Bede Music Box

An occasional paper on digital media and learning Henry Jenkins,Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program Building the new field of digital media and learning The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year,$50 million digital media and learning An occasional paper on digital media and learning Henry Jenkins,Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program Table of Contents Executive Summary3 The Needed Skills in the New Media Culture5 Enabling Participation7 Why We Should Teach Media Literacy:Three Core Problems12 Core Media Literacy Skills22 Who Should Respond? A Systemic Approach to Media Education56 The Challenge Ahead:Ensuring that All Benefit from the Expanding Media Landscape61 Sources ÒIf it were possible to define generally the mission of education,it could be said that its fundamental pur- pose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in pub- lic,community,[Creative] and economic life.Ó Ñ New London Group (2000,p.9) Ashley Richardson (Jenkins,2004b) was a middle-schooler when she ran for president of Alphaville.She wanted to control a government that had more than 100 volunteer workers and that made policies that affected thousands of people.She debated her opponent on National Public Radio.She found herself in the center of a debate about the nature of citizenship,about how to ensure honest elections,and about the future of democracy in a digital age.Alphaville is the largest city in the popular multiplayer game, Heather Lawver (H.Jenkins,2006a) was 14 years old.She wanted to help other young people improve their reading and writing skills.She established an online publication with a staff of more than 100 people across the world.Her project was embraced by teachers and integrated into their curriculum.She emerged as an important spokesperson in a national debate about intellectual property.The website Lawver created was a school newspaper for the fictional Hogwarts,the location for the popular Harry Potter Blake Ross (McHugh,2005) was 14 years old when he was hired for a summer internship at According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. user.The computer does not operate in a vacuum.Injecting digital technologies into the class- room necessarily affects our relationship with every other communications technology,chang- ing how we feel about what can or should be done with pencils and paper,chalk and black- board,books,films,and recordings. Through these various forms of participatory culture,young people are acquiring skills that will serve them well in the future.Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school,cultural expression,civic life,and work operate.A growing body of work has focused on the value of participatory culture and its long-term impact on childrenÕs understanding of themselves and the world around them. Many have argued that these new participatory cultures represent ideal learning environments. Gee (2004) calls such informal learning cultures Òaffinity spaces,Óasking why people learn more,participate more actively,engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the contents of their textbooks.Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning,Gee argues,because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge differences in age,class, race,gender,and educational level,and because people can participate in various ways accord- ing to their skills and interests,because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each partic- ipant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills,and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others.For BlauÕs report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expres- We are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced. and professional activities.Beck and Wade conclude that gamers were more open to taking Why We Should Teach Media Literacy: Some defenders of the new digital cultures have acted as though youth can simply acquire these skills on their own without adult intervention or supervision.Children and youth do know more about these new media environments than most parents and teachers.In fact,we do not need to protect them so much as engage them in critical dialogues that help them to articulate more fully their intuitive understandings of these experiences.To say that children are not victims of media is not to say that they,any more than anyone else,have fully mastered what are,after all,complex and still emerging social practices. There are three core flaws with the laissez faire approach.The first is that it does not address the fundamental inequalities in young peopleÕs access to new media technologies and the opportunities for participation they represent (what we call the participation gap ).The second is that it assumes that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thus articulate what they learn from their participation (what we call the transparency problem) .The third problem with the laissez faire approach is that it assumes children,on their own,can However,simply passing out technology is not enough.Expanding access to computers will In a 2005 report prepared for the MacArthur Foundation,Lyman finds that childrenÕs experi- ences online are shaped by a range of social factors,including class,age,gender,race,nationality, and point of access.He notes,for example,that middle-class youth are more likely to rely on resources and assistance from peers and family within their own homes,and thus seem more autonomous at school than working-class children,who must often rely more heavily on teachers and peers to make up for a lack of experience at home.The middle-class children thus seem ÒnaturallyÓsuperior in their use of technology,further amplifying their own self-confi- dence in their knowledge. Historically,those youth who had access to books or classical recordings in their homes,whose parents took them to concerts or museums,or who engaged in dinner conversation developed, almost without conscious consideration,skills that helped them perform well in school.Those experiences,which were widespread among the middle class and rare among the working class, became a kind of class distinction,which shaped how teachers perceived students.These new forms of cultural participation may be playing a similar role.These activities shape what skills teach players to think in an active way about complex phenomena (some of them Ôreal life,Õsome of them not) as dynamic,evolving systems.But they also (personal interview with Howard Gardner,2006) has found that issues of format and design are Their writing is much more open to the public and can have more far-reaching consequences. The young people are creating new modes of expression that are poorly understood by adults, As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention,we must keep in mind three core concerns: How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social,cultural,economic,and political future of The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and marshal evidence.If anything,these traditional skills assume even greater importance as students venture beyond collections that have been screened by librarians and into the more open space of the web.Some of these skills have traditionally been taught by librarians who,in the modern era,are reconceptualizing their role less as curators of bounded collection and more as infor- mation facilitators who can help users find what they need,online or off,and can cultivate good strategies for searching material. Students also need to develop technical skills.They need to know how to log on,to search,to use various programs,to focus a camera,to edit footage,to do some basic programming and so We must integrate these new knowledge cultures into our schools,not only through group work but also through long-distance collaborations across different learning communities. Students should discover what it is like to contribute their own expertise to a process that involves many intelligences,a process they encounter readily in their participation in fan dis- cussion lists or blogging.Indeed,this disparate collaboration may be the most radical element of new literacies:they enable collaboration and knowledge-sharing with large-scale communities that may never personally interact.Schools are currently still training autonomous problem- solvers,whereas as students enter the workplace,they are increasingly being asked to work in The new media literacies skills,as ways of interacting within a larger community, and not simply an individu- alized skill to be used for personal expression. Play: the capacity to experiment with oneÕs surroundings as a form of problem- Play,as psychologists and anthropologists have long recognized,is key in shaping childrenÕs rela- tionship to their bodies,tools,communities,surroundings,and knowledge.Most of childrenÕs earliest learning comes through playing with the materials at hand.Through play,children try on roles,experiment with culturally central processes,manipulate core resources,and explore their immediate environments.As they grow older,play can motivate other forms of learning. Pratt (1991) describes what her son and his friend learned through baseball card collecting: Sam and Willie learned a lot about phonics that year by trying to decipher surnames on baseball cards,and a lot about cities,states,heights,weights,places of birth,stages of life.É And baseball cards opened the door to baseball books,shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, magazines,histories,biographies,novels,books of jokes,anecdotes,cartoons,even poemsÉ. Literacy began for Sam with the newly pronounceable names on the picture cards and brought him what has been easily the broadest,most varied,most rewarding,and most integrated experience of his 13-year life.(pp.33-34) PrattÕs account suggests this playful activity motivated three very different kinds of learning. First,the activity itself demanded certain skills and practices,which had clear payoffs for aca- demic subjects.For example,working out batting averages gave Sam an occasion to rehearse his math skills;arranging his cards introduced him to the process of classification;and discussing the cards gave him reason to work on his communication skills. On another level,the cards provided a scaffold,which motivated and shaped his acquisition of other forms of school knowledge. The cards inspired Sam to think about the cities where the teams were located and acquire map-reading skills.The history of baseball provided a context through which to understand Schools are currently still training autonomous prob- lem-solvers,whereas as stu- dents enter the workplace, they are increasingly being asked to work in teams, play,if you asked them afterwards,they will say that they were having fun.So,the fun of game play is not non-stop mirth but rather the fun of engaging of attention that demands a lot of you and rewards that effort.I think most good teachers believe that in the best moments,classroom learning can be the same kind of fun.But a game is a moment when Children often feel locked out of the worlds described in their textbooks through the depersonalized and abstract prose used to describe them. Games construct compelling worlds players move through. Players feel a part of those worlds and have some stake in the events unfolding. ¥ Art and design students are turned loose with a diverse array of everyday materials and encouraged to use them to solve a specified design problem.Such activities encourage students to revisit familiar materials and everyday objects with fresh perspectives,to think through common problems from multiple directions,and to respect alternative responses to the same challenge.This approach is closely associated with the innovative design work of Ideo,a Palo Alto consultancy,but can also be seen in various reality television pro- grams,such as Project Runway or The Iron Chef,which require contestants to adopt dis- tinctive and multiple approaches to shared problems. ¥ Games offer the potential to learn through a new form of direct experience.Physics teachers use the game Supercharged ,which was developed as part of the MIT Games to Colin said:ÔI donÕt want to study Rome in high school.Hell,I build Rome every day in my on-line gameÕ...Of course,we could dismiss this narrative construction as not really being a meaningful learning experience,but a bit later he and his dad were engaged in a able and as the toolkits needed to construct such models are simplified,students have the opportunity to construct their own simulations.Bogost (2005) argues that computer games fos- ter what he calls procedural literacy,a capacity to restructure and reconfigure knowledge to look at problems from multiple vantage points,and through this process to develop a greater systemic understanding of the rules and procedures that shape our everyday experience.Bogost writes,ÒEngendering true procedural literacy means creating multiple opportunities for learn- ersÑchildren and adultsÑto understand and experiment with reconfigurations of basic build- ing blocks of all kindsÓ(p.36).Young people are learning how to work with simulations through their game play,and schools should build on such knowledge to help them become critical readers and effective designers of simulation and modeling tools.They need to be given a critical vocabulary for understanding the kind of thought experiments performed in simula- tions and the way these new digital resources inform research across a range of disciplines. ¥ Students in New Mexico facing a summer of raging forest fires throughout their home state used simulations to understand how flames spread.Manipulating factors such as den- sity of trees,wind,and rain,they saw how even minute changes to the environmental conditions could have profound effects on fire growth.This helped them understand the efficacy of common techniques such as forest thinning and controlled burns. PerformanceÑthe ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of We have thus far focused on game play as a mode of problem-solving that involves modeling experiences in playing Hannah,a house slave (an explanation that reaches well beyond any- thing explicitly present in the games and she even invents actions for the nonplayer characters in order to help her make sense of her place in the social order being depicted): You donÕt really have as much support as you would like because being a house slave they call you names,just because most of the time youÕre lighter skinÑyouÕre the masterÕs kid I have been really interested in Japanese culture since I was in sixth grade.When I was in the seventh grade,I started studying Japanese on my own.When I got into high school,I started taking Japanese courses at Smith College.I got into costuming through anime, which is actually how I got interested in Japanese.And I taught myself how to sew.ÉIÕm a Educators have for too long treated role play as a means to an endÑa fun way to introduce Appropriation Ñ the ability to meaningfully sample and remix Journalists have frequently used the term,ÒNapster generation,Óto describe the young people who have come of age in this era of participatory culture,reducing their complex forms of appropriation and transformation into the simple,arguably illegal,action of ripping and burn- ing someone elseÕs music and sharing the files.Recall that the Pew study (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005) found that almost one-quarter of American teens had sampled and remixed existing one closely associated with the kinds of new creative works that youth are generating by manipulating images with the software,Photoshop.Despite the pervasiveness of these cultural practices,school arts and creative writing programs remain hostile to overt signs of repurposed commentary of existing songs to explore a common theme or topic.They have found that this process of sampling and remixing music motivates youth to think more deeply about the sounds they hear around them and motivates them to approach school-related topics from a fresh perspective. ¥ Artist and filmmaker Juan Devis (Jenkins,2006b) has been working with the University of Southern California Film School,the Institute for Media Literacy,and the Los Angeles Leadership Academy on a project with minority youth.The youth will develop an online game based on Mark TwainÕs Huckleberry Finn. Devis drew a number of strong parallels cognitive ability.All information to be processed by our brains is temporarily held in short- term memory,and the capacity of our short-term memory is sharply limited (Baddeley,1999). Attention is critical.Learners must filter out extraneous information and sharpen their focus on fused with distraction,but as understood here,multi-task- Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of individuals,the distributed cognition perspective holds that intelligence is distributed across Òbrain,body,and worldÓ (Clark,1997),looping through an extended technological and sociocultural environment (Clark,2003).Explaining this idea,Pea (1997) notes,ÒWhen I say that intelligence is distrib- uted,I mean that the resources that shape and enable activity are distributed in configurations across people,environments,and situations.In other words,intelligence is accomplished rather than possessedÓ(p.50).Work in distributed cognition focuses on forms of reasoning that would not be possible without the presence of artifacts or information appliances and that expand and augment humanÕs cognitive capacities.These devices might be forms that externalize memory, such as a database,or they can be devices that externalize processes (Shaffer & Kaput,1999), such as the widely used spell checker.The more we rely on the capacities of technologies as a part of our work,the more it may seem that cognition is distributed. Teachers have long encouraged students to bring scratch paper with them into math examina- tions,realizing that the ability to construct representations and record processes was vital in solving complex problems.If,as Clark (2003) notes,technologies are inextricably interwoven with thinking,it makes no sense to Òfactor outÓwhat the human brain is doing as the ÒrealÓ part of thinking,and to view what the technology is doing as a ÒcheatÓor Òcrutch.ÓRather,we can understand cognitive activity as shared among a number of people and artifacts,and cogni- tive acts as learning to think with other people and artifacts.Following this theory,students need to know how to think with and through their tools as much as they need to record information in their heads. Gamers may be acquiring some of these distributed cognition skills through their participation in squadron-based video games.Gee (2003) suggests that in playing such games,one must form a mental map of what player and nonplayer characters are doing (nonplayer characters are char- acters controlled by the A.I of the game).To plan appropriately,players may not need to know what other participants know,but they do need to know what it is those participants are likely to do.Moreover,in playing the games,one may need to flip through a range of different repre- sentations of the state of the game world and of the actions that are occurring within it. Learning to play involves learning to navigate this information environment,understanding the value of each representational technology,knowing when to consult each and how to deploy this knowledge to reshape what is occurring.Instead of thinking as an autonomous problem- solver,the player becomes part of a social and technological system that is generating and deploying information at a rapid pace.Humans are able to play much more complex games (and to solve much more complex problems) in a world in which keeping track of key data and enacting well-understood computational processes can be trusted to the processing power of the computer,and they can thus focus more attention on strategic decision making. Distributed cognition is not simply about technologies;it is also about tapping social institu- tions and practices or remote experts whose knowledge may be useful in solving a particular problem.According to this understanding,expertise comes in many shapes and sizes (both human and non-human).Experts can be expert practitioners,who can be consulted through such technologies as video conferencing,instant messaging,or email;some knowledge can providing a space for the body of the story,the byline,and the lead,this Òsmart toolÓscaf- folds studentsÕprocesses of learning to write a journalistic story.By cueing students on what to write,where to write it,and even into such journalistic values as the need to catch the readerÕs attention,this specially designed program helps students to learn the conventions and values of journalism. ¥ A classroom designed to foster distributed cognition encourages students to participate with a range of people,artifacts,and devices.The various forms of participation compos- ing such cognitive activity might be understood more generally as the skill of how to act within distributed knowledge systems .Interested in designing learning environ- ments that would foster such a skill,Bell and Winn (2000) describe a classroom not only in which participation requires active collaborations with people and tools that are physi- cally present,but also with people and tools that are virtually present through,for exam- ple,video conferencing with a science practitioner,using the web to connect to a data- ÒCollective intelligenceÓÉ In such a world,everyone a group,to solve the challenges we are presented with.The solution,however,does not lie in the story.We are the solution. The 7500+ people in this group ...we are all one.We have made manifest the idea of an unbelievably intricate intelligence.We are one mind,one voice ...made of 7500+ neu- ronsÉ We are not one person secluded from the rest of the world...We have become a Leadership within a knowledge community requires the ability to identify specific functions for each member of the team based on his or her expertise and to interact with the team members in an appropriate fashion.Teamwork involves a high degree of interdisciplineÑthe ability to reconfigure knowledge across traditional categories of expertise.In early February 2004,Eric Klopfer (Atwood,2004),an MIT professor of urban studies and planning,along with a team of researchers from the Education Arcade,conducted Òa Hi-Tech Who Done ItÓ for middle-school youth and their parents inside the Boston Museum of Science.Teams of three adult-child pairs were given handhelds to search for clues of the whereabouts and identi- ty of the notorious Pink Flamingo Gang,who had stolen an artifact and substituted a fake in ¥ Sites such as ning.com offers nonprogrammers tools for rapidly creating social web appli- cations that allow users to interact with and share information with one another.For example,a Mandarin teacher could easily create an online travel guide in which students (potentially nationwide) would each contribute write-ups of interesting sites in their local areas that would be of interest to visitors from China. ¥ Students taking civic classes might be encouraged to map their local governments using a a wiki are produced by participating in their construction,and then actively reflecting on the different possibilities for inaccuracies. In truth,schools should always teach students critical thinking skills for Òsussing outÓthe quali- The new mediated landscape of mainstream news sources, collaborative blog projects, unsourced news sites,and increasingly sophisticated species.Rather,the child assembles information from various media,with the result that each images,as some advocates of visual literacy have suggested.Rather,it develops a more complex vocabulary for communicating ideas that requires students to be equally adept at reading and writing through images,texts,sounds,and simulations.The filmmaker George Lucas (Daly, 2004,online source/no page number) offers an equally expansive understanding of what litera- cy might mean today: We must teach communication comprehensively in all its forms.Today we work with the written or spoken word as the primary form of communication.But we also need to understand the importance of graphics,music,and cinema,which are just as powerful and in some ways more deeply intertwined with young peopleÕs culture.We live and work in a visually sophisticated world,so we must be sophisticated in using all the forms of commu- nication,not just the written word. camera;they might illustrate it by drawing pictures.As they do so,they are encouraged to think about what each new tool contributes to their overall experience of the story as well as what needs to remain the same for viewers to recognize the same characters and situations across these various media. describes the conditions needed to receive the maximum benefit from collective intelligence: There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart.It needs to be diverse,so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table.It needs to be decentralized,so that no one at the top is dictating the crowdÕs answer.It needs a way of summarizing peo- pleÕs opinions into one collective verdict.And the people in the crowd need to be inde- pendent,so that they pay attention mostly to their own information,and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks. Noel Jenkins (2006),a British junior high teacher,created a geography unit in which The massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft It becomes increasingly criti- cal to help students acquire skills in understanding mul- tiple perspectives,respecting and even embracing diversity of views,understanding a ¥ Researchers at Stanford UniversityÕs Center for Deliberative Democracy (Fishkin & Lushkin,2004) have been experimenting with new forms of civic engagement that ¥ Schools historically have used the adversarial process of formal debate to encourage stu- Literacy skills for the twenty- first century are skills that enable participation in the new communities emerging We have identified three core problems that should concern all of us who care about the development and well-being of AmericanÕs young people: How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to Afterschool programs may encourage students to examine more directly their relationship to popular media and participatory culture.Afterschool programs may introduce core technical skills that students need to advance as media makers.In these more informal learning contexts, students may explore rich examples of existing media practice and develop a vocabulary for critically assessing work in these emerging fields.Students may also have more time to produce their own media and to reflect on their own production activities.The approach proposed here takes the best of several contemporary approaches to media education,fusing the critical skills and inquiry associated with media literacy with the production skills associated with the Computer Clubhouses,and adding to both a greater awareness of the politics and practice of participatory culture. The media literacy movement emerged in response to the rise of mass media.Here,for exam- ple,is a classic definition of media literacy created by the Ontario Association for Media Literacy in 1989 (As quoted by Duncan,2005,online source/no page numbers): Media literacy is concerned with developing an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the mass media,the techniques used by them,and the impact of those techniques.It is education that aims to increase studentsÕunderstanding and enjoyment of how the media work,how they produce meaning,how they are organized,and how they construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media products. Although some media literacy educators have instituted groundbreaking work on digital media,the bulk of presentations at national conferences are still focused on more traditional media Ñ print,broadcast,cinema,popular music,advertising Ñ which are assumed to exert the greatest influence on young peopleÕs lives. Media literacy educators are not wrong to be concerned by the concentrated power of the media industry,but they must also realize that this is only part of a more complex picture.We ¥ What lifestyles,values,and points of view are represented in Ð or omitted from Ð this ¥ Why is this message being sent? There is much to praise in these questions:they understand media as operating within a social and cultural context;they recognize that what we take from a message is different from what lic libraries,churches,and social organizations (such as the YWCA or the Boy Scouts) can play important roles,each drawing on its core strengths to expand beyond what can be done during the official school day. We also see an active role for parents to play in shaping childrenÕs earliest relationship to media Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 19,2006),Bill Ivey,the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts,and Steven J.Tepper,a professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University,described what they see as the long term consequences of this participa- Increasingly,those who have the education,skills,financial resources,and time required to navi- gate the sea of cultural choice will gain access to new cultural opportunities....They will be the Bruce,B.(2002).ÒDiversity and Critical Social Engagement:How Changing Technologies Enable New Modes of Literacy in Changing Circumstances.ÓIn Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World Duncan,B.(2005).ÒMedia Literacy:Essential Survival Skills for the New Millennium.Ó Magazine, 35 (2).Available online at:http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/orbit/mediaed_sample.html Dyson,A.H.(1997). 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Turkle,S.(1995). www.digitallearning.macfound.org An occasional paper on digital media and learning Henry Jenkins,Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program An occasional paper on digital media and learning Henry Jenkins,Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program