NML has recently partnered with New Hampshire's
Department of Education to facilitate a year-long
professional development initiative using the new media literacies as a springboard for developing innovative curriculum. Our goal is to help foster a broader perspective of what it means to be media literate in the digital age, and offer tools for translating the social skills and cultural competencies outlined in the white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006) into meaningful and engaging learning experiences in the classroom and beyond.
Educators are exploring the urgent challenges that
21st Century learners face by expanding their own learning experiences using a
participatory, digital model of professional develmopment. In this context, educators are able to practice
their own skills as teachers by creating, collaborating, connecting,
and circulating with one another in an interactive, multi-media
environment. Not only are they developing new materials for their own schools and
districts, but also an 8-part webinar series focused on a comprehensive,
practical understanding of the NML skills for the larger educational community.
The 8-part series will begin on February 11th and share
the framework of social skills and cultural competencies which shapes the work
of New Media Literacies, and illustrate the skills by looking more closely at
learning through such cultural phenomenon as computer game guilds, youtube
video production, Wikipedia, fan fiction, Second Life and other virtual worlds,
music remixing, social network sites, and cosplay. Each webinar will examine
closely new curricular materials which have emerged from New Media Literacies,
Global Kids, Harvard's GoodPlay Project, Common Sense Media, the George Lucas
Foundation, and other projects which are seeking to introduce these skills into
contemporary educational practices and leave participants with plenty of
opportunities to take the material, information and methods back into their
classroom.
We will host the first webinar on Thursday,
February 11, 2010 at 7pm EST and focus on the new media literacies, judgment and appropriation as well as copyright, fair use, and creative commons.
Our special guests will be Flourish Klink, a graduate student at MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, and Erin Reilly, NML Research Director.
See the full listing of upcoming webinars and get information on how to join the sessions here.
In 2008, New Media Literacies worked with Global Kids to take the activities in our Learning Library to promote new media literacy acquisition and adapt them to GK's style of global issue education in the afterschool setting. We also co-authored Our Space, the digital and media ethics casebook with Harvard's GoodPlay Project which will come out later this year. This work includes learning modules that address the special ethical issues that arise in the online worldcited below .
The Focus Dialogues, associated research and report produced by:
Rafi Santo, Carrie James, Katie Davis, Shira Lee Katz, Linda Burch, and Barry Joseph
Global Kids, Inc. / The GoodPlay Project at Harvard University's Project Zero / Common Sense Media /
Today's youth inhabit new digital social spaces foreign to most adults. These spaces offer unpre-cedented opportunities for connection, creativity, and community. At the same time they present challenges that are often either invisible to adults or exaggerated beyond reason.
It can be difficult for parents, educators, and other adults to talk about these challenges with young people, especially if they feel intimidated by youth who navigate sites like Facebook or master video games effortlessly.
The following report aims to document what we learned through the Focus Dialogues, the first cross-generational online conversation on digital media and ethics. It will highlight how adults and youth think about ethical issues online through the use of direct quotes and information from the Dialogues and provide context around what we believe is the first step towards addressing issues relating to ethics in the digital age.
Why Dialogue?
The Dialogues, held online in April 2009, were prompted by three organizations: Global Kids, Common Sense Media, and Harvard University's GoodPlay Project. The project was born out of a sense of curiosity and experimentation. Can youth and adults have open and honest conversation in an online setting? What are the perceptions and tensions across generations when it comes to how we act on the Internet? Is it possible to reach common ground when it comes to digital ethics?
The organizations brought over 250 parents, teachers, and teens together for a three-week online conversation. Every day, participants responded to scenarios and questions presented, and shared thoughts and situations from their own lives. Posting over 2,500 messages
over the course of the Dialogues, participants shared a wealth of perspectives. The findings summarized here are being disseminated in hopes that they might inform research, curricular development, and parenting in a space so often hard to navigate.
Media scholar Henry Jenkins is known to say, "Kids don't need us watching over their shoulders; they need us to have their backs."
This report is shared in that spirit, as one more resource supporting parents and educators in their roles as caring adults in the lives of young people trying to navigate a new digital world.
My most recent job at Project New Media Literacies has been a revamp of the NML website. As you can see, it isn't done yet - but it's got me thinking a lot about the concept of play.
Until I came to Project NML, I had never thought about the way I approached computers as "playful." To be honest, I had never thought about the way I approached computers at all. I had simply mucked my way through. In high school, I passed out of having to take a computer class - even though I had never had to use Microsoft Office before! - simply by mucking around and guessing. Turns out I was able to figure out how to use the programs I needed with a little logic and a little luck. I tried something that seemed right, and if it failed, I tried the next thing. After all, the worst that could happen to me was that I'd have to take a boring computer class - right?
Since then, I've taken the same approach to computers, and I've built up many skills. I'm conversant with how to build and publish a website of nearly any kind. I feel confident that I could learn any programming language that I needed to; some of them might take longer than others, but I'd get it in the end. I don't think it's a stretch to say that I'm a computer-savvy kinda person.
The thing is, I didn't learn to do any of these things in school. I think I know why. Play is a really hard thing to get across in school! Teachers have to ensure that their lessons get done by the end of the day, and they have to ensure that they can grade their students somehow. There isn't a culture of encouraging play, at least in the United States - just listen to the way that people excoriate any kind of game that isn't a competitive sport (Only dorks play board games and card games! Only nerds play role-playing games! And everyone knows that video games will make you violent and maladjusted!).
But sometimes, when I was first learning how to install blogging platforms (back when GreyMatter was the gold standard in the early 2000s), it really did feel like I was playing a game - a game with my friends, all of whom were also interested in blogging, as opponents. We were all seeking to have the most technologically advanced blog. Perl was complex and HTML was difficult for me to figure out, but ultimately I knew that there was a ruleset - I just needed to apply myself and, sooner or later, I would figure out all the rules, and then I'd have mastered the game.
The key thing, for me, was that I wasn't ever afraid of breaking anything. As far as I was concerned, I was playing around in a sandbox. Nothing I could do would really destroy anything - the worst thing that could possibly happen would be that I'd have to erase my blog and start over. Not a big deal.
Now compare this to the way that things typically go in schools. Students are warned NOT to touch anything on their computers that they aren't directly told to (this is intended to prevent them from messing things up, and believe me, they get the picture). They are asked to produce very specific projects. If your spreadsheet doesn't work, you've failed. And the penalty here for failing is a bad grade and the disappointment of your teacher and, presumably, your parents. Even if your parents don't care, the world tells you that if you fail in school, you're going to be a failure in life. So, pretty much, there's no room for play there. The negative consequences are simply too high.
More than that, kids aren't encouraged to think of what they're doing in computer classes as playful. They're encouraged to think of it as work. Students are introduced to the concept of reading for pleasure, but when do we talk about programming for pleasure? And yet I, and many other people, have spent many pleasant and engrossing hours creating websites and figuring out programming and markup languages, simply as a hobby. That might not be everyone's cup of tea any more than reading is everyone's cup of tea, but...
This blog entry may be somewhat formless and confused, but I hope it might help us think about and discuss: is what we do in a classroom always "work"? Can it be "leisurely"? Can it be "playful"? Do we classify some activities as "work" and some as "leisure" automatically, no matter how much or little enjoyment we get out of them? Are these things endemic to the system, or are there workarounds? Does it make sense to try to find workarounds, or is that an attempt to fix something that ain't broken?
(And, by the way: The new site design will launch by the end of January. It will be much more accessible and up-to-date as far as code is concerned, and it will feature a new NML logo and much more information about all our various projects.)
Much of your discussion centers around the impact of public media on public education. How would you describe the ideal learning environment for the 21st century and what blocks us from achieving that ideal?
One could write a book on that topic! Well, one of the intriguing things about creating a more intimate relationship between public media and public education is that public media is in possession of a national treasure of historical materials. Part of NPL would be assisting public media in digitizing that material and retooling it for teachers to use while teaching.
So imagine a science class where the teacher can pull out a segment from Nova on the spot to illustrate the answer to a particular question asked by a student. Or using a bit of an interview from a Jim Leher interview to make a political point. The examples could go on for ever. And, unlike the archives of corporate-owned media, these arches belong to the American public. We paid for them and we should take advantage of them.
There are also real opportunities for public media to be involved teaching kids media skills. Imagine a local PBS station also being a hub where kids could take classes on video editing, or putting together sound pieces, or making video games. Part of public media 2.0 calls for local stations to take a greater role in serving their local communities directly.
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.
Virtual Forum Theater (VFT)
is a computer-based learning experience that allows face- to-face,
computer, and multimedia-based drama. VFT has three parts: VFT
the toolset, VFT the creative
activity, and VFT the performance. The VFT toolset is a
multimedia tool for the creation of dramatic plays using audio, and images that
enables participatory and collaborative digital playmaking through the Internet.
The VFT activity or process is the collaborative process of creating a
digital play, and consists of much more than the VFT toolset, including
dramatic exercises involving group bonding, social awareness and Improv skills.
A VFT performance refers to the activity of watching and responding to a
previously created digital play. In practice, the distinctions between these
parts of VFT become blurred; many times a performance becomes a creative
activity.
VFT integrates image, audio and text and was
conceived as a tool for collaborative creations and remix with basic
educational goals of improving argumentation skills and expressive fluency in
disenfranchised children and youth in developing countries such as Brazil. I developed, tested, deployed and
researched it in the context of my PhD on education, technology and drama at
Tufts University.
While in Cambridge for the Futures of Entertainment conference, my wife and I stopped over at the Boston Museum of Science which is currently playing host to Harry Potter: The Exhibition. We had both attended a fascinating presentation about the design and development of this exhibit during last Summer's Azkatraz convention in San Francisco and so we had high anticipations for the show and were not disappointed.
If you live anywhere near Boston, you should definitely try to make it there for the exhibit which runs through Feb. 21. The exhibit is pricy since you have to pay a fee above and beyond the price of admission to the museum itself, but we found it more than worth it.
I was interviewed about NML recently for the Ed Beat blog, which is run by a non-profit I used to work at, Learning Matters.
Here's the intro followed by a link to the rest of the article:
Last week, when John Merrow's post on technology in schools generated a long discussion in its comments section, we learned just how important this issue is to educators and students. This week we spoke with Hillary Kolos, who worked with Learning Matters from 2002-2005, and is now a graduate student in MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. She's a research assistant for a project we've mentioned here before-Project New Media Literacies-which is attempting to explore what media literacy means in the 21st Century, and how students-and their schools-can learn to do it well.Full article
Global Kids, Inc.
Tashawna is a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY. In the morning she leaves home for school listening to her MP3s, texting her friends about meeting up after school at Global Kids, where she participates in a theater program, or FIERCE, the community center for LGBT youth. On the weekend she'll go to church and, on any given day, visit MySpace and Facebook as often as she can. While she misses television and movies, she says she just can't find the time.
This describes what we can call Tashawna's distributed learning network, the most important places in her life where learning occurs. Not just at home, school and church but also through digital media, like MP3s, SMS and social networks, and at youth-serving institutions, like Global Kids and FIERCE. Some are places that require her presence, like school, while others are opt-in, like MySpace. But the learning she gathers across the nodes in her network are preparing her to succeed in the classrooms, workplaces, and civic arenas of the 21st Century.
And Tashawna is not alone. In part due to the changes in education, in part due to the affects of digital media, youth have a wide array of options for learning knowledge and developing skills. But how many youth feel in charge of their networks, or are even aware they exist as an interconnected whole? How do they learn to synthesize what they learn and communicate it to future employers and college admission staff who won't learn of their strengths on most school transcripts?
Last weekend, Home Inc, put on a vibrant, thought-provoking conference here at MIT. Project NML was represented in two sessions. Erin and I presented about appropriation and using remixes in the classroom. Jenna McWilliams, former NML curriculum specialist and current Phd candidate at Indiana University, presented about the participatory assessment model she is working on with Dan Hickey using examples from the Teachers Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see any of the other workshop presenters, but I heard there were some very interactive and inspiring sessions. I'll have a Part Two post about our NML sessions up soon and hopefully a link to videos from the conference!
Before discussing the workshops, I wanted to write about an overarching issue that came up throughout the conference. As the day progressed, we began to notice through corridor chatter and tweets (check out #homeinc on Twiter for the threads from the conference) that copyright/fair use confusion was becoming a trend. None of the sessions were explicitly about copyright, but a pattern emerged in many of the sessions where someone would raise a copyright issue or ask a fair use question, others would offer resources or their perspective, and debate would ensue because of the many different understandings of copyright/fair use law.
