Shall We Play? (Part Two)

Because of the importance we place on play, we call the professional development program Project New Media Liteacies is developing PLAY (which in this case stands for Participatory Learning and YOU!) (We usually accompany this definition by pointing our finger at the person we are talking to, itself a playful ritual which surrounds our collective discussion of this work.) You can read more about the core concepts underlying our PLAY approach through a series of blog posts being developed by Vanessa Vartabedian at the Project NML blog. For the moment, I will simply offer this one paragraph explanation of our general approach:

Participatory learning is characterized by:

• Heightened motivation and new forms of engagement through meaningful play and experimentation;
• Learning that feels relevant to students' identities and interests;
• Opportunities for creating using a variety media, tools and practices;
• Co-configured expertise where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning;
• An integrated system of learning where connections between home, school, community and world are enabled and encouraged.

While there is no one-to-one mapping between the 6 Ps of Play and these principles of participatory learning, I hope it is clear that these two frameworks have informed each other in significant ways. What we are describing as participatory learning can and often is linked to new media tools and platforms but it does not have to be. We stress the value of low-tech and no-tech versions of these processes, even if we also try to model ways that state-of-the-art tools can be integrated into this kind of learning environment. The principles of participatory learning emerge from our close examination of what I call participatory culture, a topic which surfaces often here on the blog.

Blake Anderson, a student in my New Media Literacies class made this video to explain the concept, which I had to share. This graduate student was motivated by a series of YouTube videos to make a puppet for the first time, as he sought ways to translate my conceptual model for a new audience. As you will see, the protagonist of the video is The Professor who bears an uncanny resemblance to the actual instructor of his class but was also a tribute to a childhood spent in the company of Muppets. This deflation of academic authority was received with great pleasure by all involved, especially by me.

What does participatory learning look like in practice? Well, one example might be the workshops in interactive design which I ran for many years at MIT in collaboration with the late Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. We formed teams of students with many different educational backgrounds and interests. Each team was to chose an existing media property and began to develop a plan for how to expand it into interactive media -- most often, how to translate it into the vocabulary of contemporary video games. Students in this intensive class broke their time between hearing lectures on aspects of interactive design by faculty and industry people and working in teams, brainstorming, refining their ideas, and working towards a presentation. By the end of the week, the students "pitch" their game ideas to a panel of people from different parts of the entertainment industry, pretending to be a start up company trying to get a contract, and they got feedback on both their ideas and their presentation styles.

The result was always memorable -- a rich array of imaginative ideas which showed a deep understanding of the core concepts and information running through the class. Students listened with the idea that they would be applying what they learned in this creative and playful process. I plan to adapt this approach for the Transmedia Entertainment and Storytelling class I am offering through the Cinema School in the fall.

Participatory learning might also look like what we have been doing through an after school program which we launched at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools this semester, a program focused around themes of digital citizenship. The RFK schools (six altogether, each with different focuses and philosophies) launched this fall and they are still trying to work through their identity and norms as a community. We sought ways to get students focused on the process of defining who they were as a community through play and creative activities. Vanessa Vartabedian ran the program, with strong support from Erin Reilly and Laurel Felt, and in the end, it involved all of the current Project NML students and staff, as well as students from my New Media Literacies graduate seminar.

One activity had the students taking photographs of "invisible borders or boundaries" which shaped their social interactions, whether borders based on gender, class, or the line between student and teacher or the line between the different schools using the shared facility. This focus on norms of inclusion or exclusion was enhanced by the challenge of using photography, normally a medium for capturing the visible, as a means of representing things which are understood but often not explicit, often not seen or observed.

Another activity, developed by the Rossier Schools' Stefani Relles sought to get students to construct an anthem for their school, using very open ended modes of visual orchestration, and then, using simple instruments, trying to produce meaningful noise together. The goal was not only to get students to articulate what their schools meant to them but also to experience music-making as a creative process, one which was structured to free them from anxieties about performance.

Another activity, developed by Meryl Alper, got them to focus on the history of the school, which had, among other things, been the site of the Coconut Grove nightclub, which has been partially preserved as a drama facility, and was also the site of the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. In fact, the media lab where the after school program meets is the kitchen where RFK died, something which students had not fully understood until Alper explained it. Alper shared with them a photograph of the Latino bus boy who prayed with and comforted RFK in his final moments, and asked them to think about their own place in the history of the school. Using an app which pastiched a range of different film stocks, she asked them to go out and stage images which conveyed something of the history of the school, and again, they were invited to creatively explore and document their physical surroundings. These are simply a few of the forms of participatory learning activities we've incorporated into our work at the RFK schools. Most of these activities are playful and creative, but they are not in and of themselves games.

So, let me close with the invitation to all of the educators who read (or hear) this talk: Shall we play?

Shall We Play? (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I delivered one of the two keynote addresses at the USC Teaching with Technologies conference. This year's theme was "The Connected Mind." I chose to spend my time talking about the value of play, a theme which has surfaced several times in my recent talks, so I wanted to share the core ideas from this presentation with you here. SHALL WE PLAY?

In many ways, I am speaking to you today under false pretenses. This talk is not primarily about teaching with technology. After spending two decades of my life at MIT, I have almost reflexively become that guy who challenges claims about technological determinism and who stresses the importance of the culture which informs the design and deployment of tools.

These themes are explored more fully in the white paper which I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on Learning in a Participatory Culture. New media tools and platforms have affordances which support new kinds of learning, but those forms of learning are also very strongly informed by participatory practices, many of which have a history far older than the web. Today, in focusing on play, I am going to be drawing heavily on ideas that emerged prior to the introduction of digital games, but which continue to be relevant in rethinking our pedagogical practices. If we embrace the values of play, we may find ourselves toying with new technologies and insofar as these participatory practices are closely associated with some of the new platforms of the Web 2.0 era, we may also find that in working with these tools, we are drawn towards a reappraisal of the value of play in our teaching.

This is also not a talk about games-based learning. Through the work I did almost a decade ago at MIT with Kurt Squire, Philip Tan, Eric Klopfer, Alex Chisholm and others on the Games to Teach Project, I have been an early and frequent advocate of games-based learning. I both share James Paul Gee's belief that good game design is also good pedagogical design and have worked to model what games for education might look like. But in talking always about games, we may under-estimate the value of more open-ended forms of play and of play as a general disposition in the educational environment. These are the themes I want to explore more fully today.

This is also not a talk about gamification, a term which is being used far too often today, as if it could adequately sum up the larger movement towards games for change. To me, gamification as a concept grossly simplifies what research on games-based learning has shown us over the past decade or so. When the Games to Teach team worked with content experts, we sought ways to embed information from the curriculum, knowledge from the text book, into activities in the games. We asked each expert what knowing this allowed people to do and then we sought to capture those activities through the game design and mechanics so that they provided deep motivation for the learner to master these concepts.

At the heart of this model was intrinsic motivation. The power of games is in part that they provide such clarity in defining the roles and goals, that they helped us to know what to do and how to do it, and as such, they motivate deeper forms of learning. Gamification, at its worst, rejects a theory of intrinsic motivation in favor of one based on extrinsic motivation. That is to say, it attempts to motivate "proper" or "desired" behavoirs through attaching points to otherwise mundane and uninteresting activities. For example, Foursquare represents a gamification of consumer loyalty programs.

One might argue that this version of gamification does not in any significant way break with current educational practices which may be why it has been easier for schools to embrace than the more challenging kinds of learning games which were proposed in the past. Our students learn NOW in schools not because they value what they are learning but because they have been taught to value grades. And where their grades are not strong, they plead for extra credit points, which represents another way of adding points as rewards or incentives to behaviors valued by their teachers. I do believe we can learn much from games but I sure hope that what we take away from them goes deeper than most current models of gamification.

But, for the moment, I want to push games aside and talk about play. The distinction I am making here comes from an essay by the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. Here's what Bettelheim tells us:

'Generally speaking, play refers to the young child's activities characterized by freedom from all but personally imposed rules (which are changed at will), by free-wheeling fantasy involvement, and by the absence of any goals outside the activities itself...'

Bettelheim thus links play to freedom, experimentation, personal investment, and process, all values to which I will return later in this talk.

"Games, however, are usually competitive and are characterised by agreed-upon, often externally imposed, rules, by a requirement to use the implements of the activity in the manner for which they were intended and not as fancy suggests, and frequently by a goal or purpose outside the activity, such as winning the game."

We might think about the game, Candyland, as an ideal transitional device -- a game which teaches young players the basic mechanics of board games, one which often plays a key role in socializing us into the world of games. For Betteiheim, learning to play games represents an important step in the socialization process -- learning to accept outside and sometimes arbitrary constraints on one's behavior for the purposes of social reciprocity and delayed gratification.

"Children recognize early on that play is an opportunity for pure enjoyment, whereas games may involve considerable stress."

So, while learning to play games is a step forward, it also is accompanied by some kinds of losses -- in terms of personal expression and immediate pleasure. People cheat at games, for example, as a way of coping with the anxiety of competition in ways that they do not generally find it necessary to cheat at play. Indeed, it is not clear what cheating at play would look like given the lack of social constraint on individual expression it entails.

By that same token, institutions find it much easier to incorporate games, which preserves the notion of rule-driven activity, rather than play, which is often understood as a kind of anarchic freedom from any and all constraints. So, schools often treat most forms of play as minimally a distraction, more often a disruption, of school practices, hence the concept of "class clown" which runs through educational literature. In other cultures, the clown is an educator who invites us to re-examine existing hierarchies and structures, taking the world apart and putting it back together again, where-as the clown in our schooling is seen as an unwelcome rival for the classes attention, a challenge to discipline and a disturbance of learning.

In part, this is because our puritan culture maintains a world view in which play is the opposite of work. We have decided that schooling should be about work rather than play, and as such, we are driving down the creative impulses of our students. No wonder that many are seeing a crisis of creativity in contemporary America!

Interestingly, though, when we work with teachers in professional development programs focused on learning and teaching the new media literacies, they consistently gravitate to play out of the 12 social skills and cultural competencies we've identified through our work. Here's how our white paper defines play as a literacy: "the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem solving." Today, we are pushing beyond play as a skill to think about play as a disposition -- a way of seeing oneself and the world through new creative lens which depend on suspending real world consequences and encouraging a process of innovation and creativity.

Educators are sometimes drawn to play for the wrong reasons -- because they seek to entertain their students. I sometimes hear various lay theories of "stealth learning," the idea that we can smuggle in learning disguised as play into schools and students will have so much fun that they will overcome their resistance to the schooling process. In many ways, I see this as like that moment in Tom Sawyer where Twain's protagonist sells others in his cohort into helping him white wash the fence by convincing him that doing so is great fun. This is perhaps the same kind of trap that we fall into when we talk about gamification -- a confusion between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Play is not disguised learning; play IS learning.

Jean Piaget captures this sense of the value of play when he tells us that "play is the work of childhood." He rejects any simple opposition between play and work, suggesting that play is the most important work children perform, because it is through play they acquire basic knowledge and skills fundamental to their culture. A kitten plays at stalking. In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. And in an information society, people play with information and interfaces.

We can rehearse and acquire core skills and knowledge through play because play lowers the stakes of failure. One of the activities we've developed through Project NML for thinking about play is called "Fail and Fail Often," and it uses the casual game, Bloons, to get people to reflect on the strategies of experimentation and calibration they apply in solving problems in games. This is a totally addictive game in part because it is so simple and the way you move forward through the game is to try different strategies, most of which will not work. Through this process, we learn basic things about the physics of the game and how different materials respond to us. We can compare this with the role failure plays in schools: children are afraid to fail and teachers are afraid to tell their students that they are failing. As a result, students do not take risks which might push their performance forward and they do not get the feedback they might need to better calibrate their efforts.

Lately, as I've talked about the value of play for learning, I have started to identify a series of properties which help us to better understand the core principles of play. I call them the Six P's of Play (though this remains a work in progress and may end up with fewer or more Ps before all is said and done).

1. Permission. Before we can play, as adults, as students, we have to give ourselves permission to do so. This is of course different for many children who play often and only stop playing when they are prohibited from doing so. The concept of permission is closely linked to what game theorists call the "magic circle," that is, a mental bracket which we put around our activities which changes their affect, their meaning, and most of all, their consequences. Within that magic circle, we lower the consequences of risks; we agree to engage with each other with good humor; we try hard but do not take the outcome as seriously as we would if we performing the same activities outside of a play context. I love the example of the little girl who is sweeping the floor -- we would understand her activity differently if she were doing chores or playing house, even though the actions would be the same. In a school culture, where there is a long history of prohibiting play, we must work very hard to give signals when play is an acceptable mode of engaging with the activities and we have to build up trust with our students that we are not going to retrospectively count their play against them.

2. Process -- Play values process as much or more than product. Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens make the point that the most efficient and effective way to play golf is to walk right up to the hole and plop the ball into it. But we would not see that as a very fun way of playing golf. Instead, we create as many obstacles as possible -- we use strange implements, we move far away from the hole, we create sand and water obstacles, we slope the landscape to give us less effective control over the outcome. In an education system now focused so heavily on how students perform on standardized testing, performance based on product completely displaces performance assessed based on process, yet play's value is focusing our attention on the experience itself, in the moment, in the process. It asks us to be aware of how we do things as much as on what we do. This is why play can be helpful in supporting the acquisition of basic skills which can be rehearsed and valued on their own without regard to the finished product.

3. Passion --The Gates Foundation has found that an increasing number of young people are dropping out of school not because they are incapable of performing what's expected of them but because they are bored. Work in the Digital Media and Learning Field tells us that we need to recognize the rewards of passion-based learning, of students pursuing those topics which they care about most deeply and using these interests to motivate and sustain other kinds of learning. Mary Louise Pratt has a great story she tells about her son's baseball card collection and how talking with him about it pushed him to learn more about history (as a backdrop to the key games in baseball history), geography (as a context for where the teams come from), architecture (as a way of discussing different stadiums), and math (as a way of playing around with batting averages.) This brings us back to Bettelheim's notion of play as open-ended, free-flowing, self-determined, and thus as something which is experienced as a site of freedom and passion.

4. Productivity -- Play is highly generative, despite or perhaps even because of its focus on process rather than product. I am very fond of the photographs which Martha Cooper took in the 1960s and 1970s of children's street play in New York City. These images show the imaginative ways that children transform their geographic environments through their play, claiming space even in relatively inhospitable environments where they are free to explore and interact; these images also show them taking up everyday materials around them as raw materials for their own play, transforming them from their mundane functions through a clever recognition of their underlying properties and affordances. And of course, they do the same thing with their bodies and with their social relations, performing new roles, trying out new structures, redefining old situations. This is the sense in which play can be linked to creativity. While in the spirit of play, old rules and structures are suspended, allowing us to look at the world in new ways, and allowing us to transform and transcend our environments.

5. Participation -- Play occurs in a social context which invites us to enter into the fun. We do sometimes watch others play, to be sure, and this represents what educational theorists call "legitimate peripheral participation." We watch with the anticipation of future participation. We watch to observe how others perform, to learn new skills, to appraise our own performance, or simply because we do not yet feel in the right spirit to play. But watching in this case is also a form of learning and is of a very different kind than watching which occurs when we know we will never be able to participate, when we feel that our participation is not welcome, when we anticipate not being able to do what's expected of us. As we sit in classrooms where no one offers up answers and no one is engaging with the learning process, we could learn a lot by going back to the ways that young people are introduced to a new kind of play and the ways that ideally they are encouraged to participate. (Of course, I don't want to romanticize this. As someone who often was not picked for teams in school, I know that the promise of participation can become cutting if we experience exclusion rather than engagement.)

6. Pleasure -- Pleasure is the byproduct of play. The search for pleasure is often what motivates play. This takes us back to Bettelheim's point about the stress around winning a game versus the relative freedom of participating through play. The game remains an operationalization of play, it represents a stress on the outcome that undercuts play's focus on process. And thus, a game may offer pleasure to some but with no guarantees and often a strong threat of displeasure if we lose the game. Thus, while it is very valuable to bring games into school, it is also important to provide contexts for more free and open-ended forms of play, which can offer pleasure to all who participate, rather than offering rewards to those who win.

(MORE TO COME)

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Four)

Despite your title, you spend less time here talking about "gender" than might be expected from other books which talk about women and gaming. What roles does gender play in your analysis? What claims are you making about the different kinds of experiences and identities female players construct around games?

For me, the book is not about gender. It is about women and girls who take gaming beyond gaming to become designers within well-designed passionate affinity spaces that change their lives and the lives of others. It about these women and girls because we believe that what they are doing, how they are doing it (e.g., combing technical modding with modding for emotional intelligence and social interactions), and what they are accomplishing is on the cutting edge of where all of us are going--male or female.

Women and girls are leading the way here as they are in many other areas of society. There has been lots about modding for games like Half-Life and its connections to technical skills--and indeed this is important. But much less has been written about modding the Sims to create challenges and game play that is simultaneously in the game world, in the real world, and in writing things like graphic novels.

Such modding is the force that sustains a passionate affinity space that builds artistic, technical, social, and emotional skills. We wrote the book because these woman and girls rock, not because they are women and girls.

Also I had a sin to expiate. I had left the Sims and women gamers pretty much out of my first book on games. Betty helped me see that The Sims is a real game and a very important one because it is a game that is meant to take people beyond gaming. She helped me see that how women play and design is not "mainstream" (see comments above) but cutting edge, the edge of the future. If it were leprechauns that were the cutting edge of the future I would have written about them.

In the case of The Sims, you have a designer -- Will Wright -- who has been outspoken in his desire to empower his users to construct community and build their own content around his games. How does this goal on the part of the designer impact the kinds of stories you can tell about these women's relations to this particular game?

See answer above. Will Wright is doing in an extreme way what lots of game designers want to do: empower people to think like designers, to organize themselves around the game to become learn new skills that extend beyond the game, and to express their own creativity. Many say the Sims is not a game--and I myself used to believe that. But as Derrida would remind us, what we find marginal is often actually central. Out book argues that games like the Sims--and gaming beyond gaming--will eventually be the new center of gaming or maybe something eventually all together different.

As you get into forms of cultural production such as fan fiction, I start to wonder why is it important for you that this a book about gaming rather than about the much wider array of forms of participatory culture that have emerged in a networked society.

It is important to me because I do not want to compete with you for the participatory culture space. Further, I want to stress production, though I know well you care about production as well. There are some--not you--who in education celebrate participation in a mindless way. They argue that just because people are participating they are learning. But people can participate in ways that allow themselves to be "colonized" by a group or to gain much less than others in the group or even to be used as an example that makes others look good. I think a demand that everyone learns to produce and design--to be a "priest"--can mitigate these dangers, though I am sure that dangers remain.

I know you have expressed in the past great skepticism that our current schooling system can adjust to the potentials of this more participatory culture. Without school involvement, how do we insure a more equitable access to the kinds of formative experiences you describe in the book? On the other hand, how does a school culture so focused on standardized processes and measurements maintain anywhere near the flexibility to respond to personal passions that you've identified in The Sims?

What I have called "situated embodied problem-focused well-designed and well-mentored learning" will either come to exist primarily for elites who will get it 24/7 on demand across many institutions and their homes or it will be given to everyone.

In the first case, the regular ("mainstream") public school system will continue to teach the basics accountably and will exist to produce service workers. In the second case, we will have to reinvent a public sphere and transform our view of society, civic participation, markets, and what constitutes justice, fairness, and a good life. We are headed the first way right now, but there is always hope for the future. Both you and I are trying to push the train to the second future and not the first, though, in the end, in the future the real actors and activists in this "game" will be younger (and often browner) than we are.

The current accountability regime MUST be removed. It is immoral, stupid, and counterproductive. We define accountability around teachers failing to teach children. This is like doing accountability for surgeons by waiting to see how many people they kill and then getting rid of them if they kill too many.

Far better to have accountability back when teachers and surgeons were trained, which means radical changes in Schools of Education and universities. Surely we should not wait to see how many patients they kill or kids they screw. Teachers are punished if a kid's test scores go down, but scores could go down for many reasons, not just what the teacher did in one year. This is like punishing a surgeon when a patient dies in back surgery because his wife poisoned him--and lots of things are poisoning our children, not, by any means, mostly teachers.

What we need accountability for is curriculum and pedagogies, not teachers per se (who should have been well trained and then held to high standards that most of them can and do meet, as in the case of surgeons). Today curricula and pedagogies are often politicized, seen as right wing or left wing. If we could agree on a common measure (say a NAEP test or some other test we can come to agree on), a measure that is given to a sample of students (not given to all), so that it cannot be taught to, then we can simply say which curricula and pedagogies correlate with strong or weak results on the common measure. This is what we do with drugs and surgical procedures.

In the end, though, we MUST change our assessment system or we will never have new learning, since assessment systems, in an accountability regime, drive what is taught and how it is taught. Today's games and other digital media allow for learning to be so well designed that finishing the "game" means you have learned and mastered what it being "taught". No one needs a Halo test after finishing Halo on hard and no one should need an algebra test after finishing an equally well-designed algebra curriculum.

Furthermore, games and digital media can collect, mine, and artfully represent copious moment-by-moment data on a great many variables. So we can, with such data, assess learning across time in terms of growth; we can discover different trajectories towards mastery and use this information to help learners try new styles; and we can compare and contrast learners with thousands of others on hundreds of variables tracked across time (as we already do with Halo for instance).

When the day comes where we can contrast such assessments (based on growth, trajectories, multiple variables represented in ways that inform and develop learners, and comparison among thousands of people sorted into a zillion different types for different purposes) with our now standard "test score"--one number taken on one day--the game will be over. The choice will then be stark. Either we will develop only some or we develop everyone. The bell curve will be gone. No one needs always to be "in the middle" ("mainstream"). Everyone can, in some places and at some times, be at the very top of their game.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Three)

The part of your arguments for affinity spaces which get the most push-back from my students are your claims that "a common passion-fueled endeavor -- not race, class, gender, or disability -- is primary." To many, these seems like a very utopian claim for these spaces, which you have been careful to describe as not "communities" in the way that term is most often used. Yet, surely, inequalities impact participants at all levels, from access to the technology to access to basic skills and experiences, to access to the social networks which support their learning. How can we address these very real inequalities while recognizing that there are indeed ways where class, race, and gender matter differently in the kinds of spaces you are describing?

The statement that passionate affinity spaces are focused on a shared passion (and shared endeavors and goals around that passion) and not race, class, and gender (while allowing people to use such differences strategically as their own choices) is not an empirical claim, it is a stipulation. Something is not a passionate affinity space if it does not meet this condition. So perhaps there are none. But, then, such spaces become a goal and an ideal and we can talk about how close or far away from that goal and ideal we are.

On the other hand, it does little good to follow the standard liberal line that race, class, and gender are always and everywhere one's determining identities. This, for example, locks an African-American child into always being "an African American". A white kid can be a "Pokémon fanatic" or an expert modder, but the African American kid is always "an African-American Pokémon fanatic" or an "African-American modder".

We are never, none of us, one thing all the time. Sure, the world continuously tries to impose rigid identities on all of us all the time. But it is our moral obligation--and one necessary for a healthy life--to resist this and to try to create spaces where identities based on shared passions or commitments can predominate.

In reality, the real identities that count in life most--that define us and make us who we are--are rarely named. They are identities like "a person who would never kill someone because they did not share his or her religion" or "a person who would rather love and be loved than be rich" and a great many more such as these. These sorts of identities constitute our most significant form of human sharing and bonding. And such identities are where the deepest divisions among people occur.

It may be here that I diverge from some others. I have repeatedly seen people who are pissed off because someone said they or their work were not "mainstream". If someone called my work "mainstream" or called me "mainstream" I would be insulted. If I discovered that my work or myself was "mainstream", I would retire or find something else to do. Note, by the way, that NO good academic wants to be mainstream. If something--say, what they teach in high school--is called "mainstream history", you can bet no good young historian wants to do it and you will find next to no one, old or young, in a good history department with such a sign on his or her door.

Chibi-Robo, Ico, Psychonauts, and Shadow of the Colossus are not mainstream games. They are however great games and their designers will be long remembered when many mainstream designers are long forgotten. Remember, too, that 19th century America had only two world-class poets (Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman) and at the time neither was remotely close to mainstream. One never published and the other published his own book himself and reviewed it under various names. The monk Mendel wanted to be a high school biology teacher, but he failed his state teacher's test and was relegated to the monastery's garden. He was unknown in his time, entirely non-mainstream, and yet also the only man in his time who actually knew biology (including Darwin, who knew less than nothing about genetics), though no one knew that until much later.

Throughout the book, you celebrate "grit" as a key virtue of these new forms of cultural participation. How are you defining "grit"? Is this a skill that is valued as much in contemporary schooling?

"Grit"--originally used by Angela Duckworth in a somewhat different way--is passion plus persistence. Human expertise is a practice effect, it requires hours of effort, practice, and persistence past failure. This is unlikely to happen without passion. School has a very hard time producing grit because different people have different passions (and school is about everybody learning the same thing) and passions are something people choose (and school is often not about choice). Furthermore, interest is kindled into passion inside things like passionate affinity spaces and related sorts of social formations and these are hard to come by in schools.

In modern developed countries, only grit will lead to work or lives that are rewarding, given that most jobs will be service jobs. The passion one develops may well be in an out of work space and off market. But there has to be some space where a person has a sense of agency, intelligence, control, and creativity.

Some people have a good deal of grit at school because they believe that putting up with even badly designed schooling will lead to a good college and a successful career. It will lead to a good college, but no longer necessarily to a good career.

The world is full to bursting with educated and talented people, many of whom can compete for the same jobs across the world. Being just good at what others are also good at, in standard ways developed in standard sorts of education, will just put one in competition with millions of well-trained Chinese and Indians and many many others across the globe. In my own view, one needs to have a passion for something and master it in a creative way--it almost does not matter what it is. It could be, for instance, carving art out of avocado pits.

Whatever it is, avocado pits included, you will find via the Internet a critical number of people across the world with whom you can join with for social learning and among whom one can rise to status, respect, and a sense of real contribution and, in some cases, profit (there is not a lot of competition, at least yet, for the top places among avocado artists and, thus, a whole area is waiting to become "hot").

Many of the projects coming out of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative embrace the importance of passion-driven or interest-driven networks. Yet, increasingly, we are being asked to think about young people who do not have or have not yet discovered driving passions of the kinds the book discusses. How do you respond to critics of "geeking out" as an educational ideal? What can we do for kids who "just don't care"?

A person who cannot find a passion is going to be in trouble in our modern world as far as I am concerned. Many people will gain status, respect, control, and creativity off market (since not everyone can gain these things on market for profit in a world where, in developed countries, only 1/5 of people will be well paid). But all people need to gain these things.

All our schools and institutions are set up very poorly to help kids find their passion. We want to teach "what every citizen should know" in things like science and math (and we succeed, all Americans pretty much know the same things about science, mathematics, and geography, which is nothing).

We think we can force people to learn things. We treat collaboration as cheating. We do not give kids the time--and places where the cost of failure is low--to try out a variety of interests and identities in an attempt to discover passion or passions. We do not let kids engage with professional-like tools and activities in areas like urban planning, game design, or journalism.

Rather, we define everything to be learned in terms of content names like "algebra" or "civics" even when this "content" might be best learned as a tool set for other activities like 3-D design. We let rich kids experience what passion and practice can bring one in the world and what the routes to success are, but we do not let poor kids have this knowledge. We treat certifications and degrees as more important that actual talent and achievements.

Now what about people who just "don't care"? Barring serious illness, there are none. Every baby is born as a passion-seeking being. That is why children acquire their native languages and master much of their cultures without formal schooling.

One day, when my son Sam was a mere toddler, I found some plastic figures at the grocery store. I had no idea what they were. I brought a couple home and gave them to Sam. They were Pokémon and they led to interest, passion, and practice that made him a passionate gamer. That passion for gaming led, in ways no one could have predicted, to his current passion for acting and theater, on the one hand, and for Africa, on the other (since Age of Mythology hooked him on mythology and then on cultures beyond his own).

School is defined around outcomes it knows in advance, but does not meet for many children. Real learning kindles passions that make new kinds of people--and people capable of making themselves over again when they need to--but does not know or predict the outcome and does not, by any means, insist on the same outcomes for everyone.

MORE TO COME

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Two)

Your most recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, moves us from a focus on the kinds of learning which occurs inside the game as we play towards the kinds of learning which takes place around the game as people build upon it through the mechanisms of what you would call affinity spaces or what I call Participatory Culture. You describe this as "gaming beyond gaming." What has motivated this shift of emphasis?

Women and Gaming is no longer our most recent book. Language and Learning in the Digital Age has just appeared (another book I did with Betty). My focus of late on passionate affinity spaces was caused by the influences of my son Sam (who claims correctly to have taught me everything I know about games), Betty's wonderful work on her tech-savvy girls clubs, and, of course, you.

The first thing I ever wrote on passionate affinity spaces was motivated by a request that I write a paper about my take on "communities of practice", a notion that has become very popular in a great many areas. In my view, this powerful notion has become attached to so many different things that it is in danger of losing any real meaning. When talking about such notions I think it is necessary to name what you mean very specifically and name it in such a way that it clearly indicates what you value. This is what you have done with "participatory culture" and what I did with passionate affinity spaces.

So why did I choose that term? First I wanted to argue that "interest" gets someone in the door but not out the door to any deep place unless it leads to lots and lots of practice and persistence past failure. To get such practice and persistence past failure an interest has to be kindled into a passion and an affinity space needs to be organized to help people to do this.

I use "space" rather than "community" because the word "community" carries a rather romantic connotation which it should not have. I also use the word "space" because the notion of "membership" is very complex in modern Internet spaces. People are "in" the space even if they are just lurking, but what makes them "members" is a much harder and, in some cases (though not all), a more flexible and fungible notion.

Passionate affinity spaces tend to follow the Pareto Principle (20% of the people produce 80% of the outcomes, 80% produce 20% of the outcomes), while school classrooms tend to follow (enforced) bell curves. I want to stress not just multiple forms and routes to participation, leadership, and mentorship in passionate affinity spaces, but also the opportunity for all people in the space to become producers, designers, and creators, as well as mentors to others.

All passionate affinity spaces are organized first and foremost around a specific passion that is not necessarily shared by everyone (some only have an interest), but is the "attractor" in the space around which norms, values, and behaviors are set. The book Women and Gaming is about different forms passionate affinity spaces can take and some forms we applaud. The form we applaud most is not age-graded (young and old are together); allows newbies and experts to be together; and engages in supportive interactions because people in the space accept a theory of learning that says that expertise is not in a person but in the affinity space and that no matter how good you are there is always something more to learn and someone else from whom to get help and mentoring.

Tell us more about the Tech Savvy Girls Clubs. What were the goals behind this initiative? How did these experiences inform Women and Gaming?

The following is from Elizabeth Hayes:

TSG grew out of my interest in differences among how girls and boys engage with gaming more broadly. Not only do girls and boys tend to play different sorts of games, they also do different things with games. In particular, boys are much more likely to mod games, to create content for games, and otherwise to engage with games and other gamers in ways that support their development of technical skills and identities as content creators. The Sims is one of few games in which girls and women actually predominate as content creators and modders.

I wanted to give girls who otherwise would not participate in such practices greater access, social support and encouragement to participate. We started TSG, though, with a pretty limited understanding of the learning that takes place through fan communities, or affinity spaces. We initially saw fan sites as sources of information (i.e., tutorials, examples of content) rather than as spaces where the girls could develop identities, interact with other players, and be mentored (as well as mentor others).

A crucial turning point in our perspective was conducting interviews with adult women content creators, described in Chapter 5 of the book. These women kept pointing back to the Sims player community as crucial to their interest in content creation and modding, as well as to their mastery of technical skills. Talking to these women made me realize that I had started TSG with a deficit perspective towards women's gaming practices. That is, I'd assumed that we needed to help girls engage in modding practices similar to what boys are doing, rather than starting with an appreciation for what women were already doing.

This change in perspective led us to further investigations of the fan practices already taking place around The Sims, and this research became a very important component of our work. One of my research assistants is just completing her dissertation on The Sims Writers' Hangout, a site where players post and discuss Sims stories, a form of multimodal storytelling that requires composing images in the game and combining them with often lengthy narrative texts. Another student is investigating the learning of specialist language that takes place in Mod The Sims, another fan site devoted to game modding.

This is why discussion of the social spaces around The Sims is so central to Women and Gaming. We wanted to help others see that what women are doing with games is already exciting and important, and also to shift the lens a bit, in order to encourage people to look at male-dominated game spaces in new ways.

A key theme running through the book is the importance of becoming a designer rather than simply being a player of games. What accounts for the growing emphasis on design literacies in the 21st century?

I think that the importance of design, design thinking, and design literacies today follows from the shape of the world. We live amidst complex systems of all sorts, systems which are risky and dangerous and which interact with each other to create yet more risk. Furthermore, such systems are rarely now just "natural" or just "human made".

I live in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is a dessert. Like desserts from time immemorial, Sedona is cold at night even if it is hot in the day time. This is not so for Phoenix, which is also a dessert. It is hot at night when it is hot in the day time. This is so because of a heat-island effect. The massive amounts of concrete in Phoenix absorb the heat all day and radiate it out all night. So the temperature in Phoenix is a joint venture of "Mother Nature" and humans.

Solutions to problems involving complex systems demand multiple sorts of pooled expertise, including even the wisdom of crowds. Single minded, single focused experts are dangerous, since they undervalue what they do not know and their actions can and do create massive unintended consequences when they intervene in complex systems (as we found out in the 2008 worldwide recession and as Alan Greenspan pretty much admitted in front of Congress).

So people--citizens--need to learn to think of systems as designed or as things that act like they are designed. They need to know how themselves to produce designs as "models" to think with (and model-based thinking is the core of science).

The United States today is politically polarized and comes at all problems as if they are political or ideological, when in fact most of our problems are complex, the solutions to them are going to be compromises with tradeoffs, and we need to continuously question our expertise, values, and goals. We are so polarized today that a core goal of schooling, in my view, ought to be teaching kids to see arguments as designed and as inherently connected to evidence and perspectives and not just ideology, self-interest, and desire.

Of course, the focus on design has also come about because so many digital tools--and other tech tools--developed by and for professionals can be used today by "everyday people" to design, build, and create for themselves. There has always been the danger with any technology--most certainly including books--that people will get divided into two classes: "priests" who are experts and know the deep secrets inside the technology (or make them up) and the "laity" who consume the technology, but do not understand it enough to transform it. The potential of much digital learning today--as well as many passionate affinity spaces--is to allow more and more people to be priests. But this sort of potential has always in human history been opposed and resisted by elites, who ever seek to constrain and tame it.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part One)

James Paul Gee from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

On April 4, I will be respondent for the Pullias Lecture, being hosted by the Rossier School of Education here at the University of Southern California. The primary speaker is James Paul Gee, who is going to address "Games, Learning, and the Looming Crisis of Higher Education." For those in the Los Angeles area, the talk is being held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC, 4-6 PM.

I was delighted to be asked to participate in this exchange, both because I was recently given an honorary appointment in the Rossier School and because I have such affection and respect for Gee. We've known each other for the better part of a decade now. We've appeared together many times, often in informal conversational settings, I like to call "The Jim and Henry Show," where we talk about our shared interests in participatory culture, games and learning, and the new media literacies. Gee has been one of the key thinkers about the kinds of new pedogogical models represented by computer and video games, seeing them as illustrating alternative forms of learning to those represented by our current schooling practices. Gee has been one of the core contributors to the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, helping to inspire a whole new generation of educational researchers, who are doing serious work not only on games but also modding, machinema, fan fiction, virtual worlds, and a range of other new media platforms and practices.

This semester, I have ended up teaching Gee's recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, in my New Media Literacies class. I was delighted when I first saw the book to see Gee expand upon his thinking about "affinity spaces" to think more deeply about what he and his co-author Elizabeth Hayes call "gaming beyond gaming." The term refers to the broad range of productive and social practices which have grown up around games, practices which strongly parallel what I've found in my own research on fan cultures. The book's focus on The Sims signals the importance of this game both as a breakthrough title which expanded female interest in the medium and as a model for all subsequent games which have encouraged players to build and share content with each other. Gee and Hayes are interested in the ways this game has become the jumping off place for lifelong learning processes for a range of women, young and old. It is a delightful mixture of compelling storytelling and thoughtful analysis, one which can easily be assigned to undergraduate students but which is profound enough to capture the imagination of advanced students and researchers.

As I was anticipating our mutual participation in the Pullias Lecture event, it occurred to me that I had never interviewed Gee for my blog, despite all of our other interactions through the years. What follows includes his reflections on the current state of games-based learning research, the state of American education, and the value of participatory culture. Gee was generous with his thoughts and so I am going to be running this meaty exchange over three installments this week.

We've both been involved in thinking about games and learning for the better part of a decade. What do you see as the most significant breakthroughs which have occurred over this time?

The breakthroughs have been slower in coming than I had hoped. Like many new ideas, the idea of games for learning (better, "games as learning") has been often co-opted by entrenched paradigms and interests, rather than truly transforming them. We see now a great many skill-and-drill games, games that do in a more entertaining fashion what we already do in school. We see games being recruited in workplaces--and lots of other instances of "gamification"--simply to make the current structures of exploitation and traditional relationships of power more palatable. We will see the data mining capacities of games and digital media in general recruited for supervision, rather than development. The purpose of games as learning (and other game-like forms of learning) should be to make every learner a proactive, collaborative, reflective, critical, creative and innovative problem solver; a producer with technology and not just a consumer; and a fully engaged participant and not just a spectator in civic life and the public sphere.

In general there are two "great divides" in the games and learning arena. The two divides are based on the learning theories underlying proposals about games for learning. The first divide is this: On the one hand, there are games based on a "break everything into bits and practice each bit in its proper sequence" theory of learning, a theory long popular in instructional technology. Let's call this the "drill and practice theory". On the other hand, there are games based on a "practice the bits inside larger and motivating goal-based activities of which they are integral parts" theory. Let's call this the "problem-and-goals-centered theory". I espouse one version of this theory, but, unfortunately, there are two versions of it. And this is the second divide: On the one hand, there is a "mindless progressive theory" that says just turn learners loose to immerse themselves in rich activities under the steam of their own goals. This version of progressivism (and progressivism in Dewey's hands was not "mindless") has been around a great many years and is popular among "mindless" educational liberals. On the other hand, the other version of the "problem-and-goals-centered theory" claims that deep learning is achieved when learners are focused on well designed, well ordered, and well mentored problem solving with shared goals, that is, goals shared with mentors and a learning community.

Like so many other areas of our lives today, the conservative version (drill and practice) and the liberal version (mindless progressivism) are both wrong. The real solution does not lie in the middle, but outside the space carved up by political debates.

What do you think remain the biggest misunderstandings or disagreements in this space?

Much of what I discussed above is really not about misunderstandings, but about disagreements and different beliefs and value systems, or, in some cases, different political, economic, or cultural vested interests. The biggest misunderstanding in the case of my own work has been people saying that my work espouses games for learning. It does not and never has. It espouses "situated embodied learning", that is learning by participation in well designed and well mentored experiences with clear goals; lots of formative feedback; performance before competence; language and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; and lots of talk and interaction around strategies, critique, planning, and production within a "passionate affinity space" (a type of interest-driven group) built to sustain and extend the game or other curriculum. Games are one good way to do this. There are many others.

The biggest misunderstanding in general is that technologies (like games, television, movies, and books) are good or bad. They are neither. They are good, bad, or indifferent based on how they are used in the contexts in which they are used. By themselves they are inert, though they do have certain affordances. Games for learning work pretty much the same way as books for learning. Kids learn with books or games (or television or computers or movies or pencils) when they are engaged in well designed and good interactions with adults and more advanced peers, interactions that lead to problem solving, meta-critical reflection, and connections to the world and other texts and tools. They learn much less in other circumstances. But we must humbly admit that humans have never yet found a technology more powerful than print. The number of people who have killed others or aided them in the name of a book (the Bible, the Koran, the Turner Diaries, Silent Spring) is vastly larger than those who have killed or helped in the name of a game, movie, or television show. Of course, this may change, but it does little good, in the interim, to pretend books are benign, but games are inherently perilous.

From the start, you were less interested in designing games for teaching than in using principles of game design that are grounded in educational research to reimagine the pedagogical process? To what degree do you think recent projects such as Quest to Learn have embodied those insights?

I see game design and learning design (what a good professional teacher does) as inherently similar activities. The principles of "good games" and of "good learning" are the same, by and large. This is so, of course, because games are just well designed problem-solving spaces with feedback and clear outcomes and that is the most essential thing for real, deep, and consequential learning. These principles include (among others): making clear what identity the learning requires; making clear why anyone would want to do such learning; making clear how the learning will function to lead to problem solving and mastery; making the standards of achievement high and clear, but reachable with persistence; early successes; a low cost of failure that encourages exploration, risk taking, and trying out new styles; lots of practice of basic skills inside larger goal-based and motivating activities; creating and then challenging routine mastery at different levels to move learners upwards; using information and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; performance before competence (doing as a way of learning and being); getting learners to think like designers and to be able themselves to design; encouraging collaboration and affiliation with what is being learned as part of an identity and passion one shares with others; good mentoring by other people, as well as smart tools and technologies.

These principles can be realized in many ways, not one. Chibi-Robo, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Quest to Learn all realize them, though Quest to Learn faces the vast stupidity of our current accountability regime and Chibi-Robo and Yu-Gi-Oh do not.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

Measuring New Media Literacies: Towards the Development of a Comprehensive Assessment Tool (Part Two)

Measuring New Media Literacies: Towards the Development of A Comprehensive Assessment Tool (Part Two) by Ioana Literat

Results

Although all of our scale items collectively attempt to measure new media literacy levels, and the overall reliability of the scale was high (Chronbach's α=.903), we were interested in identifying the specific subcomponents that make up this concept. Our initial research question was whether the subscales of this survey instrument map well onto Jenkins' 12 NMLs. Particularly, we were interested in seeing if, as predicted, the scale would break down into components that were similar to those identified by Jenkins.

To address this question, we performed a factor analysis on the 60 items, and then assessed the reliability of each separate subscale that emerged from the factor analysis. With the exception of 2 NMLs (collective intelligence and simulation), the factors identified in this analysis mapped well onto Jenkins' 12 NML skills, indicating the definite existence of subcomponents that tap into dichotomous skill sets. Thus, out of the 12 NML skills that make up Jenkins' framework, 10 were identified in the factor analysis of our scale; furthermore, all 10 of these components had adequate reliability. This is a rather impressive and encouraging finding, especially given the fact that all 60 items of the scale were completely randomized and thus the items that made up each of these 12 subscales never appeared in order. The two NMLs that did not distinctly emerged from the factor analysis were collective intelligence and simulation; rather than clustering together as distinct factor components, the items measuring these two dimensions ended up being spread out over the different subscales.

Once the factor analysis revealed the various new media literacy skills that the scale constituted of, we proceeded to explore the relationship between these NMLs and patterns of media exposure and digital participation, by running multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs).

We first looked at respondents' cumulative media exposure, which included time spent with all forms of media: Internet, television, print media, and videogames. According to our second hypothesis, we expected to see a significant difference in NML skills between high and low media users. The multivariate difference in media literacy levels assessed using MANOVA was indeed significant: F(10, 316)= 3.025, p=.001, with avid media consumers scoring higher across all NML skills than less enthusiastic media consumers. The univariate differences between the high and low media exposure groups were particularly pronounced in the areas of negotiation, networking, appropriation, play, multitasking, and transmedia navigation.

Next, we explored the relationship between NMLs and exposure to specific media. In terms of Internet use, there was a significant difference between low and high users: F(10, 316)= 3.171, p=.001, with the most striking contrast occurring in terms of networking skills. Due to the interconnecting and socializing features of the Internet, less enthusiastic internet users scored much lower in networking skills than frequent users. For videogames, the difference between frequent and infrequent users was also significant (F(1, 316)=2.811, p=.002), with avid gamers scoring substantially higher than their peers in the domain of play, or experimental problem-solving.

Our questionnaire addressed users' exposure to four different forms of media: two new ones (internet and videogames) and two old ones (television and print media). Interestingly enough, while the difference in NML skills between light and heavy users of the Internet and videogames - i.e. new media - was substantial, this difference was not significant in the case of traditional media. This is an interesting conclusion, which supports the view that new digital media, due to their interactive and highly socializing nature, are more adept at breeding the social and cultural competencies needed for a full participation in today's digital environment than traditional media, which are inherently more passive.

In terms of digital participation, we hypothesized that higher levels of media literacy should predict a higher degree of engagement with Web 2.0 platforms, as well as an increased propensity for multimedia creation. This hypothesis was fully supported: the difference in NMLs between users with high digital participation levels versus those with lower participation levels was indeed significant (F(10, 316)=3.172, p=.001). Out of the digital platforms we explored in this study, the ones that emerged as particularly significant in this analysis were Facebook (F(10, 316)=5.294, p<.001), Twitter (F(10, 316)=3.181, p=.001), YouTube (F(10, 316)=4.553, p<.001), and blogging (F(10, 316)=4.747, p<.001).

For Facebook, the difference between light and heavy users was especially pronounced in the area of networking, with enthusiastic Facebook users displaying extremely high networking skills. This result is unsurprising, given the function of Facebook as a social networking site, but this connection is important in regards to the applicability of such online-learned skills in the context of one's offline behavior.

In the case of Twitter, the two main NMLs where light and heavy users significantly differed were networking and transmedia navigation. We found that light Twitter users (including non-users) scored much lower in these 2 NMLs than more enthusiastic tweeters. This conclusion makes sense, and can be explained by the hyperlinked and social nature of the Twitter platform.

YouTube also emerged as an extremely significant platform in terms of NML skills.

The NMLs that YouTube users excelled at were appropriation and transmedia navigation, but also, to a less astounding degree, performance and negotiation. These results are most likely explained by the primary functions of the YouTube platform as a crucial depository of popular culture clips (to be used in appropriation processes) and as a source of multimedia information (encouraging transmedia navigation), but also a democratic limelight for stardom and personal opinion (performance) and a transnational hub that facilitates intercultural learning (negotiation).

Finally, blogging emerged as another particularly important platform in terms of NML skills. We found a significant difference in overall NML skills between bloggers and non-bloggers, and individuals who keep a blog scored much higher in appropriation and networking skills. Most likely, this is due to the increasingly interlinked nature of the "blogosphere", with writers linking to other blogs of interest, keeping a blogroll on their personal page, republishing relevant posts, and so on. This process of hyperlinked interconnectedness, while gradually transforming the personalized "blogosphere" into one global community, increasingly requires networking and appropriation skills that allow one to most effectively tap into this informal community.

The results of this study also supported the connection between multimedia creation and NMLs. As hypothesized, higher NML levels predicted a propensity for multimedia creation, and the difference between frequent and infrequent digital creators was extremely significant (F(10, 315)=6.635, p<.001), with the most acute contrast occurring, not surprisingly, in the area of appropriation. This is in line with the literature in the field, which claims that the ability to creatively produce and distribute multimedia texts should correlate strongly with higher levels of media literacy.

Similarly, the results also confirm the connection between new media literacies and civic engagement, which is emerging as a critical application of NML educational initiatives. Our hypothesis regarding the positive relation between media literacy and civic engagement was fully supported, with respondents that scored highly across the NMLs showing much higher degrees of civic engagement than their less media literate peers (F(10, 313)=3.516, p<.001).

In conclusion, as evidenced by the support for our main conceptual hypothesis, the data gathered in this study will be instrumental in perfecting a validated quantitative assessment tool to complement NML initiatives built around this particular framework. So far, educational endeavors aimed at cultivating these skills only benefitted from qualitative evaluation tools, which are inherently unfit for use with large samples, and are much harder to implement due to logistical considerations. We therefore hope that this questionnaire, especially used as a baseline measure of new media literacies, will help provide a more accurate and comprehensive picture of individuals' abilities in this domain.

Furthermore, the study provided critical information about the connections between new media literacies, media exposure, and engagement with different Web 2.0 platforms; this represented a much-needed addition to the literature on media education, which so far did not address these specific correlations. In terms of the validity of the present assessment tool, the fact that our hypotheses regarding the connection between media literacy and media use habits were strongly supported lends additional predictive validity to this survey instrument. This is a highly significant conclusion that adds further import to the current study. While the causal relationships between these variables would need to be examined longitudinally, over time, it is our interpretation that the relationship between media use and media literacy is a circular one, involving a virtuous feedback loop: for instance, while extensive use of the internet raises one's new media literacy levels, individuals with high NML levels are also more likely to access the internet considerably more.

While further research is certainly needed regarding the feasibility and scalability of quantitative methods of assessment in the field of new media literacies, we believe our study is a valuable starting point in this direction, and a much-needed inquiry into the challenges facing such assessments in both national and international contexts. While this particular study represented a pre-test of the validity of the current survey instrument, we are now working on its practical application as a baseline measure of NML levels at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, where Project New Media Literacies will be implementing an after-school program starting in February. Stay posted for updates regarding this initiative, and an upcoming report on the quantitative assessment of new media literacies among the high school students at RFK!

Ioana Literat is a PhD student at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and a research assistant for New Media Literacies. She has taught digital storytelling and social justice curricula to children in the Dominican Republic, Romania, Uruguay and India, and spent the last year working as the field coordinator of The Modern Story program in India. At USC, Ioana is researching the social impact of media and its potential to stimulate positive change, with a special focus on the future of educational media and virtual communities. As a result of her extensive international experience, she is particularly interested in the global scalability of NML projects, and the applicability of such educational initiatives in the developing world.

Measuring New Media Literacies: Towards the Development of a Comprehensive Assessment Tool (Part One)

Last fall, I spread a message to my Twitter followers, asking for their participation in an online survey we were conducting, trying to assess new media literacies skills. Needless to say, people who follow this blog and my Twitter account are apt to have a higher degree of technical and cultural literacy than the general population, but we were looking for a sample base large enough to be able to test and refine our instruments before applying them to other populations, such as the students at the schools where we are doing after-school programs or which are adopting some of our curricular recommendations. Given the intense response we received, and our deep gratitude for everyone who participated in the survey, I wanted to make sure we shared the results with you in a timely fashion. Ioana Literat, a PhD candidate in the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California, did the work as part of a class project in Lynn Miller's class, COMM 550: Research Methods in Communication. She also is part of the Project New Media Literacies research team and we are immediately putting her tool and her insights to work by pre-testing students entering our programs here in Los Angeles.

Her results are interesting in that they do suggest that the skills we have identified through the White Paper I helped to write for the MacArthur Foundation do cohere in real world contexts and that these skills improve through engaging with new media platforms and practices. I should stress here that we believe that the relations between increased skills and increased use of new media tools does not simply mean that the people who consume more media get better at it.

As writers like James Paul Gee have argued, these "affinity spaces" contain powerful forms of informal learning which motivate and support the acquisitions of these skills in a way that would not be true for most people watching films and television outside of the context of a fan community, which might perform similar work for its members. Further, we are not simply describing consumption per se, but rather we are talking about forms of participation which involve applying those skills rather than simply observing. At its heart, then, the argument is that participatory culture communities and practices actively support the learning of their members and reversely, that as we first asserted certain skills have emerged as characteristic of and often necessary for meaningful involvement in participatory culture. Today, we are going to lay out the methods behind this research; next time, the findings.

Measuring New Media Literacies:

Towards the Development of a Comprehensive Assessment Tool

by Ioana Literat

The present study was motivated by our observation that, in spite of the increasing popularity and impact of Henry Jenkins' New Media Literacies framework, there was a lack of an appropriate quantitative measurement tool to assess these new media literacy skills. Certainly, existing tools do not capture the full spectrum of skills and propensities suggested by Jenkins. Furthermore, the reliance on qualitative data - which is typical of most studies in this field - means that such assessment projects are not feasibly replicable with larger groups. Therefore, this study aimed to address methodological lacunae within the NML framework by developing and validating a comprehensive quantitative assessment tool that could be used to measure new media literacies (NMLs) in both adult and juvenile populations.

Below, you will find an overview of the survey instrument and a summary of the results. If you would like to see the complete NML questionnaire that was used for this assessment, as well as the full report on the findings of this study (including all the statistical data), we encourage you to contact Ioana Literat at iliterat@usc.edu.

In assessing the psychometric properties of this new assessment tool, survey data was first factor analyzed in order to assess the reliability of the measure, and determine how these emergent factors compared with Jenkins' original 12 NML skills. If the survey instrument was accurately constructed, we expected to see 12 separate subscales - similar to the 12 NMLs identified by Jenkins - resulting from the factor analysis. In terms of the relationship between media exposure and NMLs, we hypothesized that higher levels of new media literacies would correlate with a higher degree of engagement with media forms - particularly new digital media - and that there would therefore be a significant difference in NMLs between people with low versus high levels of media exposure. An increased degree of digital participation in various Web 2.0 platforms should also relate to high NML levels, with light users scoring lower in media literacy than heavy users of these digital platforms. Finally, we also hypothesized that high NML levels should predict a greater propensity for multimedia creation, and, respectively, civic engagement.

The sample for this study (N=327) was a convenience sample of normal volunteers over the age of 18, who completed the survey online. In terms of gender distribution, the sample contained 131 male respondents and 187 female respondents. The average age was 33.7 years (SD=11.7). In regards to ethnicity, 83.9% of respondents were white, and 77.3% indicated English as their primary language. Income and education levels were normally distributed.

Survey Design

The survey was structured around 4 main sections: demographics, media use habits, new media literacies (NMLs), and civic engagement. All questions were randomized, so that each participant received them in a different order, to maximize the validity of the findings.

The section on media use habits queried respondents about their access to a computer and to the Internet, the extent of their exposure to different media forms, their digital memberships and affiliations, and their creative engagement with multimedia. The NML section of the survey - the most extensive and critical part of this instrument - aimed to assess respondents' new media literacy skills (NMLs) by presenting them with a randomized series of 60 statements about their personality, social and cultural modes of engagement, online and offline peer interaction, learning styles, and media consumption and creation patterns. The statements were conceptually built around the 12 NML skills identified by Jenkins (2006): play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation, and visualization. To ensure an adequate factor analysis while minimizing the duration of the survey, we decided to include 5 items for each NML, for a total of 60 questions. These items addressed both technology-related and non-technology-related behaviors, in accordance with our view that the NML skills are social and cultural competencies that stretch beyond media expertise or technological capability.

Finally, the last section of the questionnaire contained a set of 5 questions that attempted to measure the respondents' degree of civic engagement, by addressing three principal dimensions of civic engagement: self-efficacy, civic responsibility, and commitment to civic action.

Ioana Literat is a PhD student at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and a research assistant for New Media Literacies. She has taught digital storytelling and social justice curricula to children in the Dominican Republic, Romania, Uruguay and India, and spent the last year working as the field coordinator of The Modern Story program in India. At USC, Ioana is researching the social impact of media and its potential to stimulate positive change, with a special focus on the future of educational media and virtual communities. As a result of her extensive international experience, she is particularly interested in the global scalability of NML projects, and the applicability of such educational initiatives in the developing world.

What Constitutes an Open-Book Exam in the Digital Age?

Several weeks ago, I shared here the syllabus for the undergraduate class I am teaching this semester at USC. As I noted, it is my first time doing a lecture hall class in some years and my first undergraduate class at USC, so it has been a learning process for all involved. I wanted to share with you a pedagogical challenge I've faced this term in part as an illustration of the kinds of transition higher education is undergoing as we try to absorb new media technologies and practices into our teaching. It starts with the decisions we made about the course readings. We opted to put the scanned essays onto Blackboard, the classroom management tool which USC urges us to use, rather than having them printed out at a local copy shop. My hope was to save the students money and to also save trees by having as close to a paperless class as possible.

Then, I made the announcement that the exams in the class would be open book, open note and that I was planning to distribute a list of potential questions in advance from which I would draw in constructing the exam, a practice I have used for more than 20 years without any great confusion. I've found that this approach lowers stress for students by allowing them to feel more in control as they are preparing for and taking the exam. In practice, some fraction of the class works really hard, prepares for the exam by writing out their answers in advance, and copies them into the blue book. Another fraction studies their notes, comes in and improvises on the exam, or develops an outline in advance that they write from. And some fraction, for their own reasons, pays no attention to the advanced questions, doesn't study, and does really badly on the exam. The kicker is often the identification questions, which would be simple to answer by anyone with a textbook open in front of them, but nevertheless often end up unanswered or answered wrongly. The result is a grade distribution curve not very different from what I would have if I gave a closed book, closed notes exam -- but as I said, it lowers stress.

No sooner did I announce this policy than I got a question I've never been asked before. A student wondered whether open book, open note, meant open laptop. I needed time to reflect on this and said I would answer in the next class period. Actually, it took me a few to get back to them with a response. Given this was a class on technology and culture, I decided to use this as a teachable moment.

So, I started by breaking down the computer into two elements. First, there is the computer as a stand alone word processing machine. I certainly would have had no great objections to students using the computer to write their answers or even to access their materials. Indeed, as someone with painfully bad penmanship, I had been the first in my graduate program to take my quals on a computer the department provided. They made sure to give me a clean disc as I entered the room and I was allowed to take nothing else with me into the test.

But this was before the era of networked computing, which fundamentally changed the character of what a computer is. So, allowing students to use a laptop during an exam suddenly would allow students to access any information anywhere on the web and more significantly would allow students to trade information with each other throughout the test in ways which would be extremely difficult to monitor.

As I thought about it, the challenges of designing a meaningful test under those circumstances intrigued me. What would it mean to create an exam which could be taken not by individual students but by networked groups of students -- either the class as a whole or a specifically designated study group? Could we enfold ideas of collective intelligence into the design of tests? Could we create challenges which demonstrated their mastery of the material through the search strategies they deployed and the knowledge they produced together? In theory, such an exam holds promise as more and more jobs require the capacity to pool knowledge and collaborate with a team of others to solve complex problems, and learning how to mobilize expertise under these conditions should be a key goal of our educational process.

But, how would we deal with such an exam in the context of our current grading systems? After all, we still assume that grades measure individual performance and so if we gave group grades, that might prove unsatisfactory to everyone involved. Would students raised in a culture where grades based on individual performance know how to act fairly in a culture where grades were based on group performance?

After all, we know that on group projects, bright students are often treated unfairly, exploited by their classmates, who fail to do their fair share of the work, and who may, in fact, not be capable of contributing at the same level? Under such system, teachers have had to devise systems to measure individual contributions to the group, thus going back to personalized rather than collective grading? What would be involved in terms of time and technology in monitoring what each student contributed to the group's collective performance on the exam?

And of course, all of this assumes that all of my students do have laptops or can borrow laptops, a more or less safe assumption given the relatively affluent population of USC, but hardly the case at many other colleges and universities around the country. How could you give one group of students such an intense advantage on the exam? Would we then have to issue laptops the way we now issue blue books?

As I started to contemplate these issues, I started to choke. As much as I wanted to be the cool, open-minded teacher, the model pedagogue for the digital age, there was no way I was going to be able to work through all of the implications of this radical shift in classroom practice in time to apply it this semester. A real answer to this question may not be possible in our current educational system, though it is a kind of question which we are going to be asked more and more. So, I spelled all of this out to my students, and challenged them to start thinking through the issues.

But, then came the turn of the knife. If they could not use their laptops, and the course texts had navigated to the web, then in what sense was this going to be an open book test? They could no longer access the course materials without printing them off, which would undo everything we saved by making them digital in the first place. The answer of course is that with the questions in advance, they could print out notes or print out the essays they needed to address the questions. They wouldn't have to print out everything, but they would no longer be working in a paperless environment.

So, we went back to the drawing board one last time, and asked the tech people if it would be possible to shut down the wireless in the room for the duration of the exams. They were not able/willing to do this, so that's where things stand as of the moment. Neither the students nor I are fully satisfied with this resolution, but both the pedagogical and technological structures of the modern university would seem to block any path out of this challenge that I have come up with.

I can't be the only faculty member on the planet facing these challenges, so I am posting this to see how other educators are dealing with these transitions. I can see the world we are surely evolving towards, but I don't know how to get there on my own.

So, let's use our laptops to work through this problem together. Oh, wait....

While we are on the subject of Digital Media and Learning, I wanted to give people a head's up for a great new documentary, New Learners of the 21st Century, which will be airing on PBS stations across the United States this coming Sunday, Feb. 13. Some of you will recall how one-sided and negative I found the Digital Nation documentary which aired last year, despite having talked to many key researchers and collected some compelling material for their webpage.

New Learners of the 21st Century offers the flip side of that documentary, taking us into innovative school and after school programs which are making creative use of new media platforms and practices for pedagogy. You can get a taste for what to expect from this opening segment which they have posted to PBS Video, but it is really, in this case, only the beginning.

By the second segment on Quest to Learn, the New York charter school which uses game design to teach, you can see the difference in the ways the two documentaries approach their topics. In Digital Nation, the Quest to Learn segment is almost incomprehensible: we see lots of activities involving technology but we have no idea what the kids are doing or why, and as a result, it feels like technology for technology's sake. Here, we learn about their pedagogical approach; we see processes unfold; we hear about when they use technology and when they ask the kids to put it aside. The focus is less on the use of computers in the classroom, an old topic after all and as my above discussion suggests, one we are still struggling with, and more on the use of new media literacies in education.

The same holds true for the film's treatment of a range of other pedagogical sites, including great stuff on work being done by the Smithsonian Institute and by the YouMedia Center at the Chicago Public Library, both important innovators in this space.

Because the topic is more narrowly focused, and because the goal is to explain and not simply stir up controversy, this film does do justice to the complex research which the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning program has funded in this area. I have been honored to be part of this initiative from the start, so my recommendation is scarcely unbiased here. But if like me, you've been burnt several times already by PBS's treatment of youth and digital media, I want to let you know that this one will be more rewarding.

Manifestos for the Future of Media Education

A few months ago, I was asked if I might contribute a short essay to a United Kingdom based project to frame a series of arguments around the value of media education in the 21st Century. The project is intended to spark debate within the Media Studies field and beyond about the value of our contribution to secondary and post-secondary education. This week, Pete Fraser, Chief Examiner of OCR Media Studies & Jon Wardle, Director, The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University, launched a website which includes ten such manifestos, including mine, and which they hope will host ongoing discussions around these issues. Here's part of the rationale they provide for the project:

There are those who would dismiss the very idea of studying the media. The Daily Mail might argue that it is only on the national curriculum and available at degree level to ensure that the participation numbers for young people engaged in formal learning and gaining good qualifications remains high- the 'dumbing down' agenda. They might argue that studying Soap isn't a serious pursuit and will be frowned upon by University admission tutors and employers. Implicitly this argument is promoting a high brow / lowbrow divide; we can't remember the last time we read an 'angry from Tunbridge Wells' letter complaining that the tax payers money was being used to fund the teaching of metaphysical poetry instead of physics....

Twenty five years of scholarship have bought about broad consensus on the theoretical framework for Media Education - 1) that media is representation not reality, 2) that the media is produced by organizations and individuals and therefore can and should be read critically 3) that the media is now not only read and received, but reinterpreted by audiences. We would nonetheless argue that we are still some way from identifying a broader teaching and learning framework for media education and most critically - and the focus of this work - we are yet to articulate a clear purpose for the work we do. What is the point of media education? - whether it be media studies, media practice, media production, media literacy - what is the point?. You may argue the clue is in the title of each of these subsets of media education - as on the surface the differences between media production and media literacy seem pretty straightforward. However, the purpose of each still feels rather opaque.

Are we seeking to develop the media producers of tomorrow, or to nurture individuals capable of holding power to account, are we seeking to hold a looking glass up to society in order for society itself to better understand itself, or perhaps we are hoping to develop a more media literate society capable of protecting itself from evil media conglomerates?...

I used my own response to their provocation to reflect a bit on what we learned through the decade plus that I ran the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and especially how we might extend the thinking behind Project New Media Literacies to include more advanced studies in media. Here's part of what I had to say:

We should no longer be debating the value of media education. The real question is whether media education should be a stand-alone discipline or whether expertise in media should be integrated across all disciplines, just as the ability to communicate is increasingly recognized as valuable across the curriculum....

Beyond these core skills which need to be integrated into K-12 education [those in the MacArthur white paper], though, I might also argue for kinds of contextual knowledge which are vital in making sense of the changes taking place around us. All learners need to acquire a basic understanding of the processes of media change, an understanding which in turn requires a fuller grasp of the history of previous moments of media in transition. All learners need to acquire a core understanding of the institutions and practices shaping the production and ciculation of media -- from the Broadcast networks to the social networks, from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley....

Media education offers skills, knowledge, and conceptual frameworks we need in our everyday lives as consumers and citizens, members of families and communities, but they should also be part of the professional education of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, people entering a range of professions and occupations. At the present moment, there is a tremendous need across all sectors for what the industry calls "thought leadership" -- the ability to translate big picture change into language that can be widely understood and engaged -- as well as the capacity to deploy such media expertise to shape pragmatic and practical decisions.

Grant McCracken (2009) has argued that this hunger for insights into how media and cultural change impacts economic decision-making may lead many business to hire "Chief Cultural Officers," ideally people who can bring humanistic expertise on culture and society into the C-Suite. If this vision came to pass, we might imagine media educated students entering not only the academy or the creative industries, but business of all kinds, policy think tanks, arts curatorships, journalism, advertising and branding, and a range of other jobs, many of which do not yet have names. Current media education tends to focus on reproducing the professoriate, despite declining numbers of jobs, and treating the vast number of our alums who get jobs elsewhere as if this was a failure of the system, an unfortunate byproduct of the decline of higher education. What if we reversed these priorities and saw the expertise media education offers as valuable in a range of different kinds of jobs and presented these options to our students at every step in the process.

The kinds of media education required for such a context differs profoundly from what we have offered in the past. For starters, it requires a much more conscious engagement with the relationship between theory and practice -- not simply production practices (itself a big change given how often theory and production faculty sit at opposite ends of the conference table at faculty meetings) but the practices of everyday life. We need to compliment the current theoretical domains of media study with a more applied discipline, which encourages students to test their understanding through making things, solving problems, and sharing their insights with the general public.

The site's participants include some of England's top thinkers about media and learning, including David Buckingham, David Gauntlet, Cary Bazalgate, Natalie Fenton, and Julian McDougall. Having just spoken at a British media literacy conference in November, I came away with a deeper understanding of the caliber of scholarship and pedagogy emerging there and of the particular nature of the political struggles they are facing over education at the moment. I welcome the chance to learn more about their thinking through the ten remarkable essays the site assembles.

To whet your appetite for more, let me close by sharing a chunk of David Buckingham's manifesto. Buckingham notes that he often finds the rhetoric by which we justify our profession overblown and deterministic, so he labels himself a poor choice to write a manifesto. In fact, it is precisely because Buckingham is so cautious in the claims he makes, so skeptical in the way that he reads the world, that his work carries such weight and impact:

I have always felt that media education suffers from an excess of grandiose rhetoric. We have all heard far too many assertions about how media education can change the world, save democracy or empower the powerless. As a classroom teacher, I was always painfully aware of the gap between this sort of rhetoric and the messy realities of my own practice (and I don't think that was just about being a useless teacher). While it can be morale-boosting in the short term, this overblown rhetoric does not serve teachers very well: we need to cast a more dispassionate eye on what really happens in the classroom, however awkward or even painful that might feel.

In my view, we can make the case much more effectively by showing in concrete ways what and how children can learn about media. Most of the critics of media education do not have even the faintest idea of what it actually looks like in practice. Media education can be intellectually challenging; it can involve intense and rigorous forms of creativity; and it can engage learners in ways that many other school subjects do not. Even experienced teachers can be positively surprised by the quality and sophistication of students' thinking as they engage in media education activities - and by the forms of oral and written work that result from it. Like any other school subject, media education can also be undemanding and boring, and it can result in pointless 'busywork'. I am not calling here for rose-tinted accounts of 'good practice', of the kind that most teachers tend to find somewhat implausible. Rather, we need to come up with evidence that media education actually works - that it can engage, challenge and motivate young people, as well as enabling them to understand and to participate more fully in the media culture that surrounds them.

A New Culture of Learning: An Interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas (Part Two)

You describe educators in the new culture of learning as mentors, rather than teachers. Can you explain the difference between the two?

The key difference for us is that in the new culture of learning mentors are very likely to be peers who may have picked up something a little ahead of the curve or who may have more experience in something than their peers. Mentorship is a much more flexible concept and one which is tied less tightly to authority. Since so much of what we see as the key to future learning is passion-based, we think it makes more sense to understand the process of learning as something that can be guided by a mentor, as opposed to being taught by a teacher. No one can teach you to follow your passions, but they can help guide you once you discover what motivates you.

You write about learning collectives. Often, when I try to describe this concept, I run up against the deeply embedded tradition of individualism, which has made all forms of collective sound, well, "socialist." Have you found effective ways of responding to American's ideological revulsion against collective identities and experiences?

Collectives, as we use the term, have nothing to do with the politics or economics of socialism. Instead what we are trying to capture is the formation of new institutional structures that are radically different from more traditional notions of community. Collectives are literally collections of people who form around a central platform. What is interesting is that collectives tend to promote individual agency and may actually be more consistent with individualism than they are with even community based theories of social interaction. Collectives, as we use the term, are actually institutions that enable and enhance individual agency. And because the costs of entry and exit are usually negligible, they tend to have much less persistence than more traditional institutions have had in the past and hence they don't outlive their usefulness as the world changes around them.

One of the key contrasts we need to draw is between notions of communities and collectives. Communities are institutions that are designed to facilitate a sense of belonging. Collectives are institutions that facilitate individual agency. Anyone who joins a collective looking for a sense of belonging is going to wind up disappointed, because that is not how they function. Collective are more social platforms than social entities. Communities may form within a collective, but they need not form in order for the collective to function. The key point is that because collectives are agency driven, they form the perfect environment for the cultivation of imagination. In other words, the collective amplifies what I can do by tapping its collective experience.

In that sense "collective identity" is something of an oxymoron. Collectives are spaces in which individual identity is critically important. It makes no sense to talk about the "Facebook community" or the "Google community" because people are using those platforms in such incredibly different ways. Yet at the same time, Facebook and Google have become such common and shared practices that they are almost regarded as part of the fabric of online life. No one goes to Google for a sense of belonging, yet there is no denying it has had a powerful, even transformative, social effect. Our book is an argument for these collectives as environments where the cultivation of imagination is possible like it never has been before. But we are also very careful to say it is not just a matter of exposure. Cultivation is a purposeful act, not something that just happens as a result of exposure or access, but what we are discussing may also be a new sense of cultivation, one where the collective itself is committed to making the individual better.

You draw on the concept of "concerted cultivation" or what others called the "hidden curriculum" to explain why what happens outside of schools has a powerful influence on young people's performance in the classroom. To what degree does it make sense to extend this well established educational principle to think about the informal learning which takes place online? Isn't part of the point the alignment of the values in a middle class home and the classroom? Would this principle work only if schools were ready to embrace the values of the online world? Yet, elsewhere, you suggest some core conflicts between the two.

This goes back to the core thesis of the book. What we were able to identify were two radically different learning environments, one which was overly structured (such as the contemporary classroom) where boundaries are put in place to actually discourage play, experimentation and real inquiry based learning. The other environment is completely unbounded and unlimited, best represented by the information explosion on the Internet. Absent some sort of structure or boundaries, learning is not any more likely to happen in an unrestricted space than it is in a tightly controlled one. What we see happening in the most successful learning environments is a fusion of these two ideals. Like a petri dish, the best learning environments have boundaries which control and limit them, but within those boundaries permit almost unrestricted growth, experimentation and play. Neither innovation nor learning can happen in a vacuum and we have seen time and again that it is the constraints that students face that provide the opportunity for really innovative learning to happen.

The core conflict is a matter of mentality. Our schools believe that teaching more, faster, with better technology is preparing our students for the 21st century. Their answer to dealing with change is to keep doing the same thing faster. To our way of thinking, this is like trying to fix a leaky bucket by pouring more water in it. We do think there needs to be more of an alignment on both sides. We hear over and over again how our schools are broken. That metaphor only works if you treat them as machines. When you think of schools as learning environments, it no longer makes sense to say the environment is "broken." What we hope this book does is, like the work on concerted cultivation, help people see that the line between schools and the world or the world place and daily life is illusory. Learning is happening everywhere, all the time.

This brings us back to imagination and the last line of the book: Where imaginations play, learning happens.

As you note, people not only learn in "different ways" but they also learn "different things" when confronting the same information. Yet, doesn't this insight run against the current culture of schooling with its emphasis on standardized testing? How can we as a culture work past this contradiction between our understanding of learning and our policies for measuring classroom success?

What no one seems to pick up on is that innovation by its very nature runs counter to the idea of standardization. Something is innovative because it is outside of the standard. If we are serious about learning and embracing change in the 21st century, we need to also start thinking about evaluating learning in more sophisticated ways. Standardized testing is easy. It is also efficient. Again, these are the standards that we use to judge machinery. But we should be surprised when our students who go through the machine end up emerging looking like cogs.

Another key distinction we are trying to make is to understand the difference between creativity and imagination, two terms that are often used interchangeably. Creativity is a much later stage and something that can not be taught. It is the product of a fertile imagination. Imagination, on the other hand, is something that can be cultivated in response to a learning environment. Much of what we found in our research was that there is no creativity without imagination and that imagination, the true life of the mind, is something that is not given much (if any) space in classrooms or workplaces. Part of why we think collectives are such powerful environments for learning is that they stimulate imagination by encouraging activities like play, experimentation, and inquiry.

You describe inquiry as a core principle of the new culture of learning. In true inquiry, we follow our interests where-ever they lead us. Is true inquiry possible within the current structure of disciplines which shape our schooling practices?

Is it possible within the current structure? Probably not. What this book is pointing to is the need for a complete overhaul in our educational philosophy. Our schools are training people for the jobs of the 20th (and sometimes 19th !) century. Inquiry is not a new idea. Is was a core principle of Plato's academy and it was the cornerstone of John Dewey's education philosophy. Until now, however, it has not really been possible on a large scale. We now possess a technological infrastructure which makes it possible to engage in inquiry and to truly follow our interests. But at the same time, we believe there need for some constraints or boundaries on how far and in what direction those interests go. In large part, the role of the teacher needs to shift from transferring information to shaping, constructing, and overseeing learning environments. We take the idea of cultivation very seriously. You don't teach imagination; you create an environment in which it can take root, grow and flourish.

How do we understand the value of diversity in this new culture of learning? Do learning networks work better if they include homogenous mixes of people pursuing the same goals or heterogeneous groups pursuing different interests? To what degrees are our current schooling practices a product of a historically segregated culture?

This is a great question that we don't get to go into much in the book. The thing that makes learning different in the 21st century from any other time in the past is the diversity of information, knowledge, experience, and interaction that is available to us in the digital age. This new culture of learning only works if it can be fed by an enormous influx of constantly updated information. It is driven by change, so it is a way of looking at the world that is maladjusted to homogeny. In the theory of inquiry we spell out, we talk repeatedly about the questions being more important than the answers and the idea that solutions to one problem are gateways to dealing with increasingly more sophisticated problems and deeper questions. People in learning environments are inherently curious. Diversity is not only a value; we would say it is the key ingredient in formulating a new culture of learning in the 21st century.

What do you see as the value of remixing as a means of learning? Many teachers confuse remix culture with plagiarism, which they have been taught to prevent at all costs. How can you help educators resolve these competing understanding of what it means to build on the work of others?

The crux of the issue is one of content versus context. Plagiarism is the intentional misrepresentation of someone else's ideas as your own; it is about content. Remix is an effort to fundamentally transform meaning by shifting or altering the context. The idea of making meaning through context is a relatively new one, because it is only recently that we have had the technological tools available to us to reshape contexts and then disseminate that information on a large scale.

What we have had, however, are things like parody, social satire, and commentary, all of which rely on very similar mechanisms to make arguments about meaning. Once you start thinking of remix as reshaping context rather than content creation, it becomes much easier to understand both its power and it utility. Of course as an added benefit, the easier it is for the average user to manipulate context, the more transparent the tradition of mainstream media doing the same thing becomes. There are countless examples of editing, tight focus, perspective and so on which have radically remade the meaning of events and have reshaped national and international perspectives.

You talk about learning, making, and playing as the core mindsets that support education. Despite a decade now of work on games for learning, many will be surprised to see "playing" on this list, in part because our schools are shaped by a puritan work ethic which distrusts play as frivolous. What would need to change for formal education to fully grasp and embrace the value of play?

There are two critical things to realize. First, play is not trivial, frivolous or non-serious, in fact, quite the opposite. Play can be the place where we do our most serious learning. And second, it is something we do all the time. When we explore, we play. When we experiment, we play. When we tinker or fiddle, we play. Science is play. Art is play. Life, to a great extent, is play. Every great invention of the past hundred years has had an element of play in its creation. So we are using the word in a very deep and serious way. A big influence on our work was Johan Huizinga's book Homo Ludens, which goes so far as to make the argument that culture grew out of play, not the other way around. So, from Huizinga's perspective play is the most basic and most human part of us.

When education became more "mechanized" it began to lose that sense of play. After all, who wants "play" in their machinery? Play is not precise or efficient; it is messy. But play also exemplifies what we think of as the ideal learning environment. Play is defined by a set of rules which form a bounded environment. But within those rules players have as much freedom as they like to create, innovate and experiment. Just think of all the amazing athletic feats that have emerged from a game like soccer, simply from the rule "you may not touch the ball with your hands." It is that boundary that sets off an incredible set of innovations and ideas and in doing so, forms an extremely rich learning environment.

Those same principles can be applied to any environment that values learning and we believe that if we follow those ideas, we will see a revolution in education that will create a new generation of explorers, innovators, and people who understand both the ways to and value of embracing change.

Douglas Thomas is an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research focuses on the intersections of technology and culture. It has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Annenberg Center for Communication. Doug is also the author of the book Hacker Culture and a coauthor or coeditor of several other books, including Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies and Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age. He is the founding editor of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, an international, interdisciplinary journal focused on games research.

John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar and an adviser to the provost at the University of Southern California and an independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He is an author or a coauthor of several books, including The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion; The Only Sustainable Edge; and The Social Life of Information, which has been translated into nine languages. He has also authored or coauthored more than 100 papers in scientific journals.

Prior to his current position, John was the chief scientist of Xerox and, for nearly two decades, the director of the company's Palo Alto Research Center. He was also a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.

A New Culture of Learning: An Interview with John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas (Part One)

It is my privilege and pleasure from time to time to showcase through this blog new books by important thinkers who are exploring the relations between digital media and learning, concerns which have become more and more central through the years to my own interests in participatory culture. Today, I want to call attention to a significant new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, written by two of my new colleagues at the University of Southern California -- Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. Asked to write a blurb for this book, here's what I had to say:

A New Culture of Learning may be for the Digital Media and Learning movement what Thomas Paine's Common Sense provided for the American Revolution -- a straight forward, direct explanation of what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against. John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas lay out a step by step argument for why learning is changing in the 21st century and what schools need to do to accommodate these new practices. Using vivid narratives of people, institutions, and practices at the heart of the changes and drawing from a growing body of literature outlining new pedagogical paradigms, they place the terms of the argument in language which should be accessible to lay readers, offering a book you can give to the educator in your life who wants to become an agent of change. My hope is that our schools will soon embrace the book's emphasis on knowing, making, and playing.

This book really is a gift, one which arrived too late for the Christmas season, but just in time for the start of the new semester. I know that I will be drawing on its insights to shape my own New Media Literacies grad seminar this term and to inform the new afterschool program we are launching at the RFK Schools here in Los Angeles. I admire it for both its clarity of vision and clarity of prose, not a common combination. In the interview which follows, I play devil's advocate, challenging some of the core premises of the book, with the goal of addressing critics and skeptics who may not yet be ready to sign on for the substantive reforms in pedagogical practices and institutions they are advocating.

Doug, you shared a story of how your students gradually took over control of your class. On one level, this sounds like teachers' worst nightmares of where all of this may be leading, but it sounds like you discovered this process has its own rewards. Can you share some of what you learned about student-directed learning? How might you speak to the concerns of educators who are worried about their jobs and about satisfying various standards currently shaping the educational process?

This was a fascinating experience for me and it speaks directly to the distinction we are making throughout the book between teaching and learning. Even after having thought long and hard about what it means to be an educator and being open to ideas such as student-directed learning, I still found that I was carrying a whole lot of baggage about what it meant to be a responsible educator. Primarily, what that meant was transmitting valuable information and testing how well that information was received, absorbed, and processed. What I had not really thought about was the ways in which that limits and cuts off opportunities for exploration, play, and following one's passions.

The fear is easy to understand. What we are essentially doing when we move to student-directed learning is undermining our own relatively stable (though I would argue obsolete) notions of expertise and replacing them something new and different.

That doesn't mean there is no role for teachers and educators. Quite the opposite. One of the key arguments we are making is that the role of educators needs to shift away from being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments. In a way, that is a much more challenging, but also much more rewarding, role. You get to see students learn, discover, explore, play, and develop, which is the primary reason I think that most of us got into the job of teaching.

"Lifelong learning" has become a cliché. What is it about the world of networked computing you describe which transforms this abstract concept into a reality? Are the kinds of learning experiences you discuss here scalable and sustainable?

We take it as a truism that kids learn about the world through play. In fact we encourage that kind of exploration. It is how children explore and gain information about the world around them. Since the time of Piaget we have known that at that age, play and learning are indistinguishable. The premise of A New Culture of Learning is grounded in the idea that we are now living in a world of constant change and flux, which means that more often than not, we are faced with the same problem that vexes children. How do I make sense of this strange, changing, amazing world? By returning to play as a modality of learning, we can see how a world in constant flux is no longer a challenge or hurdle to overcome; it becomes a limitless resource to engage, stimulate, and cultivate the imagination. Our argument brings to the fore the old aphorism "imagination is more important than knowledge." In a networked world, information is always available and getting easier and easier to access. Imagination, what you actually do with that information, is the new challenge.

Essentially what this means is that as the world grows more complicated, more complex, and more fluid, opportunities for innovation, imagination, and play increase. Information and knowledge begin to function like currency: the more of it you have, the more opportunities you will have to do things. To us, asking if this kind of learning is scalable or sustainable is like asking if wealth is scalable and sustainable. But instead of finances, we are talking about knowledge. Education seems to us to be one of the few places we should not be afraid of having too many resources or too much opportunity.

You argue that many of the failures of current teaching practice start from "the belief that most of what we know will remain relatively unchanged for a long enough period of time to be worth the effort of transferring it." Granted the world is changing rapidly, how do we identify the narrowing range of content which probably does fall into this category and which provides a common baseline for other kinds of learning?

The problem is not with facts remaining constant. There are some things we know that we have known for a very long time and are not likely to change. The force that seems to be pushing the knowledge curve forward at an exponential rate is two fold. First, it is the generation of new content and knowledge that is the result of simply participating in any knowledge economy. This leads to a second related dimension: while content may remain stable at some abstract level, the context in which it has meaning (and therefore its meaning) is open to near constant change. The kind of work you have been examining from the point of view of convergence culture is a prime example: users are not so much creating content as they are constantly reshaping context. The very idea of remix is about the productions of new meanings by reframing or shifting the context in which something means. The 21st century has really marked the time in our history where the tools to manipulate context have become as commonplace as the ones for content creation and we now have a low cost or free network of distribution that can allow for worldwide dissemination of new contexts in amazingly brief periods of time.

If you look at something as simple as Google News, the simple act of viewing a news story provides data which is fed back into the system to determine the value and placement of that story for future users. Millions of micro-transactions, each of which are trivial as "content" powerfully and constantly reshape the context in which news and current events have meaning.

You challenge here what James Paul Gee has called the "content fetish," stressing that how we learn is more important than what we learn. How far are you willing to push this? Doesn't it matter whether children are learning the periodic table or the forms of alchemy practiced in the Harry Potter books? Or that they know Obama is Christian rather than Muslim?

Ah, this question throws us into one of the key traps of 20th century thinking about learning. Learning is not a binary construction which pits how against what. In fact, throughout the book, we stress that knowledge, now more than ever, is becoming a where rather than a what or how.

Where something means or its context raises questions about institutions and agency, about reliability and credibility and it always invites us to interrogate the relationship between meaning and context.

In our framework, we stress that every piece of knowledge has both an explicit and a tacit dimension. The explicit is only one kind of content, which tells you what something means. The tacit has its own layer of meaning. It tells why something is important to you, how it relates to your life and social practices. It is the dimension where the context and content interact. Our teaching institutions have paid almost no attention to the tacit and we believe that it is the tacit dimension that allows us to navigate meaning in a changing world.

Knowledge may maintain consistency in the explicit, while undergoing radical changes in the tacit and we believe that understanding how knowledge is both created and how it flows in the tacit is the key to understanding and transforming learning in the 21st century.

Douglas Thomas is an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research focuses on the intersections of technology and culture. It has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Annenberg Center for Communication. Doug is also the author of the book Hacker Culture and a coauthor or coeditor of several other books, including Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies and Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age. He is the founding editor of Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, an international, interdisciplinary journal focused on games research.

John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar and an adviser to the provost at the University of Southern California and an independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He is an author or a coauthor of several books, including The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion; The Only Sustainable Edge; and The Social Life of Information, which has been translated into nine languages. He has also authored or coauthored more than 100 papers in scientific journals.

Prior to his current position, John was the chief scientist of Xerox and, for nearly two decades, the director of the company's Palo Alto Research Center. He was also a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.

Multitasking and Continuous Partial Attention: An Interview with Linda Stone (Part Two)

Some have argued that new media have diminished our attention span, but you are arguing for more nuanced shifts in the ways we pay attention and process information. Do you see these shifts as a product of the technology or of the ways we have learned to inter-relate with those technologies?

Our most resilient selves are able to tap the attention strategy that best matches any given activity or situation. As we create and adopt new technologies, we do a dance with them -- we are figuring out what they offer and the trade offs (how they optimize us and how we optimize the technologies). The shifts are a result of this dance. Over time, as we internalize the costs and benefits of our inter-relationship with technologies (the "what"), and we make choices as to the "how."

When we talk about information overload, it's as if we believe the information is committing the crime. When Nicholas Carr talks about "the web shattering focus and rewiring our brains," we turn the finger of blame toward the worldwide Web. Carr even asks, "What kind of brain is the Web giving us?" Excuse me, the web is giving us a brain? Can we really be so certain about cause and effect?

If we shift our focus to the how, we can find new options. This is a call to action, not a call to a war of technology vs. humans. In our relationship with technology, we are powerful. The HOW is up to us.

For more on these ideas, check out these posts.

There has been a good deal of debate about the value of multitasking. Is it a logical adaptation to the intensified flow of information and demands we face in the current media environment?

There are so many degrees of multi-tasking. There's simple multi-tasking and complex multi-tasking. Most people lump it all together, but there are very different impacts physiologically and mentally. What I call continuous partial attention is complex multi-tasking. I wanted to more clearly differentiate. In any case, this is _not_ black and white. Sometimes it's good to multi-task, sometimes not. Attention strategies need to match intentions and situations.

What are the educational implications of your research on attention? Many educators are opposed to bringing new media tools into they classes because they see them as a potential distraction for their students. Is this a legitimate concern or should they be helping students develop skills at managing their attention which may allow them to more productively engage with such technologies?

Long, long answer possible here. The short story is that, as a former teacher, I think there's room for all kinds of experiences. There are times when NO technology is the best match and times when a thoughtful integration of technology is best.

This may sound a little out there, but I've come to believe that it's time for students to learn breathing techniques that help regulate the autonomic nervous system. Autonomically regulated, we have the best command of our attention, of using the strategy we choose that best matches the activity and situation.

honestly, I do believe, the single most important thing educators can do is to teach breathing techniques that regulate the autonomic nervous system and help up regulate parasympathetic response. This is at the heart of attention, social and emotional intelligence, and contributes to cognition. Further, educators can consider how reflection time might be integrated into the school day. Between media, technology and the 24/7 lifestyle, this precious processing and integration time doesn't exist. Art, music, leisure time - these contribute to our humanity, and often are cut in a productivity obsessed society. A post productivity society will value them again. It is not an accident at the TED Conference that art, music, dance and wordless videos are as important a part of the program as the talks. This variety contributes to the "music" of the human body and human learning.... Rests and notes.

Time and environments for self-directed play - also essential. We have replaced self-directed play with homework and guided learning. Both of the latter have value. The former is significant. Self-directed play is where our emergent questions find expression, our passions find us, failure is iteration - there isn't an emotional charge, it's part of a compelling process of discovery.

I am eternally grateful to my mother for having an art/art supply table set up in the family room. When we weren't outside playing, we were often creating books, objects, works of art -- we were given freedom to express. Questions were indulged with trips to the library, opportunities to build, make or create experiments. We were welcomed in the kitchen, one of the greatest labs, ever, for me. When I wanted to start a cookie baking company, selling cookies door to door at age 8, I was encouraged to do so and had to pay cost of goods before I could take profits.

Today, in the name of "safety"/danger, so much is declared dangerous -- so much of what feeds curiosity and wonder. Granted, some of it may be dangerous, but so much of it can be explored -- just ask Geever Tulley.

In the name of "teacher-proofing," everything from schedules (2 minutes of health and safety, 30 minutes science, 70 minutes reading, etc) to content (which book, which page), to measures (least common denominator student learning objectives, uni-dimensional tests that teachers are compelled to teach toward), is prescribed.

This alienates imaginative, passionate teachers and, honestly, it's time to assess the overall (in my opinion) damages caused by this hyper productivity approach to learning. I'm a fan of diane ravitch and highly recommend her latest book on the rise and fall of American schools. She is a wise woman.

It's not the fault of the unions and a war with the unions is not going to improve education. We need re-assess both the what and the how of education and find a way to enlist all parties in re-creation vs destruction.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention school lunches. This program was started after world war II, to support an under-nourished populous. Today, it is one of the cornerstones contributing to childhood obesity and poor health, and potentially, the learning challenges that can stem from poor nutrition.

This program must be a role model for healthy nutrition. It is one of the central ways to infuse information and experience around healthy food choices.

Social critics, such as Walter Benjamin, have long raised questions about distraction, seeing it as a phenomenon of the modern age. Is there a reason to think that contemporary forms of distraction are profoundly different from those encountered in cities at the beginning of the 20th century? If so, in what ways?

Different, but at heart, the same impact. Distraction is like a broken glass. Embracing a spectrum of attention strategies and having the flexibility and skill to match intention and activities to attention strategy is the prize. Understanding and being able to manage breath and emotion contributes this (and it's commutative -- managing attention helps manage breath as much as managing breath helps manage attention).

You noted recently that there are new tools emerging which seek to block some of the distractions we encounter on line. What is motivating these tools and are they a good response to the situations you are observing?

I'm in favor of approaches that tap the wisdom of the body or that enhance the wisdom of the body, the cooperation/integration of mindbody.

I'm not opposed to using technologies to support us in reclaiming our attention. But I prefer passive, ambient, non-invasive technologies over parental ones. Consider the Toyota Prius. The Prius doesn't stop in the middle of a highway and say, "Listen to me, Mr. Irresponsible Driver, you're using too much gas and this car isn't going to move another inch until you commit to fix that." Instead, a display engages us in a playful way and our body implicitly learns to shift to use less gas.

Personal technologies today are prosthetics for our minds.

In our current relationship with technology, we bring our bodies, but our minds rule. "Don't stop now, you're on a roll. Yes, pick up that phone call, you can still answer these six emails. Follow Twitter while working on PowerPoint, why not?" Our minds push, demand, coax, and cajole. "No break yet, we're not done. No dinner until this draft is done." Our tyrannical minds conspire with enabling technologies and our bodies do their best to hang on for the wild ride.

With technologies like Freedom, we re-assign the role of tyrant to the technology. The technology dictates to the mind. The mind dictates to the body. Meanwhile, the body that senses and feels, that turns out to offer more wisdom than the finest mind could even imagine, is ignored.

Our opportunity is to create personal technologies that are prosthetics for our beings. Conscious Computing. It's post-productivity, post-communication era computing. Personal technologies that enhance our lives.

Thirty years ago, personal computing technologies created a revolution in personal productivity, supporting a value on self-expression, output and efficiency. The personal communications technology era that followed the era of personal productivity amplified accessibility and responsiveness. Personal technologies have served us well as prosthetics for the mind, in service of thinking and doing.

How do we usher in an era of Conscious Computing? What tools, technologies, and techniques will it take for personal technologies to become prosthetics of our full human potential?

For more on conscious computing, follow this link.

Widely recognized as a visionary thinker and thought leader, Linda Stone is a writer, speaker and consultant focused on trends and their strategic and consumer implications. Articles on her work have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, The Economist, Boston Globe, Harvard Business Review, and hundreds of blogs.

Previously, she spent close to twenty years as an executive in high technology. In 1986, she was persuaded to join Apple Computer to help "change the world." In her 7 years at Apple, she had the opportunity to do pioneering work in multimedia hardware, software and publishing. In her last year at Apple, Stone worked for Chairman and CEO John Sculley on special projects. In 1993, Stone joined Microsoft Research under Nathan Myhrvold and Rick Rashid. She co-founded and directed the Virtual Worlds Group/Social Computing Group, researching online social life and virtual communities. During this time, she also taught as adjunct faculty in NYU's prestigious Interactive Telecommunications Program. In 2000, CEO Steve Ballmer tapped Stone to take on a VP role, reporting to him, to help improve industry relationships and contribute to a constructive evolution of the corporate culture. She retired from Microsoft in 2002. She is an advisor for the Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org) and is on the Advisory Board of the RIT Lab for Social Computing.

DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part One)

This is the second in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following curator's statement was written by Jonathan McIntosh, who describes himself as "a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate." Political Remix Video can empower people to assert their creative voice, tell alternative stories and critically engage with mass media systems. It is a form of critical DIY media production which challenges power structures, deconstructs cultural norms and subverts dominant social narratives by transforming fragments of mainstream media and popular culture.

The practice of remixing and re-framing moving images for political purposes has been around since the invention of film. The tradition dates back to the 1920's when Russian re-editors (many of them women) would repurpose American Hollywood films to create different political narratives and class messages. During World War Two, the Allies propaganda machine re-edited footage from Nazi rallies for newsreels to poke fun at the German Army making it seem less threatening. These early re-mixes were painstakingly done by hand, splicing strips of film and setting them to a new audio track.

The 1980s and 1990s brought video tapes and home VCRs allowing artists, activists and fan-vidders to make remixes via tape-to-tape editing. The media tools and technology of the 21st century have made the power of critical remix available to anyone with access to the web, a computer and some extra time.

Increasingly we are becoming a global culture that communicates in an audio-visual language. All political remix videos are made without the permission of the copyright holder and rely on the fair use doctrine. However despite the fact that they should be protected under fair use many critical remixes are especially vulnerable to DMCA takedowns and automatied content ID matching systems.

Today a small number of large corporations own, control and produce most of our popular culture. The remix video process provides creators a powerful way of talking back to this mass media machine. It is a way to communicate using that audio-visual language in poetic, humorous, poignant and entertaining ways.

I curated the political remix portion of the DIY 24/7 Video show at USC in the Spring of 2008. I was asked to put together a new show for 2010 highlighting some of the best remixes of the last two years. Here I have collected videos representing several distinct remix styles, covering a wide variety of social, cultural and political topics. I have focused in particular on re-cut trailers, identity correction, transformative storytelling, supercuts, and music videos. These works comment on, subvert, critique, ridicule, celebrate, illuminate and build on aspects of mass media by utilizing pieces of mass media. The topics of these videos vary widely; some focus on big "P" political issues like war, elections and government policy while others highlight small "P" political issues like race, gender and sexuality.

Re-cut trailers

Re-cut trailers are probably the most popular form of video remix online today. Some dramatically shift the genre and tone of popular movies while others remix straight characters to create new queer relationships and queer narratives from heteronormative Hollywood films.

Pretty Women as a Horror Film

Becca Marcus re-imagines the popular romantic comedy Pretty Woman as a terrifying thriller. The 1990 movie stars Richard Gere as a wealthy businessman endearingly obsessed with a women who prostitutes herself on the streets of New York City played by Julia Roberts. Becca re-cuts the films trailer adding a new soundtrack and transforming Richard Gere's character from "wealthy saviour" to a more appropriate violent controlling predator. Interestingly, the original film was written as a dark drama dealing with the difficult lives of sex workers but prior to production, Walt Disney Motion Pictures rewrote the film making it into a lighthearted Cinderella-story with the tagline "Who knew it was so much fun to be a hooker?"

Gay Marriage Storm Chasers

Mary C. Matthews of VideoPancakes remixes the now infamous anti-gay marriage "gathering storm" ad created by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). She couples it with footage from the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers, she creates a promo for a new fictitious reality show called "Gay Marriage Chasers". Matthews' seamless combination produces a hilarious critique of the absurd fear mongering embedded in religious anti-gay PR efforts.

Harry Potter and the Brokeback Mountain

By now there are thousands of Brokeback Mountain parody videos online, some edging on ridicule and homophobia and others successfully subverting heteronormative Hollywood narratives to create new queer relationships. This Harry/Ron slash remix, by 19 year old vidder MissSheenie, re-casts the stars of the heteronormative Harry Potter films as young, queer wizards struggling with magic and their feeling for each other. Slash fiction using film trailers as a foundation allows makers to easily queer nearly any on screen straight relationship and is an especially important tool for LGBT fans who have so few characters to identify with in mass media.

Jonathan McIntosh is a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate. He blogs at PoliticalRemixVideo.com and is a member of the Open Video Alliance. He also facilitates workshops with youth that utilize remix video and a crucial media literacy tool. His latest remix "Right Wing Radio Duck" along with the rest of his work, can be found on his website RebelliousPixels.com.

When Politics Meets Pop Culture: The Mid-Term Election Report

I am writing this well before any election returns have come in. At the moment, I do not know for sure how well any of these candidates fared in the American mid-term elections last night (and given the likely results, I might prefer to remain in blissful ignorance for a bit.) Actually, if you are reading this it is probably because I stayed up way too late last night watching the returns. Over the past few weeks, I've been picking up a range of political ads which are, in one way or another, inspired by contemporary popular culture. As many of you know, I'm doing research right now on the concept of "fan activism" and the related concept of the "consumer-citizen," both ways of getting at the blurring of the lines between politics and entertainment. This has been a key theme running through the campaign season here -- especially as journalists and academics alike have come to grips with the Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert rally for sanity in Washington last weekend. I thought these spots, drawn from races around the country and a range of organizations, might spark some productive conversations on the day after the election.

Here's one produced by the John Manchin (Democrat) campaign for the U.S. Senate in West Virginia.

Don't blame Manchin. The title of George Lucas's science fiction classic has been linked to missile defense systems since the Reagan era. In this case, the candidate just knows how to build on that imagery to transform the campaign in a space opera.

This spot, produced by GOP Proud, uses knowledge of reality television (in this case, Real Housewives of New Jersey) to construct a critique of three leading Democratic figures.

Here, the Pat Quinn (Dem.) for Governor campaign in Illinois borrows a few notes from Glee to try to catch voters up to what they've missed so far in that election cycle. Of course, Quinn took office after the previous governor Rod Blagojevich resigned (under scandal) and went on Celebrity Apprentice.

Here, Young Republicans take aim at the president who has become famous for campaigning on Facebook, representing youth voters as recovering from a bad online romance with an abusive boyfriend. This seems the logical followup to the celebrity-themed spots which the McCain campaign ran during the 2008 election campaign, though they are created by someone who knows what Facebook is and who is also no doubt aware that The Social Network has been generating buzz at the box office.

This last spot, produced by Jerry Brown, has been credited with helping turn around the Governor's race in California. I've included it not because it features our Terminator governor (we've gotten used to that) but because in many ways, its juxtaposition of Meg Whitman and Arnold Schwartzenegger resembles one of the segments on The Daily Show which digs into the news archive to contextualize contemporary news footage.

So here are some questions to consider about these videos:

• Which genres or forms of popular culture did they each evoke?
• What kinds of fan knowledge or consumer interests do they tap?
• What tone or attitude do they adopt towards the popular culture forms in question?
• What kinds of rhetorical work are the pop culture references doing here?
• Do the spots situate the candidate and the viewer as equally in the know about popular culture?
• Do any of them seem pandering or patronizing in their use of pop culture images? If so, why?
• How might we relate such spots to the "culture wars" which have long defined national politics? Is there a difference in running against popular culture as "cultural pollution" and mobilizing popular culture towards other political ends?
• Are there differences in liberal and conservative strategies for deploying pop culture references?

I'd love to have readers send in other examples from this campaign season where candidates drew upon pop culture references to help frame their political messages.

theaskanison, one of my Twitter followers, has added this Twilight Zone themed spot to the mix:

Risks and Safety on the Internet: The Perspectives of European Youth

Sonia Livingstone is no stranger to this blog. She was one of the two keynote speakers at last year's Digital Media and Learning Conference on "Diversifying Participation." And around the time the conference was announced, I featured an interview with her here about her most recent book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities. She's a tough-minded academic, one who challenges the easy answers offered by digital critics and supporters alike, insisting we "get it right" if we are going to "do right" by young people. She certainly values the benefits of the kinds of participatory culture and informal learning which has become a key focus of the American DML community, but she also cautions us not to move too quickly over risks and inequalities that still surround young people's lives online.

Digital Media and Learning Conference 2010 Closing Keynote and Closing Remarks from UCHRI Video on Vimeo.

In her talk at the DML conference, she argued that many young people lack the skills and resources to learn online outside of the classroom environment, facing frustrations and distractions which make it difficult for them to achieve the full benefits we've seen in other instances of youth engagement with participatory culture.

This past week, Livingstone contacted me to help share the results of a large-scale survey she and a team of researchers (Leslie Haddon, Anke Görzig and Kjartan Ólafsson) conducted with 23,420 young people drawn from 23 European countries and intended to get data on a number of "online risks," including "pornography, bullying, receiving sexual messages, contact with people not known face to face, offline meetings with online contacts, potentially harmful user-generated content and personal data misuse."

This data could not be more urgently needed given the ways that the American and international media has been focusing on issues of cyberbullying and teen suicide in the wake of a series of devastating cases of gay, lesbian, and bi youth taking their own lives over recent weeks. What follows is taken from the Key Findings section of their report:

12% of European 9-16 year olds say that they have been bothered or upset by something on the internet. This includes 9% of 9-10 year olds. However, most children do not report being bothered or upset by going online.

Looking across the range of risks included in the survey (as detailed below), a minority of European 9-16 year olds - 39% overall - have encountered one or more of these risks. Most risks are encountered by less than a quarter of children - as reported under specific findings below.

The most common risks reported by children online are communicating with new people not met face-to- face and seeing potentially harmful user-generated content. It is much rarer for children to meet a new online contact offline or be bullied online.

Significantly, risk does not often result in harm, as reported by children. Being bullied online by receiving nasty or hurtful messages is the least common risk but is most likely to upset children.

Since most children do not report encountering any of the risks asked about, with even fewer having been bothered or upset by their online experiences, future safety policy should target resources and guidance where they are particularly needed - especially for younger children who go online.

Sexual risks - seeing sexual images and receiving sexual messages online - are more encountered but they are experienced as harmful by few of the children who are exposed to them.....

The more children in a country use the internet daily, the more those children have encountered one or more risks. However, more use also brings more opportunities and, no doubt, more benefits.... In other words, internet use brings both risks and opportunities, and the line between them is not easy to draw.

Among those children who have experienced one of these risks, parents often don't realise this: 41% of parents whose child has seen sexual images online say that their child has not seen this; 56% of parents whose child has received nasty or hurtful

messages online say that their child has not; 52% of parents whose child has received sexual messages say that their child has not; 61% of parents whose child has met offline with an online contact say that their child has not. Although the incidence of these

risks affects a minority of children in each case, the level of parental underestimation is more substantial.

Later, the report provides some specific information about the prevalence of cyberbullying:

Nearly one in five (19%) 9-16 year olds across Europe say that someone has acted in a hurtful or nasty way towards them in the past 12 months. Bullying is rarely a frequent experience - 5% say someone acts towards them in a hurtful or nasty way more than once a week, for 4% it is once or twice a month, and for 10% it is less often,

suggesting one or a few instances have occurred in the past year....

The most common form of bullying is in person face to face: 13% say that someone has acted in a hurtful or nasty way towards them in person face to face compared with 5% who say that this happened on the internet and 3% who say that this happened by

mobile phone calls or messages.

Although overall, younger children are as likely to have been bullied as teenagers, they are less likely to be bullied by mobile phone or online. In other words, it seems that for teenagers, being bullied in one way (e.g. face to face) is more likely to be accompanied

by bullying online and/or by mobile....

Although overall, the vast majority of children have not been bullied on the internet, those who have are more likely to have been bullied on a social networking site or by instant messaging. Bullying by email, in gaming sites or chatrooms is less common, probably because these are less used applications across the whole population....

Among children who say "yes, I have been sent nasty or hurtful messages on the internet", one third (30%) of their parents also say that their child has been bullied online. But in over half of these cases (56%), parents say that their child has not been bullied, and in a further 14% of cases, the parent doesn't know....

Parents appear more aware that their child has been bullied if the child is a girl, or in the middle age groups (11-14) than if they are either older or younger.

Parents appear over-confident that the youngest group has not been bullied, when the child says they have, though parents also most often say they 'don't know' about the 9-10 year olds.

Where-ever one stands on the value of youth's online experiences, such numbers are at once sobering and empowering. The team's nuanced research helps us to put into perspective a range of competing claims about the risks of going online. For some of us, these numbers are higher than we'd like to believe, while for others, they are lower than some of the news coverage might have suggested. It is especially helpful where they give us contrasts between the risks online and those kids confront in their physical surroundings, as we've shared above in regard to bullying. We should be concerned that so many young people are confronting these problems without their parents being aware. I've written here before that young people may not need or deserve adults snooping over their shoulders as they interact with their friends but they need adults who are watching their backs, who understand the risks and benefits of what they are doing online, and can help them talk through the challenges they confront there.

For more information on the Livingstone et al report, check here.

Digital Media and Learning: New Video Series

Last spring, I expressed my dismay over what I saw as the failure of PBS's Digital Nation documentary to adequately express the work being done as part of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a project which has brought together some of the smartest contemporary thinkers about formal and informal learning in the digital age. I was not the only one disappointed in the documentary and so I was delighted to be working with folks from the Pearson Foundation who were producing an alternative account, which is scheduled to be aired on PBS stations around the country next spring. Their project will be called Digital Media, New Learners of the 21st Century. In advance of the broadcast, they have started to release a series of video profiles of leading thinkers about media and learning via a temporary Vimeo site. They have said that there are more profiles coming and that they are in the process of building a spiffier website to showcase the material. But I wanted to take advantage of my inside knowledge to give you a sneak peak at the forthcoming project.

Here is the profile they constructed about my work. It was shot in and around my new digs at the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Henry Jenkins from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

One of the things I really admire about this series of videos is their attempt to situate each "thinker" in their real world context -- to show where we live and/or work and to suggest some of the factors in our surroundings which shape our thoughts. This next one focused on John Seeley Brown does a beautiful job of showing the natural environment that surrounds his home in Hawaii and how he draws insight from the surfing culture there that shapes how he thinks about the learning process. (I am not sure what to make of the focus on athletics in their depiction of me -- trust me, I'm no jock, though I do enjoy an office which backs up to the field where the USC Marching Band practices.) The profile of James Paul Gee, which you can find at their site, also situates the educator taking a walk in a beautiful natural setting, again refusing to construct images which pit the digital (or the life of the mind) against the natural.

John Seely Brown from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

This profile of Katie Salen offers us some intriguing glimpses into the Quest to Learn School, an innovative charter school in New York City which uses game design principles to encourage young people to develop systems thinking. You might contrast the respectful way that the school is depicted here with the disorientating representation the project received in the Digital Nation documentary. Here, we have a sense of what young people are doing, why they find it engaging, and how it relates to traditional curricular standards.

Katie Salen from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

Check out their Vimeo site to see the other profiles of James Paul Gee, Mimi Ito, Nicole Pinkard, and Diana Rhoten. Each makes important and inspiring contributions to our understanding of digital media and learning.

Towards a New Civic Ecology: Addressing the Grand Challenges

Last week, I was asked to deliver one of the keynotes for the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges conference which was hosted on the USC campus. I had not been aware of the Grand Challenges program previously, but it seems to bring together engineering students and faculty to work together to confront some of the major problems of the 21st century, seeking to inspire them to direct their research towards the public good and social betterment. I was asked to open a panel on Communications by telling them what they needed to know about how to share their insights and ideas with key stakeholders in the current media landscape.

What follows is my attempt to capture some of the key insights that I shared during my presentation.

Towards a New Civic Ecology

If you are going to confront and overcome the Grand Challenges, you are going to need to learn how to navigate through an increasing complex communications infrastructure. Communicating your core insights is the responsibility of all of us in this room -- the engineers and educators, the journalists and communicators. As you do so, you are going to need to be able to deploy a range of different media platforms and practices. And like the rest of us, you are going to need to do what you can to build and support a robust, diverse communications system which can allow you to educate and motivate all of the many people you are going to have to work with to overcome the obstacles and achieve the solutions you are here to discuss.

Seen through that lens, the contemporary communications system is at once struggling with the threat that many major news outlets which have been the backbone of civic information over the past century are crumbling in the face of competition from new media. We may not be able to count on the traditional newspaper, news magazine or network newscast to do the work we could take for granted in the past. We are already seeing science, health, and technology reporters as especially vulnerable to lay-offs as the news media struggle to maintain economic viability and cultural relevance. At the same time, we are seeing expanded communications opportunities in the hands of everyday people -- including in the hands of academics and other experts who traditionally had little means of direct communication with the various publics impacted by their work. The problem at the present time is that existing channels of professional journalism are crumbling faster than we are developing alternative solutions which will support the kinds of information and communication needed for a democratic society.

Often, this moment of transition has been framed in terms of the concept of citizen journalism. As someone who blogs, I have many problems with this concept and not simply the one which Morley Safer raised when he said "I would trust citizen journalism as much as I would trust citizen surgery." This comment was a sharp defense of the professional skills which our students acquire through journalism schools and apply in the course of their working lives in the news media. As I've noted here before, citizen journalism is a transitional concept at best. Like the phrase, horseless carriage, it defines what is emerging in terms of legacy practices. Today, if I asked you to list ten things about your car, it is unlikely most of you would identify the fact that it is not pulled by horses, yet there was a time when the salience of this description was strong enough that it framed our understanding of what an auto was. Now, we seem to be determined to describe what citizens are doing in a language which pits them in competition with rather than in collaboration with professional journalism. In doing so, we set up several false oppositions.

First, last time I looked, most journalists were also citizens and there is a big danger in them abstracting themselves from their status as citizens when they write about the news. Second, there is often an implication that those who are not journalists are amateurs. But, when I write this blog, I am not writing as an amateur journalist. I am writing as a professional in my own right, someone who has expertise which I seek to share with a larger public, and someone whose expertise is only passed along in fragments by the traditional news media. And finally, I see what citizens as building as more expansive than journalism. We are collectively creating a communications system to support our civic engagement. For the purposes of this argument, I am going to be calling this infrastructure the civic ecology.

Thinking about a civic ecology helps us to recognize that while journalists do important work in gathering and vetting the information we need to make appropriate decisions as citizens, they are only part of a larger system through which key ideas get exchanged and discussed. We understand this if we think about the classic coffee houses which Habermaas saw as part of the ideal public sphere. The proprietors, we are told, stocked them with a range of publications -- broadsides, pamplets, newspapers, journals, and magazines -- which are intended to provide resources for debate and discussion among the paper who are gathered there on any given evening. We might think about the ways that the newspapers in colonial America were supplemented by a wide array of different kinds of political speech -- from petitions, resolutions, and proclamations to various kinds of correspondence (both personal and collective), from speeches, parades, sermons, and songs to street corner gossip.

By this same token, the present moment is characterized by both commercial and noncommercial forms of communication. As the comic strip, Zits, explains, "If it wasn't for blogs, podcasts, and twitter, I'd never know whar was going on." And of course part of the joke is that these new forms of communication are part of how his entire generation follows and makes sense of civic discourse, though often, what they are doing is monitoring and directing attention towards information which originated through professional news channels.

The 2010 State of the News report found that Americans were getting an increasing amount of news and information in the course of their day but they were doing so by "grazing" across the civic ecology -- consuming bits and pieces of information across their day from many different news channels rather than sitting down to read the morning newspaper or watch the evening news from start to finish. They flip on the television to CNN while getting dressed, they catch a few minutes in the radio in the car or listening to their ipod on the subway, they flip across a news app on their iPhone while waiting for class, they pick up a discarded newspaper at lunch and flip through it, they follow a link sent via twitter and brouse around a site on the web, and so it goes across the day and across the week. Their civic education doesn't rest on a single profession, publication, or platform, but is rather constructed across platforms. The news system is porous -- enough so that ideas flow from community to community -- until we do not always know where they originated.

A recent report from the Knight Foundation on the information needs of local communities identifies three core challenges which impact the future of news which you need to factor into the solutions you propose to the Grand challenges:

• Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all americans and their communities;
• Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information; and
• Promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community.

Let's consider each of these challenges in turn as we think about the strategies you need to adopt to reach the folks who will be most effected by your discoveries and innovations.

Challenge One: Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information

The good news is that this new civic ecology maximizes the potential of scholars -- scientists, engineers, researchers of all kinds -- to communicate directly with the publics they seek to inform without going through professional intermediaries. The bad news is that most of you are so bad about communicating your ideas in languages that laypeople can understand and most of you see doing so as below your pay grade.

It is going to be up to the generation currently in graduate school to turn this around -- seeing science writing as something more than scrawling formulas on the blackboard. This means learning how to use the wide array of tools and platforms the digital media makes available to you. This means figuring out how to translate what you know into content which is going to engage the interests of non-specialist readers, and that means figuring out the conversations they are already having and providing the resources they need to conduct those changes better. You need to build a trusted relationship with those readers; they need to recognize the value of the information you provide and learn to respect the expertise you offer.

When should you start? There's no time like the presence. I regularly encourage my own graduate students to start a blog around their research topics. Doing so expands their research networks. Many of them get jobs based on the reputations they build through these practices. Many of them discover that they have something new and important to add to ongoing conversations. If this is going to be a regular part of your professional practices in the future, graduate school is the best time to practice these skills. Form partnerships with other graduate students either at your own institutions or elsewhere, and see if you can set a regular schedule for sharing what you know with the world.

But keep in mind that blogs are only one possible mechanism for contributing your expertise to larger conversations. At the talk, I shared a visualization of the science entries on Wikipedia. I did so for two reasons: 1) to encourage scientists, engineers, and educators to contribute what they know to the larger project of collaborative knowledge production that Wikipedia represents and 2) to reflect on the ways that new tools for producing and sharing visualizations, such as those offered by the Many Eyes project, expands the resources through which STEM experts can share what they know with others.

As you reflect on these new opportunities, you also need to recognize that the new communication environment does not respect national borders. I was struck recently talking to some veteran journalists that they kept insisting that Americans did not value "foreign news" and I responded that part of the problem is that professional journalists still think of it as "foreign," when Americans now come from all of these countries and are often seeking information from their mother countries, when American youth are actively seeking out entertainment content from many corners of the world through digital sharing platforms, and where America's political and economic interests are global and not geographically local. The point is not to construct some "foreign" place -- those people over there -- and try to engage us with it but rather to insert global insights into all of the conversations we are having as a society. And as you do so, also to recognize that American news escapes our borders and because a resource which gets deployed, sometimes embraced, sometimes attacked, in all of these other conversations.

For many of the problems you want to confront, you are going to have to break through national silos and speak to a global population which needs to understand the changes you are proposing. As you do so, you need to embrace whatever works, whatever constitutes the most appropriate technologies for reaching those varied populations. And that means mixing high tech and low tech communication strategies. What begins as digital content in the developed world may be translated into images which can be printed out and pasted on walls in the developing world. What begins as a podcast in the global north may become a cassette tape which is passed hand to hand in the global south.

Again, thinking of this as a civic ecology helps us to understand how different channels reach different niches and how communication may occur between different sectors or nations by translating content from one medium to another and passing information from one person to another. This process is central to my forthcoming book on Spreadable Media. There, we distinguish between distribution, which is a top-down process under the control of mass media, and circulation, which is a hybrid process which involves movement between commercial and noncommercial participants.

Challenge Two: Strengthen the capacity to engage with information

The Knight commission correctly notes that educational reform should go hand in hand with our efforts to restructure the civic ecology. As I've shown in my work for the MacArthur foundation, young people need to acquire a range of skills and competencies if they are going to meaningfully engage in the new participatory culture. As they scan the media ecology for bits and pieces of information, they need more discernment than ever before and that comes only if they are able to count on their schools to help them overcome the connected concerns of the digital divide, the participation gap, and the civic engagement gap.

The Digital Divide has to do with access to networked communication technologies -- with many still relying on schools and public libraries to provide them with access. The Participation Gap has to do with access to skills and competencies (as well as the experiences through which they are acquired). And the Civic Engagement Gap has to do with access to a sense of empowerment and entitlement which allows one to feel like your voice matters when you tap into the new communication networks to share your thoughts.

Unfortunately, we've wired the classrooms in this country and then disabled the computers; we've blocked young people from participating in the new forms of participatory culture; and we've taught them that they are not ready to speak in public by sequestering them to walled gardens rather than allowing them to try their voices through public forums. To overcome these challenges, scientists and engineers may need to work against their own vested interests in the short run. Despite constant cries against scientific illiteracy, our public funding for education has strip-minded the funding for all other subject matters in order to support STEM education decade after decade with devastating effects. Certainly, we need to be more effective at training kids to think in scientific and engineering terms, but that does not mean we should crush humanities, arts, and social science education in order to do so. The problems you identify are as much social problems as they are technical problems and if you want your solutions to work, you have to have an educated and empowered citizenry who are able to act upon the information you provide them.

As we do so, we need to recognize that in the new civic ecology, we are going to confront conflicting regimes of truth, which is why so many Americans believe that evolution and global warming are myths or that Obama is a secret Muslim, an alien, or even someone who comes from Star Trek's mirror mirror universe. We need to understand those other regimes of truth if we are going to find ways to communicate across them. Again, this may be a social or cultural problem but it can not be left to us humanist and social scientists if you are going to achieve your goals.

Challenge 3: Promote engagement with information

It is no longer enough simply to inform. You must inspire and motivate, you must engage and enthrall the public, if you want to cut through the clutter of the new media landscape. I've often talked about the ways entertainment franchises are both creating cultural attractors which draw like-minded people together and cultural activators which gives them something to do.

Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide have written about Public Media 2.0, suggesting that we should no longer think about public service media (as if the knowledge simply flowed from above) but rather public facilitating and public mobilizing media that creates a context for meaningful conversations and helps point towards actions which the public might take to address its concerns. It is no longer enough to produce science documentaries which point to distance stars without giving the public something it can do to support your efforts and absorb your insights into motivated action.

I've been inspired lately by the efforts of Brave New Films, the producers of progressive documentaries, to motivate grassroots activism. Initially, the films were distributed via dvds which could be mailed to supporters who would host house parties where they would be discussed and where local activists might point towards concrete steps that could be taken. Now, they are distributing them as online videos which can be embeded into blogs and social networking sites and thus place the burden of their circulation into the hands of their supporters. This strikes me as a strategy which could be embraced by scientists and engineers who want to build a base of support behind their projects.

Historically, one of the best tools for capturing the imagination and rallying the support of scientifically literate segements of the population was through science fiction. Science fiction was designed as an intervention into the public debates around science and technology -- pushing us to the limits of known science, speculating about the implications of new technological discoveries, and creating a community ready to discuss what they read. The science fiction fan world became major supporters of NASA and remained supporters of manned space flight well after the rest of the public turned their eyes elsewhere. Indeed, several key science fiction blogs still publish NASA photographs of deep space exploration as "space porn" -- that is, images of heavenly bodies that will remain untouched by human hands. As you move forward with your grand challenges, see if you can find ways to engage with science fiction writers and deploy them as key allies helping to shape the public imagination so we as a society are ready for the great discoveries and innovations you generate through your research.

So there you have it, the three core challenges of communication. Each of these requires bold action just as much as will be needed to solve the energy crisis or to confront global hunger or climate change. This is why it becomes so important for you to forge cross-disciplinary partnerships throughout your graduate career. You need to walk across campus and engage in conversation with people who are pursuing other majors, who are trying to make a difference through other sectors.

Raising the Digital Generation: What Parents Need to Know About Digital Media and Learning

A few weeks ago, I was asked to represent the School of Communications by giving a talk for Trojans Parent Weekend at USC. (For those who do not follow American universities and their team mascots, the Trojans is the name for the USC sports team and thus, the name that is attached to anyone affiliated with the university.) Below, you can find the webcast version of my remarks, which sought to congratulate parents on their obvious success in raising a child smart enough to become part of our student body and to challenge some of their preconceptions about the forms of informal learning their offspring may have encountered in the course of their interactions with new media platforms and practices.

I felt that this talk might be of interest to my readers, many of whom are educators and/or parents, and who have displayed in the past great interest in my posts on new media and learning. Parents receive so little advice about how to confront the real challenges of navigating the digital environment which is unfamiliar to them and often to their children. Most often, they are told just say no. The more you restrict media use, the better parent you are. And for God's sake, keep the computer out of the kid's bedroom. But none of that feels adequate for a world where there is real learning taking place on line, where learning to navigate the new media environment is going to be key for your offspring's future success. Our schools are already blocking access to many of these core technologies and often refusing to advise youth about how to use them ethically, safely, and creatively. If parents start shutting off computers in the home, they really do close down potentials for their children's growth and development. And if they start snooping through their young person's internet accounts, they run the risk of damaging trust that is going to be vital for their long term relationship. My core advice to parents: Kids need someone to watch their back and not snoop over their shoulders. They need adults who are as engaged in their online lives as they are with their off-line lives -- not less and not more.

Some of what you hear here will be familiar, reflecting other talks and essays I've published on the work of Project New Media Literacies. Some will be newer, having to do with my ongoing projects in the area of youth, new media, and civic engagement.

I mentioned there in passing that we are in the process of creating the Participatory Culture and Learning Lab in the Annenberg School. Participatory Culture has long been the over-arching theme of my work, whether applied to think about creative industries and consumer/fan culture, new media literacies and education, or civic engagement. Over the past year, I have been transitioning out of many of the research roles I played through the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and consolidating my research efforts here at USC. I have been lucky to draw several key members of my research staff on the East coast to join me here in sunny California -- including Erin Reilly who has long been the research director of the New Media Literacies team (and now is building affiliations with the Annenberg Innovation Lab) -- and I have reunited with Sangita Shreshtova, a CMS alum, who is now Research Director for the work we are doing on civic engagement with the MacArthur and Spencer Foundations. PCL (which people are already calling Pickle) represents an umbrella organization which will sustain these efforts while opening up a space for new research initiatives down the line.

Sites of Convergence: An Interview for Brazillian Academics (Part Two)

Participation in a culture of convergence requires the development of certain cognitive capacities. Multitasking, for example, is a skill that young people, the digital "natives," seem more comfortable with than those of older generations, who lived in less complex media environments and were expected to think linearly. In the current media environment, what do we lose and what do we gain in terms of cognitive skills? And can new ways of learning co-exist with old forms of knowledge?

I am often reminded of Plato, who reacted with horror at the thought that writing would displace oral language at the center of Ancient Greek culture; he feared that we would lose the capacity to remember the core values and traditions of our society as we became overly reliant on the technology of writing. He was right in some ways. We do not command the kind of oral-based memory that dominates in pre-literate societies, but it is hard to argue that we would have been better off as a society in the absence of writing - or later, of print.

Every new technology opens up rich possibilities for human communication and expands in significant ways our cognitive capacities. Yet, at the same time, there is always a loss of some skills, which have been valuable to us in the past. We are in such a moment of transition. It's hard to see with any certainty all of the trade-offs we are going to be asked to make, but it is also clear that what is coming will dramatically expand our capacity to create, to learn, and to organize.

The question is how to balance the new skills with the old, how to embrace the capacity of the young to process multiple channels of information with the values of contemplation and meditation, which were the virtues of older forms of learning. We need students who can learn from computers and from books, rather than forcing a false choice between the two. We need young people who can embrace and deploy a range of different cognitive strategies to confront a range of different sources of information and to express themselves across a range of different discursive contexts.

For me, this is never about displacing traditional literacy with new media literacies, but rather expanding the ways young people learn to encompass what is most valuable about the new and retain what was most effective about the old.

How can humanist traditions of critical thinking survive the overflow of information that comes with new media?

To be honest, I don't know. But we will need critical thinking now more than ever if individually and collectively we will navigate through a much more complex information-scape and be able to make quick, effective decisions about the reliability and value of the sea of documents and videos that pass over our eyeballs in the course of our day. One way forward is to embrace what Pierre Levy calls collective intelligence. Levy argues that, in a networked society, nobody knows everything - get rid of the idea of the Renaissance man and rid education of the concept that every student should learn the same things. Everybody knows something - foster a culture of diverse expertise and multiple ways of knowing. And what any given member knows is available to the group as needed - enhance mechanisms for allowing us to compare notes, to deliberate together, and learn from each other. Individually, we are no match against the tsunami of data that crests over us every day of our lives, but collectively, we have the mental capacity to tackle complex problems that would be far beyond our personal competencies.

For us to achieve that potential we have to embrace collaborative learning at every stage of our educational process and we have to allow individuals to develop their own distinctive expertise rather than push our schools towards greater standardization.

From this perspective, the use of new media can in fact help build communities. The opposite, however, also seems to be true. Some media scholars have insisted, for example, that YouTube undermines this promise of community building and collective action precisely because of the huge amount and wide range of information published by its users. Making information publicly available is not the same thing as organizing community or mobilizing action. How would you respond to those who argue that fragmentation and dispersal, rather than purposeful collective action, are the likely outcomes of information overflow? Does access really translate into agency?

I would argue that YouTube represents the opposite of fragmentation. It is a site where media producers of diverse backgrounds and goals pool their resources and share with each other what they have produced. We are more aware of the diversity of our culture when we look at YouTube in large part because it has brought us into contact with forms of cultural production that were once hidden from our view, drowned out by the amplified voice of mass media, and isolated from us by all the various structures of exclusion that shape our everyday cultural experience. This is the heart of what Yochai Benkler argues in The Wealth of Networks - that many of these new sites represent a meeting ground for diversely motivated groups and individuals.

There is, at least potentially, much greater flow of information across groups at the grassroots level now than ever before. Groups that were once invisible are now gaining greater public impact through bringing their cultural productions into these new common spaces. These materials move much more fluidly through the population because they do not have to rely on traditional gatekeepers.

I don't want to overstate this point. Much recent research on social networks suggests that they reflect other kinds of segregation in our culture: people tend to gather online with people they know in their everyday lives rather than exploit the full capacity of a networked culture; they tend to seek out people like themselves rather than use the technology to build "bridging" relationships. And this tends to blunt the potential of a participatory culture to diversify our experiences and knowledge.

I would agree that access does not necessarily translate into agency: it certainly doesn't in the absence of knowledge and skills to deploy the affordances of these new social networks effectively; it doesn't in the absence of a mindset that places a real value on diversity or respects the dignity of all participants; it doesn't in the absence of new forms of social organization that help us to leverage the potentials of digital media to confront the challenges and problems of the 21st century.

The concepts of authorship and intellectual property are key to current debates on new media. On the one hand, digital culture encourages appropriation and popular uses of mass cultural texts, offering increased public exposure to fan creativity. On the other, the surge in what you call "grassroots creativity" has met with growing efforts on the part of the media industry to control the use and circulation of information. Is the notion of intellectual property on the wrong side of history? And what role - if any - can it play in the world of media convergence?

Intellectual property is the battleground that will determine how participatory our culture becomes. In some ways, the mass media industries are opening up greater space for participation, are accepting more appropriation than I ever anticipated. But they are not likely to give up the fight to own the core stories, images, and sounds of our culture without some pretty serious pushback from the public.

If we look at the history of culture, we can see some broad movements, which argue against the long-term viability of our current models of intellectual property. First, there was a folk culture, which supported broad participation, which drew few lines between amateur and professional creators, which stressed the social rather than the economic value of our creative acts, and which relied on peer-to-peer teaching of skills and practices. Second, there was a mass media culture, where the production of culture was privatized and professionalized, where most of us consumed and a few produced, and where none of us could lay claim to the cultural traditions that had sustained us or to the stories that had captured our imagination.

Now, the rise of participatory culture represents the reassertion of the practices and logics of folk culture in the face of a hundred years of mass culture. We now have greater capacity to create again and we are forming communities around the practices of cultural production and circulation. We now have the ability to share what we create with a much larger public than was possible under folk culture, and yet our templates for what culture looks like are still largely formed around the contents and practices of mass culture. This is why fan culture thrives in this new environment. Participatory culture cannot grow without the capacity to archive, appropriate, and recirculate media content; it cannot sustain itself long term without an expanded notion of fair use and a reduction on the capacity of corporate media to exert a monopoly control over our culture.

Everyone sees that the future will be more participatory, but we are fighting over the terms of our participation. New business models seek to liberalize the terms, opening up more space to consumer control, much as autocratic regimes are often forced over time to allow some kinds of democratic practices and institutions as they struggle to stay in power. But my bet is that the public demand is going to be greater than their capacity to let go of their control over the mechanisms of cultural production and circulation. They are not going to be capable of moving far enough fast enough. More and more of us will become "pirates" as we seek to pursue our own interests in a media environment that supports greater participation and a legal environment that seeks to channel that participation in ways that serve the interest of major media conglomerates.

Vinicius Navarro is assistant professor of film studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the co-author (with Louise Spence) of Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (Rutgers University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a book on performance, documentary, and new media.