Clone of New Media Literacies tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2010-01-07:/clone/22 2010-01-06T09:29:48Z learning in a participatory culture Movable Type Commercial 4.24-en Public Media, Public Education, and the Public Good: An Interview with Heather Chaplin (Part Two) tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2010://12.3550 2010-01-05T23:00:00Z 2010-01-06T09:29:48Z Much of your discussion centers around the impact of public media on public education. How would you describe the ideal learning environment for the 21st century and what blocks us from achieving that ideal? One could write a book on... Henry Jenkins http://henryjenkins.org/ Much of your discussion centers around the impact of public media on public education. How would you describe the ideal learning environment for the 21st century and what blocks us from achieving that ideal?
One could write a book on that topic! Well, one of the intriguing things about creating a more intimate relationship between public media and public education is that public media is in possession of a national treasure of historical materials. Part of NPL would be assisting public media in digitizing that material and retooling it for teachers to use while teaching.

So imagine a science class where the teacher can pull out a segment from Nova on the spot to illustrate the answer to a particular question asked by a student. Or using a bit of an interview from a Jim Leher interview to make a political point. The examples could go on for ever. And, unlike the archives of corporate-owned media, these arches belong to the American public. We paid for them and we should take advantage of them.

There are also real opportunities for public media to be involved teaching kids media skills. Imagine a local PBS station also being a hub where kids could take classes on video editing, or putting together sound pieces, or making video games. Part of public media 2.0 calls for local stations to take a greater role in serving their local communities directly.
]]> Educational games figure prominently in this report. This is not surprising given your previous work on games. Why might games be a particularly rich test case for the kind of expanded public media system you are describing?
Yes, I am very passionate about using games to teach and foster civic engagement. One example: right now simulations exist at all levels of the government for all kinds of things, from weather predictions, to budget issues, to military scenarios. Simulations can be incredibly powerful tools for learning how things work - why not take these simulations, which already exist and which we, as tax payers, financed, and turn them into games made available to the public to play with?

It would be cheap, could reach vast amounts of people quicly and easily, and could educate people about important things like how tax cuts or break will effect the economy, what the potential outcomes of military decisions might be, etc. In other words these could be powerful tools for fostering transparancy, which is key to a real democracy. We now have more data than we know what to do with.

Making games so that people can play with the data is one way to help people make sense of everything that is out there. Government data should be available to the public so that we can make informed decisions about what our government ought to be doing. Taking something that already exists- government-created simulations - and making them available as games to people seems a really obvious way to foster democracy.

I also think public media needs to begin funding games in the same way it funds educational television. The inspiration for the act of Congress that funded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and created PBS and NPR in the first place was this idea that here was this new media - TV - and that we ought to be using it for more than just entertainment purposes. Well, that was 1967. It's more than 30 years later and there's a new new media on the block and that's the videogame. Why leave such a powerful tool in the hands of corporate entertainment companies? As a society we want it in our arsenal of tools to educate the next generation of Americans to be active and engaged participants in our democracy.

In terms of the classroom of the future in general, I see digital media as a huge opportunity. I don't believe, however, that digital media tools replace things like smaller teacher-to-student ratios. And I do worry, on some level, about having so much of our lives mediated by machines. I see these digital media tools being used when appropriate to enhance the teaching experience and not as a replacement for teacher to student contact. For example, the idea of using 3-D models of molecules to teach science: that's probably just a better and more effective way of teaching what a molecule is than giving a lecture on one. Therefore, since it's something we can do, we should. On the other hand, discussing a great novel is probably best done by teacher-student discussion. That should go away. It's a matter of understanding the technology now at our disposal and making good choices of when to use it.

What blocks us from achieving these goals? A lot of things. The public school system in this country is messed up almost beyond belief and on every level. Bush's push towards more standardization certainly didn't help - it meant teachers teaching kids to pass certain standardized tests, and not teaching them to be critical thinkers, to be genuinely literate in the sense of being able to create meaning. Our schools are wildly underfunded, and even when money is available, the resistance to change is staggering. I asked one former state school superintendent what she'd do to fix the public education system in this country and she - a mild-looking women in a tweed suit - said she'd blow the whole thing up and start from scratch.

What's so scary is how high the stakes are. Democracy requires an educated citizenry. Without that, you regress to mob rule. Part of being free is knowing how to use your mind.

You are calling for improvements in the broadband infrastructure to bring richer media content into schools but schools are also seeking to police the flow of content into the classroom, blocking off access to social networking and media sharing sites, for example. How might we resolve this tension between the desire to broaden and to regulate access to information in the 21st century classroom?
Another excellent question and I wish I had the answer. It is true that schools and teachers fear the Internet desperately. In part, I think people fear the lack of control the vastness of the Internet implies, I think they fear the new, and I think on some level they simply fear and distrust new technology. People tend to think the things they didn't grow up with are somehow bad.

To me, however, it's like we've built a high-way system, said hey! our whole world is now going to be based on this new highway system - but we're not going to teach anyone to drive. It's sheer lunacy.

I think schools need to learn to teach kids how to use the Internet, not hide them from it. The reasons for this are too numerous - and too well elucidated by you, Henry!, to even go into right here. As to some sort of solution, I can't help but think the answer is working with teachers and parents.

We need to educate people as to what 21st century literacy will require - because being literate in the 21st century is going to be very different from being literate in the 20th century. You simply will not be literate in the future if you don't know how to handle the Internet in a meaningful way. I teach journalism, and I do several classes where everybody brings in their lap top and we do experiments on Internet research, for example. But then that's at the college level and I have freedom over what I get to teach. Again, I can't say enough how high I think the stakes are.

Think of the kid growing up in a small rural town that doesn't even have Internet access. How is that kid going to manage as an adult competing against kids who've been using the Internet since they were toddlers? If the schools don't take this on, children in rural and poor areas will suffer the most and will be left behind even more than they already are.
A decade ago, the push to respond to the digital divide led to the wiring of classrooms often without adequate pedagogical goals or professional development. We wired the classroom-now what? How do we avoid the replication of this same problem where the expansion of technical infrastructure outstrips the educational vision needed to use these tools towards meaningful pedagogy?
This is another great question and I feel woefully unqualified to answer it. It's so easy to say what ought to happen, and another thing entirely to actually make something happen.

I think you put your finger on it before when you asked about teachers' wanting to keep the Internet, social networking, etc. out of the classroom. Or Jim Gee talks very eloquently about classrooms very methodically making kids leave everything they're interested in at the door, thus essentially ensuring the kids will be uninterested in the classroom, and, most obviously, failing to take advantage of a kid's natural interests to facilitate learning. Or I love the example I've heard you give of your Moby-Dick project getting stymied because the word "dick" had been blocked by school administrators from Internet searches.

I totally agree with you that having fancy technology is of no use whatsoever if there's no vision of how to use it.

Part of what NPL advocates is also providing content for teachers to use in the classroom and a major push for teacher training when it comes to digital tools. But I know that's kind of a cop-out answer, because how do you actually implement these things? How do you inspire vast change in a system notoriously mired in bureaucracy and seriously allergic to change? This is one of those questions of the ages.

It's probably worth remembering that we are in a period of transition. In another ten years or so, the people signing on to become teachers will have grown up with digital technology and may feel more comfortable using it. In the meantime, I think an assault from all sides is necessary - pressing the Obama administration, which seems pretty savvy and progressive regarding digital technology, to get involved; working with parents to understand what's at stake in terms of their kids' education; educating teachers, etc.

Heather Chaplin is a professor of journalism at The New School and author of the book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. She recently participated in a Ford Foundation grant looking at issues of the public interest in the next generation of the Internet. She also works with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on issues of digital literacy and journalism. She has been interviewed for and cited in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Businessweek, and The Believer and has appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and CBS Sunday Morning. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details, and Salon. She is a regular contributor on game culture for All Things Considered.
]]> Public Media, Public Education, and the Public Good: An Interview with Heather Chaplin (Part One) tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2010://12.3549 2010-01-05T22:30:00Z 2010-01-06T09:31:03Z Heather Chaplin is one of the good guys -- she wrote one of the best books about the place of video games in contemporary culture; she's doing journalism which challenges some of the preconceptions about youth and new technology... Henry Jenkins http://henryjenkins.org/
Heather interviewed me recently for the Digital Media and Learning project website, talking about participatory culture and public engagement. She was nice enough to allow me to turn the microphone (or in this case, the keyboard) the other way to talk with her about her recently published white paper, National Public Lightpath: Documentation and Recommendations, which seeks to map some future directions for how the internet might serve the public good.
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"It's hard to remember life before the Internet. In the span of two decades it has entirely reshaped the way we do business, gather information, shop, play, and socialize. It's all moved so quickly, it's been hard to even stop and think. But do for a minute. Stop. Think. In all our rush to buy books and shoes online, and to find our lost high school friends on Facebook, we have failed to consider one thing. What part of the Internet is going to be devoted to the public interest?"
In part one of this interview, Heather offers some frank and provocative comments about how the internet might better serve the public good and critiques the "libertarian" perspective on how the web should grow. In the second part, which will run later this week, she shares some thoughts about digital literacy and public education.
 
Your white paper opens with the provocative question, "what part of the Internet is going to be devoted to the public interest?" How would you answer that question?
 
It's actually a really hard question to answer, based on what your notion of "in the public interest" is. I mean, NPR and PBS have presences on the Internet. And I suppose you could argue that there are probably millions of sites out there that serve the general public good. So, if I were to play devil's advocate against myself, I suppose I would argue that the very nature of the Internet - the anyone-can-publish idea - is in itself a public good.
But here's the thing, I'm not really the libertarian type. I don't believe that things will necessarily just sort themselves out if left alone. When I talk about creating a piece of the Internet in the public interest, I'm really talking about both public ownership of the infrastructure and content created specifically to educate, enlighten and enrich in the interests of genuine literacy and civic engagement.
I think ownership of the infrastructure is important here. There is no inherent financial incentive to create something like NPL so there is no reason on earth for Verizon or AT&T to get involved. As it is they want to create a pay structure where people pay more for faster connections, which would in effect wipe out any chance for the "little guy" to compete with corporate players. People forget in this country that corporations despite their sunny logos and appealing products, are not our friends. They have a PROFIT MOTIVE. This means, as the phrase would imply, they're motivated by profit not the public good. In fact, they're legally set up so that they're breaking the law if they stop to consider the public good over profits.
I have a real bee in my bonnet about the way the Internet infrastructure belongs to these companies when it was created by tax payer dollars. It's the same with the pharmaceutical companies - they make billions off drugs, the research for which was done by public universities funded by public citizens like you and me.
But now I digress.
What was the original question? Ah yes, well, in reality, I FEAR no part of the Internet will be devoted to the public interest in any sort of "official" capacity. I HOPE, however, that we are able to build an infrastructure that would, at first, connect public media to the schools, for educational purposes, and then build out from there to people's houses, libraries, museums etc.
Your paper proposes what you are calling the National Public Lightpath. What specifically are you advocating?

NPL proposes creating a publicly-owned piece of the Internet that links together important institutions devoted to the public good, such as public media, the public schools systems, and, eventually, museums and libraries. Ideally, it would eventually spread so that people could plug into NPL at home as well, to , say, complete a homework assignment given at school.
What many people don't understand is how the Internet works - that there are different modes of connecting households and institutions. Some Internet connections, for example, are still run over copper wires, even though copper wires don't permit for very fast transmission. The reason? In the early 1990s, a couple of the big providers bought a lot of copper wire, and don't want to lose out on their investment. NPL advocates using high speed fiber optic cable, which in essence means the "pipes" to your house or school or whatever, would be fatter and thus capable of transmitting a greater amount of data at faster speeds. This is something Japan, Korea and many European countries already have. Many scientific universities are also connected on a network they own communaly called National LamdaRail, a non-profit set up specifically for that purpose. (NPL would build off of the National LamdaRail infastructure, as it already circles the country.) Fatter pipes gives you the ability to transmit vast amounts of data in real time. Imagine your kid in school learning biology by playing with 3-D molecular models being piped into the classroom from a university on the other side of the world - or engaging in peer-to-peer learning by sharing, in real time, virtual worlds they'd built with kids in other country. The possibilities are endless.
Your talk about "empowering an agency to oversee these efforts and become the steward of the internet in the public interest" speaks of a centralized model of public media which is precisely what the internet has in many ways sought to overthrow. Have we gone too far towards decentralization and if so, what areas do require governmental intervention to promote the public interest?

This is a great question. As I mentioned, I don't really go with the whole libertarian thing. I don't have a problem with a society deciding, you know what, education is really important and we're going to create a way to make sure that kids all over the country, no matter where they're from or what color they are get a top notch one. I do think the culture of the Internet is so gung-ho on this idea of "freedom" that they sometimes forget what that word even means. I would argue that the kid who isn't given the skills she needs to be a functioning and engaged part of her society because she wasn't given the critical thinking skills for independent thinking is not really free. That's more important to me that making sure that no agency anywhere ever gets to decide about anything. I'm sick to death of the post-deconstructionist idea that nothing has any inherent meaning, that everything is subjective, etc. It's led to a lot of very smart people adopting a hands off attitude that I think is very dangerous to our future.
You note that most of the key tools which now support public discourse are owned by companies that are "designed to serve shareholders -- not the public." In what ways are these systems being deployed in ways which hurt rather than facilitate the public good?

Well this goes back to my earlier rant. I just always think it's worth pointing out what an organization's goal is. The goal of a for-profit corporation is to earn profits. That is its legal responsibility. So, if making money happens to coincide with the public good, than fantastic, everybody wins. But what happens when it doesn't? Say, keeping drug prices so high that most people in the world can't afford to buy them? Or letting cars go out on the road known to be dangerous because a recall is more expensive then settling law suits?
In the case of the Internet, one needs look no farther than the issue of Net Neutrality. The providers want to be able to charge more for faster speeds. Sounds OK. But all you need to do is think about it for one minute and realize that that's the end of the wonderful, brilliant democracy of the Internet right there and then. Why are they doing this? It's certainly not for the public good; it's to make money. Which, again, is their mandate.
I don't have a problem particularly with a company making money - we live in a capitalist society - I just don't think we should kid ourselves about the implications. We've gone so far towards being market-worshipers, and we've come to view anyone who wants to see the government get involved in any way as being anti-"freedom," that I think we've gotten ourselves into a bit of a mess. With this mind set, we've handed over a vast amount of power to extremely large entities who don't even nominally have our best interests at heart. This is a problem.
Heather Chaplin is a professor of journalism at The New School and author of the book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. She recently participated in a Ford Foundation grant looking at issues of the public interest in the next generation of the Internet. She also works with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on issues of digital literacy and journalism. She has been interviewed for and cited in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Businessweek, and The Believer and has appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and CBS Sunday Morning. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details, and Salon. She is a regular contributor on game culture for All Things Considered.
]]> Virtual Forum Theater and the New Media Literacies Skills tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3548 2009-12-22T23:15:00Z 2009-12-22T22:38:03Z Virtual Forum Theater (VFT) is a computer-based learning experience that allows face- to-face, computer, and multimedia-based drama. VFT has three parts: VFT the toolset, VFT the creative activity, and VFT the performance. The VFT toolset is a multimedia tool for... Alice Cavallo Virtual Forum Theater (VFT) is a computer-based learning experience that allows face- to-face, computer, and multimedia-based drama. VFT has three parts: VFT the toolset, VFT the creative activity, and VFT the performance. The VFT toolset is a multimedia tool for the creation of dramatic plays using audio, and images that enables participatory and collaborative digital playmaking through the Internet. The VFT activity or process is the collaborative process of creating a digital play, and consists of much more than the VFT toolset, including dramatic exercises involving group bonding, social awareness and Improv skills. A VFT performance refers to the activity of watching and responding to a previously created digital play. In practice, the distinctions between these parts of VFT become blurred; many times a performance becomes a creative activity.

VFT integrates image, audio and text and was conceived as a tool for collaborative creations and remix with basic educational goals of improving argumentation skills and expressive fluency in disenfranchised children and youth in developing countries such as Brazil. I developed, tested, deployed and researched it in the context of my PhD on education, technology and drama at Tufts University.

VFT Screenshot

VFTScreenShot.jpg

]]> It is a perfect tool to be used on the context of NML's skills. VFT involves play, performance, simulation, appropriation, collective intelligence, judgment, networking and navigation (for complete definition click here).

 

Play and performance are the core activities and skills of any theater improvisation. During both stages of Improv and Creating the Digital Play, the participants are experimenting with their surroundings and trying to determine the best way to portray their ideas and emotions. Their series of performances (improvisations) are like simulations of the real situation they are trying to capture in their script and involves taking on different personas for the purpose of discovery and adjustment. The appropriation of their script happens during the process of rehearsal and finalizes itself when they finish the digital play. Once they post their virtual play, they are ready to invite others to interact with it to offer other solutions to their quest. They know peers and perhaps strangers will be changing their creation as a result, producing new versions of their play and engaging in a process of appropriation of the new VFT play. The VFT's original playwrights welcome networking and negotiation in the context of their VFT play. They know that negotiation is key when interacting and proposing different solutions for an issue that might be foreign to a given community or group; that there is a need to discern and respect multiple perspectives. They are not aware that this process involves collective intelligence as it really requires "the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal", but this is a great point to explore when working with teenagers on the creation of VFT plays.

 

Judgment is a skill that is practiced throughout the process of creation and interaction within a given VFT performance. By definition VFT's plays exploit an unresolved issue or an issue that requires a solution. The creators of a VFT performance are looking for solutions different from their own (if they have one) or looking for a solution to the problem they are posting. Judgment of the situation is a core skill required to analyze and try out a solution, but at the same time is a skill that requires practice to develop and VFT provides a safe learning environment for it to flourish. Once someone changes the action of an existing play, and remixing it into a new one, there is room for new judgments and negotiations, generating an intermingled and iterative process.

 

In fact all the skills sited above can be improved as a group of teens use VFT and engage in the full process of creation and collaborative virtual performance or virtual chatting.

 

Several examples of appropriation and remix happened during my research. Groups created the same sketch giving a different solution but using themselves as the characters, so it meant another version of the same VFT performance. Another group decided to create a different plot (story) around the same issue, therefore another VFT performance emerged. Examples of plots were discrimination of students of public schools by sales people at shopping malls, as well as gender and skin color discriminations; animosity in the public high school classrooms among cliques (the shoppers (frivolity) groups, the academic ones, the political ones, the ones who do drugs, etc); issues of noise and trash pollutions on the poor neighborhoods of the city where neighbors do not collaborate with each other at all.

 

More on VFT research and how to use it with children and teenagers, please see my thesis or papers at http://web.media.mit.edu/~mello/research.htm.


 High School Students using VFT

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]]> Harry Potter: The Exhibition, or what Location Entertainment Adds to a Transmedia Franchise tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3544 2009-12-15T20:44:49Z 2009-12-17T16:21:22Z While in Cambridge for the Futures of Entertainment conference, my wife and I stopped over at the Boston Museum of Science which is currently playing host to Harry Potter: The Exhibition. We had both attended a fascinating presentation about the... Henry Jenkins http://henryjenkins.org/ While in Cambridge for the Futures of Entertainment conference, my wife and I stopped over at the Boston Museum of Science which is currently playing host to Harry Potter: The Exhibition. We had both attended a fascinating presentation about the design and development of this exhibit during last Summer's Azkatraz convention in San Francisco and so we had high anticipations for the show and were not disappointed.   

If you live anywhere near Boston, you should definitely try to make it there for the exhibit which runs through Feb. 21. The exhibit is pricy since you have to pay a fee above and beyond the price of admission to the museum itself, but we found it more than worth it.


]]> "The Revenge of the Oragami Unicorn" posts, so if you missed them, you may want to pause now and catch up. We'll wait up for you. 

First, we might think of the exhibit as an example of immersion. That is, from the very start, we are encouraged to enter into J.K. Rowling's universe as manifest in the feature film franchise. Before we enter the exhibit, one or two children are asked to step up, put on the sorting hat, and get placed into the proper "house." The museum has lovingly recreated some of the key settings, filled them with costumes and props, and thus offer us a chance to tour the fictional environment. We can, for example, enter into Hagrid's Hut and even sit in his giant chair which dwarfs even the adults in the party, or we can enter the Great Hall as it is decorated for one or another of the festive ocassions depicted in the story. The designers went to some length to minimize the number of glass cases we have to look through, prefering to situate props and costumes in their "natural" settings, such as the Gryfindor Boys Dormatory or a Quiddich Trophy Room. 

Some of the professor figures -- such as Lockhart or Umbridge -- get represented through their living quarters. We see the life size self portrait of Lockhart or experience directly the pink monstrosity, complete with mewing cat plates, which is Umbridge's personal quarters. As we enter and exit the exhibit, we must pass the interactive portraits which figure so strongly in the films and our entrance also takes us past the railroad car that the students take from Paddington Station to Hogwarts School. 

Often, a sense of being embedded in the world gets created by scale as we find the dementors towering above us when we meet Voldemort and his minions or when we see how much larger than lifesize Hagard's costumes are. There was something magical about the time spent inside the exhibition precisely because it felt as if we had left Boston and entered into the territory of the imagination. Everything was familiar because we knew them so well from the books and films so this sense of immersion was a kind of homecoming. 

As may already be suggested from the above, the exhibit focuses primarily around the Harry Potter books and films as a world rather than as a story. We can imagine, for example, a trip which took us through a series of vignettes which lay out the memorable moments from the narrative as a series of spectacular spaces. To a large degree, this sense of transforming events into spaces would characterize many of the earliest exhibits in Fantasyland at the Disney Theme Parks -- the Peter Pan or Snow White rides come to mind as the most obvious examples of this process. And something similar occurs often when films are adopted into video games. After all, games, amusement parks, and museums are organized spatially and our primary experience is a movement through compelling landscapes, but what gets represented in those spaces may have strong or weak narrative hooks. 

I will bow here before the ludologists who would argue that such spaces are not narratives -- yet we may see them as evoking familiar narratives, as part of a storytelling system, as alternative ways we experience exposition which alters our relationship to the more overtly narrative manifestations of the franchise. 

There are some examples in the Harry Potter exhibition which point to very specific moments in the films -- for example, there's an arrangement of the costumes which the primary characters wore to the Yule Ball which unmistakingly refers to specific events. But most of what is showcased here are recurring elements from the fictional world, scenes which appeared across multiple books or films, even if they are more central to some installments than others. There is a sense of the passing of time contributed by some exhibits which juxtapose the costumes worn by the primary characters over time, allowing us to watch the characters grow up across the series. 

The exhibit rewards our sense of fan mastery, both by allowing us to recognize and place for ourselves various costumes and props, thanks to relatively nonintrusive signage. It allows us to examine each artifact closely and often gain new insights into the characters, as we learn by studying Lockhart's exams and realizing that they ask about nothing other than the teacher's own exploits, or scanning the wrappers of the candies or the covers of the textbooks to see details which never really were visible on the screen but help to flesh out the world of the story. This is often what is meant when tourists comment on the attention to detail -- not simply that we get every detail we expect to see there but that looking more closely teaches us things about the world we would not know from consuming the other media manifestations of the franchise. So, we might see this attention to detail as part of the drillability Jason Mittell has described as a property of complex narrative systems. 

There was some tension here between the desire to immerse us in a fictional realm and the desire to provide the kinds of annotation and background we anticipate from a museum experience. There are thus video monitors at various points throughout the exhibit, creating a sense of hypermediacy (see Bolter and Grusin's Remediations). These videos offer us just in time glimpses into key scenes from the films which are evoked by the costumes, props, and settings on display. In some ways, seeing the film footage alongside the costume deepened our sense of immersion, while in other senses, it pulled us out of the suspension of disbelief since these monitors had little to do with the world of Hogwarts and everything to do with our experiences as museum goers. 

A greater sense of disjunction was created for me by the experience of taking the audio tour where key production people comment on and provide background on the design choices which went into the construction of these costumes and props. After all, the only justification for this exhibit occupying space in a Museum of Science, other than because of its crowd appeal, has to do with showcasing the technical skills and industrial design which went into the production. We might think of the audio tour as something like a director's commentary on the film world -- except that I always find it hard to listen to the director's commentary and remain absorbed in the fiction at the same time. In the case of a DVD, they represent different kinds of experiences, different modes of interpretation. 

Yet walking through the immersive exhibit space and listening to the audio tour invited us to think about what we see as real (through suspension of disbelief) and constructed (through our behind the scenes perspective). In some cases, the information provided was illuminating, inviting us to look closely at the costumes as personifying different aspects of the character's personalities, or explaining why lifesize models were created for some of the mythological creatures, like the Horntail dragon. But it always competed with the fantasy I was constructing in my head about getting to visit Hogwarts and its grounds. This is not a challenge that faces amusement park designers, for example, who are able to simply allow us to immerse ourselves in an entertaining fantasy without feeling compelled to offer educational background. 

The exhibit clearly functioned as a cultural attractor -- creating a shared space for Harry Potter fans to gather and have common experiences. I found myself engaged in conversations with many of the other patrons in ways I would have been reluctant to do at an art museum, say, or at the science museum in its normal mode. We had a common relationship to this fiction and in one way or another, we were fans. 

The exhibit also was a cultural activator, giving us some things to do -- get sorted upon entrance (if you are lucky enough to get picked), rip up a mandrake root and watch it squirm, through a quiddich ball through a hoop, and so forth. 

But many of us came into the museum with our own fantasy investments as well. For example, I strongly identify with the Ravenclaw House and its most famous character, Luna Lovegood. I have been "sorted" through a variety of mechanisms through the years and always end up getting placed in Ravenclaw. Over time, I've discovered many of my closest friends in Harry Potter fandom are also self-identified Ravenclaw, which put us in a minority within the fandom, which veers towards Slytherin (and Snape/Malfoy fans) or Griffyndor (with Harry and friends). Indeed, of the two children being sorted on my tour, both had proclaimed fantasies about being Gryffindor, and were so sorted. 

Because of this identification, though, I found myself increasingly annoyed that my house was under-represented in the exhibit -- most blatantly in an area which shows the uniforms of three of the four Quiddich team captains, but makes no mention of the Ravenclaw captain. I suppose even in fantasy you can't be an intellectual and a jock at the same time. :-{ We could accept that Luna is a sufficiently secondary character that she would not necessarily be represented but many of the other secondary characters on the same level of obscurity do find at least token acknowledgement here. The "houses" are so central to fan identifications within the Harry Potter world that it strikes me as odd that one house would be so totally neglected -- except for occassional banners -- and it suggests to me the one major misfire in an otherwise respectfully and lovingly created exhibit. 

Next time: Transmedia for Social Change
]]> Interview with Ed Beat Blog tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3543 2009-11-28T15:26:56Z 2009-12-01T04:37:35Z I was interviewed about NML recently for the Ed Beat blog, which is run by a non-profit I used to work at, Learning Matters. Here's the intro followed by a link to the rest of the article: Last week, when... Hillary Kolos I was interviewed about NML recently for the Ed Beat blog, which is run by a non-profit I used to work at, Learning Matters.

Here's the intro followed by a link to the rest of the article:

Last week, when John Merrow's post on technology in schools generated a long discussion in its comments section, we learned just how important this issue is to educators and students. This week we spoke with Hillary Kolos, who worked with Learning Matters from 2002-2005, and is now a graduate student in MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. She's a research assistant for a project we've mentioned here before-Project New Media Literacies-which is attempting to explore what media literacy means in the 21st Century, and how students-and their schools-can learn to do it well. Full article

]]> Using Alternative Assessment Models to Empower Youth-directed Learning tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3541 2009-11-23T21:29:56Z 2009-12-22T19:54:02Z Barry JosephOnline Leadership DirectorGlobal Kids, Inc. Tashawna is a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY. In the morning she leaves home for school listening to her MP3s, texting her friends about meeting up after school at Global Kids, where she... Barry Joseph http://globalkids.org/ Barry Joseph
Online Leadership Director
Global Kids, Inc.
Tashawna is a high school senior in Brooklyn, NY. In the morning she leaves home for school listening to her MP3s, texting her friends about meeting up after school at Global Kids, where she participates in a theater program, or FIERCE, the community center for LGBT youth. On the weekend she'll go to church and, on any given day, visit MySpace and Facebook as often as she can. While she misses television and movies, she says she just can't find the time.

This describes what we can call Tashawna's distributed learning network, the most important places in her life where learning occurs. Not just at home, school and church but also through digital media, like MP3s, SMS and social networks, and at youth-serving institutions, like Global Kids and FIERCE. Some are places that require her presence, like school, while others are opt-in, like MySpace. But the learning she gathers across the nodes in her network are preparing her to succeed in the classrooms, workplaces, and civic arenas of the 21st Century.

And Tashawna is not alone. In part due to the changes in education, in part due to the affects of digital media, youth have a wide array of options for learning knowledge and developing skills. But how many youth feel in charge of their networks, or are even aware they exist as an interconnected whole? How do they learn to synthesize what they learn and communicate it to future employers and college admission staff who won't learn of their strengths on most school transcripts?

]]> Global Kids, an afterschool program in New York City that supports youth like Tashawna to be global citizens and community leaders, has begun to explore just these questions. More specifically, we are increasingly asking the following: What do youth need to understand and strategically navigate their distributed learning networks? And how can youth-serving institutions support youth to document the associated learning that address 21st Century Skills that so often go unrecorded?

We are far from alone, however, in raising these concerns. For example, a number of recent initiatives supported by the MacArthur Foundation (from whom we too receive funds) are concerned with the distributed nature of learning experienced by today's young people and the challenge for both youth and learning institutions to integrate and assess it. While digital media has been a disruptive force supporting the fragmentation of learning environments it yet remains a potential source for coordinating and synthesizing the experience.

One approach to empowering youth to be more in charge of their learning and make more sense of their distributed learning network is to focus on youth's existing assets through both digital tools and offline activities to help them see the contours of their networks, understand their role as they traverse their learning nodes, and enhance their abilities to make connections amongst them. The following describes artifacts from three approaches Global Kids has undertaken to further explore these important issues.

Distributed Learning Maps

I was able above to describe Tashawna's distributed learning network because she showed it to me, on paper. It looked like this:

SKMBT_C55009101910560_0002

Actually, this was her second drawing. She didn't like her first because she was concerned it wasn't original. The first one looked like this:

SKMBT_C55009101910560_0003

When I first viewed these I paid attention to how she chose to group certain nodes. I noticed the distinctions between informal learning institutions and the formal, between portable digital media and online.

Of course, Tashawna doesn't walk around with a drawing of her learning network. I don't think she'd even thought about all the places she learns before I'd asked her to draw these pictures. But when I did it was easy for her to list on a sheet of paper places like home and school. I had to push her, however, to list all of her portable media devices, web sites and after school programs. She wasn't used to thinking about them all as sites of learning. After each one I asked her what she learned from that node:

Me: What do you learn from texting on you cellphone? Tashawna: How to spell bad! (laughs) Me: What else? Tashawna: How to use technology more effectively to communicate.
At the end of the process, as a representative of one of her learning nodes, I was left with a broader understanding of Tashawna's network, of the resources she brings into our program, and where her learning with us might affect other sites of learning. From Tashawna's perspective, I hope she began to think, perhaps for the first time, about herself as a participant within her network, as the final source creating meaning by synthesizing the collected learning, and as the one ultimately responsible for learning how to best design and navigate her network, now and in the future.

Digital Literacy Transcript

Even if Tashawna could fully articulate the learning she receives outside of the standard school curriculum, how can she communicate it to others, in a capacity more formal than a college essay? Last year, we worked with Henry Jenkins' Project New Media Literacies to create something which might do just that: a Digital Literacy Transcript.

Henry Jenkins has identified and described the core literacies afforded by new media tools that are essential for full participation in our new digital age, such as Simulation, Negotiation, and Multitasking. Last year, Global Kids developed and implemented a curriculum that used social media to sharpen their literacies while assisting youth to understand how to think about them.

Below is Tashawna's transcript by the end of the school year:

Tashawna's Digital Literacy Transcript

The Transcript turns each literacy into a triangle-shaped badge. Each corner represents a different relationship with the literacy: I can recognize it, I can talk about it, and I can do it. At the beginning of our program each youth's Transcript was blank. Over the course of the program youth watched their Transcript grow as badges were earned through completing social media projects in the program while also submitting existing work (fan fiction, podcasts, etc.) that demonstrated evidence of their existing competencies. For example, you might note that Tashawna completed her "negotiation" badge, was working on her "networking" badge, and never began "performance."

The Transcript served as both a feedback mechanism to motivate and guide learning and an alternative transcript to show colleges or prospective employers about abilities which would otherwise go unrecognized.

Digital Literacy Portfolio

How could a college or potential employer viewing Tashawna's Digital Literacy Transcript know that she actually learned the referenced skills? And for those new to the terms - which, to be frank, are most of us - what could she do to make these concepts clear and concrete? Enter the Digital Media Portfolio.

Each Portfolio is personally curated by youth like Tashawna to offer an audio and visual tour of their social media productions that highlights the literacies developed through each social media project. This stands in contrast to the Digital Transcript, which is official and controlled by Global Kids.

Below is Tashawna's:


Global Kids is new to these three approaches - Distributed Learning Maps, Digital Literacy Transcripts and Digital Literacy Portfolios - but this year will expand them in a variety of contexts. The new MacArthur Foundation-funded Edge Project will allow us, as part of a broader initiative, to bring the Learning Maps into civic and cultural institutions that use digital media for learning. Meanwhile, the Transcripts and Portofolios will be rolled out in Winter 2010 within the New York City Public Library. Over the course of the next two years we will be documenting this work and sharing our findings with the broader community.

]]> Notes from Home Inc. Media Literacy Conference: Part One tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3531 2009-11-02T22:57:43Z 2009-11-03T23:43:03Z Last weekend, Home Inc, put on a vibrant, thought-provoking conference here at MIT. Project NML was represented in two sessions. Erin and I presented about appropriation and using remixes in the classroom. Jenna McWilliams, former NML curriculum specialist and current... Hillary Kolos Last weekend, Home Inc, put on a vibrant, thought-provoking conference here at MIT. Project NML was represented in two sessions. Erin and I presented about appropriation and using remixes in the classroom. Jenna McWilliams, former NML curriculum specialist and current Phd candidate at Indiana University, presented about the participatory assessment model she is working on with Dan Hickey using examples from the Teachers Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see any of the other workshop presenters, but I heard there were some very interactive and inspiring sessions. I'll have a Part Two post about our NML sessions up soon and hopefully a link to videos from the conference!

Before discussing the workshops, I wanted to write about an overarching issue that came up throughout the conference. As the day progressed, we began to notice through corridor chatter and tweets (check out #homeinc on Twiter for the threads from the conference) that copyright/fair use confusion was becoming a trend. None of the sessions were explicitly about copyright, but a pattern emerged in many of the sessions where someone would raise a copyright issue or ask a fair use question, others would offer resources or their perspective, and debate would ensue because of the many different understandings of copyright/fair use law.

]]> When Erin and I encountered this in our session, it made sense because we were suggesting educators not only show pop culture remixes in the classroom, but also have their students think critically about media and remix it themselves. While it might not be such a big deal for students to remix copyrighted material that stayed within the school walls, Web 2.0 has increased the possibilities to distribute student-produced media outside of the classroom. Our workshop attendees asked us about their and their students' rights in terms of downloading copyrighted content, as well as what was allowed if they wanted to upload it to the web.

In the development of the Learning Library, NML recognized the widespread confusion about copyright and fair use. We built challenges to help users better understand these issues and made them required in hopes that users would keep them in mind when they were adding content to the Learning Library. These challenges "Mannie Garcia and Copyright," "Shepard Fairey and Fair Use," and "Optimus Prime and Creative Commons" allow users to think through real-world cases of copyright confusion. They are a great starting point for both teachers and students to understand what's going on with copyright today. You can access these challenges and the rest of the Learning Library here.

The copyright conversations at the conference also sparked the creation of the following list of resources on copyright and fair use for educators and students. (There resources, along with many others from the conference, are listed on a wiki created by conference attendees)

We'd love to hear how you deal with copyright/fair use issues in your school or classroom. Also if you have any other resources you like to use, please let us know!

]]> Call for Session Proposals - 1st Annual Digital Media and Learning Conference: "DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION" tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3529 2009-10-19T17:11:20Z 2009-10-19T17:17:24Z February 18 - 20, 2010Cal IT2University of California, San DiegoLa Jolla, California**SUBMISSION DEADLINE: OCTOBER 30, 2009****KEYNOTES ANNOUNCED**We are pleased to announce the first Digital Media and Learning Conference, an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation. The conference is meant... Erin Reilly

February 18 - 20, 2010

Cal IT2
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California

**SUBMISSION DEADLINE: OCTOBER 30, 2009**

**KEYNOTES ANNOUNCED**

We are pleased to announce the first Digital Media and Learning Conference, an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice.

For this inaugural year, the theme will be "Diversifying Participation". Henry Jenkins is the Chair of the Digital Media and Learning Conference and our Keynote Speakers will be Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins.

We invite submissions for session proposals that speak to the conference theme as well as to the field of digital media and learning more broadly. Those wishing to present work should look to propose or participate in a panel topic (see submission process outlined below).

DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION

A growing body of research has identified how young people's digital media use is tied to basic social and cultural competencies needed for full participation in contemporary society. We continue to develop an understanding of the impact of these experiences on learning, civic engagement, professional development, and ethical comprehension of the digital world.

Yet research has also suggested that young people's forms of participation with new media are incredibly diverse, and that risks, opportunities, and competencies are spread unevenly across the social and cultural landscape. Young people have differential access to online experiences, practices, and tools and this has a consequence in their developing sense of their own identities and their place in the world. In some cases, different forms of participation and access correspond with familiar cultural and social divides. In other cases, however, new media have introduced novel and unexpected kinds of social differences, subcultures, and identities.

It is far too simple to talk about this in terms of binaries such as "information haves and have nots" or "digital divides". There are many different kinds of obstacles to full participation, many different degrees of access to information, technologies, and online communities, and many different ways of processing those experiences. Participatory cultures surrounding digital media are characterized by a diversity that does not track automatically to high and low access or more or less sophisticated use. Rather, multiple forms of expertise, connoisseurship, identity, and practice are proliferating in online worlds, with complicated relationships to pre-existing categories such as socioeconomic status, gender, nationality, race, or ethnicity.

We encourage sessions that describe, document, and critically analyze different forms of participation and how they relate to various forms of social and cultural capital. We are interested in accounts of the challenges and obstacles which block or inhibit engagement to different forms of online participation. We also encourage session proposals that engage with successful intervention strategies and pedagogical processes enabling once marginalized groups to more fully exploit the opportunities for learning with digital media. Conversely, we are interested in hearing more about how marginal and subcultural communities find diverse uses of new and emerging technologies, pushing them in new directions and navigating a complicated relationship with "mainstream" forms of participation. Specifically, we seek to understand the following:

  • What can research on more diverse communities contribute to our understanding of the learning ecologies surrounding new media?
  • What are the technologies, practices, economic, and cultural divides that lead to segregation, "gated" information communities, and differential access?
  • When and how do diversity and differentiation in participation promote social and cultural benefits and opportunities, and when do they create schisms that are less equitable or productive?
  • What strategies have proven successful at broadening opportunities for participation, overcoming the many different kinds of segregation or exclusion which impact the online world, and empowering more diverse presences throughout cyberspace?
  • Are there things occurring on the margins of the existing digital culture that might valuably be incorporated into more mainstream practices?

In addition to these questions directly addressing the conference theme, we welcome submissions that address innovative new directions in research and practice relating to digital media and participatory learning.

]]>

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Submissions should be in the form of full session proposals. Proposed sessions may range from 1 to 2 hours in length and may include traditional paper presentations, hands-on workshops, design critiques, demos, pecha kucha, or roundtable discussions. We welcome and encourage submissions of innovative formats, but request that the proposals come in the form of session proposals rather than individual papers or presentations.

The goal of the event is to foster dialog and build connections. To that end, sessions should have at least three to four presenters and/or discussants. Session organizers should reserve substantial amounts of time for open discussion and exchange.

We have established an open wiki for potential participants to engage in session organizing. The wiki can be used to call for contributions to a briefly outlined session topic, to seek out partners to develop a topic together, to brainstorm about co-presenters, and any other functions potential participants find valuable. The wiki can be accessed at: http://dmlconference2010.wikidot.com/forum:start

Session organizers should submit proposals that consist of a title and a 200-word abstract (including proposed presentation topics and formats and the speakers and/or discussants). In addition, names and contact details for the session organizers and participants will be required. The submission system is available here

Each individual will be limited to participation on no more than two panels at the conference. Participants will be expected to fund their own travel and accommodation. Registration for the conference will be free.

Conference Website: http://dmlcentral.net/conference

Conference Wiki: http://dmlconference2010.wikidot.com/forum:start

Conference Submission System: http://www.dmlcentral.com/applicants/

Conference Committee: Henry Jenkins, David Theo Goldberg, Heather Horst, Mimi Ito, Jabari Mahiri and Holly Willis

KEY DATES AND DEADLINES
Submission System Available: September 30, 2009
Deadline for Submissions: October 30, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: November 30, 2009
Registration System Opens: December 15, 2009
Conference Program Announced: December 15, 2009
Registration Deadline: February 1, 2010
Evening Reception: February 18, 2010

CONTACT INFORMATION
Digital Media and Learning Research Hub
UC Humanities Research Institute
University of California, Irvine
Email: dmlhub@hri.uci.edu

]]> Join us at Home, Inc.'s Media Literacy conference Oct 24th tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3528 2009-10-13T17:09:21Z 2009-10-13T17:21:14Z We hope that you will join us in a couple weeks for Home, Inc.'s Media Literacy conference. It will be held here at MIT and will run from 8:00am to 4:00pm. This conference was the reason I first visited... Hillary Kolos Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for MLC 2009 Save the Date2.jpg


We hope that you will join us in a couple weeks for Home, Inc.'s Media Literacy conference. It will be held here at MIT and will run from 8:00am to 4:00pm. This conference was the reason I first visited MIT and it is truly inspiring.

Project NML will be represented in two panels at the conference:

Erin and I will be presenting from 10:15 to 11:45 about NML's tools and resources and how you can use remixes in the classroom to help students become familiar with appropriation and transmedia navigation.

Jenna McWilliams, who is now a graduate student at Indiana University, will be presenting from 2:15 to 3:45 on participatory assessment and the Teachers' Strategy Guide - Reading in a Participatory Culture that we implemented in several schools last year.


We'll also be tweeting before, during, and after the conference using the #homeinc tag.

You can register here for the conference. Below are more details!

See you there!


******************************************


Join us at Home, Inc.'s Media Literacy, Teaching and Learning and 21st Century Skills, October 24th at the Tang Center, MIT, from 8 AM-4:30 PM.

Click here for more information and registration.

HOME, Inc., TechFoundation and MIT's Comparative Media Studies program partner on their biennial one-day conference on Media Literacy. Prominent educators, filmmakers, public health workers and representatives from dedicated organizations will highlight programs that promote and teach 21st Century skills and new media literacies.

Keynote Presenter: Alan November, author, leader and innovator in the field.
Keynote title: Digital Nation- Education in Transition to 21st Century Learning

This Keynote presentation includes an analysis of trends in learning... independent and hands on learning that tracks projects that explore how the web and digital media is changing the way we think, work, learn and interact.

Twitter
For those of you who can't attend please follow us the day of the conference on Twitter!
Follow tweets tagged #homeinc and join the discussion!

]]> Straight to the Source: A Teen Perspective on Video Games and Learning tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3363 2009-08-11T21:29:38Z 2009-08-11T23:11:10Z This summer, I had the opportunity to attend the Games for Change Festival, an annual convening of academics, game developers, non-profits, and educators who are interested in using games to create social change. Over three days, I attended a game-making... Hillary Kolos This summer, I had the opportunity to attend the Games for Change Festival, an annual convening of academics, game developers, non-profits, and educators who are interested in using games to create social change. Over three days, I attended a game-making workshop, an expo of new social issue games, and panel discussions on topics ranging from funding to using games in schools.

Kaelan_viaG4Cflickr.jpgThe highlight of the festival for me though, was a short talk given by high schooler Kaelan Doyle Myerscough, who is an advisor for NYU's new Games for Learning Institute. In five minutes, she thoroughly impressed a packed room of adults and reminded us all how important it is to speak directly with young people about their thoughts and experiences with new media.

In her talk, Kaelan explains the importance of creating a sense of immersion when developing games. She also gives examples of games that are both fun to play and great learning experiences. (Here's a link to her talk.)

I asked Kaelan if she could expand on some of the ideas she brought up in her talk over email.

Here's what she had to say:


Can you explain how you became involved with the Games for Learning Institute?

Well, I am friends with Ken Perlin, who is heading up the Institute, and whenever he would come to Toronto for whatever reason we'd spend hours talking about pretty much everything. When I first met him I was working on a game with my friends, and we talked about that a lot. Eventually when it came time to put together the advisory board he asked if I wanted to be on it. At the time I was in grade 8, which was right in the demographic that they were looking at, and he thought it'd be good to have someone from that age group who was also knowledgeable about games and gaming. Of course I was thrilled, and I guess the rest is history.

Do you consider yourself a "gamer"?  What games do you like to play?

Yeah, I'd say I'm a gamer. Some of my friends play games more than me, and there are times when I hardly play games at all. But for the most part I tend to keep my Nintendo DS with me wherever I go, and I play games a lot just as part of my daily routine.  As for my favorite games, I nearly always have a Pokemon game (or two) in my aforementioned DS, and I've played through most of my Pokemon games about 5-10 times. Right now I'm playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates. I'm a huge fan of the NES as well, and I'm addicted to Tetris and Crystalis. Lastly, the Legend of Zelda games are really awesome, especially Ocarina of Time. Of course, that's just video games, but I won't get into analog games much because the list would be too long.

]]> In your presentation you mentioned that immersion is what makes games fun and engaging.  Can you explain what you mean by immersion and talk about how you experience it in games?  Do you think most young people experience immersion in school?

Basically, immersion is the feeling of losing yourself in something, so instead of seeing it through your own eyes you see it through the eyes of the main characters. People experience immersion with movies, which is why the good ones generate emotions, like crying or happiness. It's the same with games. I think one of the major reasons why kids play games is because they like the feeling of losing themselves and their problems and being immersed in another world where the rules and limitations are different, or even non-existent. Oftentimes the difference between a good game and a bad one is how immersive the world is.

No, I don't think school is as immersive as it could be. Maybe it's because of the social culture and idea of 'school is boring, work is boring', but it's also because of the attitude of the establishment. To schools these days, there's more pressure on teachers to teach the curriculum than to allow students to learn, so instead of being interested by the material it's pushed on us, and the result is that kids don't like school or learn as much. If the curriculum was a little more flexible and less written in stone, maybe kids would actually be able to be immersed in school.

You also mention that learning games typically aren't very fun.  Why do you think this is and what are the exceptions?

The thing about 'learning' games is that it completely takes away the immersion aspect of the game. When someone is immersed in a game and looking at things from the character's perspective rather than their own, if the game suddenly jumps back and says, "look! You just learned something in the REAL world!" it removes them from the game. It's sort of like getting someone's very serious and undivided attention when you want to tell them something important and serious, and then asking if they want to go to the store and get some eggs. It ruins the carefully-constructed world that you've built and reminds them of the very things they've been trying to escape. Likewise, games that are labeled as 'educational' or 'learning' generally don't work because people are trapped right from the get-go at the metaphorical doorway of the game, not really able to truly enter the world of the game, but still unable to completely step back.

A notable exception is Brain Age and its spawn, the numerous educational 'games' that Nintendo is coming out with (eg. Flash Focus, Big Brain Academy, Wii Fit). With those games, instead of having their own world, they operate in the context of our world. With them, you're perfectly aware that you're learning, but it's presented in an entertaining way. Also, instead of the game setting objectives for you, you set those objectives, like in Wii Fit where you set your own goal to lose x number of pounds in y months. They work as learning games because while they're presented as video games, they're turning our world into a sort of virtual world, with objectives and goals.

Have you ever had a class in school that successfully used video games to help you learn something?  If not, what do you imagine is the best way for games to be used in schools?

Actually, I don't remember ever using video games as part of school. We did use a simple RPG to learn about history once, but that was pen-and-paper...
It's tough to say what the best way is, because any approach you take has its drawback. It would be interesting to publicly fund a school to distribute Nintendo DSes to a class of kids and then give them, for example, Professor Layton and the Curious Village to play as a class. That's expensive, though, and it could be a bad decision to support brand names on such a large scale. I'd say it'd be a good idea to use computers, because we already have them and there's a gold mine of awesome games on the internet for free.

The downside of using games in school, though, is that just the idea of having games as part of the class has the potential to make kids uninterested. A more open approach for teachers might be a good idea, like giving kids a link to a website full of games and letting them play any game they want. It might also be fun for kids to play games as a class. For example, the teacher could get out a projector and play the McDonald's game, and the kids could advise the teacher on what to do. The key is not to be too upfront about the whole 'learning' thing, because that could really turn kids off... instead, make it like a fun and open thing to do for a week. If the next week, the teacher of that class brought up the subject of McDonald's without relating it directly to the game, a class discussion could be really interesting for the kids.

[http://www.mcvideogame.com/ <-- here's a link to the McDonald's game, so you know what I'm talking about. That's for me one of the best examples of an educational game: subtle, immersive and really really addictive.]

Assuming that most of the people reading this are adults, can you explain from your perspective as a high schooler why we should be researching how to use video games to enhance learning experiences?

Well, first of all, we all know that grades are dropping and all that. Math scores are at an all-time low. But personally for me it's not just the idea of marks dropping, it's watching them drop. When I was in the gifted program (which I was in from grade 5 to grade 8) I was surrounded by people who were actually interested in learning, and who thought of their education as something they really had to try hard in and improve in.

Coming out of gifted I saw tons of people who weren't at all interested in learning, and who hated school and all that. Not only that, I found that by the end of my first year of high school I felt a similar way--classes were boring and routine, and the whole experience made me feel a lot worse about school. It's not just me and my classmates, it's the entire continent--there really is something wrong with our educational system. I think that in some cases, kids are even learning more from video games and the like than they are from school. Video games aren't just pastimes at all--if well-done, they can be teachers for people of any age.

Take Pokemon for example. As a child, I played Pokemon all the time, and it helped me learn not just about strategy and mathematics, but also about animal cruelty, the importance of the environment and the need for social activism in the world. Those are subjects that are awfully hard to teach to a 7-year-old, but Pokemon did it easily. Even though there's no connection to the real world on the surface, people are really capable of connecting the dots and understanding the big picture.

Video games are really underestimated as a medium--they're immersive and interesting, kids love them already, and they have the potential to teach complex issues without being overwhelming. I think they could be the saving throw of the educational system, and they could bring interest back into the classroom for sure.

[picture of Kaelan above is from Games for Change's Flickr site.]

]]> Dear Mr. Vernon (a tribute to John Hughes) tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3360 2009-08-08T06:00:45Z 2009-08-08T06:45:58Z Erin Reilly Dear Mr. Vernon,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did was wrong.  But we think you're crazy to make us write this essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care?  You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.   You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct?  That's the way we saw each other at 7 o'clock in the morning.  We were brainwashed.

As the opening lines of John Hughes' classic 1980s movie The Breakfast Club illustrates, generation after generation, we've been able to stereotype each other as we come of age, but today, with the emergence of social media and participatory practices, teens have more opportunities to play with their identity and avoid being typecast.

At school, a teen might, like Ally Sheedy's character, be labeled the "basket case" but online, she can reinvent herself and practice the new media literacy, performance-- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery. Social media allows this new door to open for the girl who sees herself as a dull caterpillar but hungers to be a beautiful butterfly.  With assurance from her new group of friends who welcome her not on looks but on what she has to offer to the community, this girl gains confidence that then informs her other identities she partakes in throughout her daily activity.

Not only will John Hughes be remembered for his ability to connect to teens but my cousin who huddled with me on the couch through all hours of the night watching 16 Candles and Ferris Buehler's Day Off sent me today this blog post that really shows a touching side of someone we all might consider untouchable because of his fame.  

Sincerely, John Hughes reflects on Alison's personal pen pal experience for two years with John.  This post is filled with stories of what it's like to receive positive encouragement from someone that cares. Taking time to be a mentor is not just about giving to someone else, it's about improving and learning something new about yourself in the process. What's so interesting about this post is it's the personal connection we see of John Hughes, the Hollywood director and how meaningful relationships with fans like Alison was the highlight of what pushed him to be so good at what he did.
]]> sadhappy, anxiouscalm: on career transitions tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3285 2009-06-01T15:38:30Z 2009-06-03T23:53:40Z Today is the first day of my last month at Project New Media Literacies. It would be a lie for me to say that every minute of the nearly two years I've spent with this project was exciting, fun, and... Jenna McWilliams Today is the first day of my last month at Project New Media Literacies. It would be a lie for me to say that every minute of the nearly two years I've spent with this project was exciting, fun, and exhilarating; anyone who's done this kind of work knows that it's often exhausting, frustrating, and stressful.

That's because to do educational research well, you have to care, and you have to care deeply. And this means facing some difficult realities: That the institution of education is deeply flawed in some important and fundamental ways; that educational innovations are often stymied by policy issues and bureaucratic red tape; that most of the time, educational research--even at its most valuable--has a minimal impact on education as a whole.

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My work at NML has focused largely on the formal classroom setting, the educational environment that--because of its compulsory nature--offers the greatest opportunity for closing the participation gap that limit some learners' ability to engage with participatory culture in a meaningful way. I've had the chance to talk with some of the most amazing, dedicated teachers I've ever had the good fortune to meet, and I've gotten to sit in on some of their classes. I've seen the everyday miracles they pull off, often thanklessly, without acknowledgement from students, parents, or administrators. Some of these teachers have explained to me what they'd like to do, if they didn't have to deal with state-mandated standardized tests and the policies and curricula intended to boost student scores on these tests. I've heard teachers explain which ideals they've had to give up on, how they've become more cynical or realistic about the impact they can have.

So we're back to burnout, exhaustion, and stress: This is the story of the educator who cares.

I leave NML equipped with a more complete understanding of the complexities and challenges of working in education. I leave knowing I did my best work but wishing I could have done more. I leave more confident in my own abilities but less confident in the possibility for real, lasting transformation of formal learning environments.

And yet I leave NML to begin doctoral study in education.

Despite, or maybe because of, my frustration, I have come to believe that schools are the most important institution America has for working toward social justice. This is where the participation gap is most obvious; this is where class biases--and the racism, sexism, and accompanying approaches to teaching and learning--are simultaneously most apparent and most insidious, and therefore most essential to confront.

I've been writing obsessively on my personal blog about what I've started calling the social revolution. By this term I mean to suggest that we are immersed in fundamental changes to our society that are so rapid, so deep, and so transformative that we can't yet even say exactly what this revolution will yield; but we know that a new social order is emerging out of the emergent tools, technologies, and practices of a participatory culture.

In fact, as one of my colleagues pointed out, even NML has trouble defining "participatory culture." He argues that while we have little trouble explaining what participatory culture allows for, we struggle to explain what it actually is.

He may be right on this, and he may be wrong. It is true, however, that we don't yet know what valued social structures, practices, and dispositions will emerge out of the participatory practices enabled by new media. In fact, it may be that one of the features of a truly participatory culture is a constant destabilization--perpetual overthrow--of dominant values, mindsets, and skillsets. Christopher Kelty calls this a "constantly 'self-leveling' level playing field." Wouldn't that be scary and at the same time so very neat?

This is the struggle of our society, and one that John Dewey pointed to back at the end of the 19th century, when he proposed development of a laboratory school where educators could try out new approaches to teaching and learning. In setting forth a series of arguments about new ways to think about knowing and cognition, he conceded that

[i]t is... comparatively easy to lay down general propositions like the foregoing; easy to use them to criticize existing school conditions; easy by means of them to urge the necessity of something different. But art is long. The difficulty is in carrying such conceptions into effect--in seeing just what materials and methods, in what proportion and arrangement, are available and helpful at a given time.... There is no answer in advance to such questions as these. Tradition does not give it because tradition is founded upon a radically different psychology. Mere reasoning cannot give it because it is a question of fact. It is only by trying that such things can be found out. To refuse to try, to stick blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the only step which can introduce rational conviction into education.

Beginning this fall, I start graduate work in the Learning Sciences program at Indiana University. The transition makes me simultaneously sad and happy, anxious and calm. Bring it on, says hegemony. I can take you.

It's already been broughten, says revolutionist cat, playing hegemony off.


]]> Our rock stars could take your rock stars tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3278 2009-05-28T16:36:41Z 2009-05-28T16:47:31Z ...as long as there's no singing, fighting, or feats of athletic prowess involved. I saw this video for the first time a week or so ago while watching the season finale of "Fringe" on Hulu. Our rock stars, the commercial... Jenna McWilliams ...as long as there's no singing, fighting, or feats of athletic prowess involved.
I saw this video for the first time a week or so ago while watching the season finale of "Fringe" on Hulu.



Our rock stars, the commercial explains, aren't like your rock stars.

]]> Henry Jenkins. Last year, I went to the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where Henry and Steven Johnson were scheduled to hold a discussion at the front of an enormous room, which filled up fast. As Henry and I were chatting before the event, a woman walked up to Henry and girlishly asked, "would you mind if I got a picture of me standing next to you?"

"Sure," said Henry, as if this sort of thing happened all the time. (I later found out that it does.)



What I like about the Intel commercial is that it points to an interesting characteristic of our culture: that when people are as immersed in a field as the Intel employees of the commercial clearly are, they have their own set of rock stars who aren't like "real" rock stars. Well, at least they don't look like rock stars. But they do share certain common features with pop icons: They are generally very, very talented; they have achieved something we fantasize about; and they are famous among people who care about their field.

I'm going to come clean and admit that I have my own rock stars, and I suspect that many of my readers do too. Here's the deal: After I list my rock stars, you have to list yours. But make sure to identify your field, so we can all know how and why these people are superstars to you. (I chose to stick with 3 because I didn't want to look like some sort of crazy groupie, though of course I could go on.)

Jenna's Rock Stars

field: education / new media / participatory culture / technology / creativity
  1. Educational researcher, games expert, and social justice theorist Jim Gee
  2. Technology writer Clay Shirky
  3. Insane genius philosopher Bruno Latour
Your turn.

]]> Interning at NML tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3250 2009-05-08T22:18:53Z 2009-05-08T22:25:10Z Hi, I'm Lieke, an NML intern from the Netherlands for two weeks. Erin asked me if I'd write a blog about my experiences so I'm doing that right now. The week started with meeting everyone who was at NML and... Lieke Bos Hi, I'm Lieke, an NML intern from the Netherlands for two weeks. Erin asked me if I'd write a blog about my experiences so I'm doing that right now.

The week started with meeting everyone who was at NML and GAMBIT on Monday. I stayed at GAMBIT so I could play with the Learning Library to find out what everyone would be talking about on the conference on Saturday. The rest of the week I helped with putting papers into the folders, making signs to show where the workshops and restrooms would be, and listening to the presentations of the NML-team.

On Friday I was supposed to meet the other teens who would be at the conference - the Global Kids - but their bus got delayed. Instead we went to dinner with a couple of researchers from Indiana who work with NML to a little African restaurant where we had some good conversations. Most people left early because Saturday was going to be a long day.

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]]> On Saturday I first had to put the signs on the walls and meet with the Global Kids. Because some people who were listed didn't arrive yet, I had to sign the people in when they came during the intro session. During the coffee-breaks and lunch I had to interview the people who came to the conference. Here are some questions I asked:

1. What aspects of participatory culture and our work at New Media Literacies have you found relevant to your teaching practices? Do you have any examples or stories to share?

2. What do you do to make your classroom more participatory?

3. What are some examples of skills and tolls we need to equip students with to be able to succeed in a participatory culture? 

4. What are some challenges you find when using social media and other new media tools in the classroom? How have you overcome them? 

5. What type of teaching strategies or educational tools have you used to encourage participation and sharing in your classroom?

6. Do you have your students publish their work beyond the classroom or outside of the school (for example on blogs, Youtube, etc?) If not, why? If so, how do you help prepare them for publishing to a wider audience? 

7. Have you heard anything new about assessing your students' learning today? If so, what do you think about them? How do you think we should assess students work in the future? 

8. Have you used the web to develop collaborations with other classrooms or programs outside the school? And if yes, what was it and how did you do it? 

9. After hearing the discussion on digital media and learning this morning, what are some ways that digital media have made an impact in your teaching? 

10. What are you expecting to get from this conference?


Hopefully these interviews will be on the website soon for you to see. Everyone, mostly teachers, were willing to answer the questions and I heard a lot of different answers. There were some people who already used new media, but also people who didn't but were interested in it. The day ended with a wonderful workshop of Henry Jenkins, who got a lot of applause - what he deserved to get.
I think that it would be good for schools to be more participatory and use more new media because it's fun to do that. And when something is fun you are more engaged and more likely to learn.

I enjoyed my first week a lot, and I'm looking forward to another week of working with the NML people.

]]> Schools and Facebook: Moving Too Fast or Not Fast Enough? tag:newmedialiteracies.org,2009://12.3185 2009-04-16T17:55:00Z 2009-04-16T17:53:27Z Matt Levinson
Schools need to do the same.  Students are fast growing disenchanted with the snail's pace of change going on in classrooms regarding teaching with technology. Thankfully, some teachers have grabbed the mantle and are taking steps to meet students where they are in the online world.  One talented teacher cooked up an entire 20th century China project on Facebook.  Students adopted the personalities of Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong and Chang Kai-shek and created and updated Facebook pages and profiles, replete with photos and wall postings.  In the words of the teacher:  "This project changed the classroom.  Students were so motivated and put far more hours into their research than they would have done with a traditional project."  The best part about this project was the organic way it developed in the hands of a teacher who listens to her students.  As the class brainstormed the beginning stages of the unit, one of the students simply suggested that the class create Facebook pages for the three leaders and be required to chat, post and debate online.  Instead of balking at this potentially outlandish idea, this teacher jumped at the opportunity.  This is exactly the kind of collaborative learning that the 21st century demands, but it does mean surrendering a bit of curricular control to the students.  For many teachers, letting students "run" the show poses a challenge to the traditional "sage on the stage" model, even in the most progressive of teaching environments.  The time has come to turn the reins over to the students. 
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Urs Gasser and John Palfrey, co-authors of Born Digital:  Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, ask the critical question for schools regarding multitasking:  

"Should we expend all our effort in trying to prevent digital natives from multitasking?  The answer is no [...]  What we suggest, therefore, is engaging in a structured conversation with digital natives about multitasking as one strategy that can help them cope with the sea of information.  An understanding of the way multitasking challenges learning can even help students practice intentional learning and thus improve the performance of their working memory."  ("Mastering Multitasking," by Urs Gasser and John Palfrey in Educational Leadership, March 2009, Vol. 66 No. 6, p. 18)

The virtue of the online classroom is that it does not require classroom walls.  Learning goes on 24/7 and with the right design students will want to spend their time outside of school collaborating and adding content to class Facebook pages, for example. The teacher who created the 20th century China assignment shared that her students added to their class created Facebook pages at every hour of the day and night.
Motivation skyrocketed and learning grew more authentic with real time audience.  

Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make Magazine, has likened schools of the future to a wild ecosystem.  Students are growing up in a jungle, he argues, and schools need to figure out how to make sense of the "wild."  One productive way to do this is to develop a giant smart grid to disseminate information and facilitate communication through student developed Facebook pages, where key educational interests and accomplishments are posted and shared.  Current project work can then grow more quickly and deeply with collaboration across states, countries, and continents, Dale explains.  One key question schools need to begin to ask is what is the enrollment at school beyond school walls.   

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, poses the ultimate challenge for schools:

"Perhaps we need to separate youth from education.  Education lasts forever.  Youth is the time for exploration, maturation, socialization [...]  What if we told students that, like Google engineers, they should take one day a week or one course a term or one year in college to create something:  a company, a book, a song, a sculpture, an invention?  School could act as an incubator, advising, pushing, and nurturing their ideas and effort.  What would come of it?  Great things and mediocre things.  But it would force students to take greater responsibility for what they do and to break out of the straitjacket of uniformity."  (Jarvis, p. 212)

dSchools can offer programming electives to interested students and channel their energies to produce authentic products.  One 8th grade student devoted a year of study to develop an iPhone application.  He worked with his father, a programmer, and when he hit a bump, he sought out advice from some of Apple's finest and linked up with mentors in the programming field.  Far more hours were spent tinkering on this project than the regular course of study, and the more schools can unleash this type of creative energy in its students, the faster and more productive these students become in a rapidly changing work culture.  As The New York Times reported, the "iPhone Gold Rush is on." Last fall, Stanford University offered an undergraduate course called Computer Science 193P: iPhone Application Programming that attracted 150 students for only 50 spots. 

We live in a "flat" world as Thomas Friedman has argued.  This "flatness" must extend into the field of education.  The old hierarchical model of education needs to be dismantled in favor of cross platform teaching and learning.  President Obama has rewired government and schools need to seize the moment.  We can't wait and more importantly, kids can't wait.  A provocative video on the progression of information technology, "Did You Know?" states:  "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist using technologies that haven't been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."  Now is the time for full-scale reconsideration of instructional delivery with the latest technology tools.   As the recently released MacArthur Foundation study on digital youth stated:  "they (kids) are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults [...] to stay relevant in the 21st century, education institutions need to keep pace with the rapid changes introduced by digital media."  You can also watch a video interview with the study's lead researcher, Dr. Mizuko Ito.

Of course, social networking and Facebook do not come without certain caveats.  Schools are increasingly trapped in a Gordian knot with the onslaught of the Facebook age.  The boundaries between home and school are so twisted that school administrators, parents, and students find themselves caught in the crosshairs.  To untangle this knot, all three groups need to come together and communicate about fair use.  The recent news of Katherine Evans and her lawsuit against Pembroke Pines Charter High School (New York Times, February 8, 2009) highlight the challenges of untying this knot.  Suspended from school for creating a Facebook page aimed at venting frustration at the actions of her high school English teacher, the student, along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have cried foul at perceived first amendment violations.  The school, on the other hand, crouches under the desk of its legal counsel.  This problem will only grow worse, unless all parties can create an agreement for fair play at home and in school.  Kids will not cease posting on Facebook and the faster schools and parents can grasp that reality, the healthier the lives of students will be.

The question centers on how to build a bridge for students, parents, and schools. The Common Sense Media schools program can serve as a starting point.  Founded five years ago as a non-partisan organization committed to media safety for kids and families, CSM has recently launched its schools program, with over 1000 participating schools. Endorsed by President Obama, CSM has national reach and is one of the few organizations committed to wrestling online living to the ground for kids, families, and now schools.  CSM offers practical resources and lesson ideas for educators and conducts workshops, presentations, and focus groups with students and teachers for schools.  They even have a family media agreement, but have not yet crafted a more encompassing agreement to connect home and school.  Urs Gasser and John Palfrey write:
 
"Young people - especially those who are Digital Natives - are themselves setting the norms for how they share information, and these norms may or may not turn out to be a positive influence or to protect them sufficiently from harm.  Since parents and teachers have not yet figured out how to deal with these same issues, it could be time for a dialogue.  There is an enormous opportunity for Digital Natives and their parents to listen to one another and to establish shared, positive norms regarding privacy issues as we move forward in the digital age" (Gasser and Palfrey, Born Digital, pp. 63-64). 

Parent education evenings can serve as a starting point and can underscore for parents the need to reach out for guidance and support from a community.  Oftentimes, parents feel they are alone as they figure out how to create boundaries at home.  One parent wrote:  "When my son has "homework time," unless I am actually looking at his computer screen to make sure he is working on homework, he is either IM-ing or playing an internet war game.  This is a very frustrating and concerning situation for me as a parent. I need the tools to monitor his use effectively.  At home, much of his computer time for schoolwork is spent off task."  Schools can bring together parents to develop mutually beneficial and reinforcing terms of use and brainstorm strategies for effective monitoring at home.  Some schools have even gone so far as to create a list of acceptable behaviors on Facebook and on the Internet in general.  Parents do not want to feel alone, and they should not have to if schools can figure out with them how to balance the exciting features of social networking with the need for safe structures for teens.

My sister offers an excellent case in point.  She asked me to friend her sixteen-year old son on Facebook last year because she was worried about what he was doing.  She figured, correctly, that her son would be more inclined to "friend" his uncle than his own mother.  Sure enough, I became one of my nephew's friends and I periodically check his page to make sure his postings do not sink into the pit of locker room language.  Of course, what a sixteen year old deems inappropriate is quite different from my own sensibilities as a school administrator.  However, I did teach high school students for seven years, so I have a pretty good idea of the line between cool and out of bounds.

School administrators struggle with transgressions after school hours and outside of school networks.  While unhealthy online activity takes place in homes and on weekends, the after effects often ripple through schools and affect peer relationships on a daily basis. Schools can raise parental awareness through conversations and information sharing, but the trickier issue is whether to impose discipline on students for inappropriate and unsafe cyber actions outside of school.  Now, with lawsuits looming, even more schools will cower at the prospect of disciplining student actions on Facebook and other social networking sites, for fear of reprisal. 

Schools can put their heads in the sand and ignore the problem.  They can draw a line in the sand, with zero tolerance rules written into school handbooks, or they can shift with the changing sands of social networking and seek solutions to incorporate social networking and utilize it as part of the educational program for students.  We have reached the tipping point here and schools must address and embrace the prolific energy surrounding the Facebook age. 

If schools block Facebook use on campus, students have no opportunity to integrate social networking into their learning environment, and are instead left to swim alone in what can be treacherous waters.  When problems arise, often after hours and even late into the night, schools face the fallout in the hallways.  Students carry the burdens of unhealthy Facebook exchanges with them throughout the school day.  

It is time to unravel the knot of conflict between students and schools and disentangle the web of lawsuits that could easily overtake the better measure of capitalizing on the cooperation and communication that the Facebook age brings to educational settings. 

Parents are aching for guidance and the more home and school can partner, the better off communities will be.  One parent commented: 

"With a son in high school, I've had a lot of opportunity to think about Facebook and the issues it presents, which are certainly complex. Although I continue to have mixed feelings about the whole phenomenon, Facebook is -- for all intents and purposes - unavoidable in high school.  However, I really don't think it's unavoidable in middle school. Because we believe that part of what students learn in middle school is to organize themselves and be responsible and independent about their work, we don't allow our daughter to have a Facebook page. It's just too tempting and too time-consuming, and there is so much other stuff on which we would like to see her spending time. Furthermore, the issues about privacy, sensitivity and good judgment are complicated, and somewhat challenging for a middle schooler to navigate gracefully."

This parent is begging for guidance from the school.  Clear boundaries exist at home, but the concern over how much and how soon a student should enter the Facebook age has this parent searching for answers.  She goes on to ask the school to take a stance on Facebook accounts in middle school:

"Anyway, I know that the school is not -- nor should it be -- in a position to tell families what to permit in their homes. However, I wonder if parents would be at all receptive to a strong recommendation from the school that kids hold off on having Facebook pages until they leave middle school. Maybe the horse has already left the barn on this one -- or maybe you don't agree with me! -- but I think that if you do share my concerns, it might be worth considering whether whether wants to take an official stance on this." 
 
What is interesting about this parent's comment is that she is not alone in her request.  She is not abdicating responsibility for managing her child at home.  She is just asking for a unified voice between home and school.  This is not unreasonable. 

However, students are not ready for this to happen, and in fact, putting a full-scale ban on Facebook runs counter to all of the current research that highlights the meteoric rise of Facebook use among teens.  Project Tomorrow , the Irvine, California-based organization that sponsors an annual survey of students, teachers, parents, and administrators, saw a 150 percent increase between 2007 and 2008 "in the proportion of students using Facebook and other social-networking sites to work with their peers on group projects for school ("Schools Seen as Inhibiting Student Tech. Use," Education Week, March 24, 2009)." 

Beyond the widespread use among teens, there is a vast gulf separating students and adults, in terms of understanding the culture of social networking.  Grown ups (ages 30 and over), are often appalled at the colorful language students use on Facebook, and are unable to wrap their heads around how flippant students can be on their Facebook walls, which are open to public view.  When asked about this behavior, students look at the adults as if they have three heads.  One student responded:  "I know I swear on Facebook, but everyone I know swears on Facebook.  My friends are not offended by my posts."  Schools are not obligated to censor student use of Facebook, especially when Facebook is not accessible on many campuses, but schools do have a responsibility to alert parents, when the school becomes aware of student mis-steps on Facebook.

A recent article in The New York Times asks "Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?" (New York Times, 3/29/09).  The more appropriate question to ask is whether schools are evolving too slowly with Facebook and social networking.  The pedagogical possibilities are profound, and the opportunity to provide social and emotional guidance to students (and their families) in their use of Facebook must be broached.  There exists a unique moment to better align students and adults, especially with the mushrooming of Facebook use by the "older" generation.  Facebook has just eclipsed the 200 million-user mark and the longer we all wait to engage, and not spurn, Facebook in school communities, the worse off students, families, and educators will be.  And, I don't want my son to miss out on the "iPhone Gold Rush." 
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