term to refer to any meaningful gap or detail in a text which allows readers to draw on their own imaginations. [6] Consider, for example, a horror film where the monster remains in the shadows and thus becomes more terrifying as we flesh it out in our minds. The less the filmmaker shows us, the more we are able to imagine something that terrifies us. The minute the monster comes into the light, we are stuck with whatever the filmmaker thought we would find fearsome.

As we have seen above, all art works are incomplete and depend on the "beholder's share" to put together the pieces, to read across the gutter, to fill in the gaps, choose your own metaphor. Some artists purposefully create nooks and corners for their more creative readers to play in, while other authors want to close things down as much as possible. We might read J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) as an author who is torn between these impulses -- sometimes wanting to encourage fan readers and writers to take the story in their own directions, increasingly attempting to close off speculations that differ with her own interpretations through verbal response or continued annotation of her fiction, even through legal action.

Closely related to this artistic practice of negative capability is an encyclopedic impulse on the part of readers who want to know all of the details of a favorite story. For a work to become a cult movie, Umberto Eco suggests, it must come to us as a "completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the private sectarian world." [7] The work must contain a rich array of information that can be drilled, practiced, and mastered by devoted fans. Yet, the text will ultimately fall short of the fan's hunger to know everything, and so part of what motivates fans to write their own stories is this desire to get "more from" and "more of" a work that has given them pleasure. Negative capability describes this phenomenon from the point of view of the producer, who wants to create opportunities for audience engagement and participation; the encyclopedic impulse describes it from the point of view of the consumer who demands coherence and continuity and who is motivated towards further speculation and expression.

Many literary critics would describe a great book as one where everything is there for a reason and nothing is missing that wouldn't detract from our experience as a whole. Director's cuts and DVD extras suggest otherwise. At least in the worlds of film and television, many things remain on the cutting room floor -- some of what gets left out improves the work by its absence, some of it might have made a meaningful contribution, and some may radically transform our understanding of the whole. DVDs often label these segments "deleted scenes," inviting us to take pleasure in seeing behind the scenes in the production process and second guessing the creative decisions of the producers. For example, the DVD for Aliens includes a scene where Ripley reacts to the news that her daughter has grown up and died during the time she has been in suspended animation in space; the scene can provide a different understanding of what motivates her intense efforts to protect and rescue the young girl Newt. A scene added for the Director's Cut of Bladerunner, linking Deckard's dream of a unicorn (in the original cut) with a shot of an origami unicorn left outside his dorm (in the director's cut) implies that he may be a replicant, because people from the Corporation know the contents of his dreams.

We might contrast this focus on deleted scenes with a genre of fan fiction called "missing scenes." Here, fans add to the fiction, offering their own versions of what might have happened during scenes absent from the original source. These scenes may be as simple as showing how other characters reacted to the news of the events shown in a particular episode; they might show us what happened before or after a key turning point, allowing us a deeper understandings of the character's motivations or the impact of their actions. So, the term, "deleted scenes," holds onto the idea that authors get to determine what belongs in their story, while the term, "missing scenes," allows fans to decide for themselves what parts of the story they want to see. Both can represent creative contributions to our understanding of the work but they have different kinds of status because our culture tends to value the original author over their readers. Many fans will distinguish between canon (elements contributed by the author) and fanon (speculations proposed by fans), with the first providing an agreed upon baseline in their conversation while the second is taken as apocrypha.

[1] Center for Media Literacy, "Five Key Questions Form Foundation for Media Literacy," http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article677.html

[2] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

[3]Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (London: Seren, 2006) . See also Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).

[4]Abigail Derecho, "Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction," in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (eds.) Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2006).

[5] Henry Jenkins, "'Normal Female Interest In Men Bonking': Selections from the Terra Nostre Underground and Strange Bedfellows," in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

[6] Geoffrey Long, Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics, and Production in the Jim Henson Company, Master's Thesis, Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT, http://cmsw.mit.edu/transmedia-storytelling-jim-henson-company/

[7] Umberto Eco, "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage," in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986).

MC Lars, "Ahab," and Nerdcore

My major focus this month is on developing a teachers strategy guide for Project nml on "Reading in a Participatory Culture," which uses as its major case studies: Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's Moby Dick: Then and Now. I've written about this project here before in essays on "The Whiteness of the Whale" and "Was Herman Melville a Proto-Fan?" A central theme in the project has to do with how we bring contemporary cultural concepts of remix culture into conversation with the study of more traditional literary texts. We want to get teachers to think a bit more about writers as existing in conversation with their cultures rather than as original creators. Teachers have long asked students to write about Biblical Allusions in Moby Dick, say, without fully working through what it means that Melville draws upon, reworks, and ascribes new meaning to the story of Jonah, who surfaces directly through sermons or discussions of whaling lore and implicitly through the fate of Ahab's crew.

As I was speaking on this project recently, a member of the audience shared with me via his iPod a recording of MC Lars's song, "Ahab," which has now become an integral part of my work on the project. I thought I would share with you today some work in progress which looks at MC Lars and the Nerdcore movement as a way into thinking about contemporary remix culture. Hope you Enjoy.

MC Lars, along with Sir Frontalot, mc chris, Optimus Rhyme and Baddd Spellah, is widely considered to be a founder of the so-called "nerdcore" movement. Nerdcore refers to a subgenre of hip hop music whose themes and images are drawn from subject matter generally considered of interest to geeks: games, science and science fiction, computers and digital culture, and cult media in particular. Like other nerdcore performers, MC Lars often incorporates allusions to films, television shows, comics, and novels into his work.

For example, consider his video for "Space Game" which not only celebrates the virtues of early arcade games but also makes references to characters from Star Wars (Darth Maul, Boba Fett, Sith girls, etc.), Lost in Space (Dr. Smith), Classic Star Trek (Captain Kirk, Scotty, Spock) Star Trek: The Next Generation (Q, The Borg) , 2001:A Space Odyssey (Hal), The Matrix (Neo and Morpheus), X-Men (Magnito), Superman (Zod), even Doctor Seuss ("The Obleck"). In the later verses, the song lays claim to being "postmodernist" (under the banner of Robert Ventura and Andy Warhol) and lays smack down on modernists such as T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Wolfe, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stephens, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Watching this video with your students might be a good way to help them understand what an allusion is and how it creates a juncture between old and new stories and in this case, between high art and popular culture.

Several of MC Lars songs, including "iGeneration" and "Download this Song,"constitute manifestos for those who have grown up in a world where music is easy to access and where remix is part of what it means to consume popular culture. As one critic explained, "MC Lars is a member of what he dubs the "iGeneration," a group born and raised in the time of the Ninja Turtles, cassette tapes and new wave music, who now live in the age of Desperate Housewives, Sidekicks and screamo bands. These are the kids who have grown up using the Internet as a part of their every day life. They can conveniently carry 5,000 songs in their pocket, but are faced with the glooming fact that the world's oil supply and Social Security will both run out in their lifetime. MC Lars is the hero of this new generation, addressing their thoughts and every day struggles in his music."

The "iGeneration" has in return deployed all of the resources of participatory culture to do their own mash-ups to MC Lars songs, such as this version of "iGeneration" which combines characters from the Japanese Anime, Naruto, with a visual style associated with iPod advertising, and another fan video which deploys images from advertising, news, The Matrix, and Battleship Potemkin. So, how do the two different image tracks deployed here change the meaning or bring to the surface different aspects of the original song?

"Ahab" should be understood in this larger context, one of several songs which MC Lars, has composed based on cannonical literary works which he reads with the same playful irreverence with which he approaches icons of science fiction culture. "RapBeth" represents his hip hop ode to William Shakespeare, while "Mr. Raven" signals his respect for Edgar Allen Poe.

MC Lars has a degree in English Literature from Oxford University and has said that he would have pursued a career as an English teacher if he hadn't found success as a hip hop performer.

He jokingly told one interviewer, "I read Moby Dick, and I thought it was a great book but it was really long, so I tried to put it into three minutes." "Ahab" does manage to include a high number of reference points in the novel, some of which are expressed through the lyrics (such as the reference to the gold doubloon which Ahab nails to the mast or the shoutouts to Queequeg), some through the visual iconography of the video (for example, the scar on Mc Lars's face or his peg leg). For example, the line, " Hey Ishmael... can I call you annoying?," plays upon "Call Me Ishmael," which is probably the single most famous phrase in Melville's novel. The repeated chorus, " Peg leg, sperm whale, jaw bone, what!," not only refers to some of the recurring icons of the narrative but also hints at the novel's linkage of Ahab's leg with the Ivory of the whale. The conflict between Ahab and Starbuck is hinted at by "You're Never going to find him! He's a big sperm whale. The ocean is enormous!" while other lines hint at Ahab's self absorption and solitude, "excuse me while I go be melancholy in my room!" Another lyric neatly captures a key subplot in the novel: "Pip went insane when he almost drowned, So profound when he shrieks like a little sailor clown." The visual logic of the video, which takes us under water and then into the mouth and through the belly of the whale, may hint at the story of Jonah, who is swallowed by a great fish, which Melville reads as a whale, while the hectoring figure in the turban here may suggest Elijah's warning.

What other references to the novel do you and your students identify here?

Would the song even make sense if the listener did not have at least a broad exposure to the major themes and plot twists of this classic American novel? That's the essence of an allusion: MC Lars is able to shorthand Moby Dick because so many of his listeners will already know the story through other media representations if not through a direct experience of the book. MC Lars simply has to point us in the right direction and our mind fills in all the rest with much of the humor here stemming from the brevity with which he is able to sum up elements of such a vast and intimidating work.

Yet, the song also suggests some of the interpretations of the song which arise in high school literature classes. Ahab described himself as a "monomaniac," draws parallels to Oedipus, talks about "hubris" as his "tragic flaw," defines the book's conflict as "man vs. beast," and sums up the book's message as "revenge is never sweat." All of this is the stuff of Spark Notes and bad high school essays, suggesting a work which isn't simply familiar to us the first time we read it, but also may come predigested, neatly broken down into familiar modes of literary analysis.

The sense that "Ahab" is responding to the rituals of the English classroom is further hinted at through the visuals here, which depict a group of students re-enacting Moby Dick, and ends with a shot from the wings as the performance concludes and the audience applauds. The Nerdcore movement, in general, tends to embrace low tech and amateur looking graphics in many of its videos, hinting at the Do-It-Yourself culture which inspires them and their audiences. Ironically, here, the stagecraft is more elaborate than would be likely to be seen in any school play, making, perhaps, a reference to the spectacular and equally unlikely high school productions of films like Apocalypse Now depicted in the cult classic, Rushmore. Either way, though, the visuals reinforce lyrics which connect Moby Dick back to the classroom, suggesting that the video may be in some sense a thumbing of the nose at the practices of secondary education, even as it is also an affectionate tribute to the novel itself.

Like many examples or remix, the song combines its primary source -- Moby Dick -- with a range of other allusions. "Ahab" evokes a range of contemporary reference points which would have been anachronistic in Melville's novels, such as Steve Wozniak, the Mariana Trench, Titanic, and Finding Nemo (suggested by the clown fish at the end of the video) Is the suggestion here that the novel remains relevant to contemporary concerns or that it is hopelessly out of date?

A tossed off reference to "a Supergrass beat" acknowledges another group whose music MC Lars has sampled for this song. Remix often gets described as "plagiarism," yet in fact, it can be seen as the opposite of plagiarism: plagiarists usually seek to cover their tracks, masking the sources of their material, and taking claim for them. Remix, on the other hand, depends on our recognition of that the material is being borrowed and often depends on our understanding of the specific contexts it is borrowed from. This song would be meaningless if we did not recognize its references to Herman Melville. And it says something about the ethics within this community that the songwriter wanted to acknowledge the beats that he sampled, even if the reference makes little sense within the context of its re-purposing of Moby Dick.

So, the above discussion suggests some questions which you and your students might want to ask about any remix:

What was the context within which the remix was produced?

In this case, we read "Ahab" in relation to Nerdcore as a specific subgenre of hip hop, one which makes extensive use of allusions to forms of culture which are valued by its "nerd" audience, including video games, science fiction, and cult media. In this case, we also saw it as part of a larger strand in MC Lars's work which appropriates themes from works commonly taught in high school and college literature classes, acknowledging his own educational background and professional experiences.

What content is being repurposed here?

In this case, the primary source material is Moby Dick and to beats taken from a song by Supergrass. The song also makes a series of topical references.

What relationship is being posited between the remix and the original work?

"Ahab" is a good natured parody, one which deflates the elevated reputation of the original novel, even as it pays respect to its potential continued relevence to the present day. The song may be harsher towards some of the ways novels get taught through schools. Like several of MC Lars' other songs, "Ahab" blurs between high art and popular culture, suggesting an ongoing criticism of cultural hierarchies.

Are the works of the same or different genre?

Moby Dick is a literary epic with tragic overtones; "Ahab" is a music video with comic overtones.

Are the works of the same or different media?

Moby Dick was a printed novel; "Ahab" was a music video distributed primarily through YouTube.

How does the remix tap or transform the original meaning?

Some of both. The song remains surprisingly faithful to the themes and narrative of the original novel, even as it shifts the tone by which we understand these elements.

What techniques are deployed in reworking the original?

There's a lot going on here. First, the song compresses the complex and lengthy novel into a series of evocative phrases which summarize key themes and plot elements. Second, the song relies on anachronisms to hint at the relationship between past and present. Third, the song incorporates key phrases from literary analysis to suggest a particular set of interpretations of the novel. Fourth, the staging of the music video is intended to evoke a school pageant, again hinting at the relationship of this text and higher education. Fifth, the song's bouncy beat transforms the tone and spirit of the original book, inviting us to have fun with the story rather than taking it totally seriously.

I welcome any feedback from serious nerdcore fans: "Ahab" was really my introduction to the genre and I want to get this right. I'd also love to be in touch with MC Lars, if he's out there reading this.

Dumbledore for a Day: The Things You Can Do in Second Life

A while back, I shared with my blog readers my experiences in Teen Second Life, thanks to an organization called Global Kids. I've gotten a chance to work more closely with Barry Joseph, Rafi Santos, and others from the Global Kids organization over the past year or so and each encounter has left me even more impressed with their respect for their young participants and their imaginative use of virtual worlds to focus young people on issues impacting the real world.

Some of you may have seen the virtual documentary they produced on the Ugandan child soldiers, for example, or may be aware of their excellent advice on the educational use of Second Life.

Well, they invited me back for a return engagement -- what they billed as the Hogwarts Dance Party of Good and Evil -- this time focused around Harry Potter fandom and what it may tell us about the new media literacies. There's an extensive discussion of Harry Potter in Convergence Culture and ever since, I've found myself speaking to Harry Potter fan conventions -- including the Witching Hour in Salem, Phoenix Rising in New Orleans, and the upcoming Portus in Dallas. I am also featured in the documentary, We Are Wizards, which is currently making its way on the festival circuit.

For this event, a teen designer, Sylver Bu, developed a perfect melding of my own iconic persona and that of Dumbledore, the Wizard. As wizards go, I was not particularly skilled -- in part because I use Second Life so infrequently and because I am clumsy in my off-line persona too, so I muffed my dramatic entrance, but I got much more comfortable as the event went along. Barry Joseph, who conducted the interview, dressed up in a dragon avatar for the festivities.

The interview segment was enhanced by periodic trips to the dance floor -- this time to boogey to Wizard Rock recordings, most of which had some broad social message. The selections were chosen for Global Kids by USC's own Suzanne Scott, who is completing a dissertation which deals in part with Harry Potter fan music production and distribution. Our discussion ranged from the basics of fan culture to the particular ways that groups like the HP Alliance have used J.K. Rowling's world as a starting point for social and political activism, the ways Wizard Rock exploits social network technology,the current legal battles around the Harry Potter Lexicon, and the global nature of contemporary fan culture. For Rafi's account of the event, see this blog post.

Global Kids has posted a full recording of the event for anyone who wants to relive the experience:

And this is an edited highlights video which mostly focuses on the Wizard Rock dance:

Remix: A Contested Practice

While we are on the subject of Remix Culture, I wanted to call attention to a contest being run this month by the website, Total Recut, designed to get remix artists of all types reflecting on what remix and fair use means to them. If you don't know Total Recut, you should check it out since it is one stop shopping for a range of diverse and interesting examples of remix video -- examples which run from fan vids to political propaganda and includes both obvious and obscure examples. Here's some of the details of the contest:

Create a short video remix that explains what Remix Culture means to you. Using video footage from any source, including Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed work, we want you to produce a creative, educational and entertaining video remix that communicates a clear message to a wide audience. The video is to be no shorter than 30 seconds and no longer then 3 minutes in duration.

This contest is being run to promote awareness of remix culture in an educational capacity by encouraging the fair use of a wide variety of content and also to create a new pool of work that explains what remix culture is to the general public....

The contest will begin in May '08 and will be open for 1 month. Public Voting will begin in June and will remain open for 2 weeks, after which the best 10 videos will be put forward into the final and the Judging Panel will vote on each one. The winner will be announced in July '08.

Entries should follow the guidelines on Fair Use issued by The Center for Social Media, guidelines we discussed here a while back.

I was proud to be asked to be a judge for this competition, which emerged in part in response to a discussion with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher about the work our Project New Media Literacies has been doing focusing on the ethics and poetics of remix culture as we are supporting the teaching of Appropriation as a cultural competency through our curricular materials. We have, for example, been collaborating with the fine folks at Organization for Transformative Works who are producing videos for our learning library about vidding. And we are developing a whole curriculum around Moby Dick which centers on historic and contemporary examples of remix. So, I am personally very excited at the prospect of this competition leading to the production of new materials which might help students, teachers, parents, and the public learn more about remix, creative commons, fair use, appropriation, and participatory culture.

Total Recut has pulled together a truly diverse and interesting group of judges, including Pat Aufderheide (from the Center for Social Media), legal legend Lawrence Lessig, Darknet author J.D. Lasica, fan vidder Luminosity, Documentary filmmaker Kimbrew McLeod, and Negativeland's Mark Hosler. I hope that this range of judges indicates just how open the competition is to a range of different communities who are finding remix an effective mode of creative expression and social commentary. Even if you are not interested in the contest per se, you should check out this resource page which already includes a number of useful materials for explaining why remix matters in contemporary culture.

Children as Storytellers: The Making of TikaTok (Part Two)

Last time, I shared with you an interview with CMS alum Neal Grigsby and MIT Media Lab alum Orit Zuckerman, two of the key players in a new startup company, TikaTok, which is working to encourage children to create their own books and share them with other young readers. This time, we get a bit more personal as the two share their sense of how their MIT education contributed to their current projects. Your site also seems to promote opportunities for collaboration between young authors and illustrators. Is this a way of introducing young people to the world of collective intelligence?

Neal: It certainly is, and although it was always on our road map to add this feature, necessity made us move it up the schedule. Our users demanded it. Drawing, and getting an illustration up on the site, can be a creative and technical challenge for many. The team went back and forth for a very long time about the possibility of providing a digital drawing tool before finally coming to the conclusion that it was a bad idea for several reasons. But if you could use the illustrations that other kids had already provided and pledged to the community, if only until a time that your own drawings would be ready, it would really help.

Now we are seeing writing and illustrating as potentially two separate modes of participation, and it is quite exciting. Of course there will always be children who enjoy writing more than illustrating, and vice versa, and this gives both groups the ability to engage deeply on the site and not feel like they're missing a big part of the experience. I also suspect that for many users their first experience with collaboration will be almost accidental: they will use someone's illustration, or someone will use theirs, and the system will automatically attribute the illustration credit. And then once those two kids see the power of this passive collaboration, it may pave the way for a more deliberate collaboration like co-authorship of the text, which the site also supports, or even "massively multiplayer" co-authorship with a large group.

It is certainly possible that we will provide even more modes of participation in the future--one could easily imagine introducing analogs to the traditional roles of editor, copy editor, layout and design artist, and even publicist--but we haven't determined yet which of these would be the most meaningful to our community.

In a "Mother's Welcome," Sharon Kan suggests that this project emerged from the experience of "two mothers who wanted to create a place where children can write, illustrate, publish and print their own books." What specific experiences did you have as mothers which pushed you to start this company?

Orit: As mothers you see your children grow and their brains develop. It is one of the most fulfilling experiences to look at the world from a child's view. From very young age children try to express themselves in pictures and in stories. When I sat with my daughter and we created a story together, she knew exactly what she wanted to say and draw; she enjoyed creating a story and was very happy when it was presented to the world by her proud parents. Even though it wasn't storytelling as we see in books that are written by adults, the ideas that come out and the simplicity of the storyline was very interesting. I also noticed that through kindergarten she was always encouraged to draw, but when she went to first grade the emphasis went to reading and writing only, and all that talent of telling stories by pictures was neglected. Then I looked at my daughter's bookshelf. She loves books, yet all of her books were written by adults, edited by adults, and published by adults with adult priorities in mind. Why aren't there books for kids by kids? They clearly tell stories differently but no one publishes it? This is what led us to think that creating a platform where kids can tell their stories, bind them into real books, and be active in a community of book lovers would be a great thing to build.

Neal, you are in the process of becoming a father yourself. How is that impacting your perception of this project? What would you say in a "Father's Welcome" to the site?

Neal: In an interesting coincidence, the day that I learned I was becoming a father was the same day that we launched the private alpha release of the site. So you could say that both baby and website have been gestating for about the same amount of time. As you might expect it has been an incredibly busy and exciting time, and I approach the future with a sense of deep responsibility but also optimism.

Since learning of my impending fatherhood, I have been following blogs like Parent Hacks and GeekDad, and have been inspired by the ways those sites integrate this resurgent DIY culture with parenthood. From the stereotypes, one might expect a geeky parent to be particularly disengaged or self-absorbed, but these blogs almost show geek parents as the best hope for our future; they show passionate and caring parents who involve their children in projects of investigation, exploration, and invention.

If I were to write a "Father's Welcome," then, I would express my hope that the families who use our site embrace the opportunities it provides for parent and child to share a creative experience together. I am fully aware that, especially when he becomes a teenager, computers and the Internet will become tools of autonomy for my son. The old man will be embarrassingly uncool, as it is my destiny to become, and he will forge his online identity largely outside my direct supervision. Many sites for young children already reinforce this model, requiring the parent only for his blanket permission or his credit card. I hope on Tikatok a parent can hone a different facet of his relationship with his children: he can assist, collaborate, and inspire.

Orit, you recently completed a degree at the MIT Media Lab. Can you describe the work you did through the lab and what you learned there which has contributed to the current venture?

Orit: Part of my research in the media lab was creating a unique communication system for kids to involve remote relatives with their daily routines. Communication systems as we know them were designed for business use, later on they were adapted to home use, but without any changes to the basic design. Looking at what children need to communicate led to the development of a very unique video system that created contextual video correspondence between relatives. For example, a grandmother would read a story to her grandchild on the other side of the world; and then the grandson would get that message when he went to bed. The system would know the right time to connect between the relatives and thus create a more meaningful connection between them. Looking at things from the user's point of view creates a different product all together. With Tikatok, I tried looking at storytelling from a childs point of view and create something that would be easy and fun to use.

Neal, you recently completed a Masters through the Comparative Media Studies Program. Can you describe the work you did with us and how it has contributed to the current venture?

Neal: All of my work at CMS was united by the program's commitment to multidisciplinary thinking, and for putting theory into practice. It was really invaluable experience to me as I began work on Tikatok.

The research project I worked most on was the Project for New Media Literacies. As your regular readers well know, it is a project very much created to address the challenges of participatory culture. As a graduate student researcher it was my responsibility to create educational media and associated curricula that would illuminate media production practices for a youth audience. I produced materials around blogging and science fiction authorship (using BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow as an exemplar), public art and graffiti, Wikipedia, and video games. The project forced me to think of creative ways to teach both the practical and ethical dimensions of media production, and that experience has certainly come in handy for designing materials that engage and instruct our users. The project also trained me to see these processes of creation and expression not only as individual processes, but as social process that occur within a context. This perspective has frequently come in handy when, as a team, we discuss new features and priorities for the company. The community illustration database is the perfect example. Do we solve the problem of illustration uploading with a tool that allows individual children to create digital drawings instantly? Or do we provide a more powerful way for kids to work together and take advantage of their unique abilities? My work with NML helped me provide an informed opinion on this decision and others.

I also worked briefly at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab as the design lead for a team of Singaporean and MIT students charged with creating a multiplayer video game for mobile phones. GAMBIT really prepared me for the kind of rapid, iterative product development within a small team that is characteristic of many startups, including our own. My GAMBIT experience also gave me a heightened appreciation for the extreme importance of user interface design and QA. I believe that video games really have some of the best user interfaces of any interactive media. There are design principles common to video games that designers of websites and virtual worlds should ignore at their own peril. The multidisciplinary approach I learned at CMS has allowed me to recognize relevant connections between these different media modes.

Finally, there was my academic work. My thesis explored "Narrative of Adolescence Across Media" and its final chapter, which imagined video games as a platform for a new kind of player co-authored coming-of-age story, articulates many of the same goals that we are trying to meet with Tikatok. For someone whose thesis was inspired by Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, in which a young girl is aided in her development by, essentially, a digital platform for collaborative storytelling, it has been exciting to bring my research to bear on one of the closest real-world examples of such a platform that I have encountered.

What has been the biggest surprise as you've explored the intersection between these two MIT-based approaches to media?

Neal: The biggest surprise to me, I suppose, is how compatible the two approaches have been. If I were to believe the Media Lab stereotype, it would be that the folks there put too much faith in technological solutions. Certainly there is a huge technological optimism behind projects like the One Laptop Per Child, and it's important to peel away the layers of hyperbole to assess its potential impact. In starting a new company, it puts you in the position of having to promote yourself and your ideas, and it can be tempting to let your high aspirations get the best of you and let the hype flow unchecked. But I have never found myself battling Orit over unrealistic expectations. I think because the project is so grounded in her commitment to making something cool and worthwhile for her children, it makes her a sharp judge of what really works vs. what we want to work. She's not making something for "the children," she's making something for her children.

And while Orit works on a very intuitive level, the CMS approach has allowed me to bring a multitude of theoretical frameworks to the project, and helped me articulate what we are trying to achieve, sometimes to people on the outside, but sometimes even to the team. In that sense it is a nice marriage of a more bottom-up, creative approach with a top-down, analytical approach. But even that is a simplification - I think we both bring creative and analytical skills. As MIT media scholars I think we definitely speak the same language.

Orit Zuckerman - Co-founder and CTO

Orit has designed online communities since 1996, when she worked for Gizmoz Networks. In 1999, Orit co-founded uTOK Inc., a San Francisco-based Internet startup that created a "decentralized blogging community." She designed the community product, and supervised the R&D team. Most recently, Orit earned her Master's Degree from the MIT Media Lab, where she designed and implemented an innovative communication system for children. Orit has also exhibited her interactive portraiture installations in Milan, Monaco, Boston, British Telecom headquarters, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

Neal Grigsby - Director of Online Community

Neal Grigsby worked for seven years at LookSmart.com, where he managed volunteers on a user-generated Web directory, co-managed partnerships and developed content for FindArticles, and designed education-themed search verticals. Neal recently earned his Masters Degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where he produced educational media for the Macarthur-funded Project for New Media Literacies, and

designed video games for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Neal also

holds a BA from UC Berkeley.

Ethics and the New Media Literacies

All this week, the collaboration between MIT's Project nml and Harvard's Good Play Project is being spotlighted over at the MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning. If you don't know Spotlight, you are missing out on some of the best conversations these days about the ways that young people are learning in the context of the new participatory cultures. The two groups made a joint presentation a few weeks ago at the American Educational Researchers Association Conference in New York City.

As part of that presentation, Erin Reilly, NML's project manager, used her photoshop skills to put together this vivid representation of the collaboration we've started to build together.

The following text was written jointly by John Francis, Andrea Flores, Sam Gilbert, Lana Schwartz, and Steve Schultze

Meeting of the H's

In 2006, Henry Jenkins (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) and Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), both grantees of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, met to discuss their mutual interest in ethical issues around digital media and possible opportunities for collaboration--and why not, being situated only two subway stops apart in Cambridge? More important than geography, though, were emergent complementary themes and research questions of Gardner's and Jenkins' work, which made a collaborative effort seem promising.

How has this meeting of the H's faired, and what has come out of the combined effort of Henry and Howard's teams? This week, we hope to give you an inside look at our collaboration through a series of blog posts highlighting our present accomplishments and future plans. Today, we'll start with a bit of background about our teams and the goals of our collaboration.

Two Projects, One Mission

As youth grow up in an increasingly connected environment, they are presented with a diversity of challenges. Many of these challenges arise in the context of new technologies of communication and creativity. How does digital copying relate to legacy notions of property? What do I need to know in order to collaborate with my online peers? How do I present myself online? What do I do when I encounter new communities with unfamiliar norms or ideas? In many cases, there are helpful analogies in "age old" practices. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom of the analog world can seem like an ill fit. A more appropriate approach might frame the core skills and ethical issues within already established structures, but recognize the complications and opportunities of the contemporary media environment.

Project New Media Literacies (NML) headed by Jenkins at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program is guided by two questions:

1. What do young people need to know in order to become full, active, creative, critical, and ethically responsible participants in a media-rich environment?
2. What steps do we need to take to make sure that these skills are available to all?

NML uses digital media and new network technologies to help young people think about the role of media in their lives as consumers, producers, and participants

Gardner's GoodPlay Project, part of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is similarly concerned with the roles that youth assume online. More specifically, the GoodPlay Project seeks to understand the ethical issues that youth face in the virtual frontier of new digital media. How models of ethics transfer from the offline to the online world--especially in the five areas of identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility and participation--and how young people understand their roles and responsibilities in digital contexts are key concerns.

Together, it was decided that NML and GoodPlay would produce learning tools that help youth understand the connections between the digital media skills they learn and their roles and responsibilities as "good" cyber citizens. By integrating the GoodPlay ethical framework with the new media skill set defined by NML, the collaboration would develop activities that encourage reflection about ethical issues raised in various forms of media participation. These activities would draw on materials from the NML Exemplar Library and on data collected by the GoodPlay research team.

Let's Collaborate

In the summer of 2007, the NML and GoodPlay project teams set out to explore exactly what form our collaboration would take. We divided ourselves up into four "SuperTeams" to discuss compelling intersections between the two projects. After several weeks and many meetings, the entire group decided on a course of action for the fall: we--the "SuperQuartet" of Andrea Flores, John Francis, Steve Schultze and Lana Swartz--were challenged to generate ten high-level prototypes. After meeting with the full teams from NML-GoodPlay, we selected the best components of those prototypes for further refinement into two full learning modules. During this process, we began by considering the five core ethical issues identified in the GoodPlay white paper.

• Identity: exploring and 'playing' with different identities
• Privacy: choosing when and how to share information to whom
• Ownership/Authorship: understanding issues of control and credit for intellectual work
• Credibility: being authentic when representing one's competence and motivations
• Participation: accessing communities, understanding codes of conduct, and engaging proactively

We chose to focus on Ownership/Authorship for this first prototype development and refinement phase. This issue highlights the challenges youth face in navigating questions like "who owns the output of my work?", and "what are the appropriate means of giving credit?" Offline, these issues have a long history of legal and social norms but ethical indiscretions are commonplace. The opportunities for transgressions are compounded online by the absence of clear-cut and well-understood norms, facile technology and a multi-author model of online creation. Within this core issue of Ownership/Authorship, we integrated several skills from the New Media Literacies white paper, such as:

• Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Collective Intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

In our activities, simulation helps students set up and understand real-world scenarios of ethical ownership. When facing an opportunity to sample or remix media content, students must decide what makes for acceptable and meaningful appropriation. In several instances, they must pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal. In so doing, they must exercise the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information. Because ownership/authorship is a complex issue with different expectations in different situations, the activities encourage students to discern and respect multiple perspectives, and to engage alternative norms.

The combination of these issues and skills led us to four themes that we sought to address:

• Collaboration/Co-Creation/Knowledge Communities: Developing models of how to work together effectively and ethically.
• Responsibility: Highlighting the ways in which a creator has responsibilities to his/her audience, to the broader community, and to the original content and its creator (if he/she is a remixer).
• Copyright: Understanding the proper use of materials by the individual and the individual's understanding of his/her rights as a creator of content.
• "Inspired by " vs. Plagiarism: Identifying the difference between using content as a jumping off point for remixing/ creating new 'inspired by' materials vs. usurping materials as one's own creation.

We are excited with the progress that has been made, and the ways in which insights from both NML and GoodPlay informed the process. In some ways, we experienced the very concepts we were designing for, as we relied on the collective intelligence of all involved, easily negotiated differences and drew from a wide network of knowledge. It is clear that the shared authorship process can generate something greater than the sum of its parts, and that remixing and appropriation helped us iterate toward more effective activities.

But enough about us, we want to show you what we've made!

THE INSPIRED HIGHLIGHTER

When you're doing research or creating a work of art, the line between original work and copying is sometimes blurry. This activity helps "highlight" these distinctions.

In The Inspired Highlighter, students review different media samples in which one work is influenced by a former work. The two samples are presented side-by-side, and students identify the various tools that the latter author draws upon elements of the first work--characters, point-of-view, wording, theme, etc. We provide several options for teachers, such as Emma and Clueless, Gone with the Wind and Wind Done Gone, Moby Dick and a contemporary stage adaptation, Harry Potter fan fiction, and more. Students are also provided with simple summaries of concepts such as plagiarism, inspiration, copyright, public domain, and fair use. Working in groups or individually, students make comparisons across different genres, media forms, and authorial communities. This involves judging what makes for acceptable appropriation and what does not. Students identify the difference between using content as inspiration versus straightforward plagiarism.

The activity uses two conceptual tools to guide students through this process. First, the students themselves place the particular instances that they discover in a simple grid that helps them the tools the author, the nature of the appropriation, and the possible motivations of the second author. The second conceptual tools is a simple graph, featuring "unacceptable copyright" on one axis and "acceptable norms" on the other. Together on the board, the class discusses where on this axis they would place the specific examples they found. Perhaps some examples are acceptable with respect to copyright law but unacceptable when it comes to authoring an original academic work. Perhaps some cases are unacceptable with a strict interpretation of copyright, but seem perfectly acceptable when considered in light of social norms.

By the end of the activity, students should be able to identify norms of ownership, tools of authorship, and instances of clear and not-so-clear plagiarism. Going forward, we hope that students will be able to highlight and consider these dilemmas not only in their school work but also in day-to-day situations.

MAD MEN

The themes of authorial responsibility and copyright are difficult concepts for many young people to grasp. In this activity, we let cows do the teaching.

In Mad Men, students role-play as advertising project managers for the 'Vegetable Growers of America' (VGA) in a campaign promoting vegetarianism. In the activity, students choose photos and music for the campaign, considering both the licensing and original intent of the musical and visual creations. For example, students have to decide whether or not using an "agency" owned photo of a cow statue at the Sri Mariamman Temple in Singapore is appropriate in this context. While the photo can be used appropriately from a copyright perspective, students must weigh the needs of the campaign, the original intent of the photo's creator, and the photo's religious context. Mad Men, then, does not simply ask students to consider copyright violations, but also encourages them to think about the potential consequences of using media for different purposes than the original artist intended.

After creating their advertising campaigns, students engage in a discussion about their decisions. In light of the music and photo choices they made for the ad campaign, they are asked to consider and articulate the likely views of different stakeholders--the VGA, the viewing public, and the original creator. Students are also prompted to consider how their concerns would change were they tasked with creating an anti-vegetarianism campaign using the same images and music. Our hopes in crafting this curriculum were twofold: 1) to expose youth to ownership norms and conventions of authorial responsibility; and 2) to scaffold youth to thoughtfully reflect on the meaning of ethical authorship and ownership decision-making in their everyday experiences.

Mad Men poses issues of responsibility and copyright in a fun and engaging role-play and a substantive experience of making distinct ethical choices. Who knew that cows could do all that?

Privacy and Publicity

Now that we've developed curricular activities that address issues of ownership and authorship, the NML-GoodPlay collaboration is focusing on to another ethical issue salient to digital youth: privacy. The Internet has changed how youth find and share information about themselves and others, challenging existing conceptions of privacy. These changes result in a lot of uncertainty about what constitute good privacy practices. Our hope is to create a curriculum that gives young people thinking tools that help them to 1) understand both the promises and the perils of disclosure online and 2) consciously adopt a set of values around what to share and what not to share online.

To start things off, the NML and GoodPlay teams recently got together for a 'group think' about privacy issues and strategies for encouraging reflection about privacy. Here are a few themes from that brainstorm that we feel will be important to address through the curriculum:

• Digital media technology has made it possible for individuals to share more about themselves to more people than ever before. It has also made it harder than ever before for individuals to control what personal information gets shared with others. Thus, while young people may have more outlets to share their thoughts, receive support and feedback, and build relationships, it's much easier for them to be taken advantage of online.
• Many young people use deception as a way of maintaining privacy. One teenager interviewed for the GoodPlay project, for example, changes the hometown listed on his facebook profile every couple of weeks so as to throw off people who might try to locate him.
• Managing privacy is rarely as simple as knowing "what to say" and "what not to say" online. It involves managing one's information across diverse communities and contexts. Often, sharing an intimate part of oneself to others online can be a positive and rewarding experience; it's when such information is copied and pasted into a new context--or shared with an unintended audience--that problems arise.
• For young people, many conflicts over privacy revolve around gossiping practices. Information is power, and young people are sometimes imprudent about sharing information so as to lift their standing in the social group.

Our heads are swimming with ideas about privacy, but we'd still love to hear some more. Do you have a great concept for an activity that capitalizes on these ideas? Any thoughts on how privacy issues manifest themselves online? Write something in the comments and continue our brainstorm!

For those of you who can't get enough of talk about new media literacies, you might want to check out this recording of a public conversation between Howard Gardner, James Paul Gee, Nichole Pinkard, Connie Yowell, and myself at AERA. Thanks to Barry Joseph and the fine folks at Global Kids for sharing this link.

Librarians, YouTube, and the New Media Literacies

I recently gave talks to two groups of librarians about their role in promoting the New Media Literacies: first, I did a webcast to more than 500 members of the Association for College and Research Libraries and then, I spoke in person to a meeting of the New England Educational Media Association and the Massachusetts School Library Association. Across both conversations, it was clear that librarians are on the front lines, dealing with those who have been left behind by the participation gap, struggling to deal with those opposed to or frightened by the participatory turn in our culture, helping anxious academics understand the value and limits of wikipedia, and so forth. In the question sessions at both talks, I heard some of the concerns they are facing on their ground as they try to keep pace with the changes in our understanding of literacy and in the ways that information circulates and knowledge is produced.

I was especially struck by some questions from libraries whose school districts require them to block such key sites of participatory culture as Youtube, MySpace, and Second Life -- in part out of fear of the content they will bring into their schools but also out of concern about their liability over what students may post during school hours. I was struck all over again by the tension between the rich pedagogical benefits we see through the effective deployment of such sites and the pressures schools face from those in their community who are anxious about the directions their culture is taking.

I tried to explain to them about the ways that YouTube has become an incredible archive of materials of invaluable use in the classroom. I cited for example the website, realclearpolitics, which everyday not only gathers together key articles about the presidential campaign from newspapers and newsmagazines all over the country but also collects major clips from the campaign trail, mostly posted on Youtube, so you can quickly catch up with everything from Saturday Night Live skits to the latest interviews on Sunday Morning talk shows, from advertisements to internet parodies, which help us to understand what's happening in American civic life. This site does a great job in curating the contents of Youtube yet it would be impossible to generate such a resources without the open ended platform for sharing media content that Youtube represents. As a media scholar, I think we should be teaching students ways to understand what's going on within Youtube and how it is impacting our culture. But I also think that regardless of what subject you teach, we can learn through YouTube. At the same time, producing and sharing media can be a powerful motivator for other kinds of academic research, can be a good way to get students to take greater responsibility over their own learning, and can be a way of introducing students to the rewards and challenges of civic engagement and cultural participation. The response to the risks posed by this new media platform is not to ignore them and let young people face them on their own outside of school but to insure that there are well informed adult mentors to watch their backs rather than snoop over their shoulders. So, I urge librarians and teachers to continue to struggle to insure that they have access to this resource in their schools.

I know that a number of teachers and librarians regularly read this blog so I'd like to invite you to share your stories and perspectives on this issue. Which sites does your local school board block access to? What rationales are they giving? To what degrees is it possible to work around those restrictions? Or conversely, what uses have you made of these sites for your teaching?

As you can probably tell from the reactions to the anonymous post, we now seem to be back on track in terms of processing reader responses: it does require a one time registration process but it allows you to post directly to the site without waiting for me to clear each post. So, let's see if we can put the system to a test.

If you follow these links, you can find a podcast version of the ACRL talk (if you want to cut to the talk itself, it starts about 12 minutes into the podcast) and an interview with with College & Research Libraries News editor-in-chief David Free, which follows up on some of the core ideas in the talk.

Both talks allowed me to share some of the materials we are developing through Project nml, including our Teacher's Strategy Guide on Moby Dick, our Learning Library, and the Ethics Casebook we are developing with Harvard's Good Play Project. You can find out more about all three projects at our Project NML blog. We are still looking for schools and after school programs which might want to test some of our materials next year. I am going to share more on the Ethics casebook project later this week.

Catching Up on Project NML

I am currently in New York City participating in a range of sessions at the American Educational Research Associaton conference designed to showcase the work which we are doing on New Media Literacies. Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion with James Paul Gee, Nichole Pinkard, Howard Gardner, and Connie Yowell. Last night, at a MacArthur Foundation reception, our team showcased some of the work we've been doing on the NML Learning Library (see below). Today, we are showcasing our collaboration with Harvard University's Good Play Project (Under the supervision of Howard Gardner) which is designed to encourage reflection on the ethical challenges young people face as they navigate through the complexities of the online world. All of this is part of an effort by the MacArthur Foundation to publicize the creation of a national network of researchers, scholars, educators, and activists who are focusing their attention on Digital Media and Learning. This has been one of the most exciting collaborations of my academic career. I love working with all of these people. Individually, collectively, we are starting to make a difference in the conversations that impact young people's relations to new media technology and participatory culture. Project NML recently launched a new blog designed to create greater "transparency" around the development of curricular materials and activities supporting the teaching of new media literacies. An early highlight is a post by Jenna McWilliams, our outreach coordinator, talking about how working on a teachers strategy guide designed to support the teaching of Moby Dick has forced her to reconsider this great American novel. She writes:

Before I came to NML, I had long lived among the multitudes who for many reasons--actually, for me it was mainly out of guilt and the heavy weight of cultural duty--keep a copy of Moby-Dick on a bookshelf with the really truly honest intention of getting through it some day. My guilt was compounded by my personal history as first an English major and then a student-writer in an MFA program. Every time I looked over at that fat little book sitting plumply on my bookshelf, I got just a little miserable all over again. But then I thought, you know, it's a very long novel. And hard. And word on the street is that it's kind of...boring. But then I joined NML and started in on this teacher's guide and I figured, okay, it's time to end the shame. And I took a deep breath and I jumped in....

There's no doubt that reading Moby-Dick is not the same kind of rollicking good time as, for example, reading Harry Potter. I won't argue about the degree of concentration, deliberation, and discipline required to make it through...

When I started the book, I prepared myself for serious tedium, determined to charge through for the good of the project (good-hearted team player that I am). But--I promise you I'm telling the truth--I actually had a really good time. I think this is mainly because as I started to read, I was surrounded by some very smart people (Henry Jenkins and Melville Scholar and MIT professor Wyn Kelley) who framed the novel for me as the work of a kind of proto-fan--a writer who channeled a lifelong love of literature, science, mythology, and the tiniest details of whaling culture into the classic text we engage with today. I couldn't help but imagine Melville as a sort of geeky fanboy, running around from library to museum to shoreline to dock and collecting information that he couldn't wait to share with readers.... When you picture Melville like that, and when you think about the book as evidence of his fandom, it starts to get really fun. You can even slog your way through the pages and pages of whaling history and lore, because you understand that Melville has collected all the information he could possibly find and is presenting it to you, the reader, because he thinks it's really, really neat.

McWilliam's post captures beautifully the excitement we are all experiencing reading Moby Dick through the lens of participatory culture.

I have long argued that the New Media Literacies should not be conceptualized as an add on subject or as something teachers do on Friday afternoon if the students have been good all week. It requires a paradigm shift on the same order as the ways schools have started to confront the challenges of multiculturalism and globalization. It impacts everything schools teach. In this project, we are focusing on Literature and Language Arts. Our hopes is to provide a model for how we teach authorship and classic literature differently in an era of remix culture. For more of my thoughts on this project, see earlier blog posts -- The Whiteness of the Whale (Revisited) and

href="http://henryjenkins.org/2007/09/was_herman_melville_a_protofan.html">Was

Herman Melville a Protofan?

MIT's Tech TV site is also showcasing some of the materials Project nml is producing for its forthcoming learning library. As Erin Reilly explains in the blog:

The Exemplar Library that was once documentary videos highlighting best practices of participatory culture is now an integration of learning activities embedded into multimedia material. In addition to videos, the Exemplar Library now has animated data visualization, flash movies, and other motion media as launching points. The learning activities are a combination of online activities that teens can do on their own to group activities that can happen both in and out of the classroom. This new informal approach to learning through the Exemplar Library encourages teens from passive viewing into interactive participation... and we saw just that in our first focus group of the semester.

The featured videos include several segments focused on what young people are learning through their participation in cosplay, some thoughts about the value of simulations and visualizations including a segment dealing with animation.

We welcome your feedback on these works in progress -- especially from Educators (whether based in schools or after school programs) or Librarians.

I will be giving two talks next week focused on these materials -- on Weds. as part of a webcast for Association of College and Research Libraries and on Friday before the New England Educational Media Association. Hope to see some of my regular readers there.

If You Saw My Talk at South By Southwest...

On Saturday, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You) and I delivered the opening remarks at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. Conference organizers told me that we were heard by around 2000 people, including those in the large auditorium and in various overflow rooms. So, I've got to figure that a certain percentage of those people are going to be visiting this blog for the first time in the next week so I am pulling together a guide to where they can read more about some of the topics we discussed. For the rest of you, you might want to check out this very elaborate chart which was "live drawn" during our discussion and which does a reasonably good job of mapping out some of the core topics. For those of you who want to learn more about the New Media Literacies, you might want to check out the white paper my team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation which identifies 11 core skills and cultural competencies which we think young people need to acquire to become full participants in this emerging media culture. The MacArthur network has generated a series of books on key topics surrounding digital media and learning which can be downloaded for free.

If you'd like to read more about the politics of fear and the ways it blinds us to what's really going on as young people engage with media, you should consider this blog post and this document which danah boyd and I co-authored in response to the push to regulate school and library access to social network software.

I discussed the concept of collective intelligence in relation to Wikipedia in this post, which is an early draft of an article which will appear soon in The Journal of Media Literacy. For the distinction I raised between "collective intelligence" and "the Wisdom of the crowds," you might read this post which considers how both might be tapped through serious games.

Steven and I chatted a bit on the relative merits of The Wire (which I described as one of the best shows "inside the box") and Lost (which I characterized as one of the best shows "outside the box"). Here's an earlier discussion of Lost in relation to shifts in how we process television content. For a fuller consideration of Lost as a new form of television, you might check out CMS alum Ivan Askwith's Masters Thesis on engagement television. For an interesting take on The Wire, see Jason Mittell's essay here. And of course, Johnson's own Everything Bad is Good For You brought the debate about complexity in popular culture to a much larger public.

I spoke at some length about Harry Potter fandom. These ideas are more fully developed in the "Why Heather Can Write" chapter of my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I expanded my thinking on Harry Potter fandom this summer here at the blog. The remarks on Harry Potter were inspired in part by the fact that I appear in a new film (which I still haven't seen), We are Wizards, which was premiering at the South by Southwest film festival.

I've had several people ask me about what I meant when I suggested that the amount of energy and creativity that surrounds fan culture might be understood, at least in part, in the context of a culture which fails to tap the full intelligence and creative energies of its citizens. I suggested that many of the women I had met in the fan fiction writing community, for example, held jobs, such as those of a librarian, school teacher, nurse, or nanny, which require high level of education for entry but often do not tap that knowledge as regularly as might be ideal. Many of these women use fan fiction as an outlet for their surplus creative energies, as a way of getting recognition for their accomplishments outside of the workplace, and as a means of forming community with others who share the same frustrations and fantasies. The same is true for fans of many other types: they are able to do much more outside of the workplace than they are allowed to do in their jobs. Someone asked me if I had meant women. Well, women are certainly as a group devalued and under-utilized in our society and this may account for why such a large number of them are participating in online communities of all kinds and accomplishing extraordinary things. But the same would be true of many other groups, including a larger number of young men. The point is that we look in the wrong direction when we pathologize fans for finding creative outlets through participatory culture rather than asking why America is not more actively cultivating that intelligence and creativity through every aspect of our society. (None of this is to suggest that fan activities are meaningless in their own right or need to be justified by appealing to more 'serious' values. As I also said during my remarks, humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.)

We talked about the Obama campaign and its relationship to collective intelligence and social networks, a topic that I explored in my blog very recently. From there, we extended to talk about the concept of civic media, a topic which allowed Steve to talk about his new project, Outside.in, and for me to talk about the work we are doing through the newly launched Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

In response to a question from the audience, I spoke about the newly created Organization for Transformative Works, a project by and for fans, in response to the commercial exploitation and legal threats surrounding their culture. It's a good example of how we can use the mechanics of participatory culture to exert pressure back on other institutions.

And if you want to hear my conversation last year with danah boyd, you can find it here.

For those of you who are new to this blog, welcome. Explore the backlog of posts. Stick around for more conversations on participatory culture, collective intelligence, and new media literacies.

Multimedia in Spanish Classrooms: Harry Potter Comes to School

The Comparative Media Studies Program often provides a temporary home to scholars from all over the world who want to learn more about our approaches to research and teaching. At the present time, we have scholars in residence from Spain, Denmark, Austria, China, and the Czech Republic. Spain's Pillar Lacasa has come back for a second stay with us. Her background is in psychology and her current interests center around the educational use of computer games and other digital resources. She and her collaborators shared some of this research during the Media in Transition conference a year ago. Here, she shares some more of her impressions and insights based on field work in Spanish schools -- in this case, work which involves teaching children and adults to think about what we call transmedia navigation. Here, she is using the Harry Potter franchise to encourage a closer attention to what each media platform brings to our experience of this popular adventure saga. SPANISH CLASSROOMS AS MULTIMEDIA CONTEXTS: CHILDREN, FAMILIES, TEACHERS AND RESEARCHERS WORKING TOGETHER

by Pilar Lacasa

Recently, Henry shared some field notes about the place of digital media in Chinese society, considering not just how particular people use these media, but also how this use has a specific meaning in the Chinese political and cultural context. He was speaking about the rhetorical use of the "games addiction" concept, which specifically considers that "playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive" i.e. that game-playing is taking up the time of young people that they could better be spending doing their school homework and preparing for standardized testing. Henry's comments suggested to me that very similar reflections could be made about these debates in many other parts of the world.

Let me explain a little bit about Spain, my own country. Our team has been working in Spanish schools as participant researchers and ethnographers, exploring how games and other digital tools might be used to enhance education. Many families, some teachers and even school principals have complained to us about how children waste their time playing games or surfing the Internet looking for information that adults do not regard as very suitable for children. What are the reasons for these opinions? Put simply, many adults are afraid to approach these new worlds and digital universes that they don't know how to explore or don't find interesting.

When chatting with such adults and exploring these thoughts in more detail, we begin to understand than behind this less than enthusiastic approach to digital tools lie much stronger beliefs about what learning in and outside of school actually means. For many we spoke with, the idea of learning is related only to schoolwork, the content of the curriculum, and particularly those specific materials that have almost always been present in the classroom: books, paper and pencils, textbooks, etc. All of these cultural tools are associated with the academic culture and the school context. What people think is learning is closely related to the formal context in which people have traditionally always learnt; that is, the schools and the tools that have been used there for centuries. However, as educators we believe that an important challenge today is to redeploy certain technologies that were originally designed for leisure-time use towards educational purposes.

How can digital technologies, not just computers, be of value as learning tools? This is the question. To recognize the question is easy, even simplistic, but, for the time being, to achieve this goal demands the participation of teachers, families, investigators, companies and, not least, children. One of the first steps in meeting this challenge will be to introduce digital tools other than computers into classrooms, not just occasionally but on a permanent basis, at least as much as other traditional objects. But how can they be used? Could specific tools that have being designed just for fun also be used in schools? From our perspective new ways of teaching and learning need to be explored, enabling children's and adults' activities as active learners, capable of creating new knowledge by using the tools that they use in their everyday life.

Adopting this perspective, our team of researchers in Spain are exploring the possibility of constructing these new educational innovative settings, in which families, children, teachers and researchers, and even industry, working together, learn to use some of the digital tools that are present in everyday life. Why are these digital technologies especially appropriate for supporting new approaches to learning? Through our project, teachers and researchers begin to prepare relatively innovative school homework in which parents and children could collaborate in interesting tasks that motivate them to bring to the schools topics and ideas from their everyday life, such as family stories, real problems people need to solve in their own work, and so on. We were thinking about how to open the school doors to topics beyond the curriculum. This homework was usually presented in the form of paper and pencil tasks. What happened in these families after they had been working for at least three months in this way with their children? We recorded many conversations at home when parents and children were working together, but contrary to our expectations, no innovative educational settings appeared. Family members were acting at home as teachers do into the classrooms, but in an even more traditional way. They were evidently using the same strategies by which they were taught many years ago.

After this experience we began to look for new educational tools, which we found in the mass media. We brought Newspapers, television, videogames, consoles and any other new technology that the children use in everyday life into the classrooms. But how should we use these new tools? In the course of the past ten years many questions have arisen in our classrooms that discussions and readings at the Comparative Media Studies are helping us to answer. It is obvious that it is not enough to introduce all of them in the classrooms. It is also necessary to design new educational settings within which to develop the new media literacies in order to deal with these new media in a critical, creative and responsible way.

When teachers bring movies, newspapers, television programs, or the internet into their classes, one of the most important conditions for a successful experience in terms of children's motivation and reflective processes is that the teachers should feel secure with the materials that they are using. But bringing commercial videogames into the classrooms is still an especially challenging experience. At the moment, adults are much less familiar with games than other entertainment mass media. Today, commercial videogames are far from what many families or even teachers think could be used in classroom instruction.

Given our starting goals, it was clear that we wanted to integrate games into learning, but we weren't sure how to do so. Our previous work in Spanish schools tell us that at least three main conditions need to be present for innovative experience to be successful in both teaching and learning processes:

• First, to establish close relationships between teachers, families and researchers
• Second, to be involved in a multimedia context in which games are only one of the possible tools we can use
• Finally, to establish a working methodology that attempts to bring into a multiplicity of expressive multimedia codes that children and adults can learn to use together.

Let us show you how these three conditions are present in the Spanish classroom in which we are working. I will try to help you to observe this situation and to construct the meaning that the situations has for us as ethnographical researchers. Please, think for a moment of the context involved. It is January 2007 in a working-class neighbourhood near Madrid. The children and their teacher are waiting for the "new video game teachers", this is the name that the children give to the University of Alcalá research team. They have become used to meeting once a week with some people who do not belong to their school, but who are participants in their classroom; the children understand that we teach in other schools where they are going to be teachers in the future. For the whole of the school year we have been coming to work with them once a week, with the goal of learning together, children and adults, using new media.

This particular day we are going to begin a workshop on Harry Potter; in the previous session we had chosen the topic by reflecting on the pros and cons in a large-group discussion. We all voted for our favourite video game. By this time each of us had different expectations about what would happen on subsequent days in the workshop. Given our previous experiences with other children, the teacher and the researchers tried to find a common task for the workshop: after having talked, played and reflected about Harry Potter, we will write our opinions of the game in our blogs, so that other children should know about our adventures with Harry Potter. Both children and adults will be journalists; people who write so that others members of the community and all over around the world will know the opinions of the class.

During the next three or four session the children were playing at home and in the classroom with the PlayStation 2, with family members and the research team, to find out much more about Harry and his world.

Now let us move on a little further in our schedule by observing a more advanced session during this workshop. As always, this new session begin by talking about Harry Potter. The children knew more than the adults about him. They even bring from their homes objects related to his adventures; they all belong to the popular culture based on Harry and represent this heroic figure, who is very popular in Spain at the moment. For example, there is a game of chess designed with the main characters of the Harry Potter books, films and games, an album of stickers, T-shirts with his image, card games, etc. By showing these treasures to all the participants in the workshops and discussing them, the children showed that they were conscious that Harry is not only the main character of a video game, but it is also present in other media.

In order to look in more depth at Harry's presence in various media, a new activity was designed. We decided to compare selected parts of the film and game based on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. After an introductory discussion on the film, we all watch together the chosen chapter. Later, we talk about Harry and invented a new collective oral story about him. By doing so, the children learn not only to tell stories but also to understand how stories spread across media systems. Moreover, by writing in their blogs the children understand that many other people, such as their families and friends, will be able to read the work that they have done in class, and in that way they begin to understand that there exists an audience that can read their texts and look at their drawings although it is not present in the classroom.

Let us see now the text that two children wrote together to be published in their blog after watching a small part of the film and discussing its relationship with the game.

Blog of Sergio and Miguel

Session 8, 02-06-07

Hello, we are Sergio and Miguel:

In the class today we played with the videogame Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and have seen a little bit of the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Today we learned what are the differences and similarities between the video game and the movie. They look alike in that the characters are the same, as are the magic spells and the adventure involved. And they differ in that in the video game you move the characters and in the movie they move by themselves. The movie is more fun, thinks Miguel. Sergio prefers the video game because you can play.

This brief description of the experience enables us to comment on what conditions need to be in place when introducing entertainment games into the classroom.

First, the text shows that the children are conscious that stories can be told via several different channels of communication. Moreover, the children also knew that each of them has different, ways of expressing particular messages. At that time they were exploring various ways of being in touch with Harry Potter's adventures; e.g. the movie, the video game, the objects that the children had brought to school, the information that they had found on the Internet and the texts that they themselves have published. But what did they learn? I would want to interpret this text by considering that these children show an understanding that each medium has its own rules. Conversations with teachers, researchers, and other students, helped to increase their grasp of abstract concepts such as audience, messages, and the different affordances of different media. How have they learned this? By talking, reflecting and publishing about new media, always being supported by teachers, researchers and families, as more expert members of the community. Doing such tasks at school helped them to understand their lives beyond the schoolhouse walls.

In order to understand this educational innovative experience a little better, something more needs to be emphasized. Let us focus now on the interpersonal relationships among participants. Collaboration between the teacher, the children, their families and the research team was probably the main driving force behind these experiences. This becomes clearer when we study the video-recordings of the workshop sessions or analyse our field notes taken as ethnographers and participant observers. Two main ideas emerge:

• First of all, the classrooms were transformed not only through the introduction of games but also because relationships among participants changed in the course of the workshop. Both children and adults were learning from each other. In many cases, they adopted new and different roles. The relations between children and adults were much more symmetrical at the end of the workshops than they had been at the beginning, even though what each of the participants were teaching was really different. While the children were focusing on the procedural dimensions of the games (e.g. how to solve a specific problem to go to another game screen), adults were orienting the conversations towards a much more reflective level, e.g. how the individual media related to each other, what were their specific messages, who were the people for whom the children were writing in their blogs.
• Secondly, extensive observations of recordings of the classroom conversations show that the participants' goals also differed according to their own particular roles. For example, when the games consoles arrived in the classroom, or when we compared the video game and the movie, the teacher's interest was vividly aroused by the way in which the children can learn from the game certain content that is closely related to the curriculum. In contrast, and just as was to be expected, the most important goal of the children was just to play the game; to become immersed in it. Their families, who know of their classroom work by reading their blogs or because they were working with their children at home became interested in the games consoles as learning tools. What is was our goal as a research team? We think that we tried to be "good mediators". At the end, we came to a deeper appreciation of just how difficult it was to address these different goals through a common workshop.

Pilar's background is in Psychology and Media Education. During the past ten years she has been working with her students at the University of Alcalá (Spain), collaborating with teachers and families to facilitate the acquisition of new forms of literacy that enable children and adults to develop as global citizens in their community, as producers as well as active receivers of media content. She's a visiting scholar at CMS where she's looking for new theoretical and methodological approach to a transmedia education. At this moment they are working on a collaborative project with Electronic Arts to define innovative educational settings, introducing specific video games and other new media into the Spanish classrooms so that they can be used as educational tools in both formal and informal contexts. She recognizes that when she was lost, looking for new perspectives to design these new educational contexts, it was very useful to discover Ravi Purushotma's work and the MacArthur Foundation's report.

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part One)

I am posting tonight from the west coast, having flown out to California to participate in 24/7 A DYI Video Summit being hosted by the University of Southern California. The event brings together videomakers from a range of different communities -- everything from fan video producers to activists who use Youtube to get their messages out to the world. I am thrilled to be participating on a plenary panel on the future of DYI Video, featuring Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig, hosted by Howard Rheingold. As I was getting ready to head out to the conference, I conducted an interview for the blog with media scholar Pat Aufderheide (of the Center for Social Media) and Law Professor Peter Jaszi, both from American University. I've long been interested in the work Pat and Peter have been doing promoting fair use in relation to a range of different communities of practice -- including documentary filmmakers, media literacy instructors, and producers of online video content. We featured some of the work they were doing through the Media in Transition conference at MIT last year. You can hear a podcast of that discussion online. I wanted to check in with them because in the past few months, they've issued several major new studies on the impact of copyright confusion on our culture, work which is setting the stage for efforts to identify "best practices" and to negotiate "acceptable use" standards to broaden the protections afforded those of us who are tying to integrate media production activities into our classrooms or who are involved in mashing up content as a form of expressive practice. Today, I am running the first installment of this exchange.

A recent study by the Pew Center for Internet Research suggests that almost 60 percent of teens on line have produced their own media content and a growing percentage of them are circulating that content beyond their immediate friends and families. What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?

PA: A more participatory media culture is definitely going mainstream. While it's still true that many more people watch than make at the moment, you're right to point out that young people are growing up as makers, and seizing upon blogs, online video and social networks to express and even form their identities. There are DaxFlame aficionados, and there are dozens of take-offs on "Dick in a Box," and "Dramatic Chipmunk" has spawned "Dramatic Snake" and "Dramatic Squirrel" and even compilation and fan websites for the phenomenon.

Many practices enthusiastically being pioneered and developed online involve use of copyrighted material. That's normal for new cultural creation. It builds on existing culture. Our culture is markedly commercial and popular, and our current copyright regime features default copyright (your grocery list is copyrighted when you've written it down) and very, very long terms (meaning that nothing you'd want to quote ever seems to fall into the public domain). So quoting of copyrighted culture will continue to be a key tool of new cultural producers.

Those new cultural producers often today believe that they're doing something illegal by quoting copyrighted culture. That's partly because of relentless miseducation on the part of corporate owners of content. They are justifiably terrified of peer-to-peer file sharing and other digital copying that threatens their business models. Their response has been to demonize all unauthorized use of copyrighted material as theft and piracy.

At the same time, they're desperately trying to revamp their business models for a digital era, and are making the blanket assumption that all unauthorized copying could be a threat to some as-yet-unimagined or as-yet-unpracticed business model.

Well, you wouldn't want to be them at this moment, it's true. At the same time, when they ignore the right of fair use, they are ignoring a very vital part of the law.

They're now worried about online video as a kind of "DVR to the world." So content providers like NBC Universal and Viacom are working out deals with online video providers like Veoh and MySpace, for specialized filters and software to identify copyrighted material. These filters will be able to "take down" videos that are copies of copyrighted material. The trouble is, nobody has yet figured out how to protect online videos that may be using copyrighted material legally, under fair use. As Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, it's like going tuna fishing without a dolphin-safe net.

Until now no one has known how big the problem of accidentally suppressing legal work really is. Our study, called "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video," (available at centerforsocialmedia.org/recut) demonstrates that it could be a very big problem indeed.

Many online videos, we showed, use copyrighted material in one of nine ways that are eligible for fair use consideration. (We weren't saying that they all are examples of fair use, only that these kinds of uses can be seen and in some cases have been widely recognized as fair use.)

Many of the precedents concerning fair use could be read as protecting specific classes of users -- the right of journalists or academics to quote for the purposes of reviews or critical commentary, for example. To what degree can or should those rights be extended to include amateur media producers?

PJ: It's really not a question of extending rights, but of making users aware of the right they already have. Fair use has been around as a judge made doctrine since the mid-19th century, and back in 1976, in its (for once considerable) wisdom, the Congress came up with a formulation of the doctrine that was general in its application rather than specific to any area or areas of practice. The problem for any group of practitioners is knowing how fair use applies to them and having the collective courage to rely on it. Some groups (journalists and academics are good examples -- and commercial publishers are another!) have done well at this over the years, and as a result they enjoy use rights that are apparently more extensive. But the truth is that documentary filmmakers, K-12 teachers, and on-line video producers have the same entitlement to fair use as everyone else.

That's why the "Best Practices" approach that we've been working on over the past several years is so important. It's an effort to help practice communities claim their legal rights by formulating consensus statements of what kinds of unlicensed use of copyrighted materials are necessary and reasonable for the creative work they do.

YouTube's impact has directed much greater public attention onto the work of these amateur media producers. In your white paper, you walk through a range of different genres of media appropriation and remixing. Which of these are the most clearly protected under current law? Which seem most at risk?

PA: First, a note: Because we're at the end of the mass media era, and because the pioneers of participatory media have been end-users or non-commercial producers, we think of this as an "amateur" movement. But it won't be for long. It'll just be expression in an open digital environment. Some of that expression, whether it's produced by professionals or not, will be monetized; much of it, most of it, will be available to be monetized. So the neat distinctions between professional and amateur, and between non-commercial and commercial use, are getting a lot messier and will soon be unhelpful. One thing we're very sure of is that we won't solve this problem by creating a non-commercial, amateur zone. Now, everyone's a player.

In our study, we identified a wide range of kinds of practices -- remix/remash (Ten Things I Hate about Commandments), quoting of a whole work for online commentary (The Worst Music Video Ever), critical commentaries (analysis of Fox news bias for instance), tribute videos (Steve Irwin), diaries (Me on Stage with U2 -- again!!), to name a few. We also saw a wide range of actual practices within those genres. One of the things we didn't do was to pass any lawyerly judgment on the fair use of any particular instance. We stopped at identifying kinds of practices as fair-use eligible, which is all that the survey we did permits us. We think this is very valuable because the kinds of practices are all clearly eligible for fair-use consideration. We hope that the next phase of our work, creating a best-practices code, will provide guidance to help people make judgments for themselves about what is fair use.

You can, however, make some generalizations:

• It gets harder to claim fair use the closer people get to merely quoting the work without commenting on it, reframing it, or adapting it.
• It gets harder to justify fair use the closer the copier's purpose is to the original.
• It gets harder when the quotation is longer or more extensive than is justified by its purpose.
• It gets harder to claim fair use the more the copier is intending to monetize the original item in order to compete with the copyright owner.
• It gets harder when proper credit isn't given.

We also found that it's very easy for everybody to understand why it's o.k. to use copyrighted material for critical, political and social commentary. People understand that you can't critique something without referring to it, which in video would also involve hearing and seeing it. They also see critical speech as a great example of the First Amendment.

What's harder for people to grasp is that it's also o.k. to use copyrighted material to make new work that may be illustrative or celebratory or illustrative rather than critical, or may re-imagine the culture as remixes do, or may archive it, or may simply record reality that includes it. Why is that so hard to grasp? All this activity uses the same cultural processes, the building of new work and meaning on the platform of the old. We think it's because people have cultivated, in the mass media era, a cult of the author, a belief in creativity as the product of the genius of the individual creator. This of course flies in the face of everything we know about the creative process, which is a social, collective and iterative one. It also flies in the face of cultural evolution. After all, until very recently in the West, copying was homage, copying was learning.

Many of these amateur media makers know little about the law. Most of them lack the resources to seek legal advice about their work. What steps can or should be taken to protect their fair use rights?

PJ:We're suggesting that a "blue ribbon" panel of experts in law and communications should take on the task of developing a set of "Best Practices" for fair use in on-line video production. The first step would be to talk with a wide range of producers (and platforms) about what they regard as necessary and appropriate quotation. Then the panel would be in a position to craft a document that would be a useful reference for media makers themselves and for the platforms that make their work available – as well as for the content owners themelves. In particular, it would be a point of reference that platforms and content owners could use when they develop mechanisms (like filtering techniques or take down protcols) designed to block or disable infringing on-line content. Everyone seems to agree that mechanisms of this kind shouldn't interfere with fair use, but unless there is some consensus about what constitutes fair use in this new area of practice, these pious affirmations aren't likely to be translated into meaningful practice. In the extreme and unlikely case that an issue involving fair use and on-line video were to find its way to court, a "Best Practices" statement also would help to guide the courts. Following a long-standing (and sensible) tradition in fair use decision-making, judges in these cases pay close attention to practice communities' views of what is fair and reasonable. (More about tradition and its implications is at www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf),

And, of course, if a media maker working within the framework of a "Best Practices" document were to be sued or otherwise harassed, there would be a healthy supply of expert IP lawyers lining up to defend that person on a pro bono basis. IP progressives -- and there are plenty of them in the legal community -- always are looking for good "test cases" to demonstrate the reach of fair use. In fact, Stanford's Fair Use Project is actively looking for such cases, and would offer legal defense if it could find one.

Pat Aufderheide, one of American University's Scholar-Teachers, is a critic and scholar of independent media, especially documentary film, and of communications policy issues in the public interest. Her work on fair use in documentary film has changed industry practice, and she has won several journalism awards. She is the founder, in 2001, of the Center for Social Media, which showcases media for democracy, civil society and social justice. She recently received the Career Achievement Award for Scholarship and Preservation from the International Documentary Association.

Peter Jaszi is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law. He holds expertise in intellectual property and copyright law. He was Pauline Ruvle Moore Scholar in Public Law from 1981-82; Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Awardee in 1982; and he received the AU Faculty Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Development in 1996. He is a member of the Selden Society (state correspondent for Washington, D.C.). Previously he was a member of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. trustee, 1992-94; International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property; National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C., Animal Welfare Board, 1986-present; Library of Congress Advisory Committee on Copyright Registration and Deposit (ACCORD), 1993. He has written many chapters, articles and monographs on copyright, intellectual property, technology and other issues. He was editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994 (with M. Woodmansee) (also published as a law journal issue, 10 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 274, 1992). He is co-author of Legal Issues in Addict Diversion (Lexington Books, 1976) and Copyright Law, Third Edition (Matthew Bender & Co., 1994).

Sharing Notes about Collective Intelligence

Last week, my travels took me to San Antonio where I delivered one of the keynote addresses at the Educause Learning Initiative conference -- a gathering focused on the application of technology for learning at the college and university level. My presentation, "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About New Media Literacies," drew on materials we have been developing through Project nml and was based in an article, originally published here on the blog, soon to appear in The Journal of Media Literacy. The conference organizers are distributing a podcast of the talk. One of the highlights of the Educause Learning Initiative conference is the release of the 2008 Horizon Report. Each year, the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative work together to prepare a report "that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expressions within learning-focused organizations." The report positions these technologies in terms of their likely horizons of impact on higher learning -- hence the report's name.

This year's report profiles the following technologies:

• Grassroots Video -- "virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software."
• Collaboration Webs -- "collaboration no longer calls for expensive equipment and specialized expertise. The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and free, and require no installation."
• Mobile Broadband -- "each year, more than a billion new mobile devices are manufactured -- or a new phone for every six people on the planet....New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content -- content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network."
• Data Mashups -- "mashups-- custom applications where combinations of data from different sources are 'mashed up' into a single tool -- offer new ways to look at and interact with datasets."
• Collective Intelligence -- "the kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of people is collective intelligence."
• Social Operating Systems -- "the essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content...Social operating systems will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know."

The presenters, and some of the attendees, signaled some disappointment that Virtual Worlds did not make the final cut this year, suggesting that there is still some disagreement about their viability and their long-term impact on education.

The Horizon report can be downloaded off the web and goes into some detail about each of these technologies and processes. I was personally very pleased to see such a strong focus not simply on collective intelligence but in other forms of collaboration and social networking. As we suggested in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation, newer forms of literacy might best be understood as social rather than individual skills, having to do with the ways we share knowledge and pool resources within a larger community. Our white paper identifies collective intelligence as a core social skill and cultural competency which young people need to acquire if they want to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape.

The Horizon report situates collective intelligence on a Time-to-Adoption Horizon of Four to Five Years, though they identify forms of collective intelligence at work within many of the current Web 2.0 applications. They identify a range of current applications of collective intelligence principles in projects shaping environmental studies, history, meteorology and astronomy.

In the past, I have drawn a distinction between collective intelligence (based on the work of Pierre Levy) and "the Wisdom of the Crowds" model (proposed by James Surowiecki). The first is based on a model of deliberation in which diverse groups of people consciously compare notes and work through problems together. The second is based on a model of aggregation as individual decisions made autonomously get collected and mapped through some technology. The Horizon report makes a similar distinction:

"Two new forms of information stores are being created in real time by thousands of people in the course of their daily activities, some explicitly collaborating to create collective knowledge stores like the Wikipedia and Freebase, some contributing implicitly through the patterns of their choices and action....Explicit knowledge stores refine knowledge through contributions of thousands of authors; implicit stores allow the discovery of entirely new knowledge by capturing trillions of key clicks and decisions as people use the network in the course of their everyday lives."

Both forms, the report notes, have educational implications:

"Sources of explicit collective intelligence provide opportunities for research and self-study and give students a chance to practice the construction of knowledge -- they can contribute as well as consume....Implicit collective intelligence is already revealing a great deal about everyday patterns of activity based on programs that mine datasets of information from huge numbers of human actions."

There are several important implications of this move towards the use of collective intelligence in education:

• As I noted in my keynote remarks, the push towards collective intelligence requires us to rethink the nature of expertise and the historic monopoly that schools and institutions of higher learning have claimed over the production and circulation of knowledge. Collective Intelligence recognizes that there are diverse forms of expertise and that we learn more if we draw on as many different minds as possible rather than placing our trust in singular minds. At the same time, this push towards collective intelligence should force academics to engage more actively in public dialog with other kinds of "experts" who operate outside of the so-called "Ivory Tower." We have much to contribute, and much to learn, through participation within these larger conversations, which are being enabled through networked computing.
• Most of our current educational practices are based on the assumption that schools produce autonomous thinkers. We need to rethink our pedagogical practices to reflect the way knowledge is being produced and distributed within a networked culture. This means that we need to help young people identify and foster their own expertise while giving them skills at weighing evidence and arguments presented by others who also participate within their knowledge community. It means that we need to help them develop a set of ethical practices which holds them responsibile for the value of the information and insights they contribute to the group.
• Collective intelligence is going to work best on a scale larger than the individual college or university. As such, the push towards collective intelligence is closely linked towards moves for distance learning and for open courseware. Yet, it may force us to rethink some of the models shaping our first steps in that direction. Most of these efforts start from the assumption that information travels from an elite centralized institution to a range of peripheral locations. Collective Intelligence, however, starts from the premise that information must circulate freely and equally among all of the participating institutions.
• Collective intelligence places a new value on diversity -- this is true in both the explicit (deliberative) model and the implicit (aggregative) model. The greater diversity of inputs into the process, the richer the output. Higher education still often thinks about diversity through a lens of affirmative action and remediation. Instead, incorporating greater diversity into a collective intelligence process benefits all of the participants.

As it happens, Project nml has been developing a range of classroom activities focused on helping young learners develop a better understanding of the practices and values associated with collective intelligence. Erin Reilly, the Project's Research Manager, recently shared with me a report about a field test of some of those materials which they ran with teens from Boston's Youth Voice Collaborative. I offer it here as an illustration of some of the ways these principles might be incorporated into classroom teaching practices:

The first group activity was called "Stump the Expert". This activity put their adult facilitator, Julian ("The Expert"), in the position to work on his own and write down all that he knew about Caribbean culture …his own stated expertise. While Julian was making his long list, the girls collectively worked to jot down phrases and words on the board; anything they knew about the Caribbean culture. When Julian came back into the room, he looked at the board and laughed, stating, "Wow. You guys got a lot." He then showed the girls his paper and said how he'd written full sentences. He had started his list with the etymology of the word Caribbean. Lana Swartz, a NML Research Assistant and the Focus Group Facilitator, remarked how starting out with the origin of a word was a really good example of what an expert does.

The two lists were very different and very good in different ways. The one from the girls was totally random and not connected with each other; while Julian’s list was more like an expert where things were organized. With the two lists together, the knowledge pooled was that much greater and when the girls were asked what Collective Intelligence means to them. One girl said, "all together" and they all agreed.

This low-tech group activity was an introduction to the Exemplar Library. The group searched the skill Collective Intelligence and a video on Wikipedia pulled up. With the learning activities embedded into the multimedia material, the cue-point was when Kevin Driscoll says, "and nobody owns that sandcastle, you all built it together, you're all proud of it, and you all get the benefit of each others’ work so you really are relying on each other. And Wikipedia is like that sandcastle, except no ocean is going to wash Wikipedia away." At that point, the girls could have continued watching the video or pause and step into the exemplar to participate in the online activity. Stepping in, they were introduced to the Platial.com website, where collective intelligence is used to make maps. The clip provided a demonstration of how to make a map mash-up and they began to create their own maps.

The girls worked in two groups of two and one girl worked on her own. They were given the choice and this is what they chose. Interestingly, both 'working alone' & 'working in a group' had its drawbacks. For the kids who were in groups of two, one of the girls tended to do the whole computer part, (though in both groups, the other girl didn't seem to mind). For the girl on her own, she had the drawback of not having anyone to brainstorm and make a plan with (Luckily, Julian, the adult facilitator, jumped in and played that role which was a good example of the informal mentorship that is a key trait in participatory culture).

The girls had a great time with the activity and a picture was taken of the whole group and posted on the YVC marker on their Platial.com map. There was lots of laughing when they saw the picture. It's a fun picture. When asked if they would make these maps with their friends, they all had a resounding "Yes!"

If you'd like to learn more about collective intelligence, check out the following resources:

Podcast of a session from the Media in Transition 5 conference focused on Collaboration and Collective Intelligence -- featuring Mimi Ito, Cory Ondrejka, and Trebor Scholz, and moderated by Thomas Mallone.

Podcast of a MIT Communications Forum event focused on Collective Intelligence featuring Karim R. Lakhani, Thomas W. Malone, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland and moderated by David Thorburn.

Podcast of a conversation at the ELI conference between George Siemens and Michael Wesch about "Future Learning." I saw Seimens present an outstanding workshop on Connectivism which lay out some core assumptions about the value of social networks and collective intelligence for education.

Those of you who are in the Boston area might want to try to attend another MIT Communications Forum event this term, which is certain to consider issues of collective intelligence:

our world digitized: the good, the bad, the ugly

visionary and skeptical perspectives on the promise and perils of

the internet era

yochai benkler, harvard law school, author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

cass sunstein, univ. of chicago law school, Author of Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

april 10

5-7 p.m., bartos theater

From Zoey's Room to Project NML: An Interview with Erin Reilly

Yesterday, I introduced you to Matthew Weise, a producer from our GAMBIT lab, and a key figure behind our games research efforts. Today, I wanted to introduce you to another researcher who recently joined the CMS community -- Erin Reilly, Research Director of Project nml. The New Media Literacies (NML) project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is developing a theoretical framework and curriculum for K-12 learners that integrate new media tools into broader educational, expressive and ethical contexts. NML is partnering with classrooms and after school programs around the country to test curriculum prototypes created by CMS students and program affiliates.

Before coming to MIT, Reilly was co-creator of Platform Shoes Forum's model program Zoey's Room, a national online community for 10-14 year-old girls, encouraging their creativity through science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Zoey's Room has proven results in advancing STEM and Media Literacy skills. In 2007, Erin received a national educational Leaders in Learning Award from Cable in the Classroom for her innovative approach to learning through Zoey's Room. A recognized expert in the design and development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered by virtual learning and new media applications, Erin has been a featured speaker, panelist and keynoter at several industry events. Erin serves on the Working Committee of Pop!Tech (http://www.poptech.org), an internationally acclaimed technology event that can be seen on PBS and the Technology Committee of the Maine Arts Commission.

Knowing how many of my readers have a strong interest in the use of new media for education, I asked Reilly to share some of her insights from working on Zoey's Room and to give us a preview of what you can expect to see from Project nml in the coming year.

Tell us about Zoey's Room. What were the goals of this project and how do you measure it success?

Zoey's Room is a safe, online educational community developed by Platform Shoes Forum to creatively engage 9- to 14-year-old girls in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

The goals of Zoey's Room are to encourage middle school girls to:

• Learn science, technology, engineering and math skills in a fun, collaborative online environment by completing online activities and offline challenges on their own or in a group.

• Behave responsibly and ethically online and to be Internet Safe

• Participate and share in an informal learning environment, and

• Be better prepared for the technological demands of a future workforce.

Fewer than a dozen Science, Technology, Math, Engineering (STEM) websites are currently available online for middle school girls right now. Of them all, Zoey's Room is the only STEM website that features a multicultural character "Zoey" who appeals to both rural and urban girls. Zoey hosts her own chat room for girls every day after school. She encourages girls to explore STEM topics through fun challenges called Tec-Treks, that expand their knowledge on a range of 21st century skills. Additionally, each month, Zoey leads informative chats with "Fab Female", women role models who have STEM professions. This unique interpersonal connection, along with the collaborative nature of the Tec-Treks, encourages girls to become more interested in STEM careers.

We measure the success of Zoey's Room not on the number of its members but on the girls' safety, progress in academic fields, and retention in the program. The extensive research behind Zoey's Room allowed us to develop a practical application, which includes an on-going assessment of each member's participation and learning. Evaluative tools include a benchmark survey taken when a girl first joins the program, annual assessment polls, and one-on-one feedback from online members and adult facilitators.

Specifically, a sample of 100 girls participated in the Zoey's Room 2006-2007 benchmark and final survey. When asked the answers to very specific STEM questions we put to them in the survey, the majority of girls got 12 out of 13 of the answers right--which proves to us that they actually learned terms and concepts and principals of certain STEM topics by doing the various Tec-Treks. But beyond statistical measures, what girls are saying about Zoey's Room matters the most.

"Math is my favorite subject - I'm (now) interested in numbers and problem solving"

"We need more ideas like Zoey's Room; being a girl is hard and we need all the support we can find since it's hard to discover that at home, with our friends, or our schools."

"I think that Zoey's Room is the best idea in the whole entire world. On Zoey's Room, a safe environment is provided where questions can be answered and girls actually have a voice."

What factors have historically limited young girl's comfort with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math? How has Zoey's Room overcome these problems?

Reports like "Shortchange Girls, Shortchange America" (1991) and "Gender Gaps" (1998) by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) were the catalyst for starting a program like Zoey's Room. Through aggregated research and internal studies, these reports uncovered the need for schools to provide equitable education for girls in the areas of STEM. AAUW found that to instill math, tech and science skills in girls; we need to educate girls to be designers, not just passive users of technology- and Zoey's Room encourages that. Given the social and collaborative nature of girls, a girls-only self-paced learning environment seemed a natural platform. The next step was to make this environment engaging and attractive to girls by including community tools.

Though girls today are more apt to be interested in technology, they are still not pursuing further as advanced courses or career aspirations. According to a more recent report," What We Know about Girls, STEM, and After-school Programs" (Cheri Fancsali, Ph.D. for Educational Equity Concepts) girls are much less likely to major in science-related fields in college; less likely to complete undergraduate and graduate with STEM degrees. Beyond that, women comprise a disproportionately low percentage of the STEM workforce, earn less, and are less likely to hold high-level positions in STEM careers. What does that mean for our society? Today, eight of the 10 fastest growing jobs in the U.S. are computer related. By 2010, jobs in the technical and mathematical fields are expected to increase by 67%. If this trend continues, not only does it seriously cripple young women's potential financial earning power, but as more jobs in the future demand technological proficiency, this trend can be a detriment to the nation's intellectual resource pool.

In the last five years, numerous studies have documented concrete methods to get girls re-engaged into learning "hard skills." Programs for girls combining hands-on activities, role models, mentoring, internships, and career exploration have improved girls' self-confidence and interest in STEM courses and careers and helped reduce sexist attitudes about STEM (Campbell and Steinbrueck, 1996; Ferreira, 2001).

The AAUW Commission also stressed the need for adult female role models to engage younger females in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math for girls to begin reshaping their own perceptions about these fields as career choices. A recent Girl Scout Research Institute (GSRI) study showed that girls tend to make career choices based on their role models rather than their academic interests.

Joseph Bernt, an Ohio University professor of journalism, and one of the authors of a nationwide study funded by the National Science Foundation about the media's influence upon middle school children found "this age group spends more time interacting with media than in school or with family, or even with their peers. This means that media has to start providing better role models for girls. Zoey's Room is our example of creating a fun, creative, positive use of media. By harnessing the media for education, we hope to inspire girls with other role models.

In a recent column, I argued that the term, "digital natives," masked lots of differences in young people's access to and participation within digital media. What kinds of differences in skills and access have you observed through your work on Zoey's Room?

I think we've grown up in a culture that we have to label everything, but by doing this we limit the truth of who people really are. Using labels like digital natives and digital immigrants is just another way of stereotyping people. Anyone who's participated in community online knows that it's these places where stereotypes are broken down. The anonymity of the web allows for the girl you'd never hang out with in school to become one of your closest allies online. It's a congregation of girls interested in a particular subject rather than hanging out on a particular social norm that sets precedence in the school cafeteria.

Children have to learn technology skills just like we adults. The only way they are going to learn the skills are by trying it out or asking for help. This metaphor makes it sound that every kid is a native to the digital environment. It doesn't take into account that kids and adults all have different experiences with digital technology. And it also doesn't take into account the guidance and supervision that happens in communities and the positive results occurring when an informal mentorship happens between an adult and a child online. It really depends on how much access they have to the technology in order to be comfortable. These skills are unevenly distributed across our population and can easily be seen in the Zoey's Room membership. We have many home-schooled girls using Zoey's Room who are much more savvy online than girls who doesn't have a computer at home and only get to use the computer when she meets with her after-school Zoey's Room club.

The chat and message boards on Zoey's Room are filled with peer-to-peer sharing of how to do something online. (See the below image for example of girls sharing how to change fonts within chats).

The message board tech tips wouldn't be filled with this information if girls came into the program knowing how to do everything digital.

I also argued that adults might have more to contribute in helping young people adjust to new technologies than the phrase "digital immigrants" implied. How did you harness adult expertise through Zoey's Room?

We harnessed adult expertise in Zoey's Room by creating a mentoring pipeline through our Friends of Zoey and Fab Female components. High school girls can apply to be "Friends of Zoey", which are junior staff members who interact online with girls and encourage them in Tec-Treksâ„¢. The FOZ began as an internship program for girls who have aged-out of Zoey's Room but still wanted to stay involved and developed into these girls being the community hosts of Zoey's Room as well as keeping content evergreen.

As I mentioned earlier, Fab Females are female role models who have professions in STEM. Past Zoey's Room "Fab Females" have included a NASA Food Technologist, Microsoft IT manager, a marine biologist, a paleontologist, and digital artist, designers and film makers. Fab Females have asked to stay involved beyond the chat session. With an increase in membership this year, we're opening up a space in the community for on-going interaction between Fab Females and the members.

Not only are our Friends of Zoey the glue to the online community, but also these girls build leadership skills by recruiting and interviewing our Fab Females to conduct online chat sessions. They also work with these Fab Females for additional Tec-Trek activities.

Online safety was a central concern of your work on Zoey's Room. Many adult fears about young people's experiences online are misguided, but some are not. What do you see as the most realistic concerns and what steps did you take to address them?

Since we work with children under the age of 13, the biggest concern is following the guidelines of COPPA, and we worked closely with the FTC to ensure our registration was COPPA compliant. However, this doesn't guarantee that a person signing up is who they say they are and we all know how easy it is to change your birth date to make you whatever age you want to be. So, how do we protect girls from encountering just anybody on our site?

We've partnered with a 3rd party verifier to ensure all adults who register a girl for an account are subject to identity verification. Before confirming a girl's membership to Zoey's Room, our process verifies the data collection of adult registrants to ensure they are who they say they are. This is a reactive approach and does not provide the answer to safety but we hope this extra step will deter folks who are joining the community for reasons other than its intended purpose.

Past the access point, Zoey's Room creates a proactive approach to safety and ethics by training Friends of Zoey how to help moderate and monitor the chat room and message boards every day for ongoing protection of its members. We also create an environment where members watch out for each other and know the guidelines they need to follow to participate in the community... and I think this is the best approach to take. I conduct adult workshops and stress to attendees how important it is to have open conversations with your kids and help educate them of proper conduct online.

Lately, we find the biggest concern is not safety but ethics. We've found that when confronted with someone prying too much, they usually quit out of the program and shut down. Their natural instincts kick in. However, it is mob mentality and bullying that causes the most damage. Zoey and Friends of Zoey provide peer-to-peer guidance in how to handle the situations and have been known on more than one occasion to be the bridge to acceptance of each other.

What did you learn from the work on Zoey's Room that will help us expand the community around Project NML?

The first thing we started with this year was defining our audience. If it's for teens, make it for teens. Don't worry about the adult. If teens like it, the adults will join in. If teens don't like it, you and the adults will always feel like its work.

"Today's American teens live in a world enveloped by communications technologies," states a 2005 Pew Internet and Life Report titled "Teens and Technology.

Whether adults are comfortable with this technological revolution or not--it's happening. According to the Pew Report more than 87% of teens and tweens between 12-17 are using the Internet and their preferred method of communication is online in the form of Instant Messaging, Chat Rooms, and Social Networking sites with older girls taking the lead nationally as the "power users" of the Internet.

In Zoey's Room, we foresaw this trend in 2002 when we created a moderated chat room for girls only with the sole purpose of appealing to girls' natural collaborative and communicative natures as a platform to introduce "stealth" education in the form of Tec-Treks and role models.

We also saw the success of having a place for members to showcase their work and get feedback. Each of the Tec-Treks is project-based and not yes or no or multiple choice answers. Tec-Trek projects are loaded for not only Zoey and her friends to give feedback but also the other mentors.

I've seen first-hand that community is the glue to learning online. If you lose community, then you might as well be reading a book on your own without ever joining the book club for discussion.

I hope to take the Zoey's Room "pipeline" community to Project NML. This approach encompasses the traits recognized in participatory culture, including:

• Low barriers for artistic expression & civic engagement

• Strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others

• Some type of formal mentorship (pass it along to newbies)

• Members contribution matters - reinforce your contribution is important

• Some degree of social connection matters

And first and foremost, I bring the knowledge of lessons learned in the field. Of having taken theories and created a successful digital learning application. Having processed what works and doesn't work will help Project NML be successful and hopefully push the digital learning community further.

What have you learned through working on Project NML so far that helps you think differently about Zoey's Room?

In your graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods, you ask your students to interview a media maker and to try to get a sense of the theoretical assumptions underlying their work. Zoey's Room has been a practical application but the research that we looked at to develop Zoey's Room was girls and STEM. We were media makers so we didn't look at the media theories to develop... we just did it.

Since becoming Research Manager for Project NML, I realize that we intuitively created a participatory culture for members of Zoey's Room. Even though the program was about encouraging girls in STEM, it is an example of a shift in media literacy from thinking about what media does to helping change our mindset to what choices we make as users / producers of media. This is an active way of participating in media instead of the passive way to what media we consume.

We cannot have media literacy be a separate class / add-on at the end as we've seen in the past decade. Instead it needs to be infused cross-curricular.

Reviewing the skills against Zoey's Room Tec-Treks, I see these skills come into play both in and out of the digital realm. There are connections of how kids are connecting in the digital realm to what they should be doing in the classroom. This skill set is not just about high-tech activities. This is an opportunity to help kids acquire skills on how they process knowledge so that they can participate in a new way.

We've been rethinking the goals of Project NML since you've come on board, but the impact of that rethinking has not yet been made visible to the public. What can you tell us about the Project's future plans?

This semester, we've created new approaches to working on this project that really has allowed everyone on the team to understand the goals we want to deliver.

We are currently immersed in production with a goal to re-launch Project NML's interactive website Fall 2008. The new website will allows users to create their own pathways through our exemplar library and have users create and add their own material to the exemplar library.

The exemplar library is a sampling of the participatory culture framework centered around the 4 C's ...how do we Create, Connect, Communicate and Collaborate. It is an interactive learning library that creatively encompasses a best practice video with an online activity and offline group challenge. The library is built on an extensive backend database where each piece is tagged on multiple traits including; the 11 new media literacy skills, media tools, traditional subjects, and the 5 ethical categories created by Harvard's Good Play project.

The exemplar library will also have some online activities that highlight our collaboration with Harvard's Good Play project. These activities will provide a springboard for discussion on a dilemma centered on one of the five ethical categories: identity, ownership / authorship, privacy, participation and credibility.

As community is the glue to learning online and Project NML will provide a venue for all users to answer the question, "How do YOU create, connect, communicate and collaborate?" This type of user-generated content will allow for the library to expand by the community and for new best practices to emerge, be shared and discussed.

Whereas Project NML's exemplar library is informal learning directed to the teen, the Teacher's Strategy Guide: Education in a Participatory Culture provides structure for a teacher to integrate the new media literacies into the traditional classroom. The framework includes a lesson plan, with extension link of ways to extend the 1-2 class period lesson plan into a semester or year-long project with options to tie to other class subjects as well as a side bar that provides entry points to engage the student through the Project NML exemplar library.

We currently are in development of our first guide called Moby Dick: Remixed and are currently seeking 10 high school English / Literature teachers to test our Teacher's Strategy Guide: Education in a Participatory Culture in Fall 2008. Moby Dick: Remixed help students to better understand the appropriation and transformation of pre-existing cultural materials which shaped some of the most cherished works in the western cannon. The guide provides a set of lesson plans that juxtapose Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's theater performance Moby-Dick: Then and Now and is a clear example of the new media literacy skill: appropriation.

Our next steps are to develop material for history / geography teachers. The next guide will be called Weaving the Threads - Social Mapping to Global Citizenship. This project will couple children's interest in cultural diversity with our own interest in the New Media Literacy skills required to process new forms of simulation and representation, producing a project which challenges participants to think about their relationship to their space in fresh new ways. Such a curriculum should enhance traditional social science education, while allowing students to become active participants in their learning rather than passive recipients, because it is in this approach that we help our children become global citizens.

Mentorship will continue with expansion into a media franchise. One of the motivating factors of the community is to develop a character based on the 4 C's. This character will be customizable per user and provide rewards for motivation within the community. This character has the potential to be the lead character in an e-zine style program targeting Tweens. With the collaborative learning community online, the strategy guides deployed to the classroom and the television series, Project NML will be a transmedia experience that helps foster the new media literacies.

If you'd like to become a test school for Project nml, please contact our outreach coordinator Jenna McWilliams at .

Want to know more about new media literacies? If you live in the Boston area, you might want to check out a forum being held at the Brattle Theater at Harvard Square on Dec. 12, 5:30 pm:

MIT Press And The MacArthur Foundation Present

Totally Wired: How Technology Is Changing Kids And Learning

Are digital media changing how young people learn and play? A public forum featuring Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Henry Jenkins (MIT), and Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design), hosted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of its $50 million digital media and learning initiative. The panel will be introduced by Jonathan Fanton, MacArthur President, and moderated by Connie Yowell, MacArthur's Director of Education. Free and open to the public.

Free and open to the public

The event is designed to celebrate the launch of a new series of books being released by MacArthur and the MIT Press which share state of the art research on how kids learn and what they encounter in the new media landscape. The first six books in the series are being released this month and will be available online as of December 12.

Reconsidering Digital Immigrants...

Editor's note: The blog will run at a reduced schedule this week and next. I plan one more post this week and three posts at the start of next week. Then, the blog is going to be shut down for a while as we move to a different server and deal with some of the aftermath of the cyber-attack we received earlier this term. This may mean that I don't get back into the full swing of things before the start of the new year. Sorry for the inconvience. Hopefully this will allow us to resolve some of the issues we've been having with the comments section of this blog. I have written here in the past about my growing discomfort with the phrase, "digital natives" -- which like all metaphors helps us to see some aspects of the world clearly while masking others.

Like many of you, I first encountered these metaphors in the work of Marc Prensky and saw them as a powerful new way of thinking about generational differences that were creating an impass in debates about media literacy education. Prensky laid out these metaphors in a 2001 essay for On the Horizon which has been widely read and cited.

Here's some of what he claimed:

Today's students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a "singularity" - an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called "singularity" is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century....

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize....

What should we call these "new" students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

Prensky's deployment of the concept, as he himself has acknowledged, tapped a much larger history of use of these metaphors in talking about cyberculture. danah boyd and I have been corresponding lately, trying to track down some of the roots of this phrase. She finds, for example, that the same metaphor surfaces in John Perry Barlow's "Decleration of Independence for Cyberspace," one of the landmark documents of the first phase of the so-called "digital revolution":

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

Prinsky has also pointed towards a passage in Nicola Griffith's science fiction novel, Slow River (1995):

Those born before 1960 had the hardest time adjusting to change. They were the ones who would suddenly stop in the middle of the street as if they had vertigo when som shop window flared or called out, or get that haunted, bewildered look when the PIDA readers changed again, or the newstanks swapped to a different format.

It was a very specific expression: hollow-cheeked, eyes darting, looking for somewhere to hide. I had seen that same look on the faces of war refugees, or the foreign-speaking parents of native-speaking children. Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change - not like us.

And Prensky's use of the term in Digital Games-Based Learning references Douglas Rushkoff's Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos who wrote, "kids are natives in a place that most adults are immigrants"

Talk of "digital natives" helps us to recognize and respect the new kinds of learning and cultural expression which have emerged from a generation that has come of age alongside the personal and networked computer. Yet, talk of "digital natives" may also mask the different degrees access to and comfort with emerging technologies experienced by different youth. Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

The best writing about digital natives acknowledges these issues, though it has not yet abandoned the word, in part because none of us have come up with anything better to capture the truths that struck many of us when we first heard this metaphor. Here, for example, is how Harvard's Digital Natives Project justifies its continued use of the term:

Are all youth digital natives? Simply put, no. Though we frame digital natives as a generation "born digital," not all youth are digital natives. Digital natives share a common global culture that is defined not by age, strictly, but by certain attributes and experiences related to how they interact with information technologies, information itself, one another, and other people and institutions. Those who were not "born digital" can be just as connected, if not more so, than their younger counterparts. And not everyone born since, say, 1982, happens to be a digital native. Part of the challenge of this research is to understand the dynamics of who exactly is, and who is not, a digital native, and what that means.

Talking about digital natives also tends to make these changes all about digital media rather than encouraging us to think about the full range of media platforms which shape the world around us or for that matter, the complex set of relationships between old and new media that characterize convergence culture. The digital may be what feels new to us who are of older generations but it isn't as if these young people were exclusively interacting through digital platforms.

Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants tends to exagerate the gaps between adults, seen as fumbling and hopelessly out of touch, and youth, seen as masterful. It invites us to see contemporary youth as feral, cut off from all adult influences, inhabiting a world where adults sound like the parents in the old Peanuts cartoons -- whah, whah, whah, whah -- rather than having anything meaningful to say to their offspring. In the process, it disempowers adults, encouraging them to feel helpless, and thus justifying their decision not to know and not to care what happens to young people as they move into the on-line world.

In reality, whether we are talking about games or fan culture or any of the other forms of expression which most often get associated with digital natives, we are talking about forms of cultural expression that involve at least as many adults as youth. Fan culture can trace its history back to the early part of the 20th century; the average gamer is in their twenties and thirties. These are spaces where adults and young people interact with each other in ways that are radically different from the fixed generational hierarchies affiliated with school, church, or the family. They are spaces where adults and young people can at least sometimes approach each other as equals, can learn from each other, can interact together in new terms, even if there's a growing tendency to pathologize any contact on line between adults and youth outside of those familiar structures.

As long as we divide the world into digital natives and immigrants, we won't be able to talk meaningfully about the kinds of sharing that occurs between adults and children and we won't be able to imagine other ways that adults can interact with youth outside of these cultural divides. What once seemed to be a powerful tool for rethinking old assumptions about what kinds of educational experiences or skills were valuable, which was what excited me about Prensky's original formulation, now becomes a rhetorical device that short circuits thinking about meaningful collaboration across the generations.

More and more, I am also concerned about some of the implications of the "immigrant" metaphor. Let's go back and reread what Prensky said about "immigrants":

The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past. The "digital immigrant accent" can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today's older folk were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you - an even "thicker" accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting web site (rather than just sending them the URL). I'm sure you can think of one or two examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the "Did you get my email?" phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at ourselves and our "accent."

But this is not just a joke. It's very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling.

Digital immigrants compute with an accent: they talk funny.

Digital immigrants are being defined by what they lack with cultural difference seen as an obstacle they must overcome if they are going to fully assimilate into the modern age.

Digital immigrants are seen as imposing old world standards on the inhabitants of a new world and of getting in the way of their sons and daughter's opportunities to achieve.

These are some pretty out of date assumptions about immigrants -- ideas as old as Ellis Island -- and there are certain dangers in re-enforcing these stereotypes in the midst of a national debate about immigration. Surely, we should recognize what digital immigrants bring with them from the old world which is still valuable in the new, rather than simply focus on their lacks and inadequacies.

Keep in mind what a high portion of the folks working in Silicon Valley today are immigrants -- information workers from around the world whose expertise and mastery over these new technologies are allowing American companies to succeed. So, real digital immigrants can probably outcompute most of the so-called digital natives.

Sure, some of the problems of current education are caused by teachers and parents refusing to take seriously new kinds of identities, new forms of knowledge being produced through young people's informal learning in the online world. That's at the heart of what we have been trying to achieve through our New Media Literacies Project -- offering new ways for educators to think about what it means to learn within a participatory culture. But reading adults as fundamentally incapable of making that adjustment or as unable to offer meaningful advice to their offspring will not improve things.

Many young people are trying to confront unfamiliar problems on their own, without anyone around them who fully understands what they are dealing with or who can give them meaningful advice about the problems they are encountering. Young people don't need grown-ups snooping over their shoulders but they do need adults to help watch their backs as they venture into realms which are often as unfamiliar to them as they are to their parents.

At one time, the digital immigrant metaphor might have been helpful if it forced at least some adults to acknowledge their uncertainties, step out of their comfort zone, and adjust their thinking to respond to a generation growing up in a very different context than the realm of their own childhood. As Prensky concludes, "if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives - i.e. all their students - they will have to change." Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now -- implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

So, what would digital multi-culturalism look like? Can we come up with a different set of metaphors to talk about these issues?

Want to know about the debates surrounding youth and digital learning. If you live in the Boston area, you might want to check out a forum being held at the Brattle Theater at Harvard Square on Dec. 12, 5:30 pm:

MIT Press And The MacArthur Foundation Present

Totally Wired: How Technology Is Changing Kids And Learning

Are digital media changing how young people learn and play? A public forum featuring Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Henry Jenkins (MIT), and Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design), hosted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of its $50 million digital media and learning initiative. The panel will be introduced by Jonathan Fanton, MacArthur President, and moderated by Connie Yowell, MacArthur's Director of Education. Free and open to the public.

Free and open to the public

The event is designed to celebrate the launch of a new series of books being released by MacArthur and the MIT Press which share state of the art research on how kids learn and what they encounter in the new media landscape. The first six books in the series are being released this month and will be available online as of December 12. I will be talking more about the series in future posts.

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part One)

I recently had the privilege of being an outside examiner on a dissertation produced by Jean Burgess, a PhD candidate in the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology on the topic of "vernacular creativity." I've long considered QUT's Creative Industries program to be a sibling of our own efforts in the Convergence Culture Consortium. Indeed, Joshua Green, who currently heads the C3 research team, is a post-doc who came to us from QUT. And we've seen a steady stream of visitors through the years (John Hartley, Alan McKee, John Banks, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess, among others) from down under. Burgess is now collaborating with Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and others on the C3 team on research centering on YouTube. I was quite taken by what Burgess had to say about "vernacular creativity" and its relationship with participatory culture, media literacy, and civic engagement. She talks about these concepts in the following interview:

Your dissertation focused on what you call vernacular creativity. Can you give us a sense of what this concept means for you?

I used the concept to talk about everyday creative practices like storytelling, family photographing, scrapbooking, journaling and so on that pre-exist the digital age and yet are co-evolving with digital technologies and networks in really interesting ways. So the documentation of everyday life and the public sharing of that documentation, as in sharing photos on Flickr, or autobiographical blogging; these are forms of vernacular creativity, remediated in digital contexts. These are also cultural practices that perhaps we don't normally think of as creative, because we've become so used to thinking of creativity as a special property of genius-like individuals, rather than as a general human -- some would say -- evolutionary process. I found the term really useful for focusing on the fact that there is much about the current explosion of amateur content creation online that has a long history, that isn¹t particularly revolutionary, and that relates to specific local contexts and identities. Vernacular creativity is ordinary.

But ordinary doesn't mean generic or boring, not necessarily anyway. Each example of vernacular creativity is also a representation of a specific life, a specific time, a specific place. Because of this specificity, the ordinariness of vernacular creativity doesn't necessarily equate to uninterestingness. The practices and artefacts of vernacular creativity are of course very rich and meaningful in relation to the social contexts in which they're created, communicated, and disseminated: think of your own family photo album, and then a complete stranger's family photo album from the 1960s that you stumble across in the back of a junk shop in a different country, for example. Both ordinary at the point of origin, both full of meanings and stories, but in different ways. The point is, culture doesn¹t have to be sublime or spectacular to be useful or significant or interesting to someone, somewhere. But what I find most interesting about vernacular creativity in the context of the new media generally and the Internet particularly is the potential to scale that immediate social context add up to social connectivity, and conversation, to individualistic self-expression. The two major case studies I explored in the thesis - the Flickr photosharing network, and the Digital Storytelling movement -- each demonstrate how that might work out in practice, but in very different ways.

How might a focus on participation and creativity, rather than resistance, change the agenda for cultural studies?

The focus on cultural participation as a positive thing is entirely compatible with a long tradition in cultural studies that was concerned with empowerment and social inclusion through self-representation and education. I think this is an agenda that has always been there, but perhaps was overshadowed by an alternative relationship to power - resistance, even as resistance was located in the everyday. The important thing for me is that a focus on participation shifts the questions that we need to ask about the cultural politics of media slightly sideways from being only about power, exploitation and resistance to questions of voice, cultural inclusion, and so on and those questions seem to me to offer more hope for pragmatic interventions.

Symbolic creativity and agency in relation to media, particularly, has a long history in cultural studies. Henry, you would know better than anyone that fans were very important for earlier investigations into participatory media because they showed how creativity and agency were possible even within the media landscape of the broadcast era. At that stage, fans weren't really understood as ordinary citizens, but rather as pretty extraordinary, intensively engaged media consumers. But at least the creative practices of fans demonstrated that there might be empowering uses of popular culture, and that audiences for broadcast culture were not -- or at least not all -- passive. And I also don¹t need to tell you or many of your readers that creative fan practices in new media contexts has often led the way for more mainstream forms of participation.

I thought it was time to consider the extent to which people who may have a much less intense relationship with mass media and popular culture than fans, might also be participating in culture through their own creative efforts.

What links do you draw between empowering people to create and share what they create with others online and the development of conceptions of citizenship and civic engagement?

Most of the time, when we hear terms like citizenship and civic engagement, we think of participation in the processes of formal politics ­ democratic deliberation, elections, and so on. These forms of participation are thought of as separate from everyday life, consumption, popular culture, and pleasure. But I think some of the most interesting forms of civic engagement occur where the everyday and popular collide with the political -- look how much there is going on in the Obama Girl video, for example. So as a way of getting at those ideas, the term I use most of the time is cultural citizenship, which is a way of talking about the ways in which cultural participation and citizenship might be the same thing, in certain circumstances.

So one of the core concepts I work with in the thesis is this idea of cultural citizenship¹. It¹s used in several different ways by different theorists, but what I mean by it is that culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging. Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it¹s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship ­ in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense. This idea -- that networked individualism in participatory media might actually be good for society in some way -- really seems counter-intuitive to those who have been convinced by people like Robert Putnam, who argues that the increased privatization and commodification of social life weakens the social fabric, e.g. of neighbourhoods.

One of the things my research emphasised in relation to Flickr was that cultural citizenship was not only constituted online, but through the articulation of the online social network with everyday, local experience. A lot of my research focused on the Brisbanites group within Flickr, and there¹s a good illustration of this from an apparently insignificant event that occurred there. At one stage last year, an Italian user known on the network as Pizzodesevo, who had lived in various cities around Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, started posting scans of old slides taken in the 50s to the group. Other group members showed interest in the photographs by leaving comments that ranged from expressing appreciation to offering technical advice about scanning, to discussion of the locations of the photographs and how much they had changed in the past 46 years. What was really interesting to me was that the connections made between users as part of this discussion resulted in one Brisbane-based member of the Brisbanite groups spontaneously creating a kind of game around the images: he began going out specifically to capture images of the same locations as in the old slides, and uploading them to his own Flickr photostream. Pizzodesevo then combined some of these new images side by side with the old ones in a series of double images. The simple act of combining them revealed some of the dramatic changes to the Brisbane cityscape that have occurred over the past few decades. This led in turn to more discussion about the ways in which the city has changed, blended with nostalgia for a past that many of the discussants had never experienced themselves. So there on a microscopic level you have vernacular creativity, remediation, social networking, and civic engagement threaded back and forth and adding up to something much more than just sharing photos.

Joke Hermes refers to the texts and practices of popular culture as providing some of the "wool from which the social tapestry is knit." I think of each of these apparently insignificant moments of participation in online social networks and creative communities as being very much like that "where they start to knit together," you see how the everyday individual practices of vernacular creativity could add up to something beyond the individual level. It's in making those forms of personal expression available as part of public culture -- however small the public turns out to be -- that the digital remediation of vernacular creativity starts to look like it has real potential for propagating cosmopolitan forms of cultural citizenship, albeit at a modest scale.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.