As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design--Scratch Website

Here you can read our initial blog post for Teaching for Creative Learning Class:

New Media Literacies (NML) refer to social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire to become fully engaged in what Henry Jenkins defines as participatory culture.
Participatory culture stresses the role of people as creators, circulators, connectors and collaborators, rather than simply consumers of media. Present-day teenagers are an excellent example of members of a participatory culture, as they often maintain blogs, have MySpace pages, play online multiplayer games, and otherwise join in.
The skills, summarized in the white paper, are the things that students need to learn to become the creative artists and decisions makers of the future. They are skills that connect people to each other at something larger than individual levels. They are skills that involve creative expressions and allow people to talk and share their ideas with each other.
An explosion of new media technologies has made it easier for everyone to share and express themselves through nearly every possible media channel. However, as explained in the white paper, there are challenges and gaps involved, against which educators need to develop activities for children to develop these competencies.
The NML white paper suggests that the three major problems are the participatory gap, the transparency problem and the ethics challenge. Essentially, not enough children have access to the sorts of media that they need, and won't become sufficiently familiar with it to interact fully with the world of tomorrow; students have trouble understanding the biases and assumptions inherent in any media, and may tend to accept new media without sufficient questioning; and people in general will become widely visible to everyone through new media without being trained for it.
Here are some examples of questions to think about:
1) How could educators reduce the participation gap among children (inequalities in young people's access to new media technologies and the opportunities for participation they represent)? Furthermore, how can educators address the "fluency gap," where even those who have access to new media may not be accustomed to them or able to create and express using them?
2) How could new media literacies help children acquire skills to articulate what they learn from their participation? How can children be encouraged to reflect more critically on what they learn from participating, especially when one of the signs of a participatory culture is encouragement from the community?
3) How could we help children develop ethical norms needed to cope with a complex and diverse social environment online in a world in which the line
between consumers and producers is blurring? What are potential sources of these ethical norms?
4) What can educators of new media literacies do to reduce the phobia among parents and foundations in this moment of transition in which teens are engaged in circulating and distributing content without the supervision of adults?
5) How do you think each of the 12 skill definitions should be modified? Do you think they fully address the goal that Project NML is aiming for? Based on your personal or professional experience, how would you recommend the definitions of new media literacies be modified? Would you recommend restructuring of the 12 skill definitions in any way, say, by adding a hierarchy or combining some together?
6) How do you think tools such as scratch can come to help children acquire these skills? What advantages, if any, do new media in general have in teaching new media literacies to children?