January 2010 Archives

Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Dialogue on the Ethics of Digital Life

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 world cited below .




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.

Work, Play and Leisure

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.)

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

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.

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.