How Computer Games Help Children to Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shaffer (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced blog readers to my former student, David Williamson Shaffer, and his new book, How Computer Games Help Children to Learn. This book is a must read for anyone who is invested in the concept of Serious Games or anyone who wants to have a better understanding of what games might contribute to the reform of the educational process. In yesterday's post, he walked us through his roots in Seymore Papert's notion of hard fun and his concept of epistemic games. Here's a bit more background on David taken from his blog:

Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of the GAPPS research group for games, learning, and society. The group recently received a $1.8 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study games and media literacy in the digital age. Dr. Shaffer has a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on Alternate Routes to Technology and Science and was the recipient of a Spencer Foundation National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His particular area of interest is in the development of epistemic games: computer and video games in which players become professionals to develop innovative and creative ways of thinking.

Today, I asked Shaffer some of the hard questions which all of us who are promoting games and education are facing. He offers some candid and compelling responses.

You describe powerful activities which certainly require students to deploy a rich array of school content. But by classical definitions, not all of the activities you describe are games. And many teachers remain resistant to the concept of games in school. So what value do you see in referring to these experiences as games?

This is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. Part of the problem with the word "game" is that there isn't a single agreed-upon definition. The definition I use in the book is closer to some than others--and as you know, I talk about this very issue and how my use of the term compares to others in the book.

A major point of the book is that digital technologies force us to reexamine and rethink a number of concepts whose original definitions come from an age of print literacy: things like games, learning, thinking, innovation, professionalism, school, and so on. It is an argument that I know you are quite familiar with, since you similarly argue that new media force us to reconceptualize the nature of concepts like production and consumption, genre and medium, and so on.

The argument I make in the book is that in the digital age there is a new set of relations between games and school--and school and learning, professional practices and academic disciplines, innovation and education--and this reorganization of how we think about thinking and learning, play and education, creativity and rigor is an essential step in thinking about the future of learning.

Some skeptics have argued that the serious games movement is imposing a utilitarian logic on play (making it into something serious) when in fact, the value of play as a form of mental recreation may come from the fact that it invites us to suspend real world consequences and constraints. How would you respond to this argument?

I've heard that argument, of course, but honestly I think it is a bit of a straw man. First of all, no one (that I know) is arguing that *all* play should be "serious" in the sense you describe here--that is, devoted to some larger purpose. Second, for all the reasons that Seymour and others (and I) have talked about, there is such a thing as "hard fun"--that is, the fun of doing something difficult but worthwhile. It is an important and legitimate part of fun, and of learning, and of being a well-adjusted and happy person. Finally, and perhaps most important, serious games do suspend some real world consequences and constraints. Any game imposes some constraints and relaxes some, abates some consequences and introduces others. Different games have a different balance, and serve different functions. But I don't think there is some form of pure or idealized play (except as a theoretician's fancy) which games that serve some larger purpose somehow "pollute." Any game is played in some social context, and therefore serves some larger purpose.

Other critics of the serious games movement have argued that we are moving too quickly from ethnographic evidence that some kids learn well through games to larger claims that all youth can/should learn through game play. How would you respond to this argument?

Well, not all the evidence is ethnographic. My work is based on experimental studies: we design a game based on a specific set of hypotheses about what players will learn and how they will learn it; then we study the experiences of players to see whether that's what happens. Others in the field have done similar studies, some at quite large scales.

No one would deny that there has been a lot of enthusiasm in recent months and years about the potential of games, and some claims have no doubt been inflated, or premature, or speculative. But that doesn't mean that all claims are suspect: it depends on the claim and the evidence.

I will say that this form of argument (games for learning are all hype) is a little ironic, in the sense that the other major criticism of games is that they will teach kids the wrong thing: that playing violent games will make them violent, and so forth. We seem to think it is easier to learn bad things than good--which is, at the very least, a very Hobbsian view of the human condition.

I do think that an important part of any game is the context in which it is played. So you can take a good simulation and make it part of a game that leads to the development of useful skills, knowledge, values, and identity in service of a useful way of thinking about the world. You can also set up the conditions of play in such a way that the outcomes are quite different.

So I am skeptical of any claims about what "games" in general do or don't do for kids. That's why my book is titled "HOW computer games help children learn" and not "DO computer games help children learn?" We know that children learn from all of their experiences. The question is whether and how we can design experiences that will help them learn things we think will help them become better citizens, happier individuals, and more productive members of society.

You end your book with some speculations on the future of education. How would schools change -- for the better or for the worse -- if various kinds of game-like activities were to displace some of the activities that currently constitute the "game" of schooling?

I don't know what the ultimate shape of schools will be in the digital age. It took decades to design the modern industrial schools we have now, and they look very different from their predecessors. Schools right now focus on standardized tests of basic facts and skills for a paper and pencil world. They need to become more about learning to use sophisticated technologies to find creative and innovative solutions to real problems. I think well-designed computer games can, should, and ultimately will play a large role in that process. But to get there will mean redesigning almost everything about schools in the long run: the architecture of the buildings, the content of the curriculum, the schedule, and perhaps most important, the means of assessment.

This is going to be a big change, and a big task. But as I argue in the book, wise, well-educated, and affluent parents are already using new technologies to help their kids prepare for life in a complex world. If schools don't keep up, they risk becoming at best a footnote in the real process of education in the digital age, and in the worst case, a road to failure and an impediment to educational opportunity for those who can't afford access to the tools and pedagogies for success in a world of global competition.

Some have argued that we necessarily distort the real world phenomenon we are representing when we reduce them to the structures of a game. Do you agree with this concern? If so, how might educational game designers address it?

As Don Norman points out in his wonderful book Things That Make Us Smart any representation of reality is a simplification, leaving out details that are not relevant to solving a particular problem or accomplishing a particular task. Moreover, all of our thinking takes place through representations--whether external representations like diagrams, pictures, or spreadsheets, or internal ones, such as memories, words, or images.

So all thinking is a deliberate distortion of reality in this sense.

The power of epistemic games is that they are based on a specific theory of how you determine what it is safe to leave out in designing a game that models professional training as a way of teaching innovative thinking. The book describes that process in more detail, but the specifics aside, the point is that epistemic games are based on a specific pedagogical theory--a theory about what is worth learning and how people learn it.

There are other theories one might use, of course. But in the end, I think that any good educational game has to be based on a corresponding theory of how learning takes place. The theory might work or not--which is why we test the games we build. But it is that theory that tells you which simplifications you have to make (and which ones you can not make) in re-presenting real world phenomena in game form.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer (Part One)

I've known David Williamson Shaffer for more than a decade. I was lucky enough to have him as a student in my media theory and methods proseminar back when he was finishing up his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. where he was doing work with Seymor Papert. I've reconnected in recent years with Shaffer through his work on games and education. Shaffer has come out this month with a very important book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn. A colleague of James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer has long contributed to our conversations about the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games.

He has especially promoted the idea of epistemic games, which he discusses at some length, in the interview that follows. He is interested in the ways that we can use computer-based games (including games that involve interacting with real people in real spaces) to introduce children to the basic conceptual frameworks that govern various professional practices. For him, this is the most powerful aspect of games-based learning.

His new book makes a powerful case for this mode of teaching, including detailed case studies of games he has developed to cover a range of different professional contexts and academic disciplines and drawing parallels to commercial games already on the market. The writing is accessible and engaging, driven by his own experiences as a classroom teacher and his own passion for helping to reinvent American education.

Over the next two days, I am going to be running this interview with Shaffer. In the first part, he lays out the book's core premises and in the second, he addresses the debates around serious games more generally.

Your biography in the back of the book lists one of your titles as "game scientist." So, I suspect the readers might be interested to know what a game scientist does and how you train for such a position. The cynic in me wants to know what the implications are of using scientific language to describe what is essentially a position in the humanities.

There are a few different ways of explaining where the title "Game Scientist" comes from. The most superficial answer is that as we were founding the GAPPS (Games and Professional Practice Simulations) Group here at the University of Wisconsin Advanced Academic Distributed Learning CoLaboratory, we needed to decide what members of the group would be called. The title "Research Scientist" is often used for appointments in research labs that do not grant tenure, so given that we were all studying games someone (I think it might have been me) suggested that Game Scientist would be an appropriate title.

So originally the term was something of an historical artifact.

But I do think that there is some value in referring to the work I do as game science. Games are, as you point out, a forum of human expression, like books, movies, and other things that are studied as "humanities." But it is also possible to ask scientific questions about books: to study, for example, how people read, or to study the social, economic or psychological impact of a particular kind of book. So we can ask scientific questions about games and peoples' experiences with them.

In using the term "scientific" here, of course, I am making a statement about research methods, not values. By "scientific" I only mean asking questions that can be answered with empirical data, which can be quantitative data (surveys, brain scans, and the like) or qualitative data (like interviews and observations).

In truth, though, I am not sure that drawing explicit distinctions between the sciences and the humanities is actually all that productive. Nelson Goodman made a strong case decades ago that the similarities between the two are more striking than the differences on a philosophical level: both try to warrant claims about phenomena in the world. This is a point I have made in some of my own writings as well.

All of that having been said, I am a game scientist because the work that I do uses methods of the field of psychology, which is a form of social science.

As a graduate student, you worked with Seymor Papert, among others, at the Media Lab. Papert has written about "hard fun." In what ways is your new work a theory or application of this concept of "hard fun?"

There are a lot of connections between Seymour's work and my own. The concept of "hard fun" is one that I talk about in the book, but there are others as well.

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that it hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

The concept is certainly one that applies to almost any good game--not just the games I work with, or games for learning in general. I make this point in my book, and Steven Johnson talks about it in Everything Bad is Good for You as well. Jim Gee talks about the games that work have to be pleasantly frustrating. Good games require a lot of work.

What makes hard fun valuable from an educational point of view is when the challenge you face is worthwhile in some context beyond the game itself. In Seymour's work, kids who used Logo had to solve problems in differential geometry and computer science to build things they thought were interesting and exciting.

In my work, the challenges are the kinds of problems that professionals face in the real world: engineering design, graphic design, mediation, urban planning, and so on. The games are hard because the problems are hard. But they are fun because it is fun to solve difficult problems that matter, that have no right answer, and that give you a chance to see what it would be like to run the world--or at least some part of it.

So, let's get to the heart of the matter. What are epistemic games and what value do you think they bring to education?

Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.

They are, in other words, role-playing games where players take on the role of being a professional in training--where "professional" in this sense refers not to so-called white collar professions, but to any kind of work in a complex domain that requires the exercise of autonomy and judgment.

Professional training is based, for the most part, on professional practica: times and places where professionals-in-training do supervised work, and then talk with their peers and mentors about what they did and why. Think about internship and residency for doctors, moot court for lawyers, the design studio for architects, capstone courses for engineers and journalists, and so on.

These repeated cycles of action and reflection create a particular kind of professional thinking that Donald Schon (also at MIT, as you know, before he passed away some years ago) characterized as "reflection-in-action": literally the ability to think and to work at the same time, and thus to do work that requires constant evaluation of the situation and adjustment of the work plan in order to solve non-routine problems.

So epistemic games give players a chance to work on simulations of real problems, and to think about what they are doing--to debrief, if you will--the way professionals do when learning to solve those problems.

The games are "epistemic" because any professional practice has a particular epistemology: a way of justifying actions and warranting claims. To be a professional of some kind means you solve problems in a particular way, and you accept some kinds of solutions as legitimate and not others. The way a doctor argues that removing a patient's spleen is the "right" thing to do is different than the way a lawyer argues about it. If you're in the hospital, you probably want to go with the doctor's way of thinking. If you're in the courtroom, stick with the lawyer--assuming, of course, that you have both a good doctor and a good lawyer.

Put another way, practica are where new professionals learn the epistemology of their chosen profession--along with the skills, knowledge, and values they need to put that epistemology into practice. Epistemic games recreate those practica in game form so players can learn to think like professionals who solve non-routine problems.

The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.

You discuss a number of these epistemic games in the book. Can you pick one of them and describe how it might contrast to existing school practices in this area?

As you know, the book has two chapters that look at this very question. One chapter looking at history and what it means to think about history--in school, as a real historian, and in a game called The Debating Game. Another chapter looks at mathematics as it is learned in school and in a game called Escher's World.

I think the history example is an interesting one because the differences are so clear. Sam Wineberg at Stanford University did a lovely study comparing how graduate students in history and high school history students evaluated a collection of historical documents.

What Wineberg found (and here I'm summarizing from my book, which summarizes Wineberg's study) is that what distinguished the high school students from the historians was not the number of facts that they knew about the American Revolution. Instead, the difference was in their understanding of what it means to think historically. For the students, history is what is written in the textbook, where "facts" are presented free of bias. For the historians, historical inquiry is a system for determining the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth--it is a way of knowing based on using specific evidence to support claims rather than trying to establish a set of facts that exist without bias.

In the same chapter, I describe a game--The Debating Game--that asks players to think about historical evidence the way historians do... or at least more like the way historians do. The game is described in more detail in the book, but basically in the game players compete in a debate over whether the actions taken by some historical actor or actors were good or bad, selfish or public-spirited, constructive or destructive.

To win the debate, they have to convince the judges of the debate that their interpretation is better than their opponents' interpretation. To do that, they have to find specific pieces of the historical record to support their position: they have to argue, as Wineberg suggests professional historians do, for the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth.

The kinds of things that players of the game do are very different than what happens in most high school history classes. (The game has been played by middle school students as well, and there the contrast is even more striking.) Players in the game (debaters and judges) have to write essays where they defend a point of view, rather than take tests where they remember facts or recite received interpretations of events. They work with primary and secondary sources with conflicting viewpoints, rather than a text with one point of view. They make their own interpretations and judgments about arguments and evidence, rather than trying to decode and remember some canonical interpretation. And so on.

So the differences are quite striking: the game is about learning to use the "toolkit" of historical analysis to think for yourself; the class is about learning to give the right answers for a test. Thus the game is more realistic, in a sense, than class is.

A recurring emphasis in your discussion is on the movement from abstract school subjects towards school subjects framed around specific real world professions -- the difference between studying math, say, and studying accounting. What's the case for the use of these professional categories for secondary school education?

As I point out in the book, school is organized around a set of things that are supposedly fundamental ways of knowing--the building blocks of all thinking if you will--which in the case of school are the traditional academic disciplines.

This is a very old view of thinking, going back to ancient Greece. The disciplines were organized a little differently then, but the basic idea was the same: education is about learning some basic ways of thinking out of which all more advanced thinking is formed.

The problem is that a century of study in the psychology of learning suggests that this just isn't how it works. Complex thinking of the kind that characterizes expertise isn't simply lots of basic pieces put together. You can't teach a bunch of facts and skills and then expect that people will reassemble them as needed.

Expertise--indeed anything beyond rudimentary skill--is based on experience working with real problems, and usually quite a lot of experience. So if we want people to learn to think about problems in the real world, they need experience learning how experts solve those problems.

I should add that there isn't anything wrong, in principle, with having school focus on learning to think like historians or mathematicians, if we decide that these are the kinds of problems kids will really face later in life. But if that's what we want to do, then we should build games (and by extension design curricula) where players meet simulations of real historical and mathematical problems the way historians and mathematicians do--which is a far cry from what they are doing now.

I'd also want to see the argument made that teaching everyone to be 5 or 6 different flavors of academic is really more useful than learning to think as professionals. What, for example, would our health care system look like if everyone who went to a doctor's office understood the kinds of questions that the doctor should ask, and the kinds of answers that she or he would use to make decisions? What would our body politic look like if everyone who read a newspaper or listened to talk radio understood how a journalist thinks about stories--and thus what makes it into the news and what doesn't, and why stories get reported the way they do? How would that kind of education compare to what we have today--or to doing a better job of teaching students to think like biologists or historians?

The Merits of Nitpicking: A Doctor Diagnoses House

My son and I are both big fans of the television series, >em>House. I watch the show for the characters and their interactions -- especially for Hugh Laurie's performance but also for his interplay with the other doctors. My son has shown a bit more curiosity about the medical dimensions of the series and in search of information, he stumbled onto a fascinating blog, Polite Dissent, which offers medical insight into House, superhero comics, and a range of other popular culture texts. The blog promises us "Comics, Medicine, Politics, and Fun." Its author, Scott, describes himself as being part of a large family practice in Southwestern Illinois. Scott's blog is a good illustration of a mode of fan criticism which sometimes goes by the name of nitpicking. Nitpickers examine their favorite programs through a particular lens -- in this case, medicine -- in which they have developed expertise. I became very interested in nitpicking when I did research for Science Fiction Audiences about the reception of Star Trek at MIT. What I found at that time -- the late 1980s -- was that MIT students were often drawn to our school because of an early interest in science fiction and used science fiction -- especially debates about the lines between known science, reasonable speculation, and implaussible technobabel -- to work through their own mastery of core scientific concepts. The pleasure was in being able to prove to each other what was "wrong" with the science in a particular Star Trek episode and to explain a more plausible or realistic way of dealing with the same themes. Indeed, they classified the ST:NG episodes by discipline, often using the numerical codes ("Course 6") which are most often used to refer to majors within the MIT Context, suggesting just how much the shows functioned in parallel with what they were learning in their classes.

These scientists and engineers in training were not being obnoxious in trying to show their superiority to the program: part of the pleasure for them came in sorting out the differences between real and bogus science. In some senses, this was to look at the series through a realist lens but that's too simple a way to understand what is going on since all science fiction fans recognize that science fiction involves speculation and about social commentary, not simply about reproducing the world of known science but pushing beyond it to explore alternative possibilities. There were just "rules" that governed how far outside known science science fiction "should" stray and in what directions.

The classic nitpicker has a love/hate relationship with their favorite program: the show has to be good enough to stretch the outer limits of their knowledge at a regular basis and yet at the same time, it has to be flawed enough that they can catch it when the authors "fake it" in a particular domain of knowledge.

So, Scott takes House apart in terms of hospital procedure, medical tests and equiptment, and the specifics of the various ailments they appear in the speculations surrounding a particular case. Taken as a whole, Scott seems to enjoy the speculative aspects of the series but to be displeased by the various shortcuts the writers take to get us through a complex medical process in under an hour of screentime. Scott recognizes the tension between story telling and communicating actual medical knowledge but remains frustrated, as he puts it, "when House does a "character show," the medicine suffers."

Here, for example, are some of the key concerns he raised about "TB or Not TB", a second season episode about a grandstanding doctor who works on the medical problems in the third world and who provokes special ire from the series protagonist:

I

f the patient is suspected of having TB, why is no one treating him wearing a mask? Why he wandering around the hospital and not in isolation? Why is he not in a negative-pressure room?

PPDs are not read by sight, but by feel. It doesn't matter how red it looks, but instead how indurated it is.

TB is slow growing. How did the team know almost immediately that it was resistant TB? How did the antibiotics kick in so fast?

A nesidioblastoma would explain most of Dr. Charles's symptoms, but *wow* that's a convenient tumor. Small enough that it can't be seen on x-rays or MRIs. Intermittent, so it only releases insulin periodically. And yet strong enough to lower the sugar level in his CSF. It's more of a deus ex machina than a diagnosis.

When Dr. Charles coded, why did no one in a room full of doctors start CPR while waiting for the paddles to charge?

I'm certainly no surgeon, interventional radiologist or endocrinologist, but the scene where the team is trying to induce the tumor to release insulin seemed wrong. Injecting calcium directly into the pancreatic blood supply may be a legitimate procedure, but I doubt those four are qualified to perform it. Also, since they expected the blood sugar to drop to dangerous levels, they should have had the D50 ready to inject and not scramble for an IV setup

Frankly, most of these questions never crossed my mind: for me, the medical language on >em>House is as much technobabel as anything heard on Star Trek, but I found I had to stop watching Jack and Bobby a few years ago because I got so frustrated in how they dealt with academic life and I am starting to get more frustrated with Veronica Mars along similar lines. It all depends on where your expertise and interest lies but that's part of the value of creating a space where shared texts get examined through multiple lens.

It has been widely observed that procedural shows like House or CSI can play an important role in exciting the American public about the professions being represented. They are often accompanied both by an increase in sales of nonfiction works on the same topics and by increased applications to colleges which offer programs in those areas of specialization. The obvious parallel here is to the MIT students who got turned onto science through Star Trek. In such a context, sites like this one play an important role in providing a corrective to some of the more hairbrained ideas that find their ways into dramatic television or simply to provide further background on the medical conditions and practices discussed on the program.

I wonder how we can incorporate something like the nitpicking process into the educational system. What is the value of getting students to apply their knowledge to deconstruct a popular representation? What is gained by the process of walking through such critiques and then trying to verify competing truth claims through reference to concrete evidence and information? What gets added when we move from a single knowledgible critic like Scott to the incorporation of a larger community of interested people who might bring slightly different expertises to the table or who might have competing interpretations and evaluations of what is represented in the program (as occurs in the comments section of this site)? The key point is that the procedural shows themselves do not have to be 100 percent accurate as long as they offer problems for students to work through and solve and as long as a spirit of playful debunking is built into how they get discussed in the classroom. Indeed, the shows may be a better basis for such an experiment if they are good enough to capture the imagination but ultimately flawed or compromised in their representation of real world practices. Such an excercise would seem to be a great way to introduce media literacy concepts into the biology classroom.

The Sony Game Design Workshop

For those of you following my travels, I am now back in the United States (San Francisco to be precise) where I will be through tuesday. Further legs on this trip take me to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Durham, and New York City, before returning in Boston for the start of the term. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scordose from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

Here's the basic details:

Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age

Prof. Henry Jenkins, Sande Scoredos and Thomas Hershey, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Mon Jan 29 thru Thu Feb 1, 10am-05:00pm, 14E-310

Fri Feb 2, 10am-05:00pm, 2-105

Enrollment limited: advance sign up required (see contact below)

Signup by: 10-Jan-2007

Limited to 40 participants.

Participants requested to attend all sessions (non-series)

Prereq: None

Student teams develop story concepts for various media, including motion picture visual effects and computer games. Sponsored by MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), this non-technical activity focuses on the theoretical, historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic elements of interactive narrative and game structures. Morning lectures explore linear and non-linear storytelling across media, audio-visual elements, game theory, and techniques to increase the depth of interactive console games and enhance storytelling. Afternoons run as workshops where participants collaborate in teams to design interactive story scenarios to be presented during a final session on Friday afternoon.

Held in 14E-310. Friday February 2nd will be held in 2-105.

Contact: Generoso Fierro, 14N-207, x3-5038, generoso@mit.edu

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants though there are limits to how many people we can absorb.

The following text is taken from a teacher's guide for the workshop which currently resides on the Education Arcade website. Parts of it have previously appeared in Telemedium. We have also produced a series of reality television style short documentaries showing the process at work and displaying highlights from the final presentations. And we have notes from some of the key lectures during one year's run of the workshop. These are all designed to encourage teachers at other institutions to try their own hands at conducting this kind of workshop process.

The workshop has two basic components - a design competition where teams conceptualize and present their approaches to adopting an existing media property into a game and a series of lectures designed to provide them with the background knowledge they need to complete this task. The contest provides greater motivation for students to pay attention to the information presented through the lectures and to apply it to the specific challenges of conceptualizing their games.

Some aspects of the workshop take advantage of the unique resources of MIT, yet we believe that the basic structure of the workshop could be adopted by local teachers at the high school level. We have had several high school aged students in the past and they have done as well or better than their older counterparts. In any case, the content of the workshop has adjusted slightly each year to reflect the available faculty and their interests.

Educational Goals

This workshop emerged from a series of conversations that Henry Jenkins and Alex Chisholm had with more than 50 different companies, large and small, which might be interested in hiring Humanities-trained media studies students upon their graduation. We were consistently told that while Liberal Arts students are highly desired by employers because of their mental flexibility and breadth of background knowledge, they often lacked some core skills that would make them ideal employees. Among those things most often identified were leadership experience, teamwork, communication skills, brainstorming and problem solving skills, competitiveness, and the experience of carrying a project through to completion. So, one important thrust of the workshop was to give our own graduate and undergraduate students training and experience in these areas.

Team leaders are selected from our own graduate students or undergraduate majors. In the case of a high school, they could be selected from upperclassman and (after the first year) students who had performed well in the previous competition. These students are given some additional training in leadership, brainstorming, and communication skills so that they can insure the success of the workshop as a whole.

At the same time, the workshop was designed to expose students to the basic building blocks of computer and video games - introducing them to current industry trends, technological opportunities of the current game systems, the tools the industry uses to select and develop potential properties - storytelling, genre, character, emotion, space, game play, community building, violence and ethics, gender and generational factors, visual elements, and sound track. Students are introduced to these ideas through the lectures and then apply them to their team projects. The judging criteria for the competition are designed to insure that all of the key concepts get applied.

A third educational goal here involves encouraging students to analyze the key components of an existing media text. Students need to think deeply about what aspects of those texts are essential to defining the 'world' of the story and to insure the audience's recognition and pleasure. Any adaptation involves maintaining certain core features while changing other nonessential features to reflect the specific nature of the medium in which the work is being presented and increasingly, to offer consumers an expanded experience of the 'world' of the story. One reason why we ask students to work with existing properties is that this workshop is designed to foster the analytic skills that we introduce to students through our existing courses on film, literature, or television.

Preparing Team Leaders

The success of this process depends on having good team leaders who can be trusted to keep their groups on track and help them to cross the finish line. Over the years we have been running this process, we have had only one team totally self-destruct. Given the several dozen teams we put through this process, the intensity of the demands placed on participants, and the fact that most of the participants are working without pay or academic credit, we consider this success rate to be a major victory. In order to get teams out of the gate first, we choose a team leader prior to the start of the week. We typically select graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies program, since these are students we already work with closely and who already come into the week with some solid knowledge of media theory and production practices. In some cases, we select undergraduate students from our program who have been working on some of our games related projects or we select people who have gone through the team process once before and have been successful. In the case of a school or after school program, you should consider recruiting some older students with whom you have worked in the past to be team leaders for your first run through this process and then create a system where, if possible, participants of winning teams get asked if they will come back next year to help with the contest. In the worse case, you should select students you think have real maturity and leadership potential to head the teams. Part of what our students get out of this process is experience in managing teams and a chance to test their theoretical insights into media against the challenges of an actual production process. We have been able to recommend a significant number of our students for internships with media related companies on the basis of the leadership skills they demonstrated through their participation in this process.

One of the key things we tell our student leaders is to think of themselves as facilitators. We strongly discourage them from coming into the weeklong course with strong ideas about what kind of project they want to lead. The ideas should come from the entire team and not simply from its leaders. This is key if all participants are going to feel a sense of ownership over the finished product and if they are going to be expected to work actively to realize the group's goals. Of course, in any given group, some students will feel closer to a particular idea than others and some disagreements about goals and choices is bound to occur. But, if the leader thinks of themselves as insuring the integrity of the process and making sure that each participant has a valuable experience, then the groups are less likely to face a serious rupture on their way to the finish line. In many cases, other leaders emerge organically from the group process and may supplement or assist the selected leaders. What you want to avoid, however, is a situation where struggles over leadership blocks progress on the project. It's that reason why we want to select leaders from the start.

The group leader needs to know how to brainstorm. Brainstorming involves all participants throwing out their ideas in an non-evaluative process. The leader wants to frame open-ended questions and not dismiss any idea out of hand. Brainstorming should be seen as an iterative process in which one will not necessarily know what the final value of an idea is until it has been worked over and reconsidered several times.

At the beginning of the week, the first phase of brainstorming should involve identifying what content will serve as the basis of the game. The leader may want to get participants to throw out media properties that they think have potential and write them down on a chalkboard or on poster board so everyone can see. A good leader may start to cluster ideas that seem related as they emerge so that the participants start to see relationships between materials. Often in this first phase, it will be hard to separate out the ideas about subject matter from ideas about game play or presentation. The ultimate choice will need to be a game concept that captures people's imaginations, which allows for innovative use of the medium, and which can be presented in a lively and compelling fashion. Once you have a list of possible properties, then you want to circle back through the list again and again, thinking through the value of each nomination and winnowing out those which pose insurmountable problems or which are unknown to a larger number of people in your group. By the end of the first day, you want to have a manageable list of potentially valuable options and you want participants to spend some time researching on their own their favorite options. The second day the group leaders work to further narrow the list and to reach a consensus about what the group is doing.

The second night, group members may plan on getting together and consume the media property that has been selected, making notes, or sharing ideas about what they want to do. The third day is focused on developing the ideas which had emerged around the property throughout the first two days of brainstorming, to begin to focus on aspects of game play, audio-visual design, and marketing, which will shape the final presentation. The group leader needs to keep good notes of the lectures and to be able to insert ideas from the talks into the brainstorming process in a timely way so that participants see their application to their current design problems.

By the third day, the group leader will also have thought about a division of labor based on the skills and passions of participants. In some cases, they may put one person in charge of each aspect of their presentation and send them off to work on their own; in other cases, the group may work through each level collectively and collaborate in the completion of tasks. We have seen both approaches produce successful results in the competition. What is important is that the leader know how they are approaching the tasks and know who is responsible for completing each one. On the third day, we have a review session where group participants meet with the faculty in charge of the competition and walk through the choices which have been made so far. We recommend that the group leaders check in with the supervising faculty at the end of each day to make sure that things are on track.

On the fourth day, the group will start to shift its focus from generating new ideas towards executing those it has developed. The focus shifts more decisively onto the challenges of developing a presentation that will effectively communicate to the judges what is exciting and innovative about this particular project. Here is where the diverse skills of the team come handy with programmers helping to develop the digital embodiment of the idea, graphic artists helping to develop materials that visualize the concepts, and business students helping to develop the business plan which shows why this approach might prove commercially viable. The group leader should be prepared to work late into the night checking in with individual team members or keeping the group working together until they know they have what they need for their presentations.

The final day involves the presentations. In some cases, the group leaders may be the most effective people to communicate their ideas, though we encourage many if not all members of the team to play a role in expressing their concepts to the judges and especially in addressing questions. In other cases, the group leader may play director and stage manager, pulling out of the immediacy of the presentation in order to watch each participant and give them feedback on their performance. You want to make sure you know more or less how long each part of the presentation will take because the judges will cut students off at the end of their time whether or not they have finished their presentation. The leader needs to anticipate problematic team members and have plans about how to deal with them should they "act up" during a presentation. We have seen people try to dominate the presentation, overstepping their assigned roles, interrupting fellow panelists, or even trying to reorder PowerPoint slides mid-presentation. These are the kinds of crisis that try leader's souls, but the leader must have established enough of a relationship with each member to be able to intervene quickly and effectively to put things back on course. Other times, students develop stage fright and the leader may have to step in and fill their roles at the last moment.

The judges will have a chance to ask participants questions about their project. The leader should try to anticipate the most likely questions, develop a division of labor so that the most qualified member addresses each point and so that the group sticks by what is said even if the point is one for which no consensus has been reached. In many cases, the leader may have to be the person who addresses unanticipated questions since the leader is the one who can be expected to have the fullest sense of the project as a whole.

Throughout the process, the leader needs to maintain team spirit and morale, since the more "up" the team members feel about what they are doing, the more effectively they will communicate that enthusiasm to the judges. Morale also is what keeps someone working later in the evening or pulling out the extra stops creatively.

The Presentations

The teams have 30 minutes to present their material, 10 minutes to dress the stage, and 10 minutes to respond to the judges' questions. We keep a tight time clock to insure fairness to all involved. The teams have to be well organized in order to get themselves into position by the start of the time and to stay on schedule so that all aspects of their presentation can be heard within the allotted time. We have certainly had teams who fell behind and the team leader had to make decisions on the fly about what should/could be cut in order to get the key ideas into the time. Ideas that don't get presented aren't considered by the judges even if the judges have heard them at earlier points in the process, since the judges have no way of knowing what changes might have been made in the last minute preparations for the presentations. No matter how many times you review the projects, there are always surprising elements in the final presentations as the projects only take their final shape the night before.

The order of the presentations is chosen by drawing slips of paper the day before. Everyone comes into the day knowing when their team will present and what the ground rules are for the presentation.

All participants in the competition have to be in place at the start of the first presentation and no further work can be done once the first presentation begins. All participants hear all presentations. The other teams are pushed out of the room momentarily when the judges ask their questions. Clearly, even with this precaution, later groups have some advantage since they can absorb information into their oral presentation, even if they don't adopt it into their visual materials. But, there have really never been any complaints about unfairness here.

As the competition has continued, the quality and elaborateness of presentations has grown each year. We find consistently that showmanship counts for a great deal in terms of the relative merits of presentations. Groups have become more theatrical. For example, it is very common for participants to create and wear costumes that help to establish the characters contained within their game. These costumes range from glitter rock garb for a Making the Band project to Purple Hats and capes for Willy Wonka. Very often, they will dress the stage with elements that evoke the atmosphere of the story world. For Spirited Away, they created the look of a Japanese bathhouse. Several times, we have had teams use puppets to communicate their ideas. One memorable presentation on Princess Smartypants included both a puppet imitating the regal voice of a princess and a man dressed up like a fairy. Given the technical skills of MIT students, it will not be surprising to learn that they build power point presentations, which can contain very elaborate mock-ups done in Photoshop or flash of what the actual game might look like.

Sometimes, there are very elaborate computer animations that help communicate the core premise. A group focused on Survivor had animations of cracking fires on laptops arranged around the room. The 1984 team, which won last year, turned a video camera on the audience and projected live feed on the wall so the judges and audience had the uncomfortable experience of watching themselves watching the presentation.

More and more students provide give-aways to the judges: one year, for example, a Matrix team provided a gold box with a red and blue sugar pill, asking us to decide which one we would take. Another group, working on Homer's The Odyssey, offered us bottles of root beer with a label designed to imitate the culture of ancient Greece. Some groups mimic the advertising materials or box designs for their products, even going so far as to give us blank CDs in jewel cases mocked up to look like the finished product. For a Fugitive project, each judge was given a 'wanted' poster with his or her own image on it. The groups frequently use music to communicate the audio design of their projects - in most cases, songs sampled from existing CDs, but in a few cases, original compositions the students created for the occasion.

The judges strive to separate out flash which is simply flash from elements carefully chosen to communicate the core elements of the concept and make it come alive for the audience. If there is no serious thinking behind the performance, it can upstage rather than compliment the other elements of the presentation. Throughout the contest, the students are ask to distill down the core features which most be present in order to allow their new product to fit coherently within the existing media franchise. Here is their chance to show you how fully they have achieved that goal. Yet, students need to be aware of the importance of underlying what aspects of the performance are in the game and why. Often, students will play interesting music throughout the presentation but not talk explicitly about sound design elements in their pitch.

We now ask the groups to identify a specific audience to which they are pitching the game. This element requires the groups to do their homework on the different companies which produce games, their connections with other media companies, their existing product lines and preferences, the core market to which they are addressing the bulk of their products, and any notable successes or failures which might impact how they think about your particular product. The group working on Spirited Away, for example, chose to address the Japanese branch of Sony, opening with an extended greeting in Japanese, and drawing on what they knew about protocol and business practices in that culture. Most of the information students need to know about the business can be found on the web.

Students search for games that may be similar to what they are proposing and need to know how well they did and what markets they reached. They can find this by reviewing the large number of games-related websites produced by fans, industry insiders, or journalists. They may look up the property that they are drawing upon to conceive the game to see who produced it, how well it did at the box office, and what other connections may exist between the production company and a games-related company. They may look at other games linked to that studio's properties to see which games companies developed and released them. Those with more business interests can look for trends through industry-oriented publications, which might make the company more or less receptive to the kind of game proposed.

When we first started the competition, these business aspects took a back seat to the more aesthetic dimensions of the presentations, but in recent years, we have attracted more and more management students interested in getting into creative industries. The teacher may need to assess her or his own students to know where their strengths and weaknesses lie and decide how much emphasis to place on this aspect of the presentations. Some focus on the industry, however, seems desirable as a way to help students understand the economic contexts in which creative decisions get made (including the impact of concentration of ownership on the current media environment); this focus on factual information also gives incentive for students to work on their research skills and especially their web searching skills, since this up to the minute information is not going to be found in books.

The goal of the pitch is to put together the key elements of the game in a way that is compelling for the audience. Everything students know about presentation skills comes into play during this part of the process. Students need to think about the ordering of elements - so that the information makes sense to the audience as they are hearing it, so that the most compelling elements get the proper degree of attention, and so that the closing drives home the core elements with an extra persuasiveness. The groups need to make sure that they address each of the elements they will be judged upon while not getting bogged down in local details to such a degree that the judges do not get a clear sense of the game as a whole.

Frequently, students divide up the roles in their presentation based on their expertise and enthusiasm for different aspects of the product. Often, they also identify someone who is their best "finisher," that is, some one who has strong sales skills who can drive home the final pitch at the end of the presentation. We do not require every participant to speak, since we see the value of students who are uncomfortable in front of groups making contributions on other levels. This is, however, a philosophical question, which teachers need to consider in the context of their own programs. If the goal is to get students to really hone their presentation skills and get experience speaking in front of groups, the desire to have every student participate in the presentation is greater than if your goal is to focus on brainstorming and conceptual skills.

The presentations are a time for all team members to drop disagreements and work towards the common good. Often, team leaders instruct participants not to contradict each other during the presentation. If a team member gets hit with a question for which they are unprepared, he or she should make up an answer consistent with the overall approach they are taking and then subsequent team members will need to factor that answer into what they say about the game. One year, we had a group which totally failed to reach a consensus to the point that one group member disagreed about the order in which the PowerPoint slides should be presented and kept flicking back and forth throughout the presentation in a distracting fashion, upstaging and confusing his team mates. Needless to say, this group did badly in the competition and much anger was directed against him after they got off stage.

Judging The Presentations

We recommend having 5 or 6 judges, since each judge will see the presentations in slightly different ways and will focus on somewhat different elements. Having a broad based group of judges helps to take the pressure off any one participant and helps to even out any potential biases the judge may feel towards one group or participant. The judges are given a score sheet. We have established ten criteria of evaluation, which are known by the participants in advance. For each category, the judge gives a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest score. Each judge keeps a running tally throughout the day and reserves the right to adjust scores upwards or downwards as they hear subsequent presentations. Judges often have to rethink their responses to the first few presentations, in particular, since they do not have a very clear baseline of expectations at the start of the day. Each group must be judged by every criterion, which means that they may lower their score significantly if they do not directly address one or another aspect. For some reason, students typically offer much more on game play, narrative, and visual design than they do on sound design.

The judges should set their own standards for each category. As long as they are consistent in applying those standards to each group, then their numbers will be correctly weighted in the final score. It doesn't matter if one judge is strict and another lenient since in the end, it is the total score across all of the judges which we use to weigh the teams. But those judges who are too generous in their grading need to realize that they are flattening out the distinctions between the teams.

In our process, we tally the scores to get a straw poll vote of where the judges have aligned themselves. The judges are often surprised by their own overall scores on the different projects. Subjectively, we will weigh some elements more than others in forming our overall impressions of the team. But if we weigh each element equally, we may find a team did better overall without being the best in any particular category. Once we have a set of scores, we then discuss the presentations to make sure we are fully comfortable with where the collective tally breaks. In some cases, we end up with two teams, which are only a few points apart in scoring, well within the margin of error, and we have occasionally had absolute ties on the first stage of the scoring. Talking through the presentations may help us appreciate things we missed the first time through or think more deeply about potential problems in the team's approach. We often will then recalibrate our scores and retally the results.

Another reason why you always discuss the projects among the judges is because ultimately, we see winning and losing the competition as less important than the critique we are able to provide to each team on its work. Talking it through helps us to identify high and low points on each presentation, which will be discussed as we critique their work. Often, we will give secondary awards which foreground what we see as the biggest strength of each presentation, so that each team has some kind of moral victory in the final presentation. So, for example, we may take each of the criteria and decide which team performed best on each, giving out recognition for best visual design, most faithful to the original content, or most innovative approach to narrative.

When the students come back into the room, we go through each group in order offering our critiques of their strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, one tries to be tactful in describing flaws in the presentations but we also feel it is important for all participants to have a sense of how the judges responded to each presentation. Doing the critiques first keeps students focused on what we are saying since they are looking for clues into which group may have pleased the judges the most. Usually, we have one judge designated to lead the critique of each group with the others jumping in as needed to elaborate on key points. It is important for the students to hear how a range of different judges with different types of expertise and backgrounds responded to their projects.

Typically, we spend 5-10 minutes on each group; trying to be even in the amount of time we spend on each. At the end of the process, we then announce the superlatives assigned to each group and finally, the ultimate winner of the competition. In the MIT context, because of our association with Sony, each member of the winning team receives some moderately priced electronic gadget. All participants in the process receive a certificate and many years, Sony brings a book or video tied to one of their current releases for each participant. Teachers will need to think about what kind of prize is appropriate for their students - perhaps a gift certificate from a local merchant.

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part Two)

Over the past six months, I have been closely following the debates regarding the Deleting Online Predators Act. danah boyd and I issued a collective statement at the beginning of the summer based on our research on social networks and participatory culture. I also ran a post here describing some of the ways that banning youth from accessing MySpace and other social network sites in schools and public library might slow the potential use of blogging and other network software for pedagogical purposes. Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series focused on NetFamilyNews and its editor, Anne Collier. Collier's site has helped parents address their fears about MySpace and has kept all of us on top of the latest developments regarding governmental policies that might restrict young people's access to online space. These policies, and the fears that motivate them, play an important role in today's installment.

Many parents express an anxiety that they can not realistically control the flow of media into their homes, let alone know what their young people are doing when they are outside of their supervision. How would you respond to that concern?

I understand that concern and the frustration many parents have about diminishing control over what their children are exposed to. It isn't just parents who are experiencing diminishing control. Schools, corporations, and governments at all levels of society worldwide are too. This is an unnerving, fascinating shift we're experiencing, and I think it's calling upon all of us to think it through together out loud, bringing a whole lot of skill sets into the discussion. Because the situation seems to be requiring us to figure it out together as we go along. Problems in a participatory medium like Web 2.0 are calling for participatory solution development.

At the family level, as I suggested above, the life and tech skills of parents and kids are both needed to find solutions to Net-related problems. In schools, challenges involving defamation or cyberbullying in blogs or social sites need the best thinking of a bunch of people - students, administrators, counselors, network administrators, school-safety experts, teachers, and sometimes First Amendment legal advisers and law enforcement people. In a way, that's really exciting. It used to be that school-safety people, techies, and counselors, for example, had their spheres and hardly ever talked, much less hammered out solutions together. Now the pooling of those areas of expertise is being demanded, and I can't imagine that there won't be some creative and very positive outcomes because of it. Think, for example, about what we're all going to be learning about free-speech rights. Maybe not since the Constitutional Convention has the First Amendment been such a prominent topic in American schools!

Then I look at what's happening in other parts of the world where people are using the participatory Web. I just blogged about a report in The Guardian that, even though the Iranian government "remains a staunch opponent of Internet freedoms ... Farsi has made it into the top 10 languages on the Net." There are 70,000-100,000 active blogs in Iran, The Guardian article said. Then there's the social site ChinaKids with 800,000 registered preteen users and sponsored by the youth wing of the Chinese Communist Party. The Wall Street Journal reported that the site encourages kids to speak

out, "sometimes against authority"! The question of how to control the flow of media into homes, schools, cybercafes, and kids' mobile phones is being eclipsed by what to do about the media that flows out from those places and devices!

You have readers from around the world. What similarities and differences do you see in the concerns raised by parents in different parts of the world?

I do have readers in more than 50 countries, but I don't get email from many readers outside North America, interestingly - only some in the UK. So I mostly rely on English-language news-media coverage of technology in other countries to know what the general concerns are. It does appear that parents' concerns are fairly universal, but there are degrees of differences. For example, European parents seem to be less concerned than American parents about blocking nudity and more concerned about hate speech on the Web. But cyberbullying is a big issue everywhere. In the UK, Europe and Asia, so far it has been happening more on mobile phones than in IM and social Web sites, as we're seeing here. People are being impersonated and defamed in social sites everywhere. I did hear from a colleague in Portugal about harassment in a US-based social site popular there, one case involving a co-worker and another a teenager whose dad contacted him for help. Someone who said he was a teenager in India emailed me recently about his concern that he was accessing porn too much online, that it would hurt his future prospects. I've seen and linked to news reports of "videogame addiction" in South Korea and counseling centers established to help addicted players. Just a few examples.

One thing's for sure: Social networking sites and all the good and bad happening in them are certainly international. India has nearly a dozen social-networking sites and 1.2 million bloggers (compared to China's 19.9m, Japan's 10m, and the US's 50m), India's Economic Times reports; Japan's Mixi recently had a $1.8 billion IPO; Cyworld has saturated the teen and 20-something market in South Korea and its diaspora, so it launched a US version this past summer; LunarStorm reached the saturation point in Sweden (reportedly 90% of Swedish h.s. students) and launched a UK version - and on and on. So all the stuff that's causing worries here in the US, from bullying to piracy to PC security, is causing similar ones in other countries.

You've written a book specifically addressing adult concerns about MySpace. Why do you think social network sites like MySpace have sparked such anxiety? How real are the dangers that are being claimed?

For grownups, MySpace kind of came out of nowhere. It wasn't just for teenagers, of course (only around 20% of its users were teens), but to any parent who knew about it, it was a teenage thing, and my guess is teenagers weren't inclined to tell their parents about this new hangout if they didn't have to. So I don't think it was really on the radar for parents until it was all over the news media as a dangerous place where "predators" could contact their kids. An AP story out of Connecticut last February reported that "at least seven" girls 12-16 had been "sexually assaulted by men they met through the popular Web site MySpace." As far as I could tell following the news coverage closely, parents were hearing nothing about MySpace or social networking that wasn't at least negative, and some of it was really scary. It was that combination of a totally new thing adults knew virtually nothing about and very negative news coverage that sparked such anxiety, I

think. Then, too, there was the '06 election; politicians stood to benefit from saying they would act on those fears. It was, you might say, a "perfect storm" of parental-concern creation. By May, when our publisher, Peachpit Press, asked us to write the book ( My Space Unraveled ), there simply was no balance to the public discussion. We wanted to offer some balance - share the views of teens, researchers, children's advocates, and law enforcement people who understood social networking; encourage parents to check MySpace out themselves with simple step-by-step instructions; and explain the actual risks and the research.

How real are the dangers? There are dangers in social sites for out- there, risk-seeking people just as there are for them in "real life." As Janis Wolak, one of the authors of both of UNH's studies about child online victimization, told me last spring, "Basically, what puts kids at risk is when they talk about sex with people they meet online, and the vast majority of them don't get involved in that kind of situation." The first study was the widely misrepresented one about "one in five children" being sexually solicited online that, when actually read, said that "none of the solicitations led to an actual sexual contact or assault" and many of those solicitations came from other teens. The second study found the number of solicitations had gone down, to one in seven, but - though published this past summer - the survey was conducted before social networking took off. So even the second study from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH wasn't about social networking. What these researchers have found in other studies, though - as Janis indicated - is that it's the young people responding to and seeking out sexual contacts with strangers who are at risk.

Most of the research we have so far - or the most publicized research - is about exploitation of online kids by adults. That's important research to have, but it's only part of the picture. We know almost nothing yet about child and teen behavior on social sites, good and bad, or about the impact of online socializing, media-sharing, social-producing, or creative networking. In our book I call it "collective self-expression," this social aspect of all the mashing-up and remixing that's going on with digital media, and I think it's fascinating. I think it's kind of in its infancy, and we have so much to learn about and from it. In any case, a much more complete picture is needed before any conclusions can possibly be drawn, I feel.

But I digress. ;-) There are other "dangers," depending on a person's definition. Certainly some parents would define exposure to nudity or sexually suggestive content as a danger, and there is definitely greater risk of that than sexual predation in social sites. MySpace says it's deleting x-rated content as it finds it, and it has both scanning technology and staff dedicated to finding and deleting it, but users are posting and finding it. The general Web itself, though, is known to have much more hard-core content than anything I've seen on MySpace, if kids are seeking it out.

The risks that I suspect will affect most young social networkers, though, fall under the very large category of bullying, or social cruelty, which parents and kids have probably always dealt with and always will. Since school social life has moved online, so have bullying, gossip, harassment, etc., and they can be particularly insidious online because the behavior can go on 24x7 and be anonymous. Kids and teens often don't think about the implications of their actions because that part of the adolescent brain, the prefrontal cortex, is still in development, so they can impulsively post text and other media about themselves and others and not be able to control the outcome (see my comment above about the teenage girl emailing sexually explicit photos of herself to a boyfriend). Digital media, parents too need to know, can be cut and pasted into Web pages, attached to IMs and emails, and shared on file-sharing networks - they usually can't be taken back. This, to me, is a real risk that I've been telling parents about in NetFamilyNews for years.

Your site monitors legislation designed to "protect" youth from various perceived dangers of the new media landscape. What do you see as the most pressing trends in this area as we enter 2007?

Better-written laws that reflect understanding of the Internet and its users! Most disturbing to me was the now-defunct Delete Online Predators Act, written before hardly any research had been done on the impact of the social Web on the people it was purportedly written to protect.

The metaphor that occurred to me as I was writing a chapter of our book was Penn Station in New York. A tourist walks into that giant, confusing, fast-paced, populated space at rush hour and feels a sudden urge to look for the nearest exit. That's most adults' first experience of MySpace. But like a MySpace user going straight to his or her page, a commuter just heads to his usual platform, gets on the train and goes home. He doesn't remotely see what the tourist finds so daunting. This is changing now, I think, but when we were working on the book last summer, the tourists were in charge of the entire public discussion; legislation was being written by the tourists! For a balanced picture and sound solution development, we've got to have the commuters' perspective too, I think.

Some parents argue that when in doubt, they should simply prohibit social networking sites. What's wrong with this approach? What do you see as positive about social networking sites?

I don't think prohibition is possible, at least it'd be even harder now and with the Internet than when it was given a serious try in the 1920s and '30s. I talk about this above - it's too easy for kids to "go underground" online, with all the free accounts available to them in sites parents have never heard of, proliferating wired and wireless access points, and new Net-enabled products constantly arriving on store shelves.

We're only just beginning to see the positives, with research like that funded by the MacArthur Foundation. But I think we'll discover many positive developments involving digital media and socializing online. I think of how the Rock for Darfur profile got started on MySpace (see this on "Powerful Change Agents ); of a woman I just met in an airport whose teenage granddaughter first started publishing her poetry on MySpace and has since won a prize for her work; of the ski videos my son shoots, edits, and posts at Newschoolers.com and YouTube.com; of the html and other software code kids are learning while embellishing their pages in social sites; of the youth social activism being fostered at YouthNoise.com; of all the future professional writers who got their start vying for and trying to hold their peers' attention in their daily blogging; of the garage bands that wouldn't otherwise be finding fans and signing record deals.

I often receive letters expressing concern about addiction to digital media. Is this a realistic concern and if so, what steps should parents take if they fear that their teen may be addicted to games, social networks, or other digital media?

I'm not really qualified to answer that, but the question of whether there is such a thing as Internet addiction is getting more and more attention in the medical field (and coverage in the news media). In November the Washington Post took an in-depth look at the subject , reporting that an international neuropsychiatric medicine journal published a study that "claimed to be the first large-scale look at excessive Internet use," and "the American Psychiatric Association may consider listing Internet addiction in the next edition of its diagnostic manual." I just talked with a 16-year-old in New York State who loves playing World of Warcraft (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and says he spends 3 hours a night on school nights and 5 a day on weekends playing it, but - from communicating with both him and his librarian mom (who sounds like a great mom) - it doesn't sound like he's addicted. His mother says she's not thrilled by the amount of time he spends in WoW and his grades have gone down a bit, so there will probably be some repercussions, but there are things about his experience with the game that she likes too.

"Game addiction" is coming up more and more. South Korea opened its first game-addiction treatment center in 2002, and the Washington Post reported last June that the country had just launched a game addiction hotline. Europe's first game addiction clinic reportedly opened last summer in Amsterdam (here's an item I ran on it last June last June ).

How much should parents know about the online lives of their youth? Is there a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive?

I do think parents need to know enough about the online part of their children's lives to feel assured that it's safe and reasonably constructive. The best gauge is probably how much parents feel they need to know about their kids' offline social lives. The online part is just as individual. And it changes as young people mature, right? The responsibility for staying safe and assessing risk increasingly shifts from parent to child as the latter grows; that's no different in their online lives, I'd say.

I think there can be a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive, but it's different for every child. Some parents seem to want to remove all risk from their teenagers' lives. So - having heard from a couple of researchers that risk assessment is one of the primary tasks of adolescence and having quoted them in our book - I later asked a prominent pediatrician what he thought about this risk- removal tendency, and he very definitely said we're doing our children a disservice if we don't let them do that assessment work that helps develop their brains.

Much of the legislation that seeks to "protect" youth gets argued on the basis of protecting childhood innocence and yet gets applied to regulating the conduct of adolescents. What role should an understanding of child development play in developing meaningful response to the online lives of our offspring?

My co-author Larry Magid recently quipped that the Delete Online Predators Act was more like the Delete Online Kids Act - in the sense that it would've done nothing to "delete" predators but rather focused on banning kids from social sites in schools and libraries. The legislation that Sens. McCain and Schumer just announced they would be introducing this year is clearly aimed at keeping out predators, because it would require sex offenders to register email addresses and other online contact information in addition to offline data such as phone numbers. This makes sense if it succeeds in extending existing child-protection law into cyberspace. It seems based on what is already known and understood, but I still think more child-development expertise needs to be folded into the public discussion and lawmaking. These have been dominated so far by law enforcement and research on criminal behavior online. There are some wonderful cops out there doing fine child-protection and online-crime-prevention work, but we do badly need to broaden and balance the discussion. For example, state attorneys general have called for age verification of minors in social-networking sites, but they haven't seemed inclined to entertain a full discussion about the implications for children's privacy, and the subject of social networking became so negative and associated with predators late last year that social-networking companies were reluctant to take any position on best practices that might counter-balance politically based regulatory efforts.

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part One)

I've spent a fair amount of time in this blog talking about the challenges of educating the next generation of youth so that they acquire the social skills and cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the emerging media culture. Much of this discussion inevitably centers around what happens in school-based or after-school media literacy programs. But, as I wrote in Technology Review some years ago, media literacy begins in the home. Parents have an essential role to play in helping their young people make sense of the new media landscape and giving them the ethical foundations they need to make meaningful decisions when they go on line. Unfortunately, we offer parents very little guidance on how to perform those roles. Indeed, most of the advice literature can be reduced to a simple message: the less media your kids consume, the better off they are. I don't think this is very good advice for a number of reasons: it reduces media consumption to a social problem rather than recognizing the pedagogical benefits of actively participating in media culture. Such advice, which often talks about media in terms of "screen time," produces enormous anxieties, anxieties which in turn get fed by sensationalistic news reports, shoddy research, and culture war rhetoric from political leaders, until parents are left terrified of this online world that they often know little about and totally uncertain where to turn for thoughtful advice. I often speak to groups of MIT alum as I travel around the country and inevitably, no matter what the topic of my talk is, the questions circle around the anxieties these highly educated and thoughtful adults feel about their children's relaitons to mass and digital media. In many cases, even a little bit of information will calm their fears and offer them another way of thinking about these issues. One of the best places for parents to turn for information about the world young people are encountering and creating for themselves online is a site called NetFamilyNews.com. Here's how the site describes its beat:

* Online safety and privacy news and tools

* New technologies and Web resources for kids

* Research about the impact of digital media on kids

* Legislation affecting children's online experience

* School and library Net-use policy

* How Web-literate kids, parents, and teachers are using the Internet.

Today and tomorrow, I am going to be sharing an interview with Anne Collier, who identifies herself as a journalist and children's advocate. Collier offers a sensible middle ground perspective on the issues which concern contemporary parents: she recognizes both the risks and potentials of these new media, helping parents to see past the sensationalism and focus on the matters they need to really be concerned about. Collier also recently published a significant book dealing specifically with social network sites and young people, MySpace Unraveled: What It Is and How to Use it Safely, and so many of my questions here are designed to draw her out about the specific issues surrounding children's involvement with Web 2.0.

I am excited to call this important online resource to the attention of this blog's readers. I hope you enjoy her down to earth perspective on youth and media as refreshing as I do.

What led you to create Net Family News? What needs do you think it fills for your readers?

A couple of colleagues actually thought of the idea of a monthly email newsletter for parents in mid-'97 and asked me to write it but lost interest in the project after a while and moved on. I felt strongly it needed to continue because it was the only "community newspaper" I knew of serving an increasingly important interest community, so I renamed the newsletter NetFamilyNews, made it a weekly, and incorporated it as a nonprofit organization in '99. Later I added a daily blog and RSS feed to increase accessibility. But it was really just a blog before there were blogs - annotated links to news of tech-parenting relevance.

As for needs being filled: NFN is a news filter for busy parents, educators, children's advocates, etc. I feel it's helpful for people working directly with tech-literate kids to know what's going on "out there," have a sense of context and maybe solidarity. It's almost a cliché now that young people are more tech-literate than their parents. That's true in many cases, but it's also true, and apparently less obvious, that adults and young people use the same technologies differently, and adult Net users make incorrect assumptions about teen Net use. IM at the office is a different experience than IM among middle schoolers. So all these teen tech "anthropology" stories in newspapers and magazines around the world about how teenagers are using Lunarstorm, Bebo, MySpace, Cyworld, IM, mobiles, There.com, and World of Warcraft are, I hope, frequent reminders of and insights into a perspective that can help adults intelligently negotiate this part of parenting and policymaking.

In cases where parents are intimidated by child tech literacy, information is empowering. When I started doing this I saw parents as a "silent majority" in a vital public discussion. I don't think that has changed much, actually. They're still a silent majority, and people are writing laws that would affect their children, the implications of which I think neither the legislators nor the constituents fully understand. So, I figured, people need information before they can have a voice and become active participants, and parents are essential parties to this particular discussion. So "community news" was a start. The next step was our forum, at the moment called BlogSafety.com (we're working on a more enduring name), where people could talk about all this publicly at their convenience. I wrote the mission statement for it back in 1998 but couldn't find funding until social-networking sites saw too that parents needed a place to air their concerns and get answers other than their customer- service departments.

How well do you think the mainstream media covers the issues which concern parents about Web 2.0? What do you gain by addressing these issues through the web?

I think the mainstream media, particularly the big names and mostly print (but also some broadcast) - the New York Times, the Associated Press, USATODAY, the Boston Globe, Business Week, WSJ, NPR, the BBC, etc. - have been doing a great job of covering Web 2.0 developments but not so much Web 2.0 where youth is concerned. I try to alert parents to the implications for kids and families of what tech journalists cover. For example, the Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry recently took a thoughtful look at virtual communities as another kind of "third place," or hang out, as first considered by Prof. Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Jason wasn't writing about what these places mean to teenagers, but I thought parents might be interested in a piece about how important they have long been to people of all ages (online hanging out is really not a big leap), so I linked to it. That's just one example. There are zillions of topics - recent ones include reports and press releases all over the Web about new social-networking sites and "niches"; a New York Times report on how police are incorporating social sites into their investigative work; coming state and federal about barring sex offenders from social sites; the BBC on how a third of 8-to-13-year-olds in the UK already swap tunes on their phones ; and MTV's "The N," mobile social site Mbuzzy.com, and a market research firm teaming up to turn teen users into "a panel of 10,000 young people for immediate feedback about their lifestyles as well as network programming, advertising, events and other information."

As for what I gain from this project: I'm basically a beat reporter, given (or choosing) an interesting assignment and getting increasingly interested and invested in it as time goes on. Youth and the Internet is the assignment of a lifetime. I got my MA in East Asian studies, focusing on China, and did some TV and print reporting from Asia - which would've been a fascinating, beat right now - but in the early '90s the story that I found truly compelling was the Web. It seemed clear to me it was going to be a story about every part of life - "human interest," education, law, media, business, politics.... I wanted to follow this story for the long term in a way that might be useful to other people too.

Much of the existing advice literature for parents implies that the best advice is to minimize the amount of media children and youth consume and to keep screen technologies out of their bedrooms. What do you see as the limits of this approach?

That second basic bit of advice isn't all bad. My own common sense as a parent suggests to me that keeping screen technologies in high- traffic parts of the house is a good idea if it helps parents to be more aware of and engaged in their children's online experiences. I doubt anybody disagrees that awareness and involvement are good things, where kids' social lives are concerned, online and offline.

General safety tips - like keeping connected computers out of kids' bedrooms - have their place and usefulness (because of the simplicity they suggest, and adults need to know parenting online kids is not rocket science!), but I think anything that suggests parents can completely control their children's media exposure or Internet access is getting less realistic or practical. As the number of access points, devices providing access, and kids' workarounds multiply, we probably need to think more in terms of communication and guidance. "Just say no" and kids can simply go into stealth mode (e.g., set up a new, harder-to-find account from a friend's house or at some drive- by wireless hot spot in the neighborhood), which is increasingly easy for them as access points proliferate; delete an account and six more profiles or blogs can appear in its place in the same or any of hundreds of other social sites.

Another limitation of rules and tips is that they really only reach those who want to comply with them. It has gotten very easy to be noncompliant. I mentioned workarounds above, and there are all kinds - from proxy services that allow kids to visit sites blocked by filters to friends' houses with different Internet rules or absent parents to accessing the Web from anywhere on Web-enabled cell phones. So more thought needs to be given to how to protect kids not reached by safety tips and rules - how to educate them to protect themselves.

What kinds of things worry parents the most about web 2.0? How legitimate are those concerns?

My guess is that, if they aren't talking with their kids about their Net activity and are relying on local TV news or Oprah, they're worried about "predators" on the social networks. They're a factor to be aware of but way over-hyped, politicized, and reported out of context. I'm aware of no comparative research on this, but my close observer's take on the risks of online socializing is that cyberbullying or online harassment and negative self-exposure will affect a great many more young people than sexual predation.

About a year ago a youth officer and detective in Connecticut emailed me about a story that hadn't made it into the local paper, and he felt parents would want a heads-up. A 13-year-old girl in his community had emailed sexually explicit images of herself to a boyfriend. The boy soon became an ex-boyfriend who had shared his account password with a friend, who in turn proceeded to find and post those images on a Web page, then to share the URL with students at their school. The page was shut down, but not before "everyone" had seen it. It's that kind of age-old awful teenage "prank" that can now be so damagingly public in online digital media. Mild versions of that story - basically everyday middle and high school life, happening all over the Web - are being eclipsed by media like Dateline's endless Predator series, which isn't even about the Internet but is reflexively associated with misrepresentations of statistics like the "1 in 7 kids sexually solicited online" out of the University of New Hampshire (people who study that data say most of those solicitations are coming from peers, and none of the "1 in 5" of the original 2000 study on the subject resulted in sexual assaults).

Another risk that has gotten almost no reporting but I think will be getting more attention is what I'd call negative online reinforcement of risky offline behavior, such as eating disorders, self-mutilation, and substance abuse - young people finding support on the social Web for their harmful behaviors. We increasingly need to fold a great deal of offline expertise into the "online safety" discussion - adults who work with youth who have expertise in these behaviors. Actually, the term "online safety" will probably soon go away, as the online/offline distinction collapses. Also, our children the digital natives will be parents before long, right? So they will naturally be thinking more holistically about safety and privacy than we adults are right now.

One other thought: We really don't know how much of the (to parents) disturbing teenage behavior we're seeing on the social Web is really new and how much of it has always been a reality but is just more public all of a sudden. This exposure is probably mostly good. Parents, researchers, psychologists, and child-development experts have a lot more material to work with and learn from; suddenly they can be flies on the wall like never before (for a while, anyway - some teens are aware of this and using privacy tools more, others don't really care). Some school crises reportedly are being prevented because of threats found online. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told us last June that, since it established its profile in MySpace, that site's users have become the hotline's largest source of calls - lives are being saved because of its presence in MySpace.

All this exposure itself probably also affects individual and social behavior in some ways, maybe a little along the lines of the Heisenberg theory with all those observers out there affecting the "experiment," and it'll be very interesting to see what coming research tells us about that.

Are there some general principles parents should apply in making decisions about their youth's relations to new media?

Really just the one about how the line between online and offline is blurring for young people, so it makes great sense to apply a family's ethics and values and what one has always known about plain old parenting to the online part of children's lives. The same goes for academic ethics and citizenship. For example, discussions about plagiarism and respecting copyrights (as we watch copyright law evolve!) need to embrace online media use. We want our children to use good judgment about who they socialize with on Friday night; the same goes for who they spend time with online, who's on their friends or buddy lists, right? We ask them questions like who's driving them home, or whether there will be hundreds of people at that party; we can ask them things like whether they know all 375 people on their friends lists, if they're careful about what they click on in IMs, emails, and Web pages, if they use privacy features, and what music they use in the videos they upload to media-sharing sites.

It's getting harder to generalize. Sites like MySpace on Web 2.0, the participatory Web, the user-driven Web - whatever people want to call it - are really whatever any user wants or creates them to be. The profile is a reflection of its owner, is his/her online "self," as is each user's experience in virtual worlds such as Second Life or There, I've learned from researchers such as danah boyd at Cal Berkeley and David Huffaker at Northwestern. So family rules and school policies more tailored to the individual or, at most, to the community are more effective than general rules or federal laws, I think.

In talks, I tell parents that this is about life, not technology. Of course there are some general principles that make all of life better (in fact, they're probably even more important in the more anonymous environment the Net represents), such as the ethic of reciprocity in virtually all the world's faith traditions, or the Golden Rule, as Christians call it. We're all talking about the First Amendment and intellectual property a lot now, which I think is great; maybe Web 2.0 is also presenting us - all the Web's participants - with a prime opportunity to be talking about behavioral ethics and citizenship.

Many parents worry that their children know more about new media than they do. What advice might you have for such parents?

Not just about new media! A friend and educator in the L.A. Unified School District said recently that kids know so much more about just about everything than we did as kids that teachers' jobs are changing. As much as giving students information, they're helping them figure out what to make of it. He said it better than I can, but I think he was simply stating the new reality. Adults have street smarts or life literacy, youth has tech smarts or literacy - one could see these as complementary skills, presenting an opportunity to strengthen parent-child communication and mutual respect. Ask them what they know, turn them into the family CTO, set the preferences in IM software together, ask questions that aren't about confrontation and control but are instead aimed at understanding their online experience and helping them use good judgment online in it.

It's also important to tell our children our concerns and why we have them - not constantly, but clearly and effectively (calmly). I understand if that sounds ingenuous to parents who have uncommunicative teenagers - that has always been a challenge - but I don't think parents can afford to view teenage tech competency as purely negative. If they do, there is a risk of marginalizing themselves even more, from a teen's perspective.

He's Back....!

Didja Miss Me? This week, I am blogging from Singapore so the dates and times of posting are going to be all over the map. When I write will have more to do with my state of jet lag than anything else. I am here, as regular readers will have predicted, doing some ground work for the launch of the MIT-Singapore Games Lab this summer -- as well as giving a big public lecture about Convergence Culture.

I haven't blogged in a little over a week -- it feels like much longer. I can't tell you how deeply blogging has gotten under my skin over the past six months. I am coming back from even this brief break bursting with new ideas which I want to share with my readers. I spent a good hour on the flight just scrawling out some notes about what I might talk about over the next month. And I had already lined up four or five new interviews which I will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

For a long time, I had resisted the impulse to blog out of fear that it would take over my life. It has certainly filled a number of very important needs for me both personally and professionally. My eyes start to roll and fire sparks out of my mouth -- like Mr. Toad in Disney's version of The Wind in the Willow -- whenever anyone starts to talk to me about blogging.

I know when I started this blog some people misread me to suggest I was only going to do this for a short while -- as a publicity stunt for Convergence Culture. I hope by now I have convinced you -- and me -- that I am in this for the long haul. I am still struggling with whether I can maintain the five days a week pace I kept over the academic term. But I am going to keep doing this for a long time to come.

Let me begin the year by congratulating You (us?) or being chosen as Time Magazine's Person of the Year!

Time closed the year with two issues in a row which more or less summed up the themes and ideas we've been discussing here since June. First (December 18), they did a cover story on "How to Build a Student for the 21st Century." The central focus of the story is the release of the report, "Tough Choices for Tough Times," by the New Commission on Skills in the American Workplace. The report argues that American schools have not kept pace with the times and are not preparing young people to be competitive in a global economy where creativity, innovation, media literacy, and social networking skills represent the edge needed to succeed. In many ways, I was struck by the close parallels between what Time identifies as key themes in this report and the kinds of social skills and cultural competencies we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation.

Here are a few excerpts from Time's story:

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy--the ones that won't get outsourced or automated--"put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that's been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that's where most new breakthroughs are made. It's interdisciplinary combinations--design and technology, mathematics and art--"that produce YouTube and Google," says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

In other words, the report places a new value on being able to access and meaningfully process new sources of information, being able to participate in social networks and knowledge communities, and being able to think creatively and act globally.

One can't help but note that these are the same skills which are emerging through the kinds of activities which Time documented the following week in its cover story naming You the Person of the Year:

Look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos--those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms--than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses--its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses--but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Our schools are failing to teach these skills -- indeed, these are the kinds of meaningful activities that are being killed off as schools are facing increased pressure to insure that their young charges perform well on the standardized tests which are the legacy of No Child Left Behind. But these are the kinds of skills that many young people are acquiring outside of school through their engagement with MySpace and Facebook, YouTube and Second Life, Wikipedia and Flickr, and all of the other kinds of web 2.0 activities that Time is celebrating. Time does a pretty good job identifying the different strands of contemporary social computing -- though it still has a tendency to focus on expressive individuals rather than on grassroots communities, despite its opening rhetoric about moving us from a focus on great men to a focus on the creativity of a democratic culture. It's odd, under the circumstances, that Time didn't do more to draw attention to the link between the two stories -- the idea that these informal learning cultures or what James Paul Gee calls affinity spaces might be the seedbed for the new educational culture which is being advocated by the big Washington think tanks.

Of course, recognizing the value of these various activities is only the first step because then we have to confront what I have been calling the participation gap -- the gap in experiences (and the social connections and cultural knowledge which comes along with those experiences) between those who have easy access to new media technologies at every moment of the day and those who have restricted access through schools and public libraries. If we accept that the world of tomorrow will require those skills we are learning through playing around on web 2.0, then we need to figure out how to insure that every child in America has a chance to explore and develop those skills inside and outside of school. I have said it before and I will say it again: if the key debates in American culture in the 1990s seemed to circle around issues of privacy, the key debates for the 21st century will center on participation.

On my flight over to Singapore, I finally caught up with a great documentary produced by Zoe Silver and hosted by Alan Yentob for the BBC 1, herecomeseveryone.co.uk, which covers much the same ground as the Time magazine cover story -- including thoughts about Wikipedia, blogging, MySpace, YouTube, and Second Life, among other topics and featuring a who's who of the key thinkers on social media, including Clay Shirkey, David Weinberger, Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, the Arctic Monkeys, Chris Anderson, and ahem, Henry Jenkins. It is the kind of documentary that I wish would get produced for American television -- and barring that, I wish would get aired on public broadcasting here. Oddly enough, it hasn't left much of a trace on the web -- though the blog, Feeling Listless has created a pretty comprehensive resource page about the people who get interviewed or discussed in the program. I am mostly featured talking about blogging, which brings me back to where I started this.

Not surprisingly, the BBC picked up on an analogy I drew between what is today a little known social movement in England during World War II, The Mass Observation movement, and the role which blogs play in contemporary culture. There's surprisingly little about the movement in Wikipedia but here's what they tell us:

Mass-Observation aimed to record everyday life in Britain through a panel of around 500 untrained volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires. They also paid investigators to record people's conversation and behavior at work, on the street and at various public occasions including public meetings and sporting and religious events.

The early prime movers behind Mass Observation were anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and the film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Collaborators included the critic William Empson, the photographer Humphrey Spender, the collagist Julian Trevelyan, and the painters William Coldstream and Graham Bell.

Mass Observation has a special place in the history of participatory culture and in the politics of everyday life. As Wikipedia tells us, the goal of the Mass Observation movement had been to record, in as much detail as possible, the everyday lives of Brits in the period during and following the Second World War. They took copious notes on what people ate, what they had in their closets, what they talked about, and these records have become an incredibly valuable resource for social historians. One of the challenges of the mass observation movement was scale - even with more than 500 untrained volunteers contributing, how can you really sample the diversity of life even within a single culture. There was also a methodological concern raised by academic researchers about subjectivity -- can untrained people really chronicle their own real life practices?

We might see Live Journal as continuing this tradition of Mass Observation. Taken as a whole, it is an incredible social document of our thoughts, our everyday lives, our sexual practices, our fantasies, our conversational topics, etc. at the dawn of the 21st century. One can scarcely call LJ a movement. It's hard to imagine a future Wikipedia essay telling us who its leaders were or even what its goals were in the way that it is possible to recount who led the Mass Observation movement. The issue of scalability has shifted in the other direction: the problem isn't collecting enough data; it is processing the sheer volume of information which has been recorded. A researcher could spend their lifetime simply trying to mine the amount of data produced on Live Journal in a single day.

I think about Mass Observation, though, whenever I hear people protest about whether anyone is really interested in reading hundreds of people describe their relationship to their cats or whatever else the pundits want to reduce LJ content to. In fact, there has been a long tradition of efforts by everyday people to document their own experiences as part of a historical record for future generations -- as a way of preserving and remarking upon the details of everyday life and ordinary existence. What blogs do, what LJ does is, in that sense, not new -- though what is remarkable is the scale on which it is occurring.

So, congratulations, You, for becoming Time's Person of the Year. Time's cover suggests just how central the idea of participatory culture has been to popular discourse in 2006. Let's hope that we continue to push to reform society to defend our right to participate.

Should I Cornrow My Beard? and Other Questions at the End of 2006

This will be my last blogpost of 2006. By agreement with my family, I am going to take next week off, spending as little time online as humanly possible, and relaxing after the end of a term which has included at least 16 talks outside my home institution (and quite a few inside) as well as a period of six months during which I have made more than 165 blog posts. I think I have earned a short break. But have no fear, I will be back ready and rearing for conversation by early next year. I've already lined up some great interviews and have some cool topics in mind. There will also be some cool new announcements from the Comparative Media Studies community. Never a dull moment around here. I want to use this last post to provide a few updates and announcements -- especially concerning the podcasts of our events --- and then share a few thoughts about my recent venture into Teen Second Life thanks to the help of Barry Joseph and the other fine folks at Global Kids. (And I promise to answer or at least explain the title question by the end of this post).

CMS Announcements

We now have all but one of the webcasts of the Future of Entertainment conference up on line. That last one should be up soon.

We promised a while back that we would have a webcast version of Jesper Juul's talk, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player" and that podcast went up earlier today. We are experimenting here -- and in the Futures of Entertainment content -- with video podcasting. All feedback on these efforts would be welcome.

I wanted to flag an upcoming event. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

The dates for this year's event will be Jan. 29-Feb.2.

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants. If you are interested in joining us, contact me at henry3@mit.edu. More details will be coming early next year.

Now About the Beard.

From the start, my beard seemed to be the object of fascination and speculation among the teens at Second Life. Barry Joseph told me about this interest following my participation in the MacArthur Foundation's announcement event earlier this term. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted my own avatar so I could enter Second Life and interact with these youth. One of them wanted to know how long it took me to grow my beard. In truth, that's not an easy question to answer. I have had a beard since I left the University of Iowa to start my PhD work at the University of Wisconsin. This means I have not shaved it off completely in almost 20 years. We have watched it grow from black to salt and pepper to grey over that time. Yet, since hair continually replaces itself, it is hard to know how long I have been growing the particular beard follicles which are currently attached to my face.

At one time, we even jokingly discussed making my beard available for distribution on Second Life, though so far this hasn't happened. Part of the issue is to figure out which beard length might be most popular -- the tightly trimmed Henry beard at the start of the term or the long and shaggy one by the end when my schedule has kept me from getting to a barbershop for a trim.

Last Wedsday night, I made my live public appearance on the Global Kids island in Teen Second Life to talk about games, learning, and popular culture. I wasn't surprised when one of the first questions I got asked was when and if I would have my beard put up in cornrows. It is an interesting question -- and one I am pondering deeply as I enter into the Holiday season. So, here's the heart of my response: I welcome any and all attempts to digitally doctor photographs of my beard. I especially throw this out as a challenge to teens in Second Life. If you want to use Photoshop to cornrow a picture of my beard or if you want to fix the beard on my avatar to have a funkier do, then it's fair game. And I promise to share the results here on the blog early next year. Think of it as a technical challenge: how to cornrow Henry's Beard.

My students have long tested their skills against the iconic quality of my persona --dressing up in Henry's costumes (complete with "suspenders of disbelief"), using Barbie Fashion Designer to put me in drag, doing graffiti on photographs of my bald head. So I welcome anyone from Teen Second Life to do their stuff!

How's this for the perfect narcissistic scenario: Last Saturday, I tried out my new avatar for the first time by beaming myself onto a desert corner of the Global Kids Island. I was going to stay for just a minute, try to work through some of the control mechanisms, make sure the connection works. There was no one else in the entire world that I saw on the screen. And then, out of nowhere, someone walks up and says "Are you really Henry Jenkins?" It turns out to be Mariel, a teenaged girl from Mexico City, who has been using some of her work for a school assignment. So, here we are: only two people in the whole world on a Saturday afternoon and one of them turns out to be a fan! It's probably the only time in my life that I hit 100% market recognition! It turns out that Mariel, who introduced me at the event on Wedsday, and asked really probing and intellectually sophisticated questions, is one of the closest readers of my work I've met in some time.

People have asked me why I wanted an avatar for my appearance on Second Life. This goes back to the meaning of the word, Avatar, which is a metaphor which has gotten lost as the word has taken on such common usage. Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In Hindu philosophy, an avatar, avatara or avataram (Sanskrit: अवतार, IAST: avatāra), most commonly refers to the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of a higher being (deva), or the Supreme Being (God) onto planet Earth. The Sanskrit word avatāra- literally means "descent" (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. The term is used primarily in Hinduism, for incarnations of Vishnu whom many Hindus worship as God.

I remind us of this meaning half-ironically. I don't mean to imply that I am somehow a divine being taking earthly form. Rather, I mean to critique what happens when adult speak to youth much of the time. I felt vaguely uncomfortable at the MacArthur event because we -- the panelists -- were speaking from another order of representation (cinematically) in a world occupied by virtual beings. I wanted to get down to the same level (socially, representationally) with the community I was talking with. I think this is a real issue. Too often, adults talk about kids, maybe even speak to youth, but they don't talk with them. And becoming an avatar seemed like the best way to signal my desire to speak on the same level with my audience. Anyway, it made sense to me.

The whole experience was amazing. I will let you listen to the actual exchange which has been recorded and put on line if you wish. There's also a really wonderful video of highlights of the event which is now in circulation on YouTube. Frankly, I come off sounding much more coherent in the video than I did at the time. There was something truly overwhelming about the whole experience.

For one thing, I really am a newbie and so moving around in that body -- and indeed, remembering to keep moving -- was a challenge for me. At one point, I accidentally flew up, planted myself on the top of a sign suspended over the event, and couldn't figure out how to get down. I've had embarrassing experiences speaking before but none like that. At another point, I just slumped over in my chair because I didn't remember to keep poking at my avatar. There's a high learning curve here and doing your learning in public eye can be awkward. My students are talking about creating an animation sequence which has my characteristic hand gestures. Nobody has ever seen me speak for long without gesticulating wildly. I've got a ways to go before I blend fully and comfortably into my avatar but I was really taken with the sense of presence I felt interacting with all of the people attending the event from remote locations.

I kept getting distracted by the sheer array of avatars in attendance -- characters from anime, dancing Pandas in Ninja costumes, a monster from Will Wright's Spore... At one point I made a reference to the struggles City of Heroes had with Marvel over the fact that players might use their character design tools to create a knockoff of the Incredible Hulk and then looked out a moment later to find someone in the audience had turned themselves into the Hulk. And I was blown away by the fact that my avatar has much better moves on the dance floor than I've ever managed to master. He's one cool dude and I am, well, not. So, all in all, it was an amazing experience but I was not at my most articulate as one thing or another distracted me mid-sentence.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible and to everyone who turned out to enjoy the show. I hope to have more chances to interact in Second Life in the coming year.

And to all of you who have read and contributed to the blog this year, thanks -- and best wishes on the holiday season.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Six): An Interview with Eric Zimmerman (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part interview with Eric Zimmerman, game theorist, designer, and teacher, during which he spoke at length about his vision for the Independent Games movement and the ways that his company, Game Lab, has developed distinctive and original content. Today, I shift the focus onto some of the public service aspects of Zimmerman's work, especially in his efforts to promote games literacy. Across the term, I have been sharing with you some news about the MacArthur Foundation's 50 million dollar commitment to exploring youth and digital learning. Our own Project NML is part of this effort as was the white paper I published on the social skills and cultural competencies young people need to participate meaningfully in the new media landscape. Another dimension of this effort is the Game Designer Project, which Zimmerman is developing in collaboration with Katie Salens and James Paul Gee. I got a chance to see some early prototypes of this project at the Serious Game Summit in Washington DC earlier this term and was blown away by the wit and imagination, not to mention the pedagogical sophistication, which is informing its design. As Zimmerman discusses below, this is an attempt to use the game platform as a vehicle to teach students about the design process. The goal is not to turn young people into game designers but rather to use the design process to help them to think critically about games as a mode of experience.

In a recent interview on this blog, Greg Costikyan commented, "Consider Eric Zimmerman. He's found a viable niche doing casual games, and his company, Gamelab, does some excellent ones. But Eric is a -gamer- at heart, and while I imagine he's happy enough developing games for an audience (middle-aged women) that prizes games of types very different from those he himself loves, I'm sure he'd much prefer to be developing games of greater cultural significance and intellectual merit. In other words, if he could make as much money doing a game that appeals to people who have a passion for games, rather than for those who view them as light entertainment, I'm sure he'd be happy to. But he also has a payroll to make, and there's demonstrable money in casual games, and indie games are pretty much unproven as a market." Do you agree or disagree with that description of the context within which you work?

God bless Greg Costikyan (and I mean that in the secular, idiomatic sense).

Greg is half right. While Gamelab strives to have every game we make be in some way innovative, I believe we are just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kinds of games that could be made. So of course I would love to be doing more radically experimental and unusual work, in terms of gameplay and interaction, narrative and cultural content, contexts for play, audio and visual aesthetics, etc. In this sense, yes Greg, I'd like to be doing more than I am. But when I look around at all of the game companies out there, I'm very happy with what we are doing at Gamelab and I don't think there is another place I'd rather be.

But I certainly wouldn't frame these issues as Greg does. For example, I wouldn't describe the work I want to do as my own personal desire to make games that I want to play. As a designer, I like solving design problems, which doesn't merely mean making games that are fun for me. And even if it did, the intrinsically collaborative nature of game development means that a game is the product of many people's desires, not just those of a single author.

Greg is also certainly over-generalizing the online game audience. Online games include far more than the "middle aged woman" stereotype he invokes. I'd much rather be making games for the Internet, as the players there are vastly more diverse than for consoles and PC retail games. I can say with confidence that the two games I described in my response to the last question, Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind, are not designed just for middle-aged women.

Lastly, I would hesitate to set up an opposition between running a business and "creativity," something implied in Greg's quote. Part of what we are doing at Gamelab is not just engaging with design questions, but engaging with questions of funding and producing and distributing our work as well. And Greg's company Manifesto Games is certainly doing this too. The fact that there are still so many unanswered questions about games - in terms of design, culture, business, etc - is what makes it so exciting to be working in the game industry right now.

Tell us something about the Game Designer project. You hope to help young people develop an understanding of the game design process. Why? What do you see as the benefit of everyday people understanding games on this level?

Game Designer is a project funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant in partnership with Jim Gee's research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Game Designer will let junior high and high school students learn about game design by creating and modifying simple games. However, the point of the project is not to train future game designers. It is to engender media literacy.

Our position is that there is an emerging form of media literacy that we sometimes call "Gaming Literacy." Gaming Literacy has to do with information management, understanding complex systems, social networks, a critical design process, and creativity with digital technology. Increasingly, this new form of literacy will be crucial in the workplace and in our social and civic lives. The process of game design, which combines mathematics and logic, storytelling and aesthetics, writing and communication, systems and analytic thinking, among other elements, is one of the best ways of engaging with this form of literacy.

Katie Salen here at Gamelab is leading the Game Designer project design and working directly with our academic partners, who are focusing on research, pedagogy, testing, and assessment. Game Designer is not an open-ended prototyping tool like GameMaker - it is a guided, scaffolded experience that teaches game design concepts. So it is important that the instructional components of the project are really well-tuned. Right now there is nothing like Game Designer out there - and from kids' reaction to our prototype testing, it may be a very popular application.

One obvious analogy might be to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which translates the theory of comics into a graphic novel format. What do you gain by exploring the mechanics of game design through a game as opposed to a book

like, say, Rules of Play?

I hadn't thought of that analogy, but I like it! Thanks for the generous comparison.

Game Designer in some ways is an extension of Rules of Play, in which Katie Salen and I tried to establish a set of concepts for the practice and theory of game design. But that textbook is really designed for a university classroom - a very different audience and a very different instructional context than Game Designer!

One of the reasons why Game Designer needs to be embodied as a game creation application, rather than just as a book, is because one of our emphases in the project is on the process of game design. Interacting with Game Designer won't be just about making games in and of themselves, but will involve sharing them online, having friends playtest your games, as well as writing critical reviews of your games and of others' games. We want to borrow some elements from the practice of game design, because this process also embodies the kind of literacy we want to teach.

You announced at the Serious Games Summit the launch of a new nonprofit entity. Explain how this group will be related to Gamelab and what its goals will be?

We're still in the process of forming the nonprofit, so I can't say too much just yet. But the organization, called The Gamelab Institute of Play, is dedicated to the idea that playing, understanding, and creating games is an important learning experience. Rather than focusing on "serious games," the Institute of Play consists of programs and experiences that turn players into designers, letting them learn about and create games both on and off the computer. A close relationship between the new organization and the commercial game studio Gamelab, will also allow for new kinds of collaborations across the for-profit and not-for-profit divide. We're pretty excited about the Institute of Play! Expect to hear more about it this Spring.

There has been a lot of debate this summer about the value of games criticism and whether the field needs strong and recognized critics who might cultivate the audience for more innovative games. What do you, as a game designer, see as the role of the game critic?

Sorry to hear I missed that debate! Where and when did it happen?

I certainly agree that there is a role for game criticism, as one piece in the puzzle of growing what games are and what they might be. Education and the scholarly study of games is another piece. As are many of the design and business issues I have mentioned here. In many ways, the role of the critic binds all of these diverse elements together. The critic needs to have some kind of scholarly background, although she isn't necessarily writing for an academic audience. The critic has an educational function, although he isn't a formal instructor. And the critic needs to understand the design and business of games, even though the critic isn't selling or creating them.

Critics serve many roles for those of us working in the industry. We're usually too busy to be reading everything out there, so critics are important sources of information about what is happening. Critics also reflect audience opinion, giving us a sense of what our fans might be thinking. They also of course help generate audience opinion, giving us a way to reach our players. At their best, critics can raise issues and concerns about what, how, and why we are making games that we in the myopic industry might not ourselves see.

Props to the critics.

Grafitti as an Exemplary Practice?: Tats Cru

lloquium series featured a program about the production of Zigzag, the new video podcast which seeks to capture and convey some of the many fascinating aspects of life at MIT. This week's edition features a profile of the New Media Literacies Project. The video includes footage of several of our graduate students setting up to interview my colleague Beth Coleman for a forthcoming entry in our exemplar library project which will deal with DJs and music remixing practices. The center piece of the documentary, however, deals with the most recently added film in our collection which deals with the New York based Graffiti group, Tats Cru. This is a segment that cuts close to home for me. Indeed, many of the interview segments were shot in my living room. As some of you know, I am proud to have spent the last 12 years of my life as housemaster of an MIT dormitory known as Senior House. (Contrary to the name, the community includes a full range of undergraduates -- frosh to seniors -- and houses many of those at MIT who are interested in alternative cultures.) Tats Cru came to MIT in part at the request of our graduate resident tutors, Andrew "Zoz" Brooks who wanted help constructing a mural which would pay tribute to "Big Jimmy" Roberts, a long time night watchman who was much beloved among our residents and who passed away a few years ago. Our students have raised more than 50,000 dollars to create a scholarship in Big Jimmy's honor but they wanted an icon to help memorialize his role within the dorm. Since he worked between two dorms, the agreement was that they would paint a mural on canvas that would be portable and could spend part of the year in each location. Tats Cru came to MIT through help from the Creative Arts Council and Michelle Oshima and worked with our students to produce something that was worthy of Big Jimmy's memory. While the group was on campus, the graduate students on Project NML also filmed the production of the mural and conducted interviews to help explore graffiti as a form of creative expression.

The story of Tats Cru is a fascinating one: a group of former street artists who have become known around the world for their murals and graffiti, who work with local communities to create memory walls and who work with corporate clients to support their branding efforts. It's hard to pick any group of artists who better embody some of the contradictions which surround graffiti as a form of creative expression.

Grafitti is often discussed in terms of personal expression -- leaving one's own distinctive mark on the environment -- yet it also depends heavily on the trust and collaboration that emerges within the members of a particular Cru. Most of the exemplars so far have focused on individual artists. We very much wanted to examine here what it was like to produce art within a collective:

Nicer: Some of the things we use to do with the kids was: we'd have two guys working on the same name, and then I'll switch the papers and let them copy each other's work. And they would never get it the same. The way you do a circle is unique: it's your circle. No one else is going to copy it exactly the same. The way you create your own lettering, the way you sign your own name, even your signature or the way you write, it's so unique. It makes you an individual and you have to be proud of that.

Red: In this art form, from what I've learned, you gotta push forward. And you can't copy. I could sit there and try to copy Nicer's but it's not going to come out the same. I got to find my way and my defaults and push myself.

Nosm: Sometimes your brain is just empty, and then Nicer comes up with something: "Oh, I got this idea, I always wanted to do that." And then How comes to it and says, "yeah, we should add this and that." And then, next you see everybody's brainstorming, and we come up with a new idea for the mural.

Nicer: It's not any oil painter who can paint on the same canvas with another oil painter. And he'll paint something red and somebody else will go, "no, I want to change it blue." He'll catch some kind of fit, because he doesn't know how to work together with someone. Us, as a group, we've learned that already. And it hasn't been easy. There have been times when I've stepped back away from walls and looked and go, "wow, that red looks good." And then two guys will walk buy and one will stop and change it blue, and they'll walk away from each other. And I'll go, "uh, maybe it looks good blue." So I have to learn to trust their judgment. Because what better kind of artist can you get than a 6-headed, 12-armed monster artist?

Some of the best passages deal with the ways they seek inspiration from the culture around them:

Nicer: I grew up in a neighborhood in the '80s where there wasn't a lot of art programs. So I didn't have a lot of stuff to reference besides comic books. I would look at comic books and they would show me different colorings and outlines and characters and cartoons. And superheroes was a big thing to me. So I started young just tracing and drawing comics. As a teenager I started noticing some guys who were doing graffiti in my neighborhood, and they brought color to the walls: they would have fancy hand styles, and the lettering, the shapes, and the colors of their characters. So, I was drawn to it.

BG: It was already part of my neighborhood. That was, like, the culture. If you walked through the hallways, or walked through the streets of New York City, that's what you saw. And we took the trains, and you saw graffiti on the trains. So that was, like, the first opening of graffiti to me.

Nosm: I was born in Spain and grew up in Germany, and I've been in New York for about 7 years. Me and my brother was a little bit different because we started graffiti back in '88, '89. We saw a couple of books from New York, and we saw the movie Wild Style--it's a famous graffiti movie that is something like a documentary--and based on that, and based on our older friends who were tagging--that's like, writing your name all over the neighborhood--they were doing that and we just copied it. And after a couple of years we realized we could do more with it. Not only tags but also pieces, characters, you know, like faces and stuff like that.

Or consider this passage where Nicer talks about the ways that commercial art -- even advertising -- informs their graphic style:

Nicer: I get inspired by, like, looking at ads in magazines or just a stroll through a local supermarket. Look at the cereal boxes. Every cereal box has got funky lettering, and the coloring is bright, and it's calling the kids, "come eat me, come get me!" And if you look at the characters on these boxes, you know, like Captain Crunch and you got all these, like, Sugar Pops or... it's stylized for kids, but it's just fun. And sometimes we're looking for something fun to paint.

At the same time, they defend their work on the grounds that it introduces aesthetic experiences to people who would never feel comfortable just going inside a traditional art museum:

Nicer: I guess what we do is bring what's in galleries and what's in museums--which is art and color and technique and style--and we bring that to community walls or to neighborhoods that, you know, sometimes these kids in those neighborhoods never would have a chance to go see the MOMA or see the Louvre. So I guess, in a way, by us painting these murals in these communities is bringing a part of that art and culture into their lives.

Part of what's really exciting about these films is that they teach new ways of looking at graffiti as a meaningful form of cultural expression, providing illustrations of key terms and concepts from their world which will give students and teachers alike a vocabulary for talking about what's going on within this community.

Tats Cru doesn't engage in graffiti as a form of vandalism. Their art is authorized by the people who live in the communities being decorated. They often get invited in by the people who own the property to paint murals:

Bio: One of the big reasons that it started to gain popularity in the neighborhood was, it was a way to combat graffiti. Landlords and store owners were tired of going out on a weekly or daily basis to paint over tag signatures. But they noticed whenever we would paint a mural, it was colorful, it was attractive, but, I think, the selling point was that it would go untouched. No one would deface it or what have you. The other artists or the other graffiti artists would respect it. So they began to commission us in an effort to combat that problem.

Nicer: We sell space in communities. We find properties that are abandoned, or people are having problems keeping clean, and we make agreements with the property owners to let us use the space. And we'll keep the rest of the property clean or we'll pay rent on it. And then we'll go to these agencies and say, "listen, we have these walls." And we pick and choose what clients go on there. We're not going to go out and do tobacco or firearm companies, or big alcohol ads. We understand that, at the end of the day, we're the one's responsible for whatever images we put up there.

Yet, they also make clear that there are rules and ethical commitments even among those who produce unauthorized forms of graffiti:

Nicer: The rule is, the bigger, the more time it takes, gets the pass. So there's a pass you're given. Like if you had a throw-up, or two throw-ups and somebody did a simple style piece over it--which takes longer, there's usually like a few colors and fill it in, and an outline, and it takes more time and it's cleaner--so that stuff can go over throw-ups, because it takes more time and more skill. But if you did a throw-up over that, then you're gonna create a problem.

BG: Then you have a mural that will go over anything.

We understand graffiti to be perhaps the most controversial form of expression which we have explored through the exemplar library so far. Many see it as enhancing their community. Others see it as a form of visual clutter or as a form of vandalism. To help us better understand the controversy, we turned to a CMS alum Rekha Murthy, who did her thesis on the mediascape surrounding the Central Square area in Cambridge. Her work focused both on official media -- signage, newspapers, window displays in stores -- and unofficial media -- stickers, posters, handbills, and graffiti. We were lucky to have an expert within our own community who knew a great deal about the politics of street media. Here's some of what she had to say:

Rekha: It's illegal to poster or put stickers or graffiti in the city of Cambridge on any buildings or any surfaces without getting the approval of the city. So, obviously there's someone out there enforcing these laws. I would walk up and down the streets taking pictures for my thesis of different street media. And I would go back every couple of days or so and the whole streetscape would have changed. And I found this guy in the department of public works for the city of Cambridge, and he's actually very proud of his job.

And he said that he sees himself, actually, as helping free speech. The people who poster or who put this stuff up, you know the graffiti artists and sticker people, may just see him as someone who destroys. But he sees himself as keeping the streetscape clear so that more people can share it and more people can communicate.

There's something that I noticed in Central Square that really intrigued me. Something that I didn't go out to look for, but it kept coming back to me. And that was: people seem to respect what they like to look at. So it's not about what's legal or illegal all the time. Sometimes it's something grayer than that. You can't draw a line in it, you can't draw a box around it. It's just what people like or what the don't like, or what makes people feel OK or even happy, and what makes them feel like their neighborhood is going down the tubes.

There are people who set out to deface. There are people who really do vandalize. And they cost local business owners money. That said, there's this other group of people who want to self-express, but don't actually want to deface. And I saw in my research time and again that, some of the people that I spoke with said that they'd be perfectly happy to put art, if there were places on the streetscape that the city kind of made available. That, it didn't have to be unauthorized to be exciting or legitimate. That is just had to be in a place where people could actually see it, that implied it was being taken seriously, and that it was respected, and that there was something community about it.

We hope the documentaries will generate discussion about the borders between art and vandalism, getting people to think more deeply about what graffiti contributes to urban culture and how we might develop urban policies which support more forms of grassroots expression within our cities without necessarily bringing about property damage.

The interviews for this film were conducted by Henry Jenkins and Margaret Weigel. The documentary was edited by Neal Grigsby, a CMS graduate student, whose thesis work is focused on adolescence as a theme across many forms of contemporary media.

Catching Up: Mostly on Media Literacy

The New and Improved Henry Jenkins

I was so impressed by the experience of participating in the MacArthur Foundation's press event, which was partially held in the New York Museum of Natural History and partially held in Second Life, that I sought out Barry Joseph from Global Kids, an organization which regularly runs events through Teen Second Life, to see if there might be a way I could engage with their youth participants. My one concern, as a media scholar, had been that when we spoke in Second Life at the press event, we appeared as cinematic images and not as avatars.

So, in speaking with Joseph, we decided that I should get an avatar if I was going to relate to the Second Life youth on their own terms. Joseph was nice enough to volunteer to get some members of his group to create an avatar for me. Apparently, some of the youth had expressed a particular fascination with my beard and therefore wanted to be able to reproduce it and share it with their friends. (I wasn't sure which Henry beard they wanted since mine comes in various lengths from trim to shaggy depending on what point it is in the term and how hectic my life has been.)

This past weekend, Barry wrote to introduce me to the second Henry Jenkins. I have to say that I bonded instantly with this frisky fellow.

I have heard television puts ten pounds on you. It would appear that Second Life takes thirty or forty pounds off -- not to mention adding some of that vigor and vitality that has been worn away through many years of living the life of the jet setting academic.

Barry says they had two groups work on constructing me an avatar -- a group of adults known as The Magicians and several teens -- 1000 Carlos and Nik385 Doesberg -- and then they combined the best features of the two for the finished product. Thanks to everyone involved. It's been years since anyone has drawn a representation of me that didn't consist of a series of circles -- the bald head, the glasses, and the round little tummy. Indeed, some years ago, a whole Kindergarten class made Henry Jenkins masks by gluing string to paper plates! Even then, my beard was the subject of considerable fascination.

Barry and I are now working on the details of when and where I will be engaging with the Second Life Youth. I can't wait.

Media Snackers

Last week, I did a podcast interview with DK of the British media literacy group, Media Snackers. Here's how they describe their vision on their home page:

Remember the set menu of print, radio and television, delivered at specific times, for the masses and only in the ways the creators defined?

With the arrival of the Internet, digital TV, mobile phones, iPods, weblogs etc.--the media landscape has changed from the linear, to one of many layers, consumed by self-serving and empowered individuals.

Young people are the new 'WWW' generation--snacking whenever, wherever and whatever they like through the multi-channeled and many technological avenues available.

Creating as much as they consume--constantly hungry, always 'on' and totally self-serving!

The Media Snackers podcast series consists of ten minute conversations with leading media educators from around the world -- including, not coincidentally, one Barry Joseph from Global Kids (who always seems to be one step ahead of me!), Rob Williams, Benjamin Stokes, and a wealth of others from around the world. This is a great resource for ideas and insights into youth and new media.

There's also an excellent blog which includes some interesting discussion of major trends in this area. (I am certainly going to add it to my rss and blog list). Already, this blog has gotten me into trouble. They have a fascinating chart prepared by Gary Hays from Personalized Media, which shows the progression from Web 1.0 through to the future emergence of Web 3.0. I saw this chart the same week as The New York Times wrote an article claiming that Web 3.0 was right around the corner. Hosting a conference last weekend about the Futures of Entertainment, I couldn't resist leading our audience in a Countdown to Web 3.0 as a way of marking a transition from our own focus on social networks (web 2.0) into immersive worlds (web 3.0). I fear that this little stunt will follow me around for a while!

For the record, I am deeply suspicious of the whole Web 2.0/3.0 rhetoric. It implies dramatic breaks or ruptures in the media scene, when in fact, media change is gradual and there is a tendency for old media systems to linger even as new media systems are emerging. I do think that there are significant differences between the world of social networks and the world of immersive worlds. I have trouble imagining Second Life replacing all of the functions of the web, however, as might be applied by the Web 3.0 concept that seems to have taken root over the past few weeks. It is this idea of dramatic shifts that I was spoofing by doing a New Year's Eve style countdown to Web 3.0.

Learning Games to Go!

Finally, I wanted to share with you the latest podcasts produced for the Learning Games to Go Project -- a collaboration between the Education Arcade and Maryland Public Television. Previous podcasts have featured interviews with Scot Osterweill and the over-exposed Henry Jenkins. But, the newest one -- the first to include video content -- features Scot interacting with the CMS undergraduate and graduate students who are working on the Labyrinth game which I described here a few weeks ago. It gives you a real taste of the CMS community spirit as each of these creative individuals reflects on a toy or artifact that enabled playful learning and along the way give us a sense of what they didn't like about some of the educational games they played growing up.

Fun and Games with Copyright

This seems to be a week for confessions in the blog: I have already come out as a slash writer, one who tampers with the high cannon no less; I should also confess that I am an Eagle Scout. This is not exactly the most common combination of backgrounds and identities. (I use the present tense because officially, once you earn Eagle, it is something you carry with you the rest of your life, even though I haven't really done anything with Scouting in several decades now.) Scouting was a value part of my life: I taught for the first time when I was asked to lead classes for various merit badges for my troop, including classes in photography (which ended up centering on cinema) and in Theater (which allowed me to script and direct plays.) I can still recite the scout oath and still try to follow much of its standards. I have had more difficulty in recent years by the way the organization has gone to court to try to block membership to gay scoutmasters and scouts. I also lost some more respect for the organization when I read recently about a project conducted by the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles in association with the Motion Picture Association of America which seems designed to indoctrinate the youth into a particular ideological perspective on copyright and intellectual property.

My MIT colleague David Thorburn has shared with me the following excerpt from a recent story in the New York Times:

The 52,000 Boy Scouts in Los Angeles have a new virtue to strive for: respect for copyrights. In return for learning about the harms of downloading pirated movies and music, they will be awarded an activity patch showing a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a "C" enclosed in a circle, The Associated Press reported. By means of a curriculum devised by the movie industry, the Scouts will be instructed in basic copyright law and learn to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways that copyrighted materials may be stolen. In addition, they must choose an activity from a list that includes visiting a movie studio to see how many people may be harmed by film piracy, and creating public services announcements urging others not to steal music or movies. "Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property.

A little research found the actual curriculum on the web and not surprisingly, it makes no mention of the role of fair use as a balance for the more extreme assertions of intellectual property control being promoted by the film industry. Here are some excerpts:

Intellectual property is no different than physical property. Stealing intellectual property that is copyrighted is against the law and can have serious consequences. Movies, music, games, and software are forms of intellectual property that are usually copyrighted to protect the people who make them.

Some of the required activities include:

Demonstrate your knowledge of the following:

a. What is copyright?

b.Why do copyrights matter?

c.Identify five different types of copyrighted works (two of which may be your own). For each, give the author/creator and the date the work was copyrighted.

d. name three ways copyrighted works may be taken.

Visit a video sharing network or peer to peer website and identify which materials are copyrighted and which aren't.

Go to a movie and stay through all the credits. Tell you counselor/or scout leader who you think, in addition to the main actors and actresses, would be hurt if the film was stolen?

Keep in mind, of course, that the Boy Scouts of America does not yet offer a Media Literacy merit badge -- though the Girl Scouts do. There is a Communications badge which is required for Eagle but it's emphasis is on interpersonal communications and public speaking. And there is an optional Cinematography merit badge which focuses entirely on the filmmaking technology and process.

The scouts who were asked to participate in this program, then, are given no instruction which might speak to the structure of the American entertainment industry, the corporate interests which shape the media we consume, the role of participatory culture in contemporary society, or the forms of appropriation and parody which might be protected under Fair Use provisions.

Of course, when I was in the Scouts, there was a specific provision which prohibited you from engaging in partisan political activities while wearing the uniform. Boy Scouts were encouraged to promote citizenship in the abstract sense, including helping to get people to vote, but they were not to take sides on public policies while acting as Scouts. I have been trying to find this policy on the web but so far, have not had much success. Since the activities described above clearly take the side of the media industry on an important public policy debate, it seems curious to me that Scouts were not only encouraged to do these activities while in uniform but that they resulted in a badge which could be sewed onto the uniform.

In Yoyogi Park

The other week, I was asked to speak about globalization and new media to a delegation of Japanese businessmen who were visiting MIT. In the process of preparing for this talk, I dug back through a few of the things I wrote after a visit I took to Tokyo a few years ago. I thought it might be worth dusting them off and sharing with my readers here. What follows is an excerpt from an essay called "Media Literacy -- Who Needs It?" which builds on my experience of visiting Yoyogi Park on a Sunday afternoon. I found Yoyogi to be a key location for understanding not simply the varied subcultures of Japan (they all seem to have a niche somewhere in the park's eleborate cultural ecostructure) but also the global exchange of cultural materials. I write here about two things I saw in the park -- the cosplay which takes place around anime and the rockabilly inflected youth culture called Yanquees -- but I could have taken you deeper into the park, where, for example, one could see teens rehearsing elaborately choreographed imitations of boy band music videos, even as a few feet away others are pounding on traditional Japanese drums.

In YoYogi Park

Our story starts in Yoyogi Park on a bright Sunday afternoon last spring. Yoyogi Park is a center for youth culture in Tokyo - near Akiharbara which used to be the electronics sector but is increasingly known as the Otaku (or fan) district and Harajuku where fashionable young girls go to buy clothes. In my short time in Japan, I had already discovered the way cultural practices - forms of consumption for the most part - mapped onto spatial locations, much the way the geography of the World Wide Web structures the interactions between various American subcultures and fan communities.

Every group seemed to have their own district, their own homeland, within contemporary Tokyo. The second thing that had struck me is the public nature of these passions and fascinations - the need to act out ones fantasy, the desire to form affiliations with others who shared your tastes. Yoyogi Park is where all of this comes together. In this realm, to consume is to participate and to participate is to assume some kind of new identity.

As you approach Yoyogi Park from the Harajuku train station, the first thing you see are the Cosplay Kids. These are young girls (and a few young boys) who have come to Yoyogi dressed as characters from anime, manga, or Jpop. They have come to see and be seen. Often, if you go into the manga shops, you can find brightly colored fliers urging fans of a particular cartoon series to rendezvous in the park on a certain date often with very specific directions about what to wear. Yet, because there are so many different fan communities, one can see many different identities being performed on this somewhat narrow piece of concrete - spies with shiny new weapons, space adventurers and demonic figures, people in Goth or renaissance courtly garb, the furries who are fascinated with anthropomorphic animals, Nanas who most often wear Victorian nurse and nanny uniforms, and so forth.

Many of them spent a good deal of time posing for pictures being taken not simply by tourists but also by their fellow fans; these pictures are being recorded by cell phone, camcorder, or digital cameras and many of them soon to be distributed via the web. The costumes and makeup are elaborate, richly detailed, and for the most part, home crafted. The kids take great pride in their costumes though they may own multiple costumes reflecting multiple cultural identities.

For many Americans visiting Tokyo for the first time, all of this is apt to seem alien or typically Japanese. But I knew about this cosplay before I arrived in part because of an interview my graduate student, Vanessa Bertozzi, had done with a 17 year old American girl named Chloe Metcalf. One of a number of teenagers we contacted as part of the Young Artist project, Chloe was active in the American cosplay community.

Here's some of what she told Vanessa:

I have been really interested in Japanese culture since I was in Sixth Grade. When I was in the Seventh grade, I started studying Japanese on my own. When I got into high school, I started taking Japanese courses at Smith College. I got into costuming through anime which is actually how I got interested in Japanese. And I taught myself how to sew. ...I'm a stage hog. I like to get attention and recognition. I love acting and theater. The biggest payoff of cosplay is to go to the conventions where there are other people who know who you are dressed as and can appreciate your effort. At the first convention I ever went to, I must have had fifty people take my picture and at least ten of them came up and hugged me. It's almost like whoever you dress up as, you become that person for a day....People put the pictures up on their websites after the con. So after a con, you can search for pictures of yourself and if you are lucky, you will find five or ten.

A number of things interest me about Chloe. First is the degree to which she transforms fantasies born of media consumption into various kinds of performance. In this context, I see performance, impersonation, enactment as important kinds of media literacy skills which are often neglected in our recent focus on visual or digital literacy. A growing body of literature has shown that children acquire basic literacies and competencies through learning to manipulate core cultural materials. As they do so, they negotiate a space between self and other which helps them to work through issues of personal identity and cultural membership. These ways of playing with texts become more and more sophisticated as children mature with adolescence becoming a central site for identity play and self-invention. For her, assuming the role of a Jpop character becomes a way of expressing her mastery over favorite texts - fusing her identity with that of a fictional character. Kids have told me that role play allows them to become the person they want to be rather than simply satisfying adult demands or accepting the often unwelcome identities projected upon them at school.

For Chloe, the identity she is constructed doesn't simply involve breaking with the parochialism of her local culture but it also involves the creation of strong emotional bonds she feels towards cultures produced in other parts of the world, cultures that are not easily accessible in a marketplace which historically has been highly protective of its local culture industries.

When she told Vanessa that a particular JPop group was "her favorite group in the whole wide world," one has the sense that she is actually talking on a global scale, especially when she adds that the group is little known outside of its genre or beyond the Asian context. She has sought out more and more information about forms of Asian popular culture. And in the process, she has begun to re-imagine her relations to the world - seeing herself as tied in important ways to the kinds of Japanese youth culture I had encountered in Yoyogi Park.

This search for more information expresses itself across a range of media - the videos or DVDs she watches of Japanese produced anime, the recordings of JPop music which may consumed on MP3 or on CD, the information she finds on the internet as well as information she shares with her fellow fans about her own activities, the physical costumes she generates as well as all of the photographs that get taken of her costumes, the magazines and comics she reads to learn more about Japanese popular culture, her face to face contacts with fellow fans. An elaborate underground economy emerges to support the circulation of these materials, including grassroots efforts to translate and dub illegally imported anime so that it can be made accessible to a broader public.

These activities around popular culture in turn translate into other kinds of learning including much which would warn the hearts of educators. As a middle school student she has already begun to study Japanese language and culture first on her own and later at a local college. This is a story one hears again and again from language instructors - how kids like Chloe are moving from interest in Asian popular culture towards seeking out classes in Asian cultures and languages.

Here, we run up against old anxieties about marketing and cultural imperialism which have animated earlier stages of the American media literacy movement. Some would argue that Chloe is not so much learning or experimenting as being possessed by cultural materials not of her own making. Others would argue that she is simply a victim of the economic expansion of Japanese media companies into the American marketplace. Yet, it would be a mistake to see Chloe and the other American cosplayers as simply duplicating cultural experiences imported into Japan or buying into media franchises. Rather, they are as much involved in transformation as consumption, in localization as globalization.

We can see this more clearly if we walk another few yards into Yoyogi Park. Here, you see a very different kind of cultural phenomenon - a pack of fifty or more Japanese rockabilly fans dancing to recordings of Elvis, wearing black leather jackets and exaggerated greaser haircuts, and performing flamboyant and energetic dance moves which mix traditional rock and roll with break-dancing. They call themselves the Yanquees and by all reports they have been coming to the park every weekend for several decades to pay tribute to the King.

At first glance, it is easy to see their passionate response to American popular culture but one needs to look more closely to see the ways that those influences have been reabsorbed back into more distinctly Japanese cultural practices. For one thing, this is a highly hierarchical culture with many rituals designed to insure discipline within the rank and file as well as respect for the most esteemed members. In this case, the leader of the pack is the only one allowed to wear a red jacket - an insignia of rank based on the red jacket which James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. In their cultural mythology, the only person more powerful than Elvis is Jimmy Dean. Almost certainly the reverse is also true - Chloe and her friends pull the Japanese practice of Cosplay back into the social dynamics of 21st century suburban America. Even as they seek to connect with other cultures, they read them through the lens of their own culture.

For another, there is the gender segregation of the group. If cosplay is mostly but not exclusively female, the Yanquees are overwhelmingly but not exclusively male. I keep finding myself wondering what it meant for the two female members of the pack to dress in Elvis drag and dance with all of these muscular guys in the park. How might the fantasies provided by American popular culture allow them to escape constraints on gender performance in their own country? Or conversely, how are American boys taking advantage of the cross-dressing elements of cosplay to escape repressive constraints on male gender performance in the United States? In both cases, these youth seek a kind of freedom or fluidity of identity denied them in their own country but granted them more readily by engaging in cultural practices from elsewhere.

A long tradition of cultural scholarship has focused on the ways that youth around the world have used American cultural imports to break free from - even if only temporarily and even if only in their own imaginations - the parochialism of their own societies. Much less has been written about the ways American youth escape the parochialism of our own culture through engaging with forms of popular culture imported from Japan, China, India, or Latin America. In a recent essay, I described these practices as pop cosmopolitanism.

Historically, cosmopolitans sought knowledge and experience which took them beyond the borders of their local community. We associate the term cosmopolitanism with various forms of high culture - fine wine, painting, music, dance, theater, the art cinema, gourmet cooking, and so forth. Yet, today, popular culture performs this same function for a growing number of young people around the world. Their mastery over these cultural materials help them form emotional bonds, however imaginary, with their counterparts in other countries - not simply with Japan where this culture originates but in many other countries where these materials are also consumed. It provides common cultural currency for exchanges on the internet which may cut across national borders. This turn towards global identities is all the more striking when you consider the unilateralism currently shaping American foreign policy and the anti-Americanism which is surfacing around the world. Kids may be learning how to become global citizens through their engagement with popular culture at a time when their parent cultures are increasingly shaped by fundamentalism and nationalism.

I came to a new understanding of this pop cosmopolitanism when I stopped for groceries in a chain store in Clayton. Georgia, a small community in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As I got in line, I heard the man in front of me ask in a broad southern accent why the "rolley-poley" and very white checkout girl had a Japanese name on her badge. She was trying to explain to him that this was an identity she assumed through her cosplay and that many of her friends - especially on the internet - knew her through that name. He was perplexed and demanded to know "how in the world she got interested in that." I could have pointed out the fact that this grocery store didn't sell Time, Newsweek or Entertainment Weekly - but did carry about a dozen gun magazines and the American edition of the Japanese manga, Shonen Jump. She tried to explain her interest by pointing towards the growing popularity of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!! and the young kid in the grocery cart, who was little more than a toddler, pulled out his Pokémon cards and started waving them proudly to his father. They went away and I told her that I was an otaku myself. She was shocked both because she had never met an anime fan quite as old as I was and because she didn't know that there were any other fans locally. We talked briefly and I went on my way.

I often reflect on that moment as one that illustrates a kind of transition in our culture - each person in the story having a somewhat different relation to the flow of Asian popular culture into the American market - the father finding it inexplicable, his son finding it normal, the girl finding it a source of personal identity and I finding it a kind of intellectual interest. I also think often of what being connected to anime fandom must have meant to this Appalachian girl - a connection to the world beyond the often narrow confines of this town, a means of knowledge and experience which set her apart both from the adults around her but apparently from many of her classmates. We might well imagine that this experience meant for her some of the same things that imitating Elvis might have meant to the Japanese women I saw in Yoyogi Park.

I have devoted time on my experiences as a tourist visiting Yoyogi Park because I think what I saw there - and what I saw in the North Georgia grocery -- illustrate fairly well the complexity of young people's relationship to popular culture. Those relationships can not be reduced to traditional dualisms of production and consumption. In no meaningful sense are these kids simply consumers of cultural materials produced by others even if they are very much drawn to the content of commercial culture. Rather I would argue that they are participants - shaping the flow of cultural materials across national borders, tapping into a global information network to support their activities, transforming the media they consumed into new forms of cultural expression, moving beyond the constraints placed on them in their local environments to tap a freedom that comes from stepping outside one's own culture and embracing pop cosmopolitanism.

At the same time, it doesn't make sense to talk about this purely in terms of new media or digital culture. The availability of new technologies has enabled some of their activities but kids are also enacting these interests through very traditional forms of cultural practice. Chloe, for example, told us about a friend who had taught himself how to make his own buttons in order to more perfectly recreate the costumes of a Japanese Jpop band. What would it mean to think of these kinds of activities as a kind of media literacy put into practice? To recreate Japanese costumes and customs, they must first study and then master them. They understand these cultures from the inside out - drawing on personal reflection to flesh out things they might otherwise have known only through books or media representations. As they mimic these cultural practices, they are drawn towards further research, trying to master the language, trying to understand the much older traditions which gave rise to this popular culture, trying to understand the lives of their friends in other parts of the world. We can see performance and role playing as a catalyst which motivates media literacy on the one hand and informal learning of academic disciplines on the other. Of course, it's worth noting how few American schools offer Japanese as a language or provide any real opportunity for kids to dig this deeply into Asian culture. These informal learning communities, in fact, are teaching kids things that most adults would see as valuable but which they can't learn in schools.

For more thoughts on the concept of Pop Cosmopolitanism, see my new book, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape

The following text was written as part of the original draft for the MacArthur white paper about educating young people for a participatory culture. It was cut due to length considerations but it providees useful background for people reading the report. Most often, when people are asked to describe the current media landscape, they respond by making an inventory of tools and technologies. Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices. Rather than listing tools, we need to understand the underlying logic shaping our current moment of media in transition. These properties cut across different media platforms and different cultural communities: they suggest something of the way we live in relation to media today. Understanding the nature of our relationship with media is central to any attempt to develop a curriculum that might foster the skills and competencies needed to engage within participatory culture.

The Contemporary Media Landscape is:

1. Innovative. We are the midst of a period of prolonged and profound technological change. New media are created, dispersed, adopted, adapted, and absorbed into the culture at dramatic rates. It is certainly possible to identify previous "revolutions" in communication. The shift from orality to literacy, the rise of print culture, and the emergence of modern mass media in the late 19th and early 20th century each represent important paradigm shifts in the way we communicated our ideas. In each case, a burst of technological change was followed by a period of slow adjustment. If, as Marshall McLuhan (1969) has suggested, "media are often put out before they are thought out," then there was ample time to think through the impact of one media before another was introduced. As historians and literary scholars have long noted, the explosion of new technologies at the end of the 19th century sparked a period of profound self-consciousness which we now call modernism. Modernism impacted all existing institutions, reshaped all modes of artistic expression, and sparked a series of intellectual breakthroughs whose impact is still being felt today. If anything, the rate of technological and cultural change has accelerated as we have moved through the 20th century and shows no signs of slowing down as we enter the 21st century. The turnover of technologies is rapid; the economic fallout cataclysmic; and the cultural impact unpredictable.

Today, the introduction of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic experimentation. Anthropologist Grant McCracken has described the present moment as one of cultural "plenitude," represented by an ever-expanding menu of cultural choices and options. McCracken argues that "plentitude" is emerging because the cultural conditions are ripe for change, because new media technologies have lowered barriers to entry into the cultural marketplace, and because those traditional institutions which held innovation in check have declined in influence (what he calls "the withering of the witherers".) The result has been the diversification of cultural production. Each new technology spawns a range of different uses, inspires a diversity of aesthetic responses, as it gets taken up and deployed by different communities of users. Such transformations broaden the means of self and collective expression.

2. Convergent. Every major idea, image, sound, story, brand, and relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible range of media channels. As Henry Jenkins (2006) argues in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, convergence is being shaped top-down by the decisions being made by massive media conglomerates who have controlling interest across all possible media systems and who enjoy the power to insure that their content circulates globally. It is in their economic interest to move any successful media content from one delivery system to another in order to maximize profit and broaden market potential. At the same time, convergence is being shaped bottom-up by the participatory impulses of consumers, who want the ability to control and shape the flow of media in their lives; they want the media they want when they want it and where they want it. And, as a result, they pull media content into new spaces illegally if that content is not available for purchase in those formats. Moreover, these consumers are taking advantage of the new media technologies to respond to, remix and repurpose existing media content; they use the web to talk back to media producers or tell their own stories about fictional characters.

3. Everyday. The technologization of the American home has been an ongoing process across the 20th century. Our family rooms have become home entertainment centers. Our family hearths are now electronic. Media technologies are fully integrated into our everyday social interactions. In some ways, these technologies have been a wedge between family members; young people often deploy media to cut themselves off from the people around them. Yet, at the same time, these new technologies have enabled greater connection to more dispersed family members, helping to combat some of the forces which are breaking down extended families. The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling famously contrasted the monumental technical achievements of the early 20th century ("the great steam-snorting wonders of the past") with the more everyday and familiar technologies of the late 20th century ("the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens.") Contemporary technology "sticks to the skin, responds to the touch....pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us." There is a danger that as this technology becomes so familiar, so much a part of our daily routines that it becomes invisible to us: we can no more see the layer of media that surrounds us than fish notice the water they are swimming in.

At the same time, we can now take our media with us wherever we go. We are still coming to grips with the full implications of this latest shift in media access. Once again, this technology can be used to cut us off from our environment and isolate us from people around us -- the iPod is advertised as allowing us to create a soundtrack for our lives. In some cases, the availability of these media adds a sense of tentativeness to our real world interactions which can now be interrupted at any time by demands from elsewhere. We engage in what sociologist Linda Stone calls "continuous partial attention," shifting focus between mediated and face to face inputs as different needs arrive. We can also use these technologies to annotate our environment -- giving us access to information when we need it and thus to heighten our awareness of the world around us. As Mizuko Ito has described, we can use these technologies to maintain ongoing contact with the people in our lives who matter to us the most. And as Howard Rhiengold has suggested, we can use these technologies to mobilize quickly in response to urgent demands on our attention.

4. Appropriative. New technologies make it easy for people to sample and repurpose media images. We can now quote and recontextualize recorded sounds and images (both still and moving) almost as easily as we can quote and recontextualize words. Increasingly, our culture communicates through snippets of borrowed media content. Young people construct a mix tape to share how they feel with each other. They create a collage of images to express how they see themselves. Their webpages function as the digital equivalent of the old commonplace books, a heady mixture of personal expressions and borrowed materials. Artists have always borrowed and built upon earlier works in their tradition. As the new technologies has expanded who gets to express themselves through media, this practice of creative rewriting of previous works has also become more widespread. We still do not have a well considered ethics of appropriation. We are expressing ourselves in new ways but we do not yet have the conceptual resources to allow us to pull back and reflect on what we are creating.

New communications technologies, such as the digital video recorder or the DVD player, allow consumers to more fully control the flow of media into their homes. New modes of entertainment, such as computer and video games, depend on our active engagement: we do not simply consume them; we make them happen. Online fan communities and modding cultures are blurring the lines between consumer and producer. We want to become a part of the media experiences which matter to us; we want to create and share our own media with others. In some ways, mass media displaced the participatory impulses which characterized the folk culture of 19th century America: we moved from a country of cultural producers to one of cultural consumers. Amateur cultural production was pushed underground, hidden from view, through it was not totally destroyed by the rise of mass media. The Web has made this layer of amateur production more visible again, providing an infrastructure where amateurs can share what they created with each other: this ability to share media has helped to motivate media production, resulting in an explosion of grassroots expression.

5. Networked -- Media technologies are interconnected so that messages flow easily from one place to another and from one person to another. Communication occurs at a variety of levels -- from intimate and personal to public and large-scale. The one sender-many receiver model which dominated print culture and modern mass media is giving way to a many-to-many model in which any given participant can easily circulate their work to a larger community. The capacity to "network" has emerged as an important social and professional skill. Young people become adept at calculating the advantages and disadvantages of deploying different communications systems for different purposes -- trying to decide how to communicate their ideas only to those people they want to see them while maintaining privacy from unwanted observation.

6. Global -- Media content flows fluidly across national borders; people deploy the new communication networks to interact with others around the world. The global scale of this new media landscape changes the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world. We might imagine a progression from nations sending single diplomats to interact with each other over a distance to the modern era of international flight where many have the experience of directly visiting other parts of the world to the present moment when an increasing number of people interact daily, if not hourly, with people living on the other side of the planet. The long-term consequences of this experiment in global cultural exchange are still being discovered. Some have argued that this expanded communication will bring about greater understanding; others see the return to fundamentalism as a reaction against the threat posed by these global exchanges. Some worry that the most economically powerful nations will overwhelm the rest, insuring a homogenization of global cultures; others contend that such a world requires the constant production of cultural difference in order to satisfy a seemingly insatiable hunger to step outside the parochialism of our own culture.

7. Generational -- Historically, cultural traditions and norms were passed from one generation to another: these kinds of transfer constituted a primary focus of educational practices in these traditional societies. Throughout the 20th century, however, as the rate of technological and cultural change accelerated, young people adopted cultural styles and values radically different and often fundamentally at odds with their parent's generation. Recent research suggests that young people and adults live in fundamentally different media environments, using communications technologies in different ways and forming contradictory interpretations of their experiences. Adults know less than they think about what young people are doing on line and young people know less than they think about the values and assumptions that shape adult's relationship to media.

8. Unequal -- Some have suggested that this new media culture should be described as "elective," suggesting that people can opt in and out of different levels of participation. Roles are adopted and shed easily at least by those who have the access and skills needed to adjust quickly to new communities. Yet, in another sense, it would be wrong to describe these cultures as "elective." In so far as participation within them represents a new source of power, wealth, and knowledge, it also represents a new site of privilege and inequality. Participating may be elective for those who have the resources needed to belong in the first place but no such option can be exercised by those who are being left behind. Expanding access to cyberspace has the potential of empowering new segments of the public to become fuller participants in cultural and civic life, yet we can be concerned by the ability of these electronic technologies to render invisible anyone who is not able to participate. As British research Sonia Livingstone notes, ""teaching the skills required to produce content is more crucial than ever. Indeed, not to do so would be positively disempowering for citizens given the present rush to duplicate, or even to displace, our present social and political institutions online." .

Of these eight traits, the only one which might describe our current educational institutions is "unequal." Otherwise, our schools have not kept pace with the changing environment around them. If we were to start from scratch and design an educational system to meet the needs of the culture we have just described, it would look very little like the current school system. Our schools doubly fail kids -- offering them neither the insights they need to avoid the risks nor the opportunity to exploit the potentials of this new participatory culture. Indeed, the skills kids need to function in the new media landscape are skills which are often read as dysfunctional and disruptive in the context of formal education. Kids are, for the most part, learning these skills on their own, outside of school, with the consequence that they are unevenly distributed across the population.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Seven)

This is the last installment of my series on the white paper which we wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on participatory culture and media literacy. If you want to read the whole paper, check it out here. If you want to learn more about the work that the MacArthur Foundation is doing on youth and digital learning, you can follow their blog -- which regularly features comments from some of the country's leading educators and experts on youth media. This last installment concludes with some general thoughts about what all of this means for parents, schools, and after school based programs. Project nml will now be turning its attention to developing a range of curricular materials and activities based on this framework, which we will be rolling out through this blog, among many other places.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this material. Do let us know what you think and do share this with others you think would be interesting.

Once again let me acknowledge the contributions of Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison without whom it would have been impossible to pull this report together.

Who Should Respond? A Systemic Approach to Media Education

We have identified three core problems that should concern all of us who care about the development and well-being of American's young people:

• How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?

• How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding of the way that media shapes perceptions of the world?

• How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that will shape their practices as media makers and as participants within online communities?

We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:

Play -- the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance -- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation -- the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

Appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking -- the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition -- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation -- the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Some children are acquiring some of these skills through their participation in the informal learning communities that surround popular culture. Some teachers are incorporating some of these skills into their classroom instruction. Some afterschool programs are incorporating some of these skills into their activities. Yet, as the above qualifications suggest, the integration of these important social skills and cultural competencies remains haphazard at best. Media education is taking place for some youth across a variety of contexts, but it is not a central part of the educational experience of all students. Our goal for this report is to encourage greater reflection and public discussion on how we might incorporate these core principles systematically across curricula and across the divide between in-school and out-of-school activities. Such a systemic approach is needed if we are to close the participation gap, confront the transparency problem, and help young people work through the ethical dilemmas they face in their everyday lives. Such a systemic approach is needed if children are to acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed in a modern era.

Schools

In the above descriptions of core social skills and cultural competencies, we have spotlighted a range of existing classroom practices that help children become fuller participants in the new media landscape: the use of educational simulations, alternative and augmented reality games, webquests, production activities, blogs and wikis, and deliberation exercises. Such exercises involve actively applying new techniques of knowledge production and community participation to the existing range of academic subjects in the established school curriculum. We have seen how history classes are making use of educational games, how science classes are teaching youth to evaluate and construct simulations, how literature classes are embracing role play and appropriation, how math classes might explore the value of distributed cognition, and how foreign language classes are bridging cultural differences via networking. As these examples suggest, many individual schools and educators are experimenting with new media technologies and the processes of collaboration, networking, appropriation, participation, and expression that they enable. They are engaging students in real-world inquiries that require them to search out information, interview experts, connect with other students around the world, generate and share multimedia, assess digital documents, write for authentic audiences, and otherwise exploit the resources of the new participatory culture.

We see this report as supporting these individual educators by encouraging a more systemic consideration of the place these skills should assume in pedagogical practice. We believe that these core social skills and cultural competencies have implications across the school curriculum, with each teacher assuming responsibility for helping students develop the skills necessary for participation within their discipline. Clearly, more discipline-specific research is needed to more fully understand the value and relevance of these skills to different aspects of the school curriculum. Skills that are already part of the professional practices of scientists, historians, artists, and policymakers can also help inform how we introduce students to these disciplines.

Much of the resistance to media literacy training springs from the sense that the school day is bursting at its seams, that we cannot cram in any new tasks without the instructional system breaking down altogether. For that reason, we do not want to see media literacy treated as an add-on subject. Rather, we should view its introduction as a paradigm shift, one that, like multiculturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject. Media change is affecting every aspect of our contemporary experience, and as a consequence, every school discipline needs to take responsibility for helping students to master the skills and knowledge they need to function in a hypermediated environment.

After School

Afterschool programs may encourage students to examine more directly their relationship to popular media and participatory culture. Afterschool programs may introduce core technical skills that students need to advance as media makers. In these more informal learning contexts, students may explore rich examples of existing media practice and develop a vocabulary for critically assessing work in these emerging fields. Students may also have more time to produce their own media and to reflect on their own production activities. The approach proposed here takes the best of several contemporary approaches to media education, fusing the critical skills and inquiry associated with media literacy with the production skills associated with the Computer Clubhouses, and adding to both a greater awareness of the politics and practice of participatory culture.

The media literacy movement emerged in response to the rise of mass media. Here, for example, is a classic definition of media literacy created by the Ontario Association for Media Literacy in 1989:

Media literacy is concerned with developing an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of those techniques. It is education that aims to increase students' understanding and enjoyment of how the media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media products.

Although some media literacy educators have instituted groundbreaking work on digital media, the bulk of presentations at national conferences are still focused on more traditional media -- print, broadcast, cinema, popular music, advertising -- which are assumed to exert the greatest influence on young people's lives.

Media literacy educators are not wrong to be concerned by the concentrated power of the media industry, but they must also realize that this is only part of a more complex picture. We live in a world in which media power is more concentrated than ever before and yet the ability of everyday people to produce and distribute media has never been more free. Existing media literacy materials give us a rich vocabulary for thinking about issues of representation, helping students to think critically about how the media frames perceptions of the world and reshapes experience according to its own codes and conventions. Yet these concepts need to be rethought for an era of participatory culture.

Consider, for example, the framework for media literacy proposed by Thoman and Jolls:

•

Who created the message?

• What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?

• How may different people understand this message differently than me?

• What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in - or omitted from - this message?

• Why is this message being sent?

There is much to praise in these questions: they understand media as operating within a social and cultural context; they recognize that what we take from a message is different from what the author intended; they focus on interpretation and context as well as motivation; they are not tied up with a language of victimization.

Yet, note that each question operates on the assumption that the message was created elsewhere and that we are simply its recipients (critical, appropriating, or otherwise). We would add new complexity and depth to each of these questions if we rephrased them to emphasize individuals' own active participation in selecting, creating, remaking, critiquing, and circulating media content. One of the biggest contributions of the media literacy movement has been this focus on inquiry, identifying core questions that can be asked of a broad range of different media forms and experiences. This inquiry process seems key to overcoming the transparency problems identified above.

By contrast, education for the digital revolution stressed tools above all else. The challenge was to wire the classroom and prepare youth for the demands of the new technologies. Computer Clubhouses sprang up around the country to provide learning environments where youth could experiment with new media techniques and technologies. The goal was to allow students to set and complete their own tasks with the focus almost entirely on the production process. Little effort was made to give youth a context for thinking about these changes or to reflect on the new responsibilities and challenges they faced as participants in the digital culture. We embrace the constructivist principles that have shaped the Computer Clubhouse movement: youth do their best work when engaged in activities that are personally meaningful to them. Yet, we also see a value in teaching youth how to evaluate their own work and appraise their own actions, and we see a necessity of helping them to situate the media they produce within its larger social, cultural, and legal context.

We have developed an integrated approach to media pedagogy founded on exercises that introduce youth to core technical skills and cultural competencies, exemplars that teach youth to critically analyze existing media texts, expressions that encourage youth to create new media content, and ethics that encourage youth to critically reflect on the consequences of their own choices as media makers.

School-based and afterschool programs serve distinct but complementary functions. We make a mistake when we use afterschool programs simply to play catch-up on school-based standards or to merely reinforce what schools are already teaching. Afterschool programs should be a site of experimentation and innovation, a place where educators catch up with the changing culture and teach new subjects that expand children's understanding of the world. Afterschool programs focused on media education should function in a variety of contexts. Museums, public libraries, churches, and social organizations (such as the YWCA or the Boy Scouts) can play important roles, each drawing on its core strengths to expand beyond what can be done during the official school day.

Parents

We also see an active role for parents to play in shaping children's earliest relationship to media and reinforcing their emerging skills and competencies. The new media technologies give parents greater control over the flow of media into their lives than ever before, yet parents often describe themselves as overwhelmed by the role that media plays in their children's everyday activities. As UK Children Go On-line concluded, "Opportunities and risks go hand in hand...The more children experience one, the more they also experience the other." Rather than constraining choices to protect youth from risks, the report advocates doing a better job helping youth master the skills they need to exploit opportunities and avoid pitfalls.

Parents lack basic information that would help them deal with both the expanding media options and the breakdown of traditional gatekeeping functions. Most existing research focuses on how to minimize the risks of exposure to media, yet we have stressed the educational benefits of involvement in participatory culture. The first five or six years of a child's life are formative for literacy and social skills, and parents can play an important in helping children acquire the most basic versions of the skills we have described here. Throughout children's lives, parents play important roles in helping them make meaningful choices in their use of media and in helping them anticipate the consequences of the choices they make. Adults often are led by fears and anxieties about new forms of media that were not a part of their own childhood, and which they do not fully understand. There are few, if any, books that offer parents advice on how to make these choices or that offer information about the media landscape. Few education programs help parents to acquire skills and self-confidence to help their children master the new media literacies. There are few sites that provide up-to-date and ongoing discussions of some of the issues surrounding the place of media in children's lives.

The Challenge Ahead: Ensuring that All Benefit from the Expanding Media Landscape

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 19, 2006), Bill Ivey, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Steven J. Tepper, a professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, described what they see as the long term consequences of this participation gap:

Increasingly, those who have the education, skills, financial resources, and time required to navigate the sea of cultural choice will gain access to new cultural opportunities....They will be the pro-ams who network with other serious amateurs and find audiences for their work. They will discover new forms of cultural expression that engage their passions and help them forge their own identities, and will be the curators of their own expressive lives and the mavens who enrich the lives of others....At the same time, those citizens who have fewer resources--less time, less money, and less knowledge about how to navigate the cultural system--will increasingly rely on the cultural fare offered to them by consolidated media and entertainment conglomerates...Finding it increasingly difficult to take advantage of the pro-am revolution, such citizens will be trapped on the wrong side of the cultural divide. So technology and economic change are conspiring to create a new cultural elite--and a new cultural underclass. It is not yet clear what such a cultural divide portends: what its consequences will be for democracy, civility, community, and quality of life. But the emerging picture is deeply troubling. Can America prosper if its citizens experience such different and unequal cultural lives?

Ivey and Tepper bring us back to the core concerns that have framed this essay: how can we "ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life?" How do we guarantee that the rich opportunities afforded by the expanding media landscape are available to all? What can we do through schools, afterschool programs, and the home to give our youngest children a head start and allow our more mature youth the chance to develop and grow as effective participants and ethical communicators? This is the challenge that faces education at all levels at the dawn of a new era of participatory culture.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part Two)

What follows is a second excerpt from the white paper which I authored, along with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, for the MacArthur Foundation. The report is intended to offer a provocation for educators at all levels to think about how our pedagogical practices need to shift to reflect the demands of a more participatory culture. In Part One, I outlined some of the changes that are taking place in the media landscape and the ways they impacted young people. In Part Two, I make the case for why adult intervention is needed and why youth will not be able to make these adjustments all on their own. My hope is that the release of this report will stimulate reflection and discussion among educators, parents, and students about the ways media education is or is not being taught through school and after-school programs. I hope this discussion will also be of interest to the many other groups who read this blog -- many of whom are helping to shape the participatory culture we are discussing here and thus have some responsibility for thinking about how we insure that every youth is given a chance to participate.

As always, I welcome questions and comments. I am going to try to respond to any questions I receive once I have rolled out all of the parts of this report via the blog. While I have excluded sources from the blog version to insure ease of reading, you can see a full bibliography in the downloaded document.

Why We Should Teach Media Literacy: Three Core Problems

Some defenders of the new digital cultures have acted as though youth can simply acquire these skills on their own without adult intervention or supervision. Children and youth do know more about these new media environments than most parents and teachers. In fact, we do not need to protect them so much as engage them in critical dialogues that help them to articulate more fully their intuitive understandings of these experiences. To say that children are not victims of media is not to say that they, any more than anyone else, have fully mastered what are, after all, complex and still emerging social practices.

There are three core flaws with the laissez faire approach. The first is that it does not address the fundamental inequalities in young people's access to new media technologies and the opportunities for participation they represent (what we call the participation gap). The second is that it assumes that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thus articulate what they learn from their participation (what we call the transparency problem). The third problem with the laissez faire approach is that it assumes children, on their own, can develop the ethical norms needed to cope with a complex and diverse social environment online (the ethics challenge). Any attempt to provide meaningful media education in the age of participatory culture must begin by addressing these three core concerns.

The Participation Gap

Cities around the country are providing wireless Internet access for their residents. Some cities, such as Tempe, Arizona, charge users a fee: others, such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Cambridge, plan to provide high-speed wireless Internet access free of charge. In an interview on PBS's Nightly News Hour in November 2005, Philadelphia mayor John Street spoke of the link between Internet access and educational achievement:

Philadelphia will allow low-income families, families that are on the cusp of their financial capacity, to be able to be fully and completely connected. We believe that our public school children should be--their families have to be connected or else they will fall behind, and, in many cases, never catch up.

Philadelphia's Emergency People's Shelter (EPS) is ahead of the curve; the nonprofit group's free network access serves shelter residents and the surrounding neighborhood. Gloria Guard of EPS said,

What we realized is if we can't get computers into the homes of our constituents and our neighbors and of this neighborhood, there are children in those households who will not be able to keep up in the marketplace. They won't be able to keep up with their schoolmates. They won't be able to even apply for college. We thought it was really important to get computer skills and connection to the Internet into as many homes as possible

However, simply passing out technology is not enough. Expanding access to computers will help bridge some of the gaps between digital haves and have nots, but only in a context in which free wi-fi is coupled with new educational initiatives to help youth and adults learn how to use those tools effectively.

Throughout the 1990s, the country focused enormous energy in combating the digital divide in technological access. The efforts have ensured that most American youth have at least minimal access to networked computers at school or in public libraries. However, as a 2005 report on children's online experience in the United Kingdom concluded:

No longer are children and young people only or even mainly divided by those with or without access, though 'access' is a moving target in terms of speed, location, quality and support, and inequalities in access do persist. Increasingly, children and young people are divided into those for whom the Internet is an increasingly rich, diverse, engaging and stimulating resource of growing importance in their lives and those for whom it remains a narrow, unengaging, if occasionally useful, resource of rather less significance

What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what person can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high bandwidth, and continuous connectivity. (Current legislation to block access to social networking software in schools and public libraries will further widen the participation gap.) The school system's inability to close this participation gap has negative consequences for everyone involved. On the one hand, those youth who are most advanced in media literacies are often stripped of their technologies and robbed of their best techniques for learning in an effort to ensure a uniform experience for all in the classroom. On the other hand, many youth who have had no exposure to these new kinds of participatory cultures outside school find themselves struggling to keep up with their peers.

Wartella, O'Keefe, and Scantlin reached a similar conclusion:

Closing the digital divide will depend less on technology and more on providing the skills and content that is most beneficial....Children who have access to home computers demonstrate more positive attitudes towards computers, show more enthusiasm and report more enthusiasm and ease when using computers than those who do not.

More often than not, those youth who have developed the most comfort with the online world are the ones who dominate classroom use of computers, pushing aside less technically skilled classmates. We would be wrong, however, to see this as a simple binary: youth who have technological access and those who do not. Wartella and coauthors note, for example, that game systems make their way into a growing number of working-class homes, even if laptops and personal computers do not. Working-class youth may have access to some of the benefits of play described here, but they may still lack the ability to produce and distribute their own media.

In a 2005 report prepared for the MacArthur Foundation, Lyman finds that children's experiences online are shaped by a range of social factors, including class, age, gender, race, nationality, and point of access. He notes, for example, that middle-class youth are more likely to rely on resources and assistance from peers and family within their own homes, and thus seem more autonomous at school than working-class children, who must often rely more heavily on teachers and peers to make up for a lack of experience at home. The middle-class children thus seem "naturally" superior in their use of technology, further amplifying their own self-confidence in their knowledge.

Historically, those youth who had access to books or classical recordings in their homes, whose parents took them to concerts or museums, or who engaged in dinner conversation developed, almost without conscious consideration, skills that helped them perform well in school. Those experiences, which were widespread among the middle class and rare among the working class, became a kind of class distinction, which shaped how teachers perceived students. These new forms of cultural participation may be playing a similar role. These activities shape what skills and knowledge students bring into the classroom, and in this fashion determine how teachers and peers perceive these students. Castells tells us about youth who are excluded from these experiences:

"Increasingly, as computer use is ever less a lifestyle option, ever more an everyday necessity, inability to use computers or find information on the web is a matter of stigma, of social exclusion; revealing not only changing social norms but also the growing centrality of computers to work, education and politics"

Writing on how contemporary industry values our "portfolios" as much as our knowledge, Gee suggests that what gives elite teens their head start is their capacity to:

pick up a variety of experiences (e.g., the "right" sort of summer camps, travel, and special activities), skills (not just school-based skills, but a wide variety of interactional, aesthetic, and technological skills), and achievements (honors, awards, projects) in terms of which they can help to define themselves as worthy of admission to elite educational institutions and worthy of professional success later in life".

They become adept at identifying opportunities for leadership and accomplishment; they adjust quickly to new situations, embrace new roles and goals, and interact with people of diverse backgrounds. Even if these opportunities are not formally valued by our educational institutions or listed on one's resume when applying for a job, the skills and self confidence gathered by moving across all of these online communities surely manifest themselves in other ways, offering yet another leg up to youth on one side and another disadvantage to youth on the opposite side of the participation gap.

The Transparency Problem

Although youth are becoming more adept at using media as resources (for creative expression, research, social life, etc.), they often are limited in their ability to examine the media themselves. Turkle was among the first to call attention to this transparency problem:

Games such as SimLife teach players to think in an active way about complex phenomena (some of them 'real life,' some of them not) as dynamic, evolving systems. But they also encourage people to get used to manipulating a system whose core assumptions they do not see and which may or may not be 'true'.

Not everyone agrees. In an essay on the game Sim City, Friedman contends that game players seek to identify and exploit the rules of the system in order to beat the game. The antagonistic relationship between player and game designer means that game players may be more suspicious of the rules structuring their experiences than are the consumers of many other kinds of media. Conversations about games expose flaws in games' construction, which may also lead to questions about their governing assumptions. Subsequent games have, in fact, allowed players to reprogram the core models. One might argue, however, that there is a difference between trying to master the rules of the game and recognizing the ways those rules structure our perception of reality. It may be much easier to see what is in the game than to recognize what the game leaves out.

This issue of transparency crops up regularly in the first wave of field reports on the pedagogical use of games. Shrier developed a location-specific game for teaching American history, which was played in Lexington, Massachusetts; her game was designed to encourage reflection on competing and contradictory accounts of who fired the first shot of the American Revolution. The project asked students to experience the ways historians interpret evidence and evaluate competing truths. Such debates emerged spontaneously around the game-play experience. Yet Shrier was surprised by another phenomenon, the young people took the game's representation of historical evidence at face value, acting as if all of the information in the game was authentic.

Shrier offers several possible explanations for this transparency problem, ranging from the legacy of textbook publishing, where instructional materials did not encourage users to question their structuring or their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to "suspend our disbelief" in order to have a more immersive play experience. Squire found similar patterns when he sought to integrate the commercial game, Civilization III, into world history classes. Students were adept at formulating "what if" hypotheses, which they tested through their game play. Yet, they lacked a vocabulary to critique how the game itself constructed history, and they had difficulty imagining how other games might represent the same historical processes in different terms. In both cases, students were learning how to read information from and through games, but they were not yet learning how to read games as texts, constructed with their own aesthetic norms, genre conventions, ideological biases, and codes of representation. These findings suggest the importance of coupling the pedagogical use of new media technologies with a greater focus on media literacy education.

These concerns about the transparency of games, even when used in instructional contexts, are closely related to concerns about how young people (or indeed, any of us) assess the quality of information we receive. As Hobbs has suggested, "Determining the truth value of information has become increasingly difficult in an age of increasing diversity and ease of access to information." More recent work by the Harvard Good Works Project has found that issues of format and design are often more important than issues of content in determining how much credibility young people attach to the content of a particular website. This research suggests some tendency to read "professional" sites as more credible than "amateur" produced materials, although students lack a well developed set of standards for distinguishing between the two. In her recent book, The Internet Playground, Seiter expresses concern that young people were finding it increasingly difficult to separate commercial from noncommercial content in online environments: "The Internet is more like a mall than a library; it resembles a gigantic public relations collection more than it does an archive of scholars" .

Increasingly, content comes to us already branded, already shaped through an economics of sponsorship, if not overt advertising. We do not know how much these commercial interests influence what we see and what we don't see. Commercial interests even shape the order of listings on search engines in ways that are often invisible to those who use them. Increasingly, opportunities to participate online are branded such that even when young people produce and share their own media, they do so under terms set by commercial interests. Children, Seiter found, often had trouble identifying advertising practices in the popular Neopets site, in part because the product references were so integrated into the game. The children were used to a world where commercials stood apart from the entertainment content and equated branding with banner advertisements. This is where the transparency issue becomes especially dangerous. Seiter concludes, "The World Wide Web is a more aggressive and stealthy marketeer to children than television ever was, and children need as much information about its business practices as teachers and parents can give them". Children need a safe space within which they can master the skills they need as citizens and consumers, as they learn to parse through messages from self-interested parties and separate fact from falsehood as they begin to experiment with new forms of creative expression and community participation.

The Ethics Challenge

In Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work, Fischman and coauthors discuss how young journalists learn the ethical norms that will define their future professional practice. These writers, they find, acquired their skills most often by writing for high school newspapers. For the most part, the authors suggest, student journalists worked in highly cohesive and insulated settings. Their work was supervised, for better or worse, by a range of adult authorities, some interested in promoting the qualities of good journalism, some concerned with protecting the reputation of the school. Their work was free of commercial constraints and sheltered from outside exposure. The ethical norms and professional practices they were acquiring were well understood by the adults around them.

Now, consider how few of those qualities might be applied to the emerging participatory cultures. In a world in which the line between consumers and producers is blurring, young people are finding themselves in situations that no one would have anticipated a decade or two ago. Their writing is much more open to the public and can have more far-reaching consequences. The young people are creating new modes of expression that are poorly understood by adults, and as a result they receive little to no guidance or supervision. The ethical implications of these emerging practices are fuzzy and ill-defined. Young people are discovering that information they put online to share with their friends can bring unwelcome attention from strangers.

In professional contexts, professional organizations are the watchdog of ethical norms. Yet in more casual settings, there is seldom a watchdog. No established set of ethical guidelines shapes the actions of bloggers and podcasters, for example. How should teens decide what they should or should not post about themselves or their friends on Live Journal or MySpace? Different online communities have their own norms about what information should remain within the group and what can be circulated more broadly, and many sites depend on self-disclosure to police whether the participants are children or adults. Yet, many young people seem willing to lie to access those communities.

Ethics become much murkier in game spaces, where identities are assumed and actions are fictive, designed to allow broader rein to explore darker fantasies. That said, unwritten and often imperfectly shared norms exist about acceptable or unacceptable conduct. Essays, such as Julian Dibbel's "A Rape in Cyberspace", Henry Jenkins's "Playing Politics in Alphaville", and Always-black's "Bow Nigger" offer reminders that participants in these worlds understand the same experiences in very different terms and follow different ethical norms as they face off against each other.

In Making Good, Fischman and coauthors found that high school journalists felt constrained by the strong social ties in their high school, unwilling to publish some articles they believed would be received negatively by their peers or that might disrupt the social dynamics of their society. What constraints, if any, apply to in online realms? Do young people feel that same level of investment in their gaming guilds or their fan communities? Or does the ability to mask one's identity or move from one community to another mean there are less immediate consequences for antisocial behavior?

One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others. We may, in the short run, have to accept that cyberspace's ethical norms are in flux: we are taking part in a prolonged experiment in what happens when one lowers the barriers of entry into a communication landscape. For the present moment, asking and working through questions of ethical practices may be more valuable than the answers produced because the process will help everyone to recognize and articulate the different assumptions that guide their behavior.

As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention, we must keep in mind three core concerns:

• How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?

• How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding of how media shapes perceptions of the world?

• How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and as participants in online communities?

To address these challenges, we must rethink which core skills and competencies we want our children to acquire in their learning experiences. The new participatory culture places new emphasis on familiar skills that have long been central to American education; it also requires teachers to pay greater attention to the social skills and cultural competencies that are emerging in the new media landscape. In the next sections, we provide a framework for thinking about the type of learning that should occur if we are to address the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenges.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part One)

I spent Thursday in New York speaking on a panel with the University of Chicago's Nicole Pinkard and the University of Southern California's Mimi Ito as part of the public launch of the MacArthur Foundation's exciting slate of new initiatives in the area of youth, learning, and digital media. People interested in understanding the full context of this initiative should keep an eye on the Foundation's new blog. The event was simulcast on Second Life and on Teen Second Life.

This is the context in which we have been pursuing our own Project nml (New Media Literacies) initiatives which I have been discussing from time to time in this blog. The New York City press event was the launching point for a white paper which I wrote for MacArthur identifying what we see as the key social skills and cultural competencies which young people need to be full participants in convergence culture. In Convergence Culture, I devote one chapter to thinking about the impact of participatory culture on our current understandings of education. Here I -- and my collaborators Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison -- have been able to dig much deeper into the pedagogical implications of the world I discuss in the book as well as to lay out some of the key insights from contemporary research on informal learning, games-based pedagogy, online communities, and participatory culture.

My hope is that this white paper will spark conversations among educators at all levels -- in schools and in after school programs, in public institutions, and in churches and other community centers -- about how we need to change our practices to reflect the new ways that young people are engaging with the world around them.

In hopes of sparking such a conversation, I am publishing the white paper in installments through my blog. This first installment sets the stage, describing some of the challenges and opportunities participatory culture represents in the lives of our young people.

For those of you who are impatient and want to read the whole report at once, you can download it here.

The Needed Skills in the New Media Culture

"If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life."

-- New London Group

Ashley Richardson was a middle-schooler when she ran for president of Alphaville. She wanted to control a government that had more than 100 volunteer workers and that made policies that affected thousands of people. She debated her opponent on National Public Radio. She found herself in the center of a debate about the nature of citizenship, about how to ensure honest elections, and about the future of democracy in a digital age. Alphaville is the largest city in the popular multiplayer game, The Sims Online.

Heather Lawver was 14 years old. She wanted to help other young people improve their reading and writing skills. She established an online publication with a staff of more than 100 people across the world. Her project was embraced by teachers and integrated into their curriculum. She emerged as an important spokesperson in a national debate about intellectual property. The website Lawver created was a school newspaper for the fictional Hogwarts, the location for the popular Harry Potter books.

Blake Ross was 14 years old when he was hired for a summer internship at Netscape. By that point, he already had developed computer programming skills and published his own website. Frustrated by many of the corporate decisions made at Netscape, Ross decided to design his own web browser. Through the joint participation of thousands of other volunteer youth and adults working on his project worldwide, the Firefox web browser was born. Today, Firefox enjoys more than 60 times as many users as Netscape Navigator. By age 19, Ross had the venture capital needed to launch his own start-up company. His interest in computing was sparked by playing the popular video game, Sim City.

Josh Meeter was about to graduate from high school when he completed the claymation animation for Awards Showdown, which subsequent was widely circulated on the web. Meeter negotiated with composer John Williams for the rights to use excerpts from his film scores. By networking, he was able to convince Stephen Spielberg to watch the film, and it was later featured on the Spielberg's Dreamworks website. Meeter is now starting work on his first feature film.

Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are the future politicians, activists, educators, writers, entrepreneurs, and media makers. The skills they acquired--learning how to campaign and govern; how to read, write, edit, and defend civil liberties; how to program computers and run a business; how to make a movie and get it distributed--are the kinds of skills we might hope our best schools would teach. Yet, none of these activities took place in schools. Indeed, many of these youth were frustrated with school; some dropped out and others chose to graduate early. They developed much of the skill and knowledge through their participation in the informal learning communities of fans and gamers.

Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are exceptional individuals. In any given period, exceptional individuals will break all the rules and enjoy off-the-charts success--even at surprisingly young ages. But, Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are perhaps less exceptional than one might at first imagine.

According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project, more than one-half of all American teens--and 57 percent of teens who use the Internet--could be considered media creators. For the purpose of the study, a media creator is someone who created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Most have done two or more of these activities. One-third of teens share what they create online with others, 22 percent have their own websites, 19 percent blog, and 19 percent remix online content.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, these activities are not restricted to white suburban males. In fact, urban youth (40 percent) are somewhat more likely than their suburban (28 percent) or rural (38 percent) counterparts to be media creators. Girls aged 15-17 (27 percent) are more likely than boys their age (17 percent) to be involved with blogging or other social activities online. The Pew researchers found no significant differences in participation by race-ethnicity.

If anything, the Pew study undercounts the number of American young people who are embracing the new participatory culture. The Pew study did not consider newer forms of expression, such as podcasting, game modding or machinima. Nor did it count other forms of creative expression and appropriation, such as music sampling in the hip hop community. These forms are highly technological but use other tools and tap other networks for their production and distribution. The study does not include even more widespread practices, such as computer or video gaming, that can require an extensive focus on constructing and performing as fictional personas. Our focus here is not on individual accomplishment but rather the emergence of a cultural context that supports widespread participation in the production and distribution of media.

Enabling Participation

"While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games-- and here they are already content producers. Too often neglected, except as a source of risk, these communication and entertainment focused activities, by contrast with the information-focused uses at the centre of public and policy agendas, are driving emerging media literacy. Through such uses, children are most engaged-- multi-tasking, becoming proficient at navigation and manoeuvre so as to win, judging their participation and that of others, etc.... In terms of personal development, identity, expression and their social consequences-- participation, social capital, civic culture- these are the activities that serve to network today's younger generation." -- Sonia Livingstone.

Participatory Culture

For the moment, let's define participatory culture as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others

3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

4. Where members believe that their contributions matter

5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

In such a world, many will only dabble, some will dig deeper, and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community. The community itself, however, provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation. Historically, we have valued creative writing or art classes because they help to identify and train future writers and artists, but also because the creative process is valuable on its own; every child deserves the chance to express him- or herself through words, sounds, and images, even if most will never write, perform, or draw professionally. Having these experiences, we believe, changes the way youth think about themselves and alters the way they look at work created by others.

Most public policy discussion of new media have centered on technologies--tools and their affordances. The computer is discussed as a magic black box with the potential to create a learning revolution (in the positive version) or a black hole that consumes resources that might better be devoted to traditional classroom activities (in the more critical version). Yet, as the quote above suggests, media operate in specific cultural and institutional contexts that determine how and why they are used. We may never know whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in a forest with no one around. But clearly, a computer does nothing in the absence of a user. The computer does not operate in a vacuum. Injecting digital technologies into the classroom necessarily affects our relationship with every other communications technology, changing how we feel about what can or should be done with pencils and paper, chalk and blackboard, books, films, and recordings.

Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them. The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also supports them, if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture. It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.

That is why we focus in this paper on the concept of participatory cultures rather than on interactive technologies. Interactivity is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.

We are using participation as a term that cuts across educational practices, creative processes, community life, and democratic citizenship. Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture. Many young people are already part of this process through:

Affiliations -- memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

Expressions -- producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving -- working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

Circulations -- Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)

The MacArthur Foundation has launched an ambitious effort to document these activities and the roles they play in young people's lives. We do not want to preempt or duplicate that effort here. For the moment, it is sufficient to argue that each of these activities contains opportunities for learning, creative expression, civic engagement, political empowerment, and economic advancement.

Through these various forms of participatory culture, young people are acquiring skills that will serve them well in the future. Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate. A growing body of work has focused on the value of participatory culture and its long-term impact on children's understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Affinity Spaces

Many have argued that these new participatory cultures represent ideal learning environments. James Paul Gee calls such informal learning cultures "affinity spaces," asking why people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the contents of their textbooks. Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, and because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others. For example, Rebecca Black finds that the "beta-reading" (or editorial feedback) provided by online fan communities helps contributors grow as writers, mastering not only the basic building blocks of sentence construction and narrative structure, but also pushing them to be close readers of the works that inspire them. Participants in the beta-reading process learn both by receiving feedback on their own work and by giving feedback to others, creating an ideal peer-to-peer learning community.

Affinity spaces are distinct from formal educational systems in several ways. While formal education is often conservative, the informal learning within popular culture is often experimental. While formal education is static, the informal learning within popular culture is innovative. The structures that sustain informal learning are more provisional, those supporting formal education are more institutional. Informal learning communities can evolve to respond to short-term needs and temporary interests, whereas the institutions supporting public education have remained little changed despite decades of school reform. Informal learning communities are ad hoc and localized; formal educational communities are bureaucratic and increasingly national in scope. We can move in and out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education.

Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments, from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge Andrew Blau's 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation:

The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers...A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.

Blau's report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy. Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced.

David Buckingham argues that young people's lack of interest in news and their disconnection from politics reflects their perception of disempowerment.

"By and large, young people are not defined by society as political subjects, let alone as political agents. Even in the areas of social life that affect and concern them to a much greater extent than adults--most notably education--political debate is conducted almost entirely 'over their heads'"

Politics, as constructed by the news, becomes a spectator sport, something we watch but do not do. Yet, the new participatory culture offers many opportunities for youth to engage in civic debates, to participate in community life, to become political leaders, even if sometimes only through the "second lives" offered by massively multiplayer games or online fan communities.

Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic context: we learn the skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and gradually coming to understand the choices we make in political terms. Today's children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious tasks later. The challenge is how to connect decisions in the context of our everyday lives with the decisions made at local, state, or national levels. The step from watching television news and acting politically seems greater than the transition from being a political actor in a game world to acting politically in the "real world."

Participating in these affinity spaces also has economic implications. We suspect that young people who spend more time playing within these new media environments will feel greater comfort interacting with one another via electronic channels, will have greater fluidity in navigating information landscapes, will be better able to multitask and make rapid decisions about the quality of information they are receiving, and will be able to collaborate better with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. These claims are borne out by research conducted by Beck and Wade into the ways that early game play experiences affect subsequent work habits and professional activities. Beck and Wade conclude that gamers were more open to taking risks and engaging in competition but also more open to collaborating with others and more willing to revise earlier assumptions.

This focus on the value of participating within the new media culture stands in striking contrast to recent reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation that have bemoaned the amount of time young people spend on "screen media." The Kaiser reports collapse a range of different media consumption and production activities into the general category of "screen time" without reflecting very deeply on the different degrees of social connectivity, creativity, and learning involved. We do not mean to dismiss the very real concerns they raise: that mediated experience may squeeze out time for other learning activities; that contemporary children often lack access to real world play spaces, with adverse health consequences, that adults may inadequately supervise and interact with children about the media they consume (and produce); or concerns about the moral values and commercialization in much contemporary entertainment. Yet, the focus on negative effects of media consumption offers an incomplete picture. These accounts do not appropriately value the skills and knowledge young people are gaining through their involvement with new media, and as a consequence, they may mislead us about the roles teachers and parents should play in helping children learn and grow.

"The Only Medium That Can Make You Blush in the Dark": Learning About Radio

"There are things about not being able to see someone who is talking that somehow gives you a much more direct link to that person than if you see their face. There's an awful lot of emotion conveyed in their voice and there's an awful lot of their personality conveyed in their voice. There's the obvious thing that you are able to create your own pictures in your head. It's also a lot more intimate. It's like someone is whispering to you in the dark. There was a guy at this radio festival I go to every year called the Third Coast International Audio Festival. One thing he said was radio was the only medium that can make you blush in the dark. You have to think about it for a moment but yeah, you can't read in the dark, you can't watch TV in the dark because it's emitting its own light, and it's true. It's like being at a slumber party all the time. It's really wonderful."

-- NPR reporter Sean Cole

Sean Cole is an award winning radio reporter, working out of WBUR in Boston, and producing content for such shows as Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Marketplace, and This American Life. He is also the subject of one of the exemplars we have produced as part of the MacArthur-funded Project NML. Previous entries here have described some of our goals for this project -- to expose young people to the choices that get made in the production of various forms of media, to provide them with role-models of what it might be like to create and distribute work in those media, to provide educators -- in school and out -- with a vocabulary for talking about and assessing student work within those media.

This profile of Sean Cole was produced by Comparative Media Studies graduate student Orit Kuritsky with assistance from CMS graduate student Amulya Gopalakrishnan. Kuritsky, herself, is an experienced media producer, having worked developing new formats, scripting and editing for children's television in her native Israel and in radio production here in the United States, She moved from intern into a producer position on The Connectiona syndicated talk show that aired from WBUR Boston before returning to graduate school. She has also been part of a team of our graduate students which has been working with the Terrascope Program in the Earth Sciences department at MIT to help scientist learn to communicate their ideas through radio. The students focused their energies this year on the earthquake and tsunami that hit the coast of Chile in 1960 – the largest one ever documented. The students went to Chile during spring break to do interviews and collect sounds which would eventually be edited into a 23 minute piece dealing, as they put it, with “ecological, cultural and personal survival during a devastating earthquake and tsunami”. The piece aired on WMBR and is also available on the public radio exchange

In a recent e-mail, Kuritsky explained to me some of the factors that went into her choice of Cole as an exemplar subject:

I love to listen to him on the radio. His quirkiness, combined with genuine curiosity and wit, generate great radio pieces. And I'm not alone. He is regarded as one of the most interesting and unique voices in the world of public radio. He is a very warm, attitude-less person. When I was new at the station, besides simply being nice, he kept telling me that he also started as an intern, and that it took time for him to get a permanent position, all things I needed to hear at the time. I think this unassuming attitude, combined with willingness to give advice, translates well on the screen. Sean is technically savvy. Many highly regarded public radio reporters still send interview, narration and ambiance clips to their respective headquarters, where professional editors/engineers lace their pieces together. Sean insists on doing it himself. He is also active in online communities of radio enthusiasts (like transom and prx, commenting on othersÂ’ works and offering advice). In these regards, Sean represents where public radio is heading, or at least one among contradicting directions; younger, more personal, more participatory, more diverse.

Here, Kuritsky collaborated closely with Cole to help students develop a better understanding of what goes into the production of a segment for Morning Edition from its conceptualization and planning, through the collection of interviews and environmental sounds, the logging and selection of sounds, the scripting and editing process, and the final product. Like the Nick Bertozzi profile I showed here recently, this series of short digital films lays out the choices which shape the production process at every step along the way, offering very good professional advice to would be radio producers. Indeed, this advice seems particularly timely given the revival of interest in recorded sound production brought about by the emergence of podcasting.

Throughout the segment, Cole is passionate about radio as a medium -- as my opening quote above suggests -- and very attentive to the ways it differs from other ways of presenting the same material:

In print, you write a story and pepper it with quotes. In radio, the tape is everything. The tape is the structure of the story. It is the architecture, it's the skeleton of the story and the script is the muscle and sinew around it.

As students begin to watch these tapes of producers working in different media, we hope they will learn to think ethnographically. We want students to focus not just on what people are saying but how they say it. So, in the case of Sean Cole, part of the fascination is the ways that the kinds of metaphors which characterize NPR style emerge spontaneously throughout his interview. He speaks in the segment about the need to construct a conversational style for radio which is nevertheless concise, accurate, and evocative. Watching him talk in this extended interview, one can see how he has internalized this style and how it becomes a natural part of the way he engages with people around him.

Cole is very interested in getting youth not only to listen closely to the mix of sonic elements which constitute a radio segment but also to listen closely to their own physical surroundings. He talks about how radio producers seek to capture the characteristic sounds of a particular location -- whether it is the clacking of needles at a knitting convention or the burbling street noises which he acknowledges are something of a cliché in public radio work. This emphasis on hearing one's environment is consistent with the approach which Kuritsky had taken with the students in her own radio class:

We spent a lot of time in class listening to a variety of radio pieces and talking about them. It was striking at first to discover that the students are really not familiar with the medium (except as a vehicle for music), and have a very small vocabulary in their conceptual tool boxes to discuss it. This changed quickly as they listened to more pieces and became more sensitive to the elements of radio stories, how they work together, and how they react to them. Besides listening, students learned by doing; they created their own radio pieces, simple ones at first, and more complicated ones as final projects. (In order to do that, they had to master recording techniques and editing software, as well as develop their skills as interviewers and writers)

Throughout the series, we want very much to show the professional contexts in which these media artists produce their work, especially stressing forms of collaboration within the workplace. We feel schools put too much emphasis on individual creative expression and not enough on the ways people often work together to insure the production and distribution of art. Here's what Kuritsky had to say about her goals in depicting WBUR:

Despite the fact that Sean is very much self sufficient in his daily work it was important for me to portray him in context, banter from his boss included. (see chapter 9 “collaboration”.) It takes a certain personality, as well as certain socio-economic conditions for creative people to posit themselves as ‘artists’. Many people still need to work for organizations to make a living, and express, their creative skills. Working in organizations does not mean lack of creative freedom, but it certainly entails some give and take, which is reflected in this chapter and others.

Cole is a gifted storyteller, as the people who work with him are quick to tell us here, and this segment explodes with fascinating narratives about his experiences in the field. The primary focus is on a basic story in which he follows the evacuation route out of Boston being recommended by local government officials but along the way he also shares with us stories about Sherlock Holmes fans, about a young man who discovers the recycling of musical themes by Nickleback, and a range of other assignments on which he worked.

The goal of this project, however, is not simply to provide technical instruction to help young people become better media makers or to prepare them for professions in the media industry. We also want to heighten their awareness of the ethical issues which media makers face as they go about their work. We are especially proud of segment 8 in this series which deals with the choices Cole make in producing this segment: in particular, he has to think about the best way to preserve the original context and meaning of his interviewee's remarks, even as radio requires a ruthless pairing down of material. He encounters a situation where he could make a policeman he interviewed look foolish and has to decide the best way to preserve what the man was trying to communicate. Cole speaks forcefully about the responsibilities which reporters have to their subjects and the various professional procedures they follow in order to maintain the integrity and fairness of what they produce. This attention to journalistic ethics seems especially urgent at a time when so many young people are generating media through blogs or home pages or LJ entries without much oversight by adults. It is also urgently needed at a time when many young people are increasingly cynical about all forms of journalism, drawing limited distinction between the partisanship that often charges the blogosphere and more traditional forms of journalism. Cole makes it clear that all journalism involves making choices about how to represent what one has observed, that these choices are made by human beings who make mistakes, and that these choices have an impact on the people who they are representing through their work.

Much media literacy work has historically been concerned about the effects of media on the people who consume it. If I had my way, we would recenter those questions from media effects to media ethics, getting students to think through the choices they make as they generate and circulate their own media and the consequences of those choices on other people. Many of the same issues would resurface in such an approach but they would have greater immediacy as young people were actively involved in making choices about the kinds of media they are producing.

Making Comics: Nick Bertozzi as Exemplar

Several weeks ago, I wrote here about the New Media Exemplar Library -- a digital filmmaking project that is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of our larger project to develop curricular materials and activities to support the teaching of new media literacies. The Exemplar Library will consist of a series of short films showing media makers discussing the core choices they make -- both craft decisions and ethical dilemmas -- as they create their work. Our goal is to produce films that educators can use in classes and after school programs and that young people who are enthusiastic about media production might seek out on their own via the web. The first one I introduced to my readers centered on blogger, science fiction writer, and digital activist Cory Doctorow. Today, I wanted to share a second exemplar -- this one focused on independent comics creator Nick Bertozzi as he shows us the process by which he created a single page of his forthcoming graphic novel, The Salon The Salon centers around the circle of friends who helped generate the cubist movement and includes vivid portrayals of Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The Salon was not created as a kids comic and indeed, much of the content deals with mature themes, but it's melding of fact and fiction makes it a rich text for us to examine in the context of a project on new media literacies.

Having gotten to know Bertozzi through the years, one can't help but wonder if his fascination with this circle might have something to do with the tight circle of comic book artists in Brooklyn with whom he hangs out and sometimes collaborate, a circle which includes Jessica Abel, Paul Pope, Dean Haspiel, and Matt Madden, among others. Several years ago, these friends piled into a car and drove to MIT to visit Nick's sister, Vanessa Bertozzi, a Comparative Media Studies Masters Student, and to talk at our colloquium series. Various combinations of that circle have passed through the program in the years that have followed and this exemplar grew out of those conversations. In the interview, Bertozzi talks about why cartoonists and other artists need to work within creative communities:

You need a community of other artists of other cartoonists who understand, because nobody else will understand the insanity that you go through. And they're people who don't bug you too much because they're doing the same thing you're doing and they want to be left alone a lot of the time. But we do need to come together, because we are human after all believe it or not.

His former roommate Dean Haspiel described what he got out of working side by side with a fellow artist:

What was really good about when Nick lived with me, was we were really able to share that space and maximize the energy of that room. And turn what a lot of what we were doing separately into this combined force of this infectious, vibrant kind of brain trust. It was a really good time. I really miss those days of when I could look over my shoulder and see Nick drawing when I didn't feel like drawing and that would just inspire me to keep trudging on when I was struggling, facing that blank page and not knowing what to do next.

The video was produced and filmed by Vanessa which allowed her to achieve real trust and intimacy with her interview subject. Bertozzi turns out to be extremely good at explaining his creative process in language that is broadly accessible and there's a real fascination in watching this page take shape step by step across the videos. He takes us from the scripted concept, through the research into the historical period that insures the accuracy of his details, through penciling, inking, coloring (which occurs on the computer), and the final proofs. Bertozzi's comfort in explaining the creative process reflects his own experiences teaching and mentoring young would-be comic book artists in Brooklyn. The video also features his fellow comics artist and former roommate Dean Haspiel and one of his former students sharing their impressions of his work and creative process.

Here's how one of Bertozzi's students described the first day of class:

I was sitting in a class with all these kids who were interested in Spiderman comics, and Thor and Green Lantern. and in walks this guy, Nick. He said, the other guy who was supposed to teach this class, he's not teaching it anymore and I'm the replacement. And he comes in with this book On Directing by David Mamet and this other book called Story by Robert McKee. The first things he writes on the board are "ARCHETYPE! STEREOTYPE!" So he was talking about story structure in comics and saying that linear comicbook narrative structure has been done many, many times. And he said that what we're going for is something more, something more experimental. And I remember the first day of class he brought in a pile of superhero comics and he passed one out to everyone. And some of these students were like, "Oh, these are great, I have these in my own collection." And he said, "Now pick up the comic book and TEAR IT TO PIECES!" He said, "We're going to destroy these old idols and we're going to make new!"

One of the themes which will run across the series is an emphasis on how contemporary artists build upon the past, sampling and remixing pre-existing work as a source of inspiration for new expression. We hope to help teachers and students understand the difference between plagiarism and creative appropriation, providing a context for thinking about the ethics of what we do with other people's creative content. Comics fans will be relieved to see Bertozzi has a large library of classic comics to which he returns for inspiration whenever he confronts creative problems . Teachers will probably be gratified by the degree to which Bertozzi stresses throughout the project the importance of doing research. As he explains:

A good cartoonist has to have a lot of reference materials because you're going to be drawing a ton of things. And it's a lot easier to draw it from reference than it is to make it up out of your head.

I was taking an art history class and I was learning about Cubism, which is an art movement that was started by Pablo Picasso and George Braque. And I'll be honest, I paid attention in class but I never really understood what cubism was. So I always wanted to do a story that was about cubism so I could do the research and so I could spend a lot of time figuring out why cubism was so important.

Another fascinating part of the interview has to do with Bertozzi's choices to draw and ink the comics panels by hands but then to scan them and digitize them for the coloring process. As he explains, "You don't have to do the coloring on a computer, but I do because it saves me a lot of time." As a project, we are placing a lot of stress on the ways artists choose which tools to use and are especially interested in the hybrid nature of contemporary production practices, where some things are done physically and others digitally.

Bertozzi is not the only member of that circle who is strongly committed to introducing comics to young readers and artists. We have spent a good deal of time on Project NML discussing Matt Madden's recent book, 99 Ways to Tell A Story: Exercises in Style, which we think would be an outstanding tool for teaching storytelling techniques in any medium. Madden took a very basic situation and restaged it using different narrative devices, reading it through different points of view, accepting different artistic restrictions, and fitting it within a range of different genres. His focus clearly is on how a fairly simple set of building blocks can be used creatively to generate new stories simply by tweaking different variables in their presentation. This book teaches us how to see the choices which storytellers make in producing their work while inspiring us to think of other variations that he has not yet considered.

The Education of Sky McCloud

Last Thursday, the Comparative Media Studies Program and the MIT Media Lab played host to Scott McCloud, the comics theorist, creator, entrepreneur, activist, and visionary, who traced for us the progression of his thinking about comics as a medium -- from his first book, Understanding Comics, which gave us a language for thinking about sequential art, through Reinventing Comics, which argued that digital media represented important new opportunities for comics creators and readers, through to Making Comics, which offers practical advice to would-be comics writers and artists and in the process, lays out some important new arguments about the role of choice and styles in graphic storytelling. As McCloud noted, he first spoke in that same room 12 years before in the wake of the first book's publication and I have helped to bring him back to MIT on several other occassions. Indeed, we were lucky enough to have him do a week long workshop for our students several years ago when the ideas for Making Comics were first taking shape. So, with Scott, I knew what we were getting -- an articulate, empassioned, and visionary thinker about comics as a medium, whose work has implications for anyone who thinks seriously about the popular arts. McCloud engaged thoughtfully with questions from the MIT community on everything from the economics of online publishing to the potentials for comics on mobile platforms, from the design of tools for making art to the evolving visual language of the medium. I certainly recommend checking out the audio recording of his presentation and question and answer period.

Yet, the big surprise of the evening was Scott's 13 year old daughter, Sky McCloud. When Scott first asked if his daughter could make her own presentation following his opening remarks, we were not sure what to expect but immediately agreed.

The last time I had seen Sky, she was a toddler interupting her father's talk at Harvard's Veracon. Today, she is a dynamic young woman - a delightful mix of goth and geek -- who felt self confident enough to share her own perspective in front of a packed Bartos auditorium crammed with several hundred MIT and Harvard types.

She told us about the family's plans to do a 50 state speaking tour over the next year as her father rolls out his new book and as the family (Scott, his wife, Ivy, and his daughters, Sky and Winter) conduct an experiment in home schooling. Each member of the family is blogging about the trip over on Live Journal. And they are working together to produce a series of podcasts which they are calling Winterviews (after youngest daughter, Winter, who will be the on-camera presence in these films). The daughters will research about some of the comics people they will meet along the way, read and discuss some of their work, prepare questions, do interviews, and edit them for transmission via the web. Sky is also preparing an evolving powerpoint presentation as they travel to explain to various audiences about the trip and what they have learned along the way.

Meanwhile, she remains in contact with a larger circle of home schooled kids who are also tapping into their interests in popular culture (in this case, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars) to inform critical essays and research projects. We all concluded that Sky could be a poster child for the new media literacies we have been exploring through our project with the MacArthur Foundation -- someone who is tapping the full range of new media technologies to learn and share what she is learning with a larger community. Sky is incredibly articulate, holding her own debating the fine points of comics aesthetics with her dad and fully comfortably plopping herself down and conversing with a room full of graduate students. We were delighted to hear her say she was potentially interested in being an MIT student some day. She won the hearts of many of us here.

Let's be clear: Sky is an exceptional child, the offspring of a remarkable man, and her parents have had the flexibility to incorporate her learning (and that of her sister) into their professional lives. Not just everyone can take off for a year and travel the country with their family and still take in an income from speaking gigs. Yet, the core of what they are accomplishing here should be part of the educational experience of every child -- what she is learning grows organically from her own interests; she is being encouraged to express herself across a range of different media; she is encouraged to translate what she is learning back into public communication and is empowered to believe that what she thinks may matter to others. As I have suggested in a blog post this summer, these experiences are so far more available outside of the formal educational system through afterschool programming and home schooling than they are in the public classroom. Like many other home schoolers we have encountered through our research, she is using the potentials of new media both for creative expression and social networking.

I know that I make some people nervous when I talk here about the values of home schooling. Many people assume that home schooling is mostly used today by the religious right to escape secular education. But in fact, today's home schoolers come from many different backgrounds and are stepping outside of formal education for many different reasons. More and more kids are moving in and out of schools depending on where they are at in their emotional, social, and intellectual development or what kind of situation they are confronting in their local community. My wife and I home schooled our son for a year when he was Sky's age and oddly enough, one of his primary textbooks was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, but at the end of that year, he returned to a private school for the rest of his high school experience. I am not suggesting everyone should home school their kids. Most people should not. But I am glad that it is an option and I think that educators should study what is working in these home school contexts and pull the best of it back into their pedagogical practices. As they do so, they could learn a lot by listening to Sky McCloud speak about her experiences on the webcast of the event.