He's BA-A-A-ACK!

My blog, begun at MIT some years ago, has now successfully relocated onto USC servers. And so I am now going to return to my normal blogging activities. As I do so, I wanted to use this first post to play catch up on a number of recent developments around projects that I am involved with, so today will feel like a series of announcements (many of which you already know if you are following me on Twitter).

New Media Literacies Conference

Project New Media Literacies is collaborating once again with the fine folks at Home Inc. to put together a conference, back at MIT, on new media literacy as a "21st century skill" on Oct. 24 2009. The key note speaker will be Alan November.

Here's his bio:

November is an international leader in education technology. He began his career as an oceanography teacher and dorm counselor at an island reform school for boys in Boston Harbor. He has been director of an alternative high school, computer coordinator, technology consultant, and university lecturer. He has helped schools, governments and industry leaders improve the quality of education through technology and was named one of the nation's fifteen most influential thinkers of the decade by Classroom Computer Learning Magazine. In 2001, he was listed as one of eight educators to provide leadership into the future by the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. In 2007 he was selected to speak at the Cisco Public Services Summit during the Nobel Prize Festivities in Stockholm, Sweden. His writing includes numerous articles and best-selling book, "Empowering Students with Technology". Alan was co-founder of the Stanford Institute for Educational Leadership Through Technology and is most proud of being selected as one of the original five national Christa McAuliffe Educators.

November will be speaking about "Digital Nation - Education in Transition to 21st Century Learning." Other participants will include Erin Reilly, the Research Director for Project New Media Literacies; Jenna McWilliams, formerly the curriculum development specialist on our team, now at Indiana University's Learning Sciences Program; Chris Sperry from Project Look Sharp; Home Inc's Alan Michel; Wheelock College's Susan Owusu and Bill Densmore from the Media Giraffe Project. I wish I was going to be there, since I've very much enjoyed participating in other events in this series, but I am committed elsewhere over those dates. Here's where you can go to register.

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Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference

The Convergence Culture Consortium is really kicking into high gear as it is getting ready for our Fourth Futures of Entertainment Conference, which is going to be held at MIT on November 20-21 2009. I am going to be the opening speaker of the first day which centers on issues of transmedia entertainment. Speakers already booked include:

* DAVID BAUSOLA - Co-founder of Ag8

* NANCY BAYM- University of Kansas

* BRIAN CLARK - Partner and CEO, GMD Studios

* STEPEHN DUNCOMBE - NYU

* DAN GOLDMAN - Illustrator of Shooting War (Grand Central Publishing [US] and Weidenfeld & Nicolson [UK])

* NOESSA HIGA - Visionaire Media

* JENNIFER HOLT - UC Santa Barbara

* VICTORIA JAYE - Acting Head of Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, BBC

* HENRY JENKINS-USC

* DEREK JOHNSON - University of North Texas

* BRIAN LARKIN - Milbank Barnard College

* JUYOUNG LEE - Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, ACE Metrix

* TRAPPER MARKELZ- VP Products, GamerDNA

* JASON MITTELL- Middlebury College

* AVNER RONEN - CEO & Co-founder, Boxee

* FRANK ROSE - Contributing Editor,Wired

* LORRAINE SAMMY - Racebending

* ANDREW SLACK - The Harry Potter Alliance

* DAVID SPITZ -Director of Business Development, WPP

* LOUISA STEIN - San Diego State University

* JORDAN WEISMAN - CEO and Founder, Smith & Tinker

* MARK ZAGORSKI- Chief Revenue Officer, eXelate Media

I am particularly excited about moderating a session on Transmedia Activism, which grows out of some current work I am doing on the ways we might bridge between participatory culture and public/civic participation. I hope to write more about this session and its underlying framework as we get closer to the event.

If you have come to our events in the past, you know how exciting Futures of Entertainment can be. If you have not, all of our previous sessions are now available as webcasts. Here, for example, is a conversation I had at FOE 3 with Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks.

We see the conference as a vital meeting ground between people working in the media industry and academics, both of whom are doing cutting edge thinking about current trends impacting the realms of entertainment. So, register now and help us spread the word.

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Diversifying Participation

I am also working with the MacArthur Foundation to help organize the "Diversifying Participation" conference which will be held Feb. 18-20 2010 at the University of California, San Diego. We've just announced our keynote speakers, both of whom will be well known to regular readers of this blog -- Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics), author of Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, and S. Craig Watkins (University of Texas-Austin), author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. You can read my interview with Livingstone here and my interview with Watkins here. The conference is accepting proposals for panels (in all kinds of formats) through October 30 here.

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GAMBIT "Game of the Week"

GAMBIT, the MIT-Singapore Games Lab, is continuing to run a series of blog posts, showcasing the games which were produced during their summer program this summer. Each week, they showcase one game, including artwork, design materials, and comments from team members. If you have not had a chance to play this year's titles, you really should check them out. Several of them have already started to generate buzz across the games blogosphere and like previous titles, are certain to be competitive where-ever independent games are being shown. I had a chance to sit down with the Gambit team during a recent visit back to MIT and was as always impressed by their output, which is consistently breaking the mold in terms of the design of play mechanics, visuals, and sound. Their mandate is to stretch the limits of our understanding of what games can do. Each game serves a larger research question, but Philip Tan, the Lab's director, makes sure that the most important thing created on his watch is FUN!

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Understanding Superheroes

I will be speaking this coming Saturday (Oct. 24) at the University of Oregon as part of a conference and art exhibition they have organized around "Understanding Superheroes." It sounds funny to say that I am keynoting a superheroes conference -- like Aquaman couldn't make it! My topic will be "'Man Without Fear': David Mack and the Formal Limits of the Superhero Comic." While I have been writing and speaking about comics for a while, this will be the first time I've really dug deep into the formal conventions of superhero comics. My primary focus will be, as the title suggests, the work which Mack has done within the mainstream continuity of Marvel's Daredevil Franchise though more generally I will be exploring what happens when experimental and mainstream comics intersect each other. Other speakers at the conference include creative artists such as Danny Fingeroth, Kurt Busiek, Matt Fraction, and Gail Simone as well as scholars and critics such as Douglas Wolk, Charles Hatfield, Corey Creekmur, Jonathon Grey, and Matt Yockey. The conference was organized and the exhibit curated by Ben Saunders. I will be sharing my impressions of this event on my blog next week.

PBS's Digital Nation: Another Great Resource For Teaching the New Media Literacies

Early last summer, I sat down with a production crew from PBS's Frontline at the Games for Change conference in New York City. They were producing web-based content for a new documentary, Digital Nation, which was intended to be a follow up to their Growing Up Digital documentary. To be honest, I had some concerns about the depiction of young people's online experiences in the earlier production. It seemed to me to be sensationalistic in its choice of topics, mostly depicting generational conflicts around the use of the web. In most cases, there was a bias towards the adult perspectives offered by parents and teachers over those advanced by young people, who often lacked a language through which to defend experiences which were clearly meaningful to them. In this case, the decision not to include academic experts worked against having a fair hearing for young people, since the adults were advancing arguments which were oft staged through other news outlets while the young people were trying to get grown-ups to reconsider entrenched biases. In many ways, the Digital Nations site is correcting this over-sight, providing a rich array of indepth interviews with some of the top thinkers about young people's online lives. I was very pleased to see extensive use made of my interview, talking about the value of multitasking in an era of information overflow, how collective intelligence may displace the ideal of the Renaissance Man, participatory culture, parents and video games, the myth of game addiction, the nature of virtual reality, what schools are misunderstanding about the new media literacies and why so many teachers are ding book culture at the expense of embracing new skills and experiences. (Unfortunately, the site's producers have made it extremely difficult if not impossible to embed clips from this site onto blogs, showing how much they still have to learn about how to communicate ideas through digital media. So I am not able to offer you clips directly here on the blog but have to rely on links to direct you back to the PBS site. Trust me, if the content wasn't so good, I wouldn't bother!)

I've already found the site a useful resource for teaching my graduate seminar on New Media Literacies, finding the short segments an ideal length to spark discussions and provide students access to key thinkers, sharing their ideas in their own words. I haven't watched every segment yet but here are some of the ones I would highlight:

Marc Prensky, who is widely credited with coining the terms, "digital natives" and "digital immigrants," sums up his perspective about how young people learn and process knowledge differently than previous generations, thanks to their time spent engaged with new media.

Second Life's Philip Rosedale on the ways that we are using virtual reality's contributions to human evolution.

danah boyd on our shifting understanding of privacy and young people's desires to control disclosure in the world of Facebook and other social networks and her critiques of the anxieties about internet safety being fostered by sensationalized news reports on "stranger danger."

Net Family New's Anne Collier talks about the challenges of parenting for the digital age.

James Paul Gee on the kinds of learning that take place through computer and video games and on the ways that schools are regulating youth's access to participatory culture.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on the responsibility schools carry to help close the "opportunity gap" surrounding digital literacy.

The Dumbest Generation's Mark Bauerlein on why digital media threatens traditional literacy skills and may leave us knowing less rather than more.

"Old School, New School," a documentary segment showing the very different ways teachers understanding what it means to read in an age of digital media.

These short segments are provocative; they ask hard questions and offer contradictory advice, and that's why they represent such a valuable resource for the classroom. I am using them to start discussion; you may use them as probes for writing; but the topics they raise are ones we need to be discussing with our students.

You might want to bring one of these segments into your class as the world pays its respect this week to "One Web Day" and calls attention to the need to diversify and expand opportunities for participation in the new media landscape.

Is Facebook a Gated Community?: An Interview With S. Craig Watkins (Part One)

Earlier this year, I was asked to write a blurb for `S. Craig Watkins's book, The Young & The Digital: What the Migration To Social-Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means For Our Future. The book was an eye-opener as Watkins brings a sociological perspective to the kinds of social lives young people are building for themselves through their deployment of a range of new technologies and emerging cultural practices. Here's what I ended up writing about the book:

Why does Facebook have the same appeal as gated communities? Is distraction more concerning than addiction? How do video games like World of Warcraft value friendship? Bracing yet reassuring, often surprising, and always substantive, Craig Watkins acts as an honest broker, testing the contradictory claims often made about young people's digital lives against sophisticated fieldwork.

I don't agree with everything the book says -- that's probably what "bracing" means here -- but it shook up some of my own preconceptions and has stayed with me since I first read it.

We are seeing an explosion of significant new books on young people's digital lives -- in part inspired by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiatives, in part by the pervasiveness of digital culture all around us. I am trying to feature as many of these books and resources as they come out through the blog.

Watkins's book ranks among the best I've read on this topic. The Young & The Digital especially stands out for his close attention to the perspective of teachers as they grapple with the ways new media change how young people learn and to the perspective of young people who may not have the economic and social capital to fully participate in the digital and mobile realm inhabited by their more affluent and priviledged counterparts.

Watkins does not simply celebrate the "democratizing" impact of new media; he also looks at it as a space of social exclusions and in doing so, he calls attention to those factors which make it harder for some to participate more fully in the new media landscape. That's why I have chosen to highlight this interview as part of my contribution to this year's One Web Day with its theme -- "One Web. For All." And that's why I chose to include this book on the syllabus for the graduate course on New Media Literacies I am teaching at USC this fall.

In this installment, he takes on one of the senior figures in the sociological study of media, Robert Putnam, describing the ways that online participation may be paving the way for greater civic engagement, but he also ponders whether the online world may be making us "too social" for our own good, again striking a balance between utopian and dystopian arguments about the impact of digital media on young people's lives.

The Young and the Digital complicates in some important ways the arguments which Robert Putnam makes in Bowling Alone about the impact of electronic media on our social lives. Why did your field work lead you to reappraise Putnam's arguments?

The fieldwork did force me to reconsider some of the more enduring arguments about media and, especially, the well-traveled "Bowling Alone" thesis by Putnam. From the very beginning of the Web as an everyday tool, researchers have openly speculated about its influence in our social lives. Does the growing amount of time we spend in front of a screen make us more or less social, more or less interested in our friends, neighbors, and the world around us? Putnam's most compelling evidence regarding this questions is based on television. Among researchers who study TV as a leisure activity, the medium's greatest legacy is how it influences our connection, or lack thereof, to our neighbors, communities, and civic life. Putnam argues that TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, resulting in the erosion of social capital--a sense of neighborliness, mutual trust, and reciprocity that binds people and communities together. The big fear, of course, is that we will all retreat into our own media fortresses, forgoing any valuable social interaction with friends and acquaintances. While I understand the concern, the research evidence simply does not support it. This was certainly true in our research.

As we began talking with young people and combing through our survey results it became clear that their engagement with technology is first and foremost, a social activity. Conventional wisdom contends that time spent at home with TV is time spent away from friends and public life. But computer and mobile phone screens represent very different kinds of experiences than the ones traditionally offered by TV. Among the teens and young adults that we talk to, time spent in front of a computer or mobile screen is rarely, if ever, considered time spent alone. Screen time, increasingly, is time to connect with friends and acquaintances.

It's true, connecting via a mobile or Facebook is a different way of bonding, but, as I argue in the book, these practices are expressions of intimacy and community. We tend to get caught up on how much time young people spend with their computers and mobile phones. But what I came to understand is that their true interest is not in the technology per se, but rather the people and the relationships the technology provides access to.

Finally, I believe that young people's move online is also forcing us to reconsider another argument made by Putnam's regarding decreasing political participation. The final chapter of the book considers how young people's use of social and mobile media appears to be reversing some of the disturbing trends Putnam documents regarding a once decisive shift among Americans from political participation--for instance, attending political events, signing petitions, or writing an editor or politician. While establishing their support for President Obama, young people used Facebook, mobile phones, YouTube, and digital cameras to essentially redefine what electoral politics will look like in the future. Their use of digital media was social, communal, and in its own distinct way, political.

Throughout the book, you have a good deal to say about the ways digital media is reshaping young people's relations to traditional media (newspapers, television). What insight can you offer people working in the television industry about their prospects of attracting or holding the attention of younger Americans?

I'm glad you asked me about television. My interests in young people's engagement with the social Web is driven, in part, by a desire to understand the shift from television to screens that are more social, mobile, and personal. It's a historic shift and one that breaks from a more than fifty year cultural institution and experience--television as the first and most dominant screen in our lives.

Our research indicates that among persons ages thirty and under television is not the first or most preferred screen in their lives. They are just as likely to view their laptop or mobile phone as their "go to" screen. Young people still watch television but in ways that are quite distinct from previous generations--they watch it while media multitasking, on the go, and online. Moreover, kids are being socialized to engage TV in ways that are distinct from the generations that grew up in TV-centric households. These and other changes have forced a group of executives accustom to the dominance of TV in the household to rethink their business and programming models.

The television industry is diligently struggling to avoid what has happened to the pop music and newspaper industry. The TV business is struggling with what most of the corporate media world is struggling with and that is the question, "who will control content?" It's a hard lesson to learn but the rules of engagement really are changing.

It will be really interesting to see what network television looks like in about ten years. There is no doubt that it will look different but it will largely be outside forces--the ways our viewing and media behaviors shift--that will provoke change. Everything from rethinking the prime time schedule (NBC's decision to decrease scripted dramas and the impending Leno experiment) to the scaling back of the up-front presentations that once defined the industry's premium status among media buyers.

The biggest thing that the industry has to realize is that they can no longer control content or our viewing habits like they did in the past. It took a while but they began putting their shows online and making them available as downloads. Hulu-- a network response to the rise of YouTube--has shown signs of early success for long-format online video. But there is still a debate within the industry regarding this question of control. That is, should the network partners in Hulu make their content exclusive or, as some contend, make it available everywhere. I think it's clear that if network TV is to have a meaningful future it will have to permit its audience to not only access content across multiple platforms but also encourage audiences to shape and influence content, too.

You question the argument that digital media has had an anti-social impact on young people. Are there ways that these new media technologies and practices have made us "too social"?

I think so. Still, I realize that the idea of being "too social" is peculiar. Here is what I mean. The assertion that the Web and mobile phones are making us less social, caring, and involved with others is baffling when you consider the preponderance of evidence that actually compels a substantially different question: is today's "always-on" environment making us too social, too connected, and too involved in other people's lives?

In an "always on" world we are constantly communicating with each other via social network sites and mobile phones. It was interesting to learn that part of the initial appeal of Facebook among college students, for example, was the opportunity for constant status updates as well as the chance to gaze into the backstage world of friends and acquaintances. Young college students consistently made references to what they called, "e-stalking," that is the degree to which their peers frequently use social-network sites to track people's lives, activities, and relationships. Twitter and this idea of what Clive Thompson refers to as "ambient awareness" is another example of a technology that promotes a desire to be in constant connection with others.

In the digital age the idea of being out of touch or disconnected from family and friends is practically obsolete. No matter where we are--in class, at work, driving, or on vacation--the idea of being connected to our social networks is now a constant opportunity and, quite frankly, a constant challenge.

Rather than worrying about the likelihood of becoming anti-social I wonder if the reverse outcome--being too social--is a more legitimate concern. Talk to teachers in high school and you will learn that students are constantly connecting via their mobile phones while sitting in the classroom. Talk to university professors and there is a growing belief that students are constantly connecting with each other via platforms like Facebook while sitting in class. Again, it's the idea that we are using these emerging technologies in ways that are inventively social and dare I say excessively social.

S. Craig Watkins teaches in the departments of Radio-Television-Film and Sociology and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

His new book, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future (Beacon) explores young people's dynamic engagement with social media, online games, and mobile phones. Craig participated in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Youth, Digital Media and Learning. His work on this ground breaking project focuses on race, learning, and the growing culture of gaming. He has been invited to be a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford).

Currently, Craig is launching a new digital media research initiative that focuses on the use and evolution of social media platforms. For updates on these and other projects visit theyoungandthedigital.com.

Diversifying Participation

CALL FOR SESSION PROPOSALS FIRST ANNUAL DIGITAL MEDIA AND LEARNING CONFERENCE

CONFERENCE THEME: "DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION"

February 18 - 20, 2010

Cal IT2

University of California, San Diego

La Jolla, California

We are pleased to announce the first Digital Media and Learning Conference, an annual event sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice.

For this inaugural year, the theme will be "Diversifying Participation". Henry Jenkins is the Chair of the Digital Media and Learning Conference.

We invite submissions for session proposals that speak to the conference theme as well as to the field of digital media and learning more broadly. Those wishing to present work should look to propose or participate in a panel topic (see submission process outlined below).

DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION

A growing body of research has identified how young people's digital media use is tied to basic social and cultural competencies needed for full participation in contemporary society. We continue to develop an understanding of the impact of these experiences on learning, civic engagement, professional development, and ethical comprehension of the digital world.

Yet research has also suggested that young people's forms of participation with new media are incredibly diverse, and that risks, opportunities, and competencies are spread unevenly across the social and cultural landscape. Young people have differential access to online experiences, practices, and tools and this has a consequence in their developing sense of their own identities and their place in the world. In some cases, different forms of participation and access correspond with familiar cultural and social divides. In other cases, however, new media have introduced novel and unexpected kinds of social differences, subcultures, and identities.

It is far too simple to talk about this in terms of binaries such as "information haves and have nots" or "digital divides". There are many different kinds of obstacles to full participation, many different degrees of access to information, technologies, and online communities, and many different ways of processing those experiences. Participatory cultures surrounding digital media are characterized by a diversity that does not track automatically to high and low access or more or less sophisticated use. Rather, multiple forms of expertise, connoisseurship, identity, and practice are proliferating in online worlds, with complicated relationships to pre-existing categories such as socioeconomic status, gender, nationality, race, or ethnicity.

We encourage sessions that describe, document, and critically analyze different forms of participation and how they relate to various forms of social and cultural capital. We are interested in accounts of the challenges and obstacles which block or inhibit engagement to different forms of online participation. We also encourage session proposals that engage with successful intervention strategies and pedagogical processes enabling once marginalized groups to more fully exploit the opportunities for learning with digital media. Conversely, we are interested in hearing more about how marginal and subcultural communities find diverse uses of new and emerging technologies, pushing them in new directions and navigating a complicated relationship with "mainstream" forms of participation. Specifically, we seek to understand the following:

* What can research on more diverse communities contribute to our understanding of the learning ecologies surrounding new media?

* What are the technologies, practices, economic, and cultural divides that lead to segregation, "gated" information communities, and differential access?

* When and how do diversity and differentiation in participation promote social and cultural benefits and opportunities, and when do they create schisms that are less equitable or productive?

* What strategies have proven successful at broadening opportunities for participation, overcoming the many different kinds of segregation or exclusion which impact the online world, and empowering more diverse presences throughout cyberspace?

* Are there things occurring on the margins of the existing digital culture that might valuably be incorporated into more mainstream practices?

In addition to these questions directly addressing the conference theme, we welcome submissions that address innovative new directions in research and practice relating to digital media and participatory learning.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Submissions should be in the form of full session proposals. Proposed sessions may range from 1 to 2 hours in length and may include traditional paper presentations, hands-on workshops, design critiques, demos, pecha kucha, or roundtable discussions. We welcome and encourage submissions of innovative formats, but request that the proposals come in the form of session proposals rather than individual papers or presentations.

The goal of the event is to foster dialog and build connections. To that end, sessions should have at least three to four presenters and/or discussants. Session organizers should reserve substantial amounts of time for open discussion and exchange.

We have established an open wiki for potential participants to engage in session organizing. The wiki can be used to call for contributions to a briefly outlined session topic, to seek out partners to develop a topic together, to brainstorm about co-presenters, and any other functions potential participants find valuable. The wiki can be accessed at: http://dmlconference2010.wikidot.com/forum:start

Session organizers should submit proposals that consist of a title and a 200-word abstract (including proposed presentation topics and formats and the speakers and/or discussants). In addition, names and contact details for the session organizers and participants will be required. The submission system will be available at the end of September 2009.

Each individual will be limited to participation on no more than two panels at the conference. Participants will be expected to fund their own travel and accommodation. Registration for the conference will be free.

Conference Website: http://dmlcentral.net/conference

Conference Wiki: http://dmlconference2010.wikidot.com/forum:start

KEY DATES AND DEADLINES

Submission System Available: September 30, 2009

Deadline for Submissions: October 30, 2009

Notification of Acceptance: November 30, 2009

Registration System Opens: December 15, 2009

Conference Program Announced: December 15, 2009

Registration Deadline: January 15, 2010

Evening Reception: February 18, 2010

CONTACT INFORMATION

Digital Media and Learning Research Hub

UC Humanities Research Institute

University of California, Irvine

Email: dmlhub@hri.uci.edu

Over the next week, I am going to be focusing this blog on issues of digital inclusion, which is the theme of this year's One Web Day. A global event, One Web Day has been celebrated each year since 2006 on September 22. Bloggers all over the world are using their space to call attention to the value of the web in our everyday life and to some of the issues which are blocking full participation. This year's theme is "One Web. For All." So it seems particularly appropriate to be announcing this conference call in the midst of the blogosphere's growing focus on issues surrounding the "digital divide" and the "participation gap." For more on One Web Day, go to their homepage.

New Media Literacies -- A Syllabus

Last week, I shared the syllabus for my Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class and was blown away by the intensity of interest out there. I don't expect the same level of excitement over this class, since there are many such classes out there around the world, but I figured I would share it just the same. This course is pretty much over-subscribed at USC so I am not trying to attract new students -- just sharing models and resources with others doing work in this area. 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 than 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? Who is being left behind in the digital era and what can we do about it? And how might research on pedagogy and learning contribute more generally to our understanding of media audiences? Much of the reading in this 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.

This emerging body of research represents an important place where media and communication studies is interfacing with learning researchers and public policy makers. Understanding these debates helps shed light on long-standing debates in media and cultural theory, especially those having to do with the social production of meaning around media content and the nature of online communities. A better understanding of how informing learning, cultural collaboration and knowledge production takes place through fan and game communities may offer key new insights into media audience research and may also help journalists to better understand shifts in how young people access and deploy news and information. At the same time, translating this theory into practice poses challenges which may force our field to rethink some of its core assumptions. This course is intended to be a meeting point between students interested in communications research and cultural studies, media production, and educational research.

The course is structured in two parts: Part One, Learning in a Participatory Culture, seeks to provide an overview of our contemporary moment of media change, of the kinds of informal learning which is occuring in the context of participatory culture, of how schools are responding to the challenges posed by new media technologies, and of core debates between those who value and those who criticize the new media literacies. Part Two, Core Skills and Competencies, digs deeper into what young people need to learn if they are going to become full participants in the emerging media culture, adopting the framework of social skills and cultural competencies which shapes the work of Project New Media Literacies, and illustrating them by looking more closely at such cultural phenomenon as computer game guilds, youtube video production, Wikipedia, fan fiction, Second Life and other virtual worlds, music remixing, social network sites, and cosplay. We will be examining more closely new curricular materials which have emerged from Project New Media Literacies, Global Kids, The Good Play Project, Common Sense Media, the George Lucas Foundation, and other projects which are seeking to introduce these skills into contemporary educational practices.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Map the ways the changing media landscape has impacted the way young people learn

• Identify how participatory cultures work to support the growth and contributions of their members

• Recognize and be able to respond to core debates surrounding the value of bringing new media technologies and participatory culture practices into the classroom.

• Outline some of the ethical challenges which youth face in their roles as media producers and members of online communities.

• Describe our current understanding of the connections between participatory culture and civic engagement, including the relationship between the digital divide and the participation gap.

• Summarize and critique core theorists working in the field of New Media Literacy

• Comprehend the framework of basic social skills and cultural skills associated with the new media literacies

• Apply their theoretical understandings to the development of curricular resources for use in school or after school programs.

• Critique existing curricular resources designed to teach "the new media literacies"

• Deploy course concepts in the development of an independent research project which makes a substantive scholarly contribution.

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Course Assignments:

• For each class session, the student should make one thoughtful contribution to the class forum, describing their response to the readings, and offering some topics or questions we should explore during the class discussions. This process is designed to jump start the conversation before class so students should make an effort to read their classmate's contributions. Keep in mind that contributions here also allow me to assess your mastery over the course content so try to anchor your comments closely to the readings. You need not, however, reference all of the readings for that week but should focus your discussion on salient points of interest. (10 percent)

• Deploying their emerging understanding of the literature on New Media Literacies and their own personal experience as a user of new media tools and platforms, the student will write a five page response to Mitoko Rich, "Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading?", New York Times Book Review, July 27 2008. The response should consider what counts as literacy, how literacy changes in response to the new media landscape, and what value we should ascribe to the new forms of communication that are emerging online. (Due Week Three) (10 percent)

• The Student will do a short interview with a student or educator, identifying some of their core beliefs about the value of new media technologies and practices for learning, and sketching out how much and in what ways they use such tools and techniques inside and outside of school. Drawing on the literature we've read so far in the class, the student will write a short five page essay which paints a portrait of their interview subject and links them to larger trends impacting how young people are learning through and about new media. (Due Week Six) (20 Percent)

• The Student will develop one challenge for the Project NML Learning Library. Challenges may deploy videos produced by the project or other material that already circulates online. The challenge should reflect their understanding of the "new media" skills and should introduce young people to some aspect of digital culture. (Due Week Ten) (20 Percent)

• The student will complete a paper or project of their own design, with consultation with the instructor, which makes a significant scholarly or pedagogical contribution to our understanding of the new media literacies. A written paper should be roughly 20 pages in length. (due at end of the term) The scale of projects should be negotiated with the professor. The student will make a brief presentation of their paper or project to their classmates during the final class session. (Due Week Fifteen) (40 Percent)

Required Books:

Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (New York: Tor, 2008).

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

Peter Lyman, Mizuko Ito, Barrie Thorne, and Michael Carter, Hanging Out, Messing Around, And Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2009).

John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Perseus, 2008).

Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning (Maidenshead: Open University Press, 2006).

S. Craig Watkins, The Young and the Digital (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

PART ONE: LEARNING IN A PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

Week 1 (August 25) Growing Up Digital

Recommended Readings (For after the first class session):

Mark Prensky, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" (2001)

Henry Jenkins, "Reconsidering Digital Immigrants," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, December 5 2007.

Henry Jenkins, "Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, November 6 2006

Henry Jenkins, "Nine Propositions Towards a Theory of YouTube," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, May 28 2007

Renee Hobbs, "The Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement"

Week 2 (September 1) The New Media Literacies

Henry Jenkins et al, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. , pp.3-23.

James Paul Gee, Good Video Games + Good Learning (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), chapter 8, "Affinity Spaces", pp.87-103.

Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, New Literacies: Everyday Practices & Classroom Learning (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006). Part One: "What's New?", pp.7-101.

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008), Chapter 6 "Expressive Instructions," pp. 179-193.

Week 3 (September 8) The New Digital Landscape: Differing Perspectives

Peter Lyman, Mizuko Ito, Barrie Thorne, and Michael Carter, Hanging Out, Messing Around, And Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2009).

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbiest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. (New York: Tarcher, 2008), Chapter One: "Knowledge Deficits," pp. 11-38 and Chapter Two, "The New Bibliophobes," pp.39-70.

Week 4 (September 15) The Ethics of Participation

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," pp.1-62.

John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic, 2008), "Privacy" pp. 53-82, "Safety" pp. 83-110, "Pirates" pp. 131-154, "Aggressors" pp. 209-222.

Thomas McLaughlin, "The Ethics of Basketball", Give and Go, Basketball as Cultural Practice, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2008. 23-45

Ellen Seiter, "Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital" in Tara McPherson (ed.), Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected (Cambridge:MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2008), pp. 27-52.

Week 5 (September 22) The Politics of Participation

Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (New York: Tor, 2008).

Justine Cassell and Meg Cramer, "High Tech or High Risk: Moral Panics about Girls Online" in Tara McPherson (ed.), Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected (Cambridge:MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2008), pp. 53-76.

PART TWO: CORE SKILLS AND COMPETENCIES

Week 6 (September 29) Play

Jenkins et al, pp. 22-25.

James Paul Gee, "Learning and Games" in Katie Salens (ed.) The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2008), pp. 21-40.

Kurt Squire and Shree Durga (in press), "Productive Gaming: The Case for Historiographic Game Play," in Robert Fedig (ed.), The Handbook of Educational Gaming (Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference), pp. 1-21.

Mary Louise Pratt, " Arts of the Contact Zone," Profession 91 (1991), pp.33-35.

Eric Klopfer, "Augmented Learning," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 7 2008

David Williamson Shaffer, "How Computer Games Help Kids Learn," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, January 25 2007

Week 7 (October 6) Performance

Jenkins et al, pp. 28-31.

James Paul Gee, "Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance," in Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (eds.), A New Literacies Sampler (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.95-114.

Shelby Ann Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath, "Living in a World of Words," in Henry Jenkins (ed.) The Children's Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 406-430.

Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes, and Make-Believe Violence (New York: Basic, 2002), "The Good Fight," pp. 65-76 and "Fantasy and Reality," pp.113-128.

Geraldine Bloustein, "'Ceci N'est Pas Un Jeaune Femme': Videocams, Representation and 'Othering' In the Worlds of Teenage Girls," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) pp.162-186.

Week 8 (October 13) Appropriation

Jenkins et al, pp. 32-34.

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), Chapter 5, "Why Heather Can Write," pp. 169-205.

Rebecca W. Black, "Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction," in Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (eds.) A New Literacies Sampler (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.115-136.

Angela Thomas, "Blurring and Breaking Through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction," in Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (eds.), A New Literacies Sampler (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.137-166.

Lankshear and Knobel, "New Literacies as Remix," pp.105-136.

Week 9 (October 20) Transmedia Navigation and Multitasking

Jenkins et al, pp. 34-36, 46-49.

Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (New York: Routledge), Chapter 4 "Literacy and Multimodality: A Theoretical Framework," pp. 35-60.

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), Chapter 3 "Searching for the Oragami Unicorn," pp. 93-130.

Mimi Ito, "Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production" pp.31-34.

David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green, "Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Children's Media Culture," in Joseph Tobin (ed.), Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (Durham: Duke University press, 2004), pp.12-33.

Week 10 (October 27) Collective Intelligence and Distributed Cognition

Jenkins et al, pp. 37-43

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), Chapter One "Spoiling Survivor," pp.25-58.

Jane McGonigal, "Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming" in Katie Salens (ed.), The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2008), pp. 199-228.

Andrew Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Chapter Two "Technologies to Bond With," pp. 35-58.

T.L. Taylor, "Does WOW Change Everything?: How a PvP Server, Multinational Playerbase, and Surveillance Mod Scene Caused Me Pause," Games & Culture, October 2006, pp.1-20.

Week 11 (November 3) Simulation and Visualization

Jenkins et al, pp. 25-30.

Ian Bogost, "Procedural Literacy: Problem Solving in Programming, Systems and Play," Telemedium: The Journal of Media Literacy, 52, 2005, pp.32-36.

Rachel Prentice, "The Visible Human," in Sherry Turkle (ed.), The Inner History of Devices (Cambridge: MIT Press 2008), pp. 112-124.

Sherry Turkle, Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1996), Chapter Nine "Virtuality and Its Discontents," p.233-254

Barry Joseph, "Why Johnny Can't Fly: Treating Games as a Form of Youth Media Within a Youth Development Framework," in Katie Salen (Ed.), The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2008), pp. 253-266.

Week 12 (November 10) Networking

Jenkins et al, pp. 49- 52.

danah boyd, "Why Youth Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life," in David Buckingham (ed.) Youth, Identity and Digital Media (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2009), pp. 1-26

W. Lance Bennett, "Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age" in W. Lance Bennett (ed.), Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2009), pp. 1-24.

Yasmin B. Kafai, "Gender Play in a Tween Gaming Club," in Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun (eds.), Beyond Barbie & Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp.110-123.

Elizabeth Hayes, "Girls, Gaming, and Trajectories of IT Expertise," in Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun (eds.) Beyond Barbie & Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp.217-230.

Vanessa Bertozzi, Unschooling and Participatory Media (Master's Thesis, Comparative Media Studies, MIT, 2006), "Carsie's Network: Connecting a Geographically Dispersed Population," pp. 98-123.

Week 13 (November 17) Negotiation

Jenkins et al, pp.52-55.

S. Craig Watkins, The Young and the Digital (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009)

Antonio Lopez, "Circling the Cross: Bridging Native America, Education, and Digital Media" in Anna Everett (ed.), Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2008). pp. 109-126.

Week 14 (November 24) Judgement

Jenkins et al, pp. 43-46

Henry Jenkins, "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies," Journal of Media Literacy,

Axel Bruns, "Educating Produsers, Produsing Education," Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), pp.337-356.

Andrew J. Flanagin and Miriam J. Metzger, "Digital Media and Youth: Unparalleled Opportunity and Unprecedented Responsibility,"In Andrew J. Flanagin and Miriam J. Metzger (eds.), Digital Media, Youth, and Credability (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2008), pp. 5-28.

Week 15 (December 1) Student Presentations

Documenting the Digital Generation

The George Lucas Educational Foundation recently launched an exciting new website -- Digital Generation -- which offers a wealth of videos which will be relevant to anyone who wants to better understand the new media literacies, participatory culture, and young people's online lives, themes which recur here with great frequency. I have been looking the site over closely as I am getting ready to teach a graduate seminar on new media literacy at USC this fall. I certainly will be using the materials on this site as a resource for sparking classroom discussions and giving my students a more immediate experience of some of the writers we will be reading. First, the site brings together substantive conversations with what they are calling "Big Thinkers." These include some key participants from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiatives, including Katie Salen talking about learning with and through games, Howard Gardner talking about ethics and education, Sasha Barab talking about virtual worlds and participatory culture, John Palfrey talking about "Born Digital" youth, James Paul Gee on assessment and games, and yours truly speaking to parents and educators about our changing media landscape. Here's Mimi Ito from the Digital Youth Project talking about what her ethnographic research has shown about the ecology of informal learning.

Second, the website offers some vivid and engaging portraits of typical American teens and their relationship to new media technologies and practices. There's so much that I find commendable about these videos -- starting from the fact that they define new media in terms of its opportunities rather than starting from the conflict and controversy approach which defined for example PBS's Growing Up Online documentary last year. Key to this is the centrality of the young participant's own voice in describing what these new tools and communities mean to them, coupled with supportive comments from teachers, parents, and other adults who remain part of their lives. The picture that emerges acknowledges that there are sometimes generational conflicts around the deployment of these media but also models strategies for working through those disagreements in ways that allow everyone to tap into the opportunities and route around the risks posed by the online world. Young people's lives are shown to be conducted across and through a range of different media platforms, rather than, say, identifying one kid as a gamer or another as a social networker. The technologies are shown as supporting a range of different social roles and relationships rather than necessarily directing young people to develop in predetermined directions. There are great examples here of gifted teachers who embrace the informal learning which is taking place in and around participatory culture and linking it in meaningful ways to the school curriculum. These stories allow us to see new media practices as an expansion of rather than distraction from traditional forms of learning. These are the kinds of stories I wish we could see more of in mainstream media rather than sensationalized newsreports which are designed to provoke moral panic over the topic of the week. Right now, that topic seems to be sexting.

This video about Sam is one of my personal favorites. Sam is a young drama queen -- in all of the best senses of the word -- and it's clear that she is deploying a range of new media tools to produce, critique, edit, and restage her own persona (as well as to direct her friends in their own identity play activities).

And this portrait of Luis shows a young man as he uses new media tools to juggle a range of social responsabilities. Part of what I love here is the ways that his mastery over these technologies allows him to be a dutiful son, a caring brother, an active citizen, and a mentor to other youth.

And surrounding each of the youth portraits are samples of their own media productions and links to sites which are meaningfully part of their own lives. These young people are allowed to share their own insights and experiences through the site, alongside the credentialized experts (and "Big Thinkers") and this is clearly as it should be, given how much each of them has to say about digital culture.

Finally, the site offers videos which provide portraits of significant youth-focused organizations and the work they are doing to promote the new media literacies. These groups include several with whom Project NML has been collaborating, including New York City's Global Kids and Chicago's Digital Youth Network. This video, for example, shows a workshop on digital storytelling and talks about the Remix World project. I've had the chance to get to know Nichole Pinkard and Akili Lee, visit their school, and see their students in action. What they are doing is, in the words of one of the young people featured here, "totally sick."

These samples only scratch the surface. You should allow yourself the time to explore this rich new resource for media literacy education.

What Is Learning in a Participatory Culture? (Part Two)

Today, I am running the second part of an essay written by Erin Reilly, the Research Director of the New Media Literacies Project (NML) in which she tells you more about our new learning library. If you have not yet checked out the learning library, you can find it here. And if you want to learn more about how it is starting to be deployed across a range of educational settings, check out the special issue of Threshold magazine about "Learning in a Participatory Culture."

Exploring New Media Literacies

My work on Zoey's Room was an ideal segue to applying practice to Project NML's research into how a participatory culture facilitates learning in the 21st century. Outside their classrooms, which largely still follow a top-down model of teachers dispensing knowledge, today's children learn by searching and gathering clusters of information as they move seamlessly between their physical and virtual spaces. Knowledge is acquired through multiple new tools and processes as kids accrue information that is visual, aural, musical, interactive, abstract, and concrete and then remix it into their own storehouse of knowledge. Describing how learning and pedagogy must change in this new cultural and multimedia context, the think tank New London Group argues that "literacy pedagogy now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies."

Indeed, they describe how "the proliferation of communications channels and media supports" sets up a need for "creating the learning conditions for full social participation." The media-literacy movement has effectively taken the lead among educators in this regard by teaching students to analyze the media they consume and to see themselves as both consumers and producers of media. However, even this learning often is relegated to electives or to after-school programs rather than being integrated across curricula. The new media literacies allow us to think in very different ways about the processes of learning, because they acknowledge a shift from the top-down model to one that invokes all voices and all means of thinking and creating to build new knowledge. For many educators, however, this raises issues of maintaining control, building trust, and providing an open-source culture of learning that allows students to share their own expertise in the classroom. At the same time, the mindsets and skill sets of the new media literacies are changing the discipline itself. In effect, we are teaching an outdated version of literacy if we do not address the sorts of practices that new media and new technologies support.

Invitation to Participate

Integrating the new media literacies into learning echoes the concept of syndesis presented by social anthropologist Robert Plant Armstrong in "What's Red, White, and Blue and Syndetic?" (1982). Syndesis is a process that strings together self-contained moments or increments of what Armstrong calls "presence" to form a whole. Syndesis has important applications to today's learning environment because it ensures that educators and students contribute to the body of knowledge being formed by the group. The end result is an environment that shares information in multiple formats that become similar only when the group pulls them together.

One major approach to the new learning paradigm at Project NML is the Learning Library , a new type of learning environment that embraces the characteristics of syndesis and participatory culture. The Learning Library is an activities-based model that aggregates media from the Web--such as a video, image, or audio file--and provides tools for users to integrate that media into a learning objective. Educators are encouraged to load their own media or draw on media by others that already exist in the Library to shape new learning challenges and to collaboratively build and share new collections based on particular themes. These challenges range from playing a physics game designed to experiment with problem-solving, to developing collaborative ways to bring innovation into the classroom, to learning about attribution while exploring issues involving copyright, public domain, fair use, and Creative Commons.

Project NML has seeded the Learning Library with its first collection of 30 learning "challenges" so that users can explore and practice applying the new media literacies to their classroom activities. One example from our first collection of challenges, called Expressing Characters, uses the new media literacy of transmedia navigation. In this activity, a student learns how plot can be extended across media by following the adventures of Claire Bennet, a character from the TV show Heroes. After exploring how Claire is already portrayed on television, in a graphic novel, and on MySpace, learners practice transmedia navigation by adapting and extending one of their own favorite characters into media forms in which the character does not currently exist. Bringing their own experiences to this challenge, students then load their creations into the Library, where they can be viewed and remixed into a different learning objective by others. By exploring and practicing the new media literacy skill of transmedia navigation, students learn to make meanings across different media types--not just in relation to print text. In this way, these new modes of communication are highlighting the need to teach new ways of expression and new methods of understanding the digital world.

Conclusion

A prime goal of Project NML is to understand what happens when multiple forms of media are fully integrated into processes of learning. The new media literacies build upon existing print literacy practices, making possible new literacy practices where, according to the New London Group, "the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioral, and so on." And these practices offer new resources and pathways for learning the disciplines.

Our students are already appropriating information from the Web and turning it into new knowledge. They are already learning from each other and participating in the learning of their peers. They already connect, create, collaborate, and circulate information through new media. The goal for us, as educators, is to find new ways to harness and leverage their interests and social competencies to establish a participatory learning environment. Teachers and administrators must learn to leverage this new learning paradigm to engage our students, and we encourage you to use the Learning Library and see if it works for your context.

Resources

Armstrong, Robert Plant. "What's Red, White, and Blue and Syndetic?" Journal of American Folklore, 1982.

Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning. MacArthur Foundation.

Jenkins, Henry et al. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century." MacArthur Foundation, October 2006. digitallearning.macfound.org

The New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." In Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. Routledge, November 1999.

Erin Reilly is a recognized expert in the design and development of educational content powered by virtual learning and new media applications. As research director of MIT's Project New Media Literacies, Reilly helps conceptualize the vision of the program and develop a strategy for its implementation. Before joining MIT, Reilly co-created Zoey's Room, a national online community for 10- to 14-year-old girls, encouraging their creativity through science, technology, engineering, and math. In 2007, Reilly received a Cable's Leaders in Learning Award for her innovative approach to learning and was selected as one of the National School Boards Association's "20 to Watch" educators.

Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Zoey's Room.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy (Part Two)

A close look at the recent presidential election shows that young people are more politically engaged now than at any point since the end of the Vietnam War era. 54.5 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 voted last November, constituting a larger proportion of the total electorate -- 18 percent -- then Putnam's bowlers, people 65-years-and-older (16 percent). The youth vote was a decisive factor in Obama's victories in several states, including Indiana, North Carolina, and possibly Florida. John Della Volpe, director of polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics, told U.S. News and World Reports that the desire to make the world a better place was "baked into the millennials' DNA" but "they just didn't believe they could do that by voting." Political scientist Lance Bennett has argued that unlike Putnam's bowlers, this generation's civic identities are not necessarily defined through notions of "duty" or through once-every-four-years rituals like voting; rather, he argues, they are drawn towards "consumerism, community volunteering, or transnational activism" as mechanisms through which to impact the larger society. The Obama campaign was able to create an ongoing relationship with these new voters, connecting across every available media platform. Log onto YouTube and Obama was there in political advertisements, news clips, comedy sketches, and music videos, some created by the campaign, some generated by his supporters. Pick up your mobile phone and Obama was there with text messages updating young voters daily. Go to Facebook and Obama was there, creating multiple ways for voters to affiliate with the campaign and each other. Pick up a video game controller and Obama was there, taking out advertisement space inside several popular games. Turn on your Tivo to watch a late night comedy news show and Obama and his people are there, recognizing that The Daily Show or Colbert are the places where young people go to learn more about current events. This new approach to politics came naturally to a candidate who has fought to be able to use his Blackberry and text-messaging as he enters the White House, who regularly listens to his iPod, who knows how to give a Vulcan salute, brags about reading Harry Potter books to his daughters, and who casually talks about catching up on news online. The Obama campaign asked young people to participate, gave them chances to express themselves, enabled them to connect with each other, and allowed them to feel some sense of emotional ownership over the political process.

What has all of this to do with schools? Alas, frequently, very little.

Let's imagine a learning ecology in which the youth acquires new information through all available channels and through every social encounter. The child learns through schools and after school programs; the child learns on their own through the home and family and through their social interactions with their peers. They learn through face to face encounters and through online communities. They learn through work and they learn through play. The skills they acquire through one space helps them master core content in another. Through the New Media Literacy project, we have been developing resources which can be deployed in the classroom, in afterschool programs, and in the home for self-learning, seeking a more integrated perspective on what it means to learn in a networked society. Yet, right now, most of our schools are closing their gates to those cultural practices and forms of informal learning that young people value outside the classroom and in the process, they may be abdicating their historic roles in fostering civic engagement.

In a 2003 report, CIRCLE and the Carnegie Corporation of New York sought to document and analyze "the civic mission of schools." Historically, schools had been a key institution in fostering a sense of civic engagement. While their parents were bowling, their children were getting involved in student governments, editing the student newspaper, and discussing public affairs in their civics classes. The Civic Mission of Schools reports: "Long term studies of Americans show that those who participate in extracurricular activities in high school remain more civically engaged than their contemporaries even decades later.... A long tradition of research suggests that giving students more opportunities to participate in the management of their own classrooms and schools builds their civic skills and attitudes.....Recent evidence indicates that simulations of voting, trials, legislative deliberation, and diplomacy in schools can lead to heightened political knowledge and interest." Yet, the committee that authored the report ended up sharply divided about how realistic it was to imagine schools, as they are currently constituted, giving young people greater opportunities to participate in school governance or freedom to share their values and beliefs with each other. Student journalism programs are being defunded and in many cases, the content of the student newspaper is more tightly regulated than ever before. Schools no longer offer opportunities for students to actively debate public affairs out of fear of a push-back from politically sensitive parents.

In reality, young people have much greater opportunities to learn these civic skills outside school, as they "hang out," "mess around," and "geek out" online. This may be why so many of them use social network sites as resources to expand their contact with their friends at school or why they feel such a greater sense of investment in their game guilds than in their student governments, or why they see YouTube as a better place to express themselves than the school literature magazine. Meanwhile, our schools are making it harder for teachers and students to integrate these materials into the classroom. Federal law has imposed mandatory filters on networked computers in schools and public libraries. There have been a series of attempts to pass legislation banning access to social network sites and blogging tools. Many teachers have told Project New Media Literacies that they can't access YouTube or other web 2.0 sites on their school computers. And the Student Press Law Center reports that a growing number of schools have taken disciplinary action against students because of things they've written on blogs published outside school hours, off school grounds, and through their own computers.

In other words, rather than promoting the skills and ethical responsibilities that will enable more meaningful participation in future civic life, many schools have sought to close down opportunities to engage with these new technologies and cultural practices. Of course, many young people, as the Digital Youth Project discovered, work around these restrictions (and in the process, find one more reason to disobey the adults in their lives). Yet, many other young people have no opportunities to engage with these virtual worlds, to enter these social networks, on their own. These school policies have amplified the already serious participation gap that separates information-haves and have-nots. Those students who have the richest online lives are being stripped of their best modes of learning as they pass into the schoolhouse and those who have limited experiences outside of classroom hours are being left further behind. And all of them are being told two things: that what they do in their online lives has nothing to do with the things they are learning in school; and that what they are learning in school has little or nothing of value to contribute to who they are once the bell rings.

One of the goals of Project New Media Literacies has been to bring this participatory culture into the classroom as a key first step towards fostering a more participatory democracy . This isn't a matter of making school more "entertaining" or dealing with wavering student attention. It has to do with modeling powerful new forms of civic life and learning, of helping young people acquire skills that they are going to need to enter the workplace, to participate in public policy debates, to express themselves creatively, and to change the world. As we are doing this work, we are bumping up, again and again, against constraints which make it impossible for even the most determined, dedicated, and informed teachers to bring many of these technologies and cultural practices into their classrooms. It isn't simply that young people know more about Facebook than their teachers; it is that for the past decade, schools have sought to insulate themselves from these sites of potential disruption and transformation, hermetically sealing themselves off from these social networks and from the mechanisms of participatory culture. The first we can overcome through better teacher training, but the second is going to require us to rethink basic school policies if schools are going to pursue their traditional civic missions in ways that enhance these new forms of citizenly engagement.

This article was written for Threshold Magazine's special issue on "Learning in a Participatory Culture." Read more about Project New Media Literacies here.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy (Part One)

On the eve of our conference at MIT on "Learning in a Participatory Culture," Cable in the Classroom has joined forces with Project New Media Literacies to edit a special issue of Threshold which centers on the work we've been doing and the vision behind it. Among the features are a wonderful graphic showing the new learning environment and how informal, individual, and school based learning can work together to reinforce the core social skills and cultural competencies we've been discussing; a transcribed conversation with Benjamin Stokes, Daniel T. Hickey, Barry Joseph, John Palfrey, and myself about the challenges and opportunities surrounding bringing new media into the classroom; James Bosco adopting a school reform perspective on these issues; and a range of pieces by the core researchers on our team describing what happened when we introduced some of our materials into schools or after school programs. If you wanted to attend the conference but just couldn't make it to Cambridge, you can follow along through the live webcasts of the event. Check here for details.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to be showcasing the work of Project New Media Literacies and introducing you to some of our curricular materials which are just now going public. Along the way, you will get a chance to read several pieces from the Threshold magazine, including one from our award-winning research director Erin Reilly, get some reflections from some of our students about how they learned about and through popular culture, and learn about how spreadability may impact education. Today and next time, I will be running the essay which I wrote for the magazine, which maps the ways I am starting to think about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

And if that's not enough New Media Literacies thinking for you, check out this great podcast put together by Barry Joseph and others at Global Kids, one of our research partners, which includes a conversation between Mimi Ito and myself and an interview with Constance Steinkuehler.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy

by Henry Jenkins

In his book, Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam suggests that many members of the post-WWII generation discovered civic engagement at the local bowling alley. The bowling alley was a place where people gathered regularly not simply to play together, but talk about the personal and collective interests of the community, to form social ties and identify common interests. In a classic narrative of cultural decline, Putnam blames television for eroding these strong social ties, resulting in a world where people spent more time isolated in their homes and less time participating in shared activities with the larger community.

But what does civic engagement look like in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and World of Warcraft? All of these new platforms are reconnecting home-based media with larger communities, bridging between our public and private lives. All offer us a way to move from media consumption towards cultural participation.

During a recent visit in Santiago, I sat down with Chilean national Senator Fernando Flores Labra who believes that the guild structure in the massively multiplayer video game, World of Warcraft, offers an important training ground for the next generation of business and political leaders. (Guilds are affiliations of players who work together towards a common cause, such as battling the monsters or overcoming other enemies in the sword-and-sorcery realm depicted in the game.) The middle aged Labra, with his slicked back hair, his paunchy midsection, and his well-pressed suits, is probably not what you expect a World of Warcraft player to look like. Yet, he's someone who has spent, by his own estimate, "thousands of hours playing these games, with hundreds of people, of all ages, all over the world."

Labra recently invited leading business and political leaders to come together and learn more about such games, explaining: "I am convinced that these technologies can be excellent laboratories for learning the practices, skills and ethics required to succeed in today's global environment, where people are increasingly required to interact with people all over the world, but still have a hard time working with their colleagues in the office next door, never mind with their new colleagues, whom they have never met, on the other side of the world. If an organization is to survive and thrive in today's era of globalization, its leaders must ensure that members of their organization become experts in operational coordination among geographically and culturally diverse groups; build and cultivate trust among their various stakeholders, including their employees, their customers and their investors, all of whom may be culturally and geographically diverse; cultivate people that are able to act with leadership in an era of rapid and constant change."

Playing World of Warcraft requires the mobilization of a large number of participants and the coordination of efforts across a range of different skill groups. Experienced players find themselves logging into the game not simply because they want to play but because they feel an obligation to the other players. Participants often network outside the game space to coordinate their efforts and soon find themselves discussing a much broader range of topics (much like Putnam's bowlers). Participants develop and deploy tools which allow them to manage complex data sets and monitor their own performances. And the guild leadership, many of whom are still in their teens, learn to deal with their team member's complex motivations and sometimes conflicting personalities.

Whatever these folks are doing, they are not "bowling alone." If Putnam's correct, bowling was more than a game for post-war citizens, and World of Warcraft is more than a game for many students in your classrooms.

But let's take it a step further. Game guilds and other kinds of social networks are as central to what we mean by civic engagement in the 21st century as civic organizations were to the community life of the 20th century. If bowling helped connect citizens at the geographically local level, these new kinds of communities bring people together from diverse backgrounds, including adults and youths, and across geographically dispersed communities. Such dispersed social ties are valuable in a world where the average American moves once every four or five years, often across regions, and where many of us find ourselves needing to interact with colleagues around the planet.

I use the term "participatory culture" to describe the new kinds of social and creative activities which have emerged in a networked society. A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.

The work we are doing through the MacArthur Foundation's emerging Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a network of scholars, educators, and activists , starts from the premise that these new media platforms represent important sites of informal learning. The time young people spend, outside the classroom, engaging with these new forms of cultural experience foster real benefits in terms of their mastering of core social skills and cultural competencies (the New Media Literacies) they are going to be deploying for years to come. While much has been said about why 21st century skills are essential for the contemporary workplace, they are also valuable in preparing young people for future roles in the arts, politics, and community life. Learning how to navigate social networks or produce media may result in a sense of greater personal empowerment across all aspects of youth's lives.

In a recent report, documenting a multi-year, multi-site ethnographic study of young people's lives on and off line, the Digital Youth Project suggests three potential modes of engagement which shape young people's participation in these online communities. First, many young people go on line to "hang out" with friends they already know from schools and their neighborhoods. Second, they may "mess around" with programs, tools, and platforms, just to see what they can do. And third, they may "geek out" as fans, bloggers, and gamers, digging deep into an area of intense interest to them, moving beyond their local community to connect with others who share their passions. The Digital Youth Project argues that each of these modes encourages young people to master core technical competencies, yet they may also do some of the things that Putnam ascribed to the bowling leagues of the 1950s -- they strengthen social bonds, they create shared experiences, they encourage conversations, and they provide a starting point for other civic activities.

For the past few decades, we've increasingly talked about those people who have been most invested in public policy as "wonks," a term implying that our civic and political life has increasingly been left to the experts, something to be discussed in specialized language. When a policy wonk speaks, most of us come away very impressed by how much the wonk knows but also a little bit depressed about how little we know. It's a language which encourages us to entrust more control over our lives to Big Brother and Sister, but which has turned many of us off to the idea of getting involved. But what if more of us had the chance to "geek out" about politics? What if we could create points of entry where young people saw the affairs of government as vitally linked to the practices of their everyday lives? "Geeking out" is empowering; it motivates our participation and in a world of social networks, pushes us to find others who share our passions. If being a "wonk" is about what you know, being a "geek" involves an ongoing process of sharing information and working through problems with others. Being a political "geek" involves taking on greater responsibility for solving your own problems, working as a member of a larger community, whether one defined in geographic terms or through shared interests.

Maybe "geeking out" about politics is key to fostering a more participatory democracy, one whose success is measured not simply by increases in voting (which we've started to see over the past few election cycles) but also increased volunteerism (which shows up in survey after survey of younger Americans), increased awareness of current events, increased responsibility for each other, and increased participation in public debates about the directions our society is taking. "Geeking out" might mean we think about civic engagement as a life style rather than as a special event.

We still have a lot to learn about how someone moves from involvement in participatory culture towards greater engagement with participatory democracy. But so far, there are some promising results when organizations seek to mobilize our emerging roles as fans, bloggers, and gamers. Consider, for example, the case of the HP Alliance, an organization created by Andrew Slack, a 20-something activist and stand up comic, who saw the Harry Potter books as potential resources for mobilizing young people to make a difference in the world. Slack argues that J.K. Rowling's novels have taught a generation to read and write (through fan fiction) and now it has the potential to help many of those young people cross-over into participation in the public sphere. Creating what he describes as "Dumbledore's Army" for the real world, the HP Alliance uses the story of a young man who questioned authority, organized his classmates, and battled evil to get young people connected with a range of human rights organization. Slack works closely with Wizard Rock bands, who perform at fan conventions, record their music as mp3s, and distribute it via social network sites and podcasts. He works with the people who run Harry Potter fan websites and blogs to help spread the word to the larger fan community. So far, the HP Alliance has moved more than 100,000 people, many of them teens, to contribute to the struggles against genocide in Darfur or the battles for worker's rights at Wal-Mart or the campaign against Proposition 8 in California.

Many parents and educators grumble about this generation's lack of motivation or commitment, describing them as too busy playing computer games to get involved in their communities. For some teens, this may be sadly true. But, Global Kids, a New York organization, has been using Second Life to bring together youth leaders from around the world and to give them a playground through which they can imagine and stage solutions to real world problems. Global Kids, for example, used machinima -- a practice by which game engines are deployed to create real time digital animation -- to document the story of a child soldier in Uganda and circulate it via YouTube and other platforms to call attention to the plight of youth in the developing world. Much like the HP Alliance, Global Kids is modeling ways we can bridge between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

Upcoming Conference -- Learning in a Participatory Culture

I've often written in this blog about the work we have been doing through Project NML developing curricular materials for in school and after school use to support the New Media Literacies. We will be hosting an event to showcase this work coming up next month and I wanted to encourage you to register and attend. At NML's May 2nd conference, we will share our new web-based learning environment, the Learning Library, and host a series of conversations and workshops about the integration and implementation of the new media literacies across disciplines. Workshops include "The Complexities of Copyright: Shepard Fairey v. the AP," "Mapping in Participatory Culture: Boundaries," "Using Wikipedia in the Classroom" and many others. Henry Jenkins' closing remarks will address the future of NML and participatory democracy.

Panelists at this conference will include members of the NML team, educators who have been working with NML materials in the field, and educational researchers. The conference is designed to engage anyone with an interest in the future of education, especially high school teachers and after school coordinators. The format itself will be participatory - we hope that attendees will join the conversation, and leave the conference equipped with new ideas and strategies.

Learning in a Participatory Culture will take place at MIT, Cambridge MA, from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm.

Registration for this one-day conference is $35.00, breakfast and lunch included.

Registration is now open. For more, check out Project NML homepage.

Loomings 2009: What Obama Might Have Learned from Moby-Dick

The following post was written by Wyn Kelley, a Melville scholar, who is collaborating with Project NML (New Media Literacies) on our teacher's strategy guide on "Reading in a Participatory Culture." The work we've been doing on Moby-Dick would not have been possible without Wyn's passion for the topic and her commitment to teaching. More than any one else, she helped me to see that there are fans of serious literature just as there are fans of popular culture and that we have much to learn from each other about how we engage with texts that really matter to us. She recently shared with me these interesting reflections on Obama's reading preferences and what they might tell us about his vision for the country. I wanted to share them with you -- along with my own best wishes on the dawning of a new era in American history. "Loomings 2009"

by Wyn Kelley

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States."

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

After September 11, 2001, some commentators wondered if Melville's phrases in the opening of Moby-Dick prophesied a twenty-first-century war in Afghanistan. This year, as we observe a new inauguration, his words about an election for the presidency might seem strangely apt as well. Few have considered, however, whether "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL" matters to the government of the United States.

Now, apparently, it does. According to a statement on his homepage at Facebook, as well as in various interviews and profiles, incoming president Barack Obama's favorite books are Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. What does this information suggest about our new president?

Song of Solomon, the story of an African-American man searching for his identity, seems a likely inspiration for Obama's account of a (somewhat) similar quest, Dreams from My Father. But Moby-Dick? One would hardly associate Obama with Captain Ahab, a man of furious passion bent on revenge. Nor does he much resemble Ishmael. As verbally inclined as Melville's narrator, Obama nevertheless has assumed political leadership, whereas Ishmael prefers the role of observer.

Perhaps he is an island prince, like Queequeg? Yes, he comes from a distant Pacific island, but Obama has taken his place within American society as Queequeg never does. Does he, like Bulkington, have a soul that can "keep the open independence of her sea"? It may be too soon to tell.

One possible answer appears in Obama's book, Dreams from My Father. In contemplating an early failure when working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama describes himself as like "the first mate on a sinking ship" (166). Call me Starbuck?

Ishmael portrays Starbuck as a "long, earnest man." He admires his valor: "Looking into his eyes you seemed to see there the yet-lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life." Ishmael pays tribute to his "august dignity," which he associates with a "just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!"

Starbuck, however, goes down with the Pequod. Obama took the helm of what he saw as a sinking ship and steered it to Washington.

On further reflection, we might conclude that Obama is less like Melville's human characters and more like the whales, who maintain their equilibrium in widely diverse regions. "Oh, man!" says Ishmael, "model thyself after the whale! . . . Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. . . . [L]ike the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own." Perhaps our new president has the whale's "rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness" with which to endure the hazards of nature--or American politics.

Wyn Kelley teaches in the Literature Faculty at MIT and has published

extensively on Melville. Other projects include working with the New Media Literacies

group at MIT and the Melville Society Cultural Project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

in New Bedford, MA.

Capturing Cosplay: The Photographs of Brian Berman (Part Two)

Editor's note: this is my last post for 2008. I will be back after the start of the new year.

Last time, I shared with you a series of photographs of Furry fans taken by Brian Berman and encouraged us to reflect a bit on what they show or fail to show us about this particular subcultural community. To me, these photographs speak to a core issue in fan studies: the question of how we position ourselves vis-a-vis the subjects of our research. Put in its broadest terms, we see different things and say different things if we are writing about a community which we are a member of than when we are dealing with that same community as an outsider.

Brian is very explicit in his artistic statement and in his bio that while he is fascinated by these fan communities, he looks at them as an outsider, a non-participant. This does not mean that his photographs are necessarily hostile to the communities being depicted, but they do, to some degree, hold these fans at a distance. This is the strength of the images in many ways, but it is also what may make them more than a little disturbing to some of us who claim a much closer set of social and emotional ties to fan communities.

By way of contrast, I thought we might look at some of the videos we've been producing about Cosplay for Project New Media Literacies's learning library project. These videos, filmed at an anime convention in Ohio, reflect a perspective much more sympathetic to the fan experience. Indeed, many of the students who worked with us on these videos were themselves anime fans and some of them had a long history of cosplay. Our goal was precisely to escape the outsider perspective of many commercial documentaries about fans, to treat cosplay as a normal and valued mode of cultural expression, and to hopefully introduce these practices to young people who may not have found their way into the cosplay community before.

These photographs were taken by Brian Berman at Onnafest, Newark Gateway Hilton, Newark, NJ 2005.

Anime Family

Chris

Mark and Holly

Rebekah as Avian Firefly

Patricia, Callie & Sonya

Brian Berman was born in New York City in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. After graduating from both the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the School of Visual Arts in NYC he started shooting professionally in New York in 1996. He shoots for, and has been featured in, publications such as the New York Times, Esquire, Ojo de Pez, and Capricious Magazine. He has also been featured in shows at the Houston Photo Festival and Wallspace Gallery. The project featured here is part of larger project about how people fulfill a basic human need to fit in by creating their own subcultures. He does not watch anime or own a fursuit.

Fan Vidding: A Labor Of Love (Part Two)

In many ways, the emergence of these videos represents the culmination of a several year long process through which some in the fan vidding world have decided to come out out of their bedrooms and hotel suites and share what they are producing with the world. I wrote about part of this story in a forthcoming essay for Joshua Green and Jean Burgess's book on Youtube:

When a recent news story traced fan videos back to "the dawn of YouTube," many female fans expressed outrage. For more than two decades, a community, composed mostly of women, had been producing such videos, using two vcrs and patch cords, struggling with roll back and rainbow lines, when it seemed an act of sysiphian patience. Francesca Coppa (2007) traces the history of this form back to 1975 when a woman named Kandy Fong first put together slide show presentations set to popular songs for Star Trek conventions. Over the years, these fan vidders developed more sophisticated techniques as they embraced and mastered digital editing tools, constructed their own distribution channels, and defined and refined multiple aesthetic traditions.

Yet, even as other "remix" communities found a supportive home on YouTube, the community struggled with how public they wanted to make their practices. When I wrote Textual Poachers in 1992, the vidders were reluctant to talk and most asked not to be named. Fans were nervous that their works were vulnerable to prosecution for copyright violation from film studios, networks, and recording studios alike. They were also anxious that their videos would not be understood outside of the interpretive context fandom provided. For example, when a Kirk/Spock vid, set to Nine Inch Nails's "Closer," leaked onto Youtube without its creator's permission, its queer reading of the Star Trek characters as lovers was widely read as comic, even though this particular work was seen as disturbing within the slash fan community because of its vivid depiction of sexual violence.

Some vidders circulated their works through less visible channels, such as IMeem, often friend-locked so that they could only be accessed within their own close-knit community. Debates broke out on LiveJournal and at fan conventions as veteran vidders were torn between a fear of being written out of the history of mashup culture and an anxiety about what would happen if the Powers That Be (producers and networks) learned what they were doing. In Fall 2007, New York magazine (Hill) ran a profile of Luminosity, a leader in the viding movement, while fan vids were showcased, alongside the work of other subcultural communities, at a DIY Media conference hosted by University of Southern California.

As Laura Shapiro (2006), a contributor to the USC event, explained in a Live Journal post:

"However legitimate a vidder's fears may be, the fact is that the vids are already out there. The minute we put our vids online, we expose ourselves to the world...We can't stop people from sharing our vids without our consent or even our knowledge. We can't control the distribution of our own work in a viral medium....We also can't control other people's attitudes. New vidders arrive on the scene every day, without any historical context or legal fears, and plunk their vids onto YouTube without a second thought. They post publicly and promote themselves enthusiastically, and why not? That's what everybody does on the Internet, from the AMV creators to machinima-makers to Brokeback Mountain parodists to political remixers."

Shapiro's post to the Live Journal viding community suggests the complex creative, personal, institutional, ideological, and legal motivations which might draw such a historically sheltered subculture towards greater public outreach:

• recognition of our history and traditions, academically and socially (new vidders learn, older vidders are venerated).
• the opportunity to provide context and normalize our fannish work the way traditionally male fannish work is becoming normalized
• the potential for vidders to connect fannish work with professional work, working professionally in the entertainment industry if they want to
• more widespread appreciation and recognition of great vids and great vidders
• the potential to generate widespread support for us in any legal battles we may encounter (joining forces with other DIY video communities, representation of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, creation of legal defense funds, etc.)
• the potential for cross-pollination or even unification of disparate vidding communities and the chance to connect isolated vidders with those communities
• the chance to influence Big Media to create more of the kinds of TV shows and movies we value
• the potential to influence the wider viewing world with themes and portrayals of sexual and gender equality, homosexuality, etc."

Shapiro's comments help to explain why the fan community has become increasingly public in promoting its agenda in recent years, including the emergence of the Organization for Transformative Works, which has taken on a range of projects, ranging from legal and public advocacy to the development of an online journal and participation in our efforts to promote New Media Literacies. These documentaries on vidding suggest one of the ways that fans can deploy new media platforms to help expand public awareness and understanding of the transformative potentials displaed in their remix practices.

Those of us at Project New Media Literacies were delighted to see what Coppa, Shapiro, and the others working on this project were able to accomplish. The filmmakers manage to represent a broad range of different source material, to showcase fans of different generations, to display a range of techniques, and to convey something of the spirit of the vidding community. It is great to be able to share a fan's eye view of this phenomenon without any of the exoticism that often surrounds dominant representations of fans. I love the way that the films move through many different voices rather than focusing on a small number of individuals. This is very consistent with our own interests in collaboration, collective intelligence, and community.

Teachers often complain that they lack aesthetic criteria for talking about what constitutes good or bad work in regards to new media production practices. In particular, as we've begun to integrate materials from participatory culture into the classroom, we find that teachers and students clash over the relative value of the examples selected and such clashes can often break down opportunities for discussion and learning. As Pierre Bourdieu notes, tastes are most often defended through the expression of distastes. We deflect criticism of our own tastes by launching into an attack on some one else's cultural preferences. Fans have long gotten bogged down in what I've described as the politics of cultural preferences. From without, fans are often isolated by a public which doesn't understand their tastes or how they choose to express them. From within, fans are often isolated from each other through clashes of tastes -- even among people who share a favorite book or television series, they may disagree over "ships" (that is, preferred relationships). For that reason, we were particularly eager to have a segment exploring how fans determine what constitutes a good or bad vid. Here, we get some understanding of the aesthetic judgments shaping vidding and in the process, we may learn to be better viewers and more informed critics of vids.

In the context of the NML Learning Library, these videos will become resources for classroom teachers, after school programs, and home schoolers. They will be explored through the framework provided by our new media literacies skills including in this case, appropriation, collective intelligence, and networking. When the learning library rolls out in the spring, we will include more than 30 challenges (clusters of resources and activities organized around the skills) and more than 80 videos produced either by our NML team or by outside collaborators like the Organization for Transformative Works or American University's Center for Social Media. These materials will provide raw materials for teachers and students alike to develop their own challenges and share them with the larger NML community.

Many of our videos center around fannish topics including vidding, cosplay, and animation. I'm hoping that fan communities may want to take on the responsibility to develop their own challenges which help introduce their innovative production practices to a larger public.

Thanks to Francesca Coppa, Laura Shapiro, and the others on their team for offering such a rich model for the value of this kind of collaboration between fandom and academia.

Fan Vidding: A Labor Of Love (Part One)

Project New Media Literacies has been collaborating with the Organization for Transformative Works to develop a series of short documentaries, designed for inclusion in our Learning Library, which explain the phenomenon of fan vidding. These videos have been produced by Francesca Coppa and Laura Shapiro, both long time contributors to vidding culture. Their stated goal is to introduce vidding to a larger public, whether in support of the classroom and after-school deployment of our resources for promoting the new media literacies or as a tool within fandom for passing along the craft and poetics of vidding to future generations or for that matter, as resources for teaching about participatory culture in undergraduate and graduate classes. We've been delighted by the level of enthusiastic support this project has received from the vidding community -- some of whom shared time with the production team via fan conventions and others sent in footage of themselves working in their homes. Over the next two installments, I am going to be sharing these videos with my readers. The videos are designed to be relatively self-contained, though in the context of our learning library, we hope they will eventually be linked with creative activities designed to encourage participants to try their hand at appropriating and remixing media content.

Here's some of Francesca Coppa's thoughts about the process of producing these videos:

We made these videos--well, like vidders; collaboratively. The OTW put together a project and together we brainstormed what questions to ask. I shot some footage, but we also sent cameras around (vidders are, after all, visually smart people.) Other people used their own cameras and interviewed their friends, and still others used webcams. Laura all did the hard work of editing; she's totally the rock at the center of this project. AbsoluteDestiny is a superhero; he did the audio-postproduction. We got our drafts betaed by our friends who are vidders.

We premiered all six segments in a show at Vividcon, 2008, and everyone seemed to like them. OTW is developing a vidding project page on the OTW site, and we hope to have them streaming there as well in the near future.

While these videos do not explicitly address the issue of gender and fandom, it should be clear from watching them what a high percentage of the people who produce and consume fan vids are female (women of all ages, professional backgrounds, and races), who work individually and collectively to sustain this particular set of remix practices. Francesca Coppa comments::

We were happy to showcase the female-domination of vidding (so rare and different from fan--and regular--filmmaking; still male dominated) and I think we do a pretty good job of showing some of the key ways vidders intervene in popular culture. I will say, too, that more and more, when I think about vidding, I shorthand it as "It's the network, stupid." I think the network of vidders--who are mostly women willing to teach other women the technical ins and outs, to share practical information and expertise--is really inspiring. I think women really need to see other women as filmmakers and artists. I know I would never have dared to think about making these OTW/NML videos if I hadn't had someone sit me down in front of a computer a few years ago and say, "No, really, it's not that hard. I'll show you how."

I hope middle and high school girls will see these videos and think--I want to do that! That looks like fun. *g*

What Media Literacy Educators Need to Know About Fair Use...

Some time ago, this blog ran an interview with Pat Aufderheide (Center for Social Media) and Peter Jaszi (The Program on Informational Justice and Intellectual Property) about the work they have been doing developing Codes of Best Practices for Fair Use for a variety of different communities, including documentary producers and the DIY media world.

Last week, the team, working with long time media literacy veteran upstart Renee Hobbes Renee Hobbs (The Media Education Lab), released a new report, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. It is a follow up to an earlier report which described "The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy." The report comes with the endorsement of many key Media Literacy organizations including Action Coalition for Media Education, Media Education Foundation, National Association for Media Literacy Education, National Council for Teachers of English, and the Visual Communications Studies Division of the International Communications Association.

I've been watching this initiative develop over time, sharing the team's belief that copyright law (and confusion about fair use) represents one of the biggest obstacles for the development of meaningful resources for supporting media literacy education. We hosted a brainstorm with media educators at the last Media in Transition conference. I am particularly pleased to see that the report moves beyond the issue of what individual teachers do in their own classroom to address how and when we might share curricular materials with each other, an issue I've been pushing hard in my conversations with the authors.

In our own work, we regularly encounter teachers who are anxious about introducing any copyrighted works in their classroom and I've had at least one project shut down by university attorneys who were convinced we were exceeding our Fair Use rights in quoting from films and other existing media texts. We have been struggling through the work we are doing on New Media Literacies to get enough room to be able to show short segments from the media we are discussing. To date, we've been developing our materials using the best practices statement for documentary filmmakers and we are excited to see further clarification of what these principles mean in the specific context of media literacy education. As you will see if you look at the materials we are producing, we rely on Creative Commons content where-ever possible and where it is not possible, we are creating very strong markers of attribution. I know that many media educators read this blog, so I wanted to flag this new report for you.

Thanks to the work of Hobbes, Aufderheide, and Jaszi, many of us can walk into our classrooms with greater confidence that what we are doing falls squarely within current understandings of intellectual property law.

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part Three)

In his recent book, The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein writes, "In an average young person's online experience, the senses may be stimulated and the ego touched, but vocabulary doesn't expand, memory doesn't improve, analytic talents don't develop, and erudition doesn't ensue." What kinds of evidence did you find which might support or challenge this assertion?

Becky Herr: I don't think that Bauerlein's claim (as quoted here) is completely off the mark. For many young people, including some of those who we interviewed and observed in the Digital Youth Project, the Internet is a "vast wasteland" of flash games shrouded by banner ads, websites full of inaccurate information, and corporations looking to make money off young eyeballs. However, unlike Bauerlein, I don't think this is the fault of the kids. I think it's our fault as adults--particularly adults who are parents, educators, and media makers--for not making an effort to understand the Internet from a kid's point of view and for preventing kids from having the time and space to mess around in ways that encourage them to learn to evaluate what they come across online.

I think what's important to unpack with respect to Bauerlein's claim is that his criticism is rooted in specific, class-based assumptions about media and about childhood. These are not new assumptions, nor are they new criticisms. Similar issues of media damaging young people's hearts and minds have been levied in relation to earlier forms of media. In talking with parents and teachers about our research, I hear echoes of Bauerlein's concerns in their complaints about students writing essays in "IM speak" or eschewing activities parents prefer (for reasons of nostalgia or cultural capital) in favor of playing video games or surfing YouTube.

Mimi Ito: It is tempting to blame the media or a new technology for social or cultural problems. But research has shown that things are much more complex than that, and using media as a scapegoat obscures some of the important underlying issues. A new technology grows out of our existing norms and practices. The fact that many youth are not part of the kind of culture that Bauerlein describes is not a problem caused just by the technology, but is much more deeply embedded in, as Becky notes, existing social and cultural distinctions. If kids are doing things online that seem unproductive or problematic, we don't feel that the answer is to ban the media. Instead we think that it is important to look at and try to shape the underlying social issues. That may be the commercialization of online spaces, lack of connection between kids and teachers, or the fact that academic knowledge seems irrelevant to many kids. It is rarely something that is being driven by the technology alone.

We share a concern about the "participation gap" and how that may create inequalities in experience and knowledge. What obstacles did you discover that might block some young people from exploiting the full opportunities offered by these new media? What role do class differences play in shaping the way young people experience these new platforms?

Lisa Tripp: While increasingly young people of all social classes in the U.S. have opportunities to go online and use new media, the nature and quality of access still varies greatly. A lot of poor and working class youth still rely on schools, for example, as their primary source for access to the Internet and digital media production tools. Whereas interest-driven and friendship-driven genres of participation are fundamentally "kid-driven" in terms of growing out of youth interests and motivations, schools typically incorporate media into instruction in ways that are "teacher-driven" and heavily constrained by institutional and adult concerns. This can be seen in many "technology-integrated" assignments that address the standard curriculum without engaging students' interest or curiosity. It can also be seen in school policies and rules that aim to keep out participatory media, such as by blocking social network and video sharing sites, instant messaging, etc. While young people find creative ways to use media at school towards their own interests and goals, those who rely on schools for access to new media are at a disadvantage from other kids. For them it can be a challenge to find the time, space, and resources to experiment with media in more open-ended ways, and to engage in the media practices that youth tend to find the most meaningful.

In the cases where we interviewed parents, we also saw class disparities in how parents approached computers and the Internet. For the middle class families in our study (who were also very tech savvy), parents provided significant scaffolding and encouragement of their children's friendship and interest-driven practices with new media. In contrast, for many of the poor families in our study, the parents had little or no experience with computers (and often learned what they did know from the kids in the family). While in both cases there were opportunities for intergenerational collaboration around the computer, in the case of the middle class families young people had access to a great deal more support to pursue their own interests online. In the case of the poor families we interviewed, parents wanted their children to focus on using the computer for homework. Many had heard scare stories on the news about MySpace and were hesitant to let their children go online unsupervised. Some parents even took the modem or cable with them when they left their children home alone. This represented a well-intentioned effort to protect children from perceived online risks, but it also made it harder for the young people in these families to mobilize online opportunities. I think these examples speak to the ways that young peoples' access to new media is determined not just by economic factors, but also social and cultural factors.

danah boyd: In my fieldwork, during the 2006-2007 school year, I started witnessing a divide in social network site usage between MySpace and Facebook. While this divide was extremely complex, it can be understood through the lens of Penny Eckert's "jocks and burnouts." These two social network sites became digital turf and usage reflected social categories. While many teens opted to use both sites, the division that did occur took place along lines of race and class. This may not look like a traditional participation gap as both groups were participating, but divisions in usage that reinforce dynamics like race and class require us to pause. Consider for a moment that Facebook is the "preferred" tool on most college campuses. What does it mean that some teens are already engaged with the normative collegiate tools while others are not? How does high school nonparticipation shape early collegiate life?

Your writing is sympathetic to the various ways young people "work around" constraints imposed by adults on their ability to access online social networks. How would you address the concerns of adults who imposed those restrictions in the first place?

CJ Pascoe: What I tended to see as I studied kids in urban and suburban public schools was that teens constantly tried to work around the constraints the school administration placed on their internet use. Schools blocked the students' access to Facebook, MySpace, certain search terms and instant messaging programs. In response teens developed a sort of knowledge network in which everyone knew which kid could find the proxy servers that would allow them access to these sites (though of course none of them knew the name for proxy servers). Interestingly many of the teachers at these schools found these rules too stringent. One teacher listed off several students who were the proxy server "experts" when one of her students needed to access a forbidden site. Similarly when one of his students was writing a paper on breast cancer a teacher let the student conduct research on the teacher's computer because the word "breast" was blocked from the network to which the students had access. In light of these restrictions it seems that adults are not an undifferentiated mass, that some find certain restrictions of teens Internet use problematic. It seems that what the more restrictive adults are afraid of is teens access to information and ability to process that sort of information as well as the fear that teens might not concentrate on the task at hand - school - if they could be hanging out on MySpace. To those adults I would say that banning information or certain sites does not prevent teen access. Instead it creates a community of mistrust. Thus adults should be working with teens on issues of media literacy, how to process the sort of information that appears on the banned sites, rather than forbidding teens to visit them.

Heather Horst: We saw parents across the socioeconomic spectrum express considerable concern about the threats and vulnerabilities their kids faced in the contemporary media ecology. Parents worried about the type of information that circulated and, given the timing of our research, the ability of sites like MySpace to be used as a way to access and exploit their kids. They also worried about multitasking and 'wasting time' online. In addition, because there's fear of kids hanging out outside of the home, and their lives can often be overscheduled, young people genuinely felt that they had very little face-to-face contact with their friends. The use of Instant Messaging and online sites like MySpace, Facebook and so many others are now a part of kids everyday lives, part of peer culture. In addition, the kids who were doing the most interesting things talked about having (or finding) the time to 'mess around' and explore in a way that did not have 'serious' implications (e.g. being graded. To deny participation in this space is to fail to acknowledge the importance of sociality in kids' lives.

danah boyd: I commend parents and teachers for being engaged and concerned, but I worry that their concerns are often based on inaccurate understandings of danger. As is well documented by researchers at the Crimes Against Children Research Center, the mythical image of the online predator is a completely inaccurate portrayal of the actual dangers youth face online. Yet, I found that fear of predators prompted many of the restrictions youth face. When restrictions are driven by fear rather than risk, we do a disservice to our youth. I think that it is very important for parents and other adults to know the data. The findings that we share in our report focus primarily on the positive opportunities for learning and social engagement, but in a different role, I have aggregated all that is known about the risks and dangers youth face. For more information on this, check out this Literature Review, a product of the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force.

Heather Horst: In addition to knowing the data, as danah suggests, we also want to emphasize that the 'dangers' of online participation must also be understood within the wider context of kids' lives. For example (and too channel CJ Pascoe), part of the reason going online is so compelling for GLBT teens is that they lack the opportunities for dating that are available to heterosexual teens in their local communities as well as the social support of other GLBT teens navigating complex relationships. At the same time, the lack of local support from peers, parents and teachers also makes many GLBT teens vulnerable to individuals who might take advantage of them online. Developing an understanding of these problems from a youth perspective may help to bridge the gap in understandings risk and vulnerabilities - blaming the medium merely distracts us from the root of these complex social problems.

A key argument throughout your book is that young people are often using new media to do things that teens historically did off-line such as spend time with friends or dating. Why have so many of these activities moved into the realm of "networked publics?" What kinds of new activities or social relations have emerged as a consequence of the affordances of new media platforms?

Christo Sims: I always feel funny writing as an authority on teenage flirting and dating as it certainly wasn't what I went into the field intending to find. But, of course, this was a big oversight on my part since flirting and dating is so central to teenage culture in the U.S. I think these practices are a good example of how existing offline practices are moving online. The practices are the same, but being reshaped in some new ways. In terms of flirting and getting to know someone, the primary advantage of doing so online is that the entire process can be simultaneously more controlled and seemingly more casual. The asynchronous exchanges afford more time for composition. Plus there are far less cues to manage when compared to being on the phone or interacting face-to-face: tone-of-voice, posture, and a host of other non-verbal cues don't have to be managed. Additionally, each round of messaging is, at least initially, quite brief and seemingly low key: a short little message is "no big deal." I've called this "composed casualness" because often quite a bit of effort and time goes into composing that seemingly casual and lightweight message.

Another advantage of flirting online is that it doesn't have to be done in front of a bunch of peers at school. Boys in particular mentioned how rare it was to be able to talk to a girl at school one-on-one. Girls are in groups and almost any interaction you have is witnessed. While the Internet can amplify this sense of acting in public it also affords more private communications. Messaging features on sites like Facebook and MySpace, and well as SMS on cell phones, allow teens to carry on one-on-one conversations outside earshot of friends and family. Online communications also make rejection easier, or less confrontational, during the flirting stage. Rejection is often signaled by not responding to a message. Such a passive strategy is easier for the one doing the rejection but it also allows the person being rejected to save face since they never "officially" got rejected, the conversation just stopped. In terms of dating, sites like MySpace and Facebook offer a stage for announcing and performing the relationship. My take on this is that most of the negotiations over relationship status are handled more privately, between couples (although these too might be mediated), and when they've agreed on an "official" status they announce it to the peer group.

CJ Pascoe: As the other team member focused on teens' dating, romance and hanging out practices I'd like to build on what Christo is saying. Historically adults, particularly parents, have had a lot of control over teens' social lives and the scope of the social world from which they could draw friends. New media allows teens to move beyond the institutions in which they have been historically located (schools, churches, sometimes civic groups) to create relationships and friendships of their own choosing. So in many ways making friends or sustaining friendshps in these networked publics allows teens to create friendships independent (or at least less constrained by) the institutions in which they are located because of their age.

danah boyd: Networked publics offer new opportunities for social interaction, but they are also used to replace mobility and freedoms that have been taken away. When I asked teens if they'd prefer to socialize online or offline, face-to-face encounters consistently were preferred. Yet, for many youth, such interactions were often infeasible. The reasons for why are diverse. Some teens lack transportation to meet up with friends or do not have friends who live nearby. Others have no time because their lives are heavily structured with activities or, when they do have time, their friends don't. Many places in which adults gather do not allow youth to hang out and various laws forbid youth from gathering at certain times and in certain places. Some teens face heavy restrictions because of parental values or cultural norms. Yet, the most pervasive explanation for why youth were unable to get together with friends often came down to adult fears. All told, youth have little opportunity to gather with their friends, let alone their peers. Social network sites and other networked publics enable youth to gather in new ways, asynchronously and in different physical spaces.

Dan Perkel: In some of our case studies on creative production, we're also seeing interesting dynamics in how kids are extending existing practices in new ways online. Networked publics provide space for people to more easily share and circulate their creations to others. We've seen how for both kids and adults, many people are taking existing practices of sharing photos and video and moving them online. A lot of this reflects very familiar kinds of sharing with friends and family. Posting drawings and stories online may be a different story. Here there is the opportunity to find other people who you may not know offline, who are into the same thing you are. This is the difference between friendship-driven and interest-driven kinds of sharing. So if you are creating fan fiction or drawing fan art or making fan-related movies, you may have a few others in your school, or friends you might meet at a local comic book store that share your interests. But online there are many more opportunities to share and discuss this kind of work. Moreover, there may be more opportunity to not just post this work and talk about it, but to improve and learn from others over time. These dynamics point to how the online space can provide new kinds of learning experiences that wouldn't have otherwise been available to kids.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is an Associate Specialist at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. Becky's research interests include media literacy, teaching and learning with popular culture, and youth media production. Her dissertation, "Kids as Cultural Producers: Consumption, Literacy, and Participation," investigates issues of access and media literacy through an ethnographic study of media production projects in two mixed-grade (sixth, seventh, and eighth) special education classes. Previously, she was a member of the research team for the Digital Youth Project and a graduate fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Before beginning her graduate studies, Becky worked as a production manager for companies producing original content for the web and multimedia museum exhibits. Her current work with the DMLstudio involves a literature review of institutional efforts related to youth digital media production. Becky recently completed her PhD in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

C.J. Pascoe is a sociologist who is interested in sexuality, gender, youth, and new media. Her book on gender in high school, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, recently received the 2008 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. As a researcher with the Digital Youth Project she researched the role of new media in teens' dating and romance practices. Her project "Living Digital" examines how teenagers navigate digital technology and how new media have become a central part of contemporary teen culture with a particular focus on teens' courtship, romance, and intimacy practices. Along with Dr. Natalie Boero she conducted a study titled "No Wannarexics Allowed," looking at the formation of online pro-anorexia communities and focusing on gender, sexuality, and embodiment online. C.J. is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Colorado College.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

Lisa Tripp is Assistant Professor of School Media and Youth Services, College of Information, Florida State University. Lisa received her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2002 and collaborated with the Digital Youth Project to study youth in Los Angeles-area middle schools and neighborhoods. Her research with the project emphasized classrooms incorporating media arts into instruction and the role of the Internet in the lives of Latino immigrant families. Before coming to FSU, Lisa was Associate Director of the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy. She has a background in developing media education initiatives and she continues to research new media literacy and digital inclusion.

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part Two)

Many writers talk about "digital natives" or describe these young people as "born digital." What do you see as the strength and limitations of these terms given what you found in your research?

Becky Herr: One potential strength of the term "digital generation" for describing young people and their relationship to technology is its acknowledgement that youth are using media and technology in interesting and important ways. Talking about kids as "digital natives" can be seen as a counterargument to pervasive discourses about kids as deviant users of technology--hackers, cheaters, wasters-of-time--or kids as victims of technology--the "prey" of online predators, for example. This is not to say that the term is used exclusively to describe positive interactions with technology; it also emphasizes the gap between the ways "digital natives" use technology and the ways non-natives (like adults) use technology.

What is worrying about the discourse of digital natives is that talking about young people as a "digital generation" risks romanticizing certain types of youth participation and ignoring important differences in access to media and technology, including barriers to access that are not tied to a lack of hardware--barriers like not reading and writing in English, being a girl and having to compete with boys in a classroom with limited resources, or parental rules borne out of moral panic. Further, the idea of a digital generation marked by shared characteristics (other than the dates of their birth) that outweigh other aspects of identity/subjectivity--race, class, gender, ability, (etc.) is problematic. What we have found in the Digital Youth project is that there is a huge amount of variation in the ways kids are using media and technology in their everyday lives. Yes, the ways in which these practices are enacted vary, often by peer group or by individual kid. We've also found that things like class, race, and gender continue to have significant influence in kids' lives.

In my own research, for example, I worked with kids at the middle school level who were using media production software (iMovie and PowerPoint) for the first time. At home, most of the students I observed and interviewed did not have a computer, Internet access, or any video equipment. However, they had other media and technology that was incredibly important to them and that they used in creative and sophisticated ways to find information, to express themselves, to communicate with friends, and to mess around in order to figure out things like game cheat codes or how to substitute a borrowed digital camera for an mp3 player. Some had vast music or DVD collections, others spent hours each day playing games on a video game console. Were they "digital natives"?

Christo Sims: There are also plenty of folks who weren't "born digital" who have developed incredible fluency in various forms of online participation. We also met numerous youth who weren't technically adept or comfortable participating online. By emphasizing a generational break we risk mystifying the factors that structure online participation, and equating competency automatically with age.

danah boyd: Many of those who use these terms often do so with the best of intentions, valorizing youth engagement with digital media to highlight the ways in which youth are not dumb, dependent, or incapable. Yet, by reinforcing distinctions between generations, we reinforce the endemic age segregation that is plaguing our society. Many social and civic ills stem from the ways that we separate people based on age. If we want to curtail bullying and increase political participation, we need to stop segmenting and segregating.

Parents and teachers often want to structure young people's time online. Yet your research suggests that some of the most productive experiences come when young people are "hanging out" or "messing around" with computers in relatively unstructured ways. Explain.

Mimi Ito: In a lot of our case studies, we saw examples of kids picking up media and technical literacy through social and recreational activity online. When they were given time and space to experiment, they often were able to pick up knowledge and skills through messing around, whether that was learning how to make a MySpace profile, experimenting with video, or figuring out how to use cheat codes in a game. Some kids used this kind of messing around as a jumping off point towards much more sophisticated forms of creative production or engagement with specialized knowledge communities.

Christo Sims: One story that comes to mind is a youth named Zelan who we feature in one of the sidebars in the Work chapter. Zelan comes from a very rural area where most of his peers will end up in working class jobs, doing construction, building roads, working as mechanics. Zelan, who identifies himself as a computer geek, leveraged his technical know-how for economic gain starting in junior high school: fixing electronics, buying and selling gaming and computer gear, and servicing the computers of neighbors and teachers. His passion, though, has been video games. He started as a player but soon became an enthusiast, subscribing to game magazines, following the latest releases, looking for tips online. In addition to becoming a fan he started messing around with broken consoles, taking them apart to see how they worked, trying to fix them so he could play a better console or sell it for a profit. He did all this without seeing it as leading towards a career or success in school. It was only once he started seeing that he his gaming interest was actually valuable to others at school and in the community that he began to imagine how these interests could lead to a life after high school. When I first met him he was a Junior and was thinking of starting a computer service business when he graduated. When I saw him again last summer he was headed to a technical college on scholarship.

Dan Perkel: Another person featured in one of the sidebars is Jacob. Jacob was an African American senior who had moved from the East Bay to Georgia and back again. Jacob, like others we talked to in our studies, joined MySpace when someone else made an account for him. For a while, Jacob didn't understand how to customize his page--again like other new members to the site--and had other people do it for him. On the friendship-driven side he used MySpace as a way to communicate with people he met and friends he left behind after various moves. However, at some point he made the connection between changing MySpace profiles and the web design classes that he had gotten into at school. He then took the time to better understand how to customize his own profile and consider making and distributing MySpace layouts, something he had seen others do on the site. When I last talked to him, he was considering a career in web design and said he had been offered a job already.

danah boyd: It is important to note that "productive" engagement doesn't necessarily mean only traditional learning or media and technical literacy. As a society, we've never spent much time considering how youth learn to be competent social beings, how they learn to make sense of cultural norms and develop social contracts, or how they learn to read others' reactions and act accordingly. We expect youth to be polite and tolerant, respect others' feelings, and behave appropriately in different situations. This is all learned. And it is not simply learned by telling kids to behave. They need to experiment socially, interact with peers, make mistakes and adjust. Stripping social interactions from youth's lives does not benefit them in any manner. I would argue that even the oft-demeaned social practices that take place online are extremely productive.

You write about "genres of participation." Explain this concept. What are the most important genres at the present time and why?

Mimi Ito: We use the concept of genre as a way of describing certain social and cultural patterns that are available and recognizable. Friendship-driven and interest-driven practices are based on genres that youth recognize, have particular practices associated with them, as well as certain kinds of identities. For example, interest-driven genres of participation tend to have a more geeky identity associated with them, involve congregating on specialized and often esoteric interests, and reaching beyond given, local school networks of friends. This is a whole package of things that goes together, a recognizable genre for how youth participate in online culture and social life. We also think of hanging out, messing around, and geeking out as genres of participation.

When and how might the borders between friendship-driven and interest-driven forms of engagement start to blur?

Mimi Ito: As with all genres, there are a lot of things that don't totally fit, and a lot of blurring between genres. When kids engage in friendship-driven practices, they often get involved in messing around with technology, and that can become a jumping off point for more interest driven activities. For example, some kids will begin messing around with video or photos that they take with their friends, and then they get more interested in the creative side of things. Conversely, we find that kids who connect to others around interests will often see these groups become really important friendship networks, and an alternative source of status and identity that is different from the mainstream of what happens in the school lunchroom.

You note throughout the report a broadening of who gets to "geek out" in today's youth culture. Explain. What factors are reshaping cultural attitudes towards "geek experiences"? Who gets to "geek out" now who didn't get to do so in the past?

Mimi Ito: Now that digital media and online networking has become so embedded in kids' everyday social and recreational lives, there is a certain baseline of technical engagement that is taken for granted. Only certain kids, though, decide to go from there to what we consider more geeked out kinds of practices. Predictably, it tends to be boys who geek out more than girls. Even though girls are often engaging in highly sophisticated forms of technology use and media creation, often they don't identify with it in a geeky way. What does seem to be changing though, is the overall accessibility that kids have to more geeked out practices because of the growing accessibility of digital media production tools as well as the ability to reach out to interest groups on the Internet. Although our study didn't really measure this, this may be particularly significant for less advantaged youth who would not otherwise have had access to specialized creative communities or media creation opportunities.

Patricia Lange: Being able to connect with dispersed networked publics enables kids to explore skills and receive mentoring that may be difficult to gain from co-located peers or teachers who do not have the same interests or experiences. For example, in my study of the video-making culture of YouTube, accessing mentors or assistance in a "just-in-time" fashion is inspiring and encouraging, especially given kids' decreasing ability to connect with other adults and potential mentors in neighborhoods and local communities. One of the things we heard very often was that friends, family, and kids at school often did not understand why young YouTubers wanted to "geek out" making videos. YouTube participants' school peers did not always have the same familiarity and expertise with how media is put together in ways that kids on YouTube did. Many of the kids we interviewed have already had extensive experiences making media. They often have very sophisticated visual literacies and complex ideologies about what makes a good or bad video, what constitutes appropriate participation in technical groups, and how they think about online safety. Failing to engage with these sites in school means there is no hands-on dialogue between teachers and students that might help shed light on why some kids thrive by geeking out and why others have difficulty.

You are using terms to describe these experiences which are much closer to those which might be used by young people than those deployed by parents and teachers. What are the implications of that shift in the terms of the discussion?

CJ Pascoe: In general we tried to take a Sociology of Youth approach to our findings in this book. In line with this approach we try to let the categories of analysis as well as the descriptive terms arise from the youth themselves, rather than imposing our adult categories on our findings. What this means is that we tried, for the most part to describe a social world from the point of view of its participants, rather than as (more powerful) outsiders. I think foregrounding our participants' terms, categories and experiences allowed us to challenge some of the common assumptions adults have about youth participation of new media.

Heather Horst: As is common in most ethnographic research, we integrate terms like 'hanging out', 'messing around' and 'geeking out' into our analysis in order to highlight the categories and perspectives that are meaningful to young people themselves. Throughout this project, we felt quite strongly that part of our role and responsibility as researchers as working to navigate the gaps between youth and adult-centered perspectives. While we recognize that this may involve some degree of translation work when talking to different audiences (e.g. educators, policy makers, etc.), if we really want to see changes in discussions about learning and education, youth voices and perspectives need to be brought to the table.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Becky Herr-Stephenson is an Associate Specialist at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine. Becky's research interests include media literacy, teaching and learning with popular culture, and youth media production. Her dissertation, "Kids as Cultural Producers: Consumption, Literacy, and Participation," investigates issues of access and media literacy through an ethnographic study of media production projects in two mixed-grade (sixth, seventh, and eighth) special education classes. Previously, she was a member of the research team for the Digital Youth Project and a graduate fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Before beginning her graduate studies, Becky worked as a production manager for companies producing original content for the web and multimedia museum exhibits. Her current work with the DMLstudio involves a literature review of institutional efforts related to youth digital media production. Becky recently completed her PhD in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Patricia G. Lange is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her areas of interest for the Digital Youth Project are centered around using theories from anthropology and linguistics to understand the cultural dynamics of video creation, reception, and exchange among kids and youth. She is studying YouTube as well as video blogging groups to gain insight into the cultural aspects of video sharing and how these practices change ideas about the public and private. Lange is exploring how the content and form of videos as well as material video sharing and response practices serve as sites of identity negotiation, emotional expression, and promotion of public discourse in increasingly video-mediated, online milieu. She has recently published articles in a variety of journals including: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Discourse Studies, Anthropology of Work Review, First Monday, and The Scholar and Feminist Online.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

C.J. Pascoe is a sociologist who is interested in sexuality, gender, youth, and new media. Her book on gender in high school, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, recently received the 2008 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. As a researcher with the Digital Youth Project she researched the role of new media in teens' dating and romance practices. Her project "Living Digital" examines how teenagers navigate digital technology and how new media have become a central part of contemporary teen culture with a particular focus on teens' courtship, romance, and intimacy practices. Along with Dr. Natalie Boero she conducted a study titled "No Wannarexics Allowed," looking at the formation of online pro-anorexia communities and focusing on gender, sexuality, and embodiment online. C.J. is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The Colorado College.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

"Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out": A Conversation with the Digital Youth Project (Part One)

On Thursday, the Digital Youth Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, released "Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out," a report on a massive ethnographic investigation into the place of new communications and media technologies in the lives of American young people. I have had the distinct honor to watch this research take shape over the past few years, to get to know the core researchers on the team, and to attend meetings where they struggled over how to process the sheer volume of data and insights they have gathered. The team is a model for collaborative research with senior faculty and graduate students working side by side across disciplines and universities to make sense of problems which none of them could fully understand on their own. You will get a sense of the dialogic nature of this research in the interview which follows, a conversation which involves nine members of the research team, sharing insights from their own specific research projects as well as expressing the rich synthesis that emerged from their collaboration. The report represents one key outgrowth of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Learning and Youth initiative, which also funds our own Project New Media Literacies initiative, along with providing support for such key educational researchers as Sasha Barab, James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, Howard Gardner, Howard Rheingold, David Buckingham, and Katie Salens, among many others. "Hanging Out..." is staggering in its scope and in its implications. The researchers take seriously young people, their lives online, their subcultural practices, their identity play, their nascent civic engagement, their dating and social interactions, their involvement with fan production practices, and much much more. What emerges is a complex picture of how they are living through and around emerging technologies, how they are innovative in their use of new tools and platforms, and how they are struggling with the contradictions of their lives. This report is in no simple way a celebration of the digital generation, though it respects the meaningfulness of their involvement with digital and mobile technologies: it raises questions about inequality of access and participation; it points to conflicts between adults and youth around the deployment of new media; it identifies risks and opportunities which sites such as MySpace and YouTube pose for their young participants. Those of us who care about young people and education will be struggling with some of the implications of their research for a long time to come. I am proud to have a chance to offer this interview with some of the key members of the Digital Youth Project team over the next three installments of my blog.

By way of background, here's how the Digital Youth Project is described on their homepage:

Since the early 1980s, digital media have held out the promise of more engaged, child-centered learning opportunities. The advent of Internet-enabled personal computers and mobile devices has added a new layer of communication and social networking to the interactive digital mix. While this evolving palette of technologies has demonstrated the ability to capture the attention of young people, the innovative learning outcomes that educators had hoped for are more elusive. Although computers are now fixtures in most schools and many homes, there is a growing recognition that kids' passion for digital media has been ignited more by peer group sociability and play than academic learning. This gap between in-school and out-of-school experience represents a gap in children's engagement in learning, a gap in our research and understandings, and a missed opportunity to reenergize public education. This project works to address this gap with a targeted set of ethnographic investigations into three emergent modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies: communication, learning, and play.

The Principal Investigators on this project are Peter Lyman at the University of California, Berkeley, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito at the University of Southern California, Michael Carter of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, and Barrie Thorne of the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, the project is administered by the Institute for the Study of Social Change. With the help of a large number of graduate students and postdocs, a variety of projects are under way in both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. This project will address these objectives through ethnographic research in both local neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California, and in virtual places and networks such as online games, blogs, messaging, and online interest groups. Our research sites focus on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after-school, and in recreational settings.

This project is sponsored by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

To see the white paper and full report of the Digital Youth Project.

To learn more about the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Can you give us some sense of the scope and scale of the project?

Mimi Ito: This was a study that was conducted over three years, with 28 researchers and research collaborators. We interviewed over 800 youth and young adults, and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations. This was done in the form of 22 different case studies of youth new media practices. Some of the studies looked at particular online sites, such as YouTube and social network sites. Other studies looked at interest groups, such as gaming groups and fans of anime and Harry Potter. Other groups also recruited youth from local institutions such as afterschool programs, parent networks, and schools. We believe that this is the most extensive qualitative study of contemporary youth new media practice in the U.S.

What were your goals with this project?

Mimi Ito: Our goal was really to capture youth perspectives and voices to understand what is happening in the online world today. We wanted to look at how young people are incorporating new media into their everyday social and recreational lives, in contexts that they found meaningful and motivating. Our thought was that it was only by looking at these kind of youth-driven contexts that we could get a grasp of what youth were learning through their online participation, and how that activity was changing the shape of our media and communications landscape.

Ethnography often gets praised for its process of discovery. What was the biggest discovery your team made through this process?

Mimi Ito: One of the strengths of the ethnographic process is that it involves listening and learning from people with different perspectives, and having that inform our research frameworks. One of the big things that we learned from doing this with such a large research team, was how it was that different kinds of youth practices and social groups were related to one another, either in a synergistic way or a more antagonistic way. We learned that the main thing that distinguishes different kinds of youth new media practices was the difference between what we call "friendship-driven" and "interest-driven" participation. Friendship-driven participation is what most youth are doing online, and involve the familiar practices of hanging out, flirting, and working out status issues on sites like MySpace and Facebook. Interest-driven participation has to do with more of the geeks and creative types of practices, where youth will connect with others online around specializes interests, such as media fandom, gaming, or creative production. It wasn't the just usual things like gender and socioeconomic status that necessarily determined the big differences, but it also had a lot to do with categories in youth culture, like is considered "cool," "popular" or "dorky."

Heather Horst: In addition to friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, we also identified three genres of participation and learning - hanging out, messing around and geeking out. Hanging out is when kids are using technologies like IM, Facebook or MySpace to hang out socially with their friends. Messing around is when they are looking around online for information, or tinkering with media in relatively casual and experimental ways. Geeking out is when they really dive deep into a specialized area of knowledge or interest.

What is important about this framework is that it's not about categorizing kids as having a single identity or set of activities. What we are doing is identifying different ways that kids can participate in media culture, and this can be quite fluid. For example, we talk in our chapter on Media Ecologies about a teen named Derrick who participated in Christo Sims' study of Rural and Urban Youth. He uses Instant Messaging and his mobile phone to coordinate hanging out with his friends. Yet, and like many other teens, Derrick has also earned a reputation for geeking out through his interest in locating and downloading movies through BitTorrent. He also uses the Internet to 'mess around', such as the time he did a search on Google until he found tutorials and other information to help him build a computer. The diversity of practices reflect differing motivations, levels of commitment and intensity of use which frame Derrick's (and other youths') engagement with new media.

Mimi Ito: These genres of participation were things that we found across the different case studies that we looked at. In addition, each individual case study discovered a wealth of interesting details and findings that were specific to each case. What was unique about this project was that we discovered things that were grounded in the specifics of deep case studies, which is typical of ethnographic work, as well as identifying these broader cross-cutting patterns.

Parents often express concerns that young people are interacting online with people they don't know while those excited about social network sites talk about the ways they allow us to escape the constraints of local geography. Yet, your report finds that young people often use these tools primarily to interact with people who they already know. What can you tell us about the relationship between the online and off-line lives of teens?

danah boyd: While there are indeed examples of teens meeting others through these sites, it is critical for adults to realize that these sites are primarily about reinforcing pre-existing connections using mediated technologies. Youth's mobility is heavily curtailed and they desperately want to hang out with their friends from school. These sites have become that gathering space. Just because they can be used by youth to connect to strangers does not mean that they are. By focusing on the possibilities of risk, adults have lost touch with the benefits that these sites afford to youth.

Christo Sims: As danah says, most of our participants used social network sites to complement their offline social relationships rather than to experiment with identity or to make a bunch of new "friends" from around the country or world. With that said, there were instances where youth developed online relationships that extended beyond school, neighborhoods, and local activity groups. Youth that were more marginalized in their local social worlds would often go online for friendship and intimacy. We heard several stories of gay and lesbian youth using internet-based tools in these ways. Similarly, we heard stories of immigrants and ethnic minorities connecting online despite being widely distributed geographically. Then, there's youth who engaged in interest-driven online participation who often interacted with folks far beyond their local region. When friendships did develop they grew over sustained participation in those interest-driven activities, not out of more friendship or intimacy seeking behavior as you'd find in an online dating site. Finally, we did hear several stories of youth developing pen-pal like relationships with other teens. These interactions tended to be conversational, sharing accounts of what life was like in their respective towns or cities, discussing the challenges and confusions of being a teenager. These sorts of interactions more closely resemble the self-exploration and identity-play that earlier accounts of online participation tended to emphasize - a sense of anonymity, a degree of freedom from the trappings of one's identity in the family or at school - yet they weren't anywhere close to the dominant day-to-day uses of these tools.

Dan Perkel: Just to follow up on a point that Christo alludes to, there are in-between categories of people that might be overlooked in the split between "people you do already know" and "strangers." For example, there are people who are friends of friends, or friends of cousins, who you may not know, but go to neighboring schools, or live in the same area of town. We heard from participants in San Francisco, the East Bay, and I believe in Brooklyn as well, stories of people meeting up and getting to know people who they knew through others but only "met" using MySpace or another site. We also heard stories or in some cases watched people play out situations where they had met someone offline, and gotten their MySpace username so that they could contact them later. This was one way of facilitating dating (like asking someone for a phone number). In this case, this is someone that they have met, but is not necessarily someone they "know" or at least have any other contact with before back and forth conversations using social network sites. The point is that we learned how confusing it can be to even categorize who is a stranger versus a known person. How some of the participants use online media happens in the space inbetween.

danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how American youth engage in networked publics such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. She is interested in how teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts with invisible audiences. In addition to her research, danah works with a wide variety of companies and is an active blogger.

Heather Horst is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine (UCHRI) who conducted research during the Digital Youth Project as a Postdoctoral Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. Heather is a sociocultural anthropologist by training who is interested in the materiality of place, space, and new information and communication technologies. Before joining the Digital Youth Project in 2005, she carried out research on conceptions of home among Jamaican transnational migrants, as well as issues of digital inequality, as part of a large-scale DFID-funded project titled "Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development in the South," which compared the relationship between ICTs and development in Ghana, India, Jamaica, and South Africa. Her coauthored book with Daniel Miller, The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Oxford, UK, and New York: Berg, 2006), was the first ethnography of mobile phones in the developing world. Heather's research in the Digital Youth Project integrates her interest in media and technology in domestic spaces, families in Silicon Valley, and the economic lives of kids on sites such as Neopets.

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist specializing in media technology use by children and youth. She holds an MA in Anthropology, a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Ito has studied a wide range of digitally augmented social practices, including online gaming and social communities, the production and consumption of children's software, play with children's new media, mobile phone use in Japan, and an undergraduate multimedia-based curriculum. Her current work focuses on Japanese technoculture, and for the Digital Youth Project she is researching English-language fandoms surrounding Japanese popular culture.

Dan Perkel is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's School of Information. His research explores how young people use the web and other technologies as a part of their everyday media production activities. Dan's ongoing dissertation research investigates the mutual shaping of young people's creative practices and the social and technical infrastructure that support them. Prior projects include explorations into the design of a collaborative storytelling environment for fifth-graders, ethnographic inquiry into an after-school media and technology program, and investigations using diary studies to capture everyday technology use. With UC Berkeley artist Greg Niemeyer and colleague Ryan Shaw, Dan helped create an art installation called Organum, which looks at collaborative game play using the human voice (and which was followed up by "Good Morning Flowers"). In a past life, Dan worked as an interface designer, product manager, and implementations director for Hive Group, whose Honeycomb software helps people make decisions through data visualization. He received his BA (2000) in Science, Technology, and Society from Stanford University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and his Master's in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2005.

Christo Sims is a PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. He was a member of the Digital Youth research team from 2005 until 2008. His fieldwork focused on the ways youth use new media in everyday social practices involving friends, family, and intimates. He conducted research at two sites, one in rural Northern California, the other in Brooklyn, New York. His contributions can mostly be found in the report's chapters on Intimacy, Friendship, and Families. Christo received his Master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information in the spring of 2007, and his Bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in the spring of 2000.

The New Media Literacies: An Introduction

Over the next several weeks, I plan to be showcasing some of the work we are doing through Project New Media Literacies, an initiative funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of their Digital Learning and Youth program. Many regular readers of this blog will already be familiar with some of the work which we do. If you have not read the White Paper we wrote several years ago on the educational implications of participatory culture, check it out.

Members of our team of graduate students and researchers have been working on creating new curricular models which reflect many of the implications of this white paper. Some of them are being tested through schools and after school programs as we speak. Many of them are going to be released to the public in the course of this academic year. So, you can expect to hear more about these initiatives on this blog in the weeks and months ahead.

This video was put together by our team to explain in the most general terms what we mean by the New Media Literacies and why we think they are important. It is our collective statement about the principles which govern and motivate our work. The exciting thing about our team is that it brings together those of us who have media production backgrounds, who have expertise in media studies, and who have been trained in educational research. We are all learning from each other as we put these ideas into practice.

One respondent to the YouTube posting of this video questions our use of the term, "literacies." This is a question that crops up often. A growing body of academic research over the past few decades has increasingly realized that literacy is not simply one thing but rather a range of interconnected skills and practices. We are scarcely the first to talk about "multi-literacies." These skills are unevenly distributed across the population. Some of them may receive a high degree of prestige while others are often debased and dismissed. There is almost always a struggle over what counts as literacy.

Increasingly, the word, literacy, has moved from reference to the specific practices associated with text to a more generalized capacity to decipher the signs and symbols of our culture. The Media Literacy movement has a long history of extending the concept to refer to our capacity to intreprete and communicate through audio-visual media.

We see these earlier forms of literacy as absolutely foundational for what we are trying to promote. If you can't read and write, you may not be able to meaningfully participate in this new media landscape. At the same time, participatory culture practices -- such as fan fiction -- provide strong incentives and support for acquiring traditional literacy skills, for growing as readers and writers, while other sites -- such as those around gaming or YouTube -- may provide the infrastructure to help people acquire the skills they need to meaningfully participate.

We fear, however, that most schools are locking out what is most valuable about these participatory cultures, often by limiting or banning access to social software, blogging tools, Youtube, and other key tools and platforms. This has been true even for some of the schools we are working with to test our materials, an issue I hope to address in more detail in future installments of this blog. The New Media Literacies (definitely plural rather than singular) refer to skills which will support young people in their future roles as learners, creators, workers, and citizens. Watch the video and you will have a better sense of what we mean, but there's no substitute for reading the white paper.

Why Universities Shouldn't Create "Something like YouTube" (Part One)

I was recently interviewed by a Canadian journalist, Alexandre Cayla-Irigoyen Chef de pupitre - Societe Monde, about OpenCourseWare, Collective Intelligence, and the modern university. Somehow, the interview questions sparked me to dig deep on some ideas that I hadn't really formulated before and I figured the answers might prove interesting to blog readers. So I asked the reporter if I could run the transcript here, once he had gotten what he needed from it for his story.

I read your book (Convergence Culture) and also a couple of other of your publications. You argue that, right now, the school system is failing its children because they are learning more experimenting outside class than in it. Do you think that Internet and the tools that are being developed will help change this situation ?

The internet is improving opportunities for learning for at least some portion

of our youth, but most of what is most valuable about it is locked outside of

schools. For example, many American schools block all access to YouTube, to

social network sites, even to blogging tools, all of which are key sites for

learning. Schools are discouraging young people from using Wikipedia rather

than engaging with it as an opportunity to learn about the research process and

to engage with critical discussions around issues of credibility. The schools are

often frightened of anything that looks like a game to the point that they lock

out many powerful tools which simulate real world processes, encourage a 'what

if' engagement with history, or otherwise foster critical understanding of the

world.

As long as they react to these developments as risks rather than resources, then those kids who have access to this online world are going to be de-skilled as they enter the schoolhouse gates and those kids who don't have access are going to be left further behind because they have been abandoned by the institutions which are otherwise best situated to address the digital divide in terms of technical access and the participation gap in terms of access to skills and experiences. So, yes, informal learning is taking place outside of school for those who are able to access it but the refusal of schools to engage with it further amplifies the inequalities between information haves and have nots.

Can such changes be implemented in university classes? Flexibility seems to be the key aspect of this new approach whereas the university classroom is typically governed by a rigid student-teacher relation (at the undergrad level at least).

Whatever their limitations in terms of bureaucratic structure, most university

instructors have much greater flexibility to respond to these challenges than the average public high school. Unfortunately, by the time we get to college, these gaps in experiences, skills, and resources will have already had a near lethal impact on those kids who are being left behind. It isn't just that we will need to have a head start program to get them the technical skills they need to deploy these technologies. It is going to be much harder to give them the sense of empowerment and entitlement needed to allow them to feel fully part of the online world. They are going to be much less likely to play and experiment with the new technologies because they will be afraid of failing and looking dumb in front of classmates who will have been using these tools for more than a decade.

That said, we certainly do want to integrate these skills into college classes, because they are key to higher order thinking an research in most of our disciplines, because doing so is the best way of reaching a generation that expects to be able to participate in social networks and manipulate data through simulations. But we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we can fix a decade's worth of neglect through the public schooling system.

How can an institution recreate the type of communities you spoke about in your book ?

The kinds of communities I discussed in the book are what Cory Doctorow calls "ad-hoc-cracies." They emerge quickly in response to shared interests and concerns. They last as long as people need the community to work through a common problems or query. They vanish when they are no longer useful to their members. They are radically interdisciplinary or I'd prefer, "undisciplined," in that they draw together people with many different expertises and they deploy social networks which observe few of the barriers to interaction we experience in the physical world to bring people together who should be working together. They develop informal yet very powerful systems for vetting information and for carrying out deliberation.

Almost none of this holds with the average college class which has a fixed duration, a prearranged sequence of materials and problems, a disciplined border, a geographically narrowed location, etc. So, if we want to integrate these into our classes, they require

much greater flexibility in imagining what constitutes an educational context. They certainly involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and requires students to build on each other's work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goals since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like.

MIT has the OpenCourseWare program that seems to follow a more open logic. Does MIT have other programs that would help it achieve (or create) a more open, flexible and creative environment ?

The Open Courseware Initiative has very worthy goals -- indeed, the vision

behind it is deeply inspiring to me. Universities like MIT should be opening up their resources to the planet. We should being supporting independent learners and providing materials to support education in parts of the world which do not have what major research institutions have to offer. The scale on which Open Courseware is operating now is astonishing and a real tribute to the people who developed it.

That said, I do not myself participate in Open Courseware. I freely give away my own content through our various blogs, podcasts, and online materials. But MIT has failed to assert a strong Fair Use defense which allows instructors to meaningfully quote from and repurpose existing materials as part of their instructional process. As a media scholar, my teaching centers on helping students understand other people's media content and if I can't quote from and share that content with the users of the Open Courseware, I can not meaningfully reproduce my instructional practices online. MIT had an opportunity to be a leader in the arguments about Fair Use, especially given the good will they have gotten through Open Courseware, yet they have chosen to take a very timid and conservative legal approach to these matters and as a consequence, I feel like it severely compromises the goals and ideals of the Open Courseware initiative.

I am thus a conscientious objector in my relation to this project. I am going into this here not to slam the Open Courseware people but to suggest that the ideals of free distribution of content by educational institutions are compromised by the current intellectual property regime and that we are not going to be able to meaningfully achieve the full ambitions of such a project until we develop stronger defenses around Fair Use.

At the present time, MIT is thinking about its next step in its Internet strategy (after the OpenCourseWare project), what are the options ? What should a university try to implement ?

Many universities are trying to figure out how they can build "something like YouTube" to support their educational activities. Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations. In a sense, these university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it. As I think about what makes YouTube YouTube, I see a number of factors:

• Anyone can submit content at anytime and thus doesn't have to operate from a base of academic and institutional authority. It respects multiple kinds of expertise, understands people are differently motivated, and appreciates that information can be posted for many different reasons.
• YouTube content can be embedded on any website, blog, or social network page. It is spreadable and it gets value as it gets inserted into these various contexts, because they represent different social communities which are having ongoing conversations. YouTube sees information as something that can be used, not something that is simply stored.
• YouTube provokes responses. Indeed, the most valuable content on YouTube is content which inspires other users to talk back, reframing and repurposing materials, coming at them from many different angles.
• The content on YouTube can be reconfigured many different ways. It is not part of a structured curriculum; rather, it is modular, nonliner, unstructured. And as such, we are encouraged to play with it rather than being disciplined to approach it in set ways.

  So, I don't know for sure what the next stage of an academic content system looks like but my own sense is that it should look MORE like YouTube and less like what university lawyers and department heads think will be "something like YouTube".