New Media Literacies

Boston Area Educator Share Practices Using Web 2.0

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:00:00 -0800

I recently attended an event at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston as a member of the Regional Youth Media Arts Education Consortium (RYMAEC) that gave educators using web 2.0 technologies (and beyond) the opportunity to share best practices with one another. RYMAEC's mission is to create a community of Boston area individuals, organizations, and community-based groups committed to supporting and strengthening the youth media arts field through exchanging information, resources, and youth-produced media.

The event was Pecha-Kucha style, where all but the special presenter had roughly 3-minutes to share their practice and an example of how students or teachers were using it. Kindly, after the event, which was held in the museum's theatre, the curtain was raised, revealing the glass wall which serves as the stage's back-drop, where the Boston Harbor in it's winter glory was the scenery for networking with peers, discussing best practices and partaking in drink and food.

The consortium (and event) is the initiative of Joe Douillette, a long-time advocate and youth media educator and director of the successful Fast Forward video production program for teens, also housed at the ICA, and a member of our very own NML community.

The presenters at this event consisted of RYMAEC members and peers. Below is a list of presenters and links to their content, web 2.0 tools and examples of some work that span content area and differentiated uses of technologies.

NML at the "Diversifying Participation" Conference

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:00:00 -0800

Almost the entire NML research lab headed west to California two weeks ago to participate in the Digital Media and Learning: "Diversifying Participation" conference; and since this is a transition year where we're spread over the US from east to west -- it was nice to get everyone together in one place.

I presented with Flourish Klink and Barry Joseph from Global Kids on Mad Skills: Making New Media Literacy practices accessible to educators and students alike. This provided us time to dialogue with participants on a Worked Example that is in progress. We are writing and editing videos from the field of our observations on how the Media Makers Collection in the Learning Library was taken up and adapted into Global Kids' Media Masters program. Here is the video presentation. And after the presentation, we had everyone participate in a scavenger hunt game which had participants dialogue on the questions we posed in the presentation and situate it into their own contexts of learning.

I joined James Bosco, Milton Chen, Margaret Weigel and Christine Greenhow on a panel about Participatory Learning in Schools: Square Peg in Round Hole? It was a pleasure to be part of such a diverse group of panelists. We each took 8 minutes to share insight into what are some of the critical sticking points that need to happen to change schools in order to provide a space for participatory learning. We then opened it up for a lively discussion. Some key take-aways for me included Jim encouraging us to unite and create a strong policy voice to help change the structure of schools where Milton reminded us that this change will happen by a grass-roots effort; that there is already great examples of participatory learning but they are segmented and lost in the shuffle. Margaret shared insights from interviews with teachers and the constant tension between school culture, even with the most innovative teachers. I shared our recent findings from our field work with 7 schools on the Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture and suggested some design principles to consider in how to create a new school culture. And Christine closed with advocating for more research in this area ...one we all agree is needed.

Alice Cavallo, NML's Curriculum Specialist, chaired with Sasha Costanza-Chock to create a panel on Digital Media Production and Social Change. Alice shared insights into her dissertation on Virtual Forum Theater (VFT), an animation tool that allows the creation of digital plays as a vehicle to convey and discuss unjust social sketches. Alice shared stories of how VFT connects youth from any part of the world expanding the importance of role playing as a way of understanding interpersonal and political struggles in order to foster social changes. Through these stories, she made connections to how the new media literacies, play, performance, judgment, negotiation and collective intelligence, are present in participating in VFT.

There were many sessions to choose from during the 2 days. Mark Danger Chen has

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

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:10:51 -0800

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.

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

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:04:40 -0800

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.

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

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:46:22 -0800

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.

"Killer Paragraphs" and Other Reflections of PBS's Digital Nation

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:34:25 -0800

This week, PBS stations around the United States are airing Digital Nation, a documentary which claims to offer us insights into life in the digital age. I was happy to participate in this important production, though, I must confess, more than a little disappointed in the finished product. It raises important issues, to be sure, but does so often in a one-sided manner which panders to the biases of public television viewers rather than challenging them to look at the potentials of digital media in education through new lens.

What I value from the production is the website which gathers together extensive interviews with key thinkers with a range of views about the value of digital media in education and our everyday life and which has collected the voices of everyday people many of whom share stories of how they have built productive relationships with and through new media technologies and practices. The website allows us to chart our own paths through this debate, to drill much deeper into different points of view, and offers a more balanced picture of the current state of the debate. The website allows us to ask questions, while the television show tells us what to think. Granted it does so in a way that is much more subtle than the typical Fox News scare story, but it is hardly "fair and balanced" either.

The existence of the website with so much raw footage alongside the completed documentary offers a unique resource for teaching basic media literacy skills, allowing us to question the choices the filmmakers made, and how various rhetorical devices shape how we respond to the words and images included.

New Media Literacies Announces a Monthly Webinar Series

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:43:41 -0800

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.

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

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:26:50 -0800

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 .

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.

Work, Play and Leisure

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:51:12 -0800

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)

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:00:00 -0800

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)

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:30:00 -0800

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 and the New Media Literacies Skills

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:15:00 -0800

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.

VFT Screenshot

Harry Potter: The Exhibition, or what Location Entertainment Adds to a Transmedia Franchise

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:44:49 -0800

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.

Interview with Ed Beat Blog

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:26:56 -0800

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

Using Alternative Assessment Models to Empower Youth-directed Learning

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:29:56 -0800

Barry Joseph

Online Leadership Director

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?