The Future of Teenagers: My Interview in O Globo

Here is the interview I did with Bruno Porto of O Globo, a publication targeting youth, during my time in Rio. The newspaper devoted three full pages to this interview which was prominent on its cover and I heard lots of great responses to it as I traveled around the country. I suspect what will be striking to readers in the United States is how much the questions being asked there by parents, teachers, and others about new media are very much those being asked in our own country. For those who prefer to read this in Portuguese, here's the link. What´s the main difference between the teenagers that lived in 2000 and the ones that live nowadays? Do you see them as completely different beings or the prior generation already had cultural elements that are present in the next one?

First, the continuities across generations are much greater than the differences. Young people today listen to different bands and often acquire music through different platforms than teens a decade ago, yet one's taste in music is still a key indicator of one's personal and social identity for teens. Young people play different games on different game platforms yet young people acquire and display mastery through competitive play. Young people use different social networking platforms and communicate with their friends through text-messaging, yet forging a place for oneself within the social system of their schools remains a central goal of adolescence. We can go down the list and most of the new digital practices which seem alien to older people are serving purposes which, if they are being honest, they recognize from their own teen experiences. That said, there are also significant differences, which I know we will get to as this interview goes forward. What does it mean to have immediate contact with your friends as a support system as you move throughout your day, to know that you will remain connected with your friends no matter where you move in the planet, and that you can form intense, intimate social ties with people who you may never meet face to face? Or to know, but not yet fully grasp, that those pictures you shot at a party when you were 16 could resurface at a job interview when you are 25 or end up being used against you in a political campaign when you are 45 because they have persistence online and can be accessed by many unintended audiences? These are some of the questions that contemporary teens face which are different from those confronting previous generations of teens.

Do you think that the leap between the 2010 generation and the 2020 will be as significant as the leap between the 2000 and 2010 generations? Or have the main, structural changes, already happened?

We are in the midst of a profound and prolonged period of media transition which is inspiring changes on every other level -- economic, social, cultural, political, legal... and I don't see the rate of change slowing anytime soon. Youth are often the earliest adapters and adopters of those emerging technologies and cultural practices as they seek out some place they can call their own, some place where their parents and teachers are not going to be nagging at and snooping on them. Young people, thus, embody the change that media is bringing and they are thus likely to be the advanced guard for most cultural practices. (Interestingly, this is not true for Twitter which has spread from the professional classes outward and downward to reach youth rather than the other way around). As this happens, they are going to create differences in style and taste which signal their differences in identity and affiliation. So, yes, I think that youth ten years from now will be significantly different from youth today -- with my above caveat that it will still be the case that the continuities in experience and interests will far out distance the differences.

Which aspect of the DIY/collaborative philosophy, that transformed the youth (and the world), seems more intriguing and relevant for you now?

For the past three decades, I have studied fan cultures as the springboard for grassroots creativity. Fans are people who are inspired by the stories that circulate through the mass media, who take elements of those stories and deploy them as the raw materials for their own creative expression, and who bond together over their shared investments in these rich cultural materials. I don't call this "do-it-yourself" but rather "do-it-ourselves," because of the deeply collaborative nature of these forms of cultural production. They are collaborative both in the sense that they build on existing stories, including those of mass media, within our culture and because they depend on each other to create the infrastructure which supports their creativity. Fan fiction is collaborative from conception -- as fans talk through story ideas as cafe table conversations, as they give each other feedback through Beta-Reading (peer-review) processes, as they read and comment on each other's shared works, and as they build the very platforms through which they circulate their creations. The fan fiction writer exists alongside the cosplayer who creates costumes and embodies characters, the fan musician who creates, records, and circulates songs, the vidder who re-edits and remixes footage, and so forth. All of them form communities which embrace new participants, which generate new forms of creative expressions, which teach each other the skills needed to participate, and who support each other's creations. This kind of participatory culture has existed for more than a hundred years, but the web has made it accessible to a much broader array of participants. Because it can innovate outside the constraints of the market or the art world, it is endless generative and thus a source of ongoing fascination to me.

The transformations that the web caused are already present in almost all the Western world, but parents and teachers are still trying not only to understand it, but to accept it. Why do you think they´re still in denial?

Some parents are in denial; some are in a state of panic. The first sees no change occurring, the second fears the change that is coming. Few are finding the middle ground between the two which allows young people plenty of space to navigate between neglect and constraint. I just heard the story of a young man, who came from a conservative religious family, who was told by his parents that he could not watch Family Guy or other Fox shows on television. The kid watched it on the internet instead without guilt, since his parents hadn't set up any restrictions on what he did on line. As someone who is the parent of a 29 year old son, I can tell you that most of parenting is reactionary. You are uncertain about the right way forward and so you fall back on what your parents did, even if they were dealing with different times and situations. You end up saying everything you thought you would never say to your kids because the script you have in your head bears the early imprint of your parent's philosophy. And you have to make a very conscious effort to change or reverse those impulses. You may change it some of the time, through sheer act of will, but then you will find yourself reverting back on other fronts. Most parents now do not have a script in their heads for thinking about what young people are doing with their iPhones. The young people are encountering situations which seem on the surface totally different from anything they faced growing up. That's why I always stress the continuities first. They may not know what the value is of having lots of friends on Orkut, but they do know that forming friendships is a vital part of adolescent culture. As the next group of parents grows up, they will have a better mental framework for thinking about these issues but unfortunately, their kids still won't believe they have any clue what they are talking about. :-)

During years journalists, teachers and other specialists considered videogames as a media that causes much more damages than benefits. Do you think that that perception changed?

Yes, somewhat. The good news is that the group of people entering the teaching profession over the past five or so years probably grew up playing Super Mario Brothers and so they have a much more normative understanding of what games can be used for. The bad news is that research shows that of ten different professional classes, teachers are the least likely to still be playing games today. Teachers are consumate creatures of the book and if anything, they are becoming more defensive about these new media as they fear that print culture may be displaced by digital. So, you have some teachers who do get the value of games as recreational and teaching tools, that want to see better games developed which they can deploy through their teaching, that may respect and value the kinds of teamwork and leadership skills being fostered on World of Warcraft, who may understand the simulations of history and government offered by Civilization or Sim City, We are seeing libraries embracing gaming as a community building activity for their patrons. And among educational researchers, games for learning constitute a high growth area of research. On the other hand, you see schools locking out most forms of participatory culture, closing out not only games but also Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia. You are less likely to see teachers who believe that playing Grand Theft Auto is going to turn their students into school shooters, but you are more likely to see teachers who believe video games are simply distractions from real learning, rather than recognizing how at least some games can be vehicles for the learning process. I will be happy when our government officials stop telling kids to turn off their XBoxes and do their homework, and start telling them to turn on their XBoxes and do their homework, but that's going to be a long time coming.

Survivor, The Matrix and American Idol are some of the franchises you used as example in Convergence Culture. Any other relevant examples appeared recently?

Franchises still dominate our media production. If I were writing the book today, I might have chapters focusing on Lost, Heroes, Glee, Avatar, and District 9, each of which represent a somewhat different way of thinking about the media's relationship to its consumers. Indeed, each of these franchises plays a role in my next book, which I hope to be writing later this summer, on spreadable media. So, let's take Lost. On the one hand, Lost represents one of the biggest hits on contemporary commercial television. When the Lost finale airs later this week, it is going to attract a massive audience. It is event television on a global scale. People will gather in large theaters all over the United States to watch it. They were flood Twitter and the other social networking sites with their responses. On the other hand, Lost represents all of the properties we would have associated with niche television a decade ago. It is a complex and demanding program. It draws a hard core, socially active, culturally generative audience. It challenges the collective knowledge and thinking of large scale social networks of people who pool their knowledge, compare notes, and try to figure out the mysteries of the island. And as they do so, they follow Lost through podcasts, websites, wiki projects, alternate reality games, and countless other platforms. Lost is television outside the box -- television in a transmedia environment. Each of the other examples I cite represent the further move of television into a transmedia and participatory world. With Glee, we might pay attention to it as a vehicle for selling music -- in that sense very much like Rock Band and Guitar Hero -- and we might talk about it as inspiring lots of amateur performances -- check out all the amateur performances of the songs from Glee which spring up on YouTube within hours of the airing of a new episode. With Avatar, I am of course interested in 3D but also in the ways that activists around the world have embraced the identity of the Na'Vi and their struggle against the cloud people as a language through which to talk about their own local struggles to protect their environments and their way of life. With District 9, I am interested in the ways that a small scale movie gains the level of public interest this film did through strategies which rely heavily on the most engaged and socially networked segments of their audience. And the list continues.

Ten years ago, in Brazil and many other countries, kids found it hard to feel attracted by their schools. Now, with their connection with technology and the internet, it´s ten times worse. Do you think that most countries are facing this problem properly?

I teach a class at USC on the New Media Literacies. One of the assignments is to have my graduate students interview a teenage student or a teacher they know. My students come from all over the world and since they tend to interview people in their own families, I see projects on people who live in many different countries. Almost without exception, every young person they interviewed had a more intellectually rich life outside of school than inside. The things they cared about, they things that provoked their curiosity and passions, were often things which had no place in the current configurations of schooling. The ways they learned best often involved tools and platforms which were blocked in the classroom. And they felt like what was turning them on intellectually was largely unknown by the adults in their lives. The teachers also expressed frustration about how much new technology they needed to absorb or about how hard it was to change the presumptions of school administrators that such tools were distractions from the core business of learning. This is bad enough as a global problem if we think about schools shutting down the brains of our most networked young people, but we might feel that they still get extra educational opportunities and cultural experiences outside the school hours. But then consider all of those young people who only get access to these technologies at school, for whom the teacher or librarian may be the only adult they know who has any understanding of the technical, social, cultural, and ethical challenges and opportunities they represent. If we shut these practices out of our schools, we will have denied those young people the support they need to meaningfully engage as citizens, workers, learners, and expressive individuals in a world where these technologies are going to be taken for granted. Young people are not better off being told to learn about technology on the street corner the way my generation learned about sex. Our schools need to develop a coherent, informed, creative approach to technology which incorporates the best tools and practices into their pedagogical approaches.

How do you think that the new generation is absorving so much information? Do you think they absorb less - after all, the information is at reach all the time - or less?

First, I think there is a shift away from an emphasis on learning information towards learning how to find information. The emerging generation tends to offload much of what they know into technological devices which they use to enhance their thinking. Take away my laptop and you chop off a chunk of my brain. This is not necessarily a bad thing because the information is changing at such a rapid pace. Yet, it only works if we don't fill our heads with misinformation, if we develop skills at evaluating information and recognizing what kinds of information we need to solve particular kinds of problems. Second, they are learning to depend on each other for information they may lack. This is what we call collective intelligence -- a world where nobody knows everything, everybody knows something, and what an individual knows can be shared with the group as needed. Young people are learning to recognize the expertise of their friends and others in their networks and learning to work together to solve complex problems which they would not be able to tackle on their own. So, there are two ways of processing the massive amount of information which the web makes available to us -- deploy tools which sort and filter the information or tapping into collaborative communities which appraise the information together from many different perspectives. The later, for example, describes how I use Twitter. I subscribe to the feeds of the smartest people I know in many different fields and trust them to insure that I at least get exposed to the key developments in those fields each day. Young people are tapping this in a more informal way, which is why young people often know a lot about current events without ever seeming to read a newspaper or watch the news. A lot falls through the cracks this way, which is why we need to foster these skills more, but it is still a pretty shrewd approach to dealing with what previous generations have described as information overload.

As schools, many companies that hire young people are not prepared for all the changes that are happening. How does that affect young people? They will try to adapt or look for new kinds of jobs?

Our young people have much more to give the world than they are being allowed to contribute. No question about it. When we read reports of fans developing online reference works for Lost, say, there's often a dismissive response that says they had too much time on their hands. I don't want to undercut the value of this grassroots production of knowledge and culture on its own terms, but I also want to ask - whose fault is that? Such activity emerges in a world which undervalues the creativity and knowledge, the skills and intelligence, of every day people -- undervalues it in school, undervalues it in the work place. As a result, young people create alternative spaces where they can learn and share what they learn with each other. It can be enormously frustrating to watch the company where you work make bad decisions because it is ill-informed about alternative possibilities, even as you sit there, knowing about new ways forward, and not being solicited to contribute, or sitting there going through mind-numbing repetitive activities while you know a high tech way which would be more effective and efficient. Just as schools need to change to embrace new ways of learning, companies need to change to embrace new ways of working. The most forward thinking companies have relatively flat organizations which allow new ideas to emerge bottom up from any corner of their staffs. They reconfigure teams so that everyone has a chance to lead and people can contribute based on their skill and expertise. As we think about who might be best at working in such an organization, it may well be someone who grew up playing massively multiplayers games, swaping roles, trying new identities, tackling new challenges. Hell, don't just hire an individual gamer. Hire an entire squad or guild, since this team of people already knows how to work together to achieve its goals, already knows what each member can contribute, and already trusts each person to carry their own weight. It isn't just that companies need to embrace new technologies; they also need to recognize and value new cultural processes which come out of young people's experience of growing up in a networked society.

Last week Rio received his first TEDx (a version of the original TED) and the main attraction was a 13 years old boy that knows how to program apps for iPhone and iPod Touch. Many scientists are trying to understand the brains of people like that boy, that could be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Do you think that makes sense, that they´re treated that way? Or in some years there will be thousands of kids like that one everywhere?

Our focus should not be on prodigies. There have always been child prodigies. There will always be child prodigies. That tells us little about the state of our culture. What we need to pay attention to are the remarkable achievements of perfectly normal girls and boys who are doing things that would have been inconceivable for earlier generations. Their ability to tap into social networks, to deploy new tools and technologies, to process complex information, is astonishing, yet often dismissed by their parents and teachers because it doesn't fit within the grids through which we evaluate their educational performance. It may well be the case that what this young man is doing will become much more widespread in another generation's time, especially as the processes for designing aps are better understood and toolkits more user friendly. In any case, I would want to understand not just how the boy's brain works but also the social support system around the child. What kinds of help has he received from parents, teachers, other adults along his path to this level of accomplishment, since no kid gets to this point alone. In general, we need to understand such developments not as singular cognitive accomplishments but as windows into the kinds of learning ecology which is needed to make it possible for every young person to achieve their full potential.

Down Argentina Way...

If my trip to Brazil ended up focused primarily on convergence culture and transmedia storytelling, the second leg of my trip -- to Buenos Aires -- was much more directed towards my work on new media literacies and issues concerning education. I was invited to Argentina by Ines Dussel, an educator and public intellectual, who is one of the co-authors with Luis Alberto Quevedo of a new white paper exploring the impact of new media on education in Latin America, Educacion y nuevas technologias: los desafios pedagogicos ante el mundo digital. The report was being released at the VI For Latinoamericano de Educacion, hosted by the Fundacion Santilla. It was an event attended by education ministers and educational researchers/policy makers from many of the Latin American countries. I was asked to give a keynote address which shared with the group some of the perspectives on new media literacies, participatory culture, and informal learning we have developed through Project New Media Literacies, including some discussion of the curriculum we have developed around "Reading in a Participatory Culture." A key concern throughout the discussion was the distinction between introducing technology into the classroom and developing the skills which would enable young people of all economic and cultural backgrounds to participate more fully in the emerging media landscape. Ines and her associates have promised me an interview for the blog, which I hope to share with you soon. I ended up using two examples from my family history to illustrate my key points. First, I talked about my father's tool box. My father spent much of his life in and around the construction trade. He was the son of a sheet metal worker. For both of those generations, their tools were vitally important to them, but their knowledge consisted of how to deploy those tools and could not be contained in the tools themselves. If my father sat his tool box on the table and told me to build a house, I wouldn't know what to do. Trust me, we went through this many times when he was alive. I never could think using hand tools. It isn't just that I didn't know how to use the tools well -- how to use a hammer or a saw -- but rather, I lacked the skills needed to use them effectively and I lacked the larger understanding of how a house -- or in my case, a bookcase -- would be put together. I had the tools but I lacked the competencies which would allow me to use them in meaningful ways. I lacked the sense of my own empowerment to take those tools out in the world and construct something with them.

So, we can bring computers into the classroom but unless the tools are accompanied by other kinds of knowledge -- and I don't just mean how to use the keyboard and some basic software -- then they are not going to be able to deploy those tools in meaningful ways. For some of my friends back at MIT, the key knowledge is how to code -- and that's certainly part of what I mean -- but also I think that knowledge involves how to network, how to participate in new structures of culture and knowledge, how to read a Wikipedia page, how to assess the credability of information. And a technically focused curriculum which is not met with the integration of those skills into how we study culture and society will only get us so far in terms of closing the digital divide and the participation gap. That's the heart of the white paper I wrote for MacArthur.

The second story I drew on heavily there had to do with my grandmother, who, among other things, made quilts, growing up in rural Georgia. We might think of quilting as a kind of remix practice. She took bits of cloth left over from other sewing projects, sometimes drawing on the shared reservoirs of the female community, to create new works. In doing so, she was also building on a shared tradition with its own patterns and formulas. And she was producing an artifact which was designed for sharing -- often the quilts were made as gifts to mark social occasions of significance in the life of the community. My grandmother would have known how to engage with a participatory culture.

We can imagine moving from stitching together and remixing textiles to stitching together and remixing media content. Indeed, Francesca Coppa uses the metaphors of "cutting" and "stitching" to talk about the work that goes into producing a fanvid. In the United States, these folk traditions were radically disrupted by the rise of mass production and mass media. Today, quilt making is a specialized skill, more often trained in art schools than passed along from one generation to the next. And the logic of folk production has become disassociated from our understanding of the media.

One of my speculations about digital culture in Latin America is that because it exists alongside a still vibrant folk culture, a new model for thinking about remix may emerge. And this is part of what I am trying to understand through my travels to the region. I don't want to romanticize this possibility since it is also the case that many Latin Americas worry that the web may simply open up another gateway through which North American influences will be felt upon their traditional ways of life, and it is hard talking to people there to dismiss those concerns.

These next two images suggest some of the complex ways that these two ideas -- remix as part of the logic of folk culture and the importation of Northern culture on the south -- interact on a regular basis in Argentina. My brother owes an affinity to the brand community around Coca Cola, living in Atlanta, so I was especially interested to see the many ways that Coke's presence was felt in Buenos Aires. And yet, as cultural theorists might suggest, Coke is localized -- not only by the decisions made in the boardroom but also by the ways it is inserted into a distinctly Argentinian context.

As I traveled around the city, I was struck by the graphic arts of Buenos Aires, the expressive ways that paint -- especially bright primary colors -- was used to transform the urban landscape.

This focus on street art carried over to a strong tradition of murals and graffiti, such as the soccer related image, which also reminds us of how intense the country's connections are to sports fandom.

And this pub sign depicts Carlos Gardel, Tango performer who became a key figure in Argentinian cinema of the early sound era. I was introduced to Gardel's music while visiting Argentina, along with a wide array of appropriations and remixes of Tango music as it gets absorbed into jazz, hip hop, and techno/dance musics.

Gardel remains a key figure in Argentinian popular culture -- if you look closely, you will see his image on the wall behind these contemporary street performers who were in their own ways keeping the Tango tradition alive.

Ines and her husband took me to visit a curio market on Sunday, which is full of cultural debris, some reflecting the local traditions of Argentina, others suggesting the flow of goods and brands from the North. This still life suggests the complex assemblage of objects (and the cultural traditions they embodied) on every table.

The one thing I was taught about Argentina growing up in American public schools of the 1960s was that it was the land of the Gaucho, so I could not resist capturing this image of a Gaucho selling ropes and bolos in the marketplace. I am sure some of this was performance for tourists, but there was still something fascinating about confronting an icon which previously had lived for me only on the pages of battered and largely forgotten textbooks. Besides, I always loved a song Lupe Velez sings in one of the Wheeler and Woolsey comedies that "You can keep Harpo and Chico. I love my Gaucho."

And during this same trip, I was intrigued by these street performers. Like so many living statues, I have seen in the United States, they were frozen in a pose, defying the attempts of visitors to make them move from their static composition. Yet, what amused me here was the attempts to create what seems in still photographs to be a highly dynamic image -- they used a variety of illusions to convey a sense of movement, even as they remained absolutely still.

Pardon me for what has devolved into a series of tourist snapshots which fail to capture the complex thoughts and feelings which this trip stirred within me, but part of what I carried away with me was a real affection and fascination for the kinds of folk and popular culture practices I observed in Buenos Aires.

What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part Three)

What do you say to an educator or parent who feels that making music remix videos, say, has nothing to do with literacy? In what senses are you describing such forms of expression as literacy practices?

The common sense view of literacy is that it refers to reading and writing alphabetic print and that to be literate is simply a matter of knowing how to encode and decode printed text; that is, to recognise the letters and convert them into words and sequences of words as a reader or a writer. According to this view, literacy is the same thing for everyone. It is the same tool, or the same skill using that tool. Some people might be faster at it and others slower; some may spell better than others, and some may be better at applying text comprehension strategies than others; but at the end of the day, the common sense view is that literacy one single thing, and it is the same for everyone.

This view is flawed, however, and on a number of levels. It's a bit like saying that computing is the same for everyone, just that some are more fluent with it or more skilled. But in the hands of different people who have different purposes and different understandings of what can be done with computers, and so on, computing takes on many different forms. There are many different practices of computing, such that you could give two people what look like the same tool, but what you see going on subsequently might be so very different that you can't really even begin to see them as doing "the same thing" or using the same tool. The example may be even better made by reference to "telephoning." To say that a person calling the dentist on their landline to make an appointment is doing the same thing, using the same tool, employing the same skill - telephoning - as a person in 2010 who uses their mobile phone to video an eyewitness account of what goes on to become a major news event, then uses the phone to upload the video to a social news discussion site along with an explanatory written commentary, and to check back regularly to see what comments have been left by others as well as to track how news of the event itself is playing out across the internet and broadcast media, is to miss the point. What looks like "the same kind of machine" is taken up in very different ways by different people, and has very different meanings for different people. It is to all intents and purposes a "very different thing" in the hands of different people; not the same thing at all.

So it is with literacy, and that is why we think it is best to talk about literacies in the plural rather than literacy in the singular. The singular form focuses our attention on the wrong thing - on thinking that the all-important thing is managing alphabetic text. This is important, but it's only a part of it.

There are two key points to make here. The first is to recognize what is most important about literacy as a social phenomenon, which is that it enables people to do what cannot be done by orality alone. Literacy enables human beings to communicate and share meanings in ways that go beyond the use of voice within face-to-face settings (which is orality). Literacy checks in when the conditions of everyday life are such that people need more than the use of voice alone to get the meaning-making work done that needs to get done for life to go on. The bottom line for literacy is that it enables meaning-making to occur or "travel" across space and time, mediated by systems of signs in the form of encoded texts of one kind or another. Encoded texts "freeze" or "capture" thought and language in ways that free them from their immediate context of production so that they are "transportable." Unencoded texts like speech and hand signs "expire" at the point of production other than to the extent that they can live on - fallibly - in the memories of whoever was there at the time. Encoded texts give (semi) permanence and transcendence to thought and language in the sense that they can "travel" without requiring particular people to transport them. Literacies can involve any kind of codification that "captures" language and thought in this sense. Literacy includes letteracy (the alphabet bits), but goes far beyond that. Speech recorded on tape or digitally is frozen and counts as encoded language and thought. The same applies to still and moving images. It is not that memory and speech alone cannot sustain considerable meaning making across distance and contexts. It is just that this is exponentially enabled and facilitated by literacy as encodification, which permits all kinds of procedures and institutions and practices that would be impossible, or impossibly cumbersome, without encoded thought and language.

During the centuries of mass print, following the invention of the printing press, the dominance of print as the paradigm of encoded texts has made it "natural" to associate literacy with alphabetic text. But this is really just an historical contingency. Many centuries prior to that humans used pictorial inscriptions of one kind or another (as well as other markings) to encode language and thought independently of voice. As new ways of encoding come and go, encoding system paradigms change. And right now we are at a point where the dominance - previously, almost the monopoly - of the print paradigm is being challenged by the ease of digital encoding that can combine multiple modes and mixes of multiple modes. Where it is more effective to use alternative sign systems from alphabetic text to mediate meaning-making within mainstream everyday interactions, the alternatives will be used. And people's ideas about literacy will change accordingly.

The second key point is that literacies vary with contexts. What we mean by context has to do with who the people are within a particular setting, what they are aiming to do, how they are trying to do it, what they are trying to do it with, and who they are or are trying to be within that context. So, if we think about something as obvious as reading a particular text, it is clear that different people, coming from different cultural spaces and possessing different cultural knowledge may read the same text in very different ways and make different meanings from it. For example, during the 1980s, many liberation theology priests who worked with Latin American peasants in ways they hoped would encourage them to mobilise to demand a better share of social wealth interpreted key biblical passages very differently to how conservative urban priests who identified with the existing social order interpreted them. Moreover, both groups worked with biblical texts in different ways and in different settings; liberationists would pore over the texts with peasants within settings where evidence of poverty was immediate, and would encourage the group to think about the meaning in relation to a change agenda. By contrast, other priests would read at large anonymous assemblies, making the interpretation amidst ornate decorative milieux that often dripped gold and spoke to divine rather than popular power. Same text, different people, different purposes, different procedures, different knowledge informing the meaning making and, indeed, a different technology. A bible being read by one person set apart from the listeners is utterly different from a bible being pored over, passed from person to person, and being used to stimulate thought intended to guide political action. Within Latin American settings both of these "ways" of "reading bibles" have been common - along with many other variations we can think of.

Now the point is that these kinds of differences in "ways with encoded texts" can be multiplied many times over. In a famous example, Shirley Brice Heath showed how different social groups within a region of the United States "did bedtime reading" in very different ways. Experts on the philosophy of Kant read and discuss Kant's works in very different ways from first year philosophy students, and (can) make very different meanings from them. That is why philosophers try to induct philosophy students into sophisticated reading practices, of which following letters and words across a page is only a tiny (albeit very important) part. The expert philosophers are trying to recruit the students to a new social practice, and this involves having to teach them how to read and write philosophically (which involves a lot more than just eyes and texts). Jim Gee uses the word Discourse (with a capital "D") to signify the idea that there are all different kinds of combinations of types of people and kinds of purposes and goals, and ways of setting about them, and ways of using language within them, and ways of dressing (liberationists in outdoor garb and metropolitan priests in ornate robes) and so on. We can say that different Discourses tend to involve different literacies, and will often involve different (forms of) technologies or tools, and different ways of using them, and so on. And participants in these different Discourses will make different meanings from what look like the same resources, and they will use what look like the same resources (think: computer, phone, bible) in very different ways.

So if we put all of these ideas together (along with others there is not space to mention here) it suddenly becomes very obvious why we would think of making remix music videos as having everything to do with literacy, rather than having nothing to do with literacy. It is one of a very large number of literacies that exist (not to mention new ones that are emerging all the time). That is, when we think of literacies in terms of "so many socially recognized ways in which people who are participating in particular Discourses generate, communicate and negotiate meanings through the medium of encoded texts," it's perfectly natural to think of people who are producing and sharing and interacting with remix music videos as engaging in (a) literacy. They are decoding and encoding sophisticated multimedia texts, with a view to communicating and sharing and negotiating meanings with others of their ilk (other members of their Discourse). They set about this in ways that others recognize as appropriate to doing this literacy well. They are freezing thought and "language" so that it can travel and be experienced and negotiated within practices of giving and taking meaning.

When we look at things from this perspective it is the people who cannot see remix music video in terms of literacy that have the problem; not those for whom it is self-evidently a legitimate, pleasurable, widely-practised, and potentially incredibly powerful literacy.

In my Afterword, I raise the question about the value of learning these skills as an isolated set of practices rather than as part of a more diverse affinity space. In other words, is there a difference between learning to make a remix video and learning to be an Otaku (who happens to display his or her skills and knowledge through contributing remix videos to a larger fan culture)?

Yes, there certainly is a difference, although learning to make something like a remix video can - and often does - lead to becoming a fan of something one previously was not a fan of, and to becoming more the kind of fan who happens to display their skills and knowledge through contributing artifacts to a larger fan culture and through other characteristically Otaku practices. Indeed, this is precisely the route that Matt, the co-author of our chapter on AMV remix in the book, took. We came across Matt's anime music video remixes via YouTube, where his "Konoha Memory Book" video at the time had over half a million views (take-down notices unfortunately mean the video is no longer on YouTube). Half a million views is a significant marker of popularity online, and so we interviewed him about his anime music video production process, and his involvement in remixing AMVs. He was 17 years old at the time, and he explained that he'd started creating AMVs two years earlier. It turns out that prior to that, he hadn't been a fan of anime or manga or anything like that at all. What happened was that a mate showed him "Narutrix" (an AMV faux movie trailer parodying the Matrix movies) which got Matt interested in watching the Naruto anime series in particular, and then anime in general. It didn't take him long to start tinkering around with creating his own AMVs, even before he became what could be described a full participant in anime culture. He's subsequently gone on to become such an avid anime fan that not only does he create AMVs which he posts to AMV.org and YouTube, submit AMVs to convention contests (and for which he regularly wins awards), draw his own original manga figures and comics which he posts online at DeviantArt.org, maintain a blog about his anime interests, contribute to anime dicussion boards, write generous reviews of and comments' on others' AMVs, but he spends his weekends cosplaying a rich range of anime characters, and organizes cosplay chess games for different anime conventions as well. He's now--thanks to his initial interest in AMVs as an expressive form in their own right--most definitely an Otaku!

Other ideas arise here, however, which are relevant to questions about the relationships between identity and practices and to ideas and ideals of learning. For example, it may not be that a person learns DIY media practices as an isolated set of skills but, rather, as skills and knowledges and values and mastery of systems and the like as part of becoming a kind of person that just happens not to be a fan. Hence, a person who identifies as the kind of person who practises the ideal of being as self-sufficient as possible might learn a particular skill and knowledge set under this kind of motivation (e.g., knowing how to sew clothes; knowing how to preserve or can home-grown fruit; knowing how to make solar-powered things). Moreover, we often find a paradox associated with self-sufficiency: people who identify with being self-sufficient often are closely linked with like minded people and inter-relate with them, sharing points of view, solidarity, and resources and so on. But they do this under a much more diffuse kind of identity than members of specific affinity groups. When people who are into "self-sufficiency" interact with one another their specific interests and things they create may have little or no overlap whatsoever, other than as expressions of participating in a general ideal of being as self-sufficient as possible.

Alternatively, the kind of audience we have for this book is of people who might want to get some experience of DIY creativity and production as part of how they see themselves becoming a more effective teacher or, perhaps, a more in touch parent. Here again, the skills and knowledge being learned would not be "isolated". They might be a long way, at least initially, from Otaku culture or other avid fan cultures, but, equally, they may not at all be isolated but connected to something that is very important to them. In fact, isolation would actually be very difficult to sustain in the context of learning some digital DIY media. The very process tends to put people very quickly into the realm of affinity spaces and, as Matt's case indicates, from there anything can happen - including the development of full-fledged fan affinities and approximations to Otaku ways of doing and being.

At the same time, there are some important differences and distinctions at stake. One is the difference between a more instrumental orientation to practice and a more intrinsic orientation. There is all the difference in the world between dropping in on a Linux forum to get some help with a problem, leaving feedback, making the information available to others and maybe making a Paypal contribution to an open source software fund, on one hand, and being a full-on contributor who helps code open source software and build the open source movement, on the other. In the first case the relationship is instrumental: minimal participation as a means to an end. In the second, it is intrinsic; one is a devotee of open source ideals and practices and, in effect, becomes a steward of those ideals and practices. Lawrence Eng's classic statement about fanship and stewardship is a supreme expression of the intrinsic orientation that defines many Otaku identities. Explaining why he proactively sought out other fans of Sasami from the Tenchi Muyo anime and developed the Sasami Appreciation Society as an affinity space, Eng said "it's our devotion to Sasami ... we're dedicated to bringing her the fanship that she deserves" (as cited by Mimi Ito). This is activity as an end in itself rather than to some further end. It is done for its own sake, as an expression of devotion, rather than as a means to producing an artifact, getting a reputation, or reaping other personal benefits. These may occur, of course, but they are not the point and purpose of the engagement within an intrinsic orientation. Of course, one can learn an incredible amount along the way, but even this is not the motivation to participate.

There is much that is important and valuable about this kind of orientation and way of being. In many ways it constitutes an ideal of active citizenship - of being committed to building something because one believes in it, and of putting that first, and of dedicating one's activity to contributing to its fullest realisation. At its best, this is what communities of academic practice become, and if we need any reminders of how valuable this ideal can be we need only think of negative examples that are always available of academics who are largely or mainly there for "career prospects", and of the ugliness that can so quickly surface in the form of academic jealousies, back-biting practices, resentment, clique formation and turf battles and so on. Apart from the quality of learning that can occur within bona fide affinity practices, the fact is that there is much of human beauty to be found there: selflessness, promotion of the greater good, humility, stewardship, generosity, reciprocity and so on. Anyone who doesn't think we need as much as we can get of such values has not looked outside in a while.

This said, however, it is worth making a couple of cautionary observations about the "structure" of participation and learning within affinity spaces. While we have identified the qualities of stewardship, humility, commitment to a greater (assumed) good, and the priority of intrinsic worth to fan practices, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that humans can be(come) fans of anything, and for these qualities to remain intact and yet, potentially, have regrettable consequences. While becoming a fan of many popular culture practices and icons, as with becoming a fan of environmental science, or mathematics, or democracy might typically be expected to have more or less benign and positive outcomes, the same might not apply to becoming a fan of the Third Reich or Pol Pot or any number of contemporary examples that could be named, where people do in fact become fans (although "bad" fans are often called, fanatics), and do pursue intrinsic goods (as they see them), practice stewardship, collaborate, share, put other people and ideals before themselves and so on. To be a fan has no limits so far as objects of affinity are concerned, and while we may limit the word "Otaku" to some specific range of fanships it may be more difficult to so limit the general concept and its deep grammar. Hence, the "good" of displaying skills and knowledge through contributing to a larger (fan) culture will always be to some extent contingent.

A related point here concerns the structure of learning within practice affinities or, as they are often called, communities of practice. The New Work Order (1996) argues that communities of practice seed values without these values needing some apparent central controlling agency to insist upon them or maintain them: "Immersion into a community of practice [an affinity] can allow individuals or units to internalize values and goals - often without a great deal of negotiation or conscious reflection and without the exercise of very much top-down authority" (p. 65). Participants collaborate, participate, share, reciprocate, "scaffold" and support, for all they are worth, and the net effect of this is building the practice and the community. But it does not necessarily transcend what Kevin Harris (1979), many years ago, referred to as "supportive rhetoric". It can, and usually does, support critical scrutiny that is internal to the practice/community, but at the same time this critique insulates participants against possibilities of external critique. The more a person invests in an affinity the less space there is for countenancing alternatives. The learning is, to be sure, often "deep," and deeply social. But "learning works best - it is most enculturating, but (alas) also most indoctrinating - when it is done inside the social practices of a Discourse" such as a fan affinity practice (New Work Order p. 15). It is not for nothing that many "fast capitalist" enterprises have encouraged the development of fandoms around their products, seeding the core values and leaving it to fan collaboration, participation and celebration to build the community (and the profits).

For us, the important thing is trying to keep the baby with the bathwater, in the sense of encouraging multiple fandoms - memberships of multiple affinities - and multiple orders of affinities, such that we strive for Otaku-like membership of practices that embrace intrinsic ends linked to distribution of material social goods as well as to pleasures. Becoming fans of understanding how social practices work for better and for worse so far as contributing materially to promoting long-term human good is concerned seems to us to be of the utmost importance.

Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research examines new literacy practices across a broad range of contexts. She is joint editor, with Colin Lankshear, of DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. They have also jointly edited A New Literacies Sampler and Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.

Colin Lankshear is an Adjunct Professor of Education at McGill University in Montreal, and James Cook University, in Cairns, Australia. His research interest is in sociocultural studies of literacy practices and new technologies. He is joint author, with Michele Knobel, of The Handbook for Teacher Research and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning.

What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part One)

Last time, I shared a chunk from my afterword for DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. There's plenty more where that came from, including a report on some of the core insights from our "Reading in a Participatory Culture" initiative. Over the next few installments, I am sharing an extensive and substantive interview with Colin Landkshear and Michele Knobel, the two editors of that book, which digs deep into the implications of DIY culture for contemporary education. Lankshear and Knobel are legends in the space of new media literacies, having authored or edited a series of first rate books, which explore how education is and should be responding to shifts in public access to the means of cultural production. I draw heavily on their collections and on their personal writings when I teach my New Media Literacies class at USC. One reason I feel such kinship with this dynamic duo is that they often ground their considerations of the nature of literacy and the purpose of learning through reference to field work they have done on Anime fans and their video production practices.

Like their other books, DIY Media brings together young and established writers looking at a range of digital media practices; this book is especially targeted at educators who want to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty mucking about with media. In some ways, this is a "How to" book explaining how to make podcasts or edit vids; in some ways it is a "why to" book explaining why these alternative media practices will change our understanding of what it means to be literate. The essays move from pragmatic advice to theoretical ruminations without ever missing a beat and will be incredibly useful to educators struggling to find their footing in these unfamiliar spaces.

In this opening installment, Lankshear and Knobel will explain some of the core premises which shaped the project. As you will see, we do not always agree, but we arrive at what I see as complimentary positions. One reason why I reproduced a chunk from my essay yesterday was to allow you to better understand the points of debate which emerge in the passages that follow.

What is the DIY Media book about?

It's an edited collection, and is an eclectic sampling of do-it-yourself media practices under current conditions of digital technologies and people's ideas about how these technologies can be used within everyday life, and how experience with engaging in such practices might help contribute to enhancing formal education. The authors address music remix, podcasting, photoshopping and photosharing, machinima movie making, stop-motion and flash animation, and anime music video practices. Each chapter begins by talking a little about cultural aspects of the practice it's addressing, and then provides a brief "tutorial" on how to get started technically and socially in that practice, before discussing some educational connections and implications.

The book is "eclectic" partly in the sense that it covers quite a spread of media practices. But it's also eclectic in terms of how "DIY media" is understood. In your Afterword for the book, Henry, you suggest a distinction between DIY/Do-It-Yourself and DIO/Do-It-Ourselves (or DIT/Do-It-Together) to reflect varying degrees of engagement in participatory culture, as you and colleagues so usefully have conceived it. So, at one pole, the concept of DIY media might involve an individual using the generous affordances of the internet (as well as drawing on face-to-face and offline resources) to learn how to create a music video or a stop-motion animation artifact, and to then get on with creating it. This might involve quite minimal participation in affinity spaces - let's say, acknowledging support given by others and reciprocating by making one's own knowledge available to others and, perhaps, posting the animation online. At the other pole, a full-blown DIO/DIT media practice as a full expression of participatory culture involves aficionados of a particular interest working together and in deeply collaborative ways to build a rich and deep affinity space - a kind of cultural community - in which the act of creating a particular artifact is not the end in itself but much more a part (and maybe a relatively insignificant part) of contributing to building the affinity. In this sense of DIO media practices, as we see them, a person's commitment to the space can take a number of active forms. They may participate directly in collaborative artifact production and promotion (such as can be found within the machinima community, for example). Just as importantly, a person can devote much of their energies to regularly visiting a site central to the shared affinity or interest, say, Animemusicvideos.org, and viewing recently uploaded videos, and commenting on them; following up favourite videos on YouTube and commenting there, too; following particular anime music video remixers' work across the internet; voting in viewers' choice awards hosted by AMV.org or other online entities; recommending favourite AMVs to friends; physically attending anime music video screenings at comic conventions; watching a wide range of anime in order to better appreciate anime music video remixers' work, and so on. They actually may be relatively little engaged in creating - albeit with input and support of others - their "own" media artifacts, but still be very much participating within this shared, collaborative affinity space.

The contributing authors in DIY Media cover most of this spectrum themselves as DIY media creators, and as editors we think that having a wide spectrum is important, since the main audience for this book is intended to be formal educators (teachers, teacher educators, teacher education students) and, hopefully, some parents/caregivers. For some serious fans it may be too goal-directed and "instrumental," although we hope that fans will read and interact with it because that interchange is essential for getting a sense of how to bridge the gap between the worlds of formal and less formal learning. Indeed, that role is already really nicely begun by your Afterword to the collection

Our own perspective on DIY generally, and DIY media specifically, in terms of our work as educators may be worth spelling out a little here: starting with the "D." All DIY work involves doing: some degree of producing and not merely consuming. There is still plenty of room for consumption, but when we focus on the "D" we are focusing on being producers. We believe this emphasis has particular importance for formal education, precisely because it is so powerfully and deeply immersed in consuming. In his wonderful and important attack on the disempowering effect of disabling professions, Ivan Illich referred to school as the "reproductive organ of the consumer society," and argued that once our imaginations have been "all schooled up" to accept "full time attendance at an obligatory curriculum" as the learning paradigm, people are ready prey for all the other manipulative institutions that dominate our social system and force us to use their services because they are the only ones sanctioned or authorized to "deliver" them. School learning becomes, in effect, consumption of subject knowledge organised into various pre-determined sequences, and with little or no opportunity to learn how to produce that knowledge in the ways that experts do. Instead, the production within schooled learning is pretty much limited to recycling consumed information within standardized essay writing formats or school projects. There is little opportunity for Doing in the sense involved in doing for oneself at any point on the DIY-DIO spectrum, which is based on creating use values for oneself and for others, in accordance with personal goals, interests and purposes.

The operating conditions of schooling increasingly are becoming as consumer-dominated for teachers as they are for learners. Competency benchmarks, standardized assessment protocols and tests, textbooks and resources, curriculum frameworks and reporting mechanisms are presented to teachers, along with batteries of "professional development opportunities" to consume information about how to enact the requirements imposed from above. Many teacher education students quickly catch onto this and are soon asking to be shown how to do this or that step-by-painful-step. In addition, many teachers are not at home with new technologies and are often reluctant to use them, or become anxious when confronted with getting up to speed - which is often "delivered" as a one-off professional development session that accompanies the arrival of some new technology in the school (Smartboards are a classic case of this kind of thing).

So, for us, the "D" in DIY, as we thought about it for the book, is about trying to challenge at least some of this massive emphasis on consumption/being a consumer within the teaching and learning roles found in formal education through the process of encouraging readers to get started in some digital media practices. In the process, readers who are new to these practices can introduce themselves to some of the opportunities for learning and engaging within the kinds of affinity spaces that have evolved around DIY-DIO media practices and that exemplify participatory culture.

As your book notes, the current moment of digital culture reflects a much older tradition of DIY media production. Can you share with us your sense of that history and what specifically digital media has brought to the kinds of DIY media communities being discussed.

Our take on the DIY tradition is quite literal and pragmatic. We note that as a term in popular use, "DIY" really only dates to the 1950s although, of course, the idea of communities of enthusiasts and others with a will to bypass what is produced for them and to produce their own versions for constituencies they identify with is, as you note in your Afterword, very much older. In some of our earliest published work, for instance, we looked at the determined efforts of working class people in early 19th century Britain to establish a press that would help further their pursuit of better economic and social conditions, through organizing en masse to win voting rights, the right to organize their labour in syndicates or unions, and to generate their own material for reading pleasure and edification. Such doing-it-for-themselves media, however, was scarcely an intrinsic pursuit. It was much closer to a matter of necessity, although it was certainly a major exercise in building affinities and affinity spaces.

In this book we are talking about DIY media in terms of digital entertainment and expressive media--animation, live action video, music video, music, spoken voice tracks, other artistic works--produced by everyday people to meet their own goals and personal satisfactions. Often, these goals and satisfactions are associated with fanship in some larger phenomenon and close affiliation with some social group. At the same time it often emerges out of opportunities to tinker with and explore the means for producing a media artifact of one kind or another. DIY media in this sense is very much characterised by people being able to produce their "own" media--whether it be radio-like podcasts, "original" remixed music, animated video shorts, music videos, etc.--by making use of software, hardware and "insider" skills, techniques and knowledge that were previously the domain of highly-trained experts who had access to specialised and typically very expensive media production know-how, resources and spaces.

Our view of DIY runs multiple strands together. One is the idea of a DIY ethic in the sense of being able to do things oneself that are otherwise the preserve of experts or professionals - a kind of self reliance that lends a measure of independence. Another is the idea that, when it needs to be, this "self reliant production" is nonetheless of good quality and standing. Sometimes a "folksy" look and feel is fine and apropos. But at other times a professional feel and finish is sought, and the proficient DIY creator can achieve that (e.g., furniture construction, intricate quilts). A third strand is the idea that for some DIYers a key purpose is to resist corporate, commercial, and consumerist values per se. We note the way in which the punk subculture that emerged in the '70s not only encouraged personal styles of self-presentation, self- expression, and identity work within self publishing, music creation, clothing oneself and making oneself up; it also - through fanzine, and later general zine publication - impacted the ways fans interacted with musicians, and touched bases with other DIY/DIO traditions by providing gateways to access for novices via zines that offered tutorials on a wide range of creative pursuits.

By comparison with your own position on DIO media, Henry, our view takes a shorter historical sweep, and tends to emphasize the use of tools/technologies, techniques and know how, and generating artifacts. We talk quite a bit about getting up to speed on production aspects and quality aspects, via interactions with others who share the same interest. But we do not emphasize the Otaku-like dimensions of the practices to any extent. We recognize them, but do not emphasize or prioritize them here.

What this means is that our sense of what digital technologies have brought to the kinds of media practices and communities being discussed in DIY Media is less "communitarian" and more "functional", "quality-oriented", and "informational" than a full on "participatory culture" approach involves. For example, we talk about the way these new technologies make it possible in principle for everyday people to produce artifacts that have the kind of sophistication that could previously only be obtained via very high cost infrastructure. We talk about the way networked technologies open up rich opportunities for on-demand or just-in-time learning: the idea that "google is your friend" when you need to know something. This includes cultural knowledge about "cool" and "quality" as well as technical knowhow. We talk about DIY media creators often having a good sense of relevant professional standards, although they will not always prioritize these. Sometimes, basic explorations of a new tool or technique are satisfying and sufficient. At other times, posting a video recording online of a friend riding a bike off a pier and into deep water has much more to do with maintaining social relationships within a friendship network than producing an acclaimed artifact. But we highlight the satisfactions and use values that can be gained from tapping the affordances of contemporary tools and (especially online) learning resources to produce professional-like artifacts and resources. Sophisticated tools are augmented by online how-to guides, dedicated open discussion forums where experts and novices alike can participate, help boards and blogs, user-created media content review and comment spaces, and ready access to what are regarded as exemplary models of the media artifact being created. Such resources make many elements of "professional standards" explicit and accessible to the everyday person (e.g., amateur anime music video makers committed to professional standards know that good quality AMVs don't include clips that are subtitled or have different image resolutions from one another, that they avoid clichéd transitions between clips, and so on).

TO BE CONTINUED

Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research examines new literacy practices across a broad range of contexts. She is joint editor, with Colin Lankshear, of DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. They have also jointly edited A New Literacies Sampler and Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.

Colin Lankshear is an Adjunct Professor of Education at McGill University in Montreal, and James Cook University, in Cairns, Australia. His research interest is in sociocultural studies of literacy practices and new technologies. He is joint author, with Michele Knobel, of The Handbook for Teacher Research and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning.

Why Participatory Culture Is Not Web 2.0: Some Basic Distinctions

The following is excerpted from the Afterword I wrote for the recently published book, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel's DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. Next time, I will begin an extended interview with the book's editors about their views about DIY Media, Informal Learning, New Media Literacies, and Otaku Culture. Do It Yourself rarely means Do It Alone. For example, much of what youth learn through game playing emerges from "meta-gaming," the conversations about the game play. Trading advice often forces participants to spell out their core assumptions as more experienced players pass along what they've learned to newcomers. This "meta-gaming" has many of the dimensions of peer-to-peer teaching or "Social Learning." As John Seeley Brown and Richard P. Adler (2008) explain, "social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions."To call this "learning by doing" is too simple, since we will not learn as much if we separate what we are doing -- making a podcast, modding a game, mastering a level -- from the social context in which we are doing it.

I have always felt uncomfortable with the phrase, "Do It Yourself," to label the practices described in this book. "Do It Yourself" is too easy to assimilate back into some vague and comfortable notion of "personal expression" or "individual voice" that Americans can assimilate into long-standing beliefs in "rugged individualism" and "self-reliance." Yet, what may be radical about the DIY ethos is that learning relies on these mutual support networks, creativity is understood as a trait of communities, and expression occurs through collaboration. Given these circumstances, phrases like "Do It Ourselves" or "Do It Together" better capture collective enterprises within networked publics. This is why I am drawn towards concepts such as "participatory culture," (Jenkins et a, 2009l) "Affinity Spaces," (Gee, 2007) "Genres of Participation," (Ito et al, 2009) "networked publics," (Varnelis, 2008) "Collective Intelligence," (Levy, 1999) or "Communities of Practice," (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

While each reflects somewhat different pedalogical models, each captures the sense of a shared space or collective enterprise which shapes the experience of individual participants/learners. Each offers us a model of peer-to-peer education: we learn from each other in the process of working together to achieve shared goals. Many of these models emphasize the diverse roles played by various participants in this process. It is not that all participants know the same things (as has been the expectation in school); success rests on multiple forms of expertise the group can deploy "just in time" responding to shifting circumstances and emerging problems. It is not that all participants do the same things; rather, these practices depend on the ad hoc coordination of diverse skills and actions towards shared interests.

We need to understand the specific practices discussed here as informed by norms and values that emerge from their community of participants. We see different things if we focus on the practices or on the communities that deploy them, and in my remarks here, I hope to shift the lens onto the communities. Focusing on practices first, the editors write in this book's introduction, "Podcasting, for example, involves using particular kinds of tools, techniques and technologies to achieve the goals and purposes that podcasters aim to achieve, and to use them in the ways that people known as podcasters recognize as appropriate to their endeavor in terms of their goals and values." While saying something important about the nature of these practices, this description assumes that the operative identity here is that of the podcaster and that podcasters enjoy a shared identity as parts of a community of practice regardless of the content and functions of their podcasts. And this may be true for some, especially at the moment they are first learning how to podcast or are passing those skills and practices along to others, but for many, podcasting is a means to an end.

OTAKU, FANS, HIP HOPPERS AND GAMERS

On the ground, these practices get embedded in a range of different interest-driven networks and what motivates these activities may be less a desire to make a podcast than an urge to create a shared space where, for example, fans can discuss their mutual interests in Severius Snape or where church members can hold prayer circles or where comic book buffs can interview writers and artists or... The Digital Youth Project (Ito et al) drew a useful distinction between "messing around," tinkering with new tools and techniques to see what they can do, and "geeking out," going deep into a particular interest that may in turn lead you to engage with a range of social networks and production practices. There is some risk that as educators organize class projects around the production of podcasts, they risk divorcing these practices from the larger cultural contexts in which they operate.

We might think about different interest-driven networks as mobilizing somewhat different clusters of interlocking and mutually reinforcing practices. Consider, for example, Mimi Ito's (2005) description of the literacy skills within Otaku culture, the fan community around anime and manga:

"Anime otaku are media connoisseurs, activist prosumers who seek out esoteric content from a far away land and organize their social lives around viewing, interpreting, and remixing these media works. Otaku translate and subtitle all major anime works, they create web sites with hundreds and thousands of members, stay in touch 24/7 on hundreds of IRC channels, and create fan fiction, fan art, and anime music videos that rework the original works into sometimes brilliantly creative and often subversive alternative frames of reference.... To support their media obsessions otaku acquire challenging language skills and media production crafts of scripting, editing, animating, drawing, and writing. And they mobilize socially to create their own communities of interest and working groups to engage in collaborative media production and distribution. Otaku use visual media as their source material for crafting their own identities, and as the coin of the realm for their social networks. Engaging with and reinterpreting professionally produced media is one stepping stone towards critical media analysis and alternative media production."

Certainly, within Otaku culture, one can gain an identity as a fan-subber, a vidder, a fan fiction author, a community organizer, or an illustrator, but these practice-based identities do not supersede one's larger identity as an Otaku.

What Ito observes about Otaku culture is consistent with what researchers have observed in a range of other subcultures. Consider this description from my field work on female-centered science fiction fandom in the early 1990s (Jenkins, 1992):

"Four Quantum Leap fans gather every few weeks in a Madison, Wisconsin apartment to write. The women spread out across the living room, each with their own typewriter or laptop, each working diligently on their own stories about Al and Sam. Two sit at the dining room table, a third sprawls on the floor, a fourth balances her computer on the coffee table. The clatter of the keyboards and the sounds of a filktape are interrupted periodically by conversation. Linda wants to insure that nothing in the program contradicts her speculations about Sam's past. Mary has introduced a southern character and consults Georgia-born Signe for advice about her background. Kate reviews her notes on Riptide, having spent the week rewatching favorite scenes so she can create a 'crossover' story which speculates that Sam may have known Murray during his years at MIT. Mary scrutinizes her collection of 'telepics' (photographs shot from the television image), trying to find the right words to capture the suggestion of a smile that flits across his face....Kate passes around a letter she has received commenting on her recently published fanzine....Each of the group members offers supportive comments on a scene Linda has just finished, all independently expressing glee over a particularly telling line. As the day wears on, writing gives way to conversation, dinner, and the viewing of fan videos (including the one that Mary made a few weeks before)....For the fan observer, there would be nothing particularly remarkable about this encounter. I have spent similar afternoons with other groups of fans, collating and binding zines, telling stories, and debating the backgrounds of favorite characters....For the 'mundane' observer, what is perhaps most striking about this scene is the ease and fluidity with which these fans move from watching a television program to engaging in alternative forms of cultural production: the women are all writing their own stories; Kate edits and publishes her own zines she prints on a photocopy machine she keeps in a spare bedroom and the group helps to assemble them for distribution. Linda and Kate are also fan artists who exhibit and sell their work at conventions; Mary is venturing into fan video making and gives other fans tips on how to shoot better telepics. Almost as striking is how writing becomes a social activity for these fans, functioning simultaneously as a form of personal expression and as a source of collective identity (part of what it means to be a fan). Each of them has something potentially interesting to contribute; the group encourages them to develop their talents fully, taking pride in their accomplishments, be they long-time fan writers and editors like Kate or relative novices like Signe."

At the time, I was interested in what this scene told us about how fans read television and how they deployed its contents as raw materials for their own expressive activities. Rereading the passage today, I am struck by how fully the description captures the strengths of a DIY culture as a site for informal learning. Sometimes the women are working on individual, self-defined projects and sometimes they are working together on mutual projects but always they are drawing moral support from their membership in an interest-driven network. Each plays multiple roles: sometimes the author, sometimes the reader; sometimes the teacher, sometimes the student; sometimes the editor, sometimes the researcher, sometimes the illustrator. They move fluidly from role to role as needed, interupting their own creative activity to lend skills and knowledge to someone else. Their creative interests straddle multiple media practices: they write stories, they take telepics, they edit videos, they publish zines, each of which constitutes a complex cultural practice combining technical skills and cultural expertise. Leadership, as Gee tells us, is "porous": the space is Signe's apartment; Kate is editing the zine to which they are each contributing; and Mary has the expertise in fan video production which she shares with her circle in hopes of getting more of them vidding. And we see here a conception of culture as a series of "processes" rather than a set of "products." Fan work is always open to revision, expansion, and elaboration, rather than locked down and closed off from other's contributions. As a more recent account of fan cultural practices (Busse and Helleckson, 2006) explains:

"Work in progress is a term used in the fan fiction world to describe a piece of fiction still in the process of being written but not yet completed....The appeal of works in progress lies in part in the ways... it invites responses, permits shared authorship, and enjoins a sense of community.....In most cases, the resulting story is part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced...When the story is finally complete and published, likely online but perhaps in print, the work in progress among the creators shifts to the work in progress among the readers."

Similarly, Kevin Driscoll (2009) has discussed how Hip Hop's diverse practices around music, dance, the graphic arts, video production, and entrepreneurship associated with Hip Hop encourage participants to master a range of cultural and technological skills. He describes, for example, the different participatory practices that got mobilized around the circulation of a single song:

"

As the figurehead of 2007's "Crank Dat" phenomenon, Atlanta teenager Soulja Boy exploited social-networking and media-sharing websites to encourage a widespread dance craze that afforded him a level of visibility typically only available to artists working within the pop industry. "Crank Dat" ... began as a single commodity but grew into a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon.... Within just a few months of the first "Crank Dat" music video, fans had posted countless custom revisions of "Crank Dat" to media-sharing sites like YouTube, SoundClick, imeem, and MySpace. In each case, the participants altered the original video in a different manner. They changed the dance steps, altered the lyrics, created new instrumental beats, wore costumes, and performed in groups. Some created remix videos that borrowed footage from popular TV programs and movies...."Crank Dat" welcomed diverse modes of participation but every production required considerable technical expertise. Even a cursory exploration of the various "Crank Dat" iterations available on YouTube provides evidence of many different media production tools and techniques. The most basic homemade dance videos required operation of a video camera, post-production preparation of compressed digital video, and a successful upload to YouTube. For some of the participants in "Crank Dat", the dance craze provided an impetus for their first media projects. This lively media culture is representative of a spirit of innovation that traverses hip-hop history."

As a former classroom teacher who worked with inner city and minority youth, Driscoll directs attention towards the technical proficency of these Hip Hop fans, to challenge assumptions that often position African-American males on the wrong side of the digital divide, assuming that they have limited capacity and interest for entering STEM subjects. Rather, he argues that educators need to better understand the ways that their cultural attachments to Hip Hop often motivate them to embrace new technologies and adopt new cultural practices, many of which could provide gateways into technical expertise.

Or consider what James Paul Gee (2007) tells us about the "affinity spaces" around on-line gaming:

" A portal like AoM [Age of Mythologies] Heaven, and the AoM space as a whole, allows people to achieve status, if they want it (and they may not), in many different ways. Different people can be good at different things or gain repute in a number of different ways. Of course, playing the game well can gain one status, but so can organizing forum parties, putting out guides, working to stop hackers from cheating in the multi-player game, posting to any of a number of different forums, or a great many other things."

Indeed, for Gee, the idea of multiple forms of participation and status are part of what makes these affinity spaces such rich environments for informal learning. Unlike schools, where everyone is expected to do (and be good at) the same things, these participatory cultures allow each person to set their own goals, learn at their own pace, come and go as they please, and yet they are also motivated by the responses of others, often spending more time engaged with the activities because of a sense of responsibility to their guild or fandom. They enable a ballance between self-expression and collaborative learning which may be the sweet spot for DIY learning.

These examples represent four very different communities, each with their own governing assumptions about what it means to participate and about what kinds of cultural practices and identities are meaningful. Yet, all of them embody the pedagogical principles I have identified within participatory culture:

"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." (Jenkins et al, 2006)

CHALLENGING THE "LEARNING 2.0" FORMULATION

There has been a growing tendency to describe the application of these participatory culture principles to the classroom as "education 2.0" and as we do so, to take the highly visible corporate "web 2.0" portals not simply as our ideal model, but also as the source for these new participatory practices. Look at the way Brown and Adler's (2008) influential formulation of "Learning 2.0" ascribes agency to corporate platforms and technologies rather than to communities of participants:

"The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people. New kinds of online resources-- such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities-- have allowed people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multple modes of learning."

The DIY ethos, which emerged as a critique of consumer culture and a celebration of making things ourselves, is being transformed into a new form of consumer culture, a product or service that is sold to us by media companies rather than something that emerged from grassroots practices.

For this reason, I want to hold onto a distinction between participatory cultures, which may or may not engaged with commercial portals, and Web 2.0, which refers specifically to a set of commercial practices that seek to capture and harness the creative energies and collective intelligences of their users. "Web 2.0" is not a theory of pedagogy; it's a business model. Unlike projects like Wikipedia that have emerged from nonprofit organizations, the Open Courseware movement from educational institutions, and the Free Software movement from voluntary and unpaid affiliations, the Web 2.0 companies follow a commercial imperative, however much they may also wish to facilitate the needs and interests of their consumer base. The more time we spend interacting with Facebook, YouTube, or Live Journal, the clearer it becomes that there are real gaps between the interests of management and consumers. Academic theorists (Terranova,2004; Green and Jenkins, 2009) have offered cogent critiques of what they describe as the "free labor" provided by those who chose to contribute their time and effort to creating content which can be shared through such sites, while consumers and fans have offered their own blistering responses to shifts in the terms of service which devalue their contributions or claim ownership over the content they produced. Many Web 2.0 sites provide far less scaffolding and mentorship than offered by more grassroots forms of participatory culture. Despite a rhetoric of collaboration and community, they often still conceive of their users as autonomous individuals whose primary relationship is to the company that provides them services and not to each other. There is a real danger in mapping the Web 2.0 business model onto educational practices, thus seeing students as "consumers" rather than "participants" within the educational process.

Helping Teachers Learn About New Media Practices (Part Two)

Often, the teaching of the new media literacies is understood as either the domain of a specific digital specialist or as the work of language arts or arts instructors. Yet you offer many examples of how and why this approach should impact other disciplinary domains. Why should these skills and knowledge be integrated across the curriculum?

Erin:

If you look at these three words, New + Media + Literacies ...there are different ways to interpret them. You could read it as "New Media" Literacies or "New" Media Literacies. Either way, there is no wrong answer.

"New" Media Literacies does build upon the media literacy movement where we move from being empowered by media to critically analyze the media we consume through asking important reflective questions to now being producers of media ourselves. And in this new role as producer, there are new questions to ask and new ways to think and act on how to be an integral part of shaping and contributing my perception of the world.

But also, "New Media" Literacies is a new form of literacy and helps teachers understand that our students are reading and writing in new ways. Reading and writing was once relegated to reading books and writing papers, but now we write into meaning through new media such as video, audio or even construction of physical objects.

A possible hypothesis is that the educational system has not caught up with the shifting landscape of participatory culture where there are new ways to read, write, and compute numbers.

PAST PRESENT

Reading a Book Reading a Transmedia Story

Writing Alone Networked Writing

Memorizing Formulas Gaming as Problem Solving

This shift changes the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement where creativity and active participation are the hallmark. And it makes it increasingly important to understand and be competent in the skills of citizenship, art, and expression of social connectivity. These are the skills identified in our white paper as the New Media Literacies and ones we need to foster as we think about education.

We are in a paradigm shift in the classroom where educators need to work in the gap between life and school. You only have to observe your students outside of the classroom for a few hours to see that they are immersed in this digital culture. This is not a "special treat if they're good" sort of immersion but a complete shift. It's their way of life. Incorporating participatory practices into the classroom -- such as remixing, Wikipedia, SNS, or even mobile -- allows for a blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning and harnesses the power of digital technologies for students to reflect on the participatory culture that they live in.

This provides teachers an opportunity to offer learning objectives in their classrooms in a new way, while at the same time offering students opportunities to read and write their cultural practices that are central to their own everyday experience.

You point to a kind of generation gap around Wikipedia where students love it and teachers are wary. What do you see as meaningful steps forward in addressing these different perceptions of the value of Wikipedia? Are there examples of teachers who are effectively integrating Wikipedia into their teaching?

Jessica:

A first step is for our educational community to view Wikipedia as a collaborative learning environment. At first glance Wikipedia is perceived as simply an online encyclopedia--it's a product. Our community should look beyond the surface and focus on Wikipedia as a venue for contributing, editing and the sharing of one's expertise. For me, educators can learn a lot by creating low-risk environments in which making mistakes and struggling to come to an answer are the norm. Although someone can delete my additions to a Wikipedia entry, I can engage in a conversation around why this happened. I am part of a larger discussion around the creation and sharing of knowledge rather than being told I am incorrect and here is the right answer. Engaging a student can depend on whether or not she believes her input matters. Yet an engaged student must also be open to negotiation, revision, and change as these are inherent to the learning process. I learn from my mistakes just as I learn from my accomplishments.

I also think that Wikipedia should not be banned in schools (although there are issues of determining the appropriateness of content). I think it is an excellent starting point for research--as long as both teachers and students understand its strengths and weaknesses. And this means that all teachers need to teach what it means to research something in their disciplines. The act of researching is an act of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and assessing information as well as its source. These skills are vital to our digital media age and get at the heart of bias, perspective, objectivity/subjectivity.

Erin:

The first meaningful step to recommend is for school administrators and teachers to better understand Wikipedia's practice and the importance of the new media literacies that are gained in its practice.

Wikipedia was a predominant activity we encouraged in NML's pilot studies last year. However, this activity had numerous road-blocks. We had one teacher comment, "When I've looked at pages in Wikipedia, I've found that some are not very accurate or complete. I'll use it in my classroom, when they go in and fix it." This shows that we need to help teachers understand that "they" is the community of users and that community could include the teacher and her students. We also found that Wikipedia was often blocked at the schools we piloted our resources in, and had to go to measures to get it unblocked in order to use it for the class period.

One of the most valuable segments of Wikipedia's use was observing Global Kids' Media Masters program create the Prospect Heights Campus Wikipedia Project, which spanned five weeks. The Wikipedia page about the Prospect Heights Campus was a place for students to document information about the campus, its schools, history, and whatever else the students decided was important to include in an entry - and a place for them to do so publicly and neutrally. There are many examples of a structured learning environment of wikis or wiki pages being created; however, Global Kids chose to use Wikipedia and not develop a pbwiki or something similar for just their group of students to view.

Trying to replicate Wikipedia through pbwiki, or some other wiki software, certainly has its benefits. It is what might be termed a "walled garden" approach, allowing students to tinker with wiki software and yet not be exposed to the potentially disruptive larger Internet. However, choosing a walled garden approach also has many costs. Students who already use the internet know very well what is actually "out there," and the walled garden runs the risk of losing their interest - because, after all, a walled garden isn't the "real world." Even if students are unfamiliar with the Internet, using a walled garden approach precludes the possibility of emergent learning.

If a teacher develops a project in a walled garden, that is where it stays. It cannot become part of the information ecology of the web, and students cannot thereby learn about community participation. Nor can they be convinced that their work has any greater significance than "something I had to do to get a grade." They know very well that their work will never receive any attention from people who are not in their class.

In Global Kids' Media Masters class, however, the students were energized by the knowledge that 1) they were filling a real need on Wikipedia, and 2) their work was going to become part of the great online knowledge base. The students prepared their page, but when it came time to copy and paste it into Wikipedia, they were nervous, excited, and thrilled. The act of pushing the "submit" button - that is, the act of submitting their classwork to their teacher - was suddenly pregnant with significance. They weren't just turning in homework. They were putting themselves out there and helping shape the way the public would see their high school - would see them.

You make a strong case for the value of remix practices for learning, yet many teachers are stuck back at square one, expressing concerns about plagerism and wondering whether remix really does foster creativity. How can you speak to this long-standing concern of educators? Are they wrong to worry about issues of ownership and authorship in the new digital age or are there important differences between remix and plagerism?

Erin:

Right now, technology, new social norms and economics are all going through radical change and history has shown that at this point of convergence, moral structures break down and need to be re-built (E. P. Thompson).

It's a known fact that probably every teacher reading this has seen in the classroom a form of plagiarism facilitated by digital media. Existing laws on copyright may not match social norms and this crossroads is predicated even more with the rise of remix culture and the ability to meaningfully sample content and create new pieces of work. Shephard Fairey's Hope poster of Barack Obama is a perfect example of one of the most powerful images ever created that captured the moment of political change being foreground now with the legal battle of messiness where people are taking sides as to where they stand on Fair Use. Even artists are at a crossroads.

Through all of this though - teens are still remixing. You only have to go to YouTube to see the latest remix posted. Should we leave our students alone to wade through this muckiness themselves or is it our responsibility to mentor them in their process?

Encouraging remix in the classroom provides new venues of learning and interacting with our students. Teachers can guide youth to better reflect on these new forms of creation and know the difference between plagiarism and appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content. We can help students to support their argument for their creative expression and identify other works that inspired them during their process. We can provide opportunities to explore how we author new creations with regards to point of view, character, themes, etc. and give practice to understanding copyright protection and a broader sense of authorial responsibility.

So yes, there is concern for this but the question to ask yourself is, "Are you going to blame new media as the problem or are you going to look to it as a possible solution?" Perhaps this moment in history gives us pause to rethink what are the projects we ask of our students to do? Is an essay the only way your learning objective can be met? Are their other creative practices that provide new forms of reflection and learning?

Your book's contributors involve both academic researchers and practicing educators. What do you see as the most important points or contact or divergence between the ways these two contributors approached the concerns the book raises?

Jessica:

Classroom teachers are often voicing their concerns about a lack of opportunity to sit down with their colleagues and discuss important issues; time is not allocated for them to be part of a learning community. I have had similar experiences as a professor in academia. In both realms, there is a tendency to work extremely hard in isolation. My hope is that this book can serve as a conduit for academic researchers and practicing educators to talk about their findings, their experiences, and their hopes for new and different teaching and learning environments. We must remember that there is always something to learn about our disciplines by looking outside of them.

What I find wonderful about the contributors to the book is that researchers like danah boyd would welcome an opportunity to sit down with classroom teachers and talk about the ethics of social networks and what it means to be part of a network, just as English teacher Amy Crawford would jump at a chance to talk to researchers about her students as textual borrowers--as remixers and media makers in her classroom. There are many points of interest here and, to be frank, we must be open to these kinds of trans-academic connections and discussions because we need each other as allies to move forward in rethinking learning, literacy, and technology integration.

Much of the book tries to help teachers overcome their anxieties about working with new media technologies and practices. So, let me ask, which concerns do you think are valid? Where should teachers and schools go slowly in embracing these new media?

Maryanne:

With regard to embracing technology, I think that teachers need think through the consequences of implementing any innovation. For example if a teacher hosts a blog where students post satiric pieces about the school, the administration might feel that some of the postings conflict with the image of the school they wish to project to the community. In any social network there are going to be "in-house" jokes that might puzzle or even offend outsiders. Teachers need to take a clear look at new media practices and consider how they will change when they are employed in school settings. With the ability to broadcast thoughts, ideas and products, also comes the responsibility for considering who the audience will be and how they might respond.

Any time a teacher is asking students to perform activities in a virtual environment, be it posting on a website, or interacting in an immersive setting, she must consider her duties to guide, protect and mentor her students. Teacher need to think the way they do when they take students on field trips and make clear guidelines regarding their expectations. It is not foolish to be cautious; it would only be foolish to miss out on incredible opportunities for learning simply because teachers were not willing to plan and prepare for the excursion.

Jessica:

Technology can be a scary proposition for some teachers. For both novice and veteran technology users, integrating this element into their curriculum and feeling the need to be knowledgeable can be intimidating and anxiety inducing. Additionally, teachers rarely have time to pursue their own professional development (e.g. PD that isn't mandated by the school/district), which would allow them to bring something new to their curriculum. The anxiety comes from feeling like there is too much technology to learn, too little time to learn it, and not enough of the right support from employers to really grapple with it. One option is to utilize the knowledge of the classroom: no one knows everything about technology so who knows how to do what? Is there an opportunity for students, parents, or community members to step up in a technological role? Even though this shift in thinking may challenge our notions of authority and expertise within a classroom, it opens up the possibility to create a community of learners made up of both teachers and students working toward a common goal.

Since we know that time and anxiety are key issues for teachers, then let's change the culture of professional development: let's view PD not as a one-day affair with an "expert" but as an ongoing project with a group of educators dedicated to learning, creating, discussing, experimenting, and reflecting on their philosophy of technology and its integration.

You have created this book to spark conversations with teachers. What steps have you taken to continue this dialogue once the book is published?

Jessica:

It seemed illogical to invite classroom teachers to join a discussion without offering an online space to help promote and nurture such a discussion. I created this social network (http://teachingtechsavvykids.com) in the hopes that both researchers and practicing educators could connect and discuss issues important to them as well as the issues the book addresses. I view the site as a way to collaborate, share stories of hope, frustration, and change, and tackle some of the tough questions of this profound moment. Ann Lauriks, a middle school counselor who contributed to the book, has already promised to write another piece to share with the new online community. In addition, some of the researchers who contributed to the book along with other colleagues have expressed interest in sharing their ideas and personal experiences within this space. I am excited to see the enthusiasm and ongoing commitment to continue this discussion and collaboration and I hope all educators will feel inclined to participate.

Maryanne Berry enjoys a high school teaching career that has spanned a

quarter of a century. The longer she teaches, the more fascinated she

becomes with the ways young people learn. She is currently a doctoral

candidate in the Graduate School of Education at U.C. Berkeley

Phil Halpern is the lead teacher of Communication Arts and Sciences, a

small school within Berkeley High School, where he teaches a variety of

English and communications classes. He traces his interest in media

education to the weekly television news program he helped produce while in

high school back in the earliest days of videotape.

Erin B. Reilly is the research director for Project New Media Literacies

first at MIT and now at USC. She is a recognized expert in the design and

development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered

by virtual learning and new media applications, known best for her work

with women and girls in Zoey's Room.

Jessica K. Parker is currently an assistant professor at Sonoma State

University, and she studies how secondary schools integrate multimedia

literacy into academic literacy learning. She has taught middle school,

high school, and college students for over a decade and has also created

and taught professional development courses for teachers.

Helping Teachers Learn About New Media Practices (Part One)

Jessica K. Parker's new book, Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom, Grades 5-12 manages to be visionary and pragmatic in equal measures. Drawing heavily on the work done by researchers affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiatives, especially the Digital Youth Project, the book offers educators, especially classroom teachers, new ways of understanding young people's online lives and how the resources of new media and participatory culture can be effectively integrated into their pedagogical practices. The book brings together smart people -- researchers, classroom teachers alike -- to talk through the implications of our present moment of media changes on the kinds of learning which are taking place in school. The authors move deftly from considering the big picture to explaining specific activities which might be deployed in the classroom. I was proud to see some discussion of the work we've been doing through Project New Media Literacies sprinkled throughout the book and not simply because our Research Director, Erin Reilly, has contributed an essay on learning through remixing. I am using the release of the book this week as an excuse to bring together several key contributors to the volume, including Reilly and the book's editor Parker, for a conversation about the ways that this new research is challenging some of the assumptions that govern how teachers and administrators often respond to the potentials of new media and learning. And while you are at it, check out this rich website developed to provide teachers with resources around the book.

Can you give me a sense of your goals for this book? In some ways, it is translating or popularizing insights from the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning research for an audience of teachers. What do you see as the value of this research for impacting the decisions which teachers make everyday in the classroom, given, as you note, the primary focus of this research was on informal learning outside the classroom?

Jessica:

With this book, I wanted to invite educators, specifically classroom teachers, into this larger discussion of digital media and learning (DML). I felt that if I wrote a book for teachers my invitation needed to connote, "I trust you. Here is something that I want to share with you. I value your opinion and your insights." In the DML community, there is a sense that this current moment is a defining one. It is a profound moment. And I don't think my collective academic community has reached out enough to classroom teachers to say, "Join us in this moment." Join us--even though we may exist as researchers, educators, and mentors in different learning environments--join us as we analyze these important educational concepts and discuss how learning, literacy and knowledge creation and sharing are changing. Changing the culture of learning within schools starts with teachers.

I wanted to share this research with classroom teachers and listen to their responses. And yet, I realize that the book that I created with 28 collaborators will force educators to shift their perspective of learning by going beyond a normative understanding of formal education. I don't think this discussion will be an easy one: in fact, this book might take readers out of their comfort zones. And that is why it was important for me to "invite" teachers into this discussion. We desperately need this kind of philosophical discussion. In order to do this, I followed in the footsteps of the MacArthur Foundation and wrote a book that focuses on "learning" rather than "education" or "schooling." We must take a different angle on learning in order to see beyond the constraints of our own educational system.

I also wanted to avoid framing the book as a teacher's guide with a focus on one single subject with cut-and-paste activities for the classroom. This kind of thinking seems to promote an educational system devoid of curricular connections and deep participatory learning, and lacks application to everyday life. I framed the book as a philosophical discussion regarding learning in the 21st century in the hopes that we could take a step back from the everyday realities of the classroom and reflect on what it means to be an educator in these changing times. I know too well the teacher-mode of the treadmill, where from August to June I would run from unit to unit and chapter to chapter and miss making connections between topics, across disciplines or even daily lessons. We need to stop running on our treadmills and start asking serious questions about what it means to learn, to be literate, and to know something in a mediated culture.

In terms of the value of the research from the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative, it is an excellent opportunity for teachers to explore pioneering research in this emerging field. Additionally, I don't buy into the notion that informal learning and formal learning are completely separate entities that have no bearing on another. I realize that they usually exist in separate settings and have different properties, but as a teacher and a learner, I have always viewed them as fluid. I don't want to draw a line in the sand and promote one over the other or frame our discussions as an either/or issue; in fact, I advocate that we should learn, reflect on, and analyze both settings. This can only make us better teachers and--most importantly--better learners.

You frame the book around issues of what learning, literacy, and knowledge mean in the 21st century. While it is clear you want educators to continue to ponder these issues, you also clearly have some thoughts that guide this book towards certain answers. What do you know about these concepts at the end of the process of writing this book that you did not know before?

Jessica:

In my current work with pre-service and in-service teachers in Northern California, when I introduce the topic of reassessing learning, literacy and knowledge, it takes more than just reading research to unpack these issues. It takes more than just having a class discussion; it takes more than just testing out an idea in their own classroom. Analyzing and re-visioning these core educational concepts takes a lot of effort and it is really a combination of factors that allow teachers to really grapple with these topics: reading, discussing, experimenting and testing out ideas in their classrooms, and then coming back to our graduate class and reflecting and getting feedback from peers. This is a process that needs to be woven into the daily life of teachers--and it's hard to create time and space to accomplish this. We have to know ourselves as teachers and be willing to analyze our own philosophies of education. It's not an easy road to take but it is required if we are to rethink school-based learning.

Many teachers fear that new media practices -- such as texting - leave students less literate. Yet, your book challenges this presumption. How do you see new media practices changing the range of expressive opportunities available to students?

Maryanne:

With regard to new media practices making youth less literate, it's a version of an old argument that surfaces every time there's a new wave of practice. Each new wave of media practices encounters resistance. Literary scholar, Nina Baym (2006), chronicles magazine and journal articles from the early 1800's in which editors asserted the need for reviewers to exercise surveillance and provide direction to the newly literate masses who had taken up the habit of reading fiction. Novels were dangerous! There was a similar kind of backlash in response to comic books. If anyone had taken that criticism seriously we would never have the incredible array of graphic novels we enjoy today.

As Henry Jenkins has pointed out, the critical change in the latest of the new literacies is that of convergence. The problem with "either/or" thinking with regard to traditional and digital literacy is that it fails to capture the experiences of youth. The child who is reading a novel from a traditional text, or listening to it on her ipod, downloading it onto her e-book, and visiting a website where she can play a game as a character from the book, participate in a forum discussion, and answer challenge questions, is transforming the practices of reading and writing. The sad fact is that she is not allowed to bring her e-book to school, even though some of her classmates wear outfits that cost more than her Kindle. She only sees a computer when her teacher beats out the thirty other teachers attempting to sign-up for the school's only computer lab on Wednesday, after lunch. Though at home she rarely writes with a pen, during the school day it is the only tool she is allowed to use in most of her classes. Even her cell phone must be kept in her locker or it will be confiscated.

Phil:

Students express themselves through a variety of media. Kids are writing independently more now than they have since I started teaching in1992. What is new is the range of digital communication modalities that kids are adopting with zeal and creativity. That they are doing so using communication tools that are new to all of us and somewhat foreign to many teachers is immaterial. They are practicing the skills we teachers value on a daily basis. When teachers build on students' passion, they are capitalizing on an opportunity to help kids deepen both their use of communication tools and their understanding of (hopefully) relevant course content.

You note that teachers often want to be told how they can use specific technologies in their classes. But you argue that this is not an adequate approach to the potentials and challenges of new media. Explain.

Erin:

When technology was first being used in the classroom, everyone involved in the process (from the developers to the school administrators, to the teachers working with the students) tried to replicate one to one what was already happening in the classroom. But we learned that this is the wrong approach. Integrating technology into the classroom provides new practices and scenarios that don't exist when technology is not there.

On top of that, technology moves at such a rapid pace that to introduce teachers to specific technologies to use in the classroom would be doing them an injustice in better understanding how to incorporate new practices in the classroom. If teachers only learned how to use specific types of tools, they would not be prepared to adapt and negotiate new spaces and new innovations that continuously happen in this rich media landscape.

No one technology is the savior for the classroom. It's not about asking ourselves what technology should I be using but instead we should be asking ourselves, "What practices enable my learning objectives?" This shift in question will encourage teachers to not be betrothed to a tool but instead encourage acquiring the new ways of thinking and doing through participating in new forms of practices.

New Media Literacies (NML) is working with the state of New Hampshire on a project called the Early Adopters' Network. This is a group of teachers from schools across New Hampshire who we collaborate with through NML's Community to better understand our pedagogical approach and try new methods and tools to increase collaboration among educators. One of the participating New Hampshire educators recently wrote us a reflection on her experience, "No longer am I looking to transfer some tech skill for use of an application but facilitating thoughts and skills through them. It's funny, because I always thought I did this, but the reality was my model basically encouraged to seek support from a classmate. The activities and lessons themselves were not thought-provoking or designed to encourage collaboration."

Though I don't endorse teaching teachers specific technologies, I think its important to provide ample time during each week to play. Play is one of the new media literacies, and we define it as the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving. What about setting up a digital tool playground for your school as part of your teachers' professional development and as a way for students to share their expertise with the adults in their lives? This would provide a new space for teachers and students to come together wearing different hats than what we see in the classroom. In an unstructured format, this digital playground would allow teachers and students to collaborate in new ways and make visible the value of the different expertise available right in their own school.

This is messiness at its best where teachers and students struggle together to better understand the social and cultural competencies and in a place where one isn't judged on outcome but on participation, teachers and students would have time to practice and reflect on what it means to be part of this networked world.

Jessica:

To reinforce what Erin said it isn't as easy as insert technology, out comes student learning. The excitement, sleekness, and allure of contemporary technology should not suggest that educators only have to incorporate laptops and webcams into their classrooms for students to magically acquire technical skills and understand academic concepts. We need an educational mindset that views technology as more than a mere tool--using technology in a classroom is in fact an application of a philosophy of learning. It is possible to incorporate digital media in a way that simply reproduces a particular kind of knowledge, a static notion of student identity, and a rigid understanding of teacher-student relationships. Viewing technology as both a philosophical issue and pedagogical practice offers teachers a way to avoid an overly deterministic approach to integrating technology.

Maryanne:

As a classroom teacher myself, I do not think that teachers want "canned" products that they can only employ in a particular way. Rather, they want tools and environments that can be used to extend and support the worlds they are creating in their classrooms. Excellent teaching involves a degree of risk and sadly today there are many constraints on teachers that keep them from trying anything new. Being too cautious can cause a teacher to miss the wave of enthusiasm that can generate real engagement in learning. I think that teachers need to look at how students use particular tools, how they participate in particular practices, how they act in particular virtual environments and then ask themselves, 'how can I use this to forward the subject I teach?'

I saw how much my students enjoyed instant messaging when it first became available to them and so I devised a project through which students used IM to discuss literature. The point is to try and play with the forms, bend the rules to serve learning in school. I made strict guidelines about IM-ing. I didn't want the conversations to be superficial. Students had to support their ideas with quotes from the text. There is a way of balancing the excitement of a new practice with the rigor demanded by a particular discipline.

With regard to specific uses of technology in classrooms we should be wary of practices that standardize student investigation and expression of knowledge. What the five-paragraph essay has done for writing, the powerpoint has done for presentations. Standardization of practices kills innovation as well as what we used to call "voice" in writing. While we want to introduce practices that help students organize their thinking, we also want to ensure that students will have opportunities to exercise agency in their own educations. I worry about this with regard to virtual worlds. Quests and adventures could be very exciting narratives through which students might learn all kinds of subjects, but there also needs to be studios and stages, places where young people can determine how to use the environments.

After an initial surge of interest, many schools have started to dismiss virtual worlds such as Second Life as potential distractions from the learning process. What was missed in this first wave of experimentation with virtual worlds for education? How valuable are such immersive experiences for learning? Which educational groups have been most effective at deploying virtual worlds?

Maryanne:

Of the reading I've done, the most interesting work has been in the field of medicine, not only with technical training but through experiments with virtual patients. Studies indicate that pre-service health care professionals respond to virtual patients as they would to actual ones--they have physical responses of anxiety and empathy when interacting with virtual patients.

With regard to virtual worlds, I think we will learn important lessons from Second Life. Before the recession there were 50+ virtual worlds emerging. I'm hopeful that we'll see lots of innovation in the development of immersive environments. What I envision happening is that schools and perhaps individual teachers will have access to virtual environments that they will be able to customize for their own uses. In the meantime, teachers should investigate virtual environments of all kinds, but especially immersive ones in order to experience how their literacy practices change when one dons an avatar. In Second Life, a teacher could join the very large and active education group and participate in virtual conferences and programs, in order to familiarize themselves with the possibilities. Teachers can visit http://simteach.com to get started.

Maryanne Berry enjoys a high school teaching career that has spanned a

quarter of a century. The longer she teaches, the more fascinated she

becomes with the ways young people learn. She is currently a doctoral

candidate in the Graduate School of Education at U.C. Berkeley

Phil Halpern is the lead teacher of Communication Arts and Sciences, a

small school within Berkeley High School, where he teaches a variety of

English and communications classes. He traces his interest in media

education to the weekly television news program he helped produce while in

high school back in the earliest days of videotape.

Erin B. Reilly is the research director for Project New Media Literacies

first at MIT and now at USC. She is a recognized expert in the design and

development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered

by virtual learning and new media applications, known best for her work

with women and girls in Zoey's Room.

Jessica K. Parker is currently an assistant professor at Sonoma State

University, and she studies how secondary schools integrate multimedia

literacy into academic literacy learning. She has taught middle school,

high school, and college students for over a decade and has also created

and taught professional development courses for teachers.

Thinkers Welcome: New Resources on Participatory Culture and Learning

Today, I want to flag for you some exciting online resources which emerged from two conferences on new media and education which I attended and participated in earlier this semester. The first is the TEDxNYED conference, which brought together some of the top thinkers about new technology, learning, and civic media, for an intensive one day session. Speakers included Amy Bruckman, Andy Carvin, Jeff Jarvis, Neeru Khosla, Lawrence Lessig, Jay Rosen, George Siemens, Mike Wesch, David Wiley, and others. There was something about speaking as part of an "A-Team" of speakers -- you bring your best work to the game -- and so each talk was surprising, engaging, informative, and mind-blowing. The TED podcasts are all gems and you can see this set of talks here. They just went up over the weekend. Since this is my blog, I am claiming the right to post my own video here. This talk emerged from some of the work I've launched since coming to USC on participatory culture and the public sphere. I've assembled a team of wickedly smart PhD candidates from Annenberg and the Cinema School who meet with me every week to try to identify and interprete case studies where our involvements as fans and gamers spill over into forms of public advocacy and activism. I've already showcased some of this work on the blog in the past and you will be seeing more in the months ahead.

As for the other podcasts, I wanted to flag two in particular which were of special interest to me because they represent the voices of classroom teachers who are trying to translate the abstract insights about new media and learning into day to day interactions with students on the ground. Chris Lehmann is the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia and Dan Meyer teaches high school math outside of Santa Cruz, California. Whenever academics gather to talk about education, there's some tendency to knock teachers. Or at least teachers become "collateral damage" in our critiques of educational institutions and practices, as if they were simply agents of the structures in which they serve. Yet, in fact, there are many greater teachers, librarians, and other educators out there who "get it," who have a grasp of the significance of the cultural and technological changes we are describing, and why they matter to young people. It was great to see their voices represented at the TEDx conference and I am happy to share those talks here.

I was honored to be asked to be the Conference Chair for the first MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Conference and to be able to propose "Diversifying Participation" as the main theme for the event. Diversifying Participation brought together several hundred educators, scholars, activists, community leaders, and journalists to share their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities participatory culture represents in the lives of young people. Our goal was in part to push the entire DML community to grapple more directly with the importance of enabling and promoting diversity within participatory culture. The plenary sessions of the conference have also recently been posted on line and may give you some sense of the event if you were unable to attend.

Digital Media and Learning Conference 2010 Introduction and Opening Keynote from Shane Depner on Vimeo.

Introduction: David Theo Goldberg, Connie Yowell and Henry Jenkins (Conference Chair)

Opening Keynote: "Living on the Digital Margins: How Black and Latino Youth are Remaking the Participation Gap" S. Craig Watkins

Digital Media and Learning Conference 2010 Plenary Panel from Shane Depner on Vimeo.

Digital Media and Learning: The State of the Field

Session Chair: Heather A Horst

Presenters: Amanda Lenhart, Brigid Barron, Eszter Hargittai, Joe Kahne, Kevin Leander and Lynn Schofield Clark

Discussion Moderator: Mimi Ito

Digital Media and Learning Conference 2010 Closing Keynote and Closing Remarks from Shane Depner on Vimeo.

Closing Keynote: "Youthful Participation - what have we learned, what shall we ask next?" Sonia Livingstone

Closing Remarks: Henry Jenkins

By the way, I've gotten some questions about my discussion of 19th century zine publishing. My key source is: Paula Petrik. "The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1870-1886," in Elliot West and Paula Petrik (eds.) Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. (Kansas City: U of Kansas P, 1992)

Finally, for those of you who heard about the great webinar which Project New Media Literacies ran last week on Collective Intelligence and Education, you can listen to a recording here. We will be running monthly events through the summer centered on the different skills identified in my MacArthur white paper. You should join us for some of the future sessions. It's a great way for us to engage with educators -- both classroom teachers and teachers in training -- who want to integrate the new media literacies into their pedagogical practice.

Transmedia Generation

Participatory culture is a global phenomenon. Young people all over the world are embracing the expressive and distribution resources of the computer to create and share their own cultural materials with each other. In countries all over the planet, they are mixing together local traditions of folk culture with the now globally accessible forms of digital expression in ways which could not have been imagined by previous generations. And as they do so, educators and parents are starting to recognize these creative communities as sites of informal learning which are transforming the ways these teens see themselves and the world. In every country, it is different. In every country, it is the same. I was delighted to hear recently from a young scholar, Felipe G. Gil, from Sevilla, Spain, who shared with me some of his thoughts about new media literacy and education. In particular, he wanted me to read this account of his young cousin, whose filmmaking activities he had come to understand in relation to some of my writings. I am delighted to reproduce this blog post, originally written in Spanish, here for my readers in hopes that it may spark other international reactions around these important topics. Gil is justly proud of the range of different kinds of media productions this young man engages with in the course of his everyday life, and has sought ways to place them in a larger context.

Transmedia Generation

by Felipe G. Gil

It's Christmas. A family is gathered around a large table set for sixteen. At one end sits the grandfather. At the other, one of his grandkids, Pep. While his parents, cousins and aunts and uncles start clearing up, Pep continues immersed in dissecting a piece of fruit with a surgeon's precision. Suddenly, one of his cousins goes up to him and asks «What are you doing, Pep?» and he answers easily: «peeling a mandarin». What he has done is slice the peel in such a way that it forms a kind of orange underpants. What he is doing without realizing it is reinventing everyday life.

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.

Pep is 13 years old, he lives in Tarragona, Catalonia, and is in his second year of secondary school. In the afternoons, he goes to his theatre group. He loves dinosaurs, videogames and watching videos on You Tube. He doesn't have an Internet connection at home, but there is one in his dad's furniture store. He doesn't have a computer of his own either: he shares a laptop with his parents and his younger sister. Since he was little, he has been fascinated by any audiovisual gadget that has come his way, using all of them to do what his generation is best at: play.

Play is one of the ways we learn, and during a period of reskilling and reorientation, such play may be much more important than it seems at first glance.

In the current educational system in Spain, only a few Language and Literature teaching units analyze the media. The Media Studies subjects that used to be in the secondary and upper secondary school syllabus are no longer taught. There is increasing talk of Education 2.0 and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) but the politicians in charge of Education have paradoxically failed to notice that digital and audiovisual literacy is, to paraphrase author and academic Gutierrez-Martín, more than just a mouse and a keyboard. Fortunately, an expanded form of education is starting to emerge. As "We TV" claims, perhaps we are fulfilling the utopia of the caméra-stylo and people are transforming video cameras (and similar devices) into the writing implements of the future. So why shouldn't a You Tube video be seen as a syntagm to be analysed in Language and Literature classes?

The "Angry German Kid" remix

Audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture.

Pep has a You Tube channel. One of the first videos he uploaded is «a remix of the popular "Angry German Kid" video».

The curious thing about this video is that most people thought it was made by the boy's father, who wanted to capture his son's rage as he played computer games... but it turned out to be a satire by a kid who was probably much more intelligent than the millions of viewers who laughed at his supposed antics (for an analysis in Spanish, see Soitu.es "El niño loco alemán: la verdad tras el mito".)

More and more literacy experts are recognizing that enacting, reciting, and appropriating elements from preexisting stories is a valuable and organic part of the process by which children develop cultural literacy.

This phenomenon is paradigmatic of the age of convergence: one day, somebody uploaded a video with certain characteristics that led others to forward it, discuss it and, above all, remix it. Thousands of users downloaded the original video and created their own versions of it. One of these is Pep's. His remix shows his synchronization and scripting skills, but, in addition, he has taken it into familiar territory (the videogame Super Mario Bros) and added two nuances: the sound of the game, and of a supposed porn film that suddenly crops up at one point. The voice in the video is Pep's own imitation of heavy breathing. Pep thus takes three media sources and converges them into a new one: the "Angry German Kid" video, Super Mario Bros and a porn film.

Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each one of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday life.

As Pep himself explains in the interview, he had to work out how to hack the You Tube video (which currently doesn't have a download option), how to load it into a video editing program (he uses Windows Movie Maker), how to synchronize the subtitles, how to export the video, how to create his own You Tube account, and how to upload his video. Given this whole process, there is an inevitable question: what drives Pep to do it? The Internet has boosted social intelligence, with its main premise being to generate specific-interest communities. Pep had seen dozens of different remixes of the "Angry German Kid" video before he began to consider adding one of his own. Before he felt the urge to become part of what he was seeing.

Our traditional assumptions about expertise are breaking down or at least being transformed by the more open-ended processes of communication in cyberspace. The expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge, which an individual can master. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence, however, are open ended and profoundly interdisciplinary; they slip and slide across borders and draw on the combined knowledge of a more diverse community.

Jurassic Park, Lego version

Animation is another of Pep's hobbies. Somebody once explained the concept of persistence of vision to him. He soon grasped that moving images are actually the illusion of movement created when there is a rapid succession of still images. Since then, some of his small creations are linked to this.

Pep has made several animated videos using scenes or excerpts from Jurassic Park. This video is his own trailer for the third film in the series, and in the video he discusses in the interview he recreates one of his favourite scenes from the film.

New-media theorist Janet Murray has written of the "encyclopaedic capacity" of digital media, which she thinks will lead to new narrative forms as audiences seek information beyond the limits of the individual story.

Pep is part of the transmedia generation: he imitates a kind of popular form of creation (try doing a search for "Lego" on You Tube) in order to tell his own story in a video that mixes the original sound from a scene in Jurassic Park III with an animation he creates using his Lego pieces and other toys. Unfortunately, the mammoth audiovisual industry sees this as illegal divergence rather than cultural convergence. When will it be set down that a film's users can remix it to their heart's content?

Along with this industry aspect, this situation poses many questions: why do people have such a strong urge to tell their stories at this particular moment in history? can we develop a public dynamic for audiovisual culture that makes it legal to do what Pep has done, and encourages it? how can education open up in order to integrate children's need to be audiovisual "prosumers" (producer+consumer)?

The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but from writing over it, modding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feeding it back into the mainstream media.

Video-playing

One day, Pep discovered Spore, a game created by Will Wright, who is also behind the popular games The Sims and Sim City. Spore «allows the player to develop a species from a microscopic organism to its evolution into a complex animal, its emergence as a social, intelligent being, to its mastery of the planet and then finally to its ascension into space» (source: Wikipedia). In Spore, you have the choice of progressing in one of two ways: by cooperating with, or attacking, other civilisations. It is not only the specialist press that considers videogames to be the future-present of audiovisual narrative, given their capacity to integrate different stories in different media. Spore, for example, can be played online and allows users to show the community how their creatures have turned out, interact with other species, etc. And Spore has something in common with The Sims and Sim City: it is an alternative reality game.

ARG's (alternative reality games) are generating "players who feel more capable, more confident, more expressive, more engaged and more connected in their everyday lives". (...) "A good immersive game will show you game patterns in non-game places".

The hyperlink is in us

Pep is currently editing a documentary he made at the beach during the summer holidays, in which he asked people what holidays meant to them. He has also discovered Game Maker, a simple program that allows him to design his own videogames. And who knows what other discoveries he will make in the coming months and years. The difference between our time and other moments in history is that Pep is not alone. You probably know somebody like him. And this is why it's important to realize that we have to keep learning, together, to read and write audiovisually instead of taking it for granted that the millions of Euros the Spanish government is spending on putting computers in classrooms is automatically going to fix the problem. This is why we have to talk about the stories that we are passionate about, not business models. And this is why we should not think of art as something exclusive to artists, but as a game that we can all take part in. This is why we have to defend the remix as a cultural ecosystem.

In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. In an information society, children play with information.

There is a Pep inside each one of us, we just have to wake him up. We are the Transmedia generation.

This is an English translation of the article "Generación transmedia". All the quotes interwoven into this text are from Convergence Culture(2006), the book in which Henry Jenkins coins the term "transmedia storytelling" and insightfully describes the changes that are taking place in the way we communicate, think, read, etc.

Felipe G. Gil, 28, lives in Sevilla (Spain) and is a member of the ZEMOS98 team, a cultural initiative which does research into expanded education, digital communication and audiovisual culture. He writes for EMBED.at, a publication about embedded audiovisual supported by Festivalito, Movil Film Fest, Yerblues.net and ZEMOS98. He is also a Star Wars fan, a proam tennis player and a fanatic of the Libanese salad.

Is New Media Incompatable with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part One)

This week, I want to use my blog to call attention to a provocative recent book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. The authors of the book are Allen Collins, formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education, and Rich Halverson, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group. I have gotten to know Halverson through the Games, Learning, and Society conference, where I will be speaking this summer, so I was curious to look at this book when it came out. Given its authors, it's no surprise that the book is well informed about contemporary debates surrounding new media and education, and like the best books that have come out in the past year or so (including those by Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins, which I have profiled here), it strives to balance between the inflated hopes of early digital advocates and the inflated fears of those who would lock technology out of the classroom.

The authors offer sage new proposals for how we might deal with the apparent tensions and incompatabilities between education as it has been conducted in this country and the new media landscape as it is lived beyond the schoolhouse gates. But the real surprise and strength of the book is the ways they are able to situate the contemporary moment of media transition in relation to the several hundred year history of American education. In doing so, we avoid the breathless sense of the "unprecidented" or "Inevitable" consequences of new media and we also avoid the sense that things have always been this way and are thus not subject to change. They show how American education's processes, policies, and structures shifted over time in response to, for example, the industrial revolution and thus give us a context for imagining the gradual yet decisive transformation of schooling which will grow out of our current moment.

I was lucky enough to get Richard Halverson to agree to an interview about the book, which I will be running over the next two installments. Much of the interview focuses on the historical insights and how they contribute to putting the present into a greater perspective.

My father used to have the expression, "never let schooling get in the way of your education." You make a similar distinction across the book. In what ways is schooling getting in the way of more informal kinds of learning today and why?

Your dad's expression was really the state of the art once upon a time! The rise of institutional schooling in the 20th century- from preK to lifelong learning - can be seen as an effort to permanently weld schooling to learning. Beginning in the early 1900s, schools rooted in formal learning environments expanded to incorporate most areas informal learning as well (consider widely available classes on knitting, oenophilia and game design). On the other side, if you didn't go to a class from a recognized institution, if you didn't have some sort of certificate/credit statement of completing, then by the mid 20th century people came to question the legitimacy of your learning. This double-movement of expansion and legitimation came to define learning in terms of schooling.

The digital media era began to call this definition into question. The inertia of maturing institutions meant that early design decisions got locked in place, and it became more difficult for schools to change core assumptions. Digital media provides a path to personalizing and customizing learning that is often at odds with the batch processing model of, especially, K-12 schooling. This has meant that digitally literate young people have come to understand that there are at least two living channels for learning - 1) an institutional channel, and 2) a peer-driven, interest-driven, and unregulated digital media channel. The bifurcation of learning experiences for young people is bound to call the institutional identification of schooling and learning into question in the coming years. We don't yet know the consequences of how this shift will play out, but unless schools figure out how to adapt to digital media our children may end up hearing their fathers say "remember when we went to school for an education?"

You open the book with the provocative statement, "There are deep incompatibilities between technology and schooling." Explain. Are these incompatibilities insurmountable? If so, what is going to change -- schooling or technology?

Our statement about the incompatibilities of schooling and technology was stated with a historical perspective in mind. There was a time, in the early 20th century, when schools were developed in concert with the most innovative technological advances. Schools grew up around the mass publication and dissemination of texts and the widespread availability of writing tools. More importantly, schools took full advantage of cutting-edge bureaucratic technologies. Although we now look back in horror at the eagerness with which early schools adopted industrial production and efficiency models, these then-innovative ideas provided important organizational techniques for delivering services at the scale required for the successful implementation of public schooling. It is difficult for us to remember just how daunting the task of mass schooling was for early school designers, who grew up with personalized pedagogies, one-room schoolhouses and agricultural-based school calendars. Early public schools took full advantage of cutting-edge technologies to gain quick and sure foothold in the American psyche.

Schools that emerged at the advent of the 21st century were, in a sense, victims of the success of the prior generation's technology, and found it very difficult to adapt to new models of information production and exchange sparked by the Internet. Technological developments later in the century, such as computing and digital media, provided a level of individualization that ran directly counter to the mass-production technologies from earlier in the century. The new information technologies that have been easiest to adapt to prior industrial models, such as standardized testing, have made the most headway into established school practices. The technologies that called on schools to alter the basic classroom relationships between teaching, learning and curriculum have met with the most difficulty. The conclusion we want to draw is that schooling and technology are not necessarily opposed, but instead are necessarily related. When considered over time, we can see the effects of institutional resistance are a consequence of the embrace of prior technologies, rather than a simple opposition of stodgy old schools to hot new technologies.

Our current educational system emerged gradually overtime in response to the pressures of the industrial revolution. What parallels can we draw between the ways the current structure took shape and the prospects of transforming education to reflect the information/knowledge revolution your book describes?

We propose that the "seeds of a new system" are already emerging as pieces of an alternative approach to education. Home schooling, for example, provides a technologically-driven alternative to institutional schooling. Distance education and your idea of participatory cultures organized around a transmedia complex provide powerful alternative visions for education. The main difference between the eras is that the 1800s system seeds such as kindergarten, common schools, textbooks and land-grant universities, converged in an era without a monolithic institution already in place. It is a much different problem to define than to redefine an institution.

We feel that digital media will continue to spark alternative forms of learning environments and to push for change in traditional learning institutions. We must not underestimate the tenacity of our collective belief in the transformative power of education. Without a civil religion, common belief in education is as close as Americans come to a common creed. If we come to feel that digital media need to be a core aspect of the learning experience of our youth, then we will re-make our institutions accordingly. As a culture, though, we seem to carry ambiguous feelings about the value of digital media for learning. For every advocate who extols the potential of media production, programming, game design or social networking, concerned citizens highlight the dangers of porn, digital bullying, appropriate use policies, child predation and, of course, GTA. This split in the perception of the value of digital media and culture may, in the mean time, create a new kind of digital divide along cultural, rather than demographic, lines. Further, locating these alternative, digital-based approaches to learning outside of public education means that families with the interest and wherewithal will access new forms of learning will, and those who won't or can't will not.

Allan Collins is Professor Emeritus of education and social policy at

Northwestern University and formerly co-director of the U.S. Department

of Education's Center for Technology in Education.

Richard Halverson is an associate professor of educational leadership

and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is

co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.

Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About Digital Ethics (Part Two)

You found that adults and teens had different understandings of the identity play which occurs online. Where do these differences come from?

GOODPLAY: In the dialogues, we asked what the participants saw as acceptable, and what they viewed as the risks and benefits of experimenting with and exploring one's identity online. Both adults and teens cited the ability to test out an "ideal self" as one of the primary benefits of online identity play. The two groups also identified common risks associated with identity play, such as not being true to yourself or becoming disconnected from your offline self.

However, as you note, we did observe differences between adults and teens in their attitudes toward online identity play. In addition to testing out an ideal self, teens mentioned the opportunity to recreate themselves online. Adults, on the other hand, were more likely to celebrate the ability to accentuate existing aspects of their personality. To make sense of this difference, we consider the fact that adolescence is generally regarded as a critical period for identity formation. Adolescents begin for the first time to ask themselves: "Who am I?" While this question is never answered once and for all, identity tends to become more stable as people leave adolescence and enter adulthood. Therefore, it's perhaps not surprising that the adult participants focused on minor alterations of existing identity elements, whereas teens considered more dramatic self-transformations.

With respect to the perceived risks of online identity play, teens focused to a greater degree than adults on the danger of developing relationships on a false or inauthentic basis. Again, this finding isn't surprising if we consider its developmental underpinnings. Interpersonal relationships become central during adolescence; it's in the context of reciprocal, trusting relationships that adolescents explore their identities. The feedback they receive from friends plays an important role in their decisions to highlight certain personal attributes and hide others. It's likely due to the centrality of peer relationships that our teen participants were more concerned than the adults about building inauthentic friendships online.

Some have argued that the emerging generation cares much less about privacy than preceding generations. Did your research bear out this oft-cited claim?

GOODPLAY: To a certain extent, yes. We found that teens are generally more comfortable sharing their lives online than adults. Teen participants had considerably more to say than adults about the benefits of sharing personal information with others online. Teens discussed the opportunities that the Internet affords them to express themselves freely, to get things off their chests, and to learn about friends and have their friends learn about them. In contrast, adults focused to a greater degree on the privacy concerns related to such self-disclosure. That's not to say that teens didn't express any concern about their privacy online. On the contrary, they were quite clear about their desire for privacy from adults!

How so?

Well, consider this quote from one teen participant: "Let me make it clear, for me Facebook is for socialising with my friends and expanding my friend circle and when my parents add me as a friend it really pisses me off so when my dad joined Facebook and added me as a friend I rejected his request that instance because I knew he was doing that to keep a check on me. for Gods sake!!! Parents should let us have our own privacy and not meddle in between as it may hinder the relationship we share." All joking aside, what sentiments like this point to is that teens aren't unaware of privacy issues, they simply have different norms when it comes to negotiating them.

Youth are often described as "the Napster generation" and accused of having little respect for intellectual property. What did you discover about the way adults and youth thought about attribution and authorship?

COMMON SENSE MEDIA: This question is interesting because both youth and adults identified how difficult it was to know what constitutes "best practice" given that the norms of the industry are in flux and because of the varying messages that artists convey to the public about how to buy their albums and from where. For instance, there are bands who have allowed customers to download their albums for the amount the customer believes is appropriate, while other bands abhor this practice.

GLOBAL KIDS: We saw both teens and adults actually call for new business models that addressed problems with downloading and made sure that authors got their fair share, while at the same time a majority of youth indeed admitted to downloading, with some being conflicted and some not about doing so. On the other hand, teens seemed quite adamant about both wanting attribution for their own work and about the importance of giving attribution to others when relevant, likely because they're creating more online remixes/mash-ups etc. than adults.

GOODPLAY: Interestingly, while a lot of teens were adamant about wanting attribution for their own work and giving attribution to others, fewer seemed to connect this to the issue of illegal downloading. When they did talk about the negative aspects of illegal downloading, they mostly worried about the negative consequences to themselves rather than the potential negative effects for the artists.

You cite one young person as saying, "the internet is a way for people to do what they want without getting in trouble." How characteristic is this of the attitudes displayed by young people in these conversations?

GLOBAL KIDS: Well, I think it's definitely representative of a certain subset of teens, though certainly not a dominant perspective. As we watched the dialogues progress and then conducted analysis of who said what, we noticed that the youth involved stratified into certain categories of thinking with regards to ethics, some that were more advanced and others less so, as GoodPlay mentioned above. We felt it was important to highlight that this sort of "do what you want without consequence" sort of thinking is indeed there, especially for teens on the younger end of the spectrum. We didn't want to be alarmist when sharing our results, as there's been plenty of alarmist rhetoric out there about young people's participation online, but rather be realistic about the views that exist and the resulting need for adult involvement in these conversations.

What insights did you get from this research which might inform the decisions made by parents? by educators?

COMMON SENSE MEDIA: I think that the biggest takeaway was that adults and teens are truly able to participate in meaningful dialogue about some of the tougher issues that emerge about life online if there's an honest and open setting to do so. Dialogues like these could be tailored to a variety of settings and could focus on a wide array of issues that might be specific to local needs in a given community. There are a lot of easy to use online tools (out of the box social networks like Ning, free forum and Listserv services, etc.) out there that can allow educators and youth workers to run online dialogues with their school communities during the school year. Increased dialogue online between teens and adults is not only important because the two groups generally inhabit the digital world in very different ways right now, but also because adults provide important guidance in terms of the ethical development of young people. Adults have always played this role in kids' lives and the more they are educated about talking about the digital aspects of their kids' lives the better.

GLOBAL KIDS: It's also important to note that this kind of cross-generational dialogue doesn't just need to happen online. We found that there are some real advantages to an online context, like a changed power dynamic where youth might feel more confident sharing openly. However, we know that having face to face conversations about these issues is critical whether it's in the home, in classrooms, in afterschool spaces or in other sorts of youth groups.

GOODPLAY: Actually, Henry, the recent collaboration between your NML team and the GoodPlay team is a great example of a school-based initiative aimed at promoting these types of conversations between adults and youth. The curricular activities that we created together - called Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World - attempt to engage high school students in a thoughtful examination of the ethical issues that arise online. We hope that these activities will be an effective way for teachers to enter into conversations with youth and scaffold their ethical thinking.

COMMON SENSE MEDIA And by bringing parents into the conversation we can strengthen home-school partnerships to help young people navigate the ethical challenges of the digital world. With the aging down of online life, it's become imperative to begin these conversations in middle school and so we are working in collaboration with the GoodPlay Project to create a 5th-8th grade digital citizenship curriculum - Digital Literacy: Citizenship in a Connected Culture Check back at www.commonsense.org in late Spring for more information and access to these materials.

Katie Davis is a Project Specialist on several research projects led by Dr. Howard Gardner at Project Zero, including the GoodPlay Project, the Developing Minds and Digital Media Project, and the Trust and Trustworthiness Project. She is also an advanced doctoral student in Human Development and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In recent work, she conducted a study investigating how girls in late adolescence and emerging adulthood use blogging as a way to express and explore their identities. For the Focus Dialogues, Katie and Carrie James, a Research Director and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, developed the framework that informed the dialogues, developed dialogue prompts, and synthesized findings.

Shira Lee Katz is the Digital Media Project Manager at Common Sense Media, where she manages the research and creation of a forthcoming Digital Citizenship curriculum for 5th-8th grade students. She is also a key point person for the Digital Media & Learning grantee network funded by The MacArthur Foundation. Shira holds a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the Focus Dialogues, Shira and Linda Burch, Common Sense Media's Chief Education and Strategy Officer, co-conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited adult participants, and produced the final report.

Rafi Santo is a Senior Program Associate in the Online Leadership Program at Global Kids, Inc. Rafi specializes in the design and implementation of educational technology projects and has done work as varied as online youth dialogues, youth advisories focused around digital media, social media civic engagement programs and youth leadership development and peer education in virtual worlds. He has collaborated on projects with many organizations and with MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grantees to strengthen their initiatives through youth voices and perspectives. Rafi has over 10 years of experience in youth development and education. For the Focus Dialogues, Rafi and Barry Joseph, Director of Global Kids' Online Leadership Program, conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited teen participants, housed and monitored the dialogues on their website, a wrote the final report.

Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About Digital Ethics (Part One)

Earlier this year, Common Sense Media, Global Kids, and the Good Play Project, three highly regarded groups, each working in different ways to promote the new media literacies, issued a report, Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About the Ethics of Digital Life, which summarized their collaborative efforts to get adults and youth discussing some core issues of online ethics. All three groups were active presences during the recent Diversifying Participation conference hosted last week by the MacArthur Foundation. I very much wanted to share the thinking behind the report with my readers and am happy today to offer you some insights from the three groups involved. I have long believed in the importance of opening chains of communication across the generations around the uncertainities we face in the digital era. I modeled what such a conversation might look like between parent and child in an essay I wrote with my son on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, and I published a study guide for adults and youth to conduct conversations in the wake of Columbine which appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of Telemedium (now the Journal of Media Literacy).

In some ways, such conversations may be easiest to frame between adults and youth who are not directly related, since it gets us out of the raw emotions which often surround adolescence within the family space, but it is also very important for parents to have frank exchanges with their children about their values, their concerns, and their experiences with digital media. I've sometimes said in the past that young people do not need adults "snooping over their shoulders," they need them "watching their backs." By this, I mean that we often reduce such issues to questions of "monitoring' youth activity (with or without their knowledge) and we really should be creating channels of communication. The news this week that a Pennsylvania school had installed spyware on their school-issued laptops and were watching what teens did outside of school is a demonstration of what happens when adults rely on surveillance rather than conversation to shape youth behavior. None of us know for sure the best course of action in confronting some of the new situations which emerge in this still evolving space. Young people deserve our best wisdom as adults, but they also deserve our respect and trust, as they try to develop their own ways in life.

I am really excited to see what these three groups have been able to accomplish using online forums as a tool for getting adults and youth to reflect more deeply about their relations to the digital realm.

Can you describe each of the three groups and some of your previous work in this area? Why did you decide to develop a collaborative project together and what did you each bring to the collaboration?

GLOBAL KIDS: Sure. For us at Global Kids, this project was in many ways a continuation of work we've been doing for almost ten years to promote youth voices about important social and global issues. We began youth projects that used online dialogues to do this as early as 2001, when we ran E.A. 911, short for "Everything After September 11th", an online dialogue that took place six months after 9/11 where youth from around the world came together to talk about the impact of the attacks. We continued for years running youth dialogues on current events with a project called Newz Crew, a collaboration with PBS's News Hour.

The Focus Dialogues, which formed the basis for the Meeting of Minds report, were born out of the desire to bring youth voice to the emerging conversation about how new media are changing kids' lives. We held the first round of the dialogues, which were teen only, back in 2007, and we heard pretty forcefully from the participating teens that adults were checked out when it came to providing guidance in this area, which prompted us to take a cross-generational approach for the next round of dialogues. We were already familiar with GoodPlay's work on ethics online as well as Common Sense Media's work with parents, and it just seemed natural to reach out to them as collaborators.

GOODPLAY: For our part, we welcomed the opportunity to incorporate some of our research methods into this exciting initiative. Since 2006, with the support of the MacArthur Foundation, the GoodPlay team has been studying young people's understanding of the ethical dimensions of their online activities. In the first phase of our study, we conducted in-depth interviews with over 60 young people, ages 15-25, who were living in the Greater Boston area. In these interviews, we posed hypothetical ethical dilemmas involving digital media and asked participants how they would respond if confronted with a similar situation.

For the Focus Dialogues, we decided to adapt some of these hypothetical dilemmas and present them as points of discussion. We also identified several compelling quotes from our interviews in which youth participants expressed various opinions about the boundaries of acceptable behavior in online contexts. In total, we created 2-3 prompts for each of the five issues that we believe to be ethically charged in the new digital media:

• identity (When does identity play cross over into deception?),
• privacy (What are the boundaries of sharing information about oneself and others online?),
• ownership/authorship (How has the act of creation been altered by digital media and with what effects on claims to ownership and authorship?),
• credibility (How do people signal their trustworthiness online and judge the trustworthiness of others?),
• participation (In a context of rapidly forming and disintegrating communities, how are norms of behavior established, maintained, and respected online?).

Each day, dialogue participants were presented with a prompt relating to one of these five ethical issues and asked to respond in a discussion thread. This approach generated some rich conversations between teens and adults.

COMMON SENSE MEDIA : As a non-profit, we were founded on the principle that dialogue among parents, teachers, and students is the way forward! One way we encourage discussion across the generations is by asking all parties to use our online ratings and reviews of movies, books, websites, and music, and to write reviews of their own. We have also conducted quantitative research about the attitudes towards media of adults and children, including a recent national poll examining hi-tech cheating with more than 2000 teens and parents. The dialogues were a creative, new way to conduct research and foster dialogue and we welcomed the chance to collaborate with Global Kids and GoodPlay on the project.

We knew the dialogues would inform our parent resources, policy work, and educational programs. We are in fact in the midst of creating a Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum for 5th-8th grade students that focuses on empowering kids to harness the power of digital technology responsibly. The curriculum, grounded in the research of the GoodPlay Project, is meant to be fun and engaging, and challenges kids to think critically about the perils and possibilities of life online. These dialogues and other focus groups and pilot research that we are conducting across the country all serve to inform this curriculum, which takes a whole community approach to engaging parents, teachers, and students in learning. As with GoodPlay, our work on digital citizenship is also supported in large part by the MacArthur Foundation.

Your key finding in the press release you've issued is that youth often lack access to valuable adult guidance in their online lives. Many have assumed that youth who are "digital natives" who do not necessarily need or appreciate adult interference. How do you respond to that argument?

GLOBAL KIDS: I think that there are a lot of ways that the digital natives argument has become more complicated and has shifted as the years have gone on. Just as people have realized that not all youth are equal in terms of technological access or the kinds of online participation they're exposed to, there's also been a growing awareness that there are many different aspects to what it means to be digitally fluent. For us, this doesn't just mean having digital skills, but also engaging online as a digital citizen. A teen might be a technological whiz and seem completely at home within complex games, but if he or she is regularly cheating new players out of virtual cash while playing those games, that's problematic. Digital skills and fluency can't exist in a vacuum, there has to be a values component to this conversation.

COMMON SENSE MEDIA: In that respect, even adults who aren't very technologically savvy can add a lot to their kids' understanding of digital life. After all, kids may possess great technology know-how, but parents and teachers have a lot of wisdom and experience grappling with "life" issues like privacy and community. At the same time, there are some distinctly new ethical challenges (that the GoodPlay Project outlines so well in its white paper) that adults should understand, many of which we address in the report. Given that adults and teens bring different prior knowledge and life experience to the online space, we believe that the conversation and subsequent learning around these issues is a two-way street. Right now the online space is seen very much as a peer dominated space in which teens talk and interact mostly with one another. In most cases, it is even looked down upon for adults to have contact with teens online. We believe that the more dialogue and mentoring that adults and teens can have online - as long as it is monitored and safe - the better.

Describe for us the process of getting adults and young people engaged in an honest exchange about ethics and digital culture. Did you learn things here that would be helpful for other groups seeking to replicate this process at a local level?

COMMON SENSE MEDIA AND GLOBAL KIDS: In terms of activity in the dialogues, we were surprised that teens participated more readily than adults, on average, especially since we saw two adults sign up for every teen that did. We chalked up the participation differences to the fact that we had a lot of youth in the dialogues that were pretty involved in online communities and were used to sharing their views online from both a social as well as technological perspective. Adults overall were a little more hesitant and some had trouble navigating the technology, and we also got the sense that many were parents that had less experience with forum based discussions and didn't realize that they actually had to build in time to participate fully.

There was a learning curve involved for some adults in terms of using an online environment, and that should certainly be taken into account for people looking to start similar exchanges in their communities. At the same time, the kind of youth engagement we saw was incredible, and we think there's something to be said for that. So often it's hard for adults to engage in dialogue about touchy issues with kids, but we found that online we saw very active sharing from the youth side.

Importantly, despite some of the differences that we observed between the two groups, it seemed that both generally saw the gray ethical areas for what they were. Adults overall did not seem too didactic or disrespectful of teens' opinions and teens generally seemed to appreciate adults' point of view. The interaction in many ways was characterized more by a kind of mutual exchange reminiscent of peers than the sort of stereotypical "parent yells at kid/kid storms off to their room" arguments that can come up when discussing difficult topics. We think that part of why this happened was that the whole interaction was framed from the beginning as a dialogue between groups, which is rare for adult/youth interactions. There's probably some lesson there for those that want to run online dialogues themselves. Both sides need to be respected and valued from the outset for this kind of exchange to work.

You report that teens are more likely to engage in moral thinking than ethical thinking. Can you explain the distinction you are drawing and what your findings were?

GOODPLAY: The distinction we make between moral and ethical thinking has its roots in the different roles and relationships that individuals experience. Moral thinking arises in the context of interpersonal relationships, such as the relationship between close friends or between a parent and child. It is perhaps most simply conceived of as "Golden Rule thinking" - treat others how you would want them to treat you. In contrast, ethical thinking requires a more abstract, disinterested frame of mind. Specific forms of ethical thinking include reflection on roles and responsibilities in online spaces; perspective taking - or the ability to take the standpoints of multiple stakeholders in an online context; and consideration of community-level benefits or harms associated with different courses of action online.

In the Focus dialogues, we found relatively few instances of either moral or ethical thinking among teens, although there were some notable exceptions. For the most part, teen participants demonstrated what we call consequence-based thinking, since they tended to focus on how each scenario would affect them personally. For instance, when participants were considering the pros and cons of illegal music downloading, they were more likely to discuss such personally relevant factors as expense, convenience, and the risk of getting caught. Less frequent were references to the potential effects on other interested parties, such as artists and music companies.

Katie Davis is a Project Specialist on several research projects led by Dr. Howard Gardner at Project Zero, including the GoodPlay Project, the Developing Minds and Digital Media Project, and the Trust and Trustworthiness Project. She is also an advanced doctoral student in Human Development and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In recent work, she conducted a study investigating how girls in late adolescence and emerging adulthood use blogging as a way to express and explore their identities. For the Focus Dialogues, Katie and Carrie James, a Research Director and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, developed the framework that informed the dialogues, developed dialogue prompts, and synthesized findings.

Shira Lee Katz is the Digital Media Project Manager at Common Sense Media, where she manages the research and creation of a forthcoming Digital Citizenship curriculum for 5th-8th grade students. She is also a key point person for the Digital Media & Learning grantee network funded by The MacArthur Foundation. Shira holds a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the Focus Dialogues, Shira and Linda Burch, Common Sense Media's Chief Education and Strategy Officer, co-conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited adult participants, and produced the final report.

Rafi Santo is a Senior Program Associate in the Online Leadership Program at Global Kids, Inc. Rafi specializes in the design and implementation of educational technology projects and has done work as varied as online youth dialogues, youth advisories focused around digital media, social media civic engagement programs and youth leadership development and peer education in virtual worlds. He has collaborated on projects with many organizations and with MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grantees to strengthen their initiatives through youth voices and perspectives. Rafi has over 10 years of experience in youth development and education. For the Focus Dialogues, Rafi and Barry Joseph, Director of Global Kids' Online Leadership Program, conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited teen participants, housed and monitored the dialogues on their website, a wrote the final report.

Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part Four)

This is the final part of my interview with Spanish educational researcher Pilar Lacasa for Cuadernos de Pedagogia, a Spanish language publication, about my research on the New Media Literacies. Here, we discuss learning games, mobile technologies, civic engagement, and my advice to parents and teachers. Our challenge is then building bridges between culture and participatory democracy. Can you explain more?

The challenge is how we can help build the bridge between participatory culture and participatory democracy. I am starting to do research on what I see as proto-political behavior: the ways that these hobby or fan or game groups educate and mobilize their members around issues of collective concern. I believe that if we better understand these practices, we will be in a position to foster a new kind of civic education which starts where young people are already gathering but helps them to expand their understanding of their roles as citizens. A striking feature of these new social structures is that they are defined less through shared geography than through shared interests.

They may be better suited to support national or even global models of citizenship than those based on purely local levels of engagement. Yet, we need to be careful about making too many hasty assumptions about this. Jean Burgess tells the story of photographers in Queensland who connected through the photosharing site, Flickr. They began meeting up on weekends to visit local sites and photograph them together. As they began to share these photographs, they connected with former residents of the region who now lived elsewhere who shared older images and stories and remain linked to the local through the platform. As they began to take photographs, they began to look at their community through new eyes, starting to identify local problems and eventually working together to increase public awareness and lobby for solutions. So, a platform which is not particularly local in its organization never the less resulted in local political engagement.

You say that these on-line communities could be a new way for people practice being citizens. Could you explain these ideas a little further?

Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, sees bowling leagues as a cornerstone of American civic life in the 1950s. He suggests that communities gathered regularly at bowling allies to spend time together, increasing the social connections within the community. When they were not bowling, they were engaged in conversations -- some simply gossip, others dealing with local policies and concerns. The strong social ties which emerged in this context helped to strengthen their collective identities as citizens and thus increased voting and public service. Putnam fears that television pushed Americans out of the bowling allies and into their private homes, resulting in much greater social isolation and a breakdown of community life.

So, how do we understand the new social structures which are emerging around online gaming -- the guilds in World of Warcraft, for example. Here, people form strong shared identifications, gather together regularly to play and socialized, develop leadership which can deploy the diverse skills of the guild membership to confront complex challenges and pursue long term and short term goals. Often players say they come back night after night out of a sense of obligation to each other as much as out of a pleasure in the game play. In short, there are many of the foundations here which Putnam argued allowed bowling to seed a robust civic culture in the mid-20th century.

And video games? What can children learn from them?

Will Wright, the designer behind Sim City, the Sims, and Spore, has suggested we think of games as problem sets which students pay to be able to solve. What he means is that a good game poses complex challenges which are just on the threshold of the player's abilities, creates a set of scaffolded experiences through which they acquire the knowledge and skills needed to solve those problems, and offers them a chance to rehearse, make mistakes and learn through them. An even stronger game allows them to manipulate the simulation, shifting variables and learning what the consequences of their changes are. A great game creates a context where they are encouraged to share what they learned and what they produced with other players, enabling peer to peer learning to occur.

As James Paul Gee has suggested, games put into action many of the core principles being discussed by the best work in contemporary learning sciences. And they do so in ways that are highly motivating. Young people have clearly defined goals and compelling roles which motivate them to actively and intensely engage in the learning process. We've all seen kids who will quit early when they hit a problem with their homework and yet beg to stay up later if they hit a challenge in a game.

Could then video games have a place in classrooms?

Schools would do well to see what they can learn from games. Some are arguing that schools should build activities on and around existing commercial games which already have strong learning potentials; others that educators should be developing compelling new games which connect school content with good game design; and others are suggesting that we redesign school activities to include elements of play and game design. All of these models point to the need to incorporate a more playful mode of learning into our educational institutions and to harness the power of games for more formal kinds of education.

Right now, games are teaching young people skills -- problem solving, design, simulation -- but it is up to teachers to couple those experiences to specific domains of knowledge which get valued in the curriculum. My experiences in developing educational games suggest that the first step is trying to rethink why we want kids to learn what they are required to learn -- that is, what it allows them to do in the world. Because information that is latent in a textbook has to be deployed actively in a game, otherwise there is no learning taking place.

Do you think video games can help break down barriers between what is learned inside and outside school?

Playing the game is only a small part of gaming culture and in the case of The Sims, Spore, or Little Big Planet, it may be the least significant part of the experience. These games encourage young people to remix and reprogram their contents. Sims players may develop their own avatars, design their own furniture, and exchange it online at the Mall of the Sims. The Sims players may use an ingame camera to collect images for their scrapbooks and then use the images to construct original fictional narratives. They may use the game engine as an animation platform to construct their own movies. In Little Big Planet, they may design and program their own levels and exchange them with other players. In many games, they form communities online to teach each other the skills they need. And in games like the Civilization series, which simulate historical societies, they include teaching about real world history as well as ingame strategies and tactics.

In each case, the game becomes the entry point for a broader range of cultural expressions and in the process, helps to create sites of learning. Young people are learning to program, design, tell stories, or become leaders through their social interactions through and around games. These accomplishments need to be recognized and valued through schools just as schools have historically supported the activities of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts or after school programs like yearbook, newspaper, drama club, and the like. These activities become a crucial part of how young people define their identities and form social affiliations.

But the principles that work there to support informal learning can also be carried over into more explicitly educational activities. For example, Mitchell Resnick at the MIT Media Lab has developed the Scratch program which uses these same participatory culture principles to enable young people to learn how to program; they've created a platform where young people develop their own projects, share them with each other, borrow and remix codes, building upon and improving each other's work, through principles derived from the Creative Commons and Open Software movements. Young people around the world are using these platforms to acquire digital skills through the classroom, after school programs, and on their own.

I would like to ask you about the context of learning related to the new mobile media, for example a small NDSi or the iPhone. What implications could have this have for education?

In many parts of the world, these new social and cultural practices are developing around mobile media rather than networked computers. Cell phones are dramatically cheaper than laptops, say, and thus we are broadening who gets to engage with the new social networks. Twitter, for example, is designed to allow contributions from both mobile phones and computers, creating a system where information flows fluidly across media platforms.

A short term consequence of these developments is that young people will be able to access the information they need from anywhere and everywhere. These mobile phones will become a new kind of knowledge prosthesis which expands the capacity of their memory, allowing them to mobilize information in new ways on the fly. We call these practices distributed cognition because they involve off-loading parts of our thinking capacity onto a range of appliances and see it as a fundamental literacy.

Of course, we need to be concerned about an over-reliance on such devices if it decreases other kinds of learning, yet we also need to know multiple ways of solving a problem and the ability to off-load some tasks to our tools makes it possible for us to explore other questions at greater depth. Yet we are just starting to explore the implications of location-awareness for education. Eric Klopfer at MIT has developed a tool kit which allows educators to design augmented reality games. Augmented reality games are played in real spaces using digital handheld devices. In some cases, they allow students to access fictional information which is GPS enabled alongside their own observations of the real world.

Through the games developed for these platforms, young people learn to see the world through the eyes of urban planners or environmental scientists; they get to see their local communities as they might have been a hundred years ago. David Williamson Schaffer talks about these practices as "epistemic games," that is, games which help us learn to think like a particular professional group, deploying their real tools and practices to confront authentic problems in the real world.

Young people may not simply play such games; they might also work to develop them, interviewing people in their neighborhoods as they build games around local history or civic problems, translating what they learned in their textbooks into resources which they can deploy on the ground to solve compelling problems.

What aspects do you consider to be essential in teacher education to help kids and young peopleto develop new literacies by using these new media?

Teachers, librarians, and other educators have a vital role to play in this new electronic culture. They will become research coaches who help young people set reasonable goals for themselves, develop strategies for tracking down the information they need, advise them on the ethical challenges they confront as they enter new social and cultural communities, and recommend safe ways of dealing with issues of publicity and privacy which necessarily shape their digital lives.

In order to perform that role, they have to become comfortable with the new technologies and their affiliated practices. It is not enough to know how to use the tool; they have to master the cultural logic and social norms which are emerging around these online communities. This is too much for any teacher to take upon themselves. So, they must each take responsibility for acquiring different skills and understandings and be prepared to draw upon each other as resources for themselves and for their students. In doing so, they will be applying the principles of collective intelligence and social networks to their own practices and thus will be immersing themselves more deeply in these new media literacy skills.

We've been experimenting with an 'unconference' model for developing curriculum which bridge between traditional school content and new media literacy skills as an alternative model for professional development. The unconference starts out fairly chaotically as participants dump onto the web or exchange in person ideas, resources, practices, and activities which they think might be valuable to this subject area. Gradually, you gather together these resources, start to construct categories, and refine the activities. In the process, participants get to know each other and what each member can contribute to the group.

Many families are afraid of new media, and may even prevent their children from using them in the same way as they use a book, or a comic, a novel and so on. What would you say to them?

In many ways, parential concerns about new media are understandable. As parents, we are facing new experiences which were not part of the world of our childhood. We don't know how to protect our children as they enter these spaces and we may not know how to advise them when they encounter problems there. But those basic concerns can easily be turned into fear and even panic as they get manipulated by a sensationalistic press , political demagogues, and culture warriors. As adults, we owe it to our children not to foreclose important opportunities out of ignorance and fear. Instead, we have an obligation to learn more about the emerging cultural practices we've been talking about here. I certainly don't think we want to turn our backs on our children nor do we want to be snooping over their shoulders all the day. We need to be informed allies who can help watch their backs as they enter into situations that none of us understand fully.

We need to be there to celebrate their accomplishments; we need to be there to advise them as they confront ethical challenges; we need to be there as they acquire skills at accessing and deploying information. We need to do this because it is important to our children, their development, and their well-being.

Maybe you can tell a little more by using some example

Here's a few practical examples of things you can do: When my son was three, my wife and I began to help him develop some basic media literacy skills. Some nights, we read him a bedtime story. Other nights, we asked him to tell us a bedtime story. We recorded his stories on the computer; we could print them out and let him illustrate them, then we'd photocopy the whole and send it to his grandparents as a gift. They would read and respond to his stories. Many of his stories dealt with the media he consumed -- games, television, comics, films, toys -- and we would use this storytelling practice to talk through with him his fantasies and fears, sharing our own values about the issues he was exploring.

Telling the stories gave him a sense of being an author -- a key experience as we think about the new participatory culture -- and it paved the way for later creative experiences he would have as he moved on line.

Or imagine an older child -- a teen or preteen -- who is first becoming interested in social networking sites. Perhaps you could ask her advice in setting up your own Facebook page. This would allow you to learn more about how social networks work but also to create a context for talking about how people represent themselves on line. If she's like most teens, she is going to be at least as concerned about being embarrassed by her parent's public presentation as you are going to be about how much information she shares on line and it is through those conversations that you can exchange your values.

Teens still need adult involvement and parential advice as they move into this new world, but they also deserve to have that advice informed by direct experience and careful research into the nature of the world we are preparing them to enter. This is no different in its logic than what previous generations of parents have faced given the pace of technological change across the 20th century, even though the specifics are going to be different from anything your parents confronted in raising you.

In conclusion: How can we transform schools by using new media? Please, give us one or two suggestions for institutions, even governments, that are considering this challange, what would you say?

The first point I'd make is that we have to understand the new media literacies as a paradigm shift which impacts every school subject, not as an additional subject which somehow has to be plugged into the over-crowded school day. The push should be to have every teacher take responsibility for those skills, tools, and practices that are central to the way their disciplines are practiced in the real world rather than locking away the technologies in a special lab or a special class where it gets isolated from the real work of the school. The school needs to work together, as a community, to develop strategies for full integration across the curriculum, and to identify those skills which each member might contribute to the community as a whole.

Schools need to operate much more along principles of collective intelligence and social networking -- to identify and deploy the expertise they have in their community and to reach beyond their community to other sources of experience and knowledge, whether parents, educators at other schools, or others within their larger community. They need to create ways of sharing best practices and failures, offering advice and feedback to each other as they make this challenging transition. They need to be as concerned with how they teach as they are with what they teach.

Where possible, schools need to introduce complex problems which require their students to track down information from multiple channels and to work together to pool knowledge and combine skills . They need to develop opportunities for young people to share what they have produced with the world, getting feedback and recognition from a larger community, and taking greater responsibility for the quality of information they circulate.

Schools need to lower existing barriers which make it difficult to deploy participatory platforms through education, stepping back from software that filters or blocks access to the internet. But in doing so, they also need to work with the students to develop norms of use that respect the particular character of the school community and its goals rather than adopting an "anything goes" attitude.

Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part Three)

This is the third part of my interview with Spanish educational researcher Pilar Lacasa for Cuadernos de Pedagogia, a Spanish language publication, about my research on the New Media Literacies. This time we talk about the relations between old and new media and explore how YouTube, fan fiction and Facebook can be deployed in meaningful ways through school. So far, we have been talking about new media, but it is clear that they do not replace the old ones.

Almost never do schools think about the relationships between new and old media. Some people may have the idea that some of them will replace the old ones. A study of American college students preparing to enter ten different professions found that educators in training were the least likely to play videogames or participate in social networks. Teachers have defined themselves as defenders of book culture, often in what they perceive as opposition to the new digital culture. This protective stance no doubt reflects the rhetoric of the digital revolution which imagined that new media was going to displace if not destroy old media. And thus, for digital culture to thrive, book culture must die.

In fact, the opposite has happened. The new media has built upon and around existing modes of communication. The average person has access to a greater array of different books now than ever before thanks to online book dealers. The average teen writes more, thanks to e-mail and online discussion forums, than the previous generation. We will live in a world where books and printed matter still matters even as students get more information from computers than ever before. They are going to need to go where the information is, know how to assess the reliability of information which comes without comfortable gatekeepers, and be able to communicate their ideas through many different channels to many different publics.

Therefore we need to use multiple media.

This situation doesn't allow us to make any easy choices between teaching print and digital literacy: students clearly need both and more importantly, they need to understand the relationship between the two. They need to understand the different structures through which traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia produce and evaluate information, for example. They need to be able to read charts, maps, and graphs, but also to be able to produce and interpret information through simulations. They need to be able to express themselves orally, with pens and paper, and with video cameras and digital editing equipment.

Many of them are already acquiring such skills outside of the classroom through informal learning practices that thrive in this participatory culture but others are being left to be raised by wolves, not able to find their way into generative practices and supporting communities, and acquiring none of the ethical norms that might govern their future activities. Howard Gardner's Good Play Project at Harvard found that many young people don't apply ethical standards to their online conduct because they don't believe that what they do online matters. We can see this as an ironic response to adults who have dismissed such activities as worthless or meaningless, rather than asking questions about how or what they are learning through their participation in this practices, recognizing their accomplishments, or advising them on their ethical conflicts.

Schools, libraries, and other educational institutions need to be both embracing the potentials and confronting the challenges of this emerging culture not as a replacement for existing print practices but as an expansion of them.

Can we think then that schools lose many of learning opportunities supported by new media?

New Media platforms, such as YouTube, have expanded our access to the rich archives of existing sounds and images from the past. We have access now to recordings that were once buried in the archives but which we now can summon up at a moments notice. We can navigate the entire media scape on the fly, at a second's notice, in response to the flow of a classroom discussion.

We could, at least, if schools were not often blocking access to these very same tools and platforms out of fear of inappropriate content or risky forms of participation. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! It is as though we were closing all the libraries out of concern that young people might track down the pictures of topless women in National Geographic!

Beyond that, the new media tools allow young people to edit and respond critically to those moving images in new ways, to create presentations which have the explanatory power of well crafted documentaries, though again, they are often blocked by schools who are uncertain about the legalities of copyright protection and thus unwilling to allow them to remix and recontextualize content. So, right now, at least in American schools, and in many other counries around the world, the opportunities afforded us by these new digital archives are being shut off through school policies that are born more from fear and uncertainty than from reasoned pedagogical goals.

Maybe your idea of transmedia phenomenon may be a way to explore opportunities offered by the media. For example, teaching students how to write narrative texts when using the Harry Potter books, movies or video games.

What I'm describing as transmedia storytelling has been a fundamental part of human expression since the dawn of time. Certainly we need young people to develop a critical understanding of how contemporary media franchises like Harry Potter operate, both recognizing the aesthetic opportunities for authors to construct worlds which are bigger than single texts or even single media, but also understanding the commercial imperatives which are marketing extensions of popular stories to them.

But this idea of transmedia might also help us to understand the world of the church in the middle ages, say. Unless you were literate and in the priesthood, you would not have experienced the stories of the Bible through a single text. Instead, those stories would surround you, conveyed through every available communications system. They would be performed on carts, expressed through stainglass windows and the structures of cathedrals, painted on the ceilings, proclaimed from the pulpet, and sung by the choir. Go back even further and think about the early cave paintings which historians believe were used as sites of performance: the live storyteller interacting with the painted image to convey the experience of the hunt. So, the earliest representations we have might have been part of a transmedia experience.

Many of the works we teach took elements of oral culture and translated them into printed prose, again suggesting that we need to understand how stories move across media if we are going to understand why and how humans tell stories. Too often, teachers have been indifferent about media, teaching the texts of plays without regard to the conditions of their performance, for example. But now, we want teachers to explore art and literature with a heightened awareness of the media through which they were produced, distributed, and consumed.

And what about social networks, a new widespread medium of communication among young people and also among many adults?

One way to understand the new power of social networks is to understand what roles these platforms and practices played in the recent Obama presidential campaign. A traditional political website works by linking individual voters to the campaign; a social network site works by linking voters to each other. At a certain point, Obama's supporters were able to take over much greater control of the political campaign. They could organize local events quickly without having to go through the centralized campaigns. They could pool resources, each member contributing what skills they could, to the shared effort. Once he's in office, they can continue to mobilize in response to public policy debates or rally around other candidates who share their vision of progressive change for the country.

These social network sites are transforming the nature of civic engagement and participation. Young people need to learn how to become a part of these powerful new kinds of communities, need to know how to navigate through social networks to connect with people who have skills and knowledge that they need, need to understand the ethics of social life within these networks, and need to understand the risks as well as the opportunities of interacting with people they do not know face to face. The Obama campaign worked at both the national and the local level, but these social networks now work on a global scale.

What is the role that these networks can play in schools?

Schools have long used pen pal programs to connect their students with children from other parts of the world. The deployment of social networks through education allows young people ongoing interactions with a global community of learners who share common interests and goals; it allows schools to dramatically expand the human resources they can draw upon in their ongoing pedagogical activities. As we think of social networks as sites of learning, we can see two levels of pedagogy -- acquiring access to the broader range of expertise supported by the networks and acquiring the skills needed to deploy social networks for a variety of purposes in the future.

As with all of the new literacy practices we are discussing here, some youth will have extensive experience deploying social networks outside of school and deploying them in the classroom will allow them to direct that experience towards mastering new content, while other youth will not know how to work through social networks and schools can provide them with a safe, supervised context for mastering those skills.

Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part Two)

Last time, we ran part one of a four part interview I did with Spanish educational researcher Pilar Lacasa for Cuadernos de Pedagogia, a Spanish language publication, about my research on the New Media Literacies. This time, we dig deeper into the concepts of participatory culture and the participation gap and talk about how the new media literacies can impact how we teach literature.

Is there anything really new in the idea of new literacies? Is it different from other processes such as reading and writing much more related to the printed materials?

Yes and No. In many ways, they are expansions of skills we've always taught which is why many of them will feel familiar to teachers and will fit comfortably within existing disciplines. In some ways, they represent the expansion of research skills into the more diverse information environment or an extrapulation of what it means to read and write to cover a broader range of communication practices.

But they also reflect habits of mind that emerge in response to networked communications or a converged media landscape. So, there is a much greater emphasis on literacy as a social and collective rather than an individual practice -- on learning to collaborate and exchange knowledge with others. There is a greater emphasis on the challenges of moving through a dispersed media landscape, interacting with groups who come from different backgrounds, shift attention between multiple channels of communication, or deploying different tools for processing information. These new skills do not so much emerge from new technologies as from new social, cultural, and educational opportunities that have emerged around those platforms.

Perhaps there is a generation gap when people use new media.

There are certainly generational differences in our experience and comfort with these new Technologies and their affiliated practices. Most adults encountered the computer first in the workplace, where-as many young people encountered it first in the home or the school. They approached it with different goals and expectations which means that they understand it in fundamentally different ways.

It isn't just that young people have grown up with the technology while adults came to it later in life. They have a totally different attitude towards what a computer is and the place it holds in their lives. That said, we have to be careful about drawing too sharp a generational dividing line here. First, the most powerful forms of participatory culture are those where adults and young people interact together in more fluid ways than would be found at school, work, church, or home. They are motivated by shared interests; they actively seek to learn from each other; and they are valued less on their age than on what they can each contribute. When we assume adults are locked out of the digital realm, we close off those opportunities for transgenerational experiences.

Second, we need to be careful about assuming that all young people have had access to the full benefits of the digital age. There are many inequalities not simple in terms of access to the Technologies but also in terms of opportunities to participate. That's what I call the participation gap. Some young people have been invited into the digital realm and feel free to express themselves there in as public a manner as is possible, while others feel excluded, cut off.. They don't understand how participatory culture works; they haven't been encouraged to participate; they don't think anyone will care what they have to say.

What could do educators to overcome these participation gaps?

Educators have key roles to play here in terms of creating a space where those who have been previously excluded can be welcomed into the new knowledge communities and can find their voice through the emerging participatory culture. But to perform those roles, they need to overcome their own fears and uncertainties about the digital World. They have to learn about the online world the way many young people have learned about it -- through active participation. They need to experiment with the various tools and platforms; they need to find a community which shares their interests and passions and plung into it deeply so they know what it is like to share knowledge through a social network and to create things through dispersed collaboration.

To do this, they may well need to sit down with a young person they know who is deeply immersed in this world and seek their advice and mentorship, reversing the normal role in the classroom, learning from their students or their children. In doing so, they will be trading different kinas of expertise -- matching the exploratory spirit of youth with the experience and wisdom of adulthood. But they need to avoid closing off the communication and learning too quickly by assuming that they already know everything the young person is going to teach them.

In these new contexts of communication we not only speak about Participatory Culture but also about Convergence Culture.

When people in the media industry use the term convergence they are often talking about a technological process -- the bringing together of multiple media functions, the uniting of multiple communication channels through a single device. Imagine say the iPhone as a tool which performs many different media functions -- from playing games to taking photographs -- and connects us to different networks -- from telephone to the internet. That's often what gets described as a convergence device.

I want to argue though that convergence is also a cultural process, one where stories, ideas, images, move across all media platforms, shaped both by the desire of companies to expand markets and by the desire of consumers to gain easier access to meaningful media. In many ways, it doesn't matter whether or not our tools are talking to each other; we are forming an integrated information ecology in our heads. Storytellers are learning to disperse information and experiences across media platforms, encouraging their readers to explore and map the storyworld through a series of encounters. Educators are discovering that we learn or do research in a similar manner, putting together dispersed pieces from many different media platforms, to form a coherent picture of the world around us. So, teachers need to encourage students to develop a core competency in transmedia navigation.

Are any specific skills necessary to take part of this new Participatory and Convergent Culture?

Transmedia navigation is simply one of a range of new competencies which we think schools should be exploring. In a white paper I helped to write for the MacArthur Foundation, we identified a series of core skills and competencies which we think are needed for young people to be able to fully enter the new participatory culture. These skills include the ability to deal with simulations and visualizations, the ability to explore the environment through play and identity through performance, the ability to deploy information appliances and social networks in processing information, and the ability to negotiate around cultural differences encountered in diverse online communities. Project NML has been developing a range of resources to help educators acquire and promote these new skills.

Could you explain what are those resources developed in the project New Media Literacy?

Our Learning Library, for example, provides a range of pedagogical challenges (a cluster of activities which allow young people to encounter, explore, experiment with, and ethically evaluate some of the emerging media practices.) which illustrate and embody the 12 skills. The library's resources are modular, so that they can be appropriated and used in a range of contexts from home schoolers to formal educators. They are multidisciplinary so that teachers can take ownership over those skills which are central to their own disciplines and thus we can integrate these skills across the curriculum.

The library is designed as an open platform which allows educators and students not simply to consume existing activities but also to contribute their own, sharing what works in their classrooms with other educators, appropriating and remixing each other's content so that we can all learn from each other. In other words, the learning library takes seriously what I've already said here about participatory culture and collective intelligence.

Who can use this library?

We are encouraging different organizations to develop their own collections for this library and are especially excited at the prospect of educators from many different countries sharing something of their own media cultures and practices through the library, allowing us to explore and learn on a global scale. I'd like to personally invite Spanish educators to try their hand at developing challenges which reflect your local educational and cultural practices.

What could be role of the curriculum content in learning new literacies?

My philosophy has been to be conservative in content and innovative in method. That is to say, we believe that these skills have something to contribute to even the most traditional of curriculum and that they are relevant across the full range of school subjects. Every field of knowledge today has been reshaped through the changes that have impacted our information environment. Scientists and social scientists for example regularly work with digital simulations and new modes of visualization as they process their data, yet these practices have scarcely impacted the way science and social science get taught in schools. Contemporary artists and writers are deploying remix practices that transform how they think about authorship but these insights about creativity have scarcely made it into the language arts classroom.

Could you mention some examples of how the curriculum can be introduced by using methodologies emerging from these new environments?

Through our Teacher Strategy Guides on Reading in a Participatory Cultture and Mapping in a Participatory Culture, we've been modeling new ways for integrating these skills into the classroom. For example, our Reading project took the American novel, Moby-Dick, as its starting point, seeking to better understand how its author, Herman Melville, created through borrowing and recontexualizing stories found in Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, and contemporary whaling lore, as the basis for his own creative expression.

We also explore how subsequent artists and authors have used Moby-Dick as a starting point for their own creation and thus how Melville has exerted a living presence in our contemporary culture. In doing so, we encourage students not simply to critically read but also to creatively rework elements from the novel to reflect their own perspectives on the issues Melville raises. And we encourage them to reflect on the ethics of appropriation -- what artists can take freely, what obligations they owe to previous generations, and so forth.

I'd imagine that this same approach might be applied productively to Cervantes. Don Quixote is a novel which centers around the imaginative life at a moment of profound media change -- not simply through the protagonist and his relationship to romantic fictions but also through the ongoing discussions of books and printing. There are so many ways that this novel can be taught in order to heighten our understanding of the personal and social consequences of changing the way a society receives and conveys information in a way that also opens students up to discuss the world they are entering at our present moment of profound and prolonged media change.

Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I received a message in the mail from Ariel Glazer at University of Buenos Aires sharing this video, which remixed some footage from the interview I gave to the producers of Digital Nation. In many ways, it captures some of my core themes and concerns better than the PBS documentary and in the process, it helps us make connections with a range of other conversations taking place around the world about New Media Literacies.

When I taught my New Media Literacies class last semester at USC, I asked my students to interview a student or teacher about the ways that the issues in our class impacted their lives. Because these students came from many different countries, we ended up with glimpses of what was taking in classrooms from the Laplands to India, from Bulgaria to India. In almost every case, the young people interviewed described deeply meaningful forms of learning which were taking place through their engagement with affinity groups and social networks online, yet they each described school practices which shut off that learning once they entered the classroom. The teachers, on the other hand, talked about struggling to keep up with their students, about a lack of formal training to help them make the transitions being demanded, and about their fears of losing control over their classroom.

I wanted to stress the international nature of these exchanges because this week I am going to be sharing with you an extended interview which I did with Pillar Lacasa, a Spanish researcher, who has spent two blocks of time as a visiting scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program and whose work has been featured on this blog before. Lacasa is a close friend and she knows enough about my work to ask questions which help position it for readers back in Spain. Since this interview will appear later this week in Spanish in Cuadernos de Pedagogia, I asked her if I could share the original English language version here. I hope that this will be of interest especially to the many parents and educators who read this blog and may represent a response to some of the issues raised in the Digital Nation documentary.

Children and young people like to spend their free time in front of the screen. Could you give us some good reasons to that could persuade educators to introduce new media and screens in schools

At the end of the day, it isn't about the technology. It certainly isn't about the screen per se. It is about the informational affordances and cultural practices which have taken shape around the computer and other interactive technologies. It isn't about the computer replacing the book. It is about a world where students learn with a book in one hand and a mouse in the other, rather than one where they are taught that book culture is so fragile it needs to be protected from the computer.

Jenna McWilliams, until recently, part of our Project NML staff, writes powerfully about reading with a mouse in your hand. She tells us that teachers often encourage students to read with a pencil in their hands -- not simply letting the words pass over their eyeballs but critically engaging with them, taking notes, asking questions, critiquing as they go. When students read with a mouse in their hands, they take this one step further: they assume that they must actively respond to what's been put in front of them; they are poised to participate; they take responsibility over the quality of information and correct it publically if it is wrong.

Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, tells us we respond to the culture differently when we see it through the eyes of a participant rather than a consumer. And it is this participatory culture which has been facilitated by the new digital media in a way that stretches far beyond the imagination of previous generations.

Reading your book I noticed that you establish an interesting distinction between mass media and technology. How do you understand both of these concepts?

For me, a medium is more than simply a technology. It also includes the social and cultural practices that have grown up around us. So, when we talk about television, we are not simply talking about an electronic appliance; we are talking about the programming strategies and conventions which have emerged to shape our experience of television and we are referencing the particular mind set that has evolved around watching television often in our homes with little chance of engaging with its contents directly or publically. When we are talking about the internet, we are talking about all of the activities we perform through this new information infrastructure and the mindset which emerges through our ongoing engagement and participation in the great public conversation that emerges through it.

Beyond the individual medium there is a media ecology -- all of the different kinds of communications systems which surround us and through which we live our everyday lives. Right now, for example, we inhabit a world where mass media, top down systems of communications, co-exist with grassroots media, which enable much broader opportunities for our participation. We are just starting to understand what happens when these two systems collide.

You introduce the idea of a Participatory Culture in relation to new media. Can you explain the relation between the two concepts?

Participatory culture didn't begin or end with the internet. Most of what I am describing as participatory culture can be found in any thriving folk culture. At its best, a folk culture is defined through the expanding opportunities for participation. Everyone who wants to join is accepted. Everyone who has something to contribute is embraced. Experienced members share what they know through informal mentorship with newcomers because it expands the expressive resources of the community. The exchange of folk artifacts is reciprocal, based on the ideals of a gift economy, rather than hierarchical or commercial.

This idea of dispersed expression broke down in the 20th century as most forms of cultural production became professionalized and commercialized. We moved into a world where we consumed but did not produce the resources of our culture -- never totally but largely. Throughout that period, though, there were all kinds of underground and grassroots practices which held onto the idea of shared cultural expression and participation. These practices have re-emerged and gained greater public visibility in the era of Flickr and YouTube.

These technologies have brought cultural expression down to a human scale; they have placed the exchange of stories or songs in a social context; and they have opened up a space where all of us can be welcomed as potential participants. All of the research shows that the communities of practice which grow up around this participatory culture are powerful sites of pedagogy, fueled by passion and curiosity and by a desire to share what we learn and think with others. As with older folk cultures, informal pedagogies thrive as people get together to learn based on shared interests rather than fixed roles and responsibilities.

Participatory Culture could be relate with a Collective Intelligence as present in the media too?

In a networked society, literacy is a social skill not simply an individual competency. Understanding how information circulates becomes as important as knowing how to put your ideas into words, sounds, or images. Creation is iterative: we reshape what we've created in response to critical feedback from others in an ongoing process of innovation and refinement.

There are new forms of collective authorship which have emerged around principles of collective intelligence. Take Wikipedia for example, where any given entry may have multiple authors, each vetting and refining what was written before, each adding what they know to what others have already contributed. This is different from traditional forms of individual expertise and autonomous learning.

Pierre Levy tells us that in a networked society, nobody knows everything (Forget about the ideal of the Renaissance Man), everybody knows something (expand the range of possible expertises) and what any given member of the community knows is available to the group as a whole as needed. The result is an ethics of information -- an obligation to share what you know with the group, a need to respect yet critically engage with multiple ways of knowing, an active push to embrace diversity because it expands the creative and knowledge capacity of your network.

We are evolving towards this much more robust information system where groups working together can solve problems that are far more complex than can be confronted by individuals. And schools can actively prepare students for such a world -- by allowing them to develop and refine their individualized expertise, by providing complex problems which require collective effort to resolve, by teaching them the ethics involved in working in such a highly collaborative and open-ended context. Right now, schools are often using group work but not in ways which encourage real collaboration or shared expertise -- in part because they still assume a world where every student knows everything rather than one where different kinds of knowledge come together towards shared ends.

The project New Media Literacy relates participation to new forms of literacy?

What we are proposing is an expanded conception of literacy which includes all of the ways which we communicate our ideas to each other. This concept moves beyond the idea of critical consumption which is often what people call media literacy. You wouldn't consider someone literate if they could read but not write text and we shouldn't consider someone literate if they can consume but not produce media. Over the past fifty years, we have expanded the resources through which humans can communicate with each other, in some cases making tools like video cameras more widely available, and in others creating an infrastructure which allows anyone who goes online a chance to communicate their thoughts to the world.

Schools need to prepare young people to use these new resources creatively, effectively, and responsibly if they are going to prepare them for the lives they will lead in the 21st century. Such power can be under-used if they are not taught to use it creatively or effectively; it can be abused if they are not taught to use it responsibly. Teachers need to recognize both the risks and the possibilities of these new opportunities for human expression.

Public Media, Public Education, and the Public Good: An Interview with Heather Chaplin (Part One)

Heather Chaplin is one of the good guys -- she wrote one of the best books about the place of video games in contemporary culture; she's doing journalism which challenges some of the preconceptions about youth and new technology that run through most mainstream coverage; and she's been doing consulting work with some leading foundations -- MacArthur, Ford, among them -- as they think through what needs to be done to reallign public institutions with the risks and opportunities of the digital age. Heather interviewed me recently for the Digital Media and Learning project website, talking about participatory culture and public engagement. She was nice enough to allow me to turn the microphone (or in this case, the keyboard) the other way to talk with her about her recently published white paper, National Public Lightpath: Documentation and Recommendations, which seeks to map some future directions for how the internet might serve the public good.

Here's part of the summary of the white paper:

It's hard to remember life before the Internet. In the span of two decades it has entirely reshaped the way we do business, gather information, shop, play, and socialize. It's all moved so quickly, it's been hard to even stop and think. But do for a minute. Stop. Think. In all our rush to buy books and shoes online, and to find our lost high school friends on Facebook, we have failed to consider one thing. What part of the Internet is going to be devoted to the public interest?"

In part one of this interview, Heather offers some frank and provocative comments about how the internet might better serve the public good and critiques the "libertarian" perspective on how the web should grow. In the second part, which will run later this week, she shares some thoughts about digital literacy and public education.

Your white paper opens with the provocative question, "what part of the Internet is going to be devoted to the public interest?" How would you answer that question?

It's actually a really hard question to answer, based on what your notion of "in the public interest" is. I mean, NPR and PBS have presences on the Internet. And I suppose you could argue that there are probably millions of sites out there that serve the general public good. So, if I were to play devil's advocate against myself, I suppose I would argue that the very nature of the Internet - the anyone-can-publish idea - is in itself a public good.

But here's the thing, I'm not really the libertarian type. I don't believe that things will necessarily just sort themselves out if left alone. When I talk about creating a piece of the Internet in the public interest, I'm really talking about both public ownership of the infrastructure and content created specifically to educate, enlighten and enrich in the interests of genuine literacy and civic engagement.

I think ownership of the infrastructure is important here. There is no inherent financial incentive to create something like NPL so there is no reason on earth for Verizon or AT&T to get involved. As it is they want to create a pay structure where people pay more for faster connections, which would in effect wipe out any chance for the "little guy" to compete with corporate players. People forget in this country that corporations despite their sunny logos and appealing products, are not our friends. They have a PROFIT MOTIVE. This means, as the phrase would imply, they're motivated by profit not the public good. In fact, they're legally set up so that they're breaking the law if they stop to consider the public good over profits.

I have a real bee in my bonnet about the way the Internet infrastructure belongs to these companies when it was created by tax payer dollars. It's the same with the pharmaceutical companies - they make billions off drugs, the research for which was done by public universities funded by public citizens like you and me.

But now I digress.

What was the original question? Ah yes, well, in reality, I FEAR no part of the Internet will be devoted to the public interest in any sort of "official" capacity. I HOPE, however, that we are able to build an infrastructure that would, at first, connect public media to the schools, for educational purposes, and then build out from there to people's houses, libraries, museums etc.

Your paper proposes what you are calling the National Public Lightpath. What specifically are you advocating?

NPL proposes creating a publicly-owned piece of the Internet that links together important institutions devoted to the public good, such as public media, the public schools systems, and, eventually, museums and libraries. Ideally, it would eventually spread so that people could plug into NPL at home as well, to , say, complete a homework assignment given at school.

What many people don't understand is how the Internet works - that there are different modes of connecting households and institutions. Some Internet connections, for example, are still run over copper wires, even though copper wires don't permit for very fast transmission. The reason? In the early 1990s, a couple of the big providers bought a lot of copper wire, and don't want to lose out on their investment. NPL advocates using high speed fiber optic cable, which in essence means the "pipes" to your house or school or whatever, would be fatter and thus capable of transmitting a greater amount of data at faster speeds. This is something Japan, Korea and many European countries already have. Many scientific universities are also connected on a network they own communaly called National LamdaRail, a non-profit set up specifically for that purpose. (NPL would build off of the National LamdaRail infastructure, as it already circles the country.) Fatter pipes gives you the ability to transmit vast amounts of data in real time. Imagine your kid in school learning biology by playing with 3-D molecular models being piped into the classroom from a university on the other side of the world - or engaging in peer-to-peer learning by sharing, in real time, virtual worlds they'd built with kids in other country. The possibilities are endless.

Your talk about "empowering an agency to oversee these efforts and become the steward of the internet in the public interest" speaks of a centralized model of public media which is precisely what the internet has in many ways sought to overthrow. Have we gone too far towards decentralization and if so, what areas do require governmental intervention to promote the public interest?

This is a great question. As I mentioned, I don't really go with the whole libertarian thing. I don't have a problem with a society deciding, you know what, education is really important and we're going to create a way to make sure that kids all over the country, no matter where they're from or what color they are get a top notch one. I do think the culture of the Internet is so gung-ho on this idea of "freedom" that they sometimes forget what that word even means. I would argue that the kid who isn't given the skills she needs to be a functioning and engaged part of her society because she wasn't given the critical thinking skills for independent thinking is not really free. That's more important to me that making sure that no agency anywhere ever gets to decide about anything. I'm sick to death of the post-deconstructionist idea that nothing has any inherent meaning, that everything is subjective, etc. It's led to a lot of very smart people adopting a hands off attitude that I think is very dangerous to our future.

You note that most of the key tools which now support public discourse are owned by companies that are "designed to serve shareholders -- not the public." In what ways are these systems being deployed in ways which hurt rather than facilitate the public good?

Well this goes back to my earlier rant. I just always think it's worth pointing out what an organization's goal is. The goal of a for-profit corporation is to earn profits. That is its legal responsibility. So, if making money happens to coincide with the public good, than fantastic, everybody wins. But what happens when it doesn't? Say, keeping drug prices so high that most people in the world can't afford to buy them? Or letting cars go out on the road known to be dangerous because a recall is more expensive then settling law suits?

In the case of the Internet, one needs look no farther than the issue of Net Neutrality. The providers want to be able to charge more for faster speeds. Sounds OK. But all you need to do is think about it for one minute and realize that that's the end of the wonderful, brilliant democracy of the Internet right there and then. Why are they doing this? It's certainly not for the public good; it's to make money. Which, again, is their mandate.

I don't have a problem particularly with a company making money - we live in a capitalist society - I just don't think we should kid ourselves about the implications. We've gone so far towards being market-worshipers, and we've come to view anyone who wants to see the government get involved in any way as being anti-"freedom," that I think we've gotten ourselves into a bit of a mess. With this mind set, we've handed over a vast amount of power to extremely large entities who dont' even nominally have our best interests at heart. This is a problem.

Heather Chaplin is a professor of journalism at The New School and author of the book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. She recently participated in a Ford Foundation grant looking at issues of the public interest in the next generation of the Internet. She also works with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on issues of digital literacy and journalism. She has been interviewed for and cited in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Businessweek, and The Believer and has appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and CBS Sunday Morning. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details, and Salon. She is a regular contributor on game culture for All Things Considered.

How Fictional Story Worlds Influence Real World Politics

Last time, I shared with you the first of a series of occassional field reports and thought pieces from a team I have been putting together at MIT and USC to reflect on what we perceive as a potential continuum from engagement with participatory culture (especially fan communities and practices) and public participation in civic and political activities. As we described last time, this work is currently at a conceptual level as we gather examples of groups which are using elements from popular culture to provide a bridge into real world social and political concerns. Eventually we hope to do more indepth case studies working with organizations and their members to identify best practices that may be increasing young people's civic engagement and from there, develop materials which may foster even greater public participation. This reserarch has been funded in part by the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT (funded by the Knight Foundation) and reflects my involvement in a new John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation initiative focused on youth, new media, and public participation. This time, Flourish Klink, a Master's Candidate in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, shares some of our current thinking about "fictional story worlds" which offer resources that these groups are deploying to think through and intervene in complex real world problems.

The idea may seem radical at first -- breaking with the largely rationalist drive of most contemporary activism. We have had less trouble accepting the premise that works of realist literature -- Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath -- can become the focal point for movements for social change than we have buying the idea that fantastical realms may do so, even though there is a long history. As someone who has spent much of my life in fandom, I have long seen examples of science fiction inspiring fans to rally support around NASA and manned space flight, say, or more recently, slash fans being moved to actively engage with issues of concern to the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transsexual community or to join fights against censorship and for free expression.

But what has intrigued me the most in recent years is the way fan communities, especially around fantasy texts, are inspiring activism around human rights issues. The green politics often implicit in Anime has sparked growing awareness of environmental issues while J.K. Rowling's background in Amnesty International helps to explain why the Harry Potter books are leading young people to be concerned with repressive governments and human dignity.

The temptation is to evaluate such movements through a focus on the author's implicit or explicit political commitments, yet we may also explore how fans have used these popular platforms as raw materials for their own public engagement, seeking inspiration there for ways they might work through complex real world issues. It is this focus on fandom as a site for exploring and engaging with social concerns that is the central focus of this second installment in the series.

If you know of any groups who are doing interesting work which fuses participatory culture and public participation, please contact me at hjenkins@usc.edu. We are trying to identify as many examples as we can at this stage in our research.

How Fictional Story Worlds Influence Real World Politics

by Flourish Klink

Once upon a time, a hare saw a tortoise ambling along, and began to mock him. The hare challenged the tortoise to a race, and the tortoise accepted. When they began, the hare immediately shot ahead. After running for some time, the hare was very far ahead of the tortoise, so he decided to sit down and have a rest before continuing the race. Sitting under a shady tree, the hare soon fell asleep. The tortoise, plodding on, overtook him, and by the time the hare woke up, the tortoise had already passed the finish line. The moral of this story is that slow and steady wins the race.

As they read stories like this one, out of Aesop's fables, children are primed to seek meanings and morals in the stories they read. What we are taught as children follows us throughout our lives. As teens and adults, we continue to look for meanings in the stories we read. "That was such an inspiring book," we say, or "that movie was so depressing. It really made me feel like there's nothing I can do to fix this messed-up world."

Sometimes, we are inspired to emulate aspects of our favorite stories. For example, when reading The Lord of the Rings, a fan might be inspired by Frodo's willingness to embark upon a long, perilous and dangerous journey, even before he really knows what it will entail, and even though every part of him wants to take the easier route:

"

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. 'I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."

Frodo's self-sacrifice and bravery might inspire us to take a chance - to try something new, perhaps. One can imagine that a person might read about Frodo's choice and decide that they, too, can take a journey to a dangerous place for the good of mankind - and sign up for the Peace Corps. Or, on a smaller scale, someone might just decide to start serving the homeless and mentally ill, overcoming her cultural revulsion against and fear of people less fortunate than herself.

This kind of inspiration really relies on you "buying into" the story's world. It doesn't matter whether Frodo is saying heroic things if you find Lord of the Rings boring and Tolkien's style dry as dust. In some sense, if you really care about a story, the characters in it become figures that live in your mind, role models, if you will.

Now think of a different situation. Imagine that, instead of our fictional do-gooder being inspired by Frodo's speech, she is inspired by a persuasive person. Perhaps she goes to a lecture about the issue of homelessness in her town, and at this lecture she meets a woman who runs a soup kitchen and who convinces her to overcome her nervousness at volunteering there. How is this situation different from the first? How is it the same? Is the first situation even realistic? Is the second situation? These are some of the sub-questions we're struggling with in our civic engagement research.

It is well known that people who are involved in the high arts are more likely to volunteer in their communities. However, the reasons for this correlation are not clear. Are people actually inspired to volunteer by high arts? Is it only high arts that can inspire people to become more civically engaged, or can popular culture do it, too? Or is there a more complex situation underpinning the NEA study and these questions?

As Anna ably chronicled in the last post in this series, there are plenty of civically engaged organizations which, to a greater or lesser degree, have formed around particular pop culture texts. There's a wide variety of ways that these organizations activate popular culture. Some of them grew organically out of a fan culture; others were concerned with a particular issue and then decided to use a story to make that issue more compelling. Some started off as very tightly focused on one issue - for instance, Racebending began life as a protest against white actors being cast in Asian roles in the movie The Last Airbender - and eventually branched out into more concerns. Others have always cast their net a bit wider. Still others began as tightly focused and continue to be tightly focused, such as Verb Noire, an e-publishing company dedicated to publishing fiction about groups that have been historically underrepresented in sci-fi and fantasy. What all these organizations have in common, however, is that they mobilize stories to encourage people to become more civically engaged - and in many cases, they were inspired and mobilized by stories.

There's a lot more complexity in the way that these organizations deal with the stories they refer to than might initially meet the eye. In Textual Poachers, Henry refers to fandom as a mix of "fascination and frustration." Never is that more clear than in these organizations. Some of them, like Verb Noire, are dealing directly with aspects of their fandom that they don't like. Other organizations have to negotiate complex and differing understandings of their core story: the Harry Potter Alliance's "What would Dumbledore do?" campaign relies on a perception of Dumbledore as a positive or "good" character, which not all Harry Potter fans share. Some, like Racebending, are dealing with multiple instantiations of a single story and their slight variations, drawing inspiration from some but not all of these versions.

Then, too, relatively simple fictional worlds often provide a starting point for hard thinking about the nuanced real world - hard thinking that goes beyond just "I want to be like Frodo." For example, the Harry Potter Alliance is doing this sort of hard thinking about the issue of witch hunts in Nigeria. In these witch hunts, parents are persuaded to ostracize and abuse their disobedient children, calling them "witches," in the name of performing an exorcism. The pastors who perform the exorcisms frequently charge a great deal of money for the service; if the parents cannot pay, they are told their only option is to completely ostracize or even kill their child. The children who survive often have suffered horrific wounds and incredible emotional trauma, and they are left alone in the world, if they aren't lucky enough to be taken into an orphanage or shelter.

Naturally, witches and wizards are an important part of the Harry Potter books - and the persecution of witches and wizards is an important part of the Harry Potter books. In fact, Harry's aunt and uncle subject him to fairly horrible neglect as a result of his wizarding talents. On the surface, there would seem to be a very direct correlation between the witch-hunts in Nigeria and Harry Potter's childhood in the Harry Potter books, a correlation which the Harry Potter Alliance might rally around.

In reality, however, this correlation was only the start of the conversation. Rather than simply seeing the similarities between Harry's life and the life of a persecuted African child, members of the Harry Potter Alliance also looked for the differences. They discussed, and are still discussing, how the cultural differences between Africa and the developed West might be clouding their understanding of the issue. They discussed the differences between the witch hunts in Nigeria and persecution of Wiccans in the United States (and came to the conclusion that Harry Potter fandom's typical claim - that the books don't lead to witchcraft - is, on some level, complicit with the idea that it is wrong to be Wiccan). And they discussed the ways that cultural flows between churches in the United States and churches in Africa may have contributed to the increased number of witch hunts that are taking place today. In fact, the conversation is still continuing, as they struggle with the question of how to make an intervention without behaving paternalistically towards the African groups involved.

This sort of discussion can take place because the Harry Potter Alliance exists in the context of participatory culture. Rather than receiving information from a central source, group members have access to a social network and to easy email communication with organizers: there's plenty of opportunity for group members to become engaged in debate about the organizations' understanding of the stories they're focused on, and the organizations' actions. This increased communication can sometimes lead to unending debate, it's true: in some more decentralized groups, it can be difficult to come to a decision. When making choices quickly is important, there's nothing like centralized authority. But sometimes, like when the Harry Potter Alliance was thinking about witch hunts in Africa, a longer, slower thought process is appropriate, leading to better decisions. To quote a story with a moral: "slow and steady wins the race!"

On Chuck and Carrot Mobs: Mapping the Connections Between Participatory Culture and Public Participation

One of my proudest moments at the Futures of the Entertainment 4 conference was moderating a session on Transmedia for Social Change, which closed off the first day of the event. This panel brought together a number of people who I have encounter recently through my research on the relations between participatory culture and public participation: Stephen Duncombe - NYU, author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy (The New Press); Andrew Slack - The Harry Potter Alliance; Noessa Higa - Visionaire Media; Lorraine Sammy - Co-creator Racebending; and Jedidiah Jenkins-Director of Public & Media Relations, Invisible Children.

For many attending this event, their discussion of new forms of activism that have emerged around the borders of transmedia entertainment were particularly eye opening While we were able to draw connections across these various projects, none of the panelists had met before and most did not know what the others were doing. It was exciting to see the shift in tone at the conference as we moved from talking about business plans to talking about human rights and social justice. I wanted to share the video of this session with you here.

During my introduction to the panel, I referenced the research we've begun to do trying to better understand how engagement with participatory culture, especially with fandom, may be teaching the skills and creating identities which can be applied to campaigns for social change. This project has launched since my move to California and is being conducted jointly with researchers at USC, MIT, and Tufts. What follows is the first of a series of reports on this still new research initiative, written by members of my team. Anna Van Someren, who wrote this first installment, joined the team having already served as the production manager on Project New Media Literacies, and with a background in media production, media literacy instruction, and social activism. Here, she gives an overview of what we are trying to do.

On Chuck and Carrot Mobs: Mapping the Connections Between Participatory Culture and Public Participation

by Anna Van Someren

I was on my 8th (excruciating) rep, struggling with some kind of bowflex-looking machine when my personal trainer asked what I do for work. As usual, I had the fleeting wish that I could say something short and concrete, something like "preschool teacher" or "novelist". Because really, did this woman care any more than the typical dentist who asks such questions with both hands inside your mouth? Could I finally come up with something a little less opaque than "researcher at MIT"? If I did, could I for once muster the self-discipline it takes not to ramble incomprehensibly?

I tried a new approach, and asked if she had a favorite television show. "Battlestar Galactica!" - her face lit up as she described the Starbuck costume her friend was helping her create for Halloween. "Well, say a Battlestar Galactica fan group became interested in doing some work for social change, work that maybe addresses an issue brought up by the show. The group I'm working with is looking at how people who organize around a story they love, and then decide to take some kind of public action." She seemed genuinely interested, so I continued with more detail during front lunges. I think I may have gotten a bit rambly, but I'll try not to here.

As readers of this blog know, Henry has moved to LA and is now the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Although he has relinquished his role as principal investigator at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (funded by the Knight Foundation), his work on participatory culture and civic engagement has spawned a new research project supported in part by the center. This project is bi-coastal; on the east coast we have myself, research advisor Clement Chau and research assistant Flourish Klink. Representing the west coast out at USC with Henry we have research director Sangita Shresthova (CMS alum '03) along with more than a dozen Annenberg School students whose work relates directly to our research interests.

Our early conversations circled around the skills needed to become involved in public discourse. We discussed emerging forms of engagement, such as the Carrotmob project, which might be considered civic because of its socially beneficial goal of protecting the environment. Carrotmob organizes competitions in which local businesses pledge to make ecological improvements to their practices. The business with the best pledge enjoys an environmentally-motivated flash mob: 'carrotmobbers' receive instructions via blog posts and twitter about where and when to show up and spend.

The 'Finale & a Footlong' Save Chuck campaign is another recent initiative working to leverage consumer power. In April 2009, organizers mobilized fans of the television show Chuck to buy footlong sandwiches at Subway, a main sponsor, on the night of the show's finale. Fans were instructed to leave a note in the Subway suggestion box mentioning the campaign, and Chuck star Zach Levi described it as "a way for non-Nielson fans to show their love of the show by directly supporting one of Chuck's key advertisers".

These two projects have entirely different goals, and some might say Save Chuck is a far cry from civic engagement, but it's interesting to note that the skills and strategies being used are so similar. We began to wonder if participants in campaigns like Save Chuck might stand to gain some of the skills and knowledge needed to become active citizens. With so many young people so engaged with popular culture, this potential is critical to understand. In Convergence Culture, Henry describes how popular culture can function as a civic playground, where lower stakes allow for a greater diversity of opinions than tolerated in political arenas. "One way that popular culture can enable a more engaged citizenry is by allowing people to play with power on a microlevel ...popular culture may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture."

Of course, there are differing definitions of what an 'engaged citizenry' looks like. CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Engagement, works with three primary categories: civic activities, electoral activities, and political voice activities. In Civic Life Online, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Luke Walker define civic engagement broadly and simply as "any activity aimed at improving one's community". In his book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam considers civic engagement to be on the decline, and bemoans the social ties we've lost now that we spend more time "isolated" in front of the television. Some share his pessimism, worrying that the millennial generation lacks an interest in the workings of government, but it's important to remember that we're not talking about something static or stabilized. In their paper Young Citizens and Civic Learning: Two Paradigms of Citizenship in the Digital Age Lance Bennett, Alison Rank and Christopher Wells remind us that "citizenship is a dynamic social construction that reflects changing social and political conditions."

So how does the dimension of popular culture fit into our understanding of citizenship? Voting, joining a political party, or doing community service are concrete, measurable activities that have long been defined as civic. What does loving a television show have to do with any of this? It's helpful here to consider two opposing views of democracy described by Stephen Coleman in Civic Life Online. Although he's talking specifically about youth e-citizenship here, he offers a useful model, describing the conflict between democracy viewed as "an established and reasonably just system, with which young people should be encouraged to engage" and as "a political as well as cultural aspiration, most likely to be realized through networks in which young people engage with one another". The second view is expansive; it describes a realm where citizens are empowered not only to participate in the public arena, but to shape it. It's a view that does not contain activity within a strictly political sphere, but embraces cultural citizenship. This aligns well with Peter Levine's definition of civic engagement as not only political activism, deliberation, and problem-solving, but also cultural production, or participation in shaping a culture.

If we want to see how engagement with popular culture can fuel social action, Loraine Sammy and her activities with racebending.com provide a rich case study. Fans of Nickelodeon's Avatar: the Last Airbender animation series were frustrated and disappointed by the casting process for the live-action movie version. Paramount cast the main characters, who are Asian in the original series, with white actors. Avatar fans came together to create the LiveJournal-based Aang Ain't White campaign, which attempted to pressure Paramount with a letter-writing campaign. Loraine, who spoke on the Transmedia for Social Change panel at Futures of Entertainment 4, helped grow Aang Ain't White into the racebending movement, "a coalition and community dedicated to encouraging fair casting practices". She and other participants volunteer their time, talents and skills to advocate on behalf of this cause, which has now reached beyond the Avatar movie and may begin to play a watchdog role in Hollywood.

There are so many aspects we want to explore about the racebending community, and others like it. It's intriguing to think about how fiction and fantasy can captivate us on an emotional level, providing a narrative structure that can motivate us to seek change in the real world. We're also curious about how individuals develop their identities as citizens - is it possible that participants in the Save Chuck campaign were developing a sense of empowerment and efficacy in the world - exercising their civic muscles, as it were? Our primary interest right now lies with the nature of participatory culture communities, like racebending.

We consider a participatory culture to be one where:

1. there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. there is strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others
3. there is some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. members believe their contributions matter
5. members feel some degree of social connection with one another

How do these characteristics work together to encourage and support civic engagement? To find out, we'll be looking at participatory culture communities engaged in some type of social or public action. We're specifically interested in groups which originally gelled around shared interest in popular culture and then become somehow involved in public discourse. Racebending is an excellent example, and is one of our planned case studies, along with the Harry Potter Alliance, Invisible Children, Browncoats, Anonymous, and possibly the hacktivism inspired by Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother.

This winter we'll be conducting interviews with members and founders of these groups, asking questions about their operations, their membership, and their activities. By spring we hope to have a stronger grasp on our research question, how do the characteristics of participatory culture environments support the kinds of social learning, deliberation, debate, and advocacy practices that allow entry into a shared public discourse? In order to share our thoughts and findings in advance of our white paper, we'll be posting updates here. This introduction marks the start of our series, so stay tuned for more from our team, and please share your ideas, critiques, and comments.

If you know of other groups or projects who are deploying fan culture/popular culture as a springboard for social change, please let us know. We are trying to cast a wide net right now to identify examples which might help us better understand these emerging forms of activism. We are especially interested in examples from outside the United States.

If you are interested in this discussion of civic engagement and participatory culture, you might also want to check out this video produced by the MacArthur Foundation and showcasing the thinkin of Joe Kahne, who is part of the new research hub MacArthur is creating to think about these issues.

Joe Kahne on Civic Participation Online and Off from Spotlight on Vimeo.

Inside the Computer Clubhouse (Part Two of Three)

What do you see as the biggest impact the Computer Clubhouse movement has made on our current pedagogies around new media?

ROBBIN: When I think of pedagogies and new media one thought is that new media can serve as a powerful amplifier of human sociality, in this case around learning. Such new media pedagogies should catalyze, facilitate, and propagate individual and collective learning and teaching experiences. The Clubhouse has been a test bed for exploring how learners and mentors can engage learning from each other through digital media. One outcome has been how members and mentors come to view digital media as a material for expressing their ideas about learning and their community.

The MacArthur Foundation will be hosting an upcoming conference on Diversifying Participation. What lessons might we take from the Computer Clubhouses about how to support diversity in access and engagement with digital media?

KYLIE: The Clubhouse definitely serves as a great model for successful scale-up across diverse contexts, including across racial, gender, religious and national boundaries. One of the programs that the Network has adopted to foster diversity within the Clubhouses is "Girls Day". Girls Day sets aside particular times and days where the Clubhouse is an all-girls site, where girls can feel comfortable learning new skills and trying out new projects in a safe space. As a result, the Computer Clubhouse Network has historically appealed equally to both boys and girls, which is uncommon in technology-rich settings.

It also seems to me that Clubhouse's emphasis on creative production allows for both local adaptability and the ability to make something personally meaningful. The tools that are available at the Clubhouse sites have been chosen precisely because they allow youth to design their own projects and give them flexibility in the process. For example, at the LA Clubhouse site, a popular activity was to manipulate digital pictures of expensive cars, inserting a picture of yourself next to "your" ride. A young bi-racial African-American and Latino youth named Dwight extended this practice by creating a culture of "Low Rida" interactive Scratch projects. A Low Rida (or lowrider) is a customized car associated principally with the Mexican American community that first emerged amongst migrant workers during World War II. Lowrider art is now an established art form where youth draw or depict lowriders and is featured in magazines, like Lowrider magazine, along with pictures of customized cars, political reports, and advertisements for parts and accessories. In one of Dwight's first projects, "Low Low," the viewer controls the hydraulics on two cars using arrow and letter keys. Dwight's contribution to the Clubhouse was to expand the genres of work in Scratch and incorporate new genres that are inclusive of his social practices. This resonated with others in the Clubhouse community, eventually drawing in several first-time users of Scratch who may have not otherwise engaged in this type of creative production. Low Ridas represent a conscientious and literate practice that stands in opposition to the pressure to assimilate into the American mainstream culture. In sum, the Clubhouse's emphasis on design and tools for design seems to facilitate the ability to adapt to local contexts more so than, say, games that are by nature more embedded in the culture that produced them.

Early in the book, you describe your goal as to "inspire youth to think about themselves as competent, creative, and critical learners and citizens." Break that down for us.

ROBBIN: Clubhouse member self-identification as critical thinkers is a product of their experiences in deep learning activities such as debugging, critical reflection, etc., and their exchanges with others learners in the Clubhouse. There are many ways to practice these skills, whether utilizing software (Pearls of Wisdom, for example), hardware (robotics, Legos, etc.), and people (working on team projects, exchanging ideas with other leaders, reacting to project feedback from other learners, etc.).

While the Clubhouse supports young people pursuing their own interests and projects, you also see adults as playing a strong role in the process. You describe these adults as "mentors" and not "teachers." How do you characterize the distinction?

KYLIE: While there is considerable overlap, the distinction is important with regard to two factors: the nature of afterschool learning environments and support for the constructionist philosophy of the Clubhouse. On the first point, when we think of the role of a "teacher", we're envisioning the type of direct instruction that is common in schools. While direct instruction has merit, there are numerous characteristics of afterschool learning spaces that don't look like those of your typical classroom--youth moving freely between activities in the Clubhouse, sporadic attendance, and the often irregular times that parents drop in to pick up their kids are a few of these factors. As a result, using a direct instruction model for projects that youth work on for a few days or weeks doesn't really work. The second, and perhaps more important, factor in this distinction between our view of a "teacher" and a "mentor" is the role of a mentor as a muse, someone who supports the kids on self-directed projects, even if the mentor has very little expertise in the area. Being a mentor extends way beyond helping members to debug their projects; it's about social networking and connecting youth with resources outside the Clubhouse; it's about listening, advice giving and supporting; and it's about co-creating with the youth. Some of the times that were most exciting for me at the Clubhouse in South LA were the times when neither of us (the member or me) knew the answer to a given problem. At one point, I was working with a youth that wanted to make a side-scrolling video game using Scratch. I had absolutely no idea how we were going to do this! We each came up with several ideas - none of them really worked, but he seemed to build some confidence in the fact that I didn't know what I was doing either and I was getting a Ph.D. at UCLA at the time. That evening he continued to work after I left. The next day, he was soooo excited to show me the solution that he had come up with - one that neither of us had originally thought of. You could see it in his eyes that he was beaming with pride and shortly thereafter he told me that he wanted to be a professional game designer. These types of experiences made me realize that you really don't need to know how to do everything in order for kids to discover new things. Being open to exploring the materials alongside youth is equally, if not more, valuable.

ROBBIN: I view the exceptional mentoring that takes place at the Clubhouse as a function of four core mentor "strengths;" mentor as model, cultivator, peer and network. While it is rare for a single individual to embody all these strengths, it is the combination and distribution of these attributes that determine the "feel" of a Clubhouse and the breadth and depth of the learning activities that take place. The "mentor as model" represents mentoring behaviors that expose members to how the adult goes about problem solving, learning new things, and how they articulate their meta-learning experiences. Members tend to be particularly drawn to mentors that exhibit this strength. The "mentor as cultivator" speaks to how mentors seed many of the "firsts" members discover during their time at the Clubhouse, including expectations of going to college, involved community citizenship, and connecting Clubhouse lessons to their dreams and aspiration. The "mentor as peer" is the person who encourages members to teach what they know to other Clubhouse members. These mentors tend also to encourage members to problem-solve and provide moral support while the member navigates this process. The members are then encouraged to share their understanding of meta-learning with their peers. Finally, the "mentor as network" refers to the mentor as a key resource, to people and ideas previously unavailable to the member through his or her personal networks. Exposure to a "larger world" than that experienced in their local neighborhood is a critical part of the learning and teaching that occurs at the Clubhouse.

You talk about the Computer Clubhouse as a "community of learners." How important is it that they function as communities rather than provide services to individual learners?

KYLIE: This question is really at the heart of what makes the Computer Clubhouse unique. During one of our interviews for the book, one of the Clubhouse Coordinators put it in terms that really resonated with me. He was someone who had made quite a bit of money in a former career as a computer engineer in the .com era but was increasingly dissatisfied with his former job. As a result, he quit his job and started working at a local Computer Clubhouse, sharing his knowledge about computer programming and engineering with the Clubhouse youth. His daughter, on the other hand, was still attending a wealthy private school. He noted that despite having access to all of the same equipment at home and at school, the crucial ingredient that was missing was the community of learners engaged in shared activity. Even learning about technologies en masse in a computer class in school doesn't provide the same arena for the development of personal interests, nor the amount of time to work in depth on your projects, using these technologies. Without it, he argued youth didn't have the support from adults and peers to creatively engage with the technologies as youth have at the Clubhouse. It's really not about the technologies, the communities and practices that emerge around the technologies are what are most important for meaningful and continued long-term engagement, which ironically is not part of technology programs even in wealthy and more well-off neighborhoods.

ROBBIN: A defining characteristic of a vibrant, productive community is its resiliency and strength. Such communities are themselves the "safety net" that protects its members and ensures their personal and professional development. Service providers may provide various safety net functions; however in most cases this requires the person being serviced to fit within a framework particular to the service provider. Clients must use the programs and services in particular ways that are determined by the service provider. The Clubhouse, as a learning community, provides a safety net without an excess of program constraints. Kids are members of the Clubhouse community. The resources of the Clubhouse belong to them and are their responsibility. They have a say in how their Clubhouse manages itself and how it grows. The Clubhouse is the launch point for new, future opportunities, including higher education and creative, successful careers based on the learning lessons of the Clubhouse. Also, the Clubhouse community is more than a group of learners and is deeply connected. Members and mentors develop lifelong relationships.

Yasmin Kafai, professor of learning sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, has led several NSF-funded research projects that have studied and evaluated youth's learning of programming as designers of interactive games, simulations and media arts in school and afterschool programs. She has pioneered research on games and learning since the early 90's and more recently on tween's participation in virtual worlds, which is now supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She has also been influential in several national policy efforts among them "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the Computer Age" (AAUW, 2000). Currently, she is a member of the steering committee for the National Academies' workshop series on "Computational Thinking for Everyone". Kafai is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education, and the Rosenfield Prize for Community Partnership in 2007.

Kylie Peppler is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a visual and new media artist by training, Peppler engages in research that focuses on the intersection of the arts, media literacy, and new technologies. A Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation as well as a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship has supported her work in these areas. Her research interests center on the media arts practices of urban, rural, and (dis)abled youth in order to better understand and support literacy, learning, and the arts in the 21st Century. Peppler is also currently a co-PI, on two recent grants from the National Science Foundation to study creativity in youth online communities focused on creative production.

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and Special Assistant to the Vice-Provost for Faculty Equity. She is responsible for strategic leadership and development of Institute-wide faculty development programs and graduate student recruitment initiatives. She is PI on a Department of Education grant project that is underway in schools in the Birmingham, Alabama public school system.