Remix: A Contested Practice

While we are on the subject of Remix Culture, I wanted to call attention to a contest being run this month by the website, Total Recut, designed to get remix artists of all types reflecting on what remix and fair use means to them. If you don't know Total Recut, you should check it out since it is one stop shopping for a range of diverse and interesting examples of remix video -- examples which run from fan vids to political propaganda and includes both obvious and obscure examples. Here's some of the details of the contest:

Create a short video remix that explains what Remix Culture means to you. Using video footage from any source, including Public Domain and Creative Commons licensed work, we want you to produce a creative, educational and entertaining video remix that communicates a clear message to a wide audience. The video is to be no shorter than 30 seconds and no longer then 3 minutes in duration.

This contest is being run to promote awareness of remix culture in an educational capacity by encouraging the fair use of a wide variety of content and also to create a new pool of work that explains what remix culture is to the general public....

The contest will begin in May '08 and will be open for 1 month. Public Voting will begin in June and will remain open for 2 weeks, after which the best 10 videos will be put forward into the final and the Judging Panel will vote on each one. The winner will be announced in July '08.

Entries should follow the guidelines on Fair Use issued by The Center for Social Media, guidelines we discussed here a while back.

I was proud to be asked to be a judge for this competition, which emerged in part in response to a discussion with Total Recut's Owen Gallagher about the work our Project New Media Literacies has been doing focusing on the ethics and poetics of remix culture as we are supporting the teaching of Appropriation as a cultural competency through our curricular materials. We have, for example, been collaborating with the fine folks at Organization for Transformative Works who are producing videos for our learning library about vidding. And we are developing a whole curriculum around Moby Dick which centers on historic and contemporary examples of remix. So, I am personally very excited at the prospect of this competition leading to the production of new materials which might help students, teachers, parents, and the public learn more about remix, creative commons, fair use, appropriation, and participatory culture.

Total Recut has pulled together a truly diverse and interesting group of judges, including Pat Aufderheide (from the Center for Social Media), legal legend Lawrence Lessig, Darknet author J.D. Lasica, fan vidder Luminosity, Documentary filmmaker Kimbrew McLeod, and Negativeland's Mark Hosler. I hope that this range of judges indicates just how open the competition is to a range of different communities who are finding remix an effective mode of creative expression and social commentary. Even if you are not interested in the contest per se, you should check out this resource page which already includes a number of useful materials for explaining why remix matters in contemporary culture.

I HEART Mutants (Except for That Shameless Mary Sue, Jean Grey)

This is the second in a series of "intimate critiques" produced by masters students in my Comparative Media Studies proseminar on media theory and methods. Each essay tries to blend personal narrative with larger theoretical issues as a way of digging deeper into the place of popular culture in our everyday lives. This year's set can be seen as a series of narratives of "coming out" as fans and how this process relates to other aspects of one's personal identity. I HEART Mutants

(Except for that Shameless Mary Sue, Jean Grey)

Lan Xuan Le

Spring 2008

I met the X-Men for the very first time on Saturday, October 31st, 1992. It was 9 AM, prime time for the grade school demographic, and the Fox Network was debuting its second attempt at an animated cartoon series based on a comic book of the same name. The first episode opened in the midst of the government's Mutant Registration Program, an initiative to find and round up all the human beings who possessed genetically-enhanced superpowers. In a recent, unexplained evolutionary burst, people across the world had begun manifesting unusual abilities at the onset of puberty. Pyrokinesis, telepathy, super-strength, invulnerability - the public had been waging a campaign of repression on these so called "mutants" out of a fear of their superior abilities. The first episode dumped the audience right into the middle of a long-standing conflict between homo sapien and "homo superior." It was in this political climate that Professor Charles Xavier and his band of select mutant followers have been fighting to preserve mutant rights against the human government and other mutants who would enslave humankind.

Running for a total of five seasons, X-Men was Fox Kid's second most successful show after Batman The Animated Series and continued airing reruns for a year after the release of its final episode. X-Men began as a popular serial comic book under the Marvel Publishing arm of Marvel Entertainment in 1963. Created by the legendary duo, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Uncanny X-Men told the story of a band of humans who struggled to protect a "world that hated and feared them." Although it was an established, long-standing franchise in American popular culture, the television show was my first point of entry into this universe.

I was not quite 12-years-old, the daughter of Vietnamese-American political immigrants, and a "gifted and talented" student in the mid-Western educational system. It seemed inevitable that the idea of mutant alienation and political struggle would ignite my young imagination. At the heart of the X-Men mythos lies a powerful metaphor of marginalization. Race, gender, sexuality - mutation stood in for and made visible the oppressions suffered by a class of people, of which I was a part. It spoke to the systematically, discursively constructed category of "othering" I suffered as a racial minority, de-naturalizing and exposing them. It spoke to my experience of systemic exclusions as a girl in America and a daughter in a family with Confucian values. X-Men represented my nascent political consciousness, the burgeoning understanding of myself as part of a larger grouping of people and an agent acting within a system of conflicting pressures. The story of X-Men became powerful to me in a way that the individual struggle of a character such as Batman could not.

The idea of mutation, a flexible metaphor, resonated with many of my experiences of exclusion. But race and gender remains, even today, the most powerful level of my experience of the mutation metaphor. Race is often discursively inscribed upon the bodies of racial minorities, like the "oversexed and savage" stereotype of black, male bodies or the sexual, pliant bodies of Asian women. So too is mutation a bodily "othering." This "otherness" of the mutant body often takes physical form, like with Doctor Hank "Beast" McCoy's hairy, animal-like appearance. Similarly, racialized or mutated bodies become the difference against which white or human bodies are visually and discursively normalized.

Some mutants in the X-Men universe, however, do not wear their differences on their bodies. Their abilities manifest in subtler ways, allowing them to "pass" as human. The conflict that arises between the obviously mutated and the "pretty" mutants erupts periodically in the story. In the X-Men universe, the physically mutated characters gathered into an underground, sewer-based community called the Morlocks after a similar, villainous society in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. They could not avoid the political experience of mutancy and became angry at those who remained sheltered and apolitical in their appearance of humanity. This, for me, mirrored the way my Asian girlfriends used the increasing invisibility of their race to avoid or even deny themselves as racialized subjects, often as gendered subjects as well. Those were precisely the moments that I understood my decisions through the mutant metaphor. By choosing to be a Morlock, I chose to openly live a fraught political reality that would act upon me whether or not I confronted it.

The metaphor of mutation, especially as applied to bodies, became a very powerful expression of the ways in which my own body had been re-written without my permission. As an Asian woman, my body is all too visible and yet my "color" has receded, being neither white nor black. I too have been inscribed upon, defined into my very DNA. But for mutants, their power lay precisely their differences. The very performance of their differences gave them the power to resist. The heroes of X-Men were those mutants who could come to accept and judiciously use their powers, not those who remained silent. That proved an important idea for me at the age of twelve, the ability to appropriate the performance of difference in some way, to reclaim the language of these performances to empower myself. It gave me a option to act, to vocally resist the silencing and naturalization of my exclusions.

While the characters in X-Men fight against the teleological framing of "mutation" in the same way I do as a woman of color, the metaphor to race and gender is imperfect. What I find most unsettling about the mutation metaphor, and the differences this represents, is the struggle between the biological reality and socially constructed nature of "mutation." Linking differences to the term "mutation" implies a kind of biological determinism. Within the story, however, these genetic changes actually produce an incontrovertible difference in the X-Men. The ability to mentally levitate objects is not comparable to the experience of race, gender, class, and sexuality, which are socially determined. Many groups have struggled to shift the debates of difference from biological determinism to social construction, and I remain ambivalent about how powerful this imperfect metaphor is for me.

I read more than just race into the bodies of these mutant characters. The bodies of women take on another significance in the X-Men television show for me. The idealization and display of female bodies is a standard part of the comic book industry's practice, which is dominated by a male culture of production. But female bodies often become sites of social anxiety. Asian female bodies, for example, were considered dangerous during earlier immigration to the US, because reproduction is the power of a marginal, feminine body to spread and contaminate the normative political body.

One of the most interesting women in the X-Men universe is Rogue, a member of the X-Men. Rogue is lushly beautiful, possessing super-strength, flight, invulnerability, and the ability to steal the life force of anyone she touches skin to skin. I envied Rogue because she represented the impenetrable female body. Rogue has the appearance of a woman who is sexually permissive, but the body which denies penetration. The markers of Rogue's class - her Southern "trash" stylings - are intimately linked to this perceived sexual permissiveness. Rogue's yearning to touch and be touched, especially when expressed in the presence of her on-again-off-again boyfriend Remy, yield to both innocent and lascivious interpretations. But because of her powers, she remains a non-reproducing body, one that is safely neutered, a contagion contained. Whether or not I understood it as a child, Rogue has always represented to me a site where masculine anxieties about women found expression.

Just as I found Rogue and the text's relationship to her body intriguing, I found the character of Jean Grey equally repugnant. In all the ways that Rogue embodies ambivalence, Jean Grey equally and oppositely represents the heteronormative forces within the text. Beautiful and in control, Jean Grey's cerebral powers mirror her middle-class origins, which stands in contrast to Rogue's physical (and blue collar) powers. Jean Grey's empathic social role in the team was to mediate the tensions of class, gender, and sexuality. She invoked her authority as the mother, the sanctioned, reproducing body, to quell insurrection and unify the group under a liberal morality invested in the feminine as a site of cultural reproduction. She became a symbol of the ways in which liberalism's promise of social justice sacrificed so many marginal voices to speak from a unified position. In a story that allowed me discursive reprieve, that provided catharsis in its simple acknowledgment of my exclusions, Jean Grey violated the agreement offered by the text.

I followed the television show until its end in 1997, at which point I sought to find the "original," the comic books, and continue my relationship with the story. I quickly discovered that the series had been running for nearly 40 years, the whole of it beyond my reach both economically and logistically. The serial nature of the comic book defeated my ability to master the canon as thoroughly as did my economic circumstances. The Internet, however, offered a different way into the X-Men history.

In 1998 I discovered fan websites, places where pieces of the X-Men story came together, character by character. But I found these dry, journalistic recitations insufficient to approximate the experience of reading the comic books, of knowing the X-Men first hand. It was during my web surfing that I found fan fiction, the resource that finally opened up X-Men to me. These stories became a snapshot of the fan's ongoing experience of reading, problematizing, and subsequent (re)writing of the X-Men comic books. It seemed a recursive, cyclical process carried through many stories, probably extending to other media properties. Whatever they represented to the fan author, for me as a reader, fan fiction became a constant renewal of the X-Men text. Through these stories, I could read X-Men anew through the lens of another fan's love. I began a two-year journey into the collective imaginary of X-Men, a historiography of myth and memory.

These fan stories explored the tensions of the comic book, perhaps further than the original format would have allowed. Dozens of stories addressed the same events in canon, correcting, changing, darning over the snags and tangles of plot holes. I had access to a collective record of the major shifts in the X-Men franchise and the fan reaction to them. Reading fan fiction was like mining the secondary sources of an historical event. Fan fiction, for me, became a record of what could never be part of the comic book canon, the discourse of an experience. The "truth" of the canon became irrelevant compared to reading the fantasy of the reading.

Fan fiction transformed my experience of the X-Men story, turning it from a monoglossic text into a multiple, unstable, heteroglossic pleasure. Every character, every relationship took on a complexity impossible in a single text, even a serial one. Although the series was multi-vocal, containing a diverse, international cast and expressive of a range of views to begin with, the very nature of fan fiction and individual interpretation allowed me a far broader experience. I adore, for example, not the canonical character of Gambit, but a layered memory of Gambit as can only be possible through people who both love and loath him. And so he is even more fascinating, engaging, and ultimately satisfying a character than any single text could offer.

By early 2000, the tide of fan fiction on the web had begun to ebb, bringing my journey with the fan community to an end. I attended college later that year and moved on to other media properties, but the X-Men would remain an essential part of my cultural imaginary. But my relationship to the franchise continued to change nonetheless. In 2000, Marvel released a full-length, live action film adapted from the comic books followed by two sequels. The same year, the X-Men: Evolution cartoon began on television, aiming to recapture the popularity of the original by re-imagining the X-Men's beginning in the present day. In 2001, the X-Men comic books spun off another alternate universe under the title of Ultimate X-Men that again re-imagined the beginning of the X-Men, but in a completely different universe from the Evolution cartoon.

The increasing number of alternate universes validated my increasing distance from the "canon" that I was originally so keen to obtain. It only added to the multiplicity and richness of the X-men text. While this move inspired fan anger for "selling out" the franchise and violating the integrity of the story, I saw this move as a way for the franchise to preserve its heteroglossic mythology. Each one of these re-imagined beginnings was designed for me, the interested audience that found itself excluded from the long-running history of the comic book. I finally felt courted by a universe that likely was not speaking to me, but from which I had appropriated strategies of resistance. While these alternate universes aimed to renew my relationship to the series, the ties had faded over time. I now possessed academic theories and frameworks through which to parse my experiences and exclusions.

In early spring of 2008, a fan group, in defiance of copyright, scanned and released all the volumes of the X-Men as PDFs online. Through the magic of peer-to-peer downloading, I finally acquired the whole of the X-Men canon. But in the end, I could not come to love them. With the exception of Joss Whedon's short stint at the helm of the Uncanny X-Men, the story was written predominantly by men for an audience that was not me, nor necessarily a group that included me. Fan fiction, on the other hand, was written primarily by women with whom I shared many salient experiences. In the end, I chose not to read the comic books lest they fundamentally change the relationship I had already nurtured with the franchise. The potential loss of that wonderfully unstable text could not ultimately compare to the gain of the comic book itself.

Lan Xuan Le

Swarthmore College, BA Biology and Asian Studies 2004

Boston University, Masters of Public Health 2007

Lan Xuan Le, who has BAs in both Biology and Asian Studies from Swarthmore College (2004) and a Masters in Public Health from Boston University (2007), has been part of the "games for health movement," conducting a qualitative study and co-authoring a white paper for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the use of games to combat childhood obesity. She also has a strong interest in the globalization of media and the construction of alternative understandings of what it means to be Asian and Asian-American through popular culture, an interest which led her to design, research and execute a library exhibition of anime and manga for Swarthmore's McCabe Library. She wrote an undergraduate thesis on problematic gender and sexual representations in Japanese popular culture with a particular focus on Card Captor Sakura, a paper which won the Swarthmore College Asian Studies Program's top writing prize.

Children as Storytellers: The Making of TikaTok (Part Two)

Last time, I shared with you an interview with CMS alum Neal Grigsby and MIT Media Lab alum Orit Zuckerman, two of the key players in a new startup company, TikaTok, which is working to encourage children to create their own books and share them with other young readers. This time, we get a bit more personal as the two share their sense of how their MIT education contributed to their current projects. Your site also seems to promote opportunities for collaboration between young authors and illustrators. Is this a way of introducing young people to the world of collective intelligence?

Neal: It certainly is, and although it was always on our road map to add this feature, necessity made us move it up the schedule. Our users demanded it. Drawing, and getting an illustration up on the site, can be a creative and technical challenge for many. The team went back and forth for a very long time about the possibility of providing a digital drawing tool before finally coming to the conclusion that it was a bad idea for several reasons. But if you could use the illustrations that other kids had already provided and pledged to the community, if only until a time that your own drawings would be ready, it would really help.

Now we are seeing writing and illustrating as potentially two separate modes of participation, and it is quite exciting. Of course there will always be children who enjoy writing more than illustrating, and vice versa, and this gives both groups the ability to engage deeply on the site and not feel like they're missing a big part of the experience. I also suspect that for many users their first experience with collaboration will be almost accidental: they will use someone's illustration, or someone will use theirs, and the system will automatically attribute the illustration credit. And then once those two kids see the power of this passive collaboration, it may pave the way for a more deliberate collaboration like co-authorship of the text, which the site also supports, or even "massively multiplayer" co-authorship with a large group.

It is certainly possible that we will provide even more modes of participation in the future--one could easily imagine introducing analogs to the traditional roles of editor, copy editor, layout and design artist, and even publicist--but we haven't determined yet which of these would be the most meaningful to our community.

In a "Mother's Welcome," Sharon Kan suggests that this project emerged from the experience of "two mothers who wanted to create a place where children can write, illustrate, publish and print their own books." What specific experiences did you have as mothers which pushed you to start this company?

Orit: As mothers you see your children grow and their brains develop. It is one of the most fulfilling experiences to look at the world from a child's view. From very young age children try to express themselves in pictures and in stories. When I sat with my daughter and we created a story together, she knew exactly what she wanted to say and draw; she enjoyed creating a story and was very happy when it was presented to the world by her proud parents. Even though it wasn't storytelling as we see in books that are written by adults, the ideas that come out and the simplicity of the storyline was very interesting. I also noticed that through kindergarten she was always encouraged to draw, but when she went to first grade the emphasis went to reading and writing only, and all that talent of telling stories by pictures was neglected. Then I looked at my daughter's bookshelf. She loves books, yet all of her books were written by adults, edited by adults, and published by adults with adult priorities in mind. Why aren't there books for kids by kids? They clearly tell stories differently but no one publishes it? This is what led us to think that creating a platform where kids can tell their stories, bind them into real books, and be active in a community of book lovers would be a great thing to build.

Neal, you are in the process of becoming a father yourself. How is that impacting your perception of this project? What would you say in a "Father's Welcome" to the site?

Neal: In an interesting coincidence, the day that I learned I was becoming a father was the same day that we launched the private alpha release of the site. So you could say that both baby and website have been gestating for about the same amount of time. As you might expect it has been an incredibly busy and exciting time, and I approach the future with a sense of deep responsibility but also optimism.

Since learning of my impending fatherhood, I have been following blogs like Parent Hacks and GeekDad, and have been inspired by the ways those sites integrate this resurgent DIY culture with parenthood. From the stereotypes, one might expect a geeky parent to be particularly disengaged or self-absorbed, but these blogs almost show geek parents as the best hope for our future; they show passionate and caring parents who involve their children in projects of investigation, exploration, and invention.

If I were to write a "Father's Welcome," then, I would express my hope that the families who use our site embrace the opportunities it provides for parent and child to share a creative experience together. I am fully aware that, especially when he becomes a teenager, computers and the Internet will become tools of autonomy for my son. The old man will be embarrassingly uncool, as it is my destiny to become, and he will forge his online identity largely outside my direct supervision. Many sites for young children already reinforce this model, requiring the parent only for his blanket permission or his credit card. I hope on Tikatok a parent can hone a different facet of his relationship with his children: he can assist, collaborate, and inspire.

Orit, you recently completed a degree at the MIT Media Lab. Can you describe the work you did through the lab and what you learned there which has contributed to the current venture?

Orit: Part of my research in the media lab was creating a unique communication system for kids to involve remote relatives with their daily routines. Communication systems as we know them were designed for business use, later on they were adapted to home use, but without any changes to the basic design. Looking at what children need to communicate led to the development of a very unique video system that created contextual video correspondence between relatives. For example, a grandmother would read a story to her grandchild on the other side of the world; and then the grandson would get that message when he went to bed. The system would know the right time to connect between the relatives and thus create a more meaningful connection between them. Looking at things from the user's point of view creates a different product all together. With Tikatok, I tried looking at storytelling from a childs point of view and create something that would be easy and fun to use.

Neal, you recently completed a Masters through the Comparative Media Studies Program. Can you describe the work you did with us and how it has contributed to the current venture?

Neal: All of my work at CMS was united by the program's commitment to multidisciplinary thinking, and for putting theory into practice. It was really invaluable experience to me as I began work on Tikatok.

The research project I worked most on was the Project for New Media Literacies. As your regular readers well know, it is a project very much created to address the challenges of participatory culture. As a graduate student researcher it was my responsibility to create educational media and associated curricula that would illuminate media production practices for a youth audience. I produced materials around blogging and science fiction authorship (using BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow as an exemplar), public art and graffiti, Wikipedia, and video games. The project forced me to think of creative ways to teach both the practical and ethical dimensions of media production, and that experience has certainly come in handy for designing materials that engage and instruct our users. The project also trained me to see these processes of creation and expression not only as individual processes, but as social process that occur within a context. This perspective has frequently come in handy when, as a team, we discuss new features and priorities for the company. The community illustration database is the perfect example. Do we solve the problem of illustration uploading with a tool that allows individual children to create digital drawings instantly? Or do we provide a more powerful way for kids to work together and take advantage of their unique abilities? My work with NML helped me provide an informed opinion on this decision and others.

I also worked briefly at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab as the design lead for a team of Singaporean and MIT students charged with creating a multiplayer video game for mobile phones. GAMBIT really prepared me for the kind of rapid, iterative product development within a small team that is characteristic of many startups, including our own. My GAMBIT experience also gave me a heightened appreciation for the extreme importance of user interface design and QA. I believe that video games really have some of the best user interfaces of any interactive media. There are design principles common to video games that designers of websites and virtual worlds should ignore at their own peril. The multidisciplinary approach I learned at CMS has allowed me to recognize relevant connections between these different media modes.

Finally, there was my academic work. My thesis explored "Narrative of Adolescence Across Media" and its final chapter, which imagined video games as a platform for a new kind of player co-authored coming-of-age story, articulates many of the same goals that we are trying to meet with Tikatok. For someone whose thesis was inspired by Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age, in which a young girl is aided in her development by, essentially, a digital platform for collaborative storytelling, it has been exciting to bring my research to bear on one of the closest real-world examples of such a platform that I have encountered.

What has been the biggest surprise as you've explored the intersection between these two MIT-based approaches to media?

Neal: The biggest surprise to me, I suppose, is how compatible the two approaches have been. If I were to believe the Media Lab stereotype, it would be that the folks there put too much faith in technological solutions. Certainly there is a huge technological optimism behind projects like the One Laptop Per Child, and it's important to peel away the layers of hyperbole to assess its potential impact. In starting a new company, it puts you in the position of having to promote yourself and your ideas, and it can be tempting to let your high aspirations get the best of you and let the hype flow unchecked. But I have never found myself battling Orit over unrealistic expectations. I think because the project is so grounded in her commitment to making something cool and worthwhile for her children, it makes her a sharp judge of what really works vs. what we want to work. She's not making something for "the children," she's making something for her children.

And while Orit works on a very intuitive level, the CMS approach has allowed me to bring a multitude of theoretical frameworks to the project, and helped me articulate what we are trying to achieve, sometimes to people on the outside, but sometimes even to the team. In that sense it is a nice marriage of a more bottom-up, creative approach with a top-down, analytical approach. But even that is a simplification - I think we both bring creative and analytical skills. As MIT media scholars I think we definitely speak the same language.

Orit Zuckerman - Co-founder and CTO

Orit has designed online communities since 1996, when she worked for Gizmoz Networks. In 1999, Orit co-founded uTOK Inc., a San Francisco-based Internet startup that created a "decentralized blogging community." She designed the community product, and supervised the R&D team. Most recently, Orit earned her Master's Degree from the MIT Media Lab, where she designed and implemented an innovative communication system for children. Orit has also exhibited her interactive portraiture installations in Milan, Monaco, Boston, British Telecom headquarters, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

Neal Grigsby - Director of Online Community

Neal Grigsby worked for seven years at LookSmart.com, where he managed volunteers on a user-generated Web directory, co-managed partnerships and developed content for FindArticles, and designed education-themed search verticals. Neal recently earned his Masters Degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where he produced educational media for the Macarthur-funded Project for New Media Literacies, and

designed video games for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Neal also

holds a BA from UC Berkeley.

Ethics and the New Media Literacies

All this week, the collaboration between MIT's Project nml and Harvard's Good Play Project is being spotlighted over at the MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning. If you don't know Spotlight, you are missing out on some of the best conversations these days about the ways that young people are learning in the context of the new participatory cultures. The two groups made a joint presentation a few weeks ago at the American Educational Researchers Association Conference in New York City.

As part of that presentation, Erin Reilly, NML's project manager, used her photoshop skills to put together this vivid representation of the collaboration we've started to build together.

The following text was written jointly by John Francis, Andrea Flores, Sam Gilbert, Lana Schwartz, and Steve Schultze

Meeting of the H's

In 2006, Henry Jenkins (Comparative Media Studies, MIT) and Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), both grantees of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, met to discuss their mutual interest in ethical issues around digital media and possible opportunities for collaboration--and why not, being situated only two subway stops apart in Cambridge? More important than geography, though, were emergent complementary themes and research questions of Gardner's and Jenkins' work, which made a collaborative effort seem promising.

How has this meeting of the H's faired, and what has come out of the combined effort of Henry and Howard's teams? This week, we hope to give you an inside look at our collaboration through a series of blog posts highlighting our present accomplishments and future plans. Today, we'll start with a bit of background about our teams and the goals of our collaboration.

Two Projects, One Mission

As youth grow up in an increasingly connected environment, they are presented with a diversity of challenges. Many of these challenges arise in the context of new technologies of communication and creativity. How does digital copying relate to legacy notions of property? What do I need to know in order to collaborate with my online peers? How do I present myself online? What do I do when I encounter new communities with unfamiliar norms or ideas? In many cases, there are helpful analogies in "age old" practices. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom of the analog world can seem like an ill fit. A more appropriate approach might frame the core skills and ethical issues within already established structures, but recognize the complications and opportunities of the contemporary media environment.

Project New Media Literacies (NML) headed by Jenkins at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program is guided by two questions:

1. What do young people need to know in order to become full, active, creative, critical, and ethically responsible participants in a media-rich environment?
2. What steps do we need to take to make sure that these skills are available to all?

NML uses digital media and new network technologies to help young people think about the role of media in their lives as consumers, producers, and participants

Gardner's GoodPlay Project, part of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is similarly concerned with the roles that youth assume online. More specifically, the GoodPlay Project seeks to understand the ethical issues that youth face in the virtual frontier of new digital media. How models of ethics transfer from the offline to the online world--especially in the five areas of identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility and participation--and how young people understand their roles and responsibilities in digital contexts are key concerns.

Together, it was decided that NML and GoodPlay would produce learning tools that help youth understand the connections between the digital media skills they learn and their roles and responsibilities as "good" cyber citizens. By integrating the GoodPlay ethical framework with the new media skill set defined by NML, the collaboration would develop activities that encourage reflection about ethical issues raised in various forms of media participation. These activities would draw on materials from the NML Exemplar Library and on data collected by the GoodPlay research team.

Let's Collaborate

In the summer of 2007, the NML and GoodPlay project teams set out to explore exactly what form our collaboration would take. We divided ourselves up into four "SuperTeams" to discuss compelling intersections between the two projects. After several weeks and many meetings, the entire group decided on a course of action for the fall: we--the "SuperQuartet" of Andrea Flores, John Francis, Steve Schultze and Lana Swartz--were challenged to generate ten high-level prototypes. After meeting with the full teams from NML-GoodPlay, we selected the best components of those prototypes for further refinement into two full learning modules. During this process, we began by considering the five core ethical issues identified in the GoodPlay white paper.

• Identity: exploring and 'playing' with different identities
• Privacy: choosing when and how to share information to whom
• Ownership/Authorship: understanding issues of control and credit for intellectual work
• Credibility: being authentic when representing one's competence and motivations
• Participation: accessing communities, understanding codes of conduct, and engaging proactively

We chose to focus on Ownership/Authorship for this first prototype development and refinement phase. This issue highlights the challenges youth face in navigating questions like "who owns the output of my work?", and "what are the appropriate means of giving credit?" Offline, these issues have a long history of legal and social norms but ethical indiscretions are commonplace. The opportunities for transgressions are compounded online by the absence of clear-cut and well-understood norms, facile technology and a multi-author model of online creation. Within this core issue of Ownership/Authorship, we integrated several skills from the New Media Literacies white paper, such as:

• Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Collective Intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• 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

In our activities, simulation helps students set up and understand real-world scenarios of ethical ownership. When facing an opportunity to sample or remix media content, students must decide what makes for acceptable and meaningful appropriation. In several instances, they must pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal. In so doing, they must exercise the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information. Because ownership/authorship is a complex issue with different expectations in different situations, the activities encourage students to discern and respect multiple perspectives, and to engage alternative norms.

The combination of these issues and skills led us to four themes that we sought to address:

• Collaboration/Co-Creation/Knowledge Communities: Developing models of how to work together effectively and ethically.
• Responsibility: Highlighting the ways in which a creator has responsibilities to his/her audience, to the broader community, and to the original content and its creator (if he/she is a remixer).
• Copyright: Understanding the proper use of materials by the individual and the individual's understanding of his/her rights as a creator of content.
• "Inspired by " vs. Plagiarism: Identifying the difference between using content as a jumping off point for remixing/ creating new 'inspired by' materials vs. usurping materials as one's own creation.

We are excited with the progress that has been made, and the ways in which insights from both NML and GoodPlay informed the process. In some ways, we experienced the very concepts we were designing for, as we relied on the collective intelligence of all involved, easily negotiated differences and drew from a wide network of knowledge. It is clear that the shared authorship process can generate something greater than the sum of its parts, and that remixing and appropriation helped us iterate toward more effective activities.

But enough about us, we want to show you what we've made!

THE INSPIRED HIGHLIGHTER

When you're doing research or creating a work of art, the line between original work and copying is sometimes blurry. This activity helps "highlight" these distinctions.

In The Inspired Highlighter, students review different media samples in which one work is influenced by a former work. The two samples are presented side-by-side, and students identify the various tools that the latter author draws upon elements of the first work--characters, point-of-view, wording, theme, etc. We provide several options for teachers, such as Emma and Clueless, Gone with the Wind and Wind Done Gone, Moby Dick and a contemporary stage adaptation, Harry Potter fan fiction, and more. Students are also provided with simple summaries of concepts such as plagiarism, inspiration, copyright, public domain, and fair use. Working in groups or individually, students make comparisons across different genres, media forms, and authorial communities. This involves judging what makes for acceptable appropriation and what does not. Students identify the difference between using content as inspiration versus straightforward plagiarism.

The activity uses two conceptual tools to guide students through this process. First, the students themselves place the particular instances that they discover in a simple grid that helps them the tools the author, the nature of the appropriation, and the possible motivations of the second author. The second conceptual tools is a simple graph, featuring "unacceptable copyright" on one axis and "acceptable norms" on the other. Together on the board, the class discusses where on this axis they would place the specific examples they found. Perhaps some examples are acceptable with respect to copyright law but unacceptable when it comes to authoring an original academic work. Perhaps some cases are unacceptable with a strict interpretation of copyright, but seem perfectly acceptable when considered in light of social norms.

By the end of the activity, students should be able to identify norms of ownership, tools of authorship, and instances of clear and not-so-clear plagiarism. Going forward, we hope that students will be able to highlight and consider these dilemmas not only in their school work but also in day-to-day situations.

MAD MEN

The themes of authorial responsibility and copyright are difficult concepts for many young people to grasp. In this activity, we let cows do the teaching.

In Mad Men, students role-play as advertising project managers for the 'Vegetable Growers of America' (VGA) in a campaign promoting vegetarianism. In the activity, students choose photos and music for the campaign, considering both the licensing and original intent of the musical and visual creations. For example, students have to decide whether or not using an "agency" owned photo of a cow statue at the Sri Mariamman Temple in Singapore is appropriate in this context. While the photo can be used appropriately from a copyright perspective, students must weigh the needs of the campaign, the original intent of the photo's creator, and the photo's religious context. Mad Men, then, does not simply ask students to consider copyright violations, but also encourages them to think about the potential consequences of using media for different purposes than the original artist intended.

After creating their advertising campaigns, students engage in a discussion about their decisions. In light of the music and photo choices they made for the ad campaign, they are asked to consider and articulate the likely views of different stakeholders--the VGA, the viewing public, and the original creator. Students are also prompted to consider how their concerns would change were they tasked with creating an anti-vegetarianism campaign using the same images and music. Our hopes in crafting this curriculum were twofold: 1) to expose youth to ownership norms and conventions of authorial responsibility; and 2) to scaffold youth to thoughtfully reflect on the meaning of ethical authorship and ownership decision-making in their everyday experiences.

Mad Men poses issues of responsibility and copyright in a fun and engaging role-play and a substantive experience of making distinct ethical choices. Who knew that cows could do all that?

Privacy and Publicity

Now that we've developed curricular activities that address issues of ownership and authorship, the NML-GoodPlay collaboration is focusing on to another ethical issue salient to digital youth: privacy. The Internet has changed how youth find and share information about themselves and others, challenging existing conceptions of privacy. These changes result in a lot of uncertainty about what constitute good privacy practices. Our hope is to create a curriculum that gives young people thinking tools that help them to 1) understand both the promises and the perils of disclosure online and 2) consciously adopt a set of values around what to share and what not to share online.

To start things off, the NML and GoodPlay teams recently got together for a 'group think' about privacy issues and strategies for encouraging reflection about privacy. Here are a few themes from that brainstorm that we feel will be important to address through the curriculum:

• Digital media technology has made it possible for individuals to share more about themselves to more people than ever before. It has also made it harder than ever before for individuals to control what personal information gets shared with others. Thus, while young people may have more outlets to share their thoughts, receive support and feedback, and build relationships, it's much easier for them to be taken advantage of online.
• Many young people use deception as a way of maintaining privacy. One teenager interviewed for the GoodPlay project, for example, changes the hometown listed on his facebook profile every couple of weeks so as to throw off people who might try to locate him.
• Managing privacy is rarely as simple as knowing "what to say" and "what not to say" online. It involves managing one's information across diverse communities and contexts. Often, sharing an intimate part of oneself to others online can be a positive and rewarding experience; it's when such information is copied and pasted into a new context--or shared with an unintended audience--that problems arise.
• For young people, many conflicts over privacy revolve around gossiping practices. Information is power, and young people are sometimes imprudent about sharing information so as to lift their standing in the social group.

Our heads are swimming with ideas about privacy, but we'd still love to hear some more. Do you have a great concept for an activity that capitalizes on these ideas? Any thoughts on how privacy issues manifest themselves online? Write something in the comments and continue our brainstorm!

For those of you who can't get enough of talk about new media literacies, you might want to check out this recording of a public conversation between Howard Gardner, James Paul Gee, Nichole Pinkard, Connie Yowell, and myself at AERA. Thanks to Barry Joseph and the fine folks at Global Kids for sharing this link.

Librarians, YouTube, and the New Media Literacies

I recently gave talks to two groups of librarians about their role in promoting the New Media Literacies: first, I did a webcast to more than 500 members of the Association for College and Research Libraries and then, I spoke in person to a meeting of the New England Educational Media Association and the Massachusetts School Library Association. Across both conversations, it was clear that librarians are on the front lines, dealing with those who have been left behind by the participation gap, struggling to deal with those opposed to or frightened by the participatory turn in our culture, helping anxious academics understand the value and limits of wikipedia, and so forth. In the question sessions at both talks, I heard some of the concerns they are facing on their ground as they try to keep pace with the changes in our understanding of literacy and in the ways that information circulates and knowledge is produced.

I was especially struck by some questions from libraries whose school districts require them to block such key sites of participatory culture as Youtube, MySpace, and Second Life -- in part out of fear of the content they will bring into their schools but also out of concern about their liability over what students may post during school hours. I was struck all over again by the tension between the rich pedagogical benefits we see through the effective deployment of such sites and the pressures schools face from those in their community who are anxious about the directions their culture is taking.

I tried to explain to them about the ways that YouTube has become an incredible archive of materials of invaluable use in the classroom. I cited for example the website, realclearpolitics, which everyday not only gathers together key articles about the presidential campaign from newspapers and newsmagazines all over the country but also collects major clips from the campaign trail, mostly posted on Youtube, so you can quickly catch up with everything from Saturday Night Live skits to the latest interviews on Sunday Morning talk shows, from advertisements to internet parodies, which help us to understand what's happening in American civic life. This site does a great job in curating the contents of Youtube yet it would be impossible to generate such a resources without the open ended platform for sharing media content that Youtube represents. As a media scholar, I think we should be teaching students ways to understand what's going on within Youtube and how it is impacting our culture. But I also think that regardless of what subject you teach, we can learn through YouTube. At the same time, producing and sharing media can be a powerful motivator for other kinds of academic research, can be a good way to get students to take greater responsibility over their own learning, and can be a way of introducing students to the rewards and challenges of civic engagement and cultural participation. The response to the risks posed by this new media platform is not to ignore them and let young people face them on their own outside of school but to insure that there are well informed adult mentors to watch their backs rather than snoop over their shoulders. So, I urge librarians and teachers to continue to struggle to insure that they have access to this resource in their schools.

I know that a number of teachers and librarians regularly read this blog so I'd like to invite you to share your stories and perspectives on this issue. Which sites does your local school board block access to? What rationales are they giving? To what degrees is it possible to work around those restrictions? Or conversely, what uses have you made of these sites for your teaching?

As you can probably tell from the reactions to the anonymous post, we now seem to be back on track in terms of processing reader responses: it does require a one time registration process but it allows you to post directly to the site without waiting for me to clear each post. So, let's see if we can put the system to a test.

If you follow these links, you can find a podcast version of the ACRL talk (if you want to cut to the talk itself, it starts about 12 minutes into the podcast) and an interview with with College & Research Libraries News editor-in-chief David Free, which follows up on some of the core ideas in the talk.

Both talks allowed me to share some of the materials we are developing through Project nml, including our Teacher's Strategy Guide on Moby Dick, our Learning Library, and the Ethics Casebook we are developing with Harvard's Good Play Project. You can find out more about all three projects at our Project NML blog. We are still looking for schools and after school programs which might want to test some of our materials next year. I am going to share more on the Ethics casebook project later this week.

Catching Up on Project NML

I am currently in New York City participating in a range of sessions at the American Educational Research Associaton conference designed to showcase the work which we are doing on New Media Literacies. Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion with James Paul Gee, Nichole Pinkard, Howard Gardner, and Connie Yowell. Last night, at a MacArthur Foundation reception, our team showcased some of the work we've been doing on the NML Learning Library (see below). Today, we are showcasing our collaboration with Harvard University's Good Play Project (Under the supervision of Howard Gardner) which is designed to encourage reflection on the ethical challenges young people face as they navigate through the complexities of the online world. All of this is part of an effort by the MacArthur Foundation to publicize the creation of a national network of researchers, scholars, educators, and activists who are focusing their attention on Digital Media and Learning. This has been one of the most exciting collaborations of my academic career. I love working with all of these people. Individually, collectively, we are starting to make a difference in the conversations that impact young people's relations to new media technology and participatory culture. Project NML recently launched a new blog designed to create greater "transparency" around the development of curricular materials and activities supporting the teaching of new media literacies. An early highlight is a post by Jenna McWilliams, our outreach coordinator, talking about how working on a teachers strategy guide designed to support the teaching of Moby Dick has forced her to reconsider this great American novel. She writes:

Before I came to NML, I had long lived among the multitudes who for many reasons--actually, for me it was mainly out of guilt and the heavy weight of cultural duty--keep a copy of Moby-Dick on a bookshelf with the really truly honest intention of getting through it some day. My guilt was compounded by my personal history as first an English major and then a student-writer in an MFA program. Every time I looked over at that fat little book sitting plumply on my bookshelf, I got just a little miserable all over again. But then I thought, you know, it's a very long novel. And hard. And word on the street is that it's kind of...boring. But then I joined NML and started in on this teacher's guide and I figured, okay, it's time to end the shame. And I took a deep breath and I jumped in....

There's no doubt that reading Moby-Dick is not the same kind of rollicking good time as, for example, reading Harry Potter. I won't argue about the degree of concentration, deliberation, and discipline required to make it through...

When I started the book, I prepared myself for serious tedium, determined to charge through for the good of the project (good-hearted team player that I am). But--I promise you I'm telling the truth--I actually had a really good time. I think this is mainly because as I started to read, I was surrounded by some very smart people (Henry Jenkins and Melville Scholar and MIT professor Wyn Kelley) who framed the novel for me as the work of a kind of proto-fan--a writer who channeled a lifelong love of literature, science, mythology, and the tiniest details of whaling culture into the classic text we engage with today. I couldn't help but imagine Melville as a sort of geeky fanboy, running around from library to museum to shoreline to dock and collecting information that he couldn't wait to share with readers.... When you picture Melville like that, and when you think about the book as evidence of his fandom, it starts to get really fun. You can even slog your way through the pages and pages of whaling history and lore, because you understand that Melville has collected all the information he could possibly find and is presenting it to you, the reader, because he thinks it's really, really neat.

McWilliam's post captures beautifully the excitement we are all experiencing reading Moby Dick through the lens of participatory culture.

I have long argued that the New Media Literacies should not be conceptualized as an add on subject or as something teachers do on Friday afternoon if the students have been good all week. It requires a paradigm shift on the same order as the ways schools have started to confront the challenges of multiculturalism and globalization. It impacts everything schools teach. In this project, we are focusing on Literature and Language Arts. Our hopes is to provide a model for how we teach authorship and classic literature differently in an era of remix culture. For more of my thoughts on this project, see earlier blog posts -- The Whiteness of the Whale (Revisited) and

href="http://henryjenkins.org/2007/09/was_herman_melville_a_protofan.html">Was

Herman Melville a Protofan?

MIT's Tech TV site is also showcasing some of the materials Project nml is producing for its forthcoming learning library. As Erin Reilly explains in the blog:

The Exemplar Library that was once documentary videos highlighting best practices of participatory culture is now an integration of learning activities embedded into multimedia material. In addition to videos, the Exemplar Library now has animated data visualization, flash movies, and other motion media as launching points. The learning activities are a combination of online activities that teens can do on their own to group activities that can happen both in and out of the classroom. This new informal approach to learning through the Exemplar Library encourages teens from passive viewing into interactive participation... and we saw just that in our first focus group of the semester.

The featured videos include several segments focused on what young people are learning through their participation in cosplay, some thoughts about the value of simulations and visualizations including a segment dealing with animation.

We welcome your feedback on these works in progress -- especially from Educators (whether based in schools or after school programs) or Librarians.

I will be giving two talks next week focused on these materials -- on Weds. as part of a webcast for Association of College and Research Libraries and on Friday before the New England Educational Media Association. Hope to see some of my regular readers there.

If You Saw My Talk at South By Southwest...

On Saturday, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You) and I delivered the opening remarks at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. Conference organizers told me that we were heard by around 2000 people, including those in the large auditorium and in various overflow rooms. So, I've got to figure that a certain percentage of those people are going to be visiting this blog for the first time in the next week so I am pulling together a guide to where they can read more about some of the topics we discussed. For the rest of you, you might want to check out this very elaborate chart which was "live drawn" during our discussion and which does a reasonably good job of mapping out some of the core topics. For those of you who want to learn more about the New Media Literacies, you might want to check out the white paper my team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation which identifies 11 core skills and cultural competencies which we think young people need to acquire to become full participants in this emerging media culture. The MacArthur network has generated a series of books on key topics surrounding digital media and learning which can be downloaded for free.

If you'd like to read more about the politics of fear and the ways it blinds us to what's really going on as young people engage with media, you should consider this blog post and this document which danah boyd and I co-authored in response to the push to regulate school and library access to social network software.

I discussed the concept of collective intelligence in relation to Wikipedia in this post, which is an early draft of an article which will appear soon in The Journal of Media Literacy. For the distinction I raised between "collective intelligence" and "the Wisdom of the crowds," you might read this post which considers how both might be tapped through serious games.

Steven and I chatted a bit on the relative merits of The Wire (which I described as one of the best shows "inside the box") and Lost (which I characterized as one of the best shows "outside the box"). Here's an earlier discussion of Lost in relation to shifts in how we process television content. For a fuller consideration of Lost as a new form of television, you might check out CMS alum Ivan Askwith's Masters Thesis on engagement television. For an interesting take on The Wire, see Jason Mittell's essay here. And of course, Johnson's own Everything Bad is Good For You brought the debate about complexity in popular culture to a much larger public.

I spoke at some length about Harry Potter fandom. These ideas are more fully developed in the "Why Heather Can Write" chapter of my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I expanded my thinking on Harry Potter fandom this summer here at the blog. The remarks on Harry Potter were inspired in part by the fact that I appear in a new film (which I still haven't seen), We are Wizards, which was premiering at the South by Southwest film festival.

I've had several people ask me about what I meant when I suggested that the amount of energy and creativity that surrounds fan culture might be understood, at least in part, in the context of a culture which fails to tap the full intelligence and creative energies of its citizens. I suggested that many of the women I had met in the fan fiction writing community, for example, held jobs, such as those of a librarian, school teacher, nurse, or nanny, which require high level of education for entry but often do not tap that knowledge as regularly as might be ideal. Many of these women use fan fiction as an outlet for their surplus creative energies, as a way of getting recognition for their accomplishments outside of the workplace, and as a means of forming community with others who share the same frustrations and fantasies. The same is true for fans of many other types: they are able to do much more outside of the workplace than they are allowed to do in their jobs. Someone asked me if I had meant women. Well, women are certainly as a group devalued and under-utilized in our society and this may account for why such a large number of them are participating in online communities of all kinds and accomplishing extraordinary things. But the same would be true of many other groups, including a larger number of young men. The point is that we look in the wrong direction when we pathologize fans for finding creative outlets through participatory culture rather than asking why America is not more actively cultivating that intelligence and creativity through every aspect of our society. (None of this is to suggest that fan activities are meaningless in their own right or need to be justified by appealing to more 'serious' values. As I also said during my remarks, humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.)

We talked about the Obama campaign and its relationship to collective intelligence and social networks, a topic that I explored in my blog very recently. From there, we extended to talk about the concept of civic media, a topic which allowed Steve to talk about his new project, Outside.in, and for me to talk about the work we are doing through the newly launched Center for Future Civic Media at MIT.

In response to a question from the audience, I spoke about the newly created Organization for Transformative Works, a project by and for fans, in response to the commercial exploitation and legal threats surrounding their culture. It's a good example of how we can use the mechanics of participatory culture to exert pressure back on other institutions.

And if you want to hear my conversation last year with danah boyd, you can find it here.

For those of you who are new to this blog, welcome. Explore the backlog of posts. Stick around for more conversations on participatory culture, collective intelligence, and new media literacies.

Multimedia in Spanish Classrooms: Harry Potter Comes to School

The Comparative Media Studies Program often provides a temporary home to scholars from all over the world who want to learn more about our approaches to research and teaching. At the present time, we have scholars in residence from Spain, Denmark, Austria, China, and the Czech Republic. Spain's Pillar Lacasa has come back for a second stay with us. Her background is in psychology and her current interests center around the educational use of computer games and other digital resources. She and her collaborators shared some of this research during the Media in Transition conference a year ago. Here, she shares some more of her impressions and insights based on field work in Spanish schools -- in this case, work which involves teaching children and adults to think about what we call transmedia navigation. Here, she is using the Harry Potter franchise to encourage a closer attention to what each media platform brings to our experience of this popular adventure saga. SPANISH CLASSROOMS AS MULTIMEDIA CONTEXTS: CHILDREN, FAMILIES, TEACHERS AND RESEARCHERS WORKING TOGETHER

by Pilar Lacasa

Recently, Henry shared some field notes about the place of digital media in Chinese society, considering not just how particular people use these media, but also how this use has a specific meaning in the Chinese political and cultural context. He was speaking about the rhetorical use of the "games addiction" concept, which specifically considers that "playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive" i.e. that game-playing is taking up the time of young people that they could better be spending doing their school homework and preparing for standardized testing. Henry's comments suggested to me that very similar reflections could be made about these debates in many other parts of the world.

Let me explain a little bit about Spain, my own country. Our team has been working in Spanish schools as participant researchers and ethnographers, exploring how games and other digital tools might be used to enhance education. Many families, some teachers and even school principals have complained to us about how children waste their time playing games or surfing the Internet looking for information that adults do not regard as very suitable for children. What are the reasons for these opinions? Put simply, many adults are afraid to approach these new worlds and digital universes that they don't know how to explore or don't find interesting.

When chatting with such adults and exploring these thoughts in more detail, we begin to understand than behind this less than enthusiastic approach to digital tools lie much stronger beliefs about what learning in and outside of school actually means. For many we spoke with, the idea of learning is related only to schoolwork, the content of the curriculum, and particularly those specific materials that have almost always been present in the classroom: books, paper and pencils, textbooks, etc. All of these cultural tools are associated with the academic culture and the school context. What people think is learning is closely related to the formal context in which people have traditionally always learnt; that is, the schools and the tools that have been used there for centuries. However, as educators we believe that an important challenge today is to redeploy certain technologies that were originally designed for leisure-time use towards educational purposes.

How can digital technologies, not just computers, be of value as learning tools? This is the question. To recognize the question is easy, even simplistic, but, for the time being, to achieve this goal demands the participation of teachers, families, investigators, companies and, not least, children. One of the first steps in meeting this challenge will be to introduce digital tools other than computers into classrooms, not just occasionally but on a permanent basis, at least as much as other traditional objects. But how can they be used? Could specific tools that have being designed just for fun also be used in schools? From our perspective new ways of teaching and learning need to be explored, enabling children's and adults' activities as active learners, capable of creating new knowledge by using the tools that they use in their everyday life.

Adopting this perspective, our team of researchers in Spain are exploring the possibility of constructing these new educational innovative settings, in which families, children, teachers and researchers, and even industry, working together, learn to use some of the digital tools that are present in everyday life. Why are these digital technologies especially appropriate for supporting new approaches to learning? Through our project, teachers and researchers begin to prepare relatively innovative school homework in which parents and children could collaborate in interesting tasks that motivate them to bring to the schools topics and ideas from their everyday life, such as family stories, real problems people need to solve in their own work, and so on. We were thinking about how to open the school doors to topics beyond the curriculum. This homework was usually presented in the form of paper and pencil tasks. What happened in these families after they had been working for at least three months in this way with their children? We recorded many conversations at home when parents and children were working together, but contrary to our expectations, no innovative educational settings appeared. Family members were acting at home as teachers do into the classrooms, but in an even more traditional way. They were evidently using the same strategies by which they were taught many years ago.

After this experience we began to look for new educational tools, which we found in the mass media. We brought Newspapers, television, videogames, consoles and any other new technology that the children use in everyday life into the classrooms. But how should we use these new tools? In the course of the past ten years many questions have arisen in our classrooms that discussions and readings at the Comparative Media Studies are helping us to answer. It is obvious that it is not enough to introduce all of them in the classrooms. It is also necessary to design new educational settings within which to develop the new media literacies in order to deal with these new media in a critical, creative and responsible way.

When teachers bring movies, newspapers, television programs, or the internet into their classes, one of the most important conditions for a successful experience in terms of children's motivation and reflective processes is that the teachers should feel secure with the materials that they are using. But bringing commercial videogames into the classrooms is still an especially challenging experience. At the moment, adults are much less familiar with games than other entertainment mass media. Today, commercial videogames are far from what many families or even teachers think could be used in classroom instruction.

Given our starting goals, it was clear that we wanted to integrate games into learning, but we weren't sure how to do so. Our previous work in Spanish schools tell us that at least three main conditions need to be present for innovative experience to be successful in both teaching and learning processes:

• First, to establish close relationships between teachers, families and researchers
• Second, to be involved in a multimedia context in which games are only one of the possible tools we can use
• Finally, to establish a working methodology that attempts to bring into a multiplicity of expressive multimedia codes that children and adults can learn to use together.

Let us show you how these three conditions are present in the Spanish classroom in which we are working. I will try to help you to observe this situation and to construct the meaning that the situations has for us as ethnographical researchers. Please, think for a moment of the context involved. It is January 2007 in a working-class neighbourhood near Madrid. The children and their teacher are waiting for the "new video game teachers", this is the name that the children give to the University of Alcalá research team. They have become used to meeting once a week with some people who do not belong to their school, but who are participants in their classroom; the children understand that we teach in other schools where they are going to be teachers in the future. For the whole of the school year we have been coming to work with them once a week, with the goal of learning together, children and adults, using new media.

This particular day we are going to begin a workshop on Harry Potter; in the previous session we had chosen the topic by reflecting on the pros and cons in a large-group discussion. We all voted for our favourite video game. By this time each of us had different expectations about what would happen on subsequent days in the workshop. Given our previous experiences with other children, the teacher and the researchers tried to find a common task for the workshop: after having talked, played and reflected about Harry Potter, we will write our opinions of the game in our blogs, so that other children should know about our adventures with Harry Potter. Both children and adults will be journalists; people who write so that others members of the community and all over around the world will know the opinions of the class.

During the next three or four session the children were playing at home and in the classroom with the PlayStation 2, with family members and the research team, to find out much more about Harry and his world.

Now let us move on a little further in our schedule by observing a more advanced session during this workshop. As always, this new session begin by talking about Harry Potter. The children knew more than the adults about him. They even bring from their homes objects related to his adventures; they all belong to the popular culture based on Harry and represent this heroic figure, who is very popular in Spain at the moment. For example, there is a game of chess designed with the main characters of the Harry Potter books, films and games, an album of stickers, T-shirts with his image, card games, etc. By showing these treasures to all the participants in the workshops and discussing them, the children showed that they were conscious that Harry is not only the main character of a video game, but it is also present in other media.

In order to look in more depth at Harry's presence in various media, a new activity was designed. We decided to compare selected parts of the film and game based on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. After an introductory discussion on the film, we all watch together the chosen chapter. Later, we talk about Harry and invented a new collective oral story about him. By doing so, the children learn not only to tell stories but also to understand how stories spread across media systems. Moreover, by writing in their blogs the children understand that many other people, such as their families and friends, will be able to read the work that they have done in class, and in that way they begin to understand that there exists an audience that can read their texts and look at their drawings although it is not present in the classroom.

Let us see now the text that two children wrote together to be published in their blog after watching a small part of the film and discussing its relationship with the game.

Blog of Sergio and Miguel

Session 8, 02-06-07

Hello, we are Sergio and Miguel:

In the class today we played with the videogame Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and have seen a little bit of the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Today we learned what are the differences and similarities between the video game and the movie. They look alike in that the characters are the same, as are the magic spells and the adventure involved. And they differ in that in the video game you move the characters and in the movie they move by themselves. The movie is more fun, thinks Miguel. Sergio prefers the video game because you can play.

This brief description of the experience enables us to comment on what conditions need to be in place when introducing entertainment games into the classroom.

First, the text shows that the children are conscious that stories can be told via several different channels of communication. Moreover, the children also knew that each of them has different, ways of expressing particular messages. At that time they were exploring various ways of being in touch with Harry Potter's adventures; e.g. the movie, the video game, the objects that the children had brought to school, the information that they had found on the Internet and the texts that they themselves have published. But what did they learn? I would want to interpret this text by considering that these children show an understanding that each medium has its own rules. Conversations with teachers, researchers, and other students, helped to increase their grasp of abstract concepts such as audience, messages, and the different affordances of different media. How have they learned this? By talking, reflecting and publishing about new media, always being supported by teachers, researchers and families, as more expert members of the community. Doing such tasks at school helped them to understand their lives beyond the schoolhouse walls.

In order to understand this educational innovative experience a little better, something more needs to be emphasized. Let us focus now on the interpersonal relationships among participants. Collaboration between the teacher, the children, their families and the research team was probably the main driving force behind these experiences. This becomes clearer when we study the video-recordings of the workshop sessions or analyse our field notes taken as ethnographers and participant observers. Two main ideas emerge:

• First of all, the classrooms were transformed not only through the introduction of games but also because relationships among participants changed in the course of the workshop. Both children and adults were learning from each other. In many cases, they adopted new and different roles. The relations between children and adults were much more symmetrical at the end of the workshops than they had been at the beginning, even though what each of the participants were teaching was really different. While the children were focusing on the procedural dimensions of the games (e.g. how to solve a specific problem to go to another game screen), adults were orienting the conversations towards a much more reflective level, e.g. how the individual media related to each other, what were their specific messages, who were the people for whom the children were writing in their blogs.
• Secondly, extensive observations of recordings of the classroom conversations show that the participants' goals also differed according to their own particular roles. For example, when the games consoles arrived in the classroom, or when we compared the video game and the movie, the teacher's interest was vividly aroused by the way in which the children can learn from the game certain content that is closely related to the curriculum. In contrast, and just as was to be expected, the most important goal of the children was just to play the game; to become immersed in it. Their families, who know of their classroom work by reading their blogs or because they were working with their children at home became interested in the games consoles as learning tools. What is was our goal as a research team? We think that we tried to be "good mediators". At the end, we came to a deeper appreciation of just how difficult it was to address these different goals through a common workshop.

Pilar's background is in Psychology and Media Education. During the past ten years she has been working with her students at the University of Alcalá (Spain), collaborating with teachers and families to facilitate the acquisition of new forms of literacy that enable children and adults to develop as global citizens in their community, as producers as well as active receivers of media content. She's a visiting scholar at CMS where she's looking for new theoretical and methodological approach to a transmedia education. At this moment they are working on a collaborative project with Electronic Arts to define innovative educational settings, introducing specific video games and other new media into the Spanish classrooms so that they can be used as educational tools in both formal and informal contexts. She recognizes that when she was lost, looking for new perspectives to design these new educational contexts, it was very useful to discover Ravi Purushotma's work and the MacArthur Foundation's report.

Learning From YouTube: An Interview with Alex Juhasz (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first installment of a two part interview with filmmaker, activist, and cultural critic Alex Juhasz. In the first part, we focused primarily on a course she taught this fall on YouTube, describing some of the pedagogical issues she encountered, and some of the ways her course got distorted through mass media coverage. Today, she is focusing more fully on some of her concerns about profoundly "undemocratic" aspects of YouTube, concerns which her teaching experience brought into sharper focus. While Juhasz and I start from very different perspectives, I see her critique as a valuable starting point for a conversation about the ways that YouTube does or does not achieve our highest goals for a more diverse and participatory culture.

You've expressed concerns about the blurring between education and entertainment in the Youtube environment. What concerns does this pose for you?

We are clearly living in a time where conventionalized methods must be re-thought because of the increased functions of the media. Teaching and learning are two conventions that will adapt in the face of web 2.0. Now, I've been an advocate of critical pedagogy my entire career as a professor. In particular, I have been keen on refiguring power, expertise, and objectivity in the classroom attempting instead to create more collaborative, imaginative pedagogic interactions where there is a self-awareness about how embedded structures of power (race, class, gender, age, expertise) organize classroom participation, and access to learning. That said, while trying to learn through YouTube, there were significant challenges posed to the traditions of teaching that both my students and I experienced as obstacles. So maybe I'm not as radical as I pretend!

Before I enumerate these, I would beg your readers to consider whether these are hold outs to a lost and dying tradition, and good riddance (as some of my students believe), or whether there are certain tried and true approaches that were developed and nuanced over time because they work: methods of teaching and learning we don't want to lose even as technology brings us new possibilities.

We found that just what defined YouTube as good entertainment -- its compelling lack of depth and expertise, and its all but disappeared procedures of coherence, order, and forced attention -- made it poor for education. Of the many surprises and challenges of this class, it was most dumbfounding for me to find how resistant my students were to the loss of discipline, authority, and structure in the classroom. They hated the amount of process this demanded; disliked that I wouldn't just tell them stuff; were reluctant to do course work in a new format in which they lacked training; and generally wanted me to take control so that they could attend to other things and know what they needed to do to satisfy me.

Why, we might ask, do they enjoy the aimlessness and devaluing of authority on YouTube, but still want it in their education, even as any student would say, in a heartbeat, that they wish school was less boring, more fun, more entertaining? We found that the rigorous, controlled, contained, and rationale argument is key to learning; not the flow, but the building of knowledge. Meanwhile, ease of acquisition, while comforting, and perhaps numbing, to my mind can never meet the sheer joy of a challenge, and the prize of the steady, often communal and hard work of growing complexity. While its nice to wast time on YouTube, people want to get something (hard) from a class!

Your students pointed towards a fairly limited range of representations of race and gender in YouTube content. Why might such stereotypes persist in what is in theory an open and participatory channel? More generally, what factors do you think limits the cultural and ideological diversity of current digital culture?

I ended up learning a lot from this class (particularly from its unique YouTube-like structure) and even more from its students (which is where I started, I did believe correctly that on this subject they could educate me). Their keen observations about the down-side to user control were a revelation to me, lefty media activist, who has made a career around expanding media access. YouTube uses its users for almost everything: they create content, sort it, judge it, and censor it, all the while producing the revenue which runs the company by producing both its content and its consumers. There are incredible opportunities this affords us as a society: primarily unparalleled access to the thoughts, experiences, interests and documents of the daily life of real people, as they wish to be seen and heard. However, two other key results are less beneficial, especially if we want to think of YouTube as a democratic commons, which is certainly how it sees itself and is broadly understood. First is the idea of mob-rule, and how it functions for censoring.

Currently, on YouTube, if a few people flag a video as being objectionable, down it may go, within an opaque system and with no recourse. My students have learned that controversial opinions, outside the norms of the society, are often so flagged and censored. This is not a commons, where everyone has a right to a voice.

Furthermore, my students found that the system of user-ranking, or popularity, has the effect where normative or hegemonic ideas rise to the top of YouTube. The society's already accepted opinions about race, or politics, are most highly valued, receive the most hits, and thus are the easiest to see.

Meanwhile, there is a lively world, just under the surface on YouTube, where opinions counter, or critical, to those of the mainstream are articulated. However, given that the search function relies first upon popularity, this niche-tube is hard to locate, and is currently playing a small role in the conventionalizing standards of this new form. As I've said before, access is only one part of an equation of liberation. In this case, I'd highlight education in media literacy, aesthetics, theory and history as equally formative.

Many critics have praised the role of confessional video in the hands of feminist and avant garde filmmakers (the works of Sadie Benning for example) yet you seemed critical of the ways that this mode gets deployed on YouTube. What differences do you see between the two?

Patty Zimmerman's Reel Families traces the various factors which have historically turned amateur media content into "home movies," locked away in the domestic sphere, ridiculed as uninteresting to anyone beyond the immediate family. Whatever else one may say about Youtube, however, it has

brought amateur media content into broader public visibility, allowing it to circulate well beyond its communities of origin and in ways that allow greater control for contributors than found in, say, America's Funniest Home Videos, an outlet Zimmerman ridiculed. Would you agree?

These two questions are closely linked in my mind. Of course I agree that YouTube has opened access to video production and distribution, and that many of these newly allowed videos appear in either the home or confessional mode (a sub-set of the YouTube staple, the talking-head or rant). But this is where my particular project interfaces with, or perhaps veers from, that of the study or use of the home movie (or mundane, or DIY media) rather than the activist or art video. I am less interested in the fact of who produces, as much as I am how she does so and in what context. I am most interested in media cultures that allow regular people not simply to document their lived experience, not merely to reflect their experience through and to the norms and values of the dominant culture, but to create art and/or opinions about their lives and culture, in the name of a stated goal (of world or self-changing), and to an intended community.

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part One)

I am posting tonight from the west coast, having flown out to California to participate in 24/7 A DYI Video Summit being hosted by the University of Southern California. The event brings together videomakers from a range of different communities -- everything from fan video producers to activists who use Youtube to get their messages out to the world. I am thrilled to be participating on a plenary panel on the future of DYI Video, featuring Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown, Joi Ito, and Lawrence Lessig, hosted by Howard Rheingold. As I was getting ready to head out to the conference, I conducted an interview for the blog with media scholar Pat Aufderheide (of the Center for Social Media) and Law Professor Peter Jaszi, both from American University. I've long been interested in the work Pat and Peter have been doing promoting fair use in relation to a range of different communities of practice -- including documentary filmmakers, media literacy instructors, and producers of online video content. We featured some of the work they were doing through the Media in Transition conference at MIT last year. You can hear a podcast of that discussion online. I wanted to check in with them because in the past few months, they've issued several major new studies on the impact of copyright confusion on our culture, work which is setting the stage for efforts to identify "best practices" and to negotiate "acceptable use" standards to broaden the protections afforded those of us who are tying to integrate media production activities into our classrooms or who are involved in mashing up content as a form of expressive practice. Today, I am running the first installment of this exchange.

A recent study by the Pew Center for Internet Research suggests that almost 60 percent of teens on line have produced their own media content and a growing percentage of them are circulating that content beyond their immediate friends and families. What are the implications of this growth of grassroots media production for our current understandings of fair use?

PA: A more participatory media culture is definitely going mainstream. While it's still true that many more people watch than make at the moment, you're right to point out that young people are growing up as makers, and seizing upon blogs, online video and social networks to express and even form their identities. There are DaxFlame aficionados, and there are dozens of take-offs on "Dick in a Box," and "Dramatic Chipmunk" has spawned "Dramatic Snake" and "Dramatic Squirrel" and even compilation and fan websites for the phenomenon.

Many practices enthusiastically being pioneered and developed online involve use of copyrighted material. That's normal for new cultural creation. It builds on existing culture. Our culture is markedly commercial and popular, and our current copyright regime features default copyright (your grocery list is copyrighted when you've written it down) and very, very long terms (meaning that nothing you'd want to quote ever seems to fall into the public domain). So quoting of copyrighted culture will continue to be a key tool of new cultural producers.

Those new cultural producers often today believe that they're doing something illegal by quoting copyrighted culture. That's partly because of relentless miseducation on the part of corporate owners of content. They are justifiably terrified of peer-to-peer file sharing and other digital copying that threatens their business models. Their response has been to demonize all unauthorized use of copyrighted material as theft and piracy.

At the same time, they're desperately trying to revamp their business models for a digital era, and are making the blanket assumption that all unauthorized copying could be a threat to some as-yet-unimagined or as-yet-unpracticed business model.

Well, you wouldn't want to be them at this moment, it's true. At the same time, when they ignore the right of fair use, they are ignoring a very vital part of the law.

They're now worried about online video as a kind of "DVR to the world." So content providers like NBC Universal and Viacom are working out deals with online video providers like Veoh and MySpace, for specialized filters and software to identify copyrighted material. These filters will be able to "take down" videos that are copies of copyrighted material. The trouble is, nobody has yet figured out how to protect online videos that may be using copyrighted material legally, under fair use. As Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, it's like going tuna fishing without a dolphin-safe net.

Until now no one has known how big the problem of accidentally suppressing legal work really is. Our study, called "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video," (available at centerforsocialmedia.org/recut) demonstrates that it could be a very big problem indeed.

Many online videos, we showed, use copyrighted material in one of nine ways that are eligible for fair use consideration. (We weren't saying that they all are examples of fair use, only that these kinds of uses can be seen and in some cases have been widely recognized as fair use.)

Many of the precedents concerning fair use could be read as protecting specific classes of users -- the right of journalists or academics to quote for the purposes of reviews or critical commentary, for example. To what degree can or should those rights be extended to include amateur media producers?

PJ: It's really not a question of extending rights, but of making users aware of the right they already have. Fair use has been around as a judge made doctrine since the mid-19th century, and back in 1976, in its (for once considerable) wisdom, the Congress came up with a formulation of the doctrine that was general in its application rather than specific to any area or areas of practice. The problem for any group of practitioners is knowing how fair use applies to them and having the collective courage to rely on it. Some groups (journalists and academics are good examples -- and commercial publishers are another!) have done well at this over the years, and as a result they enjoy use rights that are apparently more extensive. But the truth is that documentary filmmakers, K-12 teachers, and on-line video producers have the same entitlement to fair use as everyone else.

That's why the "Best Practices" approach that we've been working on over the past several years is so important. It's an effort to help practice communities claim their legal rights by formulating consensus statements of what kinds of unlicensed use of copyrighted materials are necessary and reasonable for the creative work they do.

YouTube's impact has directed much greater public attention onto the work of these amateur media producers. In your white paper, you walk through a range of different genres of media appropriation and remixing. Which of these are the most clearly protected under current law? Which seem most at risk?

PA: First, a note: Because we're at the end of the mass media era, and because the pioneers of participatory media have been end-users or non-commercial producers, we think of this as an "amateur" movement. But it won't be for long. It'll just be expression in an open digital environment. Some of that expression, whether it's produced by professionals or not, will be monetized; much of it, most of it, will be available to be monetized. So the neat distinctions between professional and amateur, and between non-commercial and commercial use, are getting a lot messier and will soon be unhelpful. One thing we're very sure of is that we won't solve this problem by creating a non-commercial, amateur zone. Now, everyone's a player.

In our study, we identified a wide range of kinds of practices -- remix/remash (Ten Things I Hate about Commandments), quoting of a whole work for online commentary (The Worst Music Video Ever), critical commentaries (analysis of Fox news bias for instance), tribute videos (Steve Irwin), diaries (Me on Stage with U2 -- again!!), to name a few. We also saw a wide range of actual practices within those genres. One of the things we didn't do was to pass any lawyerly judgment on the fair use of any particular instance. We stopped at identifying kinds of practices as fair-use eligible, which is all that the survey we did permits us. We think this is very valuable because the kinds of practices are all clearly eligible for fair-use consideration. We hope that the next phase of our work, creating a best-practices code, will provide guidance to help people make judgments for themselves about what is fair use.

You can, however, make some generalizations:

• It gets harder to claim fair use the closer people get to merely quoting the work without commenting on it, reframing it, or adapting it.
• It gets harder to justify fair use the closer the copier's purpose is to the original.
• It gets harder when the quotation is longer or more extensive than is justified by its purpose.
• It gets harder to claim fair use the more the copier is intending to monetize the original item in order to compete with the copyright owner.
• It gets harder when proper credit isn't given.

We also found that it's very easy for everybody to understand why it's o.k. to use copyrighted material for critical, political and social commentary. People understand that you can't critique something without referring to it, which in video would also involve hearing and seeing it. They also see critical speech as a great example of the First Amendment.

What's harder for people to grasp is that it's also o.k. to use copyrighted material to make new work that may be illustrative or celebratory or illustrative rather than critical, or may re-imagine the culture as remixes do, or may archive it, or may simply record reality that includes it. Why is that so hard to grasp? All this activity uses the same cultural processes, the building of new work and meaning on the platform of the old. We think it's because people have cultivated, in the mass media era, a cult of the author, a belief in creativity as the product of the genius of the individual creator. This of course flies in the face of everything we know about the creative process, which is a social, collective and iterative one. It also flies in the face of cultural evolution. After all, until very recently in the West, copying was homage, copying was learning.

Many of these amateur media makers know little about the law. Most of them lack the resources to seek legal advice about their work. What steps can or should be taken to protect their fair use rights?

PJ:We're suggesting that a "blue ribbon" panel of experts in law and communications should take on the task of developing a set of "Best Practices" for fair use in on-line video production. The first step would be to talk with a wide range of producers (and platforms) about what they regard as necessary and appropriate quotation. Then the panel would be in a position to craft a document that would be a useful reference for media makers themselves and for the platforms that make their work available – as well as for the content owners themelves. In particular, it would be a point of reference that platforms and content owners could use when they develop mechanisms (like filtering techniques or take down protcols) designed to block or disable infringing on-line content. Everyone seems to agree that mechanisms of this kind shouldn't interfere with fair use, but unless there is some consensus about what constitutes fair use in this new area of practice, these pious affirmations aren't likely to be translated into meaningful practice. In the extreme and unlikely case that an issue involving fair use and on-line video were to find its way to court, a "Best Practices" statement also would help to guide the courts. Following a long-standing (and sensible) tradition in fair use decision-making, judges in these cases pay close attention to practice communities' views of what is fair and reasonable. (More about tradition and its implications is at www.centerforsocialmedia.org/files/pdf/fairuse_motionpictures.pdf),

And, of course, if a media maker working within the framework of a "Best Practices" document were to be sued or otherwise harassed, there would be a healthy supply of expert IP lawyers lining up to defend that person on a pro bono basis. IP progressives -- and there are plenty of them in the legal community -- always are looking for good "test cases" to demonstrate the reach of fair use. In fact, Stanford's Fair Use Project is actively looking for such cases, and would offer legal defense if it could find one.

Pat Aufderheide, one of American University's Scholar-Teachers, is a critic and scholar of independent media, especially documentary film, and of communications policy issues in the public interest. Her work on fair use in documentary film has changed industry practice, and she has won several journalism awards. She is the founder, in 2001, of the Center for Social Media, which showcases media for democracy, civil society and social justice. She recently received the Career Achievement Award for Scholarship and Preservation from the International Documentary Association.

Peter Jaszi is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law. He holds expertise in intellectual property and copyright law. He was Pauline Ruvle Moore Scholar in Public Law from 1981-82; Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Awardee in 1982; and he received the AU Faculty Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Development in 1996. He is a member of the Selden Society (state correspondent for Washington, D.C.). Previously he was a member of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. trustee, 1992-94; International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property; National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C., Animal Welfare Board, 1986-present; Library of Congress Advisory Committee on Copyright Registration and Deposit (ACCORD), 1993. He has written many chapters, articles and monographs on copyright, intellectual property, technology and other issues. He was editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994 (with M. Woodmansee) (also published as a law journal issue, 10 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 274, 1992). He is co-author of Legal Issues in Addict Diversion (Lexington Books, 1976) and Copyright Law, Third Edition (Matthew Bender & Co., 1994).

Sharing Notes about Collective Intelligence

Last week, my travels took me to San Antonio where I delivered one of the keynote addresses at the Educause Learning Initiative conference -- a gathering focused on the application of technology for learning at the college and university level. My presentation, "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About New Media Literacies," drew on materials we have been developing through Project nml and was based in an article, originally published here on the blog, soon to appear in The Journal of Media Literacy. The conference organizers are distributing a podcast of the talk. One of the highlights of the Educause Learning Initiative conference is the release of the 2008 Horizon Report. Each year, the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative work together to prepare a report "that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expressions within learning-focused organizations." The report positions these technologies in terms of their likely horizons of impact on higher learning -- hence the report's name.

This year's report profiles the following technologies:

• Grassroots Video -- "virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software."
• Collaboration Webs -- "collaboration no longer calls for expensive equipment and specialized expertise. The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and free, and require no installation."
• Mobile Broadband -- "each year, more than a billion new mobile devices are manufactured -- or a new phone for every six people on the planet....New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content -- content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network."
• Data Mashups -- "mashups-- custom applications where combinations of data from different sources are 'mashed up' into a single tool -- offer new ways to look at and interact with datasets."
• Collective Intelligence -- "the kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of people is collective intelligence."
• Social Operating Systems -- "the essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content...Social operating systems will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know."

The presenters, and some of the attendees, signaled some disappointment that Virtual Worlds did not make the final cut this year, suggesting that there is still some disagreement about their viability and their long-term impact on education.

The Horizon report can be downloaded off the web and goes into some detail about each of these technologies and processes. I was personally very pleased to see such a strong focus not simply on collective intelligence but in other forms of collaboration and social networking. As we suggested in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation, newer forms of literacy might best be understood as social rather than individual skills, having to do with the ways we share knowledge and pool resources within a larger community. Our white paper identifies collective intelligence as a core social skill and cultural competency which young people need to acquire if they want to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape.

The Horizon report situates collective intelligence on a Time-to-Adoption Horizon of Four to Five Years, though they identify forms of collective intelligence at work within many of the current Web 2.0 applications. They identify a range of current applications of collective intelligence principles in projects shaping environmental studies, history, meteorology and astronomy.

In the past, I have drawn a distinction between collective intelligence (based on the work of Pierre Levy) and "the Wisdom of the Crowds" model (proposed by James Surowiecki). The first is based on a model of deliberation in which diverse groups of people consciously compare notes and work through problems together. The second is based on a model of aggregation as individual decisions made autonomously get collected and mapped through some technology. The Horizon report makes a similar distinction:

"Two new forms of information stores are being created in real time by thousands of people in the course of their daily activities, some explicitly collaborating to create collective knowledge stores like the Wikipedia and Freebase, some contributing implicitly through the patterns of their choices and action....Explicit knowledge stores refine knowledge through contributions of thousands of authors; implicit stores allow the discovery of entirely new knowledge by capturing trillions of key clicks and decisions as people use the network in the course of their everyday lives."

Both forms, the report notes, have educational implications:

"Sources of explicit collective intelligence provide opportunities for research and self-study and give students a chance to practice the construction of knowledge -- they can contribute as well as consume....Implicit collective intelligence is already revealing a great deal about everyday patterns of activity based on programs that mine datasets of information from huge numbers of human actions."

There are several important implications of this move towards the use of collective intelligence in education:

• As I noted in my keynote remarks, the push towards collective intelligence requires us to rethink the nature of expertise and the historic monopoly that schools and institutions of higher learning have claimed over the production and circulation of knowledge. Collective Intelligence recognizes that there are diverse forms of expertise and that we learn more if we draw on as many different minds as possible rather than placing our trust in singular minds. At the same time, this push towards collective intelligence should force academics to engage more actively in public dialog with other kinds of "experts" who operate outside of the so-called "Ivory Tower." We have much to contribute, and much to learn, through participation within these larger conversations, which are being enabled through networked computing.
• Most of our current educational practices are based on the assumption that schools produce autonomous thinkers. We need to rethink our pedagogical practices to reflect the way knowledge is being produced and distributed within a networked culture. This means that we need to help young people identify and foster their own expertise while giving them skills at weighing evidence and arguments presented by others who also participate within their knowledge community. It means that we need to help them develop a set of ethical practices which holds them responsibile for the value of the information and insights they contribute to the group.
• Collective intelligence is going to work best on a scale larger than the individual college or university. As such, the push towards collective intelligence is closely linked towards moves for distance learning and for open courseware. Yet, it may force us to rethink some of the models shaping our first steps in that direction. Most of these efforts start from the assumption that information travels from an elite centralized institution to a range of peripheral locations. Collective Intelligence, however, starts from the premise that information must circulate freely and equally among all of the participating institutions.
• Collective intelligence places a new value on diversity -- this is true in both the explicit (deliberative) model and the implicit (aggregative) model. The greater diversity of inputs into the process, the richer the output. Higher education still often thinks about diversity through a lens of affirmative action and remediation. Instead, incorporating greater diversity into a collective intelligence process benefits all of the participants.

As it happens, Project nml has been developing a range of classroom activities focused on helping young learners develop a better understanding of the practices and values associated with collective intelligence. Erin Reilly, the Project's Research Manager, recently shared with me a report about a field test of some of those materials which they ran with teens from Boston's Youth Voice Collaborative. I offer it here as an illustration of some of the ways these principles might be incorporated into classroom teaching practices:

The first group activity was called "Stump the Expert". This activity put their adult facilitator, Julian ("The Expert"), in the position to work on his own and write down all that he knew about Caribbean culture …his own stated expertise. While Julian was making his long list, the girls collectively worked to jot down phrases and words on the board; anything they knew about the Caribbean culture. When Julian came back into the room, he looked at the board and laughed, stating, "Wow. You guys got a lot." He then showed the girls his paper and said how he'd written full sentences. He had started his list with the etymology of the word Caribbean. Lana Swartz, a NML Research Assistant and the Focus Group Facilitator, remarked how starting out with the origin of a word was a really good example of what an expert does.

The two lists were very different and very good in different ways. The one from the girls was totally random and not connected with each other; while Julian’s list was more like an expert where things were organized. With the two lists together, the knowledge pooled was that much greater and when the girls were asked what Collective Intelligence means to them. One girl said, "all together" and they all agreed.

This low-tech group activity was an introduction to the Exemplar Library. The group searched the skill Collective Intelligence and a video on Wikipedia pulled up. With the learning activities embedded into the multimedia material, the cue-point was when Kevin Driscoll says, "and nobody owns that sandcastle, you all built it together, you're all proud of it, and you all get the benefit of each others’ work so you really are relying on each other. And Wikipedia is like that sandcastle, except no ocean is going to wash Wikipedia away." At that point, the girls could have continued watching the video or pause and step into the exemplar to participate in the online activity. Stepping in, they were introduced to the Platial.com website, where collective intelligence is used to make maps. The clip provided a demonstration of how to make a map mash-up and they began to create their own maps.

The girls worked in two groups of two and one girl worked on her own. They were given the choice and this is what they chose. Interestingly, both 'working alone' & 'working in a group' had its drawbacks. For the kids who were in groups of two, one of the girls tended to do the whole computer part, (though in both groups, the other girl didn't seem to mind). For the girl on her own, she had the drawback of not having anyone to brainstorm and make a plan with (Luckily, Julian, the adult facilitator, jumped in and played that role which was a good example of the informal mentorship that is a key trait in participatory culture).

The girls had a great time with the activity and a picture was taken of the whole group and posted on the YVC marker on their Platial.com map. There was lots of laughing when they saw the picture. It's a fun picture. When asked if they would make these maps with their friends, they all had a resounding "Yes!"

If you'd like to learn more about collective intelligence, check out the following resources:

Podcast of a session from the Media in Transition 5 conference focused on Collaboration and Collective Intelligence -- featuring Mimi Ito, Cory Ondrejka, and Trebor Scholz, and moderated by Thomas Mallone.

Podcast of a MIT Communications Forum event focused on Collective Intelligence featuring Karim R. Lakhani, Thomas W. Malone, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland and moderated by David Thorburn.

Podcast of a conversation at the ELI conference between George Siemens and Michael Wesch about "Future Learning." I saw Seimens present an outstanding workshop on Connectivism which lay out some core assumptions about the value of social networks and collective intelligence for education.

Those of you who are in the Boston area might want to try to attend another MIT Communications Forum event this term, which is certain to consider issues of collective intelligence:

our world digitized: the good, the bad, the ugly

visionary and skeptical perspectives on the promise and perils of

the internet era

yochai benkler, harvard law school, author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

cass sunstein, univ. of chicago law school, Author of Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge

april 10

5-7 p.m., bartos theater

Field Notes from Shanghai: China's Digital Mavens

As I was getting ready for the trip, I stumbled onto a recently released study, produced by IAC and JWT, which compared the centrality of digital media in the life of teens in the United States and China. I used these statistics in my talk at the conference to suggest the importance of fostering new media literacies and ethics among Chinese youth. Here are some of the report's findings:

• Almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61 percent vs. 13 percent).
• More than twice as many Chinese respondents agreed that "I have experimented with how I present myself online" (69 percent vs. 28 percent of Americans).
• More than half the Chinese sample (51 percent) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans.
• Fewer than a third of Americans (30 percent) said the Internet helps their social life, but more than three-quarters of Chinese respondents (77 percent) agreed that "The Internet helps me make friends."
• Chinese respondents were also more likely than Americans to say they have expressed personal opinions or written about themselves online (72 percent vs. 56 percent). And they have expressed themselves more strongly online than they generally do in person (52 percent vs. 43 percent of Americans).
• Chinese respondents were almost twice as likely as Americans to agree that it's good to be able to express honest opinions anonymously online (79 percent vs. 42 percent) and to agree that online they are free to do and say things they would not do or say offline (73 percent vs. 32 percent).

In almost every category, Chinese youth expressed an even deeper investment in the online world than their American counterparts. It is particularly compelling the degree to which they use digital media to escape constraints on their real world experience, whether local constraints imposed by parents and schools or larger societal constraints imposed by governments.

We need to be careful about framing these findings through Cold War discourse which stresses the free west against the repressive east. It seems more useful to think about the different constraints on participation teens in each country face in their offline lives and the ways that online experiences may allow them at some limited experiences of transcending those constraints. Of course, in both countries, there are ongoing struggles about how much access to and what kinds of participation teens should enjoy in the online world.

Several people I've spoken with here, however, have sought to qualify the picture of Chinese digital youth culture represented through the study. They note, for example, that while Chinese youth have extensive access to blogging technologies they have little to no access to social networks like MySpace and Facebook and they are blocked from being able to use Wikipedia except through elaborate proxies. (I've struggle while I have been in China with having my own access to wikipedia cut off behind the firewall.) Others suggested that Chinese youth have been very active in helping to translate western media content, including the work of participatory culture, into Chinese but have been much slower to embrace such cultural practices themselves. Some have adopted judgmental perspectives on this participation gap suggesting that the Chinese take but do not give to the culture of the web.

Certainly, we can point to the visible contributions of amateur Chinese media makers to YouTube -- most notably, of course, the Back Dorm Boys. (See an interview here conducted by my CMS colleague Beth Coleman as part of her Project Good Luck initiative designed to better understand the rise of digital culture in China.) Yet, I am told they have been much slower to embrace re-mix or modding practices or to generate their own fan fiction, though some have told me that this is starting to change at a rapid pace.

One might hypothesize that Chinese and American teens deal with the uncertainties of the digital environment in different ways: many American teens are unaware of the potential consequences of posting their own content on the web, showing ignorance or naivity about the intellectual property implications of such activities or the long term impact of digital content on how they are perceived by schools or future employees. The Chinese youth, living in a very different cultural and political context, seem less willing to take risks and probably much more awareness of the potential ramifications. They seem to value the freedom they find online all the more because they know what the stakes are in their exercise of those freedoms.

Others stress that the difference may have to do with the language barrier of the online world. Chinese young people may have more skills at translating English content for their own community and may have stronger incentives for wanting to access that western content; Chinese youth perceive the west as having little interest in what they have to say and little willingness (not to mention capacity given how rare it still is for schools to offer courses in Chinese languages) to help close that gap in terms of translating their content into English.

From Zoey's Room to Project NML: An Interview with Erin Reilly

Yesterday, I introduced you to Matthew Weise, a producer from our GAMBIT lab, and a key figure behind our games research efforts. Today, I wanted to introduce you to another researcher who recently joined the CMS community -- Erin Reilly, Research Director of Project nml. The New Media Literacies (NML) project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is developing a theoretical framework and curriculum for K-12 learners that integrate new media tools into broader educational, expressive and ethical contexts. NML is partnering with classrooms and after school programs around the country to test curriculum prototypes created by CMS students and program affiliates.

Before coming to MIT, Reilly was co-creator of Platform Shoes Forum's model program Zoey's Room, a national online community for 10-14 year-old girls, encouraging their creativity through science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Zoey's Room has proven results in advancing STEM and Media Literacy skills. In 2007, Erin received a national educational Leaders in Learning Award from Cable in the Classroom for her innovative approach to learning through Zoey's Room. A recognized expert in the design and development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered by virtual learning and new media applications, Erin has been a featured speaker, panelist and keynoter at several industry events. Erin serves on the Working Committee of Pop!Tech (http://www.poptech.org), an internationally acclaimed technology event that can be seen on PBS and the Technology Committee of the Maine Arts Commission.

Knowing how many of my readers have a strong interest in the use of new media for education, I asked Reilly to share some of her insights from working on Zoey's Room and to give us a preview of what you can expect to see from Project nml in the coming year.

Tell us about Zoey's Room. What were the goals of this project and how do you measure it success?

Zoey's Room is a safe, online educational community developed by Platform Shoes Forum to creatively engage 9- to 14-year-old girls in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

The goals of Zoey's Room are to encourage middle school girls to:

• Learn science, technology, engineering and math skills in a fun, collaborative online environment by completing online activities and offline challenges on their own or in a group.

• Behave responsibly and ethically online and to be Internet Safe

• Participate and share in an informal learning environment, and

• Be better prepared for the technological demands of a future workforce.

Fewer than a dozen Science, Technology, Math, Engineering (STEM) websites are currently available online for middle school girls right now. Of them all, Zoey's Room is the only STEM website that features a multicultural character "Zoey" who appeals to both rural and urban girls. Zoey hosts her own chat room for girls every day after school. She encourages girls to explore STEM topics through fun challenges called Tec-Treks, that expand their knowledge on a range of 21st century skills. Additionally, each month, Zoey leads informative chats with "Fab Female", women role models who have STEM professions. This unique interpersonal connection, along with the collaborative nature of the Tec-Treks, encourages girls to become more interested in STEM careers.

We measure the success of Zoey's Room not on the number of its members but on the girls' safety, progress in academic fields, and retention in the program. The extensive research behind Zoey's Room allowed us to develop a practical application, which includes an on-going assessment of each member's participation and learning. Evaluative tools include a benchmark survey taken when a girl first joins the program, annual assessment polls, and one-on-one feedback from online members and adult facilitators.

Specifically, a sample of 100 girls participated in the Zoey's Room 2006-2007 benchmark and final survey. When asked the answers to very specific STEM questions we put to them in the survey, the majority of girls got 12 out of 13 of the answers right--which proves to us that they actually learned terms and concepts and principals of certain STEM topics by doing the various Tec-Treks. But beyond statistical measures, what girls are saying about Zoey's Room matters the most.

"Math is my favorite subject - I'm (now) interested in numbers and problem solving"

"We need more ideas like Zoey's Room; being a girl is hard and we need all the support we can find since it's hard to discover that at home, with our friends, or our schools."

"I think that Zoey's Room is the best idea in the whole entire world. On Zoey's Room, a safe environment is provided where questions can be answered and girls actually have a voice."

What factors have historically limited young girl's comfort with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math? How has Zoey's Room overcome these problems?

Reports like "Shortchange Girls, Shortchange America" (1991) and "Gender Gaps" (1998) by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) were the catalyst for starting a program like Zoey's Room. Through aggregated research and internal studies, these reports uncovered the need for schools to provide equitable education for girls in the areas of STEM. AAUW found that to instill math, tech and science skills in girls; we need to educate girls to be designers, not just passive users of technology- and Zoey's Room encourages that. Given the social and collaborative nature of girls, a girls-only self-paced learning environment seemed a natural platform. The next step was to make this environment engaging and attractive to girls by including community tools.

Though girls today are more apt to be interested in technology, they are still not pursuing further as advanced courses or career aspirations. According to a more recent report," What We Know about Girls, STEM, and After-school Programs" (Cheri Fancsali, Ph.D. for Educational Equity Concepts) girls are much less likely to major in science-related fields in college; less likely to complete undergraduate and graduate with STEM degrees. Beyond that, women comprise a disproportionately low percentage of the STEM workforce, earn less, and are less likely to hold high-level positions in STEM careers. What does that mean for our society? Today, eight of the 10 fastest growing jobs in the U.S. are computer related. By 2010, jobs in the technical and mathematical fields are expected to increase by 67%. If this trend continues, not only does it seriously cripple young women's potential financial earning power, but as more jobs in the future demand technological proficiency, this trend can be a detriment to the nation's intellectual resource pool.

In the last five years, numerous studies have documented concrete methods to get girls re-engaged into learning "hard skills." Programs for girls combining hands-on activities, role models, mentoring, internships, and career exploration have improved girls' self-confidence and interest in STEM courses and careers and helped reduce sexist attitudes about STEM (Campbell and Steinbrueck, 1996; Ferreira, 2001).

The AAUW Commission also stressed the need for adult female role models to engage younger females in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math for girls to begin reshaping their own perceptions about these fields as career choices. A recent Girl Scout Research Institute (GSRI) study showed that girls tend to make career choices based on their role models rather than their academic interests.

Joseph Bernt, an Ohio University professor of journalism, and one of the authors of a nationwide study funded by the National Science Foundation about the media's influence upon middle school children found "this age group spends more time interacting with media than in school or with family, or even with their peers. This means that media has to start providing better role models for girls. Zoey's Room is our example of creating a fun, creative, positive use of media. By harnessing the media for education, we hope to inspire girls with other role models.

In a recent column, I argued that the term, "digital natives," masked lots of differences in young people's access to and participation within digital media. What kinds of differences in skills and access have you observed through your work on Zoey's Room?

I think we've grown up in a culture that we have to label everything, but by doing this we limit the truth of who people really are. Using labels like digital natives and digital immigrants is just another way of stereotyping people. Anyone who's participated in community online knows that it's these places where stereotypes are broken down. The anonymity of the web allows for the girl you'd never hang out with in school to become one of your closest allies online. It's a congregation of girls interested in a particular subject rather than hanging out on a particular social norm that sets precedence in the school cafeteria.

Children have to learn technology skills just like we adults. The only way they are going to learn the skills are by trying it out or asking for help. This metaphor makes it sound that every kid is a native to the digital environment. It doesn't take into account that kids and adults all have different experiences with digital technology. And it also doesn't take into account the guidance and supervision that happens in communities and the positive results occurring when an informal mentorship happens between an adult and a child online. It really depends on how much access they have to the technology in order to be comfortable. These skills are unevenly distributed across our population and can easily be seen in the Zoey's Room membership. We have many home-schooled girls using Zoey's Room who are much more savvy online than girls who doesn't have a computer at home and only get to use the computer when she meets with her after-school Zoey's Room club.

The chat and message boards on Zoey's Room are filled with peer-to-peer sharing of how to do something online. (See the below image for example of girls sharing how to change fonts within chats).

The message board tech tips wouldn't be filled with this information if girls came into the program knowing how to do everything digital.

I also argued that adults might have more to contribute in helping young people adjust to new technologies than the phrase "digital immigrants" implied. How did you harness adult expertise through Zoey's Room?

We harnessed adult expertise in Zoey's Room by creating a mentoring pipeline through our Friends of Zoey and Fab Female components. High school girls can apply to be "Friends of Zoey", which are junior staff members who interact online with girls and encourage them in Tec-Treksâ„¢. The FOZ began as an internship program for girls who have aged-out of Zoey's Room but still wanted to stay involved and developed into these girls being the community hosts of Zoey's Room as well as keeping content evergreen.

As I mentioned earlier, Fab Females are female role models who have professions in STEM. Past Zoey's Room "Fab Females" have included a NASA Food Technologist, Microsoft IT manager, a marine biologist, a paleontologist, and digital artist, designers and film makers. Fab Females have asked to stay involved beyond the chat session. With an increase in membership this year, we're opening up a space in the community for on-going interaction between Fab Females and the members.

Not only are our Friends of Zoey the glue to the online community, but also these girls build leadership skills by recruiting and interviewing our Fab Females to conduct online chat sessions. They also work with these Fab Females for additional Tec-Trek activities.

Online safety was a central concern of your work on Zoey's Room. Many adult fears about young people's experiences online are misguided, but some are not. What do you see as the most realistic concerns and what steps did you take to address them?

Since we work with children under the age of 13, the biggest concern is following the guidelines of COPPA, and we worked closely with the FTC to ensure our registration was COPPA compliant. However, this doesn't guarantee that a person signing up is who they say they are and we all know how easy it is to change your birth date to make you whatever age you want to be. So, how do we protect girls from encountering just anybody on our site?

We've partnered with a 3rd party verifier to ensure all adults who register a girl for an account are subject to identity verification. Before confirming a girl's membership to Zoey's Room, our process verifies the data collection of adult registrants to ensure they are who they say they are. This is a reactive approach and does not provide the answer to safety but we hope this extra step will deter folks who are joining the community for reasons other than its intended purpose.

Past the access point, Zoey's Room creates a proactive approach to safety and ethics by training Friends of Zoey how to help moderate and monitor the chat room and message boards every day for ongoing protection of its members. We also create an environment where members watch out for each other and know the guidelines they need to follow to participate in the community... and I think this is the best approach to take. I conduct adult workshops and stress to attendees how important it is to have open conversations with your kids and help educate them of proper conduct online.

Lately, we find the biggest concern is not safety but ethics. We've found that when confronted with someone prying too much, they usually quit out of the program and shut down. Their natural instincts kick in. However, it is mob mentality and bullying that causes the most damage. Zoey and Friends of Zoey provide peer-to-peer guidance in how to handle the situations and have been known on more than one occasion to be the bridge to acceptance of each other.

What did you learn from the work on Zoey's Room that will help us expand the community around Project NML?

The first thing we started with this year was defining our audience. If it's for teens, make it for teens. Don't worry about the adult. If teens like it, the adults will join in. If teens don't like it, you and the adults will always feel like its work.

"Today's American teens live in a world enveloped by communications technologies," states a 2005 Pew Internet and Life Report titled "Teens and Technology.

Whether adults are comfortable with this technological revolution or not--it's happening. According to the Pew Report more than 87% of teens and tweens between 12-17 are using the Internet and their preferred method of communication is online in the form of Instant Messaging, Chat Rooms, and Social Networking sites with older girls taking the lead nationally as the "power users" of the Internet.

In Zoey's Room, we foresaw this trend in 2002 when we created a moderated chat room for girls only with the sole purpose of appealing to girls' natural collaborative and communicative natures as a platform to introduce "stealth" education in the form of Tec-Treks and role models.

We also saw the success of having a place for members to showcase their work and get feedback. Each of the Tec-Treks is project-based and not yes or no or multiple choice answers. Tec-Trek projects are loaded for not only Zoey and her friends to give feedback but also the other mentors.

I've seen first-hand that community is the glue to learning online. If you lose community, then you might as well be reading a book on your own without ever joining the book club for discussion.

I hope to take the Zoey's Room "pipeline" community to Project NML. This approach encompasses the traits recognized in participatory culture, including:

• Low barriers for artistic expression & civic engagement

• Strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others

• Some type of formal mentorship (pass it along to newbies)

• Members contribution matters - reinforce your contribution is important

• Some degree of social connection matters

And first and foremost, I bring the knowledge of lessons learned in the field. Of having taken theories and created a successful digital learning application. Having processed what works and doesn't work will help Project NML be successful and hopefully push the digital learning community further.

What have you learned through working on Project NML so far that helps you think differently about Zoey's Room?

In your graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods, you ask your students to interview a media maker and to try to get a sense of the theoretical assumptions underlying their work. Zoey's Room has been a practical application but the research that we looked at to develop Zoey's Room was girls and STEM. We were media makers so we didn't look at the media theories to develop... we just did it.

Since becoming Research Manager for Project NML, I realize that we intuitively created a participatory culture for members of Zoey's Room. Even though the program was about encouraging girls in STEM, it is an example of a shift in media literacy from thinking about what media does to helping change our mindset to what choices we make as users / producers of media. This is an active way of participating in media instead of the passive way to what media we consume.

We cannot have media literacy be a separate class / add-on at the end as we've seen in the past decade. Instead it needs to be infused cross-curricular.

Reviewing the skills against Zoey's Room Tec-Treks, I see these skills come into play both in and out of the digital realm. There are connections of how kids are connecting in the digital realm to what they should be doing in the classroom. This skill set is not just about high-tech activities. This is an opportunity to help kids acquire skills on how they process knowledge so that they can participate in a new way.

We've been rethinking the goals of Project NML since you've come on board, but the impact of that rethinking has not yet been made visible to the public. What can you tell us about the Project's future plans?

This semester, we've created new approaches to working on this project that really has allowed everyone on the team to understand the goals we want to deliver.

We are currently immersed in production with a goal to re-launch Project NML's interactive website Fall 2008. The new website will allows users to create their own pathways through our exemplar library and have users create and add their own material to the exemplar library.

The exemplar library is a sampling of the participatory culture framework centered around the 4 C's ...how do we Create, Connect, Communicate and Collaborate. It is an interactive learning library that creatively encompasses a best practice video with an online activity and offline group challenge. The library is built on an extensive backend database where each piece is tagged on multiple traits including; the 11 new media literacy skills, media tools, traditional subjects, and the 5 ethical categories created by Harvard's Good Play project.

The exemplar library will also have some online activities that highlight our collaboration with Harvard's Good Play project. These activities will provide a springboard for discussion on a dilemma centered on one of the five ethical categories: identity, ownership / authorship, privacy, participation and credibility.

As community is the glue to learning online and Project NML will provide a venue for all users to answer the question, "How do YOU create, connect, communicate and collaborate?" This type of user-generated content will allow for the library to expand by the community and for new best practices to emerge, be shared and discussed.

Whereas Project NML's exemplar library is informal learning directed to the teen, the Teacher's Strategy Guide: Education in a Participatory Culture provides structure for a teacher to integrate the new media literacies into the traditional classroom. The framework includes a lesson plan, with extension link of ways to extend the 1-2 class period lesson plan into a semester or year-long project with options to tie to other class subjects as well as a side bar that provides entry points to engage the student through the Project NML exemplar library.

We currently are in development of our first guide called Moby Dick: Remixed and are currently seeking 10 high school English / Literature teachers to test our Teacher's Strategy Guide: Education in a Participatory Culture in Fall 2008. Moby Dick: Remixed help students to better understand the appropriation and transformation of pre-existing cultural materials which shaped some of the most cherished works in the western cannon. The guide provides a set of lesson plans that juxtapose Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley's theater performance Moby-Dick: Then and Now and is a clear example of the new media literacy skill: appropriation.

Our next steps are to develop material for history / geography teachers. The next guide will be called Weaving the Threads - Social Mapping to Global Citizenship. This project will couple children's interest in cultural diversity with our own interest in the New Media Literacy skills required to process new forms of simulation and representation, producing a project which challenges participants to think about their relationship to their space in fresh new ways. Such a curriculum should enhance traditional social science education, while allowing students to become active participants in their learning rather than passive recipients, because it is in this approach that we help our children become global citizens.

Mentorship will continue with expansion into a media franchise. One of the motivating factors of the community is to develop a character based on the 4 C's. This character will be customizable per user and provide rewards for motivation within the community. This character has the potential to be the lead character in an e-zine style program targeting Tweens. With the collaborative learning community online, the strategy guides deployed to the classroom and the television series, Project NML will be a transmedia experience that helps foster the new media literacies.

If you'd like to become a test school for Project nml, please contact our outreach coordinator Jenna McWilliams at .

Want to know more about new media literacies? If you live in the Boston area, you might want to check out a forum being held at the Brattle Theater at Harvard Square on Dec. 12, 5:30 pm:

MIT Press And The MacArthur Foundation Present

Totally Wired: How Technology Is Changing Kids And Learning

Are digital media changing how young people learn and play? A public forum featuring Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Henry Jenkins (MIT), and Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design), hosted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of its $50 million digital media and learning initiative. The panel will be introduced by Jonathan Fanton, MacArthur President, and moderated by Connie Yowell, MacArthur's Director of Education. Free and open to the public.

Free and open to the public

The event is designed to celebrate the launch of a new series of books being released by MacArthur and the MIT Press which share state of the art research on how kids learn and what they encounter in the new media landscape. The first six books in the series are being released this month and will be available online as of December 12.

Reconsidering Digital Immigrants...

Editor's note: The blog will run at a reduced schedule this week and next. I plan one more post this week and three posts at the start of next week. Then, the blog is going to be shut down for a while as we move to a different server and deal with some of the aftermath of the cyber-attack we received earlier this term. This may mean that I don't get back into the full swing of things before the start of the new year. Sorry for the inconvience. Hopefully this will allow us to resolve some of the issues we've been having with the comments section of this blog. I have written here in the past about my growing discomfort with the phrase, "digital natives" -- which like all metaphors helps us to see some aspects of the world clearly while masking others.

Like many of you, I first encountered these metaphors in the work of Marc Prensky and saw them as a powerful new way of thinking about generational differences that were creating an impass in debates about media literacy education. Prensky laid out these metaphors in a 2001 essay for On the Horizon which has been widely read and cited.

Here's some of what he claimed:

Today's students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a "singularity" - an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called "singularity" is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century....

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize....

What should we call these "new" students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

Prensky's deployment of the concept, as he himself has acknowledged, tapped a much larger history of use of these metaphors in talking about cyberculture. danah boyd and I have been corresponding lately, trying to track down some of the roots of this phrase. She finds, for example, that the same metaphor surfaces in John Perry Barlow's "Decleration of Independence for Cyberspace," one of the landmark documents of the first phase of the so-called "digital revolution":

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

Prinsky has also pointed towards a passage in Nicola Griffith's science fiction novel, Slow River (1995):

Those born before 1960 had the hardest time adjusting to change. They were the ones who would suddenly stop in the middle of the street as if they had vertigo when som shop window flared or called out, or get that haunted, bewildered look when the PIDA readers changed again, or the newstanks swapped to a different format.

It was a very specific expression: hollow-cheeked, eyes darting, looking for somewhere to hide. I had seen that same look on the faces of war refugees, or the foreign-speaking parents of native-speaking children. Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change - not like us.

And Prensky's use of the term in Digital Games-Based Learning references Douglas Rushkoff's Playing the Future: How Kids' Culture Can Teach Us to Thrive in an Age of Chaos who wrote, "kids are natives in a place that most adults are immigrants"

Talk of "digital natives" helps us to recognize and respect the new kinds of learning and cultural expression which have emerged from a generation that has come of age alongside the personal and networked computer. Yet, talk of "digital natives" may also mask the different degrees access to and comfort with emerging technologies experienced by different youth. Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

The best writing about digital natives acknowledges these issues, though it has not yet abandoned the word, in part because none of us have come up with anything better to capture the truths that struck many of us when we first heard this metaphor. Here, for example, is how Harvard's Digital Natives Project justifies its continued use of the term:

Are all youth digital natives? Simply put, no. Though we frame digital natives as a generation "born digital," not all youth are digital natives. Digital natives share a common global culture that is defined not by age, strictly, but by certain attributes and experiences related to how they interact with information technologies, information itself, one another, and other people and institutions. Those who were not "born digital" can be just as connected, if not more so, than their younger counterparts. And not everyone born since, say, 1982, happens to be a digital native. Part of the challenge of this research is to understand the dynamics of who exactly is, and who is not, a digital native, and what that means.

Talking about digital natives also tends to make these changes all about digital media rather than encouraging us to think about the full range of media platforms which shape the world around us or for that matter, the complex set of relationships between old and new media that characterize convergence culture. The digital may be what feels new to us who are of older generations but it isn't as if these young people were exclusively interacting through digital platforms.

Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants tends to exagerate the gaps between adults, seen as fumbling and hopelessly out of touch, and youth, seen as masterful. It invites us to see contemporary youth as feral, cut off from all adult influences, inhabiting a world where adults sound like the parents in the old Peanuts cartoons -- whah, whah, whah, whah -- rather than having anything meaningful to say to their offspring. In the process, it disempowers adults, encouraging them to feel helpless, and thus justifying their decision not to know and not to care what happens to young people as they move into the on-line world.

In reality, whether we are talking about games or fan culture or any of the other forms of expression which most often get associated with digital natives, we are talking about forms of cultural expression that involve at least as many adults as youth. Fan culture can trace its history back to the early part of the 20th century; the average gamer is in their twenties and thirties. These are spaces where adults and young people interact with each other in ways that are radically different from the fixed generational hierarchies affiliated with school, church, or the family. They are spaces where adults and young people can at least sometimes approach each other as equals, can learn from each other, can interact together in new terms, even if there's a growing tendency to pathologize any contact on line between adults and youth outside of those familiar structures.

As long as we divide the world into digital natives and immigrants, we won't be able to talk meaningfully about the kinds of sharing that occurs between adults and children and we won't be able to imagine other ways that adults can interact with youth outside of these cultural divides. What once seemed to be a powerful tool for rethinking old assumptions about what kinds of educational experiences or skills were valuable, which was what excited me about Prensky's original formulation, now becomes a rhetorical device that short circuits thinking about meaningful collaboration across the generations.

More and more, I am also concerned about some of the implications of the "immigrant" metaphor. Let's go back and reread what Prensky said about "immigrants":

The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past. The "digital immigrant accent" can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today's older folk were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you - an even "thicker" accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting web site (rather than just sending them the URL). I'm sure you can think of one or two examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the "Did you get my email?" phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at ourselves and our "accent."

But this is not just a joke. It's very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling.

Digital immigrants compute with an accent: they talk funny.

Digital immigrants are being defined by what they lack with cultural difference seen as an obstacle they must overcome if they are going to fully assimilate into the modern age.

Digital immigrants are seen as imposing old world standards on the inhabitants of a new world and of getting in the way of their sons and daughter's opportunities to achieve.

These are some pretty out of date assumptions about immigrants -- ideas as old as Ellis Island -- and there are certain dangers in re-enforcing these stereotypes in the midst of a national debate about immigration. Surely, we should recognize what digital immigrants bring with them from the old world which is still valuable in the new, rather than simply focus on their lacks and inadequacies.

Keep in mind what a high portion of the folks working in Silicon Valley today are immigrants -- information workers from around the world whose expertise and mastery over these new technologies are allowing American companies to succeed. So, real digital immigrants can probably outcompute most of the so-called digital natives.

Sure, some of the problems of current education are caused by teachers and parents refusing to take seriously new kinds of identities, new forms of knowledge being produced through young people's informal learning in the online world. That's at the heart of what we have been trying to achieve through our New Media Literacies Project -- offering new ways for educators to think about what it means to learn within a participatory culture. But reading adults as fundamentally incapable of making that adjustment or as unable to offer meaningful advice to their offspring will not improve things.

Many young people are trying to confront unfamiliar problems on their own, without anyone around them who fully understands what they are dealing with or who can give them meaningful advice about the problems they are encountering. Young people don't need grown-ups snooping over their shoulders but they do need adults to help watch their backs as they venture into realms which are often as unfamiliar to them as they are to their parents.

At one time, the digital immigrant metaphor might have been helpful if it forced at least some adults to acknowledge their uncertainties, step out of their comfort zone, and adjust their thinking to respond to a generation growing up in a very different context than the realm of their own childhood. As Prensky concludes, "if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives - i.e. all their students - they will have to change." Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now -- implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

So, what would digital multi-culturalism look like? Can we come up with a different set of metaphors to talk about these issues?

Want to know about the debates surrounding youth and digital learning. If you live in the Boston area, you might want to check out a forum being held at the Brattle Theater at Harvard Square on Dec. 12, 5:30 pm:

MIT Press And The MacArthur Foundation Present

Totally Wired: How Technology Is Changing Kids And Learning

Are digital media changing how young people learn and play? A public forum featuring Howard Gardner (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Henry Jenkins (MIT), and Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design), hosted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of its $50 million digital media and learning initiative. The panel will be introduced by Jonathan Fanton, MacArthur President, and moderated by Connie Yowell, MacArthur's Director of Education. Free and open to the public.

Free and open to the public

The event is designed to celebrate the launch of a new series of books being released by MacArthur and the MIT Press which share state of the art research on how kids learn and what they encounter in the new media landscape. The first six books in the series are being released this month and will be available online as of December 12. I will be talking more about the series in future posts.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming (Part One): Revolution

This is the first installment of a five part series showcasing the evolution of The Comparative Media Studies Program's thinking about Serious Games. Each installment will focus on a different games-related project, while a conclusion will describe the commonalities in how we think about games and learning. I am starting this series this week to reflect the fact that we are hosting a Communications Forum event today focused on Games and Civic Engagement. The idea for Revolution emerged as part of the Games to Teach Project, funded by a Microsoft iCampus grant, and later became the flagship project for the Education Arcade. It was a complicated project spanning five semesters, starting in Fall 2002 and extending through Fall 2004. It was designed by a team of graduate and undergraduate students, working part time while taking classes. Participants included Philip Tan (Producer), Matthew Weise (Game Designer), Brett Camper (Lead Programmer), David Lee (3D modeling), Giovanni Mendoza (Art), Cassie Huang (Character Design), James Tolbert (Animation), Nicholas Hunter (Programmer), and Bertha Tang (Art).

In a spelling bee, a kid is challenged to memorize a lot of words, there's a fair amount of pressure, and it's kind of grim. If they get a word wrong, the buzzer goes off, they're told they got it wrong, and they are out. There's never a discussion about why they got it wrong, how they could have reasoned about the word to get it right. There's never really much of a discussion about how that word could be used in speech. In fact, the goal for a spelling bee is to learn all sorts of words that you will never use in common speech.

Compare that with a game of Scrabble where kids sit with the letters in front of them and are moving them around, thinking endlessly about all of the different combinations of words and which ones are real. They try to play one and there's a discussion about whether that's a real word or whether that's a real form of the word. Through that process, kids are engaging deeply not just in spelling but in word usage and they're having fun while they are doing it.

-Scot Osterweil

Popular accounts of the Serious Games movement have often fallen back on the image of the computer as a "teaching machine" that "programs" its users - for better or for worse. The fantasy is that one can just plant kids in front of a black box and have them "learn" as if learning involved nothing more than absorbing content. Those who fear that games may turn normal youth into psycho killers similarly hope that games might transform them into historians, scientists, engineers, and tycoons. At the same time, teachers express anxiety that their pedagogical labor will be displaced by the game console.

Putting the emphasis on the program to deliver content has often led to highly rigid and pre-structured play experiences, carefully regulated to conform to various state and national curricular blueprints, with little chance for emergent play or creative expression by the players. In other words, most commercial edutainment titles look much more like spelling bees than Scrabble.

For the better part of a decade, researchers associated with the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (through Games to Teach, The Education Arcade, and The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab) have been researching the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. We have adopted a range of different models for what an educational game might look like - from mods of existing entertainment titles to augmented reality games, from role-playing games to collectible cards - and how they might be produced - including several recent collaborations with commercial media producers and professional game designers. Our games straddle academic fields, including History (Revolution) and Current Events (iCue), Math and Literacy Skills (Labyrinth), Science (Palmagotchi), even Waste Management (Backflow). What links these various projects together has been a design philosophy that focuses less on serious games and more on serious gaming. We see games not so much as vehicles for delivering curricular content as we do spaces for exploration, experimentation, and problem solving.

We do not simply want to tap games as a substitute for the textbook; we want to harness the metagaming, the active discussion and speculation that take place around the game, to inform other learning activities. Researchers have documented not only the ways that conversations around recreational game play reshape the player's perceptions of violence and the social bonds being expressed through play (Wright, 2002), but also the informal learning communities that have grown up around game, such as Civilization 3 (Squire and Giovanetto, Forthcoming), enabling participants to learn world history even as they improve their game performance. Many of our games rely on the mechanics of meta-gaming to get students to articulate what they have learned from the play experience.

This is hardly a new idea: consider the Model United Nations as a well-established pedagogical practice in American social sciences. Essentially, the Model United Nations is a role-play activity where students are assigned to represent delegates from different countries and work through current policy debates. Students don't show up and start playing: the role-play motivates library and classroom activities leading up to the formal event. They don't just stop playing: a good teacher builds on the role play by having students report back on what they learned through presentations, classroom discussions, or written assignments. A hallmark of our serious games projects is that we factor the context and process of play into our game design, insisting that much of the learning takes place outside the box as the experience of gaming gets reflected upon by teachers and learners in the context of their everyday lives.

In this series of posts, we look back on some key milestones in our program's exploration of serious gaming. In each case, we will explore how our understanding of instructional activities rather than curricular content shaped our design choices. Each project represents a different model for how a pedagogical game might work in relation to current educational practices; each also reflects a shared vision that sees play as a key component of learning.

Revolution: A Historical Simulation of Colonial America

By Brett Camper and Matt Weise

Revolution was a total conversion mod of the popular PC game Neverwinter Nights modeled on Colonial Williamsburg. In this classroom-based multiplayer experience, each student would take on the role of a different resident on a single day in the spring of 1775. Students would adopt a variety of classes, races, genders, and political perspectives as they relived the debates surrounding the American Revolution.

The starting idea was broad: to create an online historical simulation for classroom use. We knew we wanted the game to be online, allowing students to learn together socially. And we knew we wanted to base the game on Colonial Williamsburg, which has a long tradition of historical learning through role-play. We felt such a game would be great opportunity to apply our values of learning as exploration and expression rather than rote memorization.

From the outset, Revolution was meant to be an educational game designed by people who were gamers first and educators second: if your game isn't fun, its educational goals don't matter. We wanted to leverage design principles that we knew worked, or at least could work, from successful commercial games. If we could create a game that looked and sounded on par with store-bought games, and that used familiar interface and game-play concepts, we could create an experience that escaped the negative image of "edutainment" while leveraging new media literacies for pedagogical ends.

Initially, one of our biggest challenges was to design for the time constraints of the typical classroom period. Public school teachers typically have an hour or less to get the students settled down, introduce the game, teach the students how to play, have the students play the game, get the students to stop playing, and have a coherent discussion afterward. So how might we design a complete and compelling game play experience under these constraints? We were intrigued by commercial games that use fixed time limits to shape player experience, compressing complex processes into finite units of game time. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, for example, is about helping people as they go about their daily lives in a single town over the course of a fixed time period. The time limit focuses the player on the social space of the game, since Link only has a short time to affect events that will happen with or without him. Inspired, we focused Revolution's time frame into a single day. This day in our virtual Williamsburg would equal 40 minutes of class time, and would represent a key turning point in the Revolution. We wanted players to log into the game and find themselves in a living, functioning simulation of colonial America. The simulation would function with or without player intervention. Players could explore the era's social and political norms by trying to shape events, or they could simply sit back and observe.

Students would learn about history just by mastering the rules of the game, because the rules were abstracted from historical research. We wanted to get away from the drill-and-test model of public education and to challenge the master narrative of history. Instead, we wanted to focus on the choices historical agents made and the conditions under which they made them.

Realities of Development

Our aspirations for Revolution were quite high. Not all of them could have been achieved even with a full-time development staff with years of experience. As with any game project, we had to cut many features and completely redesign others. As we realized we could only implement a fraction of our original design, we tried to preserve our core design goal - to create a genuinely emergent historical simulation.

Our first decision was to forego coding Revolution from scratch and make it as a mod of an existing game. Using an existing engine enabled rapid prototyping and design. Using an existing engine also improved production quality - graphics and sound would already be at a level students would associate with professional games. Since many game companies offer modification tools to consumers for sharing new content, we wanted to explore the advantages of modding for developing serious games.

After much consideration, we settled on the Neverwinter Nights toolset. Neverwinter Nights is an RPG series for the PC that was specifically designed by its makers, Bioware Corp., to support modding projects. There was already a very robust culture of player-made NWN mods, which we could tap for inspiration and experience. We wanted to create a socially dynamic world where students would interact with both player-controlled and non-player-controlled characters, and NWN was built for character conversation, a feature we felt was crucial to the social world we wanted to model.

Technology Wrangling

Game scholar Ian Bogost identifies what he calls "procedural rhetoric" - the notion that a game system's design imparts an ideology. We wanted students to learn how a colonial society worked by interacting with a system, a system designed to embody the ideas we intended. Yet we didn't want the conventions of the NWN toolset (shaped by the commercial role-playing game genre) to transform our historical content in undesired ways. It was not always easy to leverage NWN's existing design limitations in ways that helped, not hurt, our pedagogical goals.

Accurate historical dress, for example, was challenging. In Colonial Williamsburg, men would remove their hats when entering a house. However, in the NWN toolset, hat models are not separate from head models. We could not effectively remove a hat without removing the character's entire head. So we were stuck with characters that either wore hats or were perpetually hatless. We decided to have hats on at all times. This was not 100% historically accurate, but it was less inaccurate than the alternative.

We also had a great deal of difficulty managing violence in NWN. Leaving violence out of a revolutionary setting would not convey the proper historical content. On the other hand, we'd have a disaster if we let students fight whomever they wanted at any time. Our solution was to allow students to be violent, but to have consequences. If one character punches another, they will be briefly arrested and released. While the law in 1775 was not nearly this forgiving or swift, this solution at least kept the students in the simulation and engaged with the historical setting.

Given that there was so much of NWN we could not change, we wanted to at least ensure that the conversation system would enhance the fidelity of our historical simulation. Luckily, it turned out to work better than we ever imagined.

Modeling the Social Dynamics of 1775

Revolution's conversation system evolved from a critique of how knowledge transfer typically occurs within the RPG genre. In many RPGs, information passes between characters as if by magic with no focus on the mechanisms of human communications. One of our development team members described a situation in The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind in which he killed a man, who claimed with his dying breath that his son would avenge him. When the player walked immediately to the son's house, he was promptly attacked. We understood what the designers of Morrowind were getting at: actions have social consequences. But these consequences simply flipped on and off like a light switch. We wanted students to focus on how information flowed through a colonial society and what factors blocked information from passing between different social circles.

NWN's conversation system was well equipped to produce this desired effect. We started by making computer-controlled characters remember what they were told. Then, when they were within a specific range of another character, they would go over to them and share the knowledge they had previously received. A player could pass one piece of information to a non-player character and then watch the news spread virally across town. Once we realized that we could make such a "gossip" system work, we saw all sorts of new pedagogical possibilities. While we originally envisioned a game focused around trades and jobs, much like a visit to Colonial Williamsburg, we began to re-center Revolution around the social and informational mechanisms of the era. In effect, we made Revolution a game about the oral culture of late 18th-century America. Students would need to understand how this oral culture was shaped by the social, political, racial, and gender strata of the time in order to play Revolution effectively.

A player's reputation, for example, could be adversely impacted by gossip surrounding her beliefs or actions, increasing the stakes of political choices. Revolutionaries could pass word to their supporters without information falling into the hands of the Redcoats or their Loyalist supporters. Because information would not pass certain social barriers easily, players had to figure out how to inform everybody about a local rally. If the player's avatar had an upper-class status, the information would spread more easily among the upper class. Gender and race would have similar effects. In this way, different players could work together or against each other in trying to manipulate the flow of information.

Other affordances of NWN allowed us to build in opportunities for students to reflect back on their experiences. Russell Francis, a researcher from Oxford University, asked Revolution players to write diaries or construct machinima movies recounting the events from the perspective of their fictional characters. This process allowed them to share their very different experiences in the game with classmates and gave researchers insights into what they learned and how they learned through their role-play. Francis found that players often combined things they learned in the game with insights from their own lives or things they had read in other accounts of the period. For example, one student, who played the part of a house slave, described feelings of isolation or tension with field slaves as a result of her privileged access to the master. This sense of alienation emerged as much from what she brought to the game as from anything we had programmed into the simulation. Such accounts helped us to better appreciate the ways that the mechanics of role-play enabled students to consolidate what they had learned about the period and communicate it with others.

Matthew Weise is equal parts gamer and cinephile, having attended film school before segueing into game studies and then game development. Matt is a producer for GAMBIT and a full-time gamer, which means he not only plays games on a variety of systems but he also completes (most of) them. Matthew did his undergrad at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he studied film production before going rogue to design his own degree. He graduated in 2001 with a degree in Digital Arts, which included videogames (this was before Game Studies was a field). He continued his research at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he worked on Revolution with The Education Arcade. After leaving MIT in 2004 Matt worked in mobile game development for a few years, occassionally doing some consultancy work, before returning to work at GAMBIT.

Brett Camper is an independent game developer and writer. He received a master's

degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he was a designer and

technical lead on The Education Arcade's Colonial Williamsburg: Revolution

project. He subsequently acted as The Education Arcade's research manager, and

has also worked in digital media as a program manager at RealNetworks. He is

currently a senior product manager at eMusic, the leading digital subscription

service for independent music.

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

Sometimes a class project takes on a life of its own. I asked the students in the CMS graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to work on teams and report on a contemporary media phenomenon, reading it against some of the theories about media change we have been studying so far this term. A team of our incoming graduate students -- Kevin Driscoll, Xiaochang Li, Lauren Silberman, and Whitney Trettien -- decided to focus their energy on examining the ways that Soulja Boy, a teenage hip hop phenomenon, used a mixture of social network sites and YouTube to push his way up into the top music charts.

A key to his success turns out to be his active encouragement of fans to sample, remix, mashup, and perform his "Crank Dat" song through whatever media channels they want. Our Convergence Culture Consortium is focusing this year on understanding what we call "spreadable media," arguing that the era when value was created by "stickiness" is giving way to one where media gains new value through grassroots circulation. If it doesn't spread, it's dead! And the best way to insure the spread of media is to give over greater control to the audience, to increase their emotional stakes in your success.

As the students discovered the vast array of different people out there who were performing "Crank Dat," they wanted to get into the act. And so they got a camera, borrowed some lab coats, used their social network accounts to draw people together, and staged their own music video, which now circulates via YouTube.

As it happened, I stumbled by between meetings, just in time to watch them lining up to dance on the dot. I stayed for a bit trying to master the for-me very challenging dance steps. I always seemed to be zooming like superman when I was supposed to be doing the pony walk. Unfortunately, the real Professor Jenkins doesn't have any of the moves that my avatar enjoys in Second Life. But, I enjoyed watching my students gamble and shake a leg.

To my pride, they showed their budding skills as public intellectuals, having managed to get the Boston Phoenix out to cover the story. Here's some of what the Phoenix reported on the unfolding scene:

In the summer of 2006, DeAndre Way, then 16, combated summer boredom in Batesville, Mississippi, by writing songs with Fruity Loops digital-audio software. He borrowed a cousin's video camera and filmed dances to accompany the music. Thanks to YouTube, Way's choreography quickly turned into a Southern dance craze -- particularly centered around a steel-pan-drum-fueled number called "Crank That (Soulja Boy)."...

This past Wednesday, a day after the release of Soulja Boy's debut album, Souljaboytellem.com, a dozen or so MIT grad students and professors gathered on a circular lawn beside Building 54 at 5:30 pm, blasting "Crank That" from a small gray CD player set on repeat. Some of the group were clad in lab coats and thick glasses as they repeated (and videotaped) the dance -- a crisscrossed jump in place, followed by a few shakes and stomps, a breast stroke-like arm spread, and four jumps to the left and right. "This will single-handedly transform the coolness factor for MIT," commented Henry Jenkins, co-founder of MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program, as he observed nearby.

The meeting of Soulja enthusiasts was organized by students -- including Kevin Driscoll, a/k/a Lone Wolf, a local DJ and former computer-science teacher -- from a CMS graduate course in media theory. Driscoll's lawn-dance party was more than just a way to add a video to the vast library of "Crank That" tributes. He hypothesizes that "Crank That" is a unique bullet point on the dance-craze timeline, symbolic of a shift in dances' virility and how they spread.

"It's by the power of the dance craze that [Soulja Boy] was picked up by a major label," says Driscoll. "It demonstrates how resources like YouTube and MySpace can be these enabling technologies, even for kids, really." The MIT Soulja Boy videos are now on YouTube (and up to about 400 views each, at press time) making them perpetuators of the very trend the participants are studying. At least it's not the Macarena.

Ever since, I've been talking up Soulja Boy as perhaps the most powerful success story we have so far of someone who taped the power of grassroots convergence to break into the commercial mainstream. Check out for example some of my comments about the phenomenon during my keynote address at our recent media literacy conference, organized by Home Inc., which were posted by Bill Densmore

One of the students on the project --xiaochang li-- wrote up her perspectives on "Crank Dat" and what she calls "Hustling 2.0" for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog and I wanted to pass this along to my readers. Next time, I will share her thoughts about how Soulja Boy's most recent music video might be seen as a textbook illustration for how convergence culture works.

Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon

xiaochang li

A little while back, Kevin, one of my colleagues here at MIT, brought the Soulja Boy YouTube phenomenon to my attention while we were discussing an upcoming project.

Fast forward to October: Soulja Boy is fending off Britney Spears and Kanye West on the Billboard Top 100, and you can now watch a rag-tag team of MIT grad students, researchers, affiliates, and Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Movement, crank that. (CMS program director Henry Jenkins even joined in the learn the dance, but sadly had to run off to something undoubtedly important before the video was shot.)

A little bit of context for those who have somehow managed to miss this craze: Soulja Boy produced his own tracks and uploaded videos of himself performing the dance onto MySpace and YouTube. People everywhere started doing their own versions and putting up their own videos, and the whole thing snowballed until people like Beyonce started incorporating the dance into her stage show. By that point, everyone from underground rap magazines to The Atlantic was talking about Soulja Boy.

Beyond the novelty of seeing everyone from Winnie the Pooh to a bunch of vaguely coordinated MIT students doing the "Crank That" dance, the rise of Soulja boy is an interesting exploration of self-promotion in the digital landscape.

Many groups have taken to social networks and video sharing as a means to self-promote, but, as anyone who has ignored dozens of friends requests from bands on myspace.com knows, the effectiveness of all these efforts is inconsistent, at best.

Part of the problem is that there isn't a significant shift in the way in which the

content is presented. Bands produce the same types of videos and promotional materials, except now they're accessible through YouTube instead of MTV. There's little consideration of the unique expectations and practices within these spaces.

In that way, Soulja Boy, who has described computer access as the turning point in the

development of his career, was far better equipped to handle his own online promotion

than any major label executive. In a move that was described on Artist Direct as "Hustling 2.0," Soulja took advantage of the fact that people were already downloading material from other artists, renaming his files as popular songs in order to spread his content. He also has a number of videos which use the particular video blogging aesthetic of YouTube to help brand him as a personality.

This gap in understanding between major media and cultural practices of user-generated content channels is mirrored in the official music video for "Crank That," wherein rap impresario Collipark good- naturedly mocks his own ignorance of the flourishing Web 2.0 phenomenon around Soulja Boy. The whole video, in fact, runs almost like an advertisement for the age of convergence culture, as the dance propagates over multiple channels of distribution, morphing and evolving from streaming video to mobile devices and ultimately ending up in the "real," physical world, and Soulja Boy steps away from his Webcam and chat windows to accept his record deal.

As Kevin pointed out in his blog, he takes the sign of major label recognition more like an award instead of an opportunity, payment for a job already well-done. On that note, it's interesting how the spelling varies between "Crank Dat" on many of the fan produced videos and some of the marketing on Souljaboytellem.com and "Crank That" on the official record, like a linguistic marker to differentiate the D-I-Y phenomenon from the standardization of the song and its incorporation into the established entertainment industry.

Check out the range of videos in the Soulja Boy

universe:

Soulja Boy's YouTube

channel, where you can see the original dance video, the official video, and the

instructional video, in addition to a number of fan videos and clips of celebrities

doing their own versions of "Crank That."

A fairly comprehensive collection of all the audio variations on the song that have appeared. My favorite might be the Folgers Coffee version.

A blog devoted solely to videos of the many, many versions of the dance. Note how the spellings vary from video to video.

When Xiaochang's post appeared on the C3 blog, she generated some interesting responses from the hip hop blogosphere. Check out:

ttp://www.ohword.com/blog/852/crank-dat-white-girl-the-soulja-boy-lesson-plan

http://www.prohiphop.com/2007/10/to-understand-s.html?cid=87651522

Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with David Hutchison, author of Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. In the first part, he discussed his ideas about the place of games in education and about the value of teaching young people to think critically about the games they play. Today, he takes up the question of the place of game design activities in school and addresses some of the criticisms about the pedagogical uses of existing game titles. This part of the discussion is timely since Katie Salens, a major advocate for teaching young people how to think like game designers, will be speaking as part of the CMS colloquium series this week. Watch this blog for information about the podcast of this event. Some of your exercises are designed to get students to tackle design problems and to begin to make their own games. This is very much along the lines of the kinds of design literacy which Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens have been advocating. What do you see as the value of teaching students to think like designers?

I would say that several of the activities can be used as exercises that aim to get students to think like game designers, but it is the Afterword that highlights the important role that game design can play in schools, if only in a cursory way, given that game design is not the main focus of the book.

I like to think of students as moving from being consumers of media, to being critics of it, and then creators of it, so game design is the natural next step once a number of the investigative activities in the book have been completed.

The value comes from seeing students as something more than "students" in schools. What I mean here is that teachers should consider casting students in a variety of creative roles, such as "authors" and "scientists" as they study language arts and science for example. A sixth grade student who writes a story is an author and he or she should be honored as such, perhaps by having their story published, illustrated, bound, and placed in the school library for other students to borrow.

It is a similar process for video games. By seeing themselves as a team of game designers, a group of tenth grade students can work through the very same game development stages that professional designers go through: brainstorming a story idea, pitching that idea to others, writing a story, scenario, and dialog, collecting and designing assets, programming the gameplay, and testing and distributing the game.

The above process certainly sounds daunting and of course it takes a great deal of time and commitment to produce a video game, but the good news is that are now a number of terrific educational game engines that students and educators can choose to use. Several of them streamline the game development process, so that students can focus on creative learning activities, rather than the minutia of programming their game in a professional C+ game engine.

Many educators might agree that games can be powerful motivators of learning but they also may communicate a great deal of misinformation about the world, especially given the fact that most commercial games are built for entertainment rather than educational purposes. How would you respond to this critique?

Even misinformation provides teachers with an opportune teachable moment in my view, if only to correct that misinformation and investigate how it came to be.

Consider the example of Battlefield 2142, the multiplayer first-person shooter which is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which the effects of global warming have reduced the habitable landmass on Earth to a fraction of what it is at present. The battle for control over what little habitable landmass remains is the basic premise that underlies the battles the player fights in the game.

Environmentalists and teachers may wish to take issue with the science that underlies the premise of this game, but the game itself provides teachers with a hook for getting students to consider the implications of dramatic climate change. Although there is now general agreement among scientists that climate change is occurring today and that humans are (at least in part) responsible for causing it, there are competing views among researchers as to the long-term effects of climate change on the planet - some of the changes may even be positive from a certain perspective.

What is represented in Battlefield 2142 may be an extreme view, but there are other dire predictions from climatology experts that teachers can reference as they talk about the issue of global warming with students.

Teachers can also reference the game as they discuss the ways in which the popular media represents scientific research more generally, as well as alarmist views of the future. A key question here may be the role that games, such as Battlefield 2142, potentially play in undermining serious research on climate change. My view is that the game highlights one of the most important social consequences of dramatic environmental change - the competition over increasingly scarce resources - which some environmental and military analysts - I think of Thomas Homer Dixon in particular - argue will lead to more wars in the coming years.

That's the premise of the game and it is represented, at least in a general way, in some of the futuristic military scenarios that see environmental change as a national security issue.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

For more information, check out his website at www.playingtolearn.org

Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part One)

One of the many pleasures of running this blog is being able to introduce my readers to people who are doing cutting edge thinking about the many topics -- from fandom to serious games, from media literacy to civic media, from early sound comedy to transmedia storytelling -- that matter to me. Today, I want to introduce you to David Hutchison, the author of a recently released book, Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. Hutchison's book promises over 100 game activities appropriate for classroom use, a selection that spans across academic subjects (language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, history, geography, health & physical education, drama, music, visual arts, computers, and business) and grade levels (including both elementary and high school). Writers like James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, xx and David Shaffer, have made the conceptual argument for the pedagogical value of games; our own Education Arcade has been one of a number of academic research projects focused on designing, prototyping, and field testing games for instructional purposes; Hutchinson's focus is on what we can do in our schools right now, using projects already on the market, to tap student and teacher interests in games. In the course of the collection, the models many different conceptual approaches for thinking about games -- including many designed to foster core media literacy skills. The result is a book which will be valuable to classroom teachers or for that matter, parents who want to engage their children in meaningful conversations about the place of games in their lives and about how games structure the way we see the world.

I recently had a chance to interview Hutchison about his goals for this project and wanted to share his responses with you. In explaining the value of games for schools, I often say that "nobody is advocating bringing Grand Theft Auto into the classroom" and go on to point to a broader range of other titles which do seem more appropriate for school use. But Hutchinson makes a fairly compelling argument for why schools should be addressing Grand Theft Auto in the comments which follow. His arguments here is consistent with his perspective that just as traditional media literacy involves learning to think critically about mass media, games literacy has to include asking hard questions of this still emerging medium, questions concerning representations, ideology, and of course, commercial motives.

What motivated you to write this book? Why do you think teachers should be incorporating games more fully into their classroom activities?

I wrote this book in part because I enjoy playing video games myself and I am always looking for synergies between my play time and my work time as a teacher educator and university professor. So too, I was fairly surprised to see that a book like this hadn't yet been written given the long history of video games in American culture. I also couldn't find many video game-centered lesson plans on the Web which also surprised me.

I believe that video games should be referenced in the K-12 classroom for a variety of reasons. First, video games can provide teachers with an effective instructional "hook" since so many students are gamers in their out-of-school lives. Second, many (younger) teachers are also gamers. Through gaming, they have cultivated a knowledge base which can serve them well as part of their pedagogical toolset.

Despite this, most of the teacher-gamers I have spoken with over the last two years see a disconnect between their in-school teaching jobs and their out-of-school gaming activities. It strikes me as nonsensical that so many students and their teachers may be going home at night to play the same games, but then returning to the school the next day with no intention of ever sharing their mutual passion for video games.

I would also say that from a cultural point of view, I see some video games as harbingers of the future. They play with the "world" - past, present, and future - in ways that are impractical (sometimes impossible) in the real world. Some games purposefully bend the laws of physics in exploring new virtual gameplay ideas. Multiplayer video games (and the Internet more generally) experiment with new forms of social organization that go beyond our everyday ways of living.

All of this strikes me as pedagogically interesting and worth studying in K-12 schools.

Some previous books have focused on teaching about games, others on teaching through games, but your book seems to encompass both. What do you see as the advantages of each?

I would say that most of my book treats the "video game" as a cultural artifact that has a history, was created, is used in various ways, and is sometimes discarded for various reasons.

In this sense, I would say that the activities in the book are more focused on teaching using games. I have heard from a few video-games-in-education researchers who see the activities in this book as a good beginning point, but not necessarily the end point of where we need to go in integrating video games into education. To a certain extent, I would agree with this view.

For example, except for a couple of activities, the book does not focus on living life in a virtual community, such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. Educating students in Second Life strikes me as teaching through games. But so does learning about military tactics by playing America's Army. James Paul Gee's work gets to heart of how playing video games can transform the learning experience and even supplant traditional ways of teaching and learning in schools.

I would say that my book is more focused on traditional teaching and learning techniques in which the video game is studied as a cultural artifact, rather than "lived through" as an embodied pedagogical experience. Activities which ask students to write a video game review or analyze the leaderboard statistics for a driving game in math class, for example, are fairly approachable by most teachers. They essentially treat the video game as a manipulative that can be utilized as a pedagogical tool by teachers in a wide variety of subject areas.

Your introduction suggests that you see schools as "one of the last remaining formal institutions that can mediate popular culture by examining it closely, holding it to account, and even transforming it at times." What is it about schools which enable them to play this role? What about the argument that schools have historically declared war on popular culture and thus have shown themselves to be anything but objective arbiters of its merits?

This is a phrase that I have also used elsewhere, including my previous book which explores the history of the idea of "place" in education.

I am on purpose expressing something of a idealistic sentiment here that harkens back to the early 20th century promise of a democratic system of public schooling, as articulated most famously by John Dewey and, even earlier, Horace Mann. The basic notion here is that the public school is responsible to the state (which in turn represents the citizenry) and that one of the important roles of the public school is to balance out the decentralized and largely unregulated influence of other social institutions, such as the family, church, private sector, and popular culture. Dewey argued that through purposeful social inquiry guided by the principles of the scientific method, schools could foster in students a democratic impulse that strengthened the social and democratic commons - hence the notion of the "common school."

Today, public schools are bureaucratic institutions that are generally underfunded, used for political fodder by both the right and left, and tasked with an overwhelmingly complex job. Yet schools still remain the last bastion of mandated community involvement in child socialization. As parents and citizens, we count on this bastion to mediate, counter, and offset the unchecked influence of other less formal institutions, such as the peer group, family, and popular culture, by providing a corrective or compensatory measure to a student's education. This role is fraught with difficulty and it is often contested - which is appropriate in a democratic society.

Such corrective or compensatory measures may only sporadically be successful, indeed, sometimes they fail miserably, but I would say that the idealism that schools can continue to play this role is still in place in the eyes of many adults - why else would so many battles continue to be fought over the role and purpose of public schools in American society?

Many teachers might want to "protect" children from exposure to media violence, yet some of your activities ask students to pay close attention to controversial titles, such as Bully or Grand Theft Auto. What do you see as the value of teaching youth to adopt a critical perspective on such games? And what do you say to those who might argue that you are putting them at risk by asking them to engage with these works?

In writing the book, I set it as a goal for myself to incorporate the Grand Theft Auto series into at least one activity. (The "Hot Coffee" controversy was brewing around me as I began writing the book :) The GTA activity I chose tasks students with creating their own kid-friendly open-world game that doesn't include all the adult content we normally associate with games in this franchise.

I also wanted to encourage teachers to deal with controversial ideas related to video games. There are contributed discussion articles in the book that address debates related to video games and violence, video game addiction, gender bias in video games, and health and video games.

My sense is that the book could have been roundly criticized - and rightly so - if I had chosen not to deal with the many criticisms made of video games - for example, that they produce obese layabouts with no social contacts in the real world who are prone to violence and live in a fantasy world 

Discussing the above stereotypes in class is worthwhile in my view. Studying these stereotypes by having students conduct research to test their veracity is even better. There are also activities in the book that aim to help students effect personal lifestyle changes related to their video game playing habits, such as paying close attention to their posture and reducing the amount of time they spend playing video games each week.

It seems to me that there is disconnect between gamers and those critics - Jack Thompson is a popular strawman here - who look at games from outside and see little of value worth highlighting. Since many students are gamers when out-of-school, it makes sense that turning a critical eye toward video games and especially social, medical, and legal commentaries on video games are appropriate topics for study in schools.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part Two)

Some critics of the idea of participatory culture have argued that only a small percentage of people want to generate or share content with other people. Even advocates such as Bradley Horowitz have argued for a pyramid of participation in which a small group at top become creators while others help to circulate and critique what they create. Should we then accept that the new participatory culture is only modestly more democratic than what has come before? What do you see as the implications of these inequalities in participation? What does your research suggests about the steps which need to take place before someone begins to participate in these expressive cultures?

Absolutely, these issues are vitally important. If participatory culture is a site of cultural citizenship, but the most active participants are already a privileged elite, then we have a problem ­ a problem for democracy. You refer to this as the participation gap instead of the digital divide and reframing the problem this way is an incredibly important intervention. The unevenness of participation is not a consequence of lack of access to the hardware and software and internet connections, but a consequence of uneven motivations and literacies.

The digital storytelling movement is an explicit attempt to intervene in these issues creating situations where ordinary people can work with more experienced media producers to create considered works based on their own life narratives. Just a note for readers who may not have come across the Digital Storytelling movement before: the form of Digital Storytelling I talk about in my work is a specific tradition based around the production of digital stories in intensive collaborative workshops. The outcome is a short autobiographical narrative recorded as a voiceover, combined with photographic images (often sourced from the participants own photo albums) and edited into a short movie. For examples, have a look at the Centre for Digital Storytelling (www.storycenter.org), the BBC¹s Capture Wales digital storytelling project (http://bbc.co.uk/capturewales) and one of our projects

here at QUT, the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project (http://www.kgurbanvillage.com.au/sharing/digital/index.shtm).

In comparison to Web 2.0 platforms for amateur creativity like YouTube or Flickr which rely on autonomous participation and peer learning rather than top-down training, digital storytelling works to broaden participation by connecting everyday vernacular experiences and practices (like oral storytelling) with professional expertise and institutional support. Common to all branches of this tradition is an ethic of participation: one of the core aims is to provide people who are not necessarily expert users with an opportunity to produce an aesthetically coherent and interesting broadcast quality work that communicates effectively with a wider, public audience.

But digital storytelling is mainly focused at the production end -- the creation of artefacts, albeit in an intensely social workshop setting. Much of what is so interesting in new media contexts does happen on the web, though, and those who are able to participate most effectively in those spaces are highly skilled in new and emerging literacies. In particular, I talk about network literacy -- understanding that participation in blogging, or vlogging, or in the Flickr community, or whatever, is not just about creating something great and broadcasting it ­ it's also about being part of social networks. In fact, the social and cultural value that is generated by these online creative communities is very much a product of both social networking and creative practice, in a convergent relationship. It¹s not just great content, and it¹s not just connectedness, and it's not just findability and relevance, it¹s all of those things. That's what Flickr's interestingness algorithm, as a way of re-presenting the most valuable images on the network, is all about. So the point is that ongoing, engaged participation in creative communities is just as vital for effective participation as the creative competencies and aesthetic literacies particular to your chosen artform, whether that's photography, music, vlogging, or whatever. And at the same time, those who want to learn more about photographic techniques, say, couldn¹t do better than to actively participate in a social network that¹s organised around photography, like Flickr.

There has been a growing body of criticism focused on the discourse of web 2.0 and its concept of user-generated content from the perspective of creative labor theory. Flickr has been seen as emblematic of this new creative economy. How does the corporate construction of user-generated content differ from or resemble your concept of vernacular creativity?

Let me say to begin with that I don't like the term user-generated content very much at all. First we're masses and now we're generators? Users isn't great either, but it's hard to think of a better term for the relationship it describes. I tried to use vernacular creativity as much as possible because it focuses on the practices of users in relation to their own lives; not as the sources of content in relation to online enterprises.

But to move on, I'm not really an expert in labour theory, but the debate around user-led content creation in relation to labour is really interesting because of how much it says about the unexamined assumptions of the left, more than anything else. I have to say here that some of the most interesting discussions of new labour theory in relation to network culture have been happening on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list lately (https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-August/002698.html), and my colleague Melissa Gregg (http://homecookedtheory.com) is one of many

people doing very interesting work on affective labour in relation to new media technologies. I'm not talking about discussions that occur at that level, but the knee-jerk responses that frame almost any participation in commercial online spaces as just free labour. That kind of statement reveals how much of our thinking is still structured around the competing dynamics of oppression and resistance, not to mention industrial models of the economy, and doesn't allow for the idea that we may be seeing the emergence of newly configured, dynamic and volatile economic and power relations between the media ÂŒindustry and ordinary consumer-citizens, which may afford new forms of agency and opportunities for human flourishing as much as they do new forms of labour.

Of course, mainstream technophilic commentators like Wired and so on are

just as guilty ­ the hype around the idea of crowdsourcing as a source of free or cheap labour was not only pretty insulting to the agency of users, but pretty unimaginative, I thought. I think too much focus on the idea of free labour might obscure some of the most interesting and challenging problems around user-generated content. For example, considering that there

is no alternative at scale, at least right now, to the big commercial social network services and platforms, like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and so on; what about the challenge of getting the interests of the service or platform provider and their user community to align in a way that maximises the public good they produce as side effects? Is it possible to show that this care for social and cultural value is essential for the commercial success of the platform provider as much as it is for the interests of the community? And where do commercial imperatives create barriers to the public good? Flickr is really interesting in this respect because they have very

open feedback channels between the user community and the company ­ for better or worse! The moments where that cosy, we're all in this together relationship between service provider and user community appears to break down is the moment where any hidden problems in the relationship come to the surface (think of Flickr's recent issues around localisation and censorship, for example), and at least in theory they can be explicitly discussed and even transformed for the better. Or not!

You describe your stance as one of critical optimism. What did you learn in your research which left you more optimistic? What did your research show that forced you to become more critical of the prevailing rhetoric about a DIY revolution?

When I was first planning the research project that eventually became my PhD, back in 2003, a lot of the hype about amateur creativity seemed to be saying that ordinary people were overthrowing the expertise of the media industries and creative professionals within them ­ and for some people that was seen as a great thing, a revolution; for others, it has been seen as a very dangerous thing. And by the way, it seems little has changed, if Andrew Keen's impact on public discourse is anything to go by.

I didn¹t like that overblown revolutionary and/or apocalyptic rhetoric, because it seemed to be making a grave and ahistorical mistake--we always, always have to be very careful about what is actually 'new' about 'new media'. And I was just intuitively convinced there was something more subtle and interesting going on. I also wanted to get away from that amateur-professional dichotomy and think about the actual practices and social uses of user-led content creation, in their own terms, without serving a polemical agenda.

The main thing I wanted to explore and understand was the extent to which both lower barriers to production, especially because of cheaper and more available technologies like digital cameras, in tandem with networked mediation, especially online, might be amplifying those ordinary, everyday creative practices so that they might contribute to a more democratic cultural public sphere. I guess I was optimistic in that I went looking for evidence that might support that hope, and not defeat it.

But this is happening very imperfectly, of course, and it¹s not yet clear whether the mass popularisation of participatory media platforms will improve matters or not. The encounters that occur in the most populous, democratic media platforms, like YouTube, are not always a pretty sight. Just as much as YouTube supports the self-representation of minorities or the popularisation of evolutionary science, for example, it also supports hate¹ speech and religious fundamentalism. It isn¹t clear yet how the cultural normalisation of spaces like YouTube will turn out.

I found that the spaces that were most rich in examples of vernacular creativity were at the same time constrained in certain ways, and each context was shaped towards forms of participation that served the interests of the service providers as much as they serve the interests of the participants. So in Flickr, the most active, intensive forms of participation seem to be taken up mainly by already-literate bloggers, gamers, and internet junkies. In the digital storytelling movement, there is a certain kind of polite authenticity that is valued, and the workshops are incredibly resource-intensive, so that they aren't open to the ongoing, everyday participation that something like blogging is. There are always constraints and compromises, no matter how open a platform appears to be. So, I suppose, that's the 'critical' part.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part One)

I recently had the privilege of being an outside examiner on a dissertation produced by Jean Burgess, a PhD candidate in the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology on the topic of "vernacular creativity." I've long considered QUT's Creative Industries program to be a sibling of our own efforts in the Convergence Culture Consortium. Indeed, Joshua Green, who currently heads the C3 research team, is a post-doc who came to us from QUT. And we've seen a steady stream of visitors through the years (John Hartley, Alan McKee, John Banks, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess, among others) from down under. Burgess is now collaborating with Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and others on the C3 team on research centering on YouTube. I was quite taken by what Burgess had to say about "vernacular creativity" and its relationship with participatory culture, media literacy, and civic engagement. She talks about these concepts in the following interview:

Your dissertation focused on what you call vernacular creativity. Can you give us a sense of what this concept means for you?

I used the concept to talk about everyday creative practices like storytelling, family photographing, scrapbooking, journaling and so on that pre-exist the digital age and yet are co-evolving with digital technologies and networks in really interesting ways. So the documentation of everyday life and the public sharing of that documentation, as in sharing photos on Flickr, or autobiographical blogging; these are forms of vernacular creativity, remediated in digital contexts. These are also cultural practices that perhaps we don't normally think of as creative, because we've become so used to thinking of creativity as a special property of genius-like individuals, rather than as a general human -- some would say -- evolutionary process. I found the term really useful for focusing on the fact that there is much about the current explosion of amateur content creation online that has a long history, that isn¹t particularly revolutionary, and that relates to specific local contexts and identities. Vernacular creativity is ordinary.

But ordinary doesn't mean generic or boring, not necessarily anyway. Each example of vernacular creativity is also a representation of a specific life, a specific time, a specific place. Because of this specificity, the ordinariness of vernacular creativity doesn't necessarily equate to uninterestingness. The practices and artefacts of vernacular creativity are of course very rich and meaningful in relation to the social contexts in which they're created, communicated, and disseminated: think of your own family photo album, and then a complete stranger's family photo album from the 1960s that you stumble across in the back of a junk shop in a different country, for example. Both ordinary at the point of origin, both full of meanings and stories, but in different ways. The point is, culture doesn¹t have to be sublime or spectacular to be useful or significant or interesting to someone, somewhere. But what I find most interesting about vernacular creativity in the context of the new media generally and the Internet particularly is the potential to scale that immediate social context add up to social connectivity, and conversation, to individualistic self-expression. The two major case studies I explored in the thesis - the Flickr photosharing network, and the Digital Storytelling movement -- each demonstrate how that might work out in practice, but in very different ways.

How might a focus on participation and creativity, rather than resistance, change the agenda for cultural studies?

The focus on cultural participation as a positive thing is entirely compatible with a long tradition in cultural studies that was concerned with empowerment and social inclusion through self-representation and education. I think this is an agenda that has always been there, but perhaps was overshadowed by an alternative relationship to power - resistance, even as resistance was located in the everyday. The important thing for me is that a focus on participation shifts the questions that we need to ask about the cultural politics of media slightly sideways from being only about power, exploitation and resistance to questions of voice, cultural inclusion, and so on and those questions seem to me to offer more hope for pragmatic interventions.

Symbolic creativity and agency in relation to media, particularly, has a long history in cultural studies. Henry, you would know better than anyone that fans were very important for earlier investigations into participatory media because they showed how creativity and agency were possible even within the media landscape of the broadcast era. At that stage, fans weren't really understood as ordinary citizens, but rather as pretty extraordinary, intensively engaged media consumers. But at least the creative practices of fans demonstrated that there might be empowering uses of popular culture, and that audiences for broadcast culture were not -- or at least not all -- passive. And I also don¹t need to tell you or many of your readers that creative fan practices in new media contexts has often led the way for more mainstream forms of participation.

I thought it was time to consider the extent to which people who may have a much less intense relationship with mass media and popular culture than fans, might also be participating in culture through their own creative efforts.

What links do you draw between empowering people to create and share what they create with others online and the development of conceptions of citizenship and civic engagement?

Most of the time, when we hear terms like citizenship and civic engagement, we think of participation in the processes of formal politics ­ democratic deliberation, elections, and so on. These forms of participation are thought of as separate from everyday life, consumption, popular culture, and pleasure. But I think some of the most interesting forms of civic engagement occur where the everyday and popular collide with the political -- look how much there is going on in the Obama Girl video, for example. So as a way of getting at those ideas, the term I use most of the time is cultural citizenship, which is a way of talking about the ways in which cultural participation and citizenship might be the same thing, in certain circumstances.

So one of the core concepts I work with in the thesis is this idea of cultural citizenship¹. It¹s used in several different ways by different theorists, but what I mean by it is that culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging. Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it¹s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship ­ in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense. This idea -- that networked individualism in participatory media might actually be good for society in some way -- really seems counter-intuitive to those who have been convinced by people like Robert Putnam, who argues that the increased privatization and commodification of social life weakens the social fabric, e.g. of neighbourhoods.

One of the things my research emphasised in relation to Flickr was that cultural citizenship was not only constituted online, but through the articulation of the online social network with everyday, local experience. A lot of my research focused on the Brisbanites group within Flickr, and there¹s a good illustration of this from an apparently insignificant event that occurred there. At one stage last year, an Italian user known on the network as Pizzodesevo, who had lived in various cities around Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, started posting scans of old slides taken in the 50s to the group. Other group members showed interest in the photographs by leaving comments that ranged from expressing appreciation to offering technical advice about scanning, to discussion of the locations of the photographs and how much they had changed in the past 46 years. What was really interesting to me was that the connections made between users as part of this discussion resulted in one Brisbane-based member of the Brisbanite groups spontaneously creating a kind of game around the images: he began going out specifically to capture images of the same locations as in the old slides, and uploading them to his own Flickr photostream. Pizzodesevo then combined some of these new images side by side with the old ones in a series of double images. The simple act of combining them revealed some of the dramatic changes to the Brisbane cityscape that have occurred over the past few decades. This led in turn to more discussion about the ways in which the city has changed, blended with nostalgia for a past that many of the discussants had never experienced themselves. So there on a microscopic level you have vernacular creativity, remediation, social networking, and civic engagement threaded back and forth and adding up to something much more than just sharing photos.

Joke Hermes refers to the texts and practices of popular culture as providing some of the "wool from which the social tapestry is knit." I think of each of these apparently insignificant moments of participation in online social networks and creative communities as being very much like that "where they start to knit together," you see how the everyday individual practices of vernacular creativity could add up to something beyond the individual level. It's in making those forms of personal expression available as part of public culture -- however small the public turns out to be -- that the digital remediation of vernacular creativity starts to look like it has real potential for propagating cosmopolitan forms of cultural citizenship, albeit at a modest scale.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.