The Learning Library is is in its beta phase of development and open for user generated content. It is intended as a multimedia activity center where people can come to learn more about the new media literacies, acquiring skills and practicing them through challenges, and ultimately, producing and sharing their own content with other members of the Learning Library.

We hope that the Learning Library will provide young people and educators alike a chance to share and remix media materials of their culture in order to learn what they need to do to become full participants in the contemporary media landscape.

The library is our approach to practicing what we preach. Originally started as short documentary segments produced on topics such as cosplay, wikipedia, graffiti, dj culture, and animation, it was increasingly clear that if we were to put our theories into practice we needed to create a more robust system for active participation in the learning process. The result was the current learning library where the materials we produced -- and countless other sites of cultural production and participation which are already in the web -- become resources for challenges which require a mixture of exploration, experimentation, self-reflection, and communication.

We are finding that teachers are using these challenges in a range of different ways: some are using the challenges themselves in order to get a better grasp on the new media literacy concepts and practices; some are taking the challenges directly into their classrooms; but many more are adapting them to different curricular contexts, taking their core principles to develop their own challenges, and in short, appropriating and remixing them for their own ends.

The challenges are designed to be modular -- to be able to fit into classroom and after school learning contexts or to be embraced by home schoolers and others for self-learning. The challenges are designed to be flexible so they can be used in a range of disciplines with young people at different stages in development. Many of them are designed to have low-tech variants for those classrooms where there is no laptop per child since our emphasis is on the skills and mental models as much as on the tools and techniques of new media.

BUT the Learning Library is not just a tool for educators. We've tested the library with teens as young as 13 and they have found this an easy tool to use. Teens we've worked with have embedded media they are interested in into the library. They also have created challenges, like this one on "How to make a podcast". We are encouraging educators to build challenges as class projects with their students - let them bring their expertise into the learning process.

NML hopes to continue to develop more content, including a proposed collection on civic skills and participatory democracy, and we will be consulting with some specific organizations who want our help in integrating the new media literacies into their learning environment - such as international partner, Department of Education in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

We also will be encouraging a range of other groups to develop their own collections to serve their own pedagogical needs and are hoping to spark some projects in other countries that can be shared with the NML community worldwide. We are hoping that teachers will develop materials with their students with or without input from NML.

And beyond that, we will encourage people to share materials they develop, to build upon each others materials, and to help test, moderate, and evaluate each other's materials. And the Learning Library is open to broad-scale grassroots participation, which evolves through time as people create, share, deploy, and revise each others' contributions.

Please check out our Partner with Us page to learn more about how you can participate.

This website provides a lot of materials to help you get started with the Learning Library. Whether you are a teacher, educator, researcher, or student, browsing through the Learning Library pages on this site will provide you with a good introduction to the application, how to use it, and what it is for.

• To begin, you may want to check out the Tutorials page which provides some basic tips for students and educators.
• From there, you should just begin exploring the Learning Library Application
• You may want to Embed the Learning Library application into your own web site or your class page, and see who else has embedded it.
  It's FREE!!!!