Cory Doctorow as Exemplar

Throughout the fall term, I am going to be sharing with readers more of the work we have been doing for the MacArthur Foundation on new media literacies, building up to the release of a significant new white paper in late October which makes the case for a new set of social skills and cultural competencies which we need to be incorporating into American education. We are already hard at work putting these ideas into practice, developing curricular activities and supporting materials that will help teachers and after school programs respond in more meaningful ways to the challenges and opportunities of the new participatory culture. One of our core projects is the development of an exemplar library. When we spoke with teachers and after school programs, it was clear that they recognized that their students were interested in new forms of cultural production that are enabled by new media technologies and new forms of cultural distribution supported by the web. They knew that their students were fans, bloggers, and gamers. But they faced a number of issues: they had no standards by which to evaluate work produced in these new and emerging media; they didn't know enough themselves to give good advice to student media makers; the students lacked role models to help them understand future opportunities in this space; and the students were facing ethical issues that their teachers and parents didn't really understand.

We decided to respond to these challenges by producing a library of short digital films focused around media-makers and the craft and ethical choices they face in producing and distributing their work. For each media maker, we may produce 5-10 short (4-5 minute) video segments addressing different points in their creative process. A teacher or after school program might show one or more of those segments to kick off a discussion about media production processes. They may decide to work horizontally -- fleshing out one form of media making -- or vertically -- looking at storyboarding or interviewing techniques across a range of artists and media. These videos will be accompanied by supporting materials -- vocabulary sheets, charts showing the various tools the artists use, and potential production activities that can be brought into the classroom. We also imagine that as students get engaged with the videos they will seek out more content on their own via our website and thus dig deeper into the whole world of media production than can be accomplished within the constraints of the school day.

Long term, we expect to make this an open library where anyone can insert their own content and thus provide an incentive for teachers and students to engage with media production projects around artists in their own local community. In the short run, we are producing these videos in-house -- working with Comparative Media Studies graduate students and with our new production coordinator Anna Van Someren, who was until recently part of the Youth Voice Collaborative here in Boston.

We are just now putting the first crop of exemplars out on the web and I figured I would showcase them here as they go up. One of the first will have special interest to readers of this blog, many of whom found this site because of some early shout outs by Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing. When Doctorow was speaking at MIT last year, CMS graduate student Neal Grigsby grabbed some time with him to talk about blogging, science fiction writing, and online communications. The documentary was produced for middle and high school students but we think it will engage many adult viewers as well.

Here are some highlights:

Doctorow was until recently an advocate for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: he is someone deeply committed to the concept of the Creative Commons, so it is fitting that the opening film starts with him reading aloud the Creative Common license that grants us permission to share his words with the world. He explains elsewhere in the opening segment:

My first novel was the first novel to use a Creative Commons license. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was released in stores on January 9, 2003 and, on the same day, it was released as a Creative Commons download that came with a license that allowed you to noncommercial redistribute it and make reuse of it as much as you wanted. The novel has been distributed from my website at least 650,000 times and from other people's websites some unknown number of times, and it's in its 6th printing. And that's because for most people an electronic book is not a substitute for a print book it's an advertisement for a print book. And, for me, my biggest problem isn't piracy, its obscurity. And it really seems to me that the more you give away, the better it is. That seems to be the conclusion that I've come to.

Doctorow went on to talk about why he choose Disneyworld as the setting for his first novel and in the process shared something of his own fannish relationship to popular culture:

It's a great fictional setting, for starters. I mean, there's so much great detail. And it's got both a lot of familiarity and a lot of foreignness for people. A lot of people have been to Disney World, it gets more visitors every year than the United Kingdom. But it also has all this rich detail, that if you spend a lot of time playing around with it, you can find all these interesting little factoids and trivioids that you can drop in and really excite people.

I love putting pop culture into the work I do. It lets you be a fan with a giving up authorship. You can be a drooling fanboy without surrendering your position at the top of the geek hierarchy by working in these fanboy references

in your stuff as you go, you know? And it's also, I think, a nice way to pay homage to your literary ancestors and your peers. And it's a little naughty, too, to drop in the occasional visit from someone else's characters or the

occasional moment from someone else's world. I think that pop culture references and references to other works in my own works give them a kind of a richness, a depth. You can import an entire other narrative just by dropping a couple of references to it in your book or in your short story, and that, think, is pretty exciting.

The other great advantage, of course, of writing a novel set in theme park is that it makes your trips to Disney World tax-deductible. And so I had a couple of very fine years of tax-deductible trips to Disney World.

Doctorow offers some pragmatic advice about writing in general (which are sure to earn jabs in the elbow from composition teachers around the country):

The most important thing, I think, that any writer can do is: when you're learning your writing habits, eschew all ceremony. Don't be one of those writers who needs to light a candle, and clean the cat, and wash the dishes, and vacuum the house, and put away all the books, and do 20 minutes of yoga, and go for brisk walk, and contemplate your navel before you can set a word down on the page. When you go back and reread your work, you won't know which pages you wrote on days when you were feeling completely uninspired, and which

pages you wrote on days when you were having a great time. And by not letting yourself get trapped into ceremony, and the myth of the Muse that has to visit you before you can commit to writing, you will be a writer. Because a writer is someone who writes not someone who complains about writing. And if your job is to be a writer you have to be able to write. Garbagemen never talk about having garbagemen's block. Doctors never say, "I can't do surgery today, I'm just not in the mood." If it's your job you have to be able to write when it's

time to write.

The interview also serves our mandate to offer teachers some standards for thinking about what constitutes good writing in the digital media. Here's what Doctorow has to say about the art of blogging:

A blog succeeds, I think, on the basis of how good your headline and your lead is. There's a tendency among bloggers to want to repeat the privilege and sin of newspaper writers, which is to write the clever, silly headline that draws its strength from its place on the page and the context that surrounds it. So you write a headline like "Britain Weeps!" And it's 72 point bold, and beneath it is a big photo of someone crying. And that's intriguing. But if you do that in a blog, and your headline is syndicated to an RSS reader, and it turns up among 2000 other undifferentiated headlines, and all it says is "Britain weeps," or "OMG LOL," or "funniest thing I've seen this week, can't describe it, you gotta see it," all that stuff goes right into the round file; all that stuff just gets pitched out.

If you want to write stuff that carries, you have to really focus on these clean headlines that eschew all cleverness for memorability, the ability to be remembered. And then you have to follow it on with a lead, a nut graph, that grabs everything that's in the story and sums it up in three sentences. And it's really hard to do that. Everyone wants to give some background. They want to say, "for the last several weeks we've all noticed that something, something, something, and then, subsequently, dumpty, dumpty dum, which brings me to today's point." Again, when people are skimming headlines and just the first sentence, that stuff is just noise. You have to open, and then move back to it.

It's like writing copy for a wire service. Because that's, in effect, what you do when you blog. The primary method for consumption of any blog these days is through an RSS reader, at least as the initial path in. BoingBoing, for example, has about 1.1 million unique RSS readers per day, and about 350,000 unique web page readers per day. So it's wildly disproportionate, by far the majority of people read it in headlines. So, if you're a wire service customer at a newspaper, what you do all day is go in and read thousands and thousands of headlines, and figure out which one of these is relevant to you, and pick them up for your newspapers. So, if you're a wire service writer, you've got to write to that audience. And I think that what the Internet has done is turn all those of us who read through our headline readers into wire service editors, and all of us who write blogs, and who are conscious of wanting to spread the material in our blogs, into wire service writers.

And finally, Doctorow talks extensively about science fiction writing as a mode of social commentary and activism:

The job of the technology activist and the job of the science fiction writer are pretty comparable in that both are meant to try to investigate and try to articulate what the consequences of technology policy changes will be. To say, "if you do X the outcome might be Y." And certainly in civil liberties that's always been a tricky one. To say, "well, to regulate the speech of these neo-Nazis, you will end up regulating the speech of these other people in this

way that would cause harm. Popular speech never needs defending, so if we're only going to allow people who agree with us to speak then this is what the outcome can look like."

Science fiction tells you how the present should be, it tells you what's wrong with today, and what the future could be.... Science fiction is the most didactic literature, I think, going. It's kind of infamous for the soliloquy. You know, the author who breaks off to have a character... You know, Heinlein's characters sit there and give 25 minutes of watered-down Ayn Rand in the middle of their space adventure.

1984 is the sterling example. I went back and reread that just a month or two ago, this being a good time in the history of the western world to reread 1984, and it's remarkable not just as a piece of political fiction, as it's remembered, but as a piece of science fiction. He does all the skiffy stuff that science fiction readers love to find in their books. He's a great shallow extrapolator; he extrapolates just enough to give you that frisson of the future, and then uses that to hold a warped mirror up to the present. And it works really well....

One of the nice things about writing fiction that has some didactic elements, or that has a mission and is intended to educate as well as entertain, is that it's very hard to rebut a short story. If you write an essay, someone can come along and write another essay that says your essay is rubbish. The number of people who can write a short story to rebut your short story is much smaller.

Special thanks to Margaret Weigel, the research director on the New Media Literacies Project.

Tracking the MySpace Generation...

The Los Angeles Times recently completed a first rate series describing the media consumption practices of the contemporary youth market. "Tracking the MySpace Generation" reflected the results of a large scale survey of 12-24 year olds that shatters many of the myths that have emerged around the so-called digital generation, while at the same time focusing attention on some very important shifts in the ways people relate to media content. Youth and Civic Media

Contrary to the myth (which I debunked here a few months ago), young people are not more apt to vote for the next American Idol than to participate in the next presidental election.

Only 21% of poll respondents ages 18 to 24 said they had voted for an American Idol contestant. But 53% said they had voted for a candidate for public office.

This is consistent with other research that has shown that young people are civically engaged, care about political issues, but often seek out information through different channels than older generations.

Youth and Traditional Media

The researchers also found that young people still consumed a great deal of traditional broadcast content and traditional media sources still exerted a strong influence on their lives:

For example, respondents say that traditional sources such as television advertising and radio airplay still tend to drive their decisions about movies and music more than online networking sites. Those interested in keeping up with current events report a surprising interest in conventional news sources, especially local TV news.

Parental Regulation

The survey also found that parents are increasingly aware of what young people are doing when they are online and that many young people are restricted in what kinds of cyberspaces they can visit:

Nearly 7 in 10 of 12- to 17-year-olds said their parents knew how they spent their time online. Nearly 3 out of 5 12- to 14-year-olds said their parents restricted what they could download. About a third of boys and girls ages 12 to 14 are not allowed to go on social networking sites such as MySpace.com. Only 19% of boys and 13% of girls reported having no parental restrictions on computer use

This finding parallels research in the United Kingdom that I wrote about back when I had a regular column at Technology Review.

Like many other such studies, the report has a tendency to acquate restrictions on media access with good parenting. My own views are that good parenting involves a healthy acknowledgement of legitimate roles that media can play within our lives and an open dialogue with young people about our own tastes and values. Just saying No to Nintendo is a cop-out which doesn't prepare young people for the decisions they will make as cultural participatipants when they get older.

Choices and More Choices

More than anything else, the survey found that young people wanted options -- they wanted the media they wanted when they wanted it and where they wanted it -- and that included via more traditional channels such as theatrical exhibition, print, and broadcast television. They weren't being pushed towards the latest technological devices simply because they were new and wouldn't accept them if they did not facilitate the entertainment experiences they were looking for:

Asked where they'd prefer to watch a new movie if it were simultaneously available at home and in theaters, about a third said they would choose to stay at home, and another third said it depended on the movie. Going to movies at theaters still has appeal, particularly for younger teens, but among respondents ages 21 to 24, 56% said they wanted to see the new movie at home, and only 9% said they would rather travel to a theater.

Nearly half (47%) of respondents ages 12 to 17 say they would watch a movie on a PC, well above the interest in doing the same on a cellphone (11%) or video iPod and similar devices (18%). A similar share of those 21 to 24 said they would watch movies on a computer, although they are much less willing to do the same on a cellphone (6%) or video iPod (7%)....

Interestingly, 12- to 14-year-old girls showed the greatest eagerness about small-screen viewing, with 20% of those surveyed open to watching television shows on cellphones and nearly a quarter interested in checking out programs on iPods.

The LA Times suggests that the entertainment industry was racing ahead of even its most digitally literate consumers in making some materials available for new formats such as video ipods or cell phones. A level headed young consumer explains, "Why would I want to look at a video clip on my cellphone? I'd rather make phone calls on it."

This doesn't suggest a generation that is embracing convergence for convergence's sake. It does suggest a generation that is aware of a range of different media platforms and their affordances and is making reasoned chocies about which provides the most satisfying varient of any given entertainment experience.

Multitasking

The LA Times also found that multitasking is absolutely normative in this generation -- many of them seem to flit between windows, tasks, and relationships with reckless abandon. Any future analysis of young people and media has to recognize that they are always consuming one medium in relation to another and rarely give any given content their undivided attention:

Among respondents who had homework, 53% of children ages 12 to 17 said they did at least one other thing while studying, compared with 25% of adults ages 18 to 24, the poll found.

The youngest poll respondents did the most juggling. Twenty-one percent of the 839 respondents ages 12 to 17 who were polled said they generally kept busy with at least three tasks in addition to their assignments.

Girls ages 15 to 17 were the busiest: 59% said they liked to do at least one thing in addition to homework, and 27% said they liked to do at least three other things.

"I'll focus on my schoolwork, then if an e-mail pops up I'll change focus for a second, answer it, then go back to what I was working on," said Brittany Graham, 16, who also likes to surf the Web and listen to Christian rock while she studies in her family's home in Altamonte Springs, Fla.

Among those in that same age group who did other things while studying, many reported relatively passive diversions. Eighty-four percent said they listened to music as a side activity, 47% watched TV and 22% watched a movie.

But teenage respondents also enjoyed multi-tasking with things that required active participation, the poll found, including talking on the phone (32%), going on the Internet (21%), instant messaging (15%), sending or reading e-mail (13%), text messaging (13%) and playing a video game (6%).

The Napster Generation?

Finally, the survey found that young people's attitudes towards intellectual property were evolving and reflected some understanding of the social contract between media producers and consumers:

Among teens ages 12 to 17 who were polled, 69% said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21% said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music free. Similarly, 58% thought it was legal to copy a friend's purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19% thought copying was legal if the movie wasn't purchased.

People in the recording industry often act as if kids felt no concern about "stealing" their property. Instead, the LA Times study suggests young people are struggling to make sense of a shifting set of technological options and about the intersection between the commercial economy of mass media and the gift economy of participatory culture. They seem to understand that artists should get paid for what they create but there are real questions about when we've paid enough and what rights we buy when we buy recordings of a performance.

Thanks to Zhan Li for calling this series to my attention.

What DOPA Means for Education

A little while ago, I got the following comments in an e-mail from one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students Ravi Purushotma about the news that the Deleting Online Predators Act has now passed the U.S. House of Representatives:

Some of my friends commented on how bitter, angry and depressed I seemed when DOPA passed. It's really painful spending 5 years searching for a new paradigm by which this planet could communicate among itself, coming to an actual sense of what needs to happen, then the week before it culminates into a thesis it becomes illegal because some bonehead in Alaska has his neural tubes clogged.

For those of you who have not been following this story, there's some very good reporting by Wade Rough of Technology Review about the debate surrounding DOPA. The Senator from Alaska is question is Senator Ted Stevens who has been a major backer of this legislation and who seems to know very little about how digital media works.

This exchange came as I was signing off on Purushotma's outstanding thesis which centers on the ways that various forms of new media and popular culture could be used to enhance foreign language teaching and learning. His project got some attention a year or so back when the BBC picked up on a report he had done describing his efforts to modify The Sims to support the teaching of foreign languages. Essentially, the commercial games ship with all of the relevant language tracks on the disc and a simply code determines which language is displayed as they reach a particular national market. It is a pretty trivial matter to unlock the code for a different language and play the game in Spanish, German, or what have you. The game's content closely resembles the focus on domestic life found in most first or second year language textbooks -- with one exception. Most of us are apt to put in more time playing the game than we are to spending studying our textbooks or filling in our workbooks.

This is a very rich and interesting approach but it is only one of a number of ideas that Ravi proposes in his thesis. Ravi has done more research than anyone I know about into how teachers are using this technology now and what purposes it might serve in the future. He has prepared his thesis as a multimedia web document that mixes sound, video, and text in ways that really puts his ideas into practice.

There has been lots of discussion here and elsewhere about the potentially devastating effect of DOPA on the lives of young people -- especially those for whom schools and public libraries represent their only point of access onto the digital world. I have made the argument that if supporters of DOPA really wanted to protect young people from online predators, they would teach social networking in the classroom, modeling safe and responsible practices, rather than lock it outside the school and thus beyond the supervision of informed librarians and caring teachers. The advocates of the law have implied that MySpace is at best a distraction from legitimate research activities, at worst a threat to childhood innocence.

But Ravi's thesis suggests something more -- we are closing off powerful technologies that could be used effectively to engage young people with authentic materials and real world cultural processes. Here, social networking functions not as a media literacy skill but as a tool for engaging with traditional school subjects in a fresh new way.

Throughout his thesis, Purushotma is interested in linking the affordances of new media and online practices with the traditional goals of the foreign language classroom. As I suggested in a recent blog post, more and more teachers are discovering the value of getting kids to learn through remixing elements of their culture, a recurring theme throughout his project:

Remixing has, of course, always been a central theme in foreign language pedagogy. As media from a foreign country provides students a link to the culture that created it, foreign language educators have historically been at the forefront of devising activities in which students learn to navigate through and reconfigure foreign media. With the emergence of the internet, however, today's youth are finding numerous new techniques for navigating through and reconfiguring media, both domestic and foreign. As this trend continues, foreign language education designers will need to shift from designing their own activities from scratch to actively tracking what remix activities students from a particular age group are already engaged in, and then inventing ways in which those activities can be applied towards learning a foreign language.

His impressive knowledge of Web 2.0 practices allows him to lay out a broad array of different tools that teachers can use to help students engage with a foreign language and culture in a more immediate fashion:

Perhaps the most challenging task in designing an introductory foreign language curriculum is that of representing foreign culture. If we conceptualize culture as an independent-standing entity, what ultimately gets delivered to students in our attempts to "teach culture" is a series of snapshots or editorialized slices of the target culture.

For most students in an introductory language class, their goal is often not simply to describe a foreign culture, but rather to be capable of participating in that culture. Thus, our goal should be to provide students with all the assistance appropriate to help them participate in the popular activities they would be participants in had they grown up in the target country: reading the same websites, using the same social networking tools and playing the same video games with their L2 peers. In this way, we give them agency to synthesize their own snapshot of the target culture from their own experiences and interactions within it.

While there are a number of innovative projects with similar aims already available, what is important to consider here is what a curriculum with the goal of enabling students to participate in a foreign culture would look like if the target culture is a remix culture (as many of the youth cultures in countries for the languages commonly taught in U.S. schools are). As youth culture shifts further from independently constructing media from scratch, to instead constructing media by connecting together and reconfiguring existing media artifacts, we should also be able to construct our cultural representations directly from mixing together live target language media, without having to extract them into a secondary context.

Lets begin with the way we create images. Many teachers are already turning to the web and google images to provide students with more up-to-date or authentic images of a target country than are provided by textbooks. However, copyright provisions prevent any curriculum generated using this approach from being openly published beyond a single classroom for a limited time duration; additionally, it still leaves the teacher in the position of slicing out a snapshot of the target culture to deliver to the students. For those wishing to create publicly distributable curriculum, they often need to still rely on either self-taken photographs or expensive and often dated stock photography.

Alternatively, they could gather images from the FlickR creative commons photo set. Here, real people from all over the world using the popular FlickR photo service have designated over 13,000,000 authentic/live photos as freely usable (with attribution) in other media creations. Additionally, FlickR provides an API system, allowing programs to connect directly into the FlickR database. So, for example, a Google Earth game teaching Spanish could receive all the information necessary from the FlickR API to automatically change its game content depending on what the contents of the newest photograph someone in Puerto Rico had taken. Students could then interact with the photographer through their FlickR profile, leaving comments in the L2 about that photo and any peculiarities of its cultural representation.

Perhaps the media most desperately in need of live materials is that of music. Once again, music faces similar copyright issues as images: only individual classrooms may use copyrighted music and for only a limited duration. Additionally, musical tastes are so individual and varied that no teacher could possibly find a single song to develop curriculum around that would simultaneously inspire all students to take an interest in the music of that country.

Using a distinction in the copyright system that gives "radio" broadcasts a different copyright status from standalone music, various sites such as last.fm are emerging offering "personalized radio." Here any student can find people in the target country with similar music tastes as them, then generate a personalized radio station that plays free, full length/full quality songs from around the world based on their preferences. Combined with various sound spatialization techniques, as API's for personalized radio services develop we will be able to create live curriculum that aids students to understand whichever songs in the target culture they themselves choose.

Ultimately, the real advantage of using live materials is the possibility of then connecting with live audiences. Certainly, the motivational advantages to producing work to be shared with a broader audience than just the teacher can not be over-stressed. As Cindy Evans describes of her experiences using web 2.0 technologies in her French class in which students were simply told their work would be made publicly available:

"The prospect of creating material for an authentic audience appeared to be the main motivation for the students. Students involved in the wiki project interacted with authentic cultural material on the web and also envisioned themselves as potential teachers to future students using their site. In contrast to researching and reporting on a topic for the class as students had done in previous classes, these students assumed responsibility for interacting with information, assimilating, rewriting, and organizing it in a way they deemed worthy of future students' interest."

At the same time, although Web 2.0 technologies provide infinitely more stimulating contexts for students, self-installations of these systems can bring with them major technological headaches for any teacher who doesn't have hours of free time to kill updating their PHP and MySQL libraries. In Cindy's case, it took over half the semester just to get the system running, and even then it did not contain the freely available user interface modules that would have allowed students to achieve many of the tasks she had hoped for.

Rather than leaving teachers to perform self-installations, it is important that curricular designers work to highlight the different options available for hosted services. For example, wikia.com allows anyone to instantly create their own wiki spaces in a variety of languages with all server space and configuration provided free. Services like writely, writeboard and thinkfree offer considerably more features than a typical wiki, with a cleaner interface and zero server installation. Perhaps the most valuable hosted services for foreign language teachers are the emerging platform portals such as ning.com. Here, teachers can browse through thousands of different social web applications already created by users throughout the world. They then choose "clone this app" to create a copy of a particular application for themselves, then use a suite of user friendly tools that do not require any programming knowledge to customize the application towards their own pedagogical goals. All server management and other tasks are automatically taken care of for them.

With live materials and customized social applications becoming increasingly available to non-programmers, the primary challenge will be to find models for how to connect various web applications together into coherent learning experiences. In the last ten years "webquests," that is, activities designed by teachers "in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet", have exploded in popularity in schools. According to Google Adsense, search popularity for the term "webquest" is now even approaching that of the term "lesson plan" (85 click per day rate for "webquest" versus 120 for "lesson plan" [Based on a $100 maximum cost per click estimate]). In a typical webquest, students are given a scenario which requires them to extract information or images from a series of provided websites and then compile their findings into a final report. For example, students might be told they are part of a team of experts brought in to decide on the most appropriate method for disposing of a canister of nuclear waste. They are then provided a series of websites relevant to waste disposal and then asked to present a final proposal to the teacher.

While webquests provide a popular framework for extracting information from new-media sources, little innovation has followed for what to do with that extracted information. For some students, simply compiling information into a report is unfortunately viewed as "overly structured clicking and reading." As the original webquest creator Bernie Dodge describes "It's true that most WebQuests are boring, but I think that's because they aren't really well designed, not because they don't have flashy graphics and interactivity. I'd like to think that getting engaged in a problem that requires synthesis and problem-solving is motivating in a deep and useful way that goes beyond Prensky's arcade-game type learning."

Already in the entertainment world we are seeing cases of games entirely devoid of flashy graphics or traditional game elements, yet compelling enough in their synthesis and problem-solving depth to motivate hundreds of thousand of players purely for entertainment purposes. Dubbed "Alternate Reality" games, these games are able to construct massive scale game universes simply by harnessing and mixing together numerous real-world web applications. By studying the learning that takes place in alternate reality games we can gain valuable insights into how to create engaging experiences around web content from other languages and cultures.

What is interesting about I Love Bee's is that it was a game constructed entirely out of technologies more commonly used for other purposes. In fact, at no point during the game did I Love Bee's even admit that it was a game. For many of the players, the result was a confusingly immersive experience in which they began to see much of the real world in the context of the game world. As one of the players described in an online posting "here we are, every one of us excited at blurring the lines between story and reality. The game promises to become not just entertainment, but our lives." In numerous cases, sites and mysteries not connected to the game were solved by confused players thinking that they were still in the game.

Foreign language educators have long struggled with how to ensure the language proficiency students gain while studying for a language exam successfully transfer to proficiency outside of the classroom in real life situations. Across all educational disciplines we see examples of how poorly human beings transfer abstract knowledge from one real world case to another...

As new-media usage transforms the entertainment culture of youth, if we do not adapt our curricular materials they will unfortunately bare a diminishing resemblance to the outside of school contexts in which youth live. However, by learning how to remix foreign popular culture and intelligently insert pedagogical aids at the points of connection, we can instantly appropriate automatically up-to-date media contexts that youth would naturally be engaging with if they were they living in a country speaking the L2.

Additionally, by remixing interventions inside media used throughout the day for other purposes, we naturally blur the lines between time set aside for everyday tasks and time exposed to the pedagogical interventions. For example, when a Google Earth Wars player uses Google Earth to look up driving directions to the movie theater or exploring different cities for an upcoming vacation, there is always the chance that the user will stumble upon a hidden game jewel or a poorly defended city to attack. In this way, players never really leave the game, but continue playing it throughout their everyday life. Foreign language teachers have long advised students that they need to try and continue thinking in the L2 around the clock, yet homework assignments are designed to be completed during a single block of dedicated study time. By closer integrating entertainment culture with educational interventions we can better assist students in connecting these often distinct parts of their lives.

Imagine how vibrant our schoolhouse culture would become if teachers adopted even a small portion of the recommendations this thesis provides. And so far, we are focused only on the foreign language classroom.

As Purushotma notes, foreign languages are simply one of a range of school disciplines that benefit from being able to deploy social networking and other Web 2.0 resources in the classroom setting. Here, for example, is a middle school Literature teacher who has students prepare profile pages for the characters in Shakespeare's Richard III. This exercise offers students a rich opportunity to dig deeper into fictional characters and understand what makes them tick. You could of course do much the same thing in a written paper but let's face it -- the activity would not be nearly as engaging.

Or here's the testimonial of a writing instructor who incorporated blogging into his 8th grade class and saw immediate shifts in the ways that children thought about their assignments:

My community of grade eight student bloggers became so big and so engaging that I spent every spare moment reading and writing within this community. My class community suddenly blossomed and I started seeing myself as an important part of the classroom community and no longer as a teacher who peddles content. I became a participant in a series of dialogues...

My students started blogging two years ago. It did not take me long to realize that a class blogosphere helps students see themselves as writers, as people with ideas. It helps them learn to substantiate their ideas, it helps them acquire confidence as learners, it gives them a context in which to investigate and question knowledge. Finally, it shows them a completely different understanding of knowledge as something that one constructs, arrives at, or co-constructs with others....

But then, about two months ago, there was a sudden shift. The community took on a life of its own. Imagine a place where students start with a literary text and then, rather than spend most of their time responding to literature, they are given opportunities to explore the relevance of this text in the world around them. Imagine starting with The Diary of Anne Frank and moving on to World War II, the Holocaust, genocide, human rights issues, and the work of the United Nations. Granted, it did not happen automatically. I did quite a bit of facilitating and guiding. I wrote about some of these topics on my own teacher blog within the class blogosphere. I took time to talk to each individual writer. I commented extensively on their work. I used my own blog to link to many entries, to show my students the connections between many individual posts. I suggested electronic and print resources. I talked about their work in class. We discussed individual entries.

Then, for a while, they kept composing individual responses. While certainly aware of the community around them, they continued to write as solitary writers. Then, one day at the end of April, it all changed. They started linking to each other's work because they found other entries meaningful and relevant. No, I do not mean that they linked to entries that explored the same topics. No. They started linking to entries that helped them expand their own understanding of issues that they were struggling with.

We learned about this teacher's project through Weblogg-ed which provides an important community resource for educators deploying these kinds of technologies in their classes.

As he notes in his conclusion, adopting these existing digital practices for classroom use has major advantages over developing digital classroom resources from scratch -- in terms of the level of authenticity, youth engagement, development costs, usability, and teacher training demands.

With the rise of the internet, our world today is radically different from even a decade ago. It is my belief that we can leverage these advances to greatly facilitate the evolution of actual communicative approaches into digital spaces. At the core of this is a recognition that meaningful communication is already happening inside entertainment media not explicitly designed for educational purposes. Thus, computers provide us not just devices for aiding language learning, but are an intrinsic part of the cultures for the L2's commonly taught in U.S. High schools. As such, we need to focus more on devising systematically and scalable ways of extend Communicative and TBLT methodologies to use existing new-media content in manners similar to the ways we use any other authentic media materials.

Although basic materials for this approach are naturally cheaper than for specially created materials, the real cost is, of course, the requisite teacher training and technological infrastructure maintenance. Thus, it becomes critical that we adopt the remix practices now ubiquitous in digital culture to make the use of real-world web applications more teacher friendly, and take advantage of the numerous hosted services available to give teachers the agency to bypass any technological infrastructure roadblocks imposed by their school's IT services.

All of this helps to explain why so many professional organizations of teachers and librarians have come out in opposition to DOPA. As Purushotma remarks at the opening of this post suggest, many of these potential classroom practices will be shut down if DOPA becomes law. Keep in mind that DOPA adopts a very broad definition of social networking software and nobody is really sure where the limits will fall. It will have a chilling effect where people are apt to restrict their behavior even further than the law provides for fear of potentially costing their schools federal funds needed to meet No Child Left Behind criteria.

DOPA provides some modest provisions for schools to opt out of its restrictions for legitimate classroom purposes. But, DOPA will create a climate where the pathologization of social networking will have been codified in law. American public school teachers will face an uphill battle against school administrators and parents if they want to deploy such practices in their class. And frankly, American school teachers face enough battles everyday that most of them aren't going to be fighting this one.

Part of the advantages of tapping live materials for use in the classroom is that motivated students may continue to engage with them on their own beyond the class period. In my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, I discuss the importance of informal, out of school learning -- or what James Paul Gee calls affinity spaces -- for encouraging exploration, experimentation, and mastery of important cultural materials. Ravi's work suggests ways of connecting what takes place in schools with the kinds of informal learning that is part of young people's recreational lives. For him, it is abolut embedding language learning throughout the day rather than trying to cram it into 50 minute class periods and cut and dry homework assignments. But if many students are blocked from doing so under DOPA, then again the schools will hit another roadblock. At the very time when schools should be exploring the use of Web 2.0 technologies and practices, the Federal government is actively discouraging them from doing so.

What a profound loss!

"Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education" and Other Stories

For those readers who don't get enough of me in my daily posts here (I know that must describe, maybe, three or four people out there who seriously need to get a life), I guest blogged yesterday and today over on PBS's Media Shift site. If you go there you can find two posts dealing with the relationship between education and participatory culture, which touch on some of the work we have been doing through our New Media Literacies Project. Here's a sample of what I talk about in Thursday's post, "Learning Through Remixing":

America's children are become media-makers: they are blogging, designing their own websites, podcasting, modding games, making digital movies, creating soundfiles, constructing digital images, and writing fan fiction, to cite just a few examples. As they do so, they are discovering what previous generations of artists knew: art doesn't emerge whole cloth from individual imaginations. Rather, art emerges through the artist's engagement with previous cultural materials. Artists build on, take inspiration from, appropriate and transform other artist's work: they do so by tapping into a cultural tradition or deploying the conventions of a particular genre. Beginning artists undergo an apprenticeship phase during which they try on for size the styles and techniques of other more established artists. And even well established artists work with images and themes that already have some currency within the culture. Of course, this isn't generally the way we talk about creativity in schools, where the tendency is still to focus on individual artists who rise upon or stand outside any aesthetic tradition.

Most of the classics we teach in the schools are themselves the product of appropriation and transformation or what we would now call sampling and remixing. So Homer remixed Greek myths to construct The Iliad and the Odyssey; Shakespeare sampled his plots and characters from other author's plays; The Sistine Chapel Ceiling mashes up stories and images from across the entire Biblical tradition. Lewis Carroll spoofs the vocabulary of exemplary verses which were a standard part of formal education during his period. Many core works of the western canon emerged through a process of retelling and elaboration: the figure of King Arthur goes from an obscure footnote in an early chronicle into the full blown text of Mort D'Arthur in a few centuries as the original story gets built upon by many generations of storytellers.

The post goes on to discuss a range of media literacy projects -- include our own work teaching children how to rework the Cantina scene from Star Wars -- are teaching kids to understand how culture works by breaking down familiar texts and putting them back together again. It builds on some of the issues raised in my interview with Renee Hobbs on Monday.

Today's post, "Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education," talks about home schooling, "unschooling," and informal learning, tapping James Gee's concept of "affinity spaces" to talk about such groups as fan fiction writers, gamers, and poetry enthusiasts. (I plan to write more about the later group over here in the next week or so.) But it starts with a more personal account of our decision to home school my son for a year:

Some years ago, my wife, my son, and I came to a parting of the ways with the Sommerville Public School System. We felt the schooling process was failing our son. The science teacher conducted no experiments but simply had students write answers to study questions while he worked crossword puzzles in front of the class. The literature instructor had managed to walk them paragraph by paragraph through a single, not particularly challenging novel for the entire school year. And the history class had not progressed much past the American Revolution after 9 months.

The social environment of the school was hostile. When the other kids were taunting my son by throwing basketballs at him during gym, we suggested he spend a period sitting next to the teacher. When my son’s abusers accidentally hit her with a ball, she asked him to move rather than dealing with the bullies. The school was neither going to nurture his curiosity nor protect his dignity.

My wife and I had decided we wanted to take action but weren't sure how our son would feel about it. One day he asked us if he could stop going to that school and we shocked everyone by saying yes. He had mixed feelings from the start but we plowed forward anyway.

We had been reluctant to add to the ranks of Cambridge faculty members who were not supporting the public schools. We had both been a product of public education ourselves. But at the end of the day, the needs of the child came first. We were reminded of what my father used to say, “never let schooling get in the way of your education.

Anyway, I thought these two posts might interest some of you who regularly read this blog.

Behind the Scenes at My Pop Studio: An Interview with Renee Hobbs

Much of my attention on this blog so far has centered around issues of participatory culture -- the ways fans and consumers are taking media in their own hands whether through user-generated content or through exerting a collective influence over the circulation and reception of media content. I have suggested that the new media landscape -- and the social structures and cultural practices which grow up around it -- creates unique opportunities for everyday people to get involved as media-makers and as they do so, we all benefit through the increased diversification and innovation that results. To insure that every kid in America is able to fully participate within this emerging culture, though, there needs to be a greater commitment to media literacy education. By media literacy, I mean not simply the ability to critically interprete the images and stories that circulate in our culture, but also the ability to produce media (and to understand all of the factors that shape the production of media). We would not consider someone to be literate in the traditional sense if they could read but not write. We shouldn't consider someone to be media literate if they can consume but not produce media. Indeed, the greatest insights about media -- even mass media -- come when we are able to step into the role of media producer and understand the choices that shape the media that we consume.

Several weeks ago, Renee Hobbs helped to launch a fascinating new site -- My Pop Studio -- which takes this premise as a starting point. The site targets young middle school and early high school aged girls, encouraging them to reflect more deeply about some of the media they consume -- pop music, reality television, celebrity magazines, and the like -- by stepping into the role of media producers. The site offers a range of engaging activities -- including designing your own animated pop star and scripting their next sensation, re-editing footage for a reality television show, designing the layout for a teen magazine. Along the way, they are asked to reflect on the messages the media offers about what it is like to be a teen girl in America today and to think about the economic factors shaping the culture that has become so much a part of their everyday interactions with their friends. If you have a daughter, granddaughter, niece or neighbor who falls into that age bracket (and who may be looking increasingly bored with the same ol', same ol' by this point in the summer), you would be doing them a favor by sending them to this site. (Full disclosure: I was one of a number of leading media and child development experts Renee and her team consulted in developing this project.)

I wanted to use my blog today to alert my readers to this new project and share some of the thinking that went into it. Renee Hobbs has spent more than 20 years of her career focused on promoting media literacy education -- through schools, after school programs, and now, through this imaginative intervention into popular culture itself. Hobbs directs the Media Education Lab at Temple University and is a co-founder of the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), the national membership organization that hosts the National Media Education Conference. She co-directed the Ph.D. program in Mass Media and Communication at Temple University in 2004-2005 and currently hosts the Media Smart Seminars, a free professional development program for Philadelphia educators, media professionals and community leaders. She's one of the people in this field I admire the most: someone who remains concerned about the issues young people face in their long transition into adulthood and who seeks ways to empower young people to take charge of the media that surrounds them.

She was nice enough to agree to answer some of my questions about the project.

You've been involved with media literacy for a number of years. What do you see as some of the most important challenges facing media literacy at the present time?

Right now, there are a number of opportunities and challenges. One great opportunity is the impending retirement of millions of K-12 teachers. Over the next 10 years, there will be huge shift in the demographics of the teaching profession, and this will help media literacy. Younger teachers have different attitudes about media and technology than older teachers. They are aware that popular film, when used skillfully in the classroom, can promote rich learning experiences. These teachers are already using materials they haveobtained from the Internet--- and they recognize the need for critical thinking skills about images, media, popular culture and technology.

This leads to a great challenge. Lots of teachers are using media and technology in the classroom, but not always in ways that promote critical thinking and communication skills. Many teachers use audio-visual media as a reward or a treat. Other teachers send their students to the computer lab--- but do not create assignments that are structured to provide rich learning experiences. As a result, a lot of what is happening with media and technology in K-12 education is not building the kinds of skills that are important for success in the world outside the classroom. You can see my recent article, "Non-Optimal Uses of Media and Technology in the Classroom," from Learning, Media and Technology for more on this issue. Over half of classroom teachers say that film and television is used in non-educational ways in schools. This includes as a substitute teacher, for "downtime," as a reward, or to fill time. That's a problem that must be addressed, because educational leaders will never accept media literacy as fully legitimate until the problem of misuse of media and technology is confronted head-on.

Another important challenge is the need to keep media literacy relevant to the continually changing media environment of the 21st century. As media literacy becomes institutionalized in K-12 settings, for example, the curriculum tends to freeze. In some schools, students in 2006 are learning about how to critically analyze news and advertising using artifacts and examples from the early 1990s. Sometimes this works--- but often it diminishes one of the major strengths of media literacy: its perceived relevance in bridging the gap between the classroom and the culture. But this problem is challenging to address, because it's hard for teachers to continually adapt their curricula to match the changing media environment. Few have the training, knowledge, resources, time or tools to do this.

This project speaks directly to young girls through the use of images and activities inspired by popular culture. What are the advantages of this approach over one which is focused more on intervention through educational or civic institutions?

One advantage is obvious-- no gatekeepers are required. Girls will learn about My Pop Studio from their friends. Parents and teachers may steer a girl toward the site, but it's also likely that girls will share the site with their peers. Media literacy education has typically been "leader-driven," as individual teachers, parents or youth leaders initiate it with children and young people. My Pop Studio is an approach to media literacy that girls can experience independently.

There's another advantage as well. My Pop Studio makes an assumption about young people that comes from developmental psychology: that play and learning are related to each other. Play can help promote confidence and build a sense of social competence. Girls already participate in popular culture--- My Pop Studio aims to re-frame popular culture in ways that can be powerful for girls.

What do you see as the most important issues confronting young girls today? How do you see this project as addressing those issues?

Adolescence is a challenging time of life. A strange thing happens between age 10 and age 15 for many American girls. At age 10, girls are confident, spunky, outspoken, and see themselves as healthy, capable and strong. By age 15, 30% of teen girls are smokers. Many have chosen to avoid more rigorous courses in math and science, even when they have the capability to perform well in these classes. Teen pregnancy rates, while declining since the 1990s, are still high, especially among young women living in poverty. Tween and teen girls experience higher rates of depression. More than 4 million teen girls shoplift. Nutrition and body image are problems, too. The average teen girl guzzles 21 ounces of soda pop a day and less than 14 ounces of milk. Finally, the intense peer culture of adolescence is stressful: material possessions and social relationships take center stage. The hierarchies and gamesmanship can be overwhelming, exhausting and hard on the ego.

My Pop Studio gives girls an opportunity to be competent at creative activities involving technology, and a sense of competence is important for adolescents. The public health literature informs us that a sense of competence is a "protective factor" that can keep girls healthy during adolescence. The website lets girls take on, in a playful way, the role of a multimedia producer. This gives them the opportunity to feel the power of making creative choices that result in publishable products. At the website, girls can make their own pop star, reflect on values messages in media, and get feedback from peers on their creative choices. They can edit a teen TV program and compose a scene. They can compose a multi-page magazine spread and reflect on how digital images create unreal realities, depicting the bodies and lives of young women in a highly unrealistic way. On My Pop Studio, girls can create and share web comics about how digital media affect their own social relationships. Girls can comment on various kinds of social situations that occur with digital media. They can create their own comics, read comics created by other girls, and use a simple blogging tool to comment on them.

During a time when feelings of confidence diminish, these high-interest activities may help girls to continue to see themselves as capable, competent and part of a creative community, able to make good choices about their lifestyle and health.

How did you choose which forms of popular culture to address through this project?

We looked at the literature on the media consumption habits of children and adolescent girls aged 9 - 14. We talked to over 50 girls who participated in My Pop Studio focus groups from five geographically diverse sites around the nation. That's why popular music takes center stage in My Pop Studio. We looked carefully at girls' feelings of attachment to celebrities. We wanted to tackle issues related to celebrity culture, because this topic has not been well-explored in the context of media literacy pedagogy. Because girls this age are beginning to read fashion magazines, we wanted to address issues of body image and digital image manipulation. Although girls this age are not (generally) using social networking sites, they are feeling social pressure to own cell phones, watch R-rated videos, and many are quite active with IM/chat. So we wanted an opportunity to explore the diversity of family attitudes about media/technology use and encourage girls to reflect on how new media create new kinds of social relationships with family and peers. We wanted to focus on forms of popular culture that were most available to all girls, regardless of their families' economic situation.

How do you balance entertainment and education goals when working on a project like this?

The site has to be entertaining, or girls won't play with it. Play and learning are related, so the language of the site provides a "behind-the-scenes" perspective to offer information about issues in media industries -- minus the didacticism or preachiness.

We tried to build educational goals into the deep structure of the activities, as in Pop Star Producer, where in making choices about your pop star, you learn 1) that there are many choices to be made and 2) that different choices have consequences--- they affect how people interpret your character. Most girls in this age group are not aware of how media messages are constructed--- stuff just appears on the TV set, or on the radio, or in the magazines, or on the Web. These activities provide an "aha" about the constructedness of media messages just by playing.

At My Pop Studio, we have a learning community where younger girls participate in dialogue with older girls. Temple University undergraduate students enrolled in a "Mass Media and Children" course will be responsible for maintaining and updating the site, and they will comment on girls' creations and participate in the creative community. Undergraduates can share their ideas with younger girls, which will extend the learning of both groups.

We also created downloadable lesson plans that can be used by parents in informal, home-based learning as well as with middle-school students in a computer lab. The lesson plans show how My Pop Studio activities can be used to promote rich dialogue, reading, writing, and discussion to strengthen critical thinking and communication skills.

Several of your activities here are focused on remixing media content. Remixing has been a controversial aspect of contemporary youth culture. Do you see remixing as a media literacy skill? Why or why not?

Remixing is now an important part of contemporary media production. In remixing, media texts, now at the center of our cultural environment, get re-interpreted by other creative people through techniques of collage, editing, and juxtaposition. Remixing is a type of creative expression. Through remixing, people can generate new ideas. It can be a vehicle for people to comment upon the role of media and technology in society.

Remixing can strengthen media literacy skills because it can deepen people's awareness of an author's purpose and context. Context is often not well-understood as a component of meaning. Through strategic juxtaposition and shifts in context, messages change their meanings. Remixing illustrates a key concept of media literacy: that meaning is in people, not in texts.