What is The New Media Literacies project?
The new media literacy project starts from the premise that we are living in a participatory culture, that we are living in a moment in time in which more and more people are producing and sharing media with each other. Traditional notions of literacy and print would have said you wouldn't call someone literate if they could read but they couldn't write. So we shouldn't accept at the present moment the idea that one is media literate if you simply know how to consume media critically and don't know how to participate in the culture around you. So what we tried to do was identify what it takes to be a full participant in this society. We identified the list of 11 social skills and cultural competencies, which are fundamental to being a participant. Being a participant not through school or through work but as a citizen and as a creative individual. And what we set out to do was to develop curriculum materials to help people acquire those skills. Recognizing at the present time we are struggling not just the digital divine, which is access to technology but also the participating gap, which is about access to those skills and competencies. You could theoretically have access to technology and not feel empowered to use them, not now how to navigate through space, not know how to put your ideas in a form other people are going to care about and you'll essentially be shut down. The challenge is to make sure every kid in America has access to the skills they need to be able to fully take advantage of the world of flicker and youtube and Facebook and all of these other technologies and from there to think about what it is to be a citizen and to be a creative artist to be an everyday person in the world where we are not just media consumers but we are media participants.

What do you think is the most challenging part of this project?
I think the challenge is the American education system is so resistant to change. If you look at the technology in most classrooms its more or less the same technology of classrooms a hundred years ago. If you look at how we use the technology its more or less the same way of teaching that goes back a thousand years. Yet the society around schools have changed radically during that time and the tendency is for schools to be nostalgic and to continue to teach things the same way and to prepare kids for the world that was and not yet even the world that is let alone the world that will be. That process of looking backwards the conservative force of education is one of the biggest challenges we have to confront because we are in a moment of time which is fundamentally transformative are in a period of profound and prolonged media change that affects every aspect of our society. If it isn't affecting how we teach and what we teach in some pretty fundamental ways then the schools are going to get more and more out of whack. It would be like going through the emergence of printing presses and not think that maybe textbooks might be a good idea. 

What do you think contributes most to some kids having an advantage of new media technologies over other kids?
I think what we are seeing now is kids are acquiring skills of new media through play, through participation on online communities, through their recreational lives and their social lives. The kids who have access to technologies outside of school, outside of the library as a continuous part of their everyday life as something they just do have a different relationship to those skills and competencies. Those kids who don't it's just like you have 10 minutes on a school computer and no ability to upload, no ability to download, mandatory filters, potential mandatory restrictions on social software and blogging technology, its just get in and get out and get the information. You're not allowed to play with it, experiment with it, live with it, it doesn't become part of your sense of your self and your everyday life and those are the kids who are left behind in the participation gap.