MacArthur Foundation: Spotlight blogging Digital Media

---

Last week I joined professor Doug Thomas and other members of USC Annenberg’s Network Culture Project in Second Life to announce “Second Life and the Public Good: A Community Challenge.” It was a great kick-off meeting, with over 100 avatars in attendance on Annenberg Island and many interesting questions, but this was only the start.  Over the next month, participants will have in-world meetings to brainstorm with the judges and to submit their proposals.

Why a Challenge?

Second Life residents have a long history of mixing the real and the virtual, from the earliest fundraising to the myriad discussions around the current US Presidential campaign, so the timing was right to challenge them to think more broadly.  By challenging the community to generate public good for the world around them, the Network Culture Project has the chance both to generate new approaches to public good and to help philanthropic institutions better understand opportunities in virtual worlds.  User generation combined with broad participation, when focused, can lead to innovative and impactful solutions to real-world issues.

Creation and Advocacy

A panel of judges brings broad expertise to public good and collaborative activities within virtual worlds, however another goal of the challenge is that it will be the Second Life community that ultimately decides which projects become finalists and receive a L$100,000 monthly stipend to develop their projects prior to being showcased at the State of Play conference in October.  After the June 1st deadline for submissions, the panel of judges will select up to 5 semi-finalists.  Those semi-finalists will have two weeks to advocate for their projects within Second Life during an open, community voting process.  The challenge allows the Second Life community to both create the public initiatives and to decide on those most worthy of additional funding.

Only the Beginning

Ultimately, the challenge, stipends, and showcases are all intended to seed further action.  Based on the turnout and energy at the kick-off meeting, the next several months leading up to State of Play should prove to be an exciting chapter in user-generated ideas, projects, and advocacy.  Visit the project site and join the process in-world!

Next Event

• May 15th Noon PST. Information Session for Europe/Americas (Annenberg Island)

Proposals Due

• June 1st 5PM PST. Send proposals to networkculture@gmail.com

---

This blog post is a follow-up to the wonderful Stanford Public Forum held April 23rd at the Hewlett Teaching Center at Stanford. 
Organized by Common Sense Media, the presentations from the Research Project">Digital Youth Research Project were both thought provoking and inspiring.  Thanks to all who participated and to those who attended.

An additional thank you goes out to Global Kids who helped provide access to this event to those who couldn’t attend in person through simulcast and webcast.

The video coverage, in three parts, begins with Julia Stasch, Vice President of the Program on Human & Community Development at MacArthur, introducing the event, and continues with coverage of the research presentations and panel discussion.

danah boyd has posted about the event and her talk on “Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics.” Kevin Marks also provided some interesting comments on the ideas surrounding “digital publics.”

---

“In a new, nationally representative poll from Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (JGCC), American parents agreed by a wide margin that digital media skills are important to kids’ success in the 21st century, but they also expressed skepticism about whether digital media could contribute to the development of skills like communicating, working with others, and establishing civic responsibility.” Read more.

I’ll be attending the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Symposium in New York City today where the full results of this new poll will be presented. The symposium, “Logging into the Playground: How Digital Media are Shaping Children’s Learning,” will explore how digital media can improve children’s literacy, learning and development.

You can watch a live Webcast of the symposium here starting at 9 a.m. Eastern time.

Additionally, a slideshow with the poll results is available here.

---

I live on a ranch outside San Antonio Texas.  If you ask a native Spanish speaker in San Antonio: “where in Mexico do you come from?” the answer is often “San Antonio!  What part of Mexico do you come from?” It turns out, the border crossed them, they didn’t cross the border.

I feel the same way about virtual worlds and learning/education.  We launched Whyville in 1999 as a learning community, based on 17 years of research (while running the Caltech PreCollege Science Initiative) on how to most effectively use computers and networks to engage kids in learning.  We were identified as a virtual world later.  We believed at the time that this structure of Internet space would be particularly effective in engaging kids in learning.  We believed if we were right, they would come and stay. They did and have.

In my view, it is wonderful that an organization as significant as the MacArthur Foundation has been able to engage the considerable abilities and expertise of researchers like Doug Thomas, Yasmin Kafai, Constance Steinkuehler and others in the study of virtual worlds and learning.  This is important and interesting work.  I also believe that many of the comments by Doug, Yasmin, Constance and Connie (the Director of the MacArthur program) are right on.  The issues raised in these blogs are interesting and thoughtful, and probably I could write a book in response (perhaps I will).  However, I really want to cut to the chase - and identify what I think is the most remarkable feature of Whyville, and not incidentally what I personally believe to be the most important measure of the effectiveness of virtual worlds for learning or anything else. 

How many users are REALLY there, and how much are they REALLY engaged and for how LONG?

Connie mentioned that the Kofi Anann event attracted almost 200 Whyvillians, many of whom activily participated in the discussion (which BTW continues on Whyville).  But broadcast videos aren’t the way we most effectively engage our kids.  When the CDC launched their virtual vaccination campaign the end of last year and kids could protect themselves from the much dreaded ‘Why-Pox”, 134,000 children participated in 6 weeks (and invited 6,000 of their grandparents to get virtually vaccinated too).  5% of Whyville’s users in 2007 visited the Virtual Getty Museum (and 3/4s of Whyvillians surveyed know the Getty is in LA).  Our citizens made 587,000 requests of the site’s dietitian on how to stay healthy eating virtual food.  Many citizens have stayed healthy eating virtual breakfast, lunch, and dinner for more than a year.  In 2007, our citizens published almost 2,000 original articles in the Whyville Times, made more than 500,000 entries on internal discussion boards, sent 3.6 million Whymail messages to their friends, and generated 585 million chat phrases.  Oh yes, and our kids have contributed 700 videos about Whyville on their own on YouTube (an order of magnitude larger than for Teen Second Life).  Overall, of the 3.4 million users who have registered in Whyville since April 1999, 1.7 million re-logged into Whyville in the last year, including 10% of the users who registered in the year 2000. 

So, I am happy to leave it to the academics to place a larger frame around why Whyville works (until I write my book J ).  In fact we have an open door policy for academics.  But for certain, one key to whyville’s success has been our focus, from the outset, on building a community of learners, supported by a sophisticated community management system that involves our citizens too, and YES we designed Whyville to be our kids first life (not their second life), and YES our children love Whyville and want to be involved.  We know they also believe that Whyville is “their world” managed by benevolent adults (which they also apparently regard as increasingly rare in their real worlds).  But most importantly, if they keep coming and engaging, we are doing our job, because learning and education is the most engaging thing we do as humans.  It’s what we care about first and foremost in Whyville - and our kids know it.

As they say in Texas “if they ain’t there, you can’t learn-um.”

---

For the last six years I have followed tween’s virtual lives, customs, and well, pimples on http://www.Whyville.net. The pimples are a prominent signal that Whypox, a virtual epidemic, has arrived in Whyville. This happens about once a year, concurrent with the flu season. Player’s avatars become infected with red pimples that grow and recede in intensity and their chat is interrupted by ‘achoo’. Life in the times of Whypox leads Whyvillians to chat and write about their experiences in the weekly newspaper the Whyville Times. Some players go as far as avoiding public spaces in Whyville while others continue with their daily life as if nothing has happened. Public health researchers have started discussing the use of virtual epidemics as a tool to trace and understand behavioral movements because unlike real life, we can start virtual epidemics that can run real time over several weeks and infect large number of participants. Whyvillians have had the privilege of this experience for many years now.

Moving Beyond Pimples

But there is more to pimples than meets the eye. During the outbreak of Whypox Whyvillians can go to a virtual Center for Disease Control to check the daily infection status within the community and track the epidemic over time. They can also post on bulletin boards their comments, questions, and theories about the cause of Whypox, its duration, and possible preventive measures. We found that players use epidemic simulators to test various conditions and make predictions about possible outcomes. Furthermore, players have debated the building of hospitals to help infected Whyvillians, universities to learn about the epidemic or research labs to develop vaccines - all of which are great starting points for engagement and learning about public health and science issues. More recently a laboratory was added so that Whyvillians can now investigate the composition of the Whypox virus and design vaccines for their protection.

Talk Trumps Pimples

As it turns out when we surveyed Whyvillians about their Whypox experiences, more than two thirds complained about the interruption of chat but only one third about their pimples. It’s not that Whyvillians don’t care about the look of their avatars. To the contrary: with over 33000 avatar parts designed by, sold or traded to other Whyvillians we know that self-expression matters in Whyville. Virtual epidemics like Whypox give us new ideas for how to engage tweens interactively in an informal yet serious manner in learning about infectious disease unlike what they can experience with reading textbooks or watching videos. Conversation about shared experiences and interests is what truly drive community in virtual worlds. It is here that we should focus our attention as learning researchers and designers and investigate the particular affordances that events like Whypox and associated activities have to offer for digital media and learning in virtual worlds.

---

I’m really interested in understanding the forms of academic play that people do in the context of popular virtual worlds and incubating those practices in after school programs for kids - especially working class and middle class adolescent boys from small towns and rural settings. These are kids who are often disengaged and failing basic coursework, who have with limited conversation with more urban, transnational, “hipster” media content and perspectives, and yet who eat up games.

In the wild, in the lab.

As part of this research, we document, analyze, and assess the practices and values that high-end knowledge workers in games like World of Warcraft engage in and then figure out ways to make it happen on our ongoing lab: An after school online gaming club for boys. We focus on things like scientific reasoning, argumentation, computational literacy (like mods), media production, and copious amounts of reading and writing both multimodal and print text. We closely examine them as they arise both “in the wild” of online gaming fandom and in the incubators we ourselves have designed. It is not straightforward (how do you map 504 AAAS science standards to unstructured, gamer forum conversation?). It is not easy (how do you use games as a motivating context for ‘work’ without totally colonizing their playspace?). But its also never boring or dull. And sometimes what we end up discovering (or rediscovering) in the process surprises us…

Its the community, not the technology.

By now, the idea that what matters most is people & relationships rather than game engines & photorealistic graphics is a truism in the world of games. But in the world of education, and educational interventions, its a pretty new idea. In practice, it means that the ‘treatment’ is participation in a community who shares certain key values and practices. Mere /play time within a particular virtual world, by itself, won’t do. So, in our work, features such as the presence of mentors, apprenticeship networks and norms, and collaborative (typically online) artifacts are the core characteristics we attend to, for example, rather than content materials, time-on-task, and one-way push media (like teachers and textbooks).

Mixed ability and maturity groups are good.

We’re so accustomed to silo’ing kids by age and ability these days that the mere suggestion of mixing in older or adult peers makes us somewhat uncomfortable. And yet, there is immense value in commingling experts and novices, learners and teachers, grown-ups and kids - especially in third places for informal sociability where one’s rank in terms of age or credentialing does not matter. Game communities are just such meritocracies. In the words of JC Hertz, “It didn’t matter what you drove to the arcade. If you sucked at Asteroids, you just sucked” (1997). And as such they can provide young people access to networks of distributed expertise where they can jointly solve problems with more able peers in a world with an assumed equal distribution of opportunities (but not necessarily outcomes). Crucially, this lets kids display (for themselves and for others) not only who they are now (based on the current limitations of what they can do) but who they are becoming (based on what they can do with more knowledgeable and able peers).  Game community relations flourish within Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.

Think: Digital montessori for big kids.

Virtual worlds are like digital montessori for big kids. Virtual worlds are interest-driven learning environments in which the learner is purposefully surrounded with well chosen and well-designed symbolic and material tools and artifacts. They enable the learner to pursue their own interests and passions (Barron) but which push back conceptually enough to enable the development of deep understandings of the system being explored. Even in our purposefully educational games-based program, we let students’ emergent goals motivate the instruction rather than expecting the instruction to motivate or engage the students’ emergent goals.

---

Understanding what is happening in virtual worlds is a tricky business.  It is easy for us to assume that the things we see on the surface are representations of what lies underneath.  As with most things, however, the story is usually more complicated that it appears.  In the language of Science and Technology Studies, we often talk about the various features of technology as “affordances,” referring less to what they are than what it is that they allow users to do.  Technologies are designed with users in mind, to “afford” them certain actions or abilities.  But things don’t really get interesting until the users begin to explore, experiment, and discover their own affordances, often the ones the developers never intended or even envisioned.

It is deceptively easy to look at some specifications or user interfaces and conclude that games or virtual worlds have particular affordances or that they limit the ability of users to participate, create, or engage with each other productively.  However, users are clever and more often than not they will find a way to subvert limitations by using the tools that are available to them in unexpected ways

As we engage these new worlds as researchers, it is critical that we understand not only the affordances and limitations of the technologies themselves, but also the practices of the participants who are engaging with the technology.  Perhaps the greatest object lesson comes from Cory Ondrejka, former CTO of Second Life, who, when describing the early days of development of Second Life found himself confronted with an object that one of the users had created using in-world building tools.  Neither Cory nor any other member of Linden Lab could figure out how it had been made.  It was at that point that they realized they had created something special.  The users were now creating things that the developers had never considered.

If we think about the primary affordances of virtual worlds as the ability to engage the imagination, then the tools themselves become interesting not as instruments, but as resources for the imagination.  Limitations are not seen as barriers, but as challenges that need to be overcome by creatively engaging the world and by experimenting, playing, and thinking beyond boundaries.  Innovation and creativity are not usually born out of freedom, but instead are often generated by the moments that we are forced to push back on the world.  We innovate and create because the tools we have are no longer sufficient for the task at hand.

Second Life, Whyville, There.com, and a host of other virtual worlds all provide users with different tools to live, learn, engage, act, and play.  But beyond that, each of these worlds also engages the play of imagination and provides the opportunity for users to collectively create the world they live in.  In each of these spaces will undoubtedly see new and interesting approaches to questions of community, citizenship, play, and entertainment.  But we will also see innovation and experimentation, often emerging from the most unlikely places.

I think we err if we only look at what we believe is possible without looking more deeply into what is actual in the everyday practices of those who live in the worlds we study.  Doing so is likely to reveal for us that what seems simple on the surface is often times concealing a much deeper and more complex world than we can initially see.

---

Understanding what is happening in virtual worlds is a tricky business.  It is easy for us to assume that the things we see on the surface are representations of what lies underneath.  As with most things, however, the story is usually more complicated that it appears.  In the language of Science and Technology Studies, we often talk about the various features of technology as “affordances,” referring less to what they are than what it is that they allow users to do.  Technologies are designed with users in mind, to “afford” them certain actions or abilities.  But things don’t really get interesting until the users begin to explore, experiment, and discover their own affordances, often the ones the developers never intended or even envisioned.

It is deceptively easy to look at some specifications or user interfaces and conclude that games or virtual worlds have particular affordances or that they limit the ability of users to participate, create, or engage with each other productively.  However, users are clever and more often than not they will find a way to subvert limitations by using the tools that are available to them in unexpected ways

As we engage these new worlds as researchers, it is critical that we understand not only the affordances and limitations of the technologies themselves, but also the practices of the participants who are engaging with the technology.  Perhaps the greatest object lesson comes from Cory Ondrejka, former CTO of Second Life, who, when describing the early days of development of Second Life found himself confronted with an object that one of the users had created using in-world building tools.  Neither Cory nor any other member of Linden Lab could figure out how it had been made.  It was at that point that they realized they had created something special.  The users were now creating things that the developers had never considered.

If we think about the primary affordances of virtual worlds as the ability to engage the imagination, then the tools themselves become interesting not as instruments, but as resources for the imagination.  Limitations are not seen as barriers, but as challenges that need to be overcome by creatively engaging the world and by experimenting, playing, and thinking beyond boundaries.  Innovation and creativity are not usually born out of freedom, but instead are often generated by the moments that we are forced to push back on the world.  We innovate and create because the tools we have are no longer sufficient for the task at hand.

Second Life, Whyville, There.com, and a host of other virtual worlds all provide users with different tools to live, learn, engage, act, and play.  But beyond that, each of these worlds also engages the play of imagination and provides the opportunity for users to collectively create the world they live in.  In each of these spaces will undoubtedly see new and interesting approaches to questions of community, citizenship, play, and entertainment.  But we will also see innovation and experimentation, often emerging from the most unlikely places.

I think we err if we only look at what we believe is possible without looking more deeply into what is actual in the everyday practices of those who live in the worlds we study.  Doing so is likely to reveal for us that what seems simple on the surface is often times concealing a much deeper and more complex world than we can initially see.

---

An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action.  This term came to mind as I read through Barry Joseph’s post—Comparing apples and oranges in virtual worlds.  The recent simulcasting of an extraordinary speech by Kofi Annan into four different virtual worlds certainly provided an opportunity to think about virtual worlds and how young people use them.  I came away from the event most struck, perhaps, by the size and quality of the discussion held in Whyville.  Over 180 young people attended the event in Whyville, creating streams and streams of thoughtful chat discussion.  Quite extraordinary really.  What is it about the norms, practices, adult roles and other such affordances of this space that is so appealing and engaging for young people?  More importantly perhaps, is if we cast aside our adult expectations and standards, what it is we can learn from young people about why they find this virtual world such an engaging learning space? 

These are the kind of questions that form the basis of MacArthur’s grantmaking in Digital Media and Learning.  What can we learn from young people about how to use digital media to support learning?  What do young people have to tell us about the shape and future of learning environments in the 21st century?  As research begins to emerge and as we observe the extraordinary engagement of young people in virtual worlds such as Whyville, Quest Atlantis and others, we have begun to form a tentative list of the kinds of affordances we see in environments that support learning.  So far, we see the greatest engagement in those environments that allow young people to pursue a need to know, to share, to produce, to make their thoughts and productions public, and to develop a specialized language. 

These are just a few tentative ideas that are emerging and are offered here simply to stimulate discussion.  We think they are useful because they focus on the experience of young people in these environments rather than on the technology.  In the posts that follow, I have invited a few of our colleagues to share their thoughts on the affordances of virtual worlds.

---

An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action.  This term came to mind as I read through Barry Joseph’s post—Comparing apples and oranges in virtual worlds.  The recent simulcasting of an extraordinary speech by Kofi Annan into four different virtual worlds certainly provided an opportunity to think about virtual worlds and how young people use them.  I came away from the event most struck, perhaps, by the size and quality of the discussion held in Whyville.  Over 180 young people attended the event in Whyville, creating streams and streams of thoughtful chat discussion.  Quite extraordinary really.  What is it about the norms, practices, adult roles and other such affordances of this space that is so appealing and engaging for young people?  More importantly perhaps, is if we cast aside our adult expectations and standards, what it is we can learn from young people about why they find this virtual world such an engaging learning space? 

These are the kind of questions that form the basis of MacArthur’s grantmaking in Digital Media and Learning.  What can we learn from young people about how to use digital media to support learning?  What do young people have to tell us about the shape and future of learning environments in the 21st century?  As research begins to emerge and as we observe the extraordinary engagement of young people in virtual worlds such as Whyville, Quest Atlantis and others, we have begun to form a tentative list of the kinds of affordances we see in environments that support learning.  So far, we see the greatest engagement in those environments that allow young people to pursue a need to know, to share, to produce, to make their thoughts and productions public, and to develop a specialized language. 

These are just a few tentative ideas that are emerging and are offered here simply to stimulate discussion.  We think they are useful because they focus on the experience of young people in these environments rather than on the technology.  In the posts that follow, I have invited a few of our colleagues to share their thoughts on the affordances of virtual worlds.

---

Not all virtual worlds are created equally, even those with the greatest potential to host educational content. On March 20th, Global Kids hosted the first massively multiworld simulcast across four virtual worlds, bringing a live speech by Kofi Annan after receiving the first ever MacArthur Foundation ‘s International Justice Award to Second Life, Teen Second Life, Whyville, and There.com, not to mention the web.

To see what I am talking about, please watch the brief video below:

The above statement and the accompanying video, however, erase the very important differences between these very different places that we conveniently label “virtual worlds.” But what choice did we have? As we begin to develop a more sophisticated way of publicly talking about the social impact of this emerging medium, it is important we learn better ways to distinguish between them than just 2D vs. 3D.

If we focus on just two of the venues, Teen Second Life (TSL) and Whyville, we can see that the outcomes were similar; in both locations a group of teens watched the live stream of Kofi Annan while participating in a reflective conversation led by adult facilitators. The experience, however, for both teen participants and the Global Kids staff members facilitating their conversation, could not have been more different.

While TSL residents could design and embody 3D designs of elaborate avatars, Whyvillians are limited to “face parts,” which is to say simple 2D images to stick on their head, somewhat akin to Colorforms.

When TSL residents arrived they walked, flew or teleported into our arena, stood around or sat their avatar in one of the chairs we provided on the Global Kids estate, waving their arms, applauding, or doing flips while watching the projected video on a virtual screen. When a Whyvillian entered the Greek Theater designed and managed by Whyville, they watched their avatar float across their screen and come to rest in an open seat and, other than occasionally jiggle around their seat, couldn’t budge. Meanwhile, on the same Web page used for viewing Whyville, the video stream was hosted, which could be watched not “within” but “alongside” the 2D space occupied by their avatar.

TSL residents participated in an open chat, with its own chat history for reference, and which offered the sort of basic options one would find in a text editor, like cut & paste. Whyvillians, however, are significantly constrained in their ability to communicate, with no chat history, no ability to cut and paste and, in fact, no ability to edit a sentence without using the backspace key.

Finally, while the TSL residents were equals with us adults at Global Kids, albeit from a technological perspective, the Whyvillians were far from equal. Adult moderators control who can walk around the stage area, can pose questions and polls, and can click on a Whyvillians to feature their comment in the center of the screen. In fact, many of these powers were not even available to Global Kids staff but were reserved by our partners at Numedeon, which administers Whyville.

So on the surface, TSL offer a much more sophisticated toolset for both self-expression and communication and offers greater powers to educators seeking to work in such spaces. Yet, nonetheless, as mentioned above, both outcomes were similar. How could this be?

In part, I think this is answered by the different age groups - Whyville serves the middle school crowd while TSL serves older teens. While those in high school might bristle at constraints, it was clear that Whyville’s toolset was designed to provide opportunities for teens to please the adult (e.g. featuring individual comments). And while Teen Second Life might offer more sophisticated tools, the learning curve is considerably steep, too steep for many teens, while Whyville’s web-based world can be easily accessed by even the oldest of computers on the slowest connections.

The lesson learned? On one hand we need to develop more sophisticated language to easily differentiate between different worlds in such areas, for example, as tools for self-expression, communication and adult facilitation. But doing so needs to be developed in parallel with research that can highlight the elements of virtual worlds that are most likely to develop informed and engaged global citizens. 

---

As a part of our ethnographic research on youth and new media I spent hundreds of hours hanging out at after school art, music, and technology programs in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was some of the most exciting research I have ever done because I had the privilege to spend time with young people and learn about their love of music. We are particularly blessed in the Bay area to have so many programs in after school settings where young people can do art and learn about new media. One of the dominant themes in these programs is the desire to give young people a place and means to express themselves. Some programs have slogans like “express yourself”, “tell your story” or “youth are producers not just consumers”. These are important outlets because for the most part young people often feel they are not heard. After school spaces give them the opportunity for expression and to describe their experiences through video, music, poetry, spoken word, prose writing, photography, graphic design, drawing etc.

These mottos which encourage expression and real experience are in and of themselves wonderful and positive but cast in the wider web of society they perhaps play into the logic that has made formal institutional schooling problematic for young people in general. What I mean by this is formal schooling is thematically intended to produce adults who are rational animals.  The pedagogy of the animal rational transforms children who are in fact understood to be irrational into norm conforming, logical, and analytic problem solvers. The rational animal is one who forgoes immediate gratification and the expression of bodily desires in favor of long term practical goals usually in relation to the free market. Additionally the rational animal uses reason to transcend the limitations or desires of one’s own experiencing body. In short formal institutional schooling is designed to produce well rounded ‘minds’.

The obverse of this is seen in some after school settings where young people are encouraged to express themselves and produce narratives of experience. In essence youth are encouraged to produce narratives about the experiencing ‘body’. Expression in this sense implies a reaction such as a gene expressing a phenotype. However young people are not mere mechanisms. In this dualistic mode youth will only be understood as empirical and not theoretical. This tendency to see young people as only expressive and experiential puts a veil over seeing them as thinking and theorizing about their world through their bodies in music and dance or other modes of art. As well simply producing rational animals makes knowledge they acquire in everyday experience illegitimate. Music is a mode that challenges this dualism of mind and body. Music making is not simply expression of experience but also theorizing about it. Music is a mode of thinking about ones world which cannot be measured up against the same metrics of animal rational. As progressive scholars and adults we often pride ourselves in our ability to listen to youth, but are we hearing them?

Editor’s Note: For more information about tonight’s panel discussion from MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media in the Everyday lives of Youth click here.

---

As a part of our ethnographic research on youth and new media I spent hundreds of hours hanging out at after school art, music, and technology programs in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was some of the most exciting research I have ever done because I had the privilege to spend time with young people and learn about their love of music. We are particularly blessed in the Bay area to have so many programs in after school settings where young people can do art and learn about new media. One of the dominant themes in these programs is the desire to give young people a place and means to express themselves. Some programs have slogans like “express yourself”, “tell your story” or “youth are producers not just consumers”. These are important outlets because for the most part young people often feel they are not heard. After school spaces give them the opportunity for expression and to describe their experiences through video, music, poetry, spoken word, prose writing, photography, graphic design, drawing etc.

These mottos which encourage expression and real experience are in and of themselves wonderful and positive but cast in the wider web of society they perhaps play into the logic that has made formal institutional schooling problematic for young people in general. What I mean by this is formal schooling is thematically intended to produce adults who are rational animals.  The pedagogy of the animal rationale transforms children who are in fact understood to be irrational into norm conforming, logical, and analytic problem solvers. The rational animal is one who forgoes immediate gratification and the expression of bodily desires in favor of long term practical goals usually in relation to the free market. Additionally the rational animal uses reason to transcend the limitations or desires of one’s own experiencing body. In short formal institutional schooling is designed to produce well rounded ‘minds’.

The obverse of this is seen in some after school settings where young people are encouraged to express themselves and produce narratives of experience. In essence youth are encouraged to produce narratives about the experiencing ‘body’. Expression in this sense implies a reaction such as a gene expressing a phenotype. However young people are not mere mechanisms. In this dualistic mode youth will only be understood as empirical and not theoretical. This tendency to see young people as only expressive and experiential puts a veil over seeing them as thinking and theorizing about their world through their bodies in music and dance or other modes of art. As well simply producing rational animals makes knowledge they acquire in everyday experience illegitimate. Music is a mode that challenges this dualism of mind and body. Music making is not simply expression of experience but also theorizing about it. Music is a mode of thinking about ones world which cannot be measured up against the same metrics of animal rational. As progressive scholars and adults we often pride ourselves in our ability to listen to youth, but are we hearing them?

Editor’s Note: For more information about tonight’s panel discussion from MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media in the Everyday lives of Youth click here.

---

Join us on Wednesday, April 23 from 5 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. at Stanford University’s Hewlett Teaching Center for a panel discussion from MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media in the Everyday lives of Youth. Researchers from the Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media project - including danah boyd, Heather Horst, Dilan Mahendran and Mimi Ito - will present case studies from a recently completed three-year ethnographic designed to document what young people are doing with new media and online networks. It is the most comprehensive review of young people’s use of media ever conducted. A panel of practitioners - including Tim O’Reilly, Deborah Stipek, Linda Burch and Kenny Miller - will highlight the implications of the research for parents, educators, the media, technology leaders and others.

If you can’t join us in person, you can watch it live on the web at this link: http://tinyurl.com/ynpp8d. You can also watch the event with us in Second Life, check back here for slurls. An audio file of the discussion will also be archived in the Newsroom of the MacArthur Foundation website within a week of the event.

The event is presented by MacArthur and Common Sense Media in association with Stanford University’s School of Education.

Look for posts this week from event panelists. 

---

Now that we’ve developed curricular activities that address issues of ownership and authorship, the NML-GoodPlay collaboration is focusing on to another ethical issue salient to digital youth: privacy. The Internet has changed how youth find and share information about themselves and others, challenging existing conceptions of privacy. These changes result in a lot of uncertainty about what constitute good privacy practices. Our hope is to create a curriculum that gives young people thinking tools that help them to 1) understand both the promises and the perils of disclosure online and 2) consciously adopt a set of values around what to share and what not to share online. To start things off, the NML and GoodPlay teams recently got together for a ‘group think’ about privacy issues and strategies for encouraging reflection about privacy. Here are a few themes from that brainstorm that we feel will be important to address through the curriculum:

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

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

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a five-part collaborative series from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies and Harvard’s GoodPlay project. See series index here.

---

Now that we’ve developed curricular activities that address issues of ownership and authorship, the NML-GoodPlay collaboration is focusing on to another ethical issue salient to digital youth: privacy. The Internet has changed how youth find and share information about themselves and others, challenging existing conceptions of privacy. These changes result in a lot of uncertainty about what constitute good privacy practices. Our hope is to create a curriculum that gives young people thinking tools that help them to 1) understand both the promises and the perils of disclosure online and 2) consciously adopt a set of values around what to share and what not to share online. To start things off, the NML and GoodPlay teams recently got together for a ‘group think’ about privacy issues and strategies for encouraging reflection about privacy. Here are a few themes from that brainstorm that we feel will be important to address through the curriculum:

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

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

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a five-part collaborative series from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies and Harvard’s GoodPlay project. See series index here.

---

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

In Mad Men, students role-play as advertising project managers for the ‘Vegetable Growers of America’ (VGA) in a campaign promoting vegetarianism. In the activity, students choose photos and music for the campaign, considering both the licensing and original intent of the musical and visual creations. For example, students have to decide whether or not using an “agency” owned photo of a cow statue at the Sri Mariamman Temple in Singapore is appropriate in this context. While the photo can be used appropriately from a copyright perspective, students must weigh the needs of the campaign, the original intent of the photo’s creator, and the photo’s religious context.

Mad Men, then, does not simply ask students to consider copyright violations, but also encourages them to think about the potential consequences of using media for different purposes than the original artist intended. After creating their advertising campaigns, students engage in a discussion about their decisions. In light of the music and photo choices they made for the ad campaign, they are asked to consider and articulate the likely views of different stakeholders-the VGA, the viewing public, and the original creator. Students are also prompted to consider how their concerns would change were they tasked with creating an anti-vegetarianism campaign using the same images and music. Our hopes in crafting this curriculum were twofold: 1) to expose youth to ownership norms and conventions of authorial responsibility; and 2) to scaffold youth to thoughtfully reflect on the meaning of ethical authorship and ownership decision-making in their everyday experiences. Mad Men poses issues of responsibility and copyright in a fun and engaging role-play and a substantive experience of making distinct ethical choices. Who knew that cows could do all that?

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a five-part collaborative series from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies and Harvard’s GoodPlay project. See series index here.

---

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

In Mad Men, students role-play as advertising project managers for the ‘Vegetable Growers of America’ (VGA) in a campaign promoting vegetarianism. In the activity, students choose photos and music for the campaign, considering both the licensing and original intent of the musical and visual creations. For example, students have to decide whether or not using an “agency” owned photo of a cow statue at the Sri Mariamman Temple in Singapore is appropriate in this context. While the photo can be used appropriately from a copyright perspective, students must weigh the needs of the campaign, the original intent of the photo’s creator, and the photo’s religious context.

Mad Men, then, does not simply ask students to consider copyright violations, but also encourages them to think about the potential consequences of using media for different purposes than the original artist intended. After creating their advertising campaigns, students engage in a discussion about their decisions. In light of the music and photo choices they made for the ad campaign, they are asked to consider and articulate the likely views of different stakeholders-the VGA, the viewing public, and the original creator. Students are also prompted to consider how their concerns would change were they tasked with creating an anti-vegetarianism campaign using the same images and music. Our hopes in crafting this curriculum were twofold: 1) to expose youth to ownership norms and conventions of authorial responsibility; and 2) to scaffold youth to thoughtfully reflect on the meaning of ethical authorship and ownership decision-making in their everyday experiences. Mad Men poses issues of responsibility and copyright in a fun and engaging role-play and a substantive experience of making distinct ethical choices. Who knew that cows could do all that?

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a five-part collaborative series from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies and Harvard’s GoodPlay project. See series index here.

---

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a five-part collaborative series from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies and Harvard’s GoodPlay project. See series index here.

---

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

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

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

• Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Collective Intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

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

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

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

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

But enough about us, we want to show you what we’ve made! In the next two days, we’ll describe two curricular activities that introduce young people to the ethical issues, media literacy skills, and ownership/authorship themes discussed above. Tomorrow, we’ll start with an activity called “Inspired Highlighter.”

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a five-part collaborative series from MIT’s Project New Media Literacies and Harvard’s GoodPlay project. See series index here.