Through the work of the New Media Literacies Project, we make a core distinction between the digital divide (which has to do with access to technologies -- especially networked computers and mobile telephones) and the participation gap (which has to do with access to skills and competencies required to meaningfully engage with networked culture). While there is clearly a relationship between the two, we've seen great value in decoupling them -- recognizing that one can have access to the technology without having the support structure around it which would enable you to meaningfully participate in the online world and suggesting that even schools which have little or no access to the technology might still help to foster core literacies which would allow their students some leg-up when and if they were able to gain access to networked computing. We've taken as a challenge the design of activities for low-tech and even no-tech contexts, trying to reassure teachers that ultimately it is about new conceptual models and cultural relations as much or more than it is about new technologies.
That's why I am so excited to share the following story with you. It was written by Laurel Felt, a student in USC's Annenberg School, who took my New Media Literacies class last year and has since joined our core research team. I will let her tell her own story in her own way and won't step on her punchlines here, but I hope that all of those schools and teachers who use lack of access to state of the art technology as an excuse for not changing how they teach and what students learn will read this story and perhaps think about their own situation in different terms.
Along the way, Felt builds on her research in my class to explore potential intersections between the frameworks which have emerged from the Emotional Literacy movement and those we've identified through MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning initiatives.
Take it away, Laurel.
High Tech? Low Tech? No Tech?
by Laurel Felt
We'd lost electricity... AGAIN.
Power outages ("coupures" en francais) are hardly a novelty in Dakar, Senegal, during the early summer. Despite the fact that Dakar is Senegal's capital city, and despite the fact that Senegal is known as one of the most advanced sub-Saharan countries in terms of access to and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the regular but unpredictably-timed blackouts bring digital manipulation to a standstill. Lack of electricity stymies desktop computing and shuts down router-dependent Internet networks.
Those offices/apartment buildings/restaurants/hotels with the means independently purchase backup generators to see them through these periods of electrical deprivation. My workplace, the African Health Education Network (Reseau African d'Education pour la Sante (RAES)), had a backup generator.
It was broken.
After a week or two of persistent outages and incalculable loss of productivity, RAES Director Alexandre Rideau was finally able to wrangle a stop-by from the hotly-in-demand(1) generator repairman. He charged us $400, a small fortune by our non-profit organization's cash-strapped standards, and fixed yet again our mediocre, overtaxed generator. Three days later, due to negligence, the generator was blown. So it was back to the drawing board... only not quite. This time, the generator's shoddy circuitry just couldn't be salvaged. And rather than draw 10,000 non-existent dollars from RAES's red budget to buy a new generator (which was sure to be exhausted in another couple of years, or carelessly destroyed at any moment), Alex ruled that we simply had to manage this season -- powerless.
Oh, did I mention the reason I was in Senegal? To teach teens, among other things, how to harness the New Media Literacies (NMLs).
I can almost hear my fellow educators protesting that teaching NMLs in such a context is impossible. But I can testify, to my colleagues' and my relief and delight, that NMLS are precisely what are needed to survive this challenge. Since NMLs cultivate critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills, and since we, as a teaching team, had benefited from NML training before unrolling the teen workshop, we were able to construct a series of ingenious solutions. While we were powerless in a technical sense - Electrical flow? That'd be a "No" -, we were quite the opposite of "powerless" in a productive sense. Our NML training had made us powerful.
How?
Well, let me explain a bit about NMLs, and Henry Jenkins's course on New Media Literacies and discussed with Project New Media Literacies Research Director Erin Reilly, NMLs don't require technology -- they're not about technology. They're about enriching learners with useful, versatile capacities that help them think sharper, work better, and appreciate fuller the ethical ramifications of their actions.
Who can quibble with that? Who's against supporting kids' intellectual, social, and moral development? Seems like a bipartisan, big tent, "everybody on board" kind of issue to me. But a lot of people doubt the necessity of NML instruction... maybe because they misunderstand it? Maybe it's a name thing, maybe people hear the word "new," and they hear the word "media,"(2) and they think,
"Forget about it! Enough with the bells, enough with the whistles! Enough with time-sucking TECHNOLOGY! Get back to teaching little Johnny and Susie(3) good ol' fundamentals, like reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. How about teaching them how to spell, for goodness sakes?! They don't know how to write anymore!"
Noted. And I basically agree with you. But did I ever mention "technology"? No. NMLs build cultural competencies and social skills -- no technology required.
But fine, let's address technology. I mean, YOU brought it up. It's not like I'm looking to dodge the topic. ;-) Look. You can't deny that technology has entered our lives in a significant way. Personally and professionally, we're accessing digital tools and sifting cybersourced information constantly. In this new context of digital ubiquity, we especially need the critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills that we've always found handy.
Am I making sense? Here's an example: We've always needed to know how to experiment in order to figure things out. How else could we have mastered free throw shooting, can opener using, or parallel parking? But now we especially need to know how to experiment. Why? Because we're confronted with complex cell phones, tricked-out digital cameras, and bewildering new versions of Microsoft Office. Let's face it, unless you're my dad, you're just *not* gonna read the manual. If we're not comfortable pushing buttons, navigating menus, and noticing what happens, we're gonna find ourselves in a jam and/or seriously undertapping potential.
Here's another example: We've always needed to know how to respect diverse perspectives and flourish in unfamiliar environments. How else could we have moved to new towns, traveled overseas, or made friends on our first day of school? But now we especially need to know how to negotiate. Why? Because we're viewing YouTube clips from abroad, joining global communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, and harnessing online tools like Wikis, GoogleDocs, Salesforce and BaseCamp to manage group projects. If we're not proficient in reading and respecting people's ways of functioning, again, we'll be stuck between a rock and a hard place or flagrantly wasting opportunity. And who wants that? I'll tell you who wants that: NOBODY.
But back to Senegal.
I was working for the summer as a consultant to RAES's program Sunukaddu, which means "our voice" in Senegal's indigenous Wolof language.
Funded over the past two years by the Soros Foundation of West Africa (OSIWA), Sunukaddu had already proven itself an innovative and effective force for social change. Its model was participatory and hands-on, connecting local media experts with motivated teens for training in multimedia health message development. Participants learned reporting and writing techniques, as well as manipulated digital cameras, camcorders, audio recording equipment, editing software, and web interfaces. Their products are online and educate all who come and click on youths' perspectives vis-à-vis HIV/AIDS. Notably, this past February, Sunukaddu ran the first public awareness media campaign by youth for youth in West Africa. Thousands of young people submitted their songs, poems, narrative films, documentaries, audio reports, articles, commentaries, and posters.. and soon this authentic content will be disseminated nationally.
Despite this demonstrable success, visionary RAES wanted to push the envelope. RAES dreamed of scaling up Sunukaddu and distributing its curriculum across West Africa. Doing so would require the construction of an explicit pedagogical method, and perhaps a re-invention of some of the ways that Sunukaddu did business...
That's when I met Alex. In our first meeting last October, Alex explained his desire for Sunukaddu to more intensively focus on storytelling, message development and diffusion. He spoke of harnessing additional, diverse media. What about pottery? What about textiles? What about dance and jewelry and cell phones? Finally, he sought to explore the human dimension of HIV/AIDS, emphasizing the relationships between and among this scourge and stigma, discrimination, community support, and human rights.
And so I began by working backwards. These new lessons and tools were Step Three. Figuring out a way to offer them so that the learning stuck was Step Two. And theorizing what was essential for any learning and growing to occur in the first place, that was Step One. So, drawing on my studies of communication, child development, and social policy, I developed a model that, at its most parsimonious, looks something like this:
New Media Literacies Improved Functioning
+
Social and Emotional Learning →
+
Asset Appreciation
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) pairs perfectly with NMLs. In the words of Forrest Gump, they're like peas and carrots. As with the 12 NML skills, SEL's five core competencies --- self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making -- set the stage for meaningful education. In my view, SEL forms the individual, NMLs form the learner.
What are the prerequisites for learning? And what is the point of school? The first federal Bullying Prevention Summit was convened in Washington, D.C., last week. Director of Healthy School Communities (part of the Whole Child Initiative at educational leadership organization ASCD) Sean Slade summed up associate professor of child development Philip Rodkin's argument:
Couldn't have said it better myself. This is proponents' rationale for teaching SEL. Sounds awfully similar to our rationale for teaching NMLs, doesn't it? And that is why SEL and NML are like peas and carrots, folks. And why life is like a box of chocolates...
Back to Senegal.
The whole Sunukaddu team agreed, Our workshops should optimize participants' engagement, appropriation, and application of the material. We should also operate as non-hierarchical partners in the learning process, and so create a context in which ideas and knowledge can flow freely in both directions.
So we developed a method that enabled learning via hands-on exploration, game play, improvisation, creation, discussion, and self-reflection. We configured these pedagogical activities such that they cultivated NMLs, SEL, and asset appreciation (a construct that I created that draws on principles from asset-based community development, appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, intrinsic motivation, and resilience). The explicit curriculum was a 12-session workshop supporting teens' efforts to access their voices, make connections, manipulate multiple communication forms and tools, and share their messages with their peers and communities.
Our original curricular outline:
DAY 1: Introduction + Basic Computer Literacy (NML skill of the day: Distributed Cognition)
DAY 2: Basic Computer Literacy + Message Development (NML skill of the day: Multitasking)
DAY 3: Message Development (Classic media literacy; NML skill of the day: Collective Intelligence)
DAY 4: Message Diffusion (Diffusion of Innovation + Stages of Change; NML skill of the day: Networking)
DAY 5: Audio (Hip hop; NML skill of the day: Appropriation)
DAY 6: Non-fiction (Journalism + Positive Deviance; NML skill of the day: Negotiation)
DAY 7: Conflict (NML skill of the day: Performance)
DAY 8: Fiction (Script-writing +Entertainment-education; NML skill of the day: Transmedia Navigation)
DAY 9: Fixed images (Photography + Peer support; NML skill of the day: Play)
DAY 10: Moving images (Cinematography + Human rights; NML skill of the day: Visualization)
DAY 11: Basic Internet Literacy (NML skill of the day: Judgment)
DAY 12: Conclusion (NML skill of the day: Simulation)
Then the power went out.
Oh yeah, remember that? ;-)
The power left the building early in the intervention, Days 1-4.(4) How do you teach basic computer literacy without computers? How do you teach distributed cognition (defined by Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, and Robinson (2006) as "the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities" (p. 4)) without the digital tools we'd intended?
Is it too jingoistic to holler, "New Media Literacies to the rescue!"? Probably.
Here's the answer: You harness distributed cognition and tap other tools -- we broke out the battery-powered smartphones.
You multi-task -- while the participants were filling out their asset inventories, we powwowed and rejiggered the day's schedule. You play -- along with the participants, we tested our way through this challenge, discovering what happened when we did X, Y, and Z, noting successes and setbacks, evaluating, replicating, discarding, and innovating. Like I said, the NMLs returned power to our powerless situation.
And a few days later, when Sunukaddu instructor Idrissa Mbaye hatched the idea of a Competence Clothesline, the NMLs provided an effective solution to our lack of electric fanning. Because our perceptive participants had pulled down competence cards from the line, they had in their hands... handy hand-fans. How about THAT? ;-)
So what I'm saying is, Who needs electricity when you've got skillz? And these skills don't need digital technology. What they do need are understanding, and they need sharing, with students, colleagues, parents, partners, anyone, everyone.
Laurel Felt is a third-year doctoral student at USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism who only wants to change the world... To do so, she seeks to support youths' development of new media literacies, social and emotional learning, and asset appreciation. Her research also looks at gender, obesity, bullying, and reproductive health.
August 30, 2010
Games, New Media and Learning in Argentina: An Interview with Ines Dussel (Part Three)
You've drawn heavily on the work of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiatve. What do you see as the most significant continuities and differences between their approach and what you are finding in Argentina?
I've been reading all the work done by the initiative, and for me it stands out as the most encompassing and organized effort to understand what is going on. I think I provided some of our keys for reading this work already, but let me try and summarize them.
One is the idea of a public culture. That there is something such as a common public sphere that has to be reconceptualized beyond Habermas' notion of the argumentative skills and rhetorical plays but that still includes some notion that there is something to be done together and for everybody, is an uncommon approach in most studies of new technologies. I think we share an engagement with an idea of public culture that remains open and subject to debate, and does not get captured by the state, the market, or the isolated individual.
The second has to do with the kind of learning that young people are doing with and in new media, trying to approach in an honest, more open way these new practices. We liked very much the notion of "genres of participation," as they help organize what we are seeing in our research. And what I liked particularly is that schools are not left out of the map, but are considered as part of this media ecology. I support the idea that schools can be helpful in organizing interesting and relevant experiences for young children which are not immediately accesible to everyone, and which bear other issues in mind than merely the audiences' tastes. Of course, this means changing the ways in which schools are working with new media, which, as said before, have been focused around issues of safety and potentials threats to children's integrity, when they have not been totally derogatory on the value, ethics, or productivity of young people's activities in and with new media.
We also agree with the general search for a balance between the celebration of new, creative, and democratic forces that are mobilizing the digital culture, and the skepticism about some trends that we do not see as democratic and that tend to extend and reshape current social divisions and inequalities. [When I use "democratic," I am pointing to some discussions in contemporary political philosophy that show how evanescent this term might be, but that still hold to an impulse towards more justice and equality (for me, Jacques Rancière or Bill Connolly are good referents of this kind of view).]
Finally, it is difficult for me to point to a difference, but I would say that we bring to our study different concerns that have to do with different "localities" and cultures, as I was saying in the last question. Lately, with the team at Flacso we've been reading more about changes in authorship, in the balance between the emotional and the rational in terms of learning, in our notions of a common culture, archive or memory (and memory is a cherished thing in Argentina, where it immediately refers to the last dictatorship and to a quest for human rights and justice), and also the need to maintain the differences between simulation and "real life" (I've been reading with great pleasure Sherry Turkle's discussions on this). I would say they are more politically- and ethically-oriented issues. These topics are not directly addressed by the MacArthur papers, but there are none the less many links to their approaches.
As you do so, you seem to be very aware of the existing visual culture of schools. For example, you told me about research which suggests students are sometimes overwhelmed by films they see in the classroom and do not always remember what they were supposed to teach. How can designers of educational games sidestep those problems?
In the research we are doing on the visual culture of schools, many students referred to their memories of remarkable activities organized by teachers using fiction films or documentaries, or asking them to bring pictures about social issues. Students liked them a lot, and valued them as great learning experiences. But when we asked about what they thought they had learned with those activities, they could not refer to any specific content. For example, a student said that her Biology teacher showed the class an image of the cell and that it caught her attention, and that she learned like in a fingers' snap, but she could not name any concept nor "title" for that image. The same happened in social studies or history lessons: students had vague memories about the activities, but all remembered the intensity of the feelings provoked by the viewing.
This is something that interests me a lot, and that I put along a series of readings I've been doing on visual studies, attention and learning. Historically, pedagogy has thought that there is an equivalence, a direct relationship, between seeing and knowing, but psychology and our own historical experience shows that that is not the case. We need to "know" something to be able to "see" it (I am aware that these are complex terms and there are deep philosophical debates around each one but let's keep it simple for the sake of the argument). What are children learning when they "see" something in the classroom? Are they learning what we want them to learn, or something completely different?
The examples mentioned above relate, for me, to something that you've referred to in previous works: the "wow" effect, the emotional impact of media on people. When using images in classrooms, we might get that "wow" feeling, as when the first student says, "wow, the teacher caught my attention," but from that we cannot deduce that she learnt the structure of the cell or anything in that neighborhood.
How to sidestep this problem is a difficult question. The first thing I would say is not to take learning for granted. We have to be aware that the intensity of stimuli and the excitement of the game might provoke them to learn something altogether different from what we wanted them to learn with these activities.
And the second thing I would say is that this doesn't imply that we have to become more explicit of our message or the "content" we want to convey. On the contrary, my reading of these examples is that form and content are divorced in some pedagogical activities, and that "forms" are compelling and complex while "content" is straightforward and unidimensional, and so young people's attention is caught by the more complex and interesting stimuli and do not attend to the content. So, I would say we should struggle to produce better materials that are more consistent in their forms and contents.
You also told me about research you have been doing about the image banks which teachers draw upon in thinking about the world and how these may differ from those which their students bring into their classes. Can you share some of this research with my readers?
Yes, of course. I wrote an essay on teachers' visual culture, based on the findings of an activity I've done in online courses with teachers. I ask them to post a powerful image of our culture. The idea of "powerful image" draws on visual studies and refers to images that impact us for any reason, that have a lasting effect not only personally but also socially.
In this activity, it struck me that most of the teachers chose shocking images that come from photojournalism: the Biafra child, Kevin Carter's Pullitzer picture of a little girl in a Sudanese village, anonymous pictures of children in famine, in war refuges, or hurt or killed by political violence. They endorse a "hyperrealism" that, while it aligns itself with a progressive rhetoric, might have troubling effects as a visual discourse on the social. Most pictures were of children, and children were almost always depicted among ruins. No "happy," meaning no optimistic, narrative was to be found in most pictures (and when it appeared, it was in the line of the Benetton-multiculturalism: black child with white child taking hands and smiling to each other). Also, it was surprising that the Argentinean teachers spoke a "Global visual Esperanto," as Nick Mirzoeff calls it: the images were from Albania, Africa, Palestina, New York, Central America, Brazil, and not many depicted Argentina's landscapes or events. The pictures are all serious, and engage in the performance of denunciation. There is almost no ironic image, nor images that refer to advertising or cultural industries. My guess is that, if the same question was posed to young people, the number of advertising images, and of images of their own production, would be much more significant than in the teachers' selections.
My interest in this essay is with global visual imaginaries, and the visual culture of teachers. There is much more I could say on this, but let's refer the reader to the essay that has been published in a book edited by the National Society for the Study of Education, whose title is Globalization and the Study of Education, and edited by Fazal Rizvi and Tom Popkewitz.
You have been involved in a number of games and learning initiatives. Can you describe some of the work you are doing and explain what kinds of pedagogical and design principles are informing this work?
With my research team at Flacso, we started doing educational documentaries in 2002. We produced eight 30-minutes videos that developed a program to address issues of discrimination and inclusiveness in middle and secondary schools. We tried to build complex and subtle plots, to present the stories always in a dignified way, and never construct people as passive victims. We were always thinking of how and when the teacher would be using these materials, so time constraints and also pedagogical problems of what to show and how to show it were present from the beginning (and we made pilot tests with teachers to make room for that).
But seen from today, I think that at the beginning we were more aware of the conceptual and political dimensions of our work than about the aesthetic aspects of it. And it was a great experience, because we learned a lot about the tensions between content and form. As soon as we started to work with teachers and students, we realized that there were many unexpected things in their reactions to our videos, and that they had to do with the context in which they were seen, with their prior experiences with these type of videos, and with our own pedagogy. And most of all we had to learn to work through and with the emotions elicited by the documentaries.
This drove us to media studies and also to visual studies, and this intersection is still very interesting to me. The question of which type of knowledge is produced by an image, as posed by the French historian Georges Didi-Huberman, remains a potent, even a burning issue, as he says. Sometimes images touch us at a sensitive level, without being able to put it into words, and yet they do produce important effects on us. Could these effects be called a learning or be considered as knowledge?
I am not interested in measuring it, but on understanding what is it that they do to us. Will it last? Will it be attached in our memory to some meanings? Will we, as the students I found in our recent research, just remember the intense emotion we felt without being able to conceptualize or rationalize anything about it? Maybe this is not a bad thing, but we should be aware of which kind of learning or effects some images produce on us.
We then moved to do an animation piece on global warming which was also very exciting, and since 2007 I've been engaged in a team run by Analía Segal, a colleague and friend of mine, that produces videogames. Analía had extensive experience on simulations and games in social studies, and some years ago she decided to experiment with new media, and I joined her. We wanted to explore the potentialities of videogames for learning: they can offer complex narratives, they use a visual language that is closer to young people's visual culture than the schools', they promote learning through immersion in a given situation and mobilize intuitive, bodily language that is scarcely mobilized by traditional schooling, among many other possibilities. The team includes people from different disciplines in the social sciences and young game designers who are key to the project. We know that educational materials are not magical solutions to anything, but believe that they can contribute to make classroom more interesting and more challenging. This might be a poor goal for an educational reformer but it is good enough for us as development team.
One of our principles was to produce materials that were not offered by the cultural industries, neither by their topics nor by their aesthetics. We did research on alternative groups that are working on serious games, and decided to focus on sustainable development and produced three or four games on this subject. The first one is called "Urgent, Message" and is about a messenger in the near future who has to deliver different things to different places, always considering time, cost, and environmental impact.
The second one is called "Villa Girondo" and is a multi-player game. We wanted to explore a different game structure. This one deals with the relocation of a village due to the planned construction of a water dam. Players are asked to assume different roles in the community and decide whether the village will be relocated or not. The tension between progress and sustainability is explored, as well as the centrality and complexity of citizens' involvement in environmental issues.
In the development of the videogames, we included a working group with teachers with whom we discuss and test the games at different stages. And we are doing research on the first developed prototypes to understand how they interact with the real dynamic of classrooms. The questions that interest us are both related to the design of the game and to the pedagogical skills needed to use it in classrooms. Which kind of interactions are promoted by the rules of the game? How important and effective are teachers' interventions? What kind of strategies do young people use when playing the game? Are there constraints by playing the game at school? Which reflections are opened up by the game? Which ones are picked up by the teachers and which ones are left aside, and why? These are some of the questions we are investigating in schools these days.
I was impressed by the distinctive look and feel of the games you shared with me. To what degree is the goal to create games which reflect the national culture of Argentina as opposed to following the "neutral" or "odorless" design practices that shape many commercial video games? Why might it be important for students in your country to see games which look and feel like the culture around them?
Well, I like your comment and take it as a compliment. As I said before there is a relation between form and content. We believe that it is important to provide students with different aesthetics, less standardized and more related to their daily life. But it doesn't mean that one has to close down aesthetic diversity. So while we don't want to follow mainstream games in their options, we do not support any kind of localism that tends to isolate cultural productions. On the other hand, this would be impossible as we are all visual subjects in a global culture.
We hope our games can be played by any child or young person who is interested in these topics. For example, the relocation of villages has been a common problem in Latin America. We include some excerpts from documentaries that give more information and context about real life situations. We believe it is important that schools pick up these debates and provide interesting and challenging opportunities to unfold the complexities involved. In that respect, videogames can be really helpful.
Inés Dussel graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in Educational Sciences and got her Ph.D. at the Dept of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Principal Researcher at Flacso/Argentina, a centre for research and graduate teaching in the social sciences, and Educational Director of Sangari Argentina. She's currently interested in the intersections between schooling, new media, and visual culture, and is doing research and producing materials for classroom teaching.
August 27, 2010
Games, New Media and Learning in Argentina: An Interview with Ines Dussel (Part Two)
Can you tell us something about the context of this debate in your country? For example, how much access to students have to new media technology outside of school? How much exposure do teachers as a class have to new media in the course of their everyday life?
I would say that most students have access to technology, although the frequency and intensity is heavily dependent on socio-economic backgrounds. The main divide is between urban and rural/semi-rural populations, because even in low-income groups in big cities there is a push towards having multi-functional cell phones that allow most of the operations one can do on the internet. Of course, the problem is the soaring costs of the broadband or the phone service, which are still terribly high in the region. In Portugal, and in some Brazilian cities, there are state policies being effected that subsidize broadband connections to low-income populations (5 euros per month or less). This might be a really democratic move in the near future in most of Latin American countries, but we are not there yet. Anyway, I was surprised to read some recent educational research that shows that almost 50% of the children from low-income families report to have Internet connections at home. This means it is spreading quickly.
But the divide, as many people are arguing, is moving from access to use. In a research we are currently doing at FLACSO on schools and visual culture, we find a clear distinction between the type of uses young people from middle and upper classes are doing, and the ones done by young people who come from low-income families, and especially those in semi-rural areas. The first ones are making sophisticated videos, have large collections of images and music, and produce multimedia reports for schools, while the latter make basic powerpoints and have smaller collections of pictures and music, generally with less reflection on what it is, and what for, they are collecting. As always, there are exceptions, but this seems to be the trend. That is why I believe schools could be very important in providing a wide range of experiences that enrich young people's engagement with the media.
Teachers, on the other hand, do not have a special relationship to new media as a class, that is, because they are teachers. Quite the contrary: pre-service training has started to include it as a curricular content only in the last two years, and it is still a marginal trend, though increasingly important in some groups (who can be considered as "early adaptors," as in the work you are doing in the New Media Literacy project). But most of the times, one can see young teachers in low-income schools who do not have an email account or don't even know about the possibilities that new media offer. I ask myself how it is that nobody in their training, which did not happen in the 1980s but only three or five years ago, told them that having an email account and navigating the internet is important not only for them as professionals who are concerned with knowledge or as citizens of this world, but also for them as teachers in their relationship and their cultural offer to their students.
I think that this has to do with some prejudice on the part of the teacher training institutions that assume that new media is kind of a "sumptuous consumption" for low-income populations who are not getting the basics (decent employment, food, electricity or water) and so that it should not be included as a basic content. What they are overlooking is that today access and use of new media is part of the "basics," of being a member of the local or global community, of getting to be informed and participate in a public culture, even of getting a job.
And children and young people know this better than the training institutions, which are falling behind. In our research, we found multiple examples of young people from low-income families whose relatively-poor use of IT is still pivotal for themselves and their parents in doing budgets for contract works, making a website for home repairs or other informal jobs, or connecting to family in other provinces or neighbouring countries. These uses might not be as sophisticated as others, but are none the less very effective and important in helping them get better material and emotional conditions.
Most teachers do not use new media in these ways, nor do they recognize that their students are doing these kind of things with the computers. The kind of activity they privilege in classrooms, when they do anything, is that of seeking information (all they see in the internet is a gigantic library), and sometimes asking their students to write a report, preferably text-only, or produce a powerpoint with some images, but generally without further reflection on the combination of text, sound, special effects or rhythm that is implied in multimodal texts, as Gunther Kress and many others have emphasized.
So, as research notes in other countries, in Argentina the uses promoted by schools are poor when compared to the actual things young people are doing at homes or with their friends in cybercafés. It is slightly different in middle- and upper-classes, but overall I would say there is still a small proportion of schools that are promoting richer, innovative uses of new media.
How has new media been perceived by the Argentinian public? Is it still read mostly as a threat or is there an awareness of the opportunities it represents?
Well, part of the answer refers to what I said before. For some people, those in the middle classes, new media are a luxury that comes after some basic issues have been guaranteed for the society as a whole. And while this argument is sensible (you cannot think about the internet if you're not eating or have no electricity), it is not true that one thing can be solved without the other. As the examples mentioned above show, low income families use the internet to improve their work opportunities and to enrich their support networks in multiple respects. It is part of having a wider horizon and range of possibilities.
On the other hand, the public debate is still organized around moral terms which are dichotomic, and I would say that they tend to go for the pessimistic side of the dichotomy. Talks of threat, safety, danger, not only for the children but also for the Spanish language (fear of Anglo-influence) or for "the world as we know it," are visible in most of the media coverage on new media. Teachers tend to endorse this view, and complain about the supposed empoverishment of writing and oral skills that new media are causing in young people (with the support of traditional agencies like the National Academy of Letters, who has produced a report on this, with doubtful empirical evidence but with lots of media coverage).
But there are some perspectives that are trying to build a more balanced approach, which value the opportunities while they point to the challenges the new media are posing to us. My own concern has been to produce something in that line. I believe that a deeper discussion is needed that addresses the profound changes brought about by new media, part of which I signaled when talking about the 1-to-1 strategy. I particularly like Bernard Stiegler's discussion in The YouTube Reader on the breakdown of the synchronized access to a flux of programmed texts such as the ones provided by broadcast TV, and the emergence of a cardinal access that can be produced and controlled by the user. I think that there are many issues to be debated around the possibility of a common, public culture that goes beyond what each ones of us chooses to look at, consume, produce in our individual screens and in our own time or pace; and that is why I also do not want to give up on the presence of a common screen in the classroom, be it the blackboard, the smart board, or any other common point of attention. In that respect, I also align myself with the comments done by you, Mimi Ito, and many others, on the reports done through the MacArthur Foundation initiative, that posit the discussion of new media in the light of the production of a public culture.
I got a sense from some of the questions I was asked that new media is understood through some of the same paradigms that were applied to broadcast media -- concerns that it exposes Latin Americans to cultural imperialism from Hollywood and elsewhere. How big a concern do you think this is for parents and educators?
I believe that anti-Americanism is more prevalent among progressive intellectuals (including educators) than among the general public, but I do not know of any serious study on this so I will speculate in the next paragraphs. There might be a reemergence of a certain nationalism or LatinAmericanism in the last decade, after the 2001 crisis which put the region in the verge of a collapse, and also backed by the center-left governments in the region that have stressed a rhetoric of autonomy and self-determination for Latin Americans. And of course Bush's government has done lots to increase the anti-imperialist rhetoric. I know that the rates of disapproval of Bush in Argentina were among the highest in Latin America, and that people welcomed Obama's election as a hope of a new external policy in the US.
But these are the only data I recall to make a statement about the public's relation to the US, and I don't think this translates into a relationship to broadcast media or anti-Hollywood: blockbusters are the same ones than in the US, with the exception of some Argentinean films. But even speaking of "Argentinean films" is ambivalent: the best Argentinean filmmaker today is Juan José Campanella, whose movie El secreto de sus ojos(The Secret in Their Eyes) won the Oscar for foreign films in 2010. Campanella works in LA and has directed some episodes of House, M.D. and other major TV series in the US. So whether his narrative style and aesthetics is anti-Hollywood remains quite debatable... I don't think he even considers that a problem or a question that deserves attention.
Anyway, in some respects, your perception is right in terms that anti-imperialism is a significant force in terms of how educators react to new media (I'm less sure about parents). Many teachers feel that they have to defend the nation and the Spanish language against any kind of imperialism, and that they have to do it in the schools, through their teaching. I would say that, as a general rule, teachers in Latin America are more politicized than in the US, and think of themselves as constructors of the nation, as producers of a new type of citizen.
I did my Ph.D. in the US, at UW-Madison, and I was surprised when teachers said that their primary task was to develop the full potential of the individual child and spoke almost exclusively in psychological terms. You don't see that kind of talk in Argentina or in most Latin American countries. Even the less politicized teachers make reference to the nation, to the society, to social functions and ideals. They might do it in a conservative way, but they still feel part of a social mission, of a political project.
But the question you raised takes me in another direction, that is how the global and the local are negotiating in and through new media. Being an otaku in New York or in a small village of Salta, Argentina, is similar and different, in ways that we need to analyze much more carefully than simply celebrating cosmopolitanism and global culture, or rejecting it by refuging ourselves in an anti-Hollywood or anti-US culture position. Watching a TV series like 24 in the US might reaffirm a certain power narrative about geopolitics and the imperial domination, but when seen in Latin America it might say quite the opposite.
I like very much the work done by Carlos Monsiváis, a wonderful Mexican cultural critic who just passed away, on the dispositions and sensitivities of the audience in our region -which is extremely diverse, of course. He said that, contrary to Hollywood's happy ending movies where the cowboy saves the girl, it is very likely that in Latin American melodramas the girl dies right before her hero comes to her rescue. For him, melodrama was a "structure of understanding," a "unifying device for experience" that was built into politics, religion, and social bonds. This structure (which he thought of as something loose, not rigid) comes from the verbal blocks of 19th century novels, the filmic melodrama, or TV's telenovelas.
So, following his lead, I would say that for most Latin American viewers there is not an epic of triumph when seeing these TV series, but we put them along or inside a narrative that is sadder, more nostalgic, definitely not victorious (may be it derives in identifications with the bad guys, which is extremely dangerous). Images and audiovisual texts might be the same, but the locality of the viewing makes a great difference in understanding the narratives in which they are inscribed, and the meaning which we produce. So yes, going back to your question, I would say that locality plays a role in new media, and the structures of understanding still seem more local than global.
Inés Dussel graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in Educational Sciences and got her Ph.D. at the Dept of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Principal Researcher at Flacso/Argentina, a centre for research and graduate teaching in the social sciences, and Educational Director of Sangari Argentina. She's currently interested in the intersections between schooling, new media, and visual culture, and is doing research and producing materials for classroom teaching.
August 25, 2010
Games, New Media and Learning in Argentina: An Interview with Inés Dussel
Earlier this summer, I shared with you some of my experiences in Buenos Aires where I was a speaker at the VI For Latinoamericano de Educacion, hosted by the Fundacion Santilla, an event attended by education ministers and educational researchers/policy makers from many of the Latin American countries.
My host for the event was educator and public intellectual Inés Dussel who is one of the co-authors with Luis Alberto Quevedo of a new white paper exploring the impact of new media on education in Latin America, Educacion y nuevas technologias: los desafios pedagogicos ante el mundo digital. I was deeply impressed by Dussel and her colleagues: she is highly engaged with the work we've been doing through the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, as well as the debates taking place in South America around these same topics. I wanted to be able to share more of her perspectives with English-language researchers and educators in hopes of brokering more conversations between educators in the North and the South who are confronting the ways that rapid media change is reshaping the lives and interests of their students.
While I was in Argentina, you released a significant report which sought to explore the impact of new media on educational practices in Latin America. What were your major goals for this project?
The report was commissioned by the Organization of IberoAmerican States (OEI) and the Foundation Santillana, which is affiliated to a major publishing house in the Spanish-speaking world. They organize annual conferences that bring together Ministers of Education from throughout the Southern Cone, educators, and media people. It is an important venue for public policy and debate in education.
The 2010 Forum, on which you were the guest speaker, was devoted to the pedagogical challenges of IT technologies in the region. Luis Alberto Quevedo and myself were asked to write the discussion paper, which actually turned into a 60+-pages report. Both Luis Alberto and myself have been working on these issues for a number of years, and run together an online course on education, visual culture and media designed primarily for educators. Above all, we share an active engagement with public debate in and around media, both in public and commercial media, although Luis Alberto has a more sociological take on this and I bring a pedagogical concern with what people learn from their experiences with the media.
Our goal with the report was to provide a broad frame that helps organize a discussion around the different alternatives that are being explored either by public policies or by the schools themselves in the introduction of IT. We talk about four major strategies: a) organizing computer labs in schools, b) getting one laptop to every child (1-to-1) either by joining the OLPC initiative or through major commercial firms, c) having portable carriages with laptops for planned, alternate usage in classrooms, and d) introducing electronic boards in each classroom. Each strategy has different assumptions about the extent to which IT should permeate the daily life of schools and of course imply different costs and mobilization of resources.
In the report, we were also interested in taking a look at the production of content, especially the work done by teachers with the use of blogs or video production for educational purposes, and by the Argentinean Ministry of Education, which has done an interesting TV series for rural schools called Horizontes (Horizons) whose impact on school practices we want to investigate. These schools usually have only one teacher with multi-grade classrooms, so IT technologies can be a great help in supporting teachers who usually exhaust themselves in their daily work.
We could only get a glimpse at content issues and DIY media production in the report but it seems promising, and we are currently doing research to get a better understanding of what is going on. And finally, we made a review on the changes on teacher training, looking in particular at changes in curricular contents, and discussing whether there are new teaching figures appearing in the landscape of schools (IT specialists or audiovidual assistants, among others). So, as you can see, the scope was broad and it calls for more research and more writing, which is the step in which we are currently engaged.
Which models have gotten the greatest traction in Latin America and why?
So far, the most extended strategy in the region is to equip computer labs, but research shows that, while it was helpful in the 1990s to get at least some teachers interested in IT, today it tends to confine the novelty to a marginal place in the curriculum and does not contribute to a deeper discussion on the big changes brought about by digital culture in the production and circulation of knowledge in our societies. Also, it has been noted that computer labs usually get trapped in the micro-politics of schools, with power games around who's got the key or privileged access to the lab (the same can be said about any innovation in schools, of course, but the concentration of computers in one space contributes to a more centralized struggle around access and control).
There is also a particular Argentinean context that has to do with the scarcity of resources: the first reaction of school principals and teachers when they get computers or even books is to lock them off so that they are not lost or ruined by usage. This sounds absurd, but it has to do with an entrenched learning that in schools you don't get good things too many often, so you better preserve them, even though this might mean not using them at all...
So, as we all know but tend to forget, innovations and new technologies in schools have to negotiate with multiple levels of adaptation and with different school dynamics that produce unexpected effects. Sometimes they are able to mobilize creative, wonderful energies and forces in the schools, and sometimes these effects are undesirable. When involved in the innovations, we tend to forget about the latter.
The second alternative, which is actually becoming the most common nowadays, is the 1-to-1 strategy of equipping every child with a netbook. In Uruguay the Plan Ceibal, effective since 2007 and based on OLPC, has been very successful in doing that with all elementary school children in public schools (around 320,000 students, ages 6 to 11). Uruguay is a relatively small country, with a flat land, and is one of the most socially egalitarian in the region, so in many respects it has not gone through the challenges of connectivity that other countries are undergoing right now, especially when there are high mountains with blind spots for telecommunication, lots of isolated villages, or heavily marginalized groups with a predictable feeling of resentment towards State policies (which might derive in high levels of theft or destruction of equipment), challenges that countries such as Argentina, Chile, or Perú are facing. Argentina's government has recently started a program called ConectarIgualdad (ConnectEquality) that will provide 3,000,000 secondary school students in public schools with netbooks, manufactured by commercial firms. It is probably the largest single investment in the region, and we are all eager to see how it will work.
The third and fourth alternatives (portable carriages with laptops and smart boards) are being implemented in small scale, and more research is needed to understand their effects. Both seem interesting ways of making a smoother transition into the digital culture than the 1-to-1 strategy, because they are closer to the way in which classrooms are organized today. But apparently the 1-to-1 option is the route that the educational systems are taking in our region. It might be interesting, though, to keep these other possibilities in mind, as we don't know yet how effectively the 1-to-1 strategy is going to work, and also because we don't think this should be an "either/or" option: school systems are large conglommerates of people and institutions and they should be able to incorporate new media through many different strategies that might be useful for different purposes.
What are the goals of Latin American governments in seeking to expand access to new media?
Our reading of initiatives like the 1-to-1 option is that they are great strategies for digital inclusion, and the main effects are not only to be seen on children's lives but on their families'. In Uruguay and Argentina, the fact that the netbooks are going to public school children means that they are helping to bridge the digital gap in terms of access (middle and upper classes have fled to private schools some decades ago).
There's an ad from the Plan Ceibal in Uruguay that is rich in images about the social progress that rural children will make with their laptops. The song is performed by Jorge Drexler (Oscar winner with the film The Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guevara's youthful journey across South America) and says something like this: "I want to be a sailor/ on the Austral sky/ without getting away from my haven/ under the shadow of my ceibal" (which is a common tree in the pampas). The symbolic aspect of having an opportunity for growth and development without being forced to migrate to a big city or to a foreign country is something that is really strong in the Latin American context, and points to a transformation in the economy and the politics of our societies. I want to stress the complexity of the symbolism that is being mobilized: it is conceived as part of the rights of every citizen; it also has overtones of deep quests for social justice in Latin America and it implies an affirmation of local development not in a nostalgic mood but with hope for the future. This is a major change, and, from my point of view, quite an interesting and promising one.
Surrounding these initiatives there is, however, a significant lack of discussion about what it will mean for schools and classrooms to have children connected to individual screens, presumably moving at their own pace in a rich environment with multiple alternatives and pathways to be followed. This sounds fantastic on one level, but it is also terrifying for most teachers who have no clue about how to handle these new situations.
A person who is doing research in Uruguay told me some days ago (two or more years after they started) about the kind of problems teachers get when some students are not able to connect, which sometimes can happen to almost 50% of the class. The netbooks might have software or hardware problems, and at any rate teachers are not prepared to deal with them and do not have a technical aid at hand. Thus, the classroom sequence they prepared most likely starts to sink. When you encounter this kind of problems, you cannot simply tell the students with failing equipment to shut up and let other children work (in fact you can, but this won't make things any better!). There are things to be done in these situations, but what I mean is that teachers should have a repertoire of alternatives that they don't have yet.
The training they are receiving is on software and, as far as I know, there is no organized training or discussion about the pedagogical situations they are facing. This is something that could be dealt with if there were more concerns about pedagogical issues and about the skills and practices that are needed to implement these changes.
There is also not much reflection on the demand for new content and sequences for teaching that this change will place on teachers and school administrators, and unfortunately there has been no significant investment so far to put up to this challenge. In educational journals and in mainstream media there are lots of apologetic talks on the "School 2.0," most of the times in de-politicized terms, that propose an ideal of a direct (un-mediated) access to information and knowledge and that assume the model of the business websites for participation. In this view, with the Internet 2.0 children will (finally!) be free from the domination of the teacher and the institution of schooling, and the rhetoric promises that, instead of having ill-trained teachers, young people will be able to access any site and get all the expert advice that they want from top scientists and thinkers.
The mainstream rhetoric is no different, at least from what I've read, from what you hear in the U.S. or in Europe. I have many problems with these arguments, among them, the derogatory view they have of actual schools and teachers and the uncritical privileging of expert knowledge, but probably the largest difference lies in the assumption that there is an access to knowledge that is un-mediated by existing social knowledge or institutions.
Let me give just one example of this difference, referred to the type of production children and young people do with digital media. As Sonia Livingstone, Mimi Ito and Julian Sefton-Green have shown in their work, tyoung people's uses of digital technologies are not necessarily creative, but tend to be shaped by their own culturally-mediated practices with existing media. For instance, some years ago the Ministry of Education developed an interesting program on short-film making with digital media (camcorders, simple editing programs, a notebook) in low-income schools in the northern provinces of Argentina -the ones with the highest levels of exclusion and poverty, and lower performance rates in schools. The program was led by a great team that included popular educators and young filmmakers (interestingly, Argentinean film industry is booming and the film schools are producing many graduates who have trouble finding a job, so teaching is actually an option for many of them, and while this is bad for the young graduates, this is a great opportunity for schools to involve people from the creative industries).
During its first year, the program was very open about the kind of topics and styles that students could use, and the short films that young people produced were all in the line of TV reality shows, with topics such as drug addiction, juvenile crime, teenage pregnancy, etc. The aesthetics was mimicking that of the TV shows such as Cops or alike. Most of these young people lived in small villages with different problems than the ones narrated by these sensationalist shows, but the students, when left on their own, had a hard time imagining other narratives or alternative aesthetics than the ones they learned from the TV shows (Julian Sefton-Green and David Buckingham's work in the UK show the same thing). So, after discussing this development, the second year of the program the organizers decided to ask the students to produce short films based on their dreams and with a surrealistic approach. The range of genres and of topics was much more interesting this second time, when actually the framing was more clearly defined in a top-down manner.
For me, this example speaks about the inescapable connections between the kind of productions and uses that young people do with new media and the cultural industries. When I say this, I do not intend to demonize cultural industries; but being naïve about the kind of constraints that are at play is no good either. I like very much Mimi Ito's Engineering Play, because it shows all the nuances of media production in the case of videogames, the different genres, but also all the range of practices in media use or consumption by young people. What I want to stress is that the most likely outcome of this "non-mediated" (which in fact means non-mediated by schools or teachers) access will be in fact mediated by young people's experience with the media outside schools, which is far from being pure or uncontaminated by social class, cultural habitus, etc..
Inés Dussel graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in Educational Sciences and got her Ph.D. at the Dept of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a Principal Researcher at Flacso/Argentina, a centre for research and graduate teaching in the social sciences, and Educational Director of Sangari Argentina. She's currently interested in the intersections between schooling, new media, and visual culture, and is doing research and producing materials for classroom teaching.
August 6, 2010
Ethics and Game Design: A Conversation (Part Two)
One goal of the book is to help identify design principles that encourage game designers and players to reflect more deeply on their ethical choices. What would a designer learn from studying the contents of this book?
COLLEEN: You ask the question I'm super invested in and excited about! On one hand, I think we have to be careful about what we mean by ethical choices in the context of designing and playing. Both design and play are inherently transgressive (if they are any good). They push against the boundaries of rules and norms to create new experiences. At least, this is what many of us (designers and players) aspire to. I think what's really exciting about the collection of essays in the book is how each author defines ethics on their own terms, but also in complementary ways. I think the book gives designers the freedom to consider ethics not just as a property of games (to shoot or not to shoot?), but as an active engagement with players, context, and culture. Considering ethical choices as a way of thinking about game design and where and how games take form expands the boundaries of what we think about when we consider a game. The playing field extends beyond the game itself to the social context and the rhetorical perspectives (intentional or otherwise) of its creators (to borrow from Ian Bogost's model of persuasive games).
Do ethical concerns emerge differently in single-player and multi-player games? If so, how are the social dimensions of games being harnessed to encourage greater ethical reflection?
MIGUEL: Even though much of my work is focused on single-player games (as I understand them being the singularity that allows us a deeper understanding of games as ethical systems), I think the right answer to this questions is to say that we, scholars and sometimes developers, don't often think about ethics and multiplayer, and how to harness the social for creating this kind of meaningful play. I mean, the social is always moral (and political), so I guess we are taking it for granted, and focusing much more on this solitary experience (clearly influenced by other media that some could understand operate this way, even though careful reading of say Brecht shows that even epic theatre understood the audience as a social body, even though the experience of the play was individual - but I digress). In other words: we tend to forget multiplayer, and social dynamics, when thinking about the design of ethical gameplay, and we focus too much on either single player, or how the rules/mechanics of a system will affect a single player, even in a multiplayer game.
I think there is much work to be done regarding multiplayer ethical gameplay design. I feel that games like Diplomacy, or Defcon, or even RPGs (specially the swedish school of "jeepen games") have understood how to design particular multiplayer mechanics that generate ethical gameplay. Of course, backstabbing is one: but how does it work? Does it always generate ethical gameplay? How about harnessing empathy, solidarity, other values that are at play in multiplayer contexts? This question you're asking points us, I think, in the right direction: how to include the social, that which cannot be proceduralized, into the design of ethical gameplay?
My answer? By understanding how does a game system operate when creating ethical experiences (high abstract order), and then trying to think about mechanics that translate that into player-to-player behavior. I think the "Fragile Alliance" multiplayer mode in Kane and Lynch does this very well, for example: being a traitor is fun, but it's also a moral decision, one that is recognized so by both the game system and the game players, both reacting to a particular ethical choice.
COLLEEN: Adding another real person into the equation certainly changes the game. Interacting with unpredictable real people demands dynamic ethical choice-making from the start. You can't really grief an NPC! I think, however, it's more difficult to for designers to harness ethical choice-making in these social situations. In MMORPGs to grief or not to grief is really a player choice - like bluffing in human-human poker - these are not "designed" ethical choice moments. They are emergent aspects of play which designers don't always anticipate. This unpredictability is the magic of games and I think it's also where ethical play is more complicated and interesting. The complexity of emergent play - particularly in social play - can't always be harnessed, but it can be sought after. I think the flip-side to this fairly optimistic view of social and ethical dimensions is where we see social games designed around behaviorist concepts to
generate responses like addictive play, social coercion, and perhaps the worst evil of all, spam. I think there are definitely some ethics to consider here. Do we need a game design code of ethics?
Several of the writers note that all games are in some sense "ethical systems." Yet, certain games recur across many of the essays, suggesting that there may already be a canon of "ethical" games within this new field. What are these games doing which makes them such rich examples for research?
MIGUEL: Well, what the games I tend to analyze do right is to think about ethical gameplay beyond the basic consequentialist dilemma posing in a black-and-white moral universe. When we think about ethical gameplay, we immediately fall prey of the binary dilemmas, of the clashes between right or wrong, or between greater and lesser evils. Which I think it's often both too ethically coarse and a waste of time. Games can contribute to fostering our moral values, but they can only do so inasmuch as they first address us, players, as moral beings, then challenging our values and forcing us to reflect about our very notion of morality.
Binary dilemmas just help us corroborate our values - we don't need to challenge them, we act by them. The canon of "good" ethical games presents us with challenges beyond choices, a way in which we can use play to learn, develop and evaluate our own morality, both as players and as citizens. The games I find the most interesting are those in
which either there are no choices (Shadow of the Colossus) or the choices have effects I cannot easily predict by trying to understand the algorithms behind the game, therefore effectively making me develop ethical, and not instrumental strategies (Fallout 3).
KAREN: There are quite a few games that were mentioned regularly throughout the book collection and across multiple authors--games that could be considered part of a growing canon. These were typically games that attempted to include some type of ethical components or questions, or game play that ascribed some type of morality points to how you behave in the game. Some of these games, such as Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, and Fallout 3, incorporated a system (which varied from being transparent to opaque), where depending on your choices (e.g., actions in the game, or your dialogue selections), your avatar would be placed on a scale that was related to his or her ever-changing honor, ethics or morality. As a result, different options or interactions would open up due to your avatar's status on this scale. Other games did not use an ethical lever as part of describing your avatar, but offered an ethical choice that had certain direct outcomes, such as in Bioshock I/II. There are also some games that bring up specific ethical issues or concerns through their game content, narrative or other mechanics, such as Super Columbine
Massacre RPG or the Grand Theft Auto series. Thus, many of the authors in this collection analyzed the extent to which these games truly support ethical thinking, and provide the ability to experiment with one's own ethics and values, as well as which types of principles might better support this. I am personally interested in the moments in games when players have difficulty deciding what is right or appropriate to do, and how they think through those decisions.
On the other hand, I believe that all games (and any type of artistic expression) to some extent embody and express values--from everything through their modes of production and distribution, their mechanics and rules, to their cultural touch points and the ways subcultures form around them. For example, how a game is staffed or advertised may
have ethical implications, and there are values embedded in the way a particular game's world is designed. Again, while many games mentioned in the books more directly present ethical content and mechanics around ethics, potentially any game could be a site of interest because of the ways they were used, written about, or played with other people. For example, what is the function of using cheat codes in games?; how do players negotiate with each other in a given game, particularly ones that require social interaction?; and what are the rules around play? Any game can be a beneficial site for exploring ethical issues.
Interestingly, I've noticed that in the past few years, many games, particularly RPGs, have had more direct ethical components and have been quite popular. I believe this may be because games enable you to experience a new perspective--a new role--and one's ethical identity is an important part of this perspective. Being able to access diverse
ethical perspectives is perhaps even necessary for fully appreciating humanity. Through play, we are able to access new ways to experience the world, understand humankind, reflect on our identities, our destinies, our pasts and our mysteries. We may never fully answer these questions, but hopefully games can help us approach them.
Other essays describe so-called "serious" or "educational" games which are created specifically to foster ethical reflection. What are these games doing that's different from those already on the market?
COLLEEN: I'm not sure these games are doing anything different on a formal level, but they are certainly coming out of different development contexts from AAA titles, or "mainstream" videogames. Many of the games referenced in the book are the result of a different economic model: research funding and university/not-for-profit labs. In the last 5-10 years some exciting models have taken form in New York (I have heard it referred to as "The New York School") where there's lots of cross-pollination between academia and industry, enabling lots of low-risk experimentation and new funding possibilities/models. Out there in Cali you guys have some very exciting things happening as well, particularly at your institution, Henry! I think in order to build games that take risks with content and gameplay, there needs to be these kinds of alternative spaces and collaborations to experiment and learn.
The market is definitely changing and diversifying as well. Over the last month console sales dropped and mobile game sales skyrocketed. More distribution platforms for all kinds of games will definitely also help "serious" and "educational" games reach wider audiences, and exist across different platforms and in different contexts.
Games encourage what James Paul Gee describes as "projective identification." How is this concept linked to notions of "empathy"? What role does "empathy" play in fostering ethical reflection through play?
MIGUEL: As a Virtue Ethicist, I would argue that empathy is one of the core virtues that needs to be fostered in order to achieve the good life. However, in games, empathy presents itself in a different way. Let me start with a question - what or who do we feel empathy for in games? In the case of multiplayer games, the answer is easy: other players. Therefore, any game that includes some kind of systemic reward for behaviors that are empathetic will foster that value, and hence maybe not provoke ethical reflection, but have an ethical outcome.
In single player games, though, what is the object of empathy? AI researchers aspire to create empathy for artificial agents, but I am not certain we are there yet. We do feel empathy though for characters and locations, that is, not for the way a particular agent behaves, but for the role a particular agent plays in the game narrative or fiction. So using this instinctive care for the plot (if you wish to call it so - there is no story requirement, and open-world games also foster care for the place), developers can create engaging ethical
experiences based on one of the values that are cardinal to fulfilling the good life. Play, then, becomes valuable.
COLLEEN: I love how you connect empathy to Gee's concept, because in many ways I think Gee has developed a more nuanced - and realistic - model for empathy in games. The role of empathy is key to ethical thinking, since ethical possibilities are always in flux and specific to the situation and people/entities involved. Gee's concept of projective identification goes beyond just trying to understand another person through reflection or thought, it's a verb - learning how to think like someone else by playing them - and by practicing them. That said, I think bridging these experiences between the game and the real world is where the reflection is potentially more potent. The game is a practice space, but it is inherently limited. In many cases, players are not just identifying with the roles they are playing, they are trying to understand what the game - or the game's designers - will reward and they'll play accordingly. In "trw" (the real world) there
are many more possibilities and while stuff learned in the game can be tried out, it will likely produce very different results.
KAREN: This question is of particular interest to me, as I am currently
writing my dissertation on the relationship among play, empathy and ethical thinking! It was also an integral part of the game I co-designed, called Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony? I outlined the design process for this game in one of the chapters in the book, called, "Using Mission U.S. For Crown or Colony? to Develop Historical Empathy and Nurture Ethical Thinking." Mission U.S. is developed by Channel 13/WNET, Electric Funstuff, historians from CUNY and researchers from EDC. It is an adventure game that teaches historical thinking skills to Middle School students. The game, which centers around the Revolutionary War and Boston Massacre, invites the player to explore 1770 Boston as printer's apprentice, Nat. We argue that through playing the game, the player and avatar form a new avatar-self relationship that embodies both the social conventions of 1770 Boston and the modern-day knowledge of the player. In a sense, we can argue, the player projects his or her identity onto this avatar, thereby
strengthening the ability to see through the eyes of Nat, and empathizing with Nat's 1770 context.
So, although I'm still thinking through this complicated question, my hypothesis (and gut reaction) is that empathy plays a strong role in fostering ethical reflection and reasoning (in games and outside games), because it enables a person to take on a new role, project
one's self into that role, and to perceive the world through those new eyes and from within a new ethical system. Similarly, empathizing with another person in any context allows one to think through their perspective, and start to consider other's points of view, which is
helpful when deciding what is right and wrong in a given situation. In the practice of argumentation, for example, it's one thing to tell your side, but it's a stronger argument if you know what the other side is thinking, and how to incorporate that into your thesis. People are really good at stating their opinion, but not as good as considering other's opinions and building an argument that predicts and addresses contrary opinions. Yet, as citizens in a democracy, it is absolutely necessary to be able to empathize with others so we can judge ethical issues more holistically, argue our opinions more substantially, and decide the best solution to complex issues. From my experience with Mission U.S. and beyond, I think that games have the potential for helping support "projective identification" and empathy,which in turn can help people become better ethical thinkers--and more
engaged citizens.
Karen, the American Revolution was the subject of both your thesis project at MIT and your new initiative, described in the book. What lessons did you learn from your student work that has informed your new project? Why do you think the American Revolution is especially rich as a context for exploring the kinds of historical questioning that have been at the center of these projects?
KAREN:Yes! How lucky was I to work on two interesting history-focused
projects?! Working on my MIT Comparative Media Studies masters thesis project, Reliving the Revolution, was definitely a strong impetus for developing this book collection. It also helped me to shape the game design for Mission U.S, a game that teaches kids historical and ethical thinking skills. Reliving the Revolution is a location-based GPS-enabled game that lets players to step into the shoes of historic figures involved in the Battle of Lexington, and relive the events leading up to and after the battle, so they can figure out together who fired the first shot. To do this, the players explore present-day real-world Lexington, MA, and also interact with virtual historic figures and objects accessed through a mobile device. The purpose of my project was, in part, to help students start to realize that historic moments are interpretable, and that there were many perspectives on what happened during this specific moment. Likewise, I believe all moments--both past, present, and future--are interpretable. I believe that being able to critically analyze these moments, and consider other's perspectives, helps us be better at deciding what is right or wrong in a given context.
History is a great way to practice interpretation, analysis, multiple perspectives and empathy--all important components of understanding complex social and ethical issues. Some may balk, but historical thinking and ethical thinking are, to me, not very different. History just adds another dimension to a moment--time--which affects how you
analyze a particular context. To be a good historian, you need to embody a historical time period, and its unique values, morals and norms. I would argue that historians could (and do) readily apply their skills to current and future moments. When playtesting Reliving the Revolution with Middle School students, I was pleased to see how
naturally the students translated their skills to thinking about current events, and wondering how, for example, the War in Iraq would be written about differently in textbooks there versus here.
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to apply my experience to a new game, Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony, which was developed as part of a Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant, and as I mentioned earlier, designed by Channel 13/WNET, Electric Funstuff, historians at CUNY, and EDC. The climax of Mission U.S. is the Boston Massacre, which the player, in the role of a printer's apprentice named Nat,
experiences first-hand. Yet instead of showing one version of the event, we built the game so that each student in a class could potentially see totally different versions of what happened. To do this, we created eight different vignettes about the Massacre, some
that displayed the Loyalist/British take on what happened, and some that leaned more to the Patriot perspective. The choice of vignettes that are presented are randomized for each player. After playing the Boston Massacre module of the game, the students then have the opportunity to discuss with their peers why there were multiple interpretations and perspectives on the event. Later, they also have the ability in the game to participate in a deposition where they could tell an officer what they think happened at the event--their testimony even has consequences on their game play. I know it sounds
crazy, but even just the idea that there can be other points of view on the past--and that kids can be active arbiters of historic moments--is an epiphany for many young students. Most students just get fed history facts from a textbook! But being critical thinkers of past
and present moments is necessary for developing engaged citizens in a democracy and a globally interconnected world. No one opinion or interpretation is enough, so we all need to be responsible for considering many points of view and appropriately expressing our own.
I hope this collection will inspire everyone to find ways--perhaps through games and play--to teach these important skills to young people (and adults, too!).
Colleen Macklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and Director of PETLab (Prototyping Evaluation, Teaching and Learning lab), a lab focused on developing new games, simulations, and play experiences for experimental learning and social issues. Projects range from a curriculum in game design for the Boys and Girls Club, a card game for the Red Cross Climate Centre, and big games such as Re:Activism and the sport Budgetball. In addition to work in social games and interactive media, her research focuses on the social aspects of the design and prototyping process. In this vein, she is working with the Social Science Research Council on a prototyping approach to creating innovative mobile learning spaces with youth, public schools and cultural institutions, with funding through the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Member of the game design collectives Local No. 12 (see backchattergame.com) and The Leisure Society. India China Institute Fellow (2006-2007). Interactive work shown at Come Out and Play, SoundLab, The Whitney Museum for American Art and Creative Time. BFA, Media Arts Pratt Institute, graduate studies in Computer Science, CUNY and International Affairs, The New School.
Miguel Sicart is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he teaches game design. He received his Ph.D. in game studies 2006; taking a multidisciplinary approach to ethics and computer games, he studied issues of game design, violence and videogames and the role of age-regulation codes. His book, The Ethics of Computer Games, which is based on his doctoral work, was published by MIT Press in the spring of 2009. He is currently working on developing a design framework for implementing ethical gameplay in digital games.
Karen Schrier is a doctoral student at Columbia University, where she is finishing her dissertation on ethics and games. She also currently works full-time as the Director of Interactive Media at ESI Design, an experience design firm in New York City. Her first co-edited book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, was published last March by IGI Global; the next book in the collection will be published in early 2011. Previously, she worked as a portfolio manager and executive producer at Scholastic, where she spearheaded digital initiatives for the Corporate and International divisions. She has also worked at Nickelodeon, BrainPOP and Barnes & Noble's SparkNotes. Karen was the Games Program co-chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in 2008 and 2009, currently serves on the advisory boards of the Computer Game Education Review (CGER), and is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School. Karen has spoken on games and learning at numerous conferences, including GDC, SIGGRAPH, AERA, Games for Change, NECC, and SITE. She also helped develop numerous games and digital properties, such as Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony?; Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, and Scholastic.com; and Nickelodeon's ParentsConnect. Her digital and non-digital games have been featured in festivals such as Come Out and Play. Karen holds a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a bachelor's degree from Amherst College.
August 5, 2010
Ethics and Game Design: A Conversation (Part One)
A year or so ago, Karen Shrier, an alumna from the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, asked me to contribute a forward to a book she was co-editing on Ethics and Games with David Gibson. The opening of the piece I wrote for her book gives some sense of how I personally think about these issues:
What a videogame does at heart is teach you how, in the midst of utter chaos, to know what is important, what is not and act on that" -- Colonel Casey Wardynski
"I'm reviewing the situation. Can a fellow be a villain all his life?" or so asks Fagin, the scheming and ruthless mastermind of an army of thieving young boys, at a key moment in Oliver!, the musical based on Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. Fagin's "situation" may be an odd place to start in thinking about the potential role of games in providing ethical and moral instruction--after all, Dickens used Fagin to embody the negative influences which besieged young men when society turned their backs on them--but bear with me.
In Oliver!, through the song, "Reviewing the Situation," we have a character digging deep into his own goals, values, and place in the world, and openly proclaiming that his experiences as a "villain" make him ill-suited to most of the trappings of a "normal life." Fagin's self-reflection leads him to construct and test a series of scenarios (marrying, joining respectable society, getting a job, living alone, freeing the young men in his employee, reaching old age), each embodying an alternative version of himself. Fagin plays out their consequences as a series of thought experiments, before pulling back and deciding to "think it out again." In the course of "Reviewing the Situation," Fagin engages in a range of different cognitive processes--projecting alternative versions of himself, and speculating about possible choices and anticipating their consequences--all in a particular kind of mental space that has no immediate consequences for his current social situation, though it has the potential to reshape the way he sees himself and his place in the world. Here, for example, he explores what it would be like to work for a living: "Is it such a humiliation for a robber to perform an honest job? So a job I'm getting, possibly, I wonder who my boss'll be? I wonder if he'll take to me...? What bonuses he'll make to me...? I'll start at eight and finish late, At normal rate, and all..but wait! ...I think I'd better think it out again."
Now consider a typical adolescent, seated in front of her computer screen, beginning to construct a character for a role playing game, and facing the same range of questions about her potential identities and goals. Should she join the dark horde, embrace a life as a villain, commit atrocities on other players, and in the process, begin to experiment with and potentially exorcise the darker side of her own personality? Or, should she become one of the good ones, going out to do heroic deeds, sharing the loot with others in her party, rescuing those in distress and helping newbies learn to play, and developing a sense of responsibility and accountability to others in her guild? Should she design an avatar that reflects the way she sees herself or should she embrace a fantasy radically different from her real world personality or situation and in so doing, see what it might be like to walk in a different set of moccasins?
Like Fagin, she can try on different personas, test different scenarios, and imagine alternative moral codes through which she might navigate the challenges of her day-to-day existence. She has the option of taking risks, dying, rebooting, and exploring another course of action: "I think I'd better think it out again." While young people have often found it difficult to anticipate the future consequences of their current actions, the game offers her a powerful tool through which to accelerate life processes and thus play out in the course of an afternoon several different scenarios and their consequences. And through in-game cameras that allow players to record and replay their actions, she can literally review the situation, going back to key choice points and retrospectively evaluate where she went wrong and how bad decisions led to negative consequences. Seen in this way, the computer game constitutes an incredible resource for self-reflection and personal exploration, one with rich potentials for moral and ethical education. No other current art form allows such an intense focus on choices and their consequences; no other art form allows us this same degree of agency to make our own decisions and then live through their outcomes.
Over time, Karen's project expanded into two edited collections, the first of which is already out in the market, the second of which will appear late this year or in early 2011. If you want to buy the first book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play, Karen's publisher is generously offering readers a chance to buy a copy at half price if they follow this link. You can see the table of contents for the collection here. The second book will be called Designing Games for Ethics: Models, Techniques, and Frameworks.
Taken together, the two books bring together an impressive array of game designers, theorists, and critics, representing a mix of people working on mainstream commercial and alternative "serious" games production, a global community of people trying to think through the core issues implied by the books' titles. I read the first volume with great interest (and no small amount of pride at seeing my former student at the center of such an effort): the topic is one which deserves more attention than it has and the book offers us some important ways to complicate the typical arguments around games and media effects. These books are important not only to those deeply invested in games but to the growing community of people invested in new media literacies and education, given the centrality of games to the cultural lives of young people and the importance of encouraging self reflection and ethical skills.
In the hopes of calling more attention to this project, I asked Karen if she would do an interview for this blog. The interview has grown into a conversation between Karen and two of her contributors, Miguel Sicart (IT University of Copenhagen) and Colleen Macklin (Parsons The New School), which explores games (in many forms) as ethical systems and as vehicles for shaping the empathy and identification of their players.
As the book's preface suggests, ethics and games is an "emerging field of study." What role do you see this collection playing in generating interest and awareness around this topic?
Karen: A major goal of my co-edited collection, Ethics and Game Design:Teaching Values through Play is to bring together the diverse and growing community of voices and begin to define the field of ethics and games, identify its primary challenges and questions, and establish the current state of the discipline. To start to unpack this, I brought together experts from a variety of perspectives--such as computer science, art history, education, philosophy, law, game design, management, media studies, and psychology. These designers, practitioners, educators and researchers wrote almost 40 chapters on everything from the ethics of Farmville's game mechanics; to a case study on designing Train, a non-digital game about the Holocaust; to the types of ethical play styles of teenagers. Our goal is to encourage game designers to think through and address ethical questions and issues in their designs; to motivate educators to seek new ways to support ethical thinking and reflection through play; and to inspire researchers to develop relevant frameworks and methodologies, design principles and theories for understanding this complex field. Attention to this field is essential for developing citizens who can think deeply about ethics; fully engage with complex issues; reflect on their values; and decide what is right for them, their families, their societies and the world.
My hope is that the collection will provide the foundation to start an engaged, rigorous dialogue around games, play, and ethics. The book collection, however, is just the first step in building a larger community of researchers, policy makers, journalists, educators, game players, and designers who are interested in moving the question beyond whether games are inherently good or bad, to how games and play can support ethics and citizenship skills.
And wow, it was a lot of work putting this collection together, but it was totally worth it.
Games and play are fundamental to all human societies and have historically been used explicitly and implicitly to teach values. What lessons can we learn from thinking about pre-digital games as "ethical systems"?''
MIGUEL: First of all, I am not sure we should make a pre-digital/digital divide without mentioning what makes digital games so unique. It may be possible to argue that in fact, there is nothing unique to digital games, and therefore what we learn from thinking about non-digital games is also valid for digital games.
In the case of ethics and games, I'd argue that there are at least two unique elements in digital games that differentiate it from the past: one, the possibility of single player games, and more importantly, of solitary play. Digital games have afforded single player games that make players engage alone with the game system. Two, the black-box effect (rules are invisible to players and have to deduct them from play - and they are not discussable/easily modifiable) is stronger in games. Of course, there are mod communities and hackers, but still, the access to rules and their configuration is much more complicated than in non-digital games.
In terms of thinking about morality, this implies that there are significant differences with the non-digital world. Essentially, I'd claim that morally interesting non-digital games make it complicated to claim that games can be understood as ethical systems, since the role of the social (which is, in my opinion, always bringing in the political and the moral) is deeply intertwined with the systems design. In other words: how much of the ethical analysis of a non-digital game can argue for the morality embedded in the system, and how much can it refer to the moral social play? With digital games, specially with single-player games, we can have an optimal sample: from the rules, through the player, we can deduct the values, and given the black-boxing of the system, we can claim that those values are inscripted there by designers.
So, after this digression (apologies!), what I want to say is that maybe we can learn from digital games how to look at non-digital games as ethical systems, without the role of the social. And therefore, what we can learn from pre-digital games is that multiplayer is always ethically interesting, and that negotiation of rules, sportsmanship and player-to-player behavior, that is, many of those elements external to a systems-centric understanding of games, are fundamental for the ethics of play. Because what pre-digital games tell us is precisely that: play is moral (regardless of Huizinga's claims), not only because there are many players, but also because the systems are of ethical interest.
I guess I haven't much answered the question as rephrased it and answered what I actually wanted to answer. I'll give a shot at a short answer then: pre-digital games can help us trace the history of play as a moral activity, as one used to teach, educate and promote a number of values in our society by means of systems designed to embody
and foster a number of values.
COLLEEN:I think we can learn a lot. From a cultural perspective, looking at
the historic trajectory of games engaging with social and political issues is pretty exciting. I am thinking here of Situationist Games, The New Games Movement, Buckminster Fuller's World Game and the recent surge of "big games" fostered by festivals like Come Out and Play and (for the first time this year) IndieCade. In fact, many big games bridge pre and post digital games, gaming in and with the real world, which might happen to include and use computers (i.e. mobile devices). These kinds of games take place out in the streets actively blurring the edges of the magic circle and raising all kinds of interesting questions about what happens when public space and game space, game rules and social norms collide. If an ethics is a dynamic negotiation between people and/or entities, I think this kind of negotiation between spaces - inside and outside the game, digital and nondigital - is a productive place to start thinking about "ethical systems."
In the chapter I contributed, I talk about the design of a big game called Re:Activism, which so happens to have "serious" content, but that's not the part that is so interesting to me on an ethical level. What I think is interesting are the complex relationships between the designer, the player and the publics that encountered the game.
Much of the debate about video game violence would assume that games as a rule exert a negative moral and ethical influence on players. How might the essays in this book complicate such an understanding of their impact on players?
MIGUEL: Even though this is something Karen should answer, since she's the editor, let me chip in: I think this collection helps describing why players are moral beings, arguing strongly against the implicit discourse of the computer game player as a moral zombie that is so ubiquitous in popular press and anti-videogame literature. Players are ethical agents, and they have moral fail-safe systems that help them engage with the ethical complexities of computer game play.
KAREN: Again, the purpose of this book is to move the conversation away from simply demonizing games as violent or inappropriate, to really understanding why games are so controversial, and determining the potential (and limits) of games to help us think about and reflect on ethical issues and complex social dynamics. Building on what [one Ethics and Games collection contributor] Nick Fortugno said at a talk a few years ago, there are books that embody what many would consider negative ethics (e.g., Mein Kampf) and books that embody positive values (e.g., The Bible), but we should not deem books themselves as evil or good as a result. As we have seen throughout history, the introduction of each new medium incites fear that it will negatively affect our youth. This happened even during the movement from orality to the written word, where educators were worried that writing things down, rather than memorizing all texts by rote, would destroy young minds. We need to be open about what games can do, rather than focusing on some specific content in a few particular games. Or, at least let's talk about why certain violent content bugs us, or let's reflect on what types of cultural dynamics are at work when some people strive to ban all games.
Thus, many of the authors in this book start to complicate ethics surrounding games, and investigate the nuances of the player and game relationship. For example, Erin Hoffman takes a philosophical approach to understanding the purpose of death in games, and how violence and death may serve to help us contemplate the human experience. J. Alison Bryant and Jordana Drell take a more educational approach and investigate how families play video games together to see how to better foster dialogue about values through group play. Just like ethics themselves, no one feels these issues are black or white, but something to be discussed and deliberated.
Moreover, I want to make it clear that in editing this collection, or designing games, I personally do not seek to decide for someone else what is right or wrong, morally appropriate, or socially acceptable. Rather, I believe there is a need to equip young citizens with the ability to reflect on their values, consider other perspectives, make
complex arguments, and decide what is right in a given context. After all, values are constantly shifting from offline to online, transnationally, and across peer groups and social contexts. How you act at work is different from how you would act on an online parenting discussion group. What is appropriate in one country may not be relevant in another, and what you on the playground may be interpreted differently than in the boardroom. The way we individually and collectively vote on issues today may be different to how we cast our ballot in twenty years. We need to be our own arbiters of right and wrong during complex moments and shifting contexts.
I do feel that games provide a unique opportunity to practice these types of skills.
Colleen Macklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and Director of PETLab (Prototyping Evaluation, Teaching and Learning lab), a lab focused on developing new games, simulations, and play experiences for experimental learning and social issues. Projects range from a curriculum in game design for the Boys and Girls Club, a card game for the Red Cross Climate Centre, and big games such as Re:Activism and the sport Budgetball. In addition to work in social games and interactive media, her research focuses on the social aspects of the design and prototyping process. In this vein, she is working with the Social Science Research Council on a prototyping approach to creating innovative mobile learning spaces with youth, public schools and cultural institutions, with funding through the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Member of the game design collectives Local No. 12 (see backchattergame.com) and The Leisure Society. India China Institute Fellow (2006-2007). Interactive work shown at Come Out and Play, SoundLab, The Whitney Museum for American Art and Creative Time. BFA, Media Arts Pratt Institute, graduate studies in Computer Science, CUNY and International Affairs, The New School.
Miguel Sicart is Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he teaches game design. He received his Ph.D. in game studies 2006; taking a multidisciplinary approach to ethics and computer games, he studied issues of game design, violence and videogames and the role of age-regulation codes. His book, The Ethics of Computer Games, which is based on his doctoral work, was published by MIT Press in the spring of 2009. He is currently working on developing a design framework for implementing ethical gameplay in digital games.
Karen Schrier is a doctoral student at Columbia University, where she is finishing her dissertation on ethics and games. She also currently works full-time as the Director of Interactive Media at ESI Design, an experience design firm in New York City. Her first co-edited book, Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, was published last March by IGI Global; the next book in the collection will be published in early 2011. Previously, she worked as a portfolio manager and executive producer at Scholastic, where she spearheaded digital initiatives for the Corporate and International divisions. She has also worked at Nickelodeon, BrainPOP and Barnes & Noble's SparkNotes. Karen was the Games Program co-chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in 2008 and 2009, currently serves on the advisory boards of the Computer Game Education Review (CGER), and is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School. Karen has spoken on games and learning at numerous conferences, including GDC, SIGGRAPH, AERA, Games for Change, NECC, and SITE. She also helped develop numerous games and digital properties, such as Mission U.S.: For Crown or Colony?; Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, and Scholastic.com; and Nickelodeon's ParentsConnect. Her digital and non-digital games have been featured in festivals such as Come Out and Play. Karen holds a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a bachelor's degree from Amherst College.
June 21, 2010
Transmedia Education: the 7 Principles Revisited
Last week, I participated in one of the ongoing series of webinars for teachers which is being conducted by our Project New Media Literacies team. The series emerges from an Early Adopters Network we are developing with educators in New Hampshire to drill down on the skills we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation and to think through how teachers in all school subjects and at all levels can draw on them to change how they support the learning of their students. Vanessa Vartabedian is the coordinator who has been running this series. Each month, they focus on a different skill. This month's focus was on Transmedia Navigation. The webinars are open to any and all participants and are drawing educators from all over the world. The webinars are also available after the fact via podcast. The Transmedia Navigation discussion involved not only some remarks by me but also a conversation with Clement Chau from Tufts University and Mark Warshaw from the Alchemists who has developed transmedia content for Smallville, Heroes, and Melrose Place, among other properties.
"Our Ning site is where our community of educators are exchanging ideas and trying out resources. You simply need to sign-up and fill out a short profile to access the schedule of upcoming webinars, as well as links to the archived recordings for previous webinars."
The focus of transmedia navigation offered me a chance to think a bit more deeply about what it might mean for us to produce transmedia education and I thought I would share some of those insights with you.
Let's start with some first principles:
Transmedia needs to be understood as a shift in how culture gets produced and consumed, a different way of organizing the dispersal of media content across media platforms. We might understand this in terms of a distinction I make between multimedia and transmedia. Multimedia refers to the integration of multiple modes of expression within a single application. So, for example, an educational cd-rom a decade or so ago might combine text, photographs, sound files, and video files which are accessed through the same interface. Transmedia refers to the dispersal of those same elements across multiple media platforms. So, for example, the use of the web to extend or annotate television content is transmedia, while the iPad is fostering a return to interest in multimedia.
Multimedia and Transmedia assume very different roles for spectators/consumers/readers. In a multimedia application, all the readers needs to do is click a mouse and the content comes to them. In a transmedia presentation, students need to actively seek out content through a hunting and gathering process which leads them across multiple media platforms. Students have to decide whether what they find belongs to the same story and world as other elements. They have to weigh the reliability of information that emerges in different contexts. No two people will find the same content and so they end up needing to compare notes and pool knowledge with others. That's why our skill is transmedia navigation - the capacity to seek out, evaluate, and integrate information conveyed across multiple media.
The push for transmedia is bound up with the economic logic of media consolidation. Yet, there is a push to transform this economic imperative into an aesthetic opportunity. If entertainment experiences are going to play out across multiple platforms, why not use this principle to expand and enrich the experience which consumers have of stories? Why not see transmedia as an expanded platform through which storytellers can deploy their craft? As we think about transmedia in the classroom, there are several key justifications/motivations for integrating it into our learning and teaching practices.
First, as modes of human expression expand and diversify, then the language arts curriculum has to broaden to train students for these new forms of reading and writing. If many stories are going to become transmedia, then we need to talk with our students about what it means to read a transmedia story and as importantly what it means to conceive and write a transmedia story. This is closely related to what Gunther Kress talks about in terms of multimodality and multiliteracy. Kress argues that we need to teach students the affordances of different media through which we can communicate information and help them to foster the rhetorical skills they need to effectively convey what they want to say across those different platforms.
I've had good luck at getting students to think in these terms through assignments which ask them to propose ways of translating an established story into a new medium - for example, translating a novel or film into a computer game. This practice requires them to develop critical skills at identifying the distinctive features of specific stories and worlds and it requires them to think about the affordances and expectations surrounding other media. Check out my earlier blog post on this practice.
As educators, we need to model the effective use of different media platforms in the classroom, a practice which would support what Howard Gardner has told us about multi-intelligences. In this case, I am referring to the idea that different students learn better through different modes of communications and thus the lesson is most effective when conveyed through more than one mode of expression. We can reinforce through visuals or activities what we communicate through spoken words or written texts. Doing so effectively pushes us to think about how multiple platforms of communication might re-enforce what we do through our classrooms.
Some will object that this skill takes a mode of commercial production as a model for what takes place in the classroom. Didn't I note here just a few weeks ago the dangers of talking about "learning 2.0" because it confuses a business plan for a pedagogical approach. I think we need to be careful in this regard and if it were only Pokemon or Lost that operated according to transmedia principles, I might be much slower to advocate integrating these same principles into our teaching.
But here's the thing: Obi-Wan Kenobi is a transmedia character, so is Barrack Obama. In both cases, readers put together information about who this character is and what he stands for by assembling data that comes at us from a range of media platforms. In such a world, each student in our class will have had exposure to different bits of information because they will have consumed different media texts. As a result, one child's mental model of Obama may include the idea that he was not born in the United States, that he is a Moslem, that he is a socialist, or what have you, and we need some way of communicating across those mental models, we need a way of understanding where they came from, and we need to help students expand the range of media sources through which they search out and assess information about what's happening in the world around them. To some degree, teachers emphasis similar skills when they tell students to seek out multiple sources when they write a paper, yet often, they mean only multiple print sources and not sources from across an array of different media. All of this suggests to me that we need to make the process of transmedia navigation much more central to the ways we teach research methods through schools.
Vanessa asked me to share with the group the Seven Principles of Transmedia Entertianment which I presented through this blog last fall and suggest how they might relate to learning. I wanted to express some cautions about this exercise. Transmedia Storytelling is one of a range of transmedia logics, which might also include transmedia branding, transmedia performance, and transmedia learning. There is sure to be some overlap between these different transmedia logics, but also differences. I don't doubt that some principles carry over but we need to keep in mind that there may also be some core principles for transmedia teaching/learning which will not be explored if we simply try to adopt what we know about transmedia entertainment for this space. I hope that this blog can start a conversation which helps us to identify other principles which are specific to the learning domain.
Here goes.
Spreadability vs. Drillability Daniel Thomas Hickey wrote a series of posts (Part One, Part Two) which explore how the circulation of educational media might be described and improved by our model of spreadability. They are worth checking out.
But for the moment, let's think of this in a somewhat broader way. Spreadability refers to a process of dispersal - to scanning across the media landscape in search of meaningful bits of data. Drillability refers to the ability to dig deeper into something which interests us. A good educational practice, then, encompasses both, allowing students to search out information related to their interests across the broadest possible terrain, while also allowing students to drill deep into something which matters to them. This requires us as educators to think more about motivation - what motivates students to drill deeper - as well as class room management - how can we facilitate their capacity to dig into something that matters to them.
Continuity vs. Multiplicity The media industry often talks about continuity in terms of canons - that is, information which has been authorized, accepted as part of the definitive version of a particular story. Education has often dealt in the range of canon - not only the canon of western literature which deems some books as more worth reading than others but also the structures of disciplines and standards which determine what is worth knowing and how we should know it.
Multiplicity, by contrast, encourages us to think about multiple version - possible alternatives to the established canon. So, for example, Kurt Squire in his work on adapting Civilization III for the classroom talks about the value of asking students to think through "what if" scenarios about history - what if the Native Americans or Africans had resisted colonization, for example - that can be played out in the simulation game and which can help us to understand the contingencies of history. Asking what if questions both force us to think about the impact of historical events as well as the different factors which weighed in to make some possibilities more likely than others. As Squire notes, playing Civilization III encourages students to master the logic of history rather than simply what happened. The same thing happens when we explore how the same story has been told in different national contexts. It helps us to see the different values and norms of these cultures as we look at the way the story has been reworked for local audiences.
p>Immersion vs. Extraction In terms of immersion, we might think about the potential educational value of virtual worlds. I don't mean simply having classes in Second Life which look like virtual versions of the classes we would have in First Life except with far less human expressivity. I mean the idea of moving through a virtual environment which replicates key aspects of a historical or geographical environment. I am thinking about Sasha Barab's Quest Atlantis< or Chris Dede's River City as examples of fully elaborated virtual learning environment which rely on notions of immersion. I am also thinking about activities where students build their own virtual worlds - deciding what details need to be included, mapping their relationship to each other, guiding visitors through their worlds and explaining the significance of what they contain.
Extractability captures another principle which has long been part of education - the idea of meaningful props and artifacts in the classroom. In a sense, every time we have show and tell, everytime a student brings an element from their home culture into the classroom, every time a teacher brings back a mask or a tool from their visit to another country and displays it as part of their geography lesson.
World Building World Building comes out of thinking of the space of a story as a fictional geography. I've mentioned here before that L. Frank Baum described himself as the Royal Geographer of Oz. In this case, we do not simply mean physical geography though this is part of it. Books with a strong focus on worlds often include maps - whether it is the large scale map of Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien or the much more local map of the rigigng of the ship found in many of Patrick O'Brian's books. Part of the pleasure of reading those books is mastering that fictional geography. But world building also depends on cultural geography - our sense of the peoples, their norms and rituals, their dress and speech, their everyday experiences, which is also often the pleasure of reading a fantasy or science fiction narrative. But it is also part of the pleasure of reading historical fiction and a teacher can use the activity of mapping and interpreting a fictional world as a way of opening up a historical period to their students. This moves us away from a history of generals and presidents towards social history as the key way through which schools help us to understand the past. And many traditional school activities encourage students to cook and eat meals, to make and wear costumes, to engage in various rituals, associated with other historical periods. If we develop ways of mapping these worlds as integrated systems, we can push beyond these local insights towards a fuller, richer understanding of past societies.
Seriality The media industry often discusses seriality in terms of the "mythology," which offers one way of understanding how we might connect this principle to traditional school content. At its heart, seriality has to do with the meaningful chunking and dispersal of story-related information. It is about breaking things down into chapters which are satisfying on their own terms but which motivate us to keep coming back for more. What constitutes the equivalent of the cliffhanger in the classroom? What represents the story arc which stitches a range of television episodes together? Or by contrast, what has to be present for a story or lesson to have a satisfying and meaningful shape even if it is part of a larger flow?
Subjectivity At heart, subjectivity refers to looking at the same events from multiple points of view. When we were going through my late mother's papers, we found a school assignment from the 1930s when she wrote the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the perspective of the wolf. When I mentioned this at the webinar, others mentioned Wicked which tells the Wizard of Oz from the vantage point of the Wicked Witch of the West. Matt Madden's book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Excercises in Style is a great way to bring these issues into the art or language arts classroom: he tells the same simple story 99 times, each time tweaking different storytelling variables, including those around tense and perspective. In the history classroom, there's a value of flipping perspectives - how were the same events understood by the Greeks and the Persians, the RedCoats and the Yankees, the North and the South, and so forth, as a way of breaking out of historical biases and understanding what lay at the heart of these conflicts.
Performance In speaking about entertainment, I discuss performance in terms of a structure of cultural attractors and activators. The attractors draw the audience, the activators give them something to do. In the case of the classroom, there are a range of institutional factors which insure that you have a group of students sitting in front of you. But you still face the issue of motivation. When we were doing work on thinking about games to teach, we often had to ask the content experts to tell us what the information they saw as valuable allowed students to do. To turn the curriculum into a game, we had to move from information on the page to activities which put that information to use.
This is at the heart of any process-driven approach to learning. What are you asking your students to do with what you teach them? How are they able to adapt it in a timely and meaningful fashion from knowledge to skill? And tied to this is the idea of adaptation and improvisation, since in the entertainment world, different fans show their different understandings and interest in the entertainment content through very different kinds of performances. So, how do we create a space where every student can perform the content of the class in ways which are meaningful to them? In short, how might teachers learn to think about cultural activators in designing their lessons?
June 14, 2010
The Future of Teenagers: My Interview in O Globo
Here is the interview I did with Bruno Porto of O Globo, a publication targeting youth, during my time in Rio. The newspaper devoted three full pages to this interview which was prominent on its cover and I heard lots of great responses to it as I traveled around the country. I suspect what will be striking to readers in the United States is how much the questions being asked there by parents, teachers, and others about new media are very much those being asked in our own country. For those who prefer to read this in Portuguese, here's the link.
What´s the main difference between the teenagers that lived in 2000 and the ones that live nowadays? Do you see them as completely different beings or the prior generation already had cultural elements that are present in the next one?
First, the continuities across generations are much greater than the differences. Young people today listen to different bands and often acquire music through different platforms than teens a decade ago, yet one's taste in music is still a key indicator of one's personal and social identity for teens. Young people play different games on different game platforms yet young people acquire and display mastery through competitive play. Young people use different social networking platforms and communicate with their friends through text-messaging, yet forging a place for oneself within the social system of their schools remains a central goal of adolescence. We can go down the list and most of the new digital practices which seem alien to older people are serving purposes which, if they are being honest, they recognize from their own teen experiences. That said, there are also significant differences, which I know we will get to as this interview goes forward. What does it mean to have immediate contact with your friends as a support system as you move throughout your day, to know that you will remain connected with your friends no matter where you move in the planet, and that you can form intense, intimate social ties with people who you may never meet face to face? Or to know, but not yet fully grasp, that those pictures you shot at a party when you were 16 could resurface at a job interview when you are 25 or end up being used against you in a political campaign when you are 45 because they have persistence online and can be accessed by many unintended audiences? These are some of the questions that contemporary teens face which are different from those confronting previous generations of teens.
Do you think that the leap between the 2010 generation and the 2020 will be as significant as the leap between the 2000 and 2010 generations? Or have the main, structural changes, already happened?
We are in the midst of a profound and prolonged period of media transition which is inspiring changes on every other level -- economic, social, cultural, political, legal... and I don't see the rate of change slowing anytime soon. Youth are often the earliest adapters and adopters of those emerging technologies and cultural practices as they seek out some place they can call their own, some place where their parents and teachers are not going to be nagging at and snooping on them. Young people, thus, embody the change that media is bringing and they are thus likely to be the advanced guard for most cultural practices. (Interestingly, this is not true for Twitter which has spread from the professional classes outward and downward to reach youth rather than the other way around). As this happens, they are going to create differences in style and taste which signal their differences in identity and affiliation. So, yes, I think that youth ten years from now will be significantly different from youth today -- with my above caveat that it will still be the case that the continuities in experience and interests will far out distance the differences.
Which aspect of the DIY/collaborative philosophy, that transformed the youth (and the world), seems more intriguing and relevant for you now?
For the past three decades, I have studied fan cultures as the springboard for grassroots creativity. Fans are people who are inspired by the stories that circulate through the mass media, who take elements of those stories and deploy them as the raw materials for their own creative expression, and who bond together over their shared investments in these rich cultural materials. I don't call this "do-it-yourself" but rather "do-it-ourselves," because of the deeply collaborative nature of these forms of cultural production. They are collaborative both in the sense that they build on existing stories, including those of mass media, within our culture and because they depend on each other to create the infrastructure which supports their creativity. Fan fiction is collaborative from conception -- as fans talk through story ideas as cafe table conversations, as they give each other feedback through Beta-Reading (peer-review) processes, as they read and comment on each other's shared works, and as they build the very platforms through which they circulate their creations. The fan fiction writer exists alongside the cosplayer who creates costumes and embodies characters, the fan musician who creates, records, and circulates songs, the vidder who re-edits and remixes footage, and so forth. All of them form communities which embrace new participants, which generate new forms of creative expressions, which teach each other the skills needed to participate, and who support each other's creations. This kind of participatory culture has existed for more than a hundred years, but the web has made it accessible to a much broader array of participants. Because it can innovate outside the constraints of the market or the art world, it is endless generative and thus a source of ongoing fascination to me.
The transformations that the web caused are already present in almost all the Western world, but parents and teachers are still trying not only to understand it, but to accept it. Why do you think they´re still in denial?
Some parents are in denial; some are in a state of panic. The first sees no change occurring, the second fears the change that is coming. Few are finding the middle ground between the two which allows young people plenty of space to navigate between neglect and constraint. I just heard the story of a young man, who came from a conservative religious family, who was told by his parents that he could not watch Family Guy or other Fox shows on television. The kid watched it on the internet instead without guilt, since his parents hadn't set up any restrictions on what he did on line. As someone who is the parent of a 29 year old son, I can tell you that most of parenting is reactionary. You are uncertain about the right way forward and so you fall back on what your parents did, even if they were dealing with different times and situations. You end up saying everything you thought you would never say to your kids because the script you have in your head bears the early imprint of your parent's philosophy. And you have to make a very conscious effort to change or reverse those impulses. You may change it some of the time, through sheer act of will, but then you will find yourself reverting back on other fronts. Most parents now do not have a script in their heads for thinking about what young people are doing with their iPhones. The young people are encountering situations which seem on the surface totally different from anything they faced growing up. That's why I always stress the continuities first. They may not know what the value is of having lots of friends on Orkut, but they do know that forming friendships is a vital part of adolescent culture. As the next group of parents grows up, they will have a better mental framework for thinking about these issues but unfortunately, their kids still won't believe they have any clue what they are talking about. :-)
During years journalists, teachers and other specialists considered videogames as a media that causes much more damages than benefits. Do you think that that perception changed?
Yes, somewhat. The good news is that the group of people entering the teaching profession over the past five or so years probably grew up playing Super Mario Brothers and so they have a much more normative understanding of what games can be used for. The bad news is that research shows that of ten different professional classes, teachers are the least likely to still be playing games today. Teachers are consumate creatures of the book and if anything, they are becoming more defensive about these new media as they fear that print culture may be displaced by digital. So, you have some teachers who do get the value of games as recreational and teaching tools, that want to see better games developed which they can deploy through their teaching, that may respect and value the kinds of teamwork and leadership skills being fostered on World of Warcraft, who may understand the simulations of history and government offered by Civilization or Sim City, We are seeing libraries embracing gaming as a community building activity for their patrons. And among educational researchers, games for learning constitute a high growth area of research. On the other hand, you see schools locking out most forms of participatory culture, closing out not only games but also Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia. You are less likely to see teachers who believe that playing Grand Theft Auto is going to turn their students into school shooters, but you are more likely to see teachers who believe video games are simply distractions from real learning, rather than recognizing how at least some games can be vehicles for the learning process. I will be happy when our government officials stop telling kids to turn off their XBoxes and do their homework, and start telling them to turn on their XBoxes and do their homework, but that's going to be a long time coming.
Survivor, The Matrix and American Idol are some of the franchises you used as example in Convergence Culture. Any other relevant examples appeared recently?
Franchises still dominate our media production. If I were writing the book today, I might have chapters focusing on Lost, Heroes, Glee, Avatar, and District 9, each of which represent a somewhat different way of thinking about the media's relationship to its consumers. Indeed, each of these franchises plays a role in my next book, which I hope to be writing later this summer, on spreadable media. So, let's take Lost. On the one hand, Lost represents one of the biggest hits on contemporary commercial television. When the Lost finale airs later this week, it is going to attract a massive audience. It is event television on a global scale. People will gather in large theaters all over the United States to watch it. They were flood Twitter and the other social networking sites with their responses. On the other hand, Lost represents all of the properties we would have associated with niche television a decade ago. It is a complex and demanding program. It draws a hard core, socially active, culturally generative audience. It challenges the collective knowledge and thinking of large scale social networks of people who pool their knowledge, compare notes, and try to figure out the mysteries of the island. And as they do so, they follow Lost through podcasts, websites, wiki projects, alternate reality games, and countless other platforms. Lost is television outside the box -- television in a transmedia environment. Each of the other examples I cite represent the further move of television into a transmedia and participatory world. With Glee, we might pay attention to it as a vehicle for selling music -- in that sense very much like Rock Band and Guitar Hero -- and we might talk about it as inspiring lots of amateur performances -- check out all the amateur performances of the songs from Glee which spring up on YouTube within hours of the airing of a new episode. With Avatar, I am of course interested in 3D but also in the ways that activists around the world have embraced the identity of the Na'Vi and their struggle against the cloud people as a language through which to talk about their own local struggles to protect their environments and their way of life. With District 9, I am interested in the ways that a small scale movie gains the level of public interest this film did through strategies which rely heavily on the most engaged and socially networked segments of their audience. And the list continues.
Ten years ago, in Brazil and many other countries, kids found it hard to feel attracted by their schools. Now, with their connection with technology and the internet, it´s ten times worse. Do you think that most countries are facing this problem properly?
I teach a class at USC on the New Media Literacies. One of the assignments is to have my graduate students interview a teenage student or a teacher they know. My students come from all over the world and since they tend to interview people in their own families, I see projects on people who live in many different countries. Almost without exception, every young person they interviewed had a more intellectually rich life outside of school than inside. The things they cared about, they things that provoked their curiosity and passions, were often things which had no place in the current configurations of schooling. The ways they learned best often involved tools and platforms which were blocked in the classroom. And they felt like what was turning them on intellectually was largely unknown by the adults in their lives. The teachers also expressed frustration about how much new technology they needed to absorb or about how hard it was to change the presumptions of school administrators that such tools were distractions from the core business of learning. This is bad enough as a global problem if we think about schools shutting down the brains of our most networked young people, but we might feel that they still get extra educational opportunities and cultural experiences outside the school hours. But then consider all of those young people who only get access to these technologies at school, for whom the teacher or librarian may be the only adult they know who has any understanding of the technical, social, cultural, and ethical challenges and opportunities they represent. If we shut these practices out of our schools, we will have denied those young people the support they need to meaningfully engage as citizens, workers, learners, and expressive individuals in a world where these technologies are going to be taken for granted. Young people are not better off being told to learn about technology on the street corner the way my generation learned about sex. Our schools need to develop a coherent, informed, creative approach to technology which incorporates the best tools and practices into their pedagogical approaches.
How do you think that the new generation is absorving so much information? Do you think they absorb less - after all, the information is at reach all the time - or less?
First, I think there is a shift away from an emphasis on learning information towards learning how to find information. The emerging generation tends to offload much of what they know into technological devices which they use to enhance their thinking. Take away my laptop and you chop off a chunk of my brain. This is not necessarily a bad thing because the information is changing at such a rapid pace. Yet, it only works if we don't fill our heads with misinformation, if we develop skills at evaluating information and recognizing what kinds of information we need to solve particular kinds of problems. Second, they are learning to depend on each other for information they may lack. This is what we call collective intelligence -- a world where nobody knows everything, everybody knows something, and what an individual knows can be shared with the group as needed. Young people are learning to recognize the expertise of their friends and others in their networks and learning to work together to solve complex problems which they would not be able to tackle on their own. So, there are two ways of processing the massive amount of information which the web makes available to us -- deploy tools which sort and filter the information or tapping into collaborative communities which appraise the information together from many different perspectives. The later, for example, describes how I use Twitter. I subscribe to the feeds of the smartest people I know in many different fields and trust them to insure that I at least get exposed to the key developments in those fields each day. Young people are tapping this in a more informal way, which is why young people often know a lot about current events without ever seeming to read a newspaper or watch the news. A lot falls through the cracks this way, which is why we need to foster these skills more, but it is still a pretty shrewd approach to dealing with what previous generations have described as information overload.
As schools, many companies that hire young people are not prepared for all the changes that are happening. How does that affect young people? They will try to adapt or look for new kinds of jobs?
Our young people have much more to give the world than they are being allowed to contribute. No question about it. When we read reports of fans developing online reference works for Lost, say, there's often a dismissive response that says they had too much time on their hands. I don't want to undercut the value of this grassroots production of knowledge and culture on its own terms, but I also want to ask - whose fault is that? Such activity emerges in a world which undervalues the creativity and knowledge, the skills and intelligence, of every day people -- undervalues it in school, undervalues it in the work place. As a result, young people create alternative spaces where they can learn and share what they learn with each other. It can be enormously frustrating to watch the company where you work make bad decisions because it is ill-informed about alternative possibilities, even as you sit there, knowing about new ways forward, and not being solicited to contribute, or sitting there going through mind-numbing repetitive activities while you know a high tech way which would be more effective and efficient. Just as schools need to change to embrace new ways of learning, companies need to change to embrace new ways of working. The most forward thinking companies have relatively flat organizations which allow new ideas to emerge bottom up from any corner of their staffs. They reconfigure teams so that everyone has a chance to lead and people can contribute based on their skill and expertise. As we think about who might be best at working in such an organization, it may well be someone who grew up playing massively multiplayers games, swaping roles, trying new identities, tackling new challenges. Hell, don't just hire an individual gamer. Hire an entire squad or guild, since this team of people already knows how to work together to achieve its goals, already knows what each member can contribute, and already trusts each person to carry their own weight. It isn't just that companies need to embrace new technologies; they also need to recognize and value new cultural processes which come out of young people's experience of growing up in a networked society.
Last week Rio received his first TEDx (a version of the original TED) and the main attraction was a 13 years old boy that knows how to program apps for iPhone and iPod Touch. Many scientists are trying to understand the brains of people like that boy, that could be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Do you think that makes sense, that they´re treated that way? Or in some years there will be thousands of kids like that one everywhere?
Our focus should not be on prodigies. There have always been child prodigies. There will always be child prodigies. That tells us little about the state of our culture. What we need to pay attention to are the remarkable achievements of perfectly normal girls and boys who are doing things that would have been inconceivable for earlier generations. Their ability to tap into social networks, to deploy new tools and technologies, to process complex information, is astonishing, yet often dismissed by their parents and teachers because it doesn't fit within the grids through which we evaluate their educational performance. It may well be the case that what this young man is doing will become much more widespread in another generation's time, especially as the processes for designing aps are better understood and toolkits more user friendly. In any case, I would want to understand not just how the boy's brain works but also the social support system around the child. What kinds of help has he received from parents, teachers, other adults along his path to this level of accomplishment, since no kid gets to this point alone. In general, we need to understand such developments not as singular cognitive accomplishments but as windows into the kinds of learning ecology which is needed to make it possible for every young person to achieve their full potential.
June 9, 2010
Down Argentina Way...
If my trip to Brazil ended up focused primarily on convergence culture and transmedia storytelling, the second leg of my trip -- to Buenos Aires -- was much more directed towards my work on new media literacies and issues concerning education. I was invited to Argentina by Ines Dussel, an educator and public intellectual, who is one of the co-authors with Luis Alberto Quevedo of a new white paper exploring the impact of new media on education in Latin America, Educacion y nuevas technologias: los desafios pedagogicos ante el mundo digital. The report was being released at the VI For Latinoamericano de Educacion, hosted by the Fundacion Santilla. It was an event attended by education ministers and educational researchers/policy makers from many of the Latin American countries. I was asked to give a keynote address which shared with the group some of the perspectives on new media literacies, participatory culture, and informal learning we have developed through Project New Media Literacies, including some discussion of the curriculum we have developed around "Reading in a Participatory Culture." A key concern throughout the discussion was the distinction between introducing technology into the classroom and developing the skills which would enable young people of all economic and cultural backgrounds to participate more fully in the emerging media landscape. Ines and her associates have promised me an interview for the blog, which I hope to share with you soon.
I ended up using two examples from my family history to illustrate my key points. First, I talked about my father's tool box. My father spent much of his life in and around the construction trade. He was the son of a sheet metal worker. For both of those generations, their tools were vitally important to them, but their knowledge consisted of how to deploy those tools and could not be contained in the tools themselves. If my father sat his tool box on the table and told me to build a house, I wouldn't know what to do. Trust me, we went through this many times when he was alive. I never could think using hand tools. It isn't just that I didn't know how to use the tools well -- how to use a hammer or a saw -- but rather, I lacked the skills needed to use them effectively and I lacked the larger understanding of how a house -- or in my case, a bookcase -- would be put together. I had the tools but I lacked the competencies which would allow me to use them in meaningful ways. I lacked the sense of my own empowerment to take those tools out in the world and construct something with them.
So, we can bring computers into the classroom but unless the tools are accompanied by other kinds of knowledge -- and I don't just mean how to use the keyboard and some basic software -- then they are not going to be able to deploy those tools in meaningful ways. For some of my friends back at MIT, the key knowledge is how to code -- and that's certainly part of what I mean -- but also I think that knowledge involves how to network, how to participate in new structures of culture and knowledge, how to read a Wikipedia page, how to assess the credability of information. And a technically focused curriculum which is not met with the integration of those skills into how we study culture and society will only get us so far in terms of closing the digital divide and the participation gap. That's the heart of the white paper I wrote for MacArthur.
The second story I drew on heavily there had to do with my grandmother, who, among other things, made quilts, growing up in rural Georgia. We might think of quilting as a kind of remix practice. She took bits of cloth left over from other sewing projects, sometimes drawing on the shared reservoirs of the female community, to create new works. In doing so, she was also building on a shared tradition with its own patterns and formulas. And she was producing an artifact which was designed for sharing -- often the quilts were made as gifts to mark social occasions of significance in the life of the community. My grandmother would have known how to engage with a participatory culture.
We can imagine moving from stitching together and remixing textiles to stitching together and remixing media content. Indeed, Francesca Coppa uses the metaphors of "cutting" and "stitching" to talk about the work that goes into producing a fanvid. In the United States, these folk traditions were radically disrupted by the rise of mass production and mass media. Today, quilt making is a specialized skill, more often trained in art schools than passed along from one generation to the next. And the logic of folk production has become disassociated from our understanding of the media.
One of my speculations about digital culture in Latin America is that because it exists alongside a still vibrant folk culture, a new model for thinking about remix may emerge. And this is part of what I am trying to understand through my travels to the region. I don't want to romanticize this possibility since it is also the case that many Latin Americas worry that the web may simply open up another gateway through which North American influences will be felt upon their traditional ways of life, and it is hard talking to people there to dismiss those concerns.
These next two images suggest some of the complex ways that these two ideas -- remix as part of the logic of folk culture and the importation of Northern culture on the south -- interact on a regular basis in Argentina. My brother owes an affinity to the brand community around Coca Cola, living in Atlanta, so I was especially interested to see the many ways that Coke's presence was felt in Buenos Aires. And yet, as cultural theorists might suggest, Coke is localized -- not only by the decisions made in the boardroom but also by the ways it is inserted into a distinctly Argentinian context.
As I traveled around the city, I was struck by the graphic arts of Buenos Aires, the expressive ways that paint -- especially bright primary colors -- was used to transform the urban landscape.
This focus on street art carried over to a strong tradition of murals and graffiti, such as the soccer related image, which also reminds us of how intense the country's connections are to sports fandom.
And this pub sign depicts Carlos Gardel, Tango performer who became a key figure in Argentinian cinema of the early sound era. I was introduced to Gardel's music while visiting Argentina, along with a wide array of appropriations and remixes of Tango music as it gets absorbed into jazz, hip hop, and techno/dance musics.
Gardel remains a key figure in Argentinian popular culture -- if you look closely, you will see his image on the wall behind these contemporary street performers who were in their own ways keeping the Tango tradition alive.
Ines and her husband took me to visit a curio market on Sunday, which is full of cultural debris, some reflecting the local traditions of Argentina, others suggesting the flow of goods and brands from the North. This still life suggests the complex assemblage of objects (and the cultural traditions they embodied) on every table.
The one thing I was taught about Argentina growing up in American public schools of the 1960s was that it was the land of the Gaucho, so I could not resist capturing this image of a Gaucho selling ropes and bolos in the marketplace. I am sure some of this was performance for tourists, but there was still something fascinating about confronting an icon which previously had lived for me only on the pages of battered and largely forgotten textbooks. Besides, I always loved a song Lupe Velez sings in one of the Wheeler and Woolsey comedies that "You can keep Harpo and Chico. I love my Gaucho."
And during this same trip, I was intrigued by these street performers. Like so many living statues, I have seen in the United States, they were frozen in a pose, defying the attempts of visitors to make them move from their static composition. Yet, what amused me here was the attempts to create what seems in still photographs to be a highly dynamic image -- they used a variety of illusions to convey a sense of movement, even as they remained absolutely still.
Pardon me for what has devolved into a series of tourist snapshots which fail to capture the complex thoughts and feelings which this trip stirred within me, but part of what I carried away with me was a real affection and fascination for the kinds of folk and popular culture practices I observed in Buenos Aires.
May 31, 2010
What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part Three)
What do you say to an educator or parent who feels that making music remix videos, say, has nothing to do with literacy? In what senses are you describing such forms of expression as literacy practices?
The common sense view of literacy is that it refers to reading and writing alphabetic print and that to be literate is simply a matter of knowing how to encode and decode printed text; that is, to recognise the letters and convert them into words and sequences of words as a reader or a writer. According to this view, literacy is the same thing for everyone. It is the same tool, or the same skill using that tool. Some people might be faster at it and others slower; some may spell better than others, and some may be better at applying text comprehension strategies than others; but at the end of the day, the common sense view is that literacy one single thing, and it is the same for everyone.
This view is flawed, however, and on a number of levels. It's a bit like saying that computing is the same for everyone, just that some are more fluent with it or more skilled. But in the hands of different people who have different purposes and different understandings of what can be done with computers, and so on, computing takes on many different forms. There are many different practices of computing, such that you could give two people what look like the same tool, but what you see going on subsequently might be so very different that you can't really even begin to see them as doing "the same thing" or using the same tool. The example may be even better made by reference to "telephoning." To say that a person calling the dentist on their landline to make an appointment is doing the same thing, using the same tool, employing the same skill - telephoning - as a person in 2010 who uses their mobile phone to video an eyewitness account of what goes on to become a major news event, then uses the phone to upload the video to a social news discussion site along with an explanatory written commentary, and to check back regularly to see what comments have been left by others as well as to track how news of the event itself is playing out across the internet and broadcast media, is to miss the point. What looks like "the same kind of machine" is taken up in very different ways by different people, and has very different meanings for different people. It is to all intents and purposes a "very different thing" in the hands of different people; not the same thing at all.
So it is with literacy, and that is why we think it is best to talk about literacies in the plural rather than literacy in the singular. The singular form focuses our attention on the wrong thing - on thinking that the all-important thing is managing alphabetic text. This is important, but it's only a part of it.
There are two key points to make here. The first is to recognize what is most important about literacy as a social phenomenon, which is that it enables people to do what cannot be done by orality alone. Literacy enables human beings to communicate and share meanings in ways that go beyond the use of voice within face-to-face settings (which is orality). Literacy checks in when the conditions of everyday life are such that people need more than the use of voice alone to get the meaning-making work done that needs to get done for life to go on. The bottom line for literacy is that it enables meaning-making to occur or "travel" across space and time, mediated by systems of signs in the form of encoded texts of one kind or another. Encoded texts "freeze" or "capture" thought and language in ways that free them from their immediate context of production so that they are "transportable." Unencoded texts like speech and hand signs "expire" at the point of production other than to the extent that they can live on - fallibly - in the memories of whoever was there at the time. Encoded texts give (semi) permanence and transcendence to thought and language in the sense that they can "travel" without requiring particular people to transport them. Literacies can involve any kind of codification that "captures" language and thought in this sense. Literacy includes letteracy (the alphabet bits), but goes far beyond that. Speech recorded on tape or digitally is frozen and counts as encoded language and thought. The same applies to still and moving images. It is not that memory and speech alone cannot sustain considerable meaning making across distance and contexts. It is just that this is exponentially enabled and facilitated by literacy as encodification, which permits all kinds of procedures and institutions and practices that would be impossible, or impossibly cumbersome, without encoded thought and language.
During the centuries of mass print, following the invention of the printing press, the dominance of print as the paradigm of encoded texts has made it "natural" to associate literacy with alphabetic text. But this is really just an historical contingency. Many centuries prior to that humans used pictorial inscriptions of one kind or another (as well as other markings) to encode language and thought independently of voice. As new ways of encoding come and go, encoding system paradigms change. And right now we are at a point where the dominance - previously, almost the monopoly - of the print paradigm is being challenged by the ease of digital encoding that can combine multiple modes and mixes of multiple modes. Where it is more effective to use alternative sign systems from alphabetic text to mediate meaning-making within mainstream everyday interactions, the alternatives will be used. And people's ideas about literacy will change accordingly.
The second key point is that literacies vary with contexts. What we mean by context has to do with who the people are within a particular setting, what they are aiming to do, how they are trying to do it, what they are trying to do it with, and who they are or are trying to be within that context. So, if we think about something as obvious as reading a particular text, it is clear that different people, coming from different cultural spaces and possessing different cultural knowledge may read the same text in very different ways and make different meanings from it. For example, during the 1980s, many liberation theology priests who worked with Latin American peasants in ways they hoped would encourage them to mobilise to demand a better share of social wealth interpreted key biblical passages very differently to how conservative urban priests who identified with the existing social order interpreted them. Moreover, both groups worked with biblical texts in different ways and in different settings; liberationists would pore over the texts with peasants within settings where evidence of poverty was immediate, and would encourage the group to think about the meaning in relation to a change agenda. By contrast, other priests would read at large anonymous assemblies, making the interpretation amidst ornate decorative milieux that often dripped gold and spoke to divine rather than popular power. Same text, different people, different purposes, different procedures, different knowledge informing the meaning making and, indeed, a different technology. A bible being read by one person set apart from the listeners is utterly different from a bible being pored over, passed from person to person, and being used to stimulate thought intended to guide political action. Within Latin American settings both of these "ways" of "reading bibles" have been common - along with many other variations we can think of.
Now the point is that these kinds of differences in "ways with encoded texts" can be multiplied many times over. In a famous example, Shirley Brice Heath showed how different social groups within a region of the United States "did bedtime reading" in very different ways. Experts on the philosophy of Kant read and discuss Kant's works in very different ways from first year philosophy students, and (can) make very different meanings from them. That is why philosophers try to induct philosophy students into sophisticated reading practices, of which following letters and words across a page is only a tiny (albeit very important) part. The expert philosophers are trying to recruit the students to a new social practice, and this involves having to teach them how to read and write philosophically (which involves a lot more than just eyes and texts). Jim Gee uses the word Discourse (with a capital "D") to signify the idea that there are all different kinds of combinations of types of people and kinds of purposes and goals, and ways of setting about them, and ways of using language within them, and ways of dressing (liberationists in outdoor garb and metropolitan priests in ornate robes) and so on. We can say that different Discourses tend to involve different literacies, and will often involve different (forms of) technologies or tools, and different ways of using them, and so on. And participants in these different Discourses will make different meanings from what look like the same resources, and they will use what look like the same resources (think: computer, phone, bible) in very different ways.
So if we put all of these ideas together (along with others there is not space to mention here) it suddenly becomes very obvious why we would think of making remix music videos as having everything to do with literacy, rather than having nothing to do with literacy. It is one of a very large number of literacies that exist (not to mention new ones that are emerging all the time). That is, when we think of literacies in terms of "so many socially recognized ways in which people who are participating in particular Discourses generate, communicate and negotiate meanings through the medium of encoded texts," it's perfectly natural to think of people who are producing and sharing and interacting with remix music videos as engaging in (a) literacy. They are decoding and encoding sophisticated multimedia texts, with a view to communicating and sharing and negotiating meanings with others of their ilk (other members of their Discourse). They set about this in ways that others recognize as appropriate to doing this literacy well. They are freezing thought and "language" so that it can travel and be experienced and negotiated within practices of giving and taking meaning.
When we look at things from this perspective it is the people who cannot see remix music video in terms of literacy that have the problem; not those for whom it is self-evidently a legitimate, pleasurable, widely-practised, and potentially incredibly powerful literacy.
In my Afterword, I raise the question about the value of learning these skills as an isolated set of practices rather than as part of a more diverse affinity space. In other words, is there a difference between learning to make a remix video and learning to be an Otaku (who happens to display his or her skills and knowledge through contributing remix videos to a larger fan culture)?
Yes, there certainly is a difference, although learning to make something like a remix video can - and often does - lead to becoming a fan of something one previously was not a fan of, and to becoming more the kind of fan who happens to display their skills and knowledge through contributing artifacts to a larger fan culture and through other characteristically Otaku practices. Indeed, this is precisely the route that Matt, the co-author of our chapter on AMV remix in the book, took. We came across Matt's anime music video remixes via YouTube, where his "Konoha Memory Book" video at the time had over half a million views (take-down notices unfortunately mean the video is no longer on YouTube). Half a million views is a significant marker of popularity online, and so we interviewed him about his anime music video production process, and his involvement in remixing AMVs. He was 17 years old at the time, and he explained that he'd started creating AMVs two years earlier. It turns out that prior to that, he hadn't been a fan of anime or manga or anything like that at all. What happened was that a mate showed him "Narutrix" (an AMV faux movie trailer parodying the Matrix movies) which got Matt interested in watching the Naruto anime series in particular, and then anime in general. It didn't take him long to start tinkering around with creating his own AMVs, even before he became what could be described a full participant in anime culture. He's subsequently gone on to become such an avid anime fan that not only does he create AMVs which he posts to AMV.org and YouTube, submit AMVs to convention contests (and for which he regularly wins awards), draw his own original manga figures and comics which he posts online at DeviantArt.org, maintain a blog about his anime interests, contribute to anime dicussion boards, write generous reviews of and comments' on others' AMVs, but he spends his weekends cosplaying a rich range of anime characters, and organizes cosplay chess games for different anime conventions as well. He's now--thanks to his initial interest in AMVs as an expressive form in their own right--most definitely an Otaku!
Other ideas arise here, however, which are relevant to questions about the relationships between identity and practices and to ideas and ideals of learning. For example, it may not be that a person learns DIY media practices as an isolated set of skills but, rather, as skills and knowledges and values and mastery of systems and the like as part of becoming a kind of person that just happens not to be a fan. Hence, a person who identifies as the kind of person who practises the ideal of being as self-sufficient as possible might learn a particular skill and knowledge set under this kind of motivation (e.g., knowing how to sew clothes; knowing how to preserve or can home-grown fruit; knowing how to make solar-powered things). Moreover, we often find a paradox associated with self-sufficiency: people who identify with being self-sufficient often are closely linked with like minded people and inter-relate with them, sharing points of view, solidarity, and resources and so on. But they do this under a much more diffuse kind of identity than members of specific affinity groups. When people who are into "self-sufficiency" interact with one another their specific interests and things they create may have little or no overlap whatsoever, other than as expressions of participating in a general ideal of being as self-sufficient as possible.
Alternatively, the kind of audience we have for this book is of people who might want to get some experience of DIY creativity and production as part of how they see themselves becoming a more effective teacher or, perhaps, a more in touch parent. Here again, the skills and knowledge being learned would not be "isolated". They might be a long way, at least initially, from Otaku culture or other avid fan cultures, but, equally, they may not at all be isolated but connected to something that is very important to them. In fact, isolation would actually be very difficult to sustain in the context of learning some digital DIY media. The very process tends to put people very quickly into the realm of affinity spaces and, as Matt's case indicates, from there anything can happen - including the development of full-fledged fan affinities and approximations to Otaku ways of doing and being.
At the same time, there are some important differences and distinctions at stake. One is the difference between a more instrumental orientation to practice and a more intrinsic orientation. There is all the difference in the world between dropping in on a Linux forum to get some help with a problem, leaving feedback, making the information available to others and maybe making a Paypal contribution to an open source software fund, on one hand, and being a full-on contributor who helps code open source software and build the open source movement, on the other. In the first case the relationship is instrumental: minimal participation as a means to an end. In the second, it is intrinsic; one is a devotee of open source ideals and practices and, in effect, becomes a steward of those ideals and practices. Lawrence Eng's classic statement about fanship and stewardship is a supreme expression of the intrinsic orientation that defines many Otaku identities. Explaining why he proactively sought out other fans of Sasami from the Tenchi Muyo anime and developed the Sasami Appreciation Society as an affinity space, Eng said "it's our devotion to Sasami ... we're dedicated to bringing her the fanship that she deserves" (as cited by Mimi Ito). This is activity as an end in itself rather than to some further end. It is done for its own sake, as an expression of devotion, rather than as a means to producing an artifact, getting a reputation, or reaping other personal benefits. These may occur, of course, but they are not the point and purpose of the engagement within an intrinsic orientation. Of course, one can learn an incredible amount along the way, but even this is not the motivation to participate.
There is much that is important and valuable about this kind of orientation and way of being. In many ways it constitutes an ideal of active citizenship - of being committed to building something because one believes in it, and of putting that first, and of dedicating one's activity to contributing to its fullest realisation. At its best, this is what communities of academic practice become, and if we need any reminders of how valuable this ideal can be we need only think of negative examples that are always available of academics who are largely or mainly there for "career prospects", and of the ugliness that can so quickly surface in the form of academic jealousies, back-biting practices, resentment, clique formation and turf battles and so on. Apart from the quality of learning that can occur within bona fide affinity practices, the fact is that there is much of human beauty to be found there: selflessness, promotion of the greater good, humility, stewardship, generosity, reciprocity and so on. Anyone who doesn't think we need as much as we can get of such values has not looked outside in a while.
This said, however, it is worth making a couple of cautionary observations about the "structure" of participation and learning within affinity spaces. While we have identified the qualities of stewardship, humility, commitment to a greater (assumed) good, and the priority of intrinsic worth to fan practices, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that humans can be(come) fans of anything, and for these qualities to remain intact and yet, potentially, have regrettable consequences. While becoming a fan of many popular culture practices and icons, as with becoming a fan of environmental science, or mathematics, or democracy might typically be expected to have more or less benign and positive outcomes, the same might not apply to becoming a fan of the Third Reich or Pol Pot or any number of contemporary examples that could be named, where people do in fact become fans (although "bad" fans are often called, fanatics), and do pursue intrinsic goods (as they see them), practice stewardship, collaborate, share, put other people and ideals before themselves and so on. To be a fan has no limits so far as objects of affinity are concerned, and while we may limit the word "Otaku" to some specific range of fanships it may be more difficult to so limit the general concept and its deep grammar. Hence, the "good" of displaying skills and knowledge through contributing to a larger (fan) culture will always be to some extent contingent.
A related point here concerns the structure of learning within practice affinities or, as they are often called, communities of practice. The New Work Order (1996) argues that communities of practice seed values without these values needing some apparent central controlling agency to insist upon them or maintain them: "Immersion into a community of practice [an affinity] can allow individuals or units to internalize values and goals - often without a great deal of negotiation or conscious reflection and without the exercise of very much top-down authority" (p. 65). Participants collaborate, participate, share, reciprocate, "scaffold" and support, for all they are worth, and the net effect of this is building the practice and the community. But it does not necessarily transcend what Kevin Harris (1979), many years ago, referred to as "supportive rhetoric". It can, and usually does, support critical scrutiny that is internal to the practice/community, but at the same time this critique insulates participants against possibilities of external critique. The more a person invests in an affinity the less space there is for countenancing alternatives. The learning is, to be sure, often "deep," and deeply social. But "learning works best - it is most enculturating, but (alas) also most indoctrinating - when it is done inside the social practices of a Discourse" such as a fan affinity practice (New Work Order p. 15). It is not for nothing that many "fast capitalist" enterprises have encouraged the development of fandoms around their products, seeding the core values and leaving it to fan collaboration, participation and celebration to build the community (and the profits).
For us, the important thing is trying to keep the baby with the bathwater, in the sense of encouraging multiple fandoms - memberships of multiple affinities - and multiple orders of affinities, such that we strive for Otaku-like membership of practices that embrace intrinsic ends linked to distribution of material social goods as well as to pleasures. Becoming fans of understanding how social practices work for better and for worse so far as contributing materially to promoting long-term human good is concerned seems to us to be of the utmost importance.
Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research examines new literacy practices across a broad range of contexts. She is joint editor, with Colin Lankshear, of DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. They have also jointly edited A New Literacies Sampler and Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.
Colin Lankshear is an Adjunct Professor of Education at McGill University in Montreal, and James Cook University, in Cairns, Australia. His research interest is in sociocultural studies of literacy practices and new technologies. He is joint author, with Michele Knobel, of The Handbook for Teacher Research and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning.
May 26, 2010
What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part One)
Last time, I shared a chunk from my afterword for DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. There's plenty more where that came from, including a report on some of the core insights from our "Reading in a Participatory Culture" initiative.
Over the next few installments, I am sharing an extensive and substantive interview with Colin Landkshear and Michele Knobel, the two editors of that book, which digs deep into the implications of DIY culture for contemporary education. Lankshear and Knobel are legends in the space of new media literacies, having authored or edited a series of first rate books, which explore how education is and should be responding to shifts in public access to the means of cultural production. I draw heavily on their collections and on their personal writings when I teach my New Media Literacies class at USC. One reason I feel such kinship with this dynamic duo is that they often ground their considerations of the nature of literacy and the purpose of learning through reference to field work they have done on Anime fans and their video production practices.
Like their other books, DIY Media brings together young and established writers looking at a range of digital media practices; this book is especially targeted at educators who want to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty mucking about with media. In some ways, this is a "How to" book explaining how to make podcasts or edit vids; in some ways it is a "why to" book explaining why these alternative media practices will change our understanding of what it means to be literate. The essays move from pragmatic advice to theoretical ruminations without ever missing a beat and will be incredibly useful to educators struggling to find their footing in these unfamiliar spaces.
In this opening installment, Lankshear and Knobel will explain some of the core premises which shaped the project. As you will see, we do not always agree, but we arrive at what I see as complimentary positions. One reason why I reproduced a chunk from my essay yesterday was to allow you to better understand the points of debate which emerge in the passages that follow.
What is the DIY Media book about?
It's an edited collection, and is an eclectic sampling of do-it-yourself media practices under current conditions of digital technologies and people's ideas about how these technologies can be used within everyday life, and how experience with engaging in such practices might help contribute to enhancing formal education. The authors address music remix, podcasting, photoshopping and photosharing, machinima movie making, stop-motion and flash animation, and anime music video practices. Each chapter begins by talking a little about cultural aspects of the practice it's addressing, and then provides a brief "tutorial" on how to get started technically and socially in that practice, before discussing some educational connections and implications.
The book is "eclectic" partly in the sense that it covers quite a spread of media practices. But it's also eclectic in terms of how "DIY media" is understood. In your Afterword for the book, Henry, you suggest a distinction between DIY/Do-It-Yourself and DIO/Do-It-Ourselves (or DIT/Do-It-Together) to reflect varying degrees of engagement in participatory culture, as you and colleagues so usefully have conceived it. So, at one pole, the concept of DIY media might involve an individual using the generous affordances of the internet (as well as drawing on face-to-face and offline resources) to learn how to create a music video or a stop-motion animation artifact, and to then get on with creating it. This might involve quite minimal participation in affinity spaces - let's say, acknowledging support given by others and reciprocating by making one's own knowledge available to others and, perhaps, posting the animation online. At the other pole, a full-blown DIO/DIT media practice as a full expression of participatory culture involves aficionados of a particular interest working together and in deeply collaborative ways to build a rich and deep affinity space - a kind of cultural community - in which the act of creating a particular artifact is not the end in itself but much more a part (and maybe a relatively insignificant part) of contributing to building the affinity. In this sense of DIO media practices, as we see them, a person's commitment to the space can take a number of active forms. They may participate directly in collaborative artifact production and promotion (such as can be found within the machinima community, for example). Just as importantly, a person can devote much of their energies to regularly visiting a site central to the shared affinity or interest, say, Animemusicvideos.org, and viewing recently uploaded videos, and commenting on them; following up favourite videos on YouTube and commenting there, too; following particular anime music video remixers' work across the internet; voting in viewers' choice awards hosted by AMV.org or other online entities; recommending favourite AMVs to friends; physically attending anime music video screenings at comic conventions; watching a wide range of anime in order to better appreciate anime music video remixers' work, and so on. They actually may be relatively little engaged in creating - albeit with input and support of others - their "own" media artifacts, but still be very much participating within this shared, collaborative affinity space.
The contributing authors in DIY Media cover most of this spectrum themselves as DIY media creators, and as editors we think that having a wide spectrum is important, since the main audience for this book is intended to be formal educators (teachers, teacher educators, teacher education students) and, hopefully, some parents/caregivers. For some serious fans it may be too goal-directed and "instrumental," although we hope that fans will read and interact with it because that interchange is essential for getting a sense of how to bridge the gap between the worlds of formal and less formal learning. Indeed, that role is already really nicely begun by your Afterword to the collection
Our own perspective on DIY generally, and DIY media specifically, in terms of our work as educators may be worth spelling out a little here: starting with the "D." All DIY work involves doing: some degree of producing and not merely consuming. There is still plenty of room for consumption, but when we focus on the "D" we are focusing on being producers. We believe this emphasis has particular importance for formal education, precisely because it is so powerfully and deeply immersed in consuming. In his wonderful and important attack on the disempowering effect of disabling professions, Ivan Illich referred to school as the "reproductive organ of the consumer society," and argued that once our imaginations have been "all schooled up" to accept "full time attendance at an obligatory curriculum" as the learning paradigm, people are ready prey for all the other manipulative institutions that dominate our social system and force us to use their services because they are the only ones sanctioned or authorized to "deliver" them. School learning becomes, in effect, consumption of subject knowledge organised into various pre-determined sequences, and with little or no opportunity to learn how to produce that knowledge in the ways that experts do. Instead, the production within schooled learning is pretty much limited to recycling consumed information within standardized essay writing formats or school projects. There is little opportunity for Doing in the sense involved in doing for oneself at any point on the DIY-DIO spectrum, which is based on creating use values for oneself and for others, in accordance with personal goals, interests and purposes.
The operating conditions of schooling increasingly are becoming as consumer-dominated for teachers as they are for learners. Competency benchmarks, standardized assessment protocols and tests, textbooks and resources, curriculum frameworks and reporting mechanisms are presented to teachers, along with batteries of "professional development opportunities" to consume information about how to enact the requirements imposed from above. Many teacher education students quickly catch onto this and are soon asking to be shown how to do this or that step-by-painful-step. In addition, many teachers are not at home with new technologies and are often reluctant to use them, or become anxious when confronted with getting up to speed - which is often "delivered" as a one-off professional development session that accompanies the arrival of some new technology in the school (Smartboards are a classic case of this kind of thing).
So, for us, the "D" in DIY, as we thought about it for the book, is about trying to challenge at least some of this massive emphasis on consumption/being a consumer within the teaching and learning roles found in formal education through the process of encouraging readers to get started in some digital media practices. In the process, readers who are new to these practices can introduce themselves to some of the opportunities for learning and engaging within the kinds of affinity spaces that have evolved around DIY-DIO media practices and that exemplify participatory culture.
As your book notes, the current moment of digital culture reflects a much older tradition of DIY media production. Can you share with us your sense of that history and what specifically digital media has brought to the kinds of DIY media communities being discussed.
Our take on the DIY tradition is quite literal and pragmatic. We note that as a term in popular use, "DIY" really only dates to the 1950s although, of course, the idea of communities of enthusiasts and others with a will to bypass what is produced for them and to produce their own versions for constituencies they identify with is, as you note in your Afterword, very much older. In some of our earliest published work, for instance, we looked at the determined efforts of working class people in early 19th century Britain to establish a press that would help further their pursuit of better economic and social conditions, through organizing en masse to win voting rights, the right to organize their labour in syndicates or unions, and to generate their own material for reading pleasure and edification. Such doing-it-for-themselves media, however, was scarcely an intrinsic pursuit. It was much closer to a matter of necessity, although it was certainly a major exercise in building affinities and affinity spaces.
In this book we are talking about DIY media in terms of digital entertainment and expressive media--animation, live action video, music video, music, spoken voice tracks, other artistic works--produced by everyday people to meet their own goals and personal satisfactions. Often, these goals and satisfactions are associated with fanship in some larger phenomenon and close affiliation with some social group. At the same time it often emerges out of opportunities to tinker with and explore the means for producing a media artifact of one kind or another. DIY media in this sense is very much characterised by people being able to produce their "own" media--whether it be radio-like podcasts, "original" remixed music, animated video shorts, music videos, etc.--by making use of software, hardware and "insider" skills, techniques and knowledge that were previously the domain of highly-trained experts who had access to specialised and typically very expensive media production know-how, resources and spaces.
Our view of DIY runs multiple strands together. One is the idea of a DIY ethic in the sense of being able to do things oneself that are otherwise the preserve of experts or professionals - a kind of self reliance that lends a measure of independence. Another is the idea that, when it needs to be, this "self reliant production" is nonetheless of good quality and standing. Sometimes a "folksy" look and feel is fine and apropos. But at other times a professional feel and finish is sought, and the proficient DIY creator can achieve that (e.g., furniture construction, intricate quilts). A third strand is the idea that for some DIYers a key purpose is to resist corporate, commercial, and consumerist values per se. We note the way in which the punk subculture that emerged in the '70s not only encouraged personal styles of self-presentation, self- expression, and identity work within self publishing, music creation, clothing oneself and making oneself up; it also - through fanzine, and later general zine publication - impacted the ways fans interacted with musicians, and touched bases with other DIY/DIO traditions by providing gateways to access for novices via zines that offered tutorials on a wide range of creative pursuits.
By comparison with your own position on DIO media, Henry, our view takes a shorter historical sweep, and tends to emphasize the use of tools/technologies, techniques and know how, and generating artifacts. We talk quite a bit about getting up to speed on production aspects and quality aspects, via interactions with others who share the same interest. But we do not emphasize the Otaku-like dimensions of the practices to any extent. We recognize them, but do not emphasize or prioritize them here.
What this means is that our sense of what digital technologies have brought to the kinds of media practices and communities being discussed in DIY Media is less "communitarian" and more "functional", "quality-oriented", and "informational" than a full on "participatory culture" approach involves. For example, we talk about the way these new technologies make it possible in principle for everyday people to produce artifacts that have the kind of sophistication that could previously only be obtained via very high cost infrastructure. We talk about the way networked technologies open up rich opportunities for on-demand or just-in-time learning: the idea that "google is your friend" when you need to know something. This includes cultural knowledge about "cool" and "quality" as well as technical knowhow. We talk about DIY media creators often having a good sense of relevant professional standards, although they will not always prioritize these. Sometimes, basic explorations of a new tool or technique are satisfying and sufficient. At other times, posting a video recording online of a friend riding a bike off a pier and into deep water has much more to do with maintaining social relationships within a friendship network than producing an acclaimed artifact. But we highlight the satisfactions and use values that can be gained from tapping the affordances of contemporary tools and (especially online) learning resources to produce professional-like artifacts and resources. Sophisticated tools are augmented by online how-to guides, dedicated open discussion forums where experts and novices alike can participate, help boards and blogs, user-created media content review and comment spaces, and ready access to what are regarded as exemplary models of the media artifact being created. Such resources make many elements of "professional standards" explicit and accessible to the everyday person (e.g., amateur anime music video makers committed to professional standards know that good quality AMVs don't include clips that are subtitled or have different image resolutions from one another, that they avoid clichéd transitions between clips, and so on).
TO BE CONTINUED
Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research examines new literacy practices across a broad range of contexts. She is joint editor, with Colin Lankshear, of DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. They have also jointly edited A New Literacies Sampler and Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.
Colin Lankshear is an Adjunct Professor of Education at McGill University in Montreal, and James Cook University, in Cairns, Australia. His research interest is in sociocultural studies of literacy practices and new technologies. He is joint author, with Michele Knobel, of The Handbook for Teacher Research and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning.
May 24, 2010
Why Participatory Culture Is Not Web 2.0: Some Basic Distinctions
The following is excerpted from the Afterword I wrote for the recently published book, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel's DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. Next time, I will begin an extended interview with the book's editors about their views about DIY Media, Informal Learning, New Media Literacies, and Otaku Culture.
Do It Yourself rarely means Do It Alone. For example, much of what youth learn through game playing emerges from "meta-gaming," the conversations about the game play. Trading advice often forces participants to spell out their core assumptions as more experienced players pass along what they've learned to newcomers. This "meta-gaming" has many of the dimensions of peer-to-peer teaching or "Social Learning." As John Seeley Brown and Richard P. Adler (2008) explain, "social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions."To call this "learning by doing" is too simple, since we will not learn as much if we separate what we are doing -- making a podcast, modding a game, mastering a level -- from the social context in which we are doing it.
I have always felt uncomfortable with the phrase, "Do It Yourself," to label the practices described in this book. "Do It Yourself" is too easy to assimilate back into some vague and comfortable notion of "personal expression" or "individual voice" that Americans can assimilate into long-standing beliefs in "rugged individualism" and "self-reliance." Yet, what may be radical about the DIY ethos is that learning relies on these mutual support networks, creativity is understood as a trait of communities, and expression occurs through collaboration. Given these circumstances, phrases like "Do It Ourselves" or "Do It Together" better capture collective enterprises within networked publics. This is why I am drawn towards concepts such as "participatory culture," (Jenkins et a, 2009l) "Affinity Spaces," (Gee, 2007) "Genres of Participation," (Ito et al, 2009) "networked publics," (Varnelis, 2008) "Collective Intelligence," (Levy, 1999) or "Communities of Practice," (Lave and Wenger, 1991).
While each reflects somewhat different pedalogical models, each captures the sense of a shared space or collective enterprise which shapes the experience of individual participants/learners. Each offers us a model of peer-to-peer education: we learn from each other in the process of working together to achieve shared goals. Many of these models emphasize the diverse roles played by various participants in this process. It is not that all participants know the same things (as has been the expectation in school); success rests on multiple forms of expertise the group can deploy "just in time" responding to shifting circumstances and emerging problems. It is not that all participants do the same things; rather, these practices depend on the ad hoc coordination of diverse skills and actions towards shared interests.
We need to understand the specific practices discussed here as informed by norms and values that emerge from their community of participants. We see different things if we focus on the practices or on the communities that deploy them, and in my remarks here, I hope to shift the lens onto the communities. Focusing on practices first, the editors write in this book's introduction, "Podcasting, for example, involves using particular kinds of tools, techniques and technologies to achieve the goals and purposes that podcasters aim to achieve, and to use them in the ways that people known as podcasters recognize as appropriate to their endeavor in terms of their goals and values." While saying something important about the nature of these practices, this description assumes that the operative identity here is that of the podcaster and that podcasters enjoy a shared identity as parts of a community of practice regardless of the content and functions of their podcasts. And this may be true for some, especially at the moment they are first learning how to podcast or are passing those skills and practices along to others, but for many, podcasting is a means to an end.
OTAKU, FANS, HIP HOPPERS AND GAMERS
On the ground, these practices get embedded in a range of different interest-driven networks and what motivates these activities may be less a desire to make a podcast than an urge to create a shared space where, for example, fans can discuss their mutual interests in Severius Snape or where church members can hold prayer circles or where comic book buffs can interview writers and artists or... The Digital Youth Project (Ito et al) drew a useful distinction between "messing around," tinkering with new tools and techniques to see what they can do, and "geeking out," going deep into a particular interest that may in turn lead you to engage with a range of social networks and production practices. There is some risk that as educators organize class projects around the production of podcasts, they risk divorcing these practices from the larger cultural contexts in which they operate.
We might think about different interest-driven networks as mobilizing somewhat different clusters of interlocking and mutually reinforcing practices. Consider, for example, Mimi Ito's (2005) description of the literacy skills within Otaku culture, the fan community around anime and manga:
"Anime otaku are media connoisseurs, activist prosumers who seek out esoteric content from a far away land and organize their social lives around viewing, interpreting, and remixing these media works. Otaku translate and subtitle all major anime works, they create web sites with hundreds and thousands of members, stay in touch 24/7 on hundreds of IRC channels, and create fan fiction, fan art, and anime music videos that rework the original works into sometimes brilliantly creative and often subversive alternative frames of reference.... To support their media obsessions otaku acquire challenging language skills and media production crafts of scripting, editing, animating, drawing, and writing. And they mobilize socially to create their own communities of interest and working groups to engage in collaborative media production and distribution. Otaku use visual media as their source material for crafting their own identities, and as the coin of the realm for their social networks. Engaging with and reinterpreting professionally produced media is one stepping stone towards critical media analysis and alternative media production."
Certainly, within Otaku culture, one can gain an identity as a fan-subber, a vidder, a fan fiction author, a community organizer, or an illustrator, but these practice-based identities do not supersede one's larger identity as an Otaku.
What Ito observes about Otaku culture is consistent with what researchers have observed in a range of other subcultures. Consider this description from my field work on female-centered science fiction fandom in the early 1990s (Jenkins, 1992):
"Four Quantum Leap fans gather every few weeks in a Madison, Wisconsin apartment to write. The women spread out across the living room, each with their own typewriter or laptop, each working diligently on their own stories about Al and Sam. Two sit at the dining room table, a third sprawls on the floor, a fourth balances her computer on the coffee table. The clatter of the keyboards and the sounds of a filktape are interrupted periodically by conversation. Linda wants to insure that nothing in the program contradicts her speculations about Sam's past. Mary has introduced a southern character and consults Georgia-born Signe for advice about her background. Kate reviews her notes on Riptide, having spent the week rewatching favorite scenes so she can create a 'crossover' story which speculates that Sam may have known Murray during his years at MIT. Mary scrutinizes her collection of 'telepics' (photographs shot from the television image), trying to find the right words to capture the suggestion of a smile that flits across his face....Kate passes around a letter she has received commenting on her recently published fanzine....Each of the group members offers supportive comments on a scene Linda has just finished, all independently expressing glee over a particularly telling line. As the day wears on, writing gives way to conversation, dinner, and the viewing of fan videos (including the one that Mary made a few weeks before)....For the fan observer, there would be nothing particularly remarkable about this encounter. I have spent similar afternoons with other groups of fans, collating and binding zines, telling stories, and debating the backgrounds of favorite characters....For the 'mundane' observer, what is perhaps most striking about this scene is the ease and fluidity with which these fans move from watching a television program to engaging in alternative forms of cultural production: the women are all writing their own stories; Kate edits and publishes her own zines she prints on a photocopy machine she keeps in a spare bedroom and the group helps to assemble them for distribution. Linda and Kate are also fan artists who exhibit and sell their work at conventions; Mary is venturing into fan video making and gives other fans tips on how to shoot better telepics. Almost as striking is how writing becomes a social activity for these fans, functioning simultaneously as a form of personal expression and as a source of collective identity (part of what it means to be a fan). Each of them has something potentially interesting to contribute; the group encourages them to develop their talents fully, taking pride in their accomplishments, be they long-time fan writers and editors like Kate or relative novices like Signe."
At the time, I was interested in what this scene told us about how fans read television and how they deployed its contents as raw materials for their own expressive activities. Rereading the passage today, I am struck by how fully the description captures the strengths of a DIY culture as a site for informal learning. Sometimes the women are working on individual, self-defined projects and sometimes they are working together on mutual projects but always they are drawing moral support from their membership in an interest-driven network. Each plays multiple roles: sometimes the author, sometimes the reader; sometimes the teacher, sometimes the student; sometimes the editor, sometimes the researcher, sometimes the illustrator. They move fluidly from role to role as needed, interupting their own creative activity to lend skills and knowledge to someone else. Their creative interests straddle multiple media practices: they write stories, they take telepics, they edit videos, they publish zines, each of which constitutes a complex cultural practice combining technical skills and cultural expertise. Leadership, as Gee tells us, is "porous": the space is Signe's apartment; Kate is editing the zine to which they are each contributing; and Mary has the expertise in fan video production which she shares with her circle in hopes of getting more of them vidding. And we see here a conception of culture as a series of "processes" rather than a set of "products." Fan work is always open to revision, expansion, and elaboration, rather than locked down and closed off from other's contributions. As a more recent account of fan cultural practices (Busse and Helleckson, 2006) explains:
"Work in progress is a term used in the fan fiction world to describe a piece of fiction still in the process of being written but not yet completed....The appeal of works in progress lies in part in the ways... it invites responses, permits shared authorship, and enjoins a sense of community.....In most cases, the resulting story is part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced...When the story is finally complete and published, likely online but perhaps in print, the work in progress among the creators shifts to the work in progress among the readers."
Similarly, Kevin Driscoll (2009) has discussed how Hip Hop's diverse practices around music, dance, the graphic arts, video production, and entrepreneurship associated with Hip Hop encourage participants to master a range of cultural and technological skills. He describes, for example, the different participatory practices that got mobilized around the circulation of a single song:
"
As the figurehead of 2007's "Crank Dat" phenomenon, Atlanta teenager Soulja Boy exploited social-networking and media-sharing websites to encourage a widespread dance craze that afforded him a level of visibility typically only available to artists working within the pop industry. "Crank Dat" ... began as a single commodity but grew into a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon.... Within just a few months of the first "Crank Dat" music video, fans had posted countless custom revisions of "Crank Dat" to media-sharing sites like YouTube, SoundClick, imeem, and MySpace. In each case, the participants altered the original video in a different manner. They changed the dance steps, altered the lyrics, created new instrumental beats, wore costumes, and performed in groups. Some created remix videos that borrowed footage from popular TV programs and movies...."Crank Dat" welcomed diverse modes of participation but every production required considerable technical expertise. Even a cursory exploration of the various "Crank Dat" iterations available on YouTube provides evidence of many different media production tools and techniques. The most basic homemade dance videos required operation of a video camera, post-production preparation of compressed digital video, and a successful upload to YouTube. For some of the participants in "Crank Dat", the dance craze provided an impetus for their first media projects. This lively media culture is representative of a spirit of innovation that traverses hip-hop history."
As a former classroom teacher who worked with inner city and minority youth, Driscoll directs attention towards the technical proficency of these Hip Hop fans, to challenge assumptions that often position African-American males on the wrong side of the digital divide, assuming that they have limited capacity and interest for entering STEM subjects. Rather, he argues that educators need to better understand the ways that their cultural attachments to Hip Hop often motivate them to embrace new technologies and adopt new cultural practices, many of which could provide gateways into technical expertise.
Or consider what James Paul Gee (2007) tells us about the "affinity spaces" around on-line gaming:
" A portal like AoM [Age of Mythologies] Heaven, and the AoM space as a whole, allows people to achieve status, if they want it (and they may not), in many different ways. Different people can be good at different things or gain repute in a number of different ways. Of course, playing the game well can gain one status, but so can organizing forum parties, putting out guides, working to stop hackers from cheating in the multi-player game, posting to any of a number of different forums, or a great many other things."
Indeed, for Gee, the idea of multiple forms of participation and status are part of what makes these affinity spaces such rich environments for informal learning. Unlike schools, where everyone is expected to do (and be good at) the same things, these participatory cultures allow each person to set their own goals, learn at their own pace, come and go as they please, and yet they are also motivated by the responses of others, often spending more time engaged with the activities because of a sense of responsibility to their guild or fandom. They enable a ballance between self-expression and collaborative learning which may be the sweet spot for DIY learning.
These examples represent four very different communities, each with their own governing assumptions about what it means to participate and about what kinds of cultural practices and identities are meaningful. Yet, all of them embody the pedagogical principles I have identified within participatory culture:
"A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another." (Jenkins et al, 2006)
CHALLENGING THE "LEARNING 2.0" FORMULATION
There has been a growing tendency to describe the application of these participatory culture principles to the classroom as "education 2.0" and as we do so, to take the highly visible corporate "web 2.0" portals not simply as our ideal model, but also as the source for these new participatory practices. Look at the way Brown and Adler's (2008) influential formulation of "Learning 2.0" ascribes agency to corporate platforms and technologies rather than to communities of participants:
"The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people. New kinds of online resources-- such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities-- have allowed people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multple modes of learning."
The DIY ethos, which emerged as a critique of consumer culture and a celebration of making things ourselves, is being transformed into a new form of consumer culture, a product or service that is sold to us by media companies rather than something that emerged from grassroots practices.
For this reason, I want to hold onto a distinction between participatory cultures, which may or may not engaged with commercial portals, and Web 2.0, which refers specifically to a set of commercial practices that seek to capture and harness the creative energies and collective intelligences of their users. "Web 2.0" is not a theory of pedagogy; it's a business model. Unlike projects like Wikipedia that have emerged from nonprofit organizations, the Open Courseware movement from educational institutions, and the Free Software movement from voluntary and unpaid affiliations, the Web 2.0 companies follow a commercial imperative, however much they may also wish to facilitate the needs and interests of their consumer base. The more time we spend interacting with Facebook, YouTube, or Live Journal, the clearer it becomes that there are real gaps between the interests of management and consumers. Academic theorists (Terranova,2004; Green and Jenkins, 2009) have offered cogent critiques of what they describe as the "free labor" provided by those who chose to contribute their time and effort to creating content which can be shared through such sites, while consumers and fans have offered their own blistering responses to shifts in the terms of service which devalue their contributions or claim ownership over the content they produced. Many Web 2.0 sites provide far less scaffolding and mentorship than offered by more grassroots forms of participatory culture. Despite a rhetoric of collaboration and community, they often still conceive of their users as autonomous individuals whose primary relationship is to the company that provides them services and not to each other. There is a real danger in mapping the Web 2.0 business model onto educational practices, thus seeing students as "consumers" rather than "participants" within the educational process.
May 8, 2010
Helping Teachers Learn About New Media Practices (Part Two)
Often, the teaching of the new media literacies is understood as either the domain of a specific digital specialist or as the work of language arts or arts instructors. Yet you offer many examples of how and why this approach should impact other disciplinary domains. Why should these skills and knowledge be integrated across the curriculum?
Erin:
If you look at these three words, New + Media + Literacies ...there are different ways to interpret them. You could read it as "New Media" Literacies or "New" Media Literacies. Either way, there is no wrong answer.
"New" Media Literacies does build upon the media literacy movement where we move from being empowered by media to critically analyze the media we consume through asking important reflective questions to now being producers of media ourselves. And in this new role as producer, there are new questions to ask and new ways to think and act on how to be an integral part of shaping and contributing my perception of the world.
But also, "New Media" Literacies is a new form of literacy and helps teachers understand that our students are reading and writing in new ways. Reading and writing was once relegated to reading books and writing papers, but now we write into meaning through new media such as video, audio or even construction of physical objects.
A possible hypothesis is that the educational system has not caught up with the shifting landscape of participatory culture where there are new ways to read, write, and compute numbers.
PAST PRESENT
Reading a Book Reading a Transmedia Story
Writing Alone Networked Writing
Memorizing Formulas Gaming as Problem Solving
This shift changes the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement where creativity and active participation are the hallmark. And it makes it increasingly important to understand and be competent in the skills of citizenship, art, and expression of social connectivity. These are the skills identified in our white paper as the New Media Literacies and ones we need to foster as we think about education.
We are in a paradigm shift in the classroom where educators need to work in the gap between life and school. You only have to observe your students outside of the classroom for a few hours to see that they are immersed in this digital culture. This is not a "special treat if they're good" sort of immersion but a complete shift. It's their way of life. Incorporating participatory practices into the classroom -- such as remixing, Wikipedia, SNS, or even mobile -- allows for a blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning and harnesses the power of digital technologies for students to reflect on the participatory culture that they live in.
This provides teachers an opportunity to offer learning objectives in their classrooms in a new way, while at the same time offering students opportunities to read and write their cultural practices that are central to their own everyday experience.
You point to a kind of generation gap around Wikipedia where students love it and teachers are wary. What do you see as meaningful steps forward in addressing these different perceptions of the value of Wikipedia? Are there examples of teachers who are effectively integrating Wikipedia into their teaching?
Jessica:
A first step is for our educational community to view Wikipedia as a collaborative learning environment. At first glance Wikipedia is perceived as simply an online encyclopedia--it's a product. Our community should look beyond the surface and focus on Wikipedia as a venue for contributing, editing and the sharing of one's expertise. For me, educators can learn a lot by creating low-risk environments in which making mistakes and struggling to come to an answer are the norm. Although someone can delete my additions to a Wikipedia entry, I can engage in a conversation around why this happened. I am part of a larger discussion around the creation and sharing of knowledge rather than being told I am incorrect and here is the right answer. Engaging a student can depend on whether or not she believes her input matters. Yet an engaged student must also be open to negotiation, revision, and change as these are inherent to the learning process. I learn from my mistakes just as I learn from my accomplishments.
I also think that Wikipedia should not be banned in schools (although there are issues of determining the appropriateness of content). I think it is an excellent starting point for research--as long as both teachers and students understand its strengths and weaknesses. And this means that all teachers need to teach what it means to research something in their disciplines. The act of researching is an act of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and assessing information as well as its source. These skills are vital to our digital media age and get at the heart of bias, perspective, objectivity/subjectivity.
Erin:
The first meaningful step to recommend is for school administrators and teachers to better understand Wikipedia's practice and the importance of the new media literacies that are gained in its practice.
Wikipedia was a predominant activity we encouraged in NML's pilot studies last year. However, this activity had numerous road-blocks. We had one teacher comment, "When I've looked at pages in Wikipedia, I've found that some are not very accurate or complete. I'll use it in my classroom, when they go in and fix it." This shows that we need to help teachers understand that "they" is the community of users and that community could include the teacher and her students. We also found that Wikipedia was often blocked at the schools we piloted our resources in, and had to go to measures to get it unblocked in order to use it for the class period.
One of the most valuable segments of Wikipedia's use was observing Global Kids' Media Masters program create the Prospect Heights Campus Wikipedia Project, which spanned five weeks. The Wikipedia page about the Prospect Heights Campus was a place for students to document information about the campus, its schools, history, and whatever else the students decided was important to include in an entry - and a place for them to do so publicly and neutrally. There are many examples of a structured learning environment of wikis or wiki pages being created; however, Global Kids chose to use Wikipedia and not develop a pbwiki or something similar for just their group of students to view.
Trying to replicate Wikipedia through pbwiki, or some other wiki software, certainly has its benefits. It is what might be termed a "walled garden" approach, allowing students to tinker with wiki software and yet not be exposed to the potentially disruptive larger Internet. However, choosing a walled garden approach also has many costs. Students who already use the internet know very well what is actually "out there," and the walled garden runs the risk of losing their interest - because, after all, a walled garden isn't the "real world." Even if students are unfamiliar with the Internet, using a walled garden approach precludes the possibility of emergent learning.
If a teacher develops a project in a walled garden, that is where it stays. It cannot become part of the information ecology of the web, and students cannot thereby learn about community participation. Nor can they be convinced that their work has any greater significance than "something I had to do to get a grade." They know very well that their work will never receive any attention from people who are not in their class.
In Global Kids' Media Masters class, however, the students were energized by the knowledge that 1) they were filling a real need on Wikipedia, and 2) their work was going to become part of the great online knowledge base. The students prepared their page, but when it came time to copy and paste it into Wikipedia, they were nervous, excited, and thrilled. The act of pushing the "submit" button - that is, the act of submitting their classwork to their teacher - was suddenly pregnant with significance. They weren't just turning in homework. They were putting themselves out there and helping shape the way the public would see their high school - would see them.
You make a strong case for the value of remix practices for learning, yet many teachers are stuck back at square one, expressing concerns about plagerism and wondering whether remix really does foster creativity. How can you speak to this long-standing concern of educators? Are they wrong to worry about issues of ownership and authorship in the new digital age or are there important differences between remix and plagerism?
Erin:
Right now, technology, new social norms and economics are all going through radical change and history has shown that at this point of convergence, moral structures break down and need to be re-built (E. P. Thompson).
It's a known fact that probably every teacher reading this has seen in the classroom a form of plagiarism facilitated by digital media. Existing laws on copyright may not match social norms and this crossroads is predicated even more with the rise of remix culture and the ability to meaningfully sample content and create new pieces of work. Shephard Fairey's Hope poster of Barack Obama is a perfect example of one of the most powerful images ever created that captured the moment of political change being foreground now with the legal battle of messiness where people are taking sides as to where they stand on Fair Use. Even artists are at a crossroads.
Through all of this though - teens are still remixing. You only have to go to YouTube to see the latest remix posted. Should we leave our students alone to wade through this muckiness themselves or is it our responsibility to mentor them in their process?
Encouraging remix in the classroom provides new venues of learning and interacting with our students. Teachers can guide youth to better reflect on these new forms of creation and know the difference between plagiarism and appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content. We can help students to support their argument for their creative expression and identify other works that inspired them during their process. We can provide opportunities to explore how we author new creations with regards to point of view, character, themes, etc. and give practice to understanding copyright protection and a broader sense of authorial responsibility.
So yes, there is concern for this but the question to ask yourself is, "Are you going to blame new media as the problem or are you going to look to it as a possible solution?" Perhaps this moment in history gives us pause to rethink what are the projects we ask of our students to do? Is an essay the only way your learning objective can be met? Are their other creative practices that provide new forms of reflection and learning?
Your book's contributors involve both academic researchers and practicing educators. What do you see as the most important points or contact or divergence between the ways these two contributors approached the concerns the book raises?
Jessica:
Classroom teachers are often voicing their concerns about a lack of opportunity to sit down with their colleagues and discuss important issues; time is not allocated for them to be part of a learning community. I have had similar experiences as a professor in academia. In both realms, there is a tendency to work extremely hard in isolation. My hope is that this book can serve as a conduit for academic researchers and practicing educators to talk about their findings, their experiences, and their hopes for new and different teaching and learning environments. We must remember that there is always something to learn about our disciplines by looking outside of them.
What I find wonderful about the contributors to the book is that researchers like danah boyd would welcome an opportunity to sit down with classroom teachers and talk about the ethics of social networks and what it means to be part of a network, just as English teacher Amy Crawford would jump at a chance to talk to researchers about her students as textual borrowers--as remixers and media makers in her classroom. There are many points of interest here and, to be frank, we must be open to these kinds of trans-academic connections and discussions because we need each other as allies to move forward in rethinking learning, literacy, and technology integration.
Much of the book tries to help teachers overcome their anxieties about working with new media technologies and practices. So, let me ask, which concerns do you think are valid? Where should teachers and schools go slowly in embracing these new media?
Maryanne:
With regard to embracing technology, I think that teachers need think through the consequences of implementing any innovation. For example if a teacher hosts a blog where students post satiric pieces about the school, the administration might feel that some of the postings conflict with the image of the school they wish to project to the community. In any social network there are going to be "in-house" jokes that might puzzle or even offend outsiders. Teachers need to take a clear look at new media practices and consider how they will change when they are employed in school settings. With the ability to broadcast thoughts, ideas and products, also comes the responsibility for considering who the audience will be and how they might respond.
Any time a teacher is asking students to perform activities in a virtual environment, be it posting on a website, or interacting in an immersive setting, she must consider her duties to guide, protect and mentor her students. Teacher need to think the way they do when they take students on field trips and make clear guidelines regarding their expectations. It is not foolish to be cautious; it would only be foolish to miss out on incredible opportunities for learning simply because teachers were not willing to plan and prepare for the excursion.
Jessica:
Technology can be a scary proposition for some teachers. For both novice and veteran technology users, integrating this element into their curriculum and feeling the need to be knowledgeable can be intimidating and anxiety inducing. Additionally, teachers rarely have time to pursue their own professional development (e.g. PD that isn't mandated by the school/district), which would allow them to bring something new to their curriculum. The anxiety comes from feeling like there is too much technology to learn, too little time to learn it, and not enough of the right support from employers to really grapple with it. One option is to utilize the knowledge of the classroom: no one knows everything about technology so who knows how to do what? Is there an opportunity for students, parents, or community members to step up in a technological role? Even though this shift in thinking may challenge our notions of authority and expertise within a classroom, it opens up the possibility to create a community of learners made up of both teachers and students working toward a common goal.
Since we know that time and anxiety are key issues for teachers, then let's change the culture of professional development: let's view PD not as a one-day affair with an "expert" but as an ongoing project with a group of educators dedicated to learning, creating, discussing, experimenting, and reflecting on their philosophy of technology and its integration.
You have created this book to spark conversations with teachers. What steps have you taken to continue this dialogue once the book is published?
Jessica:
It seemed illogical to invite classroom teachers to join a discussion without offering an online space to help promote and nurture such a discussion. I created this social network (http://teachingtechsavvykids.com) in the hopes that both researchers and practicing educators could connect and discuss issues important to them as well as the issues the book addresses. I view the site as a way to collaborate, share stories of hope, frustration, and change, and tackle some of the tough questions of this profound moment. Ann Lauriks, a middle school counselor who contributed to the book, has already promised to write another piece to share with the new online community. In addition, some of the researchers who contributed to the book along with other colleagues have expressed interest in sharing their ideas and personal experiences within this space. I am excited to see the enthusiasm and ongoing commitment to continue this discussion and collaboration and I hope all educators will feel inclined to participate.
Maryanne Berry enjoys a high school teaching career that has spanned a
quarter of a century. The longer she teaches, the more fascinated she
becomes with the ways young people learn. She is currently a doctoral
candidate in the Graduate School of Education at U.C. Berkeley
Phil Halpern is the lead teacher of Communication Arts and Sciences, a
small school within Berkeley High School, where he teaches a variety of
English and communications classes. He traces his interest in media
education to the weekly television news program he helped produce while in
high school back in the earliest days of videotape.
Erin B. Reilly is the research director for Project New Media Literacies
first at MIT and now at USC. She is a recognized expert in the design and
development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered
by virtual learning and new media applications, known best for her work
with women and girls in Zoey's Room.
Jessica K. Parker is currently an assistant professor at Sonoma State
University, and she studies how secondary schools integrate multimedia
literacy into academic literacy learning. She has taught middle school,
high school, and college students for over a decade and has also created
and taught professional development courses for teachers.
May 5, 2010
Helping Teachers Learn About New Media Practices (Part One)
Jessica K. Parker's new book, Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom, Grades 5-12 manages to be visionary and pragmatic in equal measures. Drawing heavily on the work done by researchers affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiatives, especially the Digital Youth Project, the book offers educators, especially classroom teachers, new ways of understanding young people's online lives and how the resources of new media and participatory culture can be effectively integrated into their pedagogical practices. The book brings together smart people -- researchers, classroom teachers alike -- to talk through the implications of our present moment of media changes on the kinds of learning which are taking place in school. The authors move deftly from considering the big picture to explaining specific activities which might be deployed in the classroom. I was proud to see some discussion of the work we've been doing through Project New Media Literacies sprinkled throughout the book and not simply because our Research Director, Erin Reilly, has contributed an essay on learning through remixing.
I am using the release of the book this week as an excuse to bring together several key contributors to the volume, including Reilly and the book's editor Parker, for a conversation about the ways that this new research is challenging some of the assumptions that govern how teachers and administrators often respond to the potentials of new media and learning. And while you are at it, check out this rich website developed to provide teachers with resources around the book.
Can you give me a sense of your goals for this book? In some ways, it is translating or popularizing insights from the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning research for an audience of teachers. What do you see as the value of this research for impacting the decisions which teachers make everyday in the classroom, given, as you note, the primary focus of this research was on informal learning outside the classroom?
Jessica:
With this book, I wanted to invite educators, specifically classroom teachers, into this larger discussion of digital media and learning (DML). I felt that if I wrote a book for teachers my invitation needed to connote, "I trust you. Here is something that I want to share with you. I value your opinion and your insights." In the DML community, there is a sense that this current moment is a defining one. It is a profound moment. And I don't think my collective academic community has reached out enough to classroom teachers to say, "Join us in this moment." Join us--even though we may exist as researchers, educators, and mentors in different learning environments--join us as we analyze these important educational concepts and discuss how learning, literacy and knowledge creation and sharing are changing. Changing the culture of learning within schools starts with teachers.
I wanted to share this research with classroom teachers and listen to their responses. And yet, I realize that the book that I created with 28 collaborators will force educators to shift their perspective of learning by going beyond a normative understanding of formal education. I don't think this discussion will be an easy one: in fact, this book might take readers out of their comfort zones. And that is why it was important for me to "invite" teachers into this discussion. We desperately need this kind of philosophical discussion. In order to do this, I followed in the footsteps of the MacArthur Foundation and wrote a book that focuses on "learning" rather than "education" or "schooling." We must take a different angle on learning in order to see beyond the constraints of our own educational system.
I also wanted to avoid framing the book as a teacher's guide with a focus on one single subject with cut-and-paste activities for the classroom. This kind of thinking seems to promote an educational system devoid of curricular connections and deep participatory learning, and lacks application to everyday life. I framed the book as a philosophical discussion regarding learning in the 21st century in the hopes that we could take a step back from the everyday realities of the classroom and reflect on what it means to be an educator in these changing times. I know too well the teacher-mode of the treadmill, where from August to June I would run from unit to unit and chapter to chapter and miss making connections between topics, across disciplines or even daily lessons. We need to stop running on our treadmills and start asking serious questions about what it means to learn, to be literate, and to know something in a mediated culture.
In terms of the value of the research from the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative, it is an excellent opportunity for teachers to explore pioneering research in this emerging field. Additionally, I don't buy into the notion that informal learning and formal learning are completely separate entities that have no bearing on another. I realize that they usually exist in separate settings and have different properties, but as a teacher and a learner, I have always viewed them as fluid. I don't want to draw a line in the sand and promote one over the other or frame our discussions as an either/or issue; in fact, I advocate that we should learn, reflect on, and analyze both settings. This can only make us better teachers and--most importantly--better learners.
You frame the book around issues of what learning, literacy, and knowledge mean in the 21st century. While it is clear you want educators to continue to ponder these issues, you also clearly have some thoughts that guide this book towards certain answers. What do you know about these concepts at the end of the process of writing this book that you did not know before?
Jessica:
In my current work with pre-service and in-service teachers in Northern California, when I introduce the topic of reassessing learning, literacy and knowledge, it takes more than just reading research to unpack these issues. It takes more than just having a class discussion; it takes more than just testing out an idea in their own classroom. Analyzing and re-visioning these core educational concepts takes a lot of effort and it is really a combination of factors that allow teachers to really grapple with these topics: reading, discussing, experimenting and testing out ideas in their classrooms, and then coming back to our graduate class and reflecting and getting feedback from peers. This is a process that needs to be woven into the daily life of teachers--and it's hard to create time and space to accomplish this. We have to know ourselves as teachers and be willing to analyze our own philosophies of education. It's not an easy road to take but it is required if we are to rethink school-based learning.
Many teachers fear that new media practices -- such as texting - leave students less literate. Yet, your book challenges this presumption. How do you see new media practices changing the range of expressive opportunities available to students?
Maryanne:
With regard to new media practices making youth less literate, it's a version of an old argument that surfaces every time there's a new wave of practice. Each new wave of media practices encounters resistance. Literary scholar, Nina Baym (2006), chronicles magazine and journal articles from the early 1800's in which editors asserted the need for reviewers to exercise surveillance and provide direction to the newly literate masses who had taken up the habit of reading fiction. Novels were dangerous! There was a similar kind of backlash in response to comic books. If anyone had taken that criticism seriously we would never have the incredible array of graphic novels we enjoy today.
As Henry Jenkins has pointed out, the critical change in the latest of the new literacies is that of convergence. The problem with "either/or" thinking with regard to traditional and digital literacy is that it fails to capture the experiences of youth. The child who is reading a novel from a traditional text, or listening to it on her ipod, downloading it onto her e-book, and visiting a website where she can play a game as a character from the book, participate in a forum discussion, and answer challenge questions, is transforming the practices of reading and writing. The sad fact is that she is not allowed to bring her e-book to school, even though some of her classmates wear outfits that cost more than her Kindle. She only sees a computer when her teacher beats out the thirty other teachers attempting to sign-up for the school's only computer lab on Wednesday, after lunch. Though at home she rarely writes with a pen, during the school day it is the only tool she is allowed to use in most of her classes. Even her cell phone must be kept in her locker or it will be confiscated.
Phil:
Students express themselves through a variety of media. Kids are writing independently more now than they have since I started teaching in1992. What is new is the range of digital communication modalities that kids are adopting with zeal and creativity. That they are doing so using communication tools that are new to all of us and somewhat foreign to many teachers is immaterial. They are practicing the skills we teachers value on a daily basis. When teachers build on students' passion, they are capitalizing on an opportunity to help kids deepen both their use of communication tools and their understanding of (hopefully) relevant course content.
You note that teachers often want to be told how they can use specific technologies in their classes. But you argue that this is not an adequate approach to the potentials and challenges of new media. Explain.
Erin:
When technology was first being used in the classroom, everyone involved in the process (from the developers to the school administrators, to the teachers working with the students) tried to replicate one to one what was already happening in the classroom. But we learned that this is the wrong approach. Integrating technology into the classroom provides new practices and scenarios that don't exist when technology is not there.
On top of that, technology moves at such a rapid pace that to introduce teachers to specific technologies to use in the classroom would be doing them an injustice in better understanding how to incorporate new practices in the classroom. If teachers only learned how to use specific types of tools, they would not be prepared to adapt and negotiate new spaces and new innovations that continuously happen in this rich media landscape.
No one technology is the savior for the classroom. It's not about asking ourselves what technology should I be using but instead we should be asking ourselves, "What practices enable my learning objectives?" This shift in question will encourage teachers to not be betrothed to a tool but instead encourage acquiring the new ways of thinking and doing through participating in new forms of practices.
New Media Literacies (NML) is working with the state of New Hampshire on a project called the Early Adopters' Network. This is a group of teachers from schools across New Hampshire who we collaborate with through NML's Community to better understand our pedagogical approach and try new methods and tools to increase collaboration among educators. One of the participating New Hampshire educators recently wrote us a reflection on her experience, "No longer am I looking to transfer some tech skill for use of an application but facilitating thoughts and skills through them. It's funny, because I always thought I did this, but the reality was my model basically encouraged to seek support from a classmate. The activities and lessons themselves were not thought-provoking or designed to encourage collaboration."
Though I don't endorse teaching teachers specific technologies, I think its important to provide ample time during each week to play. Play is one of the new media literacies, and we define it as the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving. What about setting up a digital tool playground for your school as part of your teachers' professional development and as a way for students to share their expertise with the adults in their lives? This would provide a new space for teachers and students to come together wearing different hats than what we see in the classroom. In an unstructured format, this digital playground would allow teachers and students to collaborate in new ways and make visible the value of the different expertise available right in their own school.
This is messiness at its best where teachers and students struggle together to better understand the social and cultural competencies and in a place where one isn't judged on outcome but on participation, teachers and students would have time to practice and reflect on what it means to be part of this networked world.
Jessica:
To reinforce what Erin said it isn't as easy as insert technology, out comes student learning. The excitement, sleekness, and allure of contemporary technology should not suggest that educators only have to incorporate laptops and webcams into their classrooms for students to magically acquire technical skills and understand academic concepts. We need an educational mindset that views technology as more than a mere tool--using technology in a classroom is in fact an application of a philosophy of learning. It is possible to incorporate digital media in a way that simply reproduces a particular kind of knowledge, a static notion of student identity, and a rigid understanding of teacher-student relationships. Viewing technology as both a philosophical issue and pedagogical practice offers teachers a way to avoid an overly deterministic approach to integrating technology.
Maryanne:
As a classroom teacher myself, I do not think that teachers want "canned" products that they can only employ in a particular way. Rather, they want tools and environments that can be used to extend and support the worlds they are creating in their classrooms. Excellent teaching involves a degree of risk and sadly today there are many constraints on teachers that keep them from trying anything new. Being too cautious can cause a teacher to miss the wave of enthusiasm that can generate real engagement in learning. I think that teachers need to look at how students use particular tools, how they participate in particular practices, how they act in particular virtual environments and then ask themselves, 'how can I use this to forward the subject I teach?'
I saw how much my students enjoyed instant messaging when it first became available to them and so I devised a project through which students used IM to discuss literature. The point is to try and play with the forms, bend the rules to serve learning in school. I made strict guidelines about IM-ing. I didn't want the conversations to be superficial. Students had to support their ideas with quotes from the text. There is a way of balancing the excitement of a new practice with the rigor demanded by a particular discipline.
With regard to specific uses of technology in classrooms we should be wary of practices that standardize student investigation and expression of knowledge. What the five-paragraph essay has done for writing, the powerpoint has done for presentations. Standardization of practices kills innovation as well as what we used to call "voice" in writing. While we want to introduce practices that help students organize their thinking, we also want to ensure that students will have opportunities to exercise agency in their own educations. I worry about this with regard to virtual worlds. Quests and adventures could be very exciting narratives through which students might learn all kinds of subjects, but there also needs to be studios and stages, places where young people can determine how to use the environments.
After an initial surge of interest, many schools have started to dismiss virtual worlds such as Second Life as potential distractions from the learning process. What was missed in this first wave of experimentation with virtual worlds for education? How valuable are such immersive experiences for learning? Which educational groups have been most effective at deploying virtual worlds?
Maryanne:
Of the reading I've done, the most interesting work has been in the field of medicine, not only with technical training but through experiments with virtual patients. Studies indicate that pre-service health care professionals respond to virtual patients as they would to actual ones--they have physical responses of anxiety and empathy when interacting with virtual patients.
With regard to virtual worlds, I think we will learn important lessons from Second Life. Before the recession there were 50+ virtual worlds emerging. I'm hopeful that we'll see lots of innovation in the development of immersive environments. What I envision happening is that schools and perhaps individual teachers will have access to virtual environments that they will be able to customize for their own uses. In the meantime, teachers should investigate virtual environments of all kinds, but especially immersive ones in order to experience how their literacy practices change when one dons an avatar. In Second Life, a teacher could join the very large and active education group and participate in virtual conferences and programs, in order to familiarize themselves with the possibilities. Teachers can visit http://simteach.com to get started.
Maryanne Berry enjoys a high school teaching career that has spanned a
quarter of a century. The longer she teaches, the more fascinated she
becomes with the ways young people learn. She is currently a doctoral
candidate in the Graduate School of Education at U.C. Berkeley
Phil Halpern is the lead teacher of Communication Arts and Sciences, a
small school within Berkeley High School, where he teaches a variety of
English and communications classes. He traces his interest in media
education to the weekly television news program he helped produce while in
high school back in the earliest days of videotape.
Erin B. Reilly is the research director for Project New Media Literacies
first at MIT and now at USC. She is a recognized expert in the design and
development of thought-provoking and engaging educational content powered
by virtual learning and new media applications, known best for her work
with women and girls in Zoey's Room.
Jessica K. Parker is currently an assistant professor at Sonoma State
University, and she studies how secondary schools integrate multimedia
literacy into academic literacy learning. She has taught middle school,
high school, and college students for over a decade and has also created
and taught professional development courses for teachers.
April 19, 2010
Thinkers Welcome: New Resources on Participatory Culture and Learning
Today, I want to flag for you some exciting online resources which emerged from two conferences on new media and education which I attended and participated in earlier this semester. The first is the TEDxNYED conference, which brought together some of the top thinkers about new technology, learning, and civic media, for an intensive one day session. Speakers included Amy Bruckman, Andy Carvin, Jeff Jarvis, Neeru Khosla, Lawrence Lessig, Jay Rosen, George Siemens, Mike Wesch, David Wiley, and others. There was something about speaking as part of an "A-Team" of speakers -- you bring your best work to the game -- and so each talk was surprising, engaging, informative, and mind-blowing. The TED podcasts are all gems and you can see this set of talks here. They just went up over the weekend.
Since this is my blog, I am claiming the right to post my own video here. This talk emerged from some of the work I've launched since coming to USC on participatory culture and the public sphere. I've assembled a team of wickedly smart PhD candidates from Annenberg and the Cinema School who meet with me every week to try to identify and interprete case studies where our involvements as fans and gamers spill over into forms of public advocacy and activism. I've already showcased some of this work on the blog in the past and you will be seeing more in the months ahead.
As for the other podcasts, I wanted to flag two in particular which were of special interest to me because they represent the voices of classroom teachers who are trying to translate the abstract insights about new media and learning into day to day interactions with students on the ground. Chris Lehmann is the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia and Dan Meyer teaches high school math outside of Santa Cruz, California. Whenever academics gather to talk about education, there's some tendency to knock teachers. Or at least teachers become "collateral damage" in our critiques of educational institutions and practices, as if they were simply agents of the structures in which they serve. Yet, in fact, there are many greater teachers, librarians, and other educators out there who "get it," who have a grasp of the significance of the cultural and technological changes we are describing, and why they matter to young people. It was great to see their voices represented at the TEDx conference and I am happy to share those talks here.
I was honored to be asked to be the Conference Chair for the first MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Conference and to be able to propose "Diversifying Participation" as the main theme for the event. Diversifying Participation brought together several hundred educators, scholars, activists, community leaders, and journalists to share their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities participatory culture represents in the lives of young people. Our goal was in part to push the entire DML community to grapple more directly with the importance of enabling and promoting diversity within participatory culture. The plenary sessions of the conference have also recently been posted on line and may give you some sense of the event if you were unable to attend.
Closing Keynote: "Youthful Participation - what have we learned, what shall we ask next?" Sonia Livingstone
Closing Remarks: Henry Jenkins
By the way, I've gotten some questions about my discussion of 19th century zine publishing. My key source is: Paula Petrik. "The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1870-1886," in Elliot West and Paula Petrik (eds.) Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. (Kansas City: U of Kansas P, 1992)
Finally, for those of you who heard about the great webinar which Project New Media Literacies ran last week on Collective Intelligence and Education, you can listen to a recording here. We will be running monthly events through the summer centered on the different skills identified in my MacArthur white paper. You should join us for some of the future sessions. It's a great way for us to engage with educators -- both classroom teachers and teachers in training -- who want to integrate the new media literacies into their pedagogical practice.
April 7, 2010
The Struggle Over What Gets Taught in Texas: An Interview with Rebecca Bell-Meterau
Like many of you, I have been reading with some horror about the culture war which has been taking place down in Texas over the revision of their social science standards, especially because Texas remains a key influence on national curriculum and textbook development. A group of highly reactionary candidates have gotten elected to the school board there, in some cases in races where they ran without opposition and where voters had limited access to information about their views, with the result that they are striping aside anything from the standards that may run afoul of their narrow ideological perspective. Even readers who have expressed concerns in the past about "political correctness" in American education probably are not happy at the thought that Thomas Jefferson no longer has a place in Texas schools.
Enter Rebecca Bell-Meterau, a media scholar from Texas State University, who has decided to run for the Texas School Board in order to provide a corrective to these reactionary trends. In the interview which follows, she shares her own story of how and why she got into this race. You have to admire her courage, intelligence, and civic responsibility, since I know very few academics in our field who have ever sought elective office, let alone who would be willing to engage under such trying circumstances. It's sad to think how novel the concept of an educator running for the school board has become! She can use our support -- moral or otherwise -- as she gets ready for this tough race.
You are a university professor who is running for the Texas Board of Education. Can you share some of your academic interests?
I began my academic career looking at gender in film, but when I got to Texas, I quickly developed an interest in how race and cultural identity influence the production of film and other art forms. I participated in seminars on the study of the Southwest and learned a great deal about the history of Texas, Mexico, and surrounding states. I conducted numerous workshops for public school teachers on ways to incorporate media into their classes in English, history, and other subjects, including AP classes.
I also developed a service-learning curriculum, finding ways to connect the college classroom with the larger community, so that university students participate in service projects and group problem-solving activities and then "publish" their work for fellow students. I was asked by Texas State University President Jerry Supple to serve on president's cabinet for two years to improve our retention of freshman students. We began at 68%, below average for an institution of our size, and we now have a 79% freshman retention rate, which is above average for a university of about 30,000 students. My experience is relevant in light of the soaring high school dropout rates in Texas.
How did you come to run for this office?
A number of colleagues had suggested that I run for the board, and then I began attending meetings, thinking that I would support anyone who emerged as the strongest candidate. After speaking before the group about what I would do as a board member (hypothetically), I received an email from a political consultant who told me I was clearly the best person to run. Our younger daughter saw this email and then convinced me to run by pointing out that I could actually improve the state of education in Texas, saving students from the boredom and frustration she experienced in public school. At that point, I decided that if I really cared about education, I needed to step up and do something to rescue Texas from disaster.
Many readers may not know that the Texas Board of Education has been involved in a series of heated "culture wars" over the state-wide curriculum in Social Studies. Can you share with us some of the context of these struggles?
Over the last ten years, extreme right-wing candidates have quietly taken over local and state school boards. In District 5, my opponent, Ken Mercer, ran unopposed by any Democrat in 2006. Their actions went under the radar of most people until recently. With the last round of curriculum decisions, the board has angered a number of Democrats, independents, and reasonable Republicans across Texas and the nation. Extremists on the board have voted to make outrageous revisions to a curriculum suggested by their own review committees--people they, themselves, selected. I will list a few of the more egregious examples, with my own responses:
In one of the most outrageous revisions, they removed "Enlightenment ideas" from the standard. They require instead that students learn about the "writings" of various thinkers. They removed Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today, and the board placed Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone in the standard instead. Even conservative Republicans find elimination of founding father, Thomas Jefferson, one of the most important Enlightenment thinkers, and replacing him with Aquinas and Calvin to be absurd.
Democratic member Mavis Knight suggested this amendment: "Examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others." Cynthia Dunbar and her fellow extremists maintained that the Founders did not intend to have separation of church and state.
They removed the concepts of "justice" and "responsibility for the common good" from a list of characteristics of good citizenship for Grades 1-3. I can't imagine why they would find the concepts of justice and responsibility for the common good to be objectionable.
They removed a reference to propaganda as a factor in the United States entry into World War I. Most historians would acknowledge that every nation uses propaganda, and historians try to sort out what is an accurate portrayal of the facts of history. The board should reexamine the definition of propaganda.
They changed the word "imperialism" to "expansionism" in a U.S. history course standard about the United States' acquisition of overseas territories in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The board should keep the term "imperialism" in order to avoid confusing students, especially when they go on to higher education, where the term is used to describe forceful acquisition of territories, particularly during this period.
Former Chair, Mr. McElroy, once called critical thinking "gobbledygook," and the board's systematic censorship of common terms supports this view. The board voted to delete any references to the term "democracy," substituting the term "representative republic." They also deleted the word "capitalism" and substituted the words "free enterprise" throughout the curriculum. They removed discussion of distinctions between sex and gender, fearing this would lead students to think about transvestites and transsexuals.
These battles matter well beyond Texas because Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the country and thus these standards have the potential to impact what's included in the books taught in schools across America. Can you share some of the history of how Texas has impacted textbook publishing?
At one time, texts chosen by Texas were sold all over the country with no changes. Now, with the advent of desktop publishing, Texas still influences the content of textbooks, because publishers and authors do not want to create numerous small revisions. This is a nightmare for publishers and textbook authors, who do not want to produce inadequate, inaccurate texts, but they are essentially blackmailed into censoring information or altering content, for fear of not being selected by this huge market.
In addition to the textbook issue, Texas also serves as a model for the takeover of local and state school boards by extreme right-wing groups. These groups generally believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, that the United States is a Christian nation, that global warming is a myth, and that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the biology classroom as an alternative scientific theory.
While some may argue that most students don't pay that much attention to textbooks anyway, those few students who do study their books tend to be the most conscientious and likely to succeed. Thus, the far right may be able to create a whole generation of extreme right-wing leaders who will take their place running the local, state, and national government of the future.
Is there an over-arching vision behind the changes the Texas Board of Education seeks to impose on textbooks?
The vision they have is a return to a worldview that was prevalent in earlier decades and earlier centuries. They do not respect modern science, teachers, reason, or critical thinking. Their notion of history is "American exceptionalism," which maintains the idea that we are a special nation, chosen by God to fulfill a manifest destiny and spread Christianity throughout the world. Any criticism of the United States' actions is viewed as treasonous, and any attempt to include more minorities or women in history is disparaged as liberal "political correctness." They do not want to depict conflict or nuances in history; rather, they want to present the benefits of free enterprise and a unified portrait of the United States as superior to other nations and cultures in every way imaginable.
What do you think concerned citizens around the country can do about these issues?
Concerned citizens can comment in newspapers and on blogs, contribute to reasonable candidates for State Board of Education, spread the word among their social networks, and take concerted action to defeat this movement to return to the dark ages. They can request that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report provide a venue for good candidates to tell their side of the story. The current board makes for good comedy, but we also need to push the idea that there is hope, that the majority of Texans oppose the ridiculous changes these extremists propose to the curriculum and textbooks.
What changes would you try to implement if you were elected to the Texas Board of Education?
I would return to a reasonable process that respects the work of the review committees and scholars in the various subject areas. I would also recommend that we develop strict criteria for selection of the experts who comment on review committee recommendations. To whatever extent it is possible, I would explore how to repair the damage done by the current lame duck board. Actual textbook development and selection will be the responsibility of the next board. The board needs to take a leadership role in coordinating efforts to improve the state's abysmal dropout rates. It needs to step back from partisan battles and stop micromanaging teachers and forcing publishers and schools to adhere to the outdated personal views of an extreme minority faction.
How many seats would have to change before the revisions in the curriculum could be reversed?
Seven seats of the fifteen-member board are up for election in November 2010. Theoretically, it would only take one new reasonable person on the board to shift the balance from extreme right to a moderate middle. The calculus is somewhat complicated by the fact that some Republicans who are unopposed promise to be more reasonable members of the board. Moderate Republican Tom Ratliff has beat extremist Don McElroy in District 9, and moderate George Clayton came out of the blue to defeat long-time Republican board member Geraldine "Tincy" Miller in District 12 (Dallas).
Democrat and Trinity University professor Mike Soto will probably replace Democrat Rick Agosto, who is not running in District 3 (San Antonio). Agosto often voted with the Republicans on social issues.
To assure a solid majority, the key disputed districts that must be won are 5 and 10, which have been gerrymandered to insure that no Democrat represent Austin. My opponent, incumbent Ken Mercer in District 5, has a strong extreme-right network, with which he defeated a moderate Republican opponent in the primaries. In District 10, Democrat Judy Jennings will run against whichever Republican wins the April run-off.
The board meets in the third week of May, and their proposed changes will be posted on the Texas Education Association website for thirty days prior to that for public comment. The meeting to finalize their proposed curriculum changes should bring protests from Texas and around the country. The final election will be on November 2, 2010.
March 31, 2010
Transmedia Generation
Participatory culture is a global phenomenon. Young people all over the world are embracing the expressive and distribution resources of the computer to create and share their own cultural materials with each other. In countries all over the planet, they are mixing together local traditions of folk culture with the now globally accessible forms of digital expression in ways which could not have been imagined by previous generations. And as they do so, educators and parents are starting to recognize these creative communities as sites of informal learning which are transforming the ways these teens see themselves and the world. In every country, it is different. In every country, it is the same.
I was delighted to hear recently from a young scholar, Felipe G. Gil, from Sevilla, Spain, who shared with me some of his thoughts about new media literacy and education. In particular, he wanted me to read this account of his young cousin, whose filmmaking activities he had come to understand in relation to some of my writings. I am delighted to reproduce this blog post, originally written in Spanish, here for my readers in hopes that it may spark other international reactions around these important topics. Gil is justly proud of the range of different kinds of media productions this young man engages with in the course of his everyday life, and has sought ways to place them in a larger context.
Transmedia Generation
by Felipe G. Gil
It's Christmas. A family is gathered around a large table set for sixteen. At one end sits the grandfather. At the other, one of his grandkids, Pep. While his parents, cousins and aunts and uncles start clearing up, Pep continues immersed in dissecting a piece of fruit with a surgeon's precision. Suddenly, one of his cousins goes up to him and asks «What are you doing, Pep?» and he answers easily: «peeling a mandarin». What he has done is slice the peel in such a way that it forms a kind of orange underpants. What he is doing without realizing it is reinventing everyday life.
Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.
Pep is 13 years old, he lives in Tarragona, Catalonia, and is in his second year of secondary school. In the afternoons, he goes to his theatre group. He loves dinosaurs, videogames and watching videos on You Tube. He doesn't have an Internet connection at home, but there is one in his dad's furniture store. He doesn't have a computer of his own either: he shares a laptop with his parents and his younger sister. Since he was little, he has been fascinated by any audiovisual gadget that has come his way, using all of them to do what his generation is best at: play.
Play is one of the ways we learn, and during a period of reskilling and reorientation, such play may be much more important than it seems at first glance.
In the current educational system in Spain, only a few Language and Literature teaching units analyze the media. The Media Studies subjects that used to be in the secondary and upper secondary school syllabus are no longer taught. There is increasing talk of Education 2.0 and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) but the politicians in charge of Education have paradoxically failed to notice that digital and audiovisual literacy is, to paraphrase author and academic Gutierrez-Martín, more than just a mouse and a keyboard. Fortunately, an expanded form of education is starting to emerge. As "We TV" claims, perhaps we are fulfilling the utopia of the caméra-stylo and people are transforming video cameras (and similar devices) into the writing implements of the future. So why shouldn't a You Tube video be seen as a syntagm to be analysed in Language and Literature classes?
The "Angry German Kid" remix
Audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture.
Pep has a You Tube channel. One of the first videos he uploaded is «a remix of the popular "Angry German Kid" video».
The curious thing about this video is that most people thought it was made by the boy's father, who wanted to capture his son's rage as he played computer games... but it turned out to be a satire by a kid who was probably much more intelligent than the millions of viewers who laughed at his supposed antics (for an analysis in Spanish, see Soitu.es "El niño loco alemán: la verdad tras el mito".)
More and more literacy experts are recognizing that enacting, reciting, and appropriating elements from preexisting stories is a valuable and organic part of the process by which children develop cultural literacy.
This phenomenon is paradigmatic of the age of convergence: one day, somebody uploaded a video with certain characteristics that led others to forward it, discuss it and, above all, remix it. Thousands of users downloaded the original video and created their own versions of it. One of these is Pep's. His remix shows his synchronization and scripting skills, but, in addition, he has taken it into familiar territory (the videogame Super Mario Bros) and added two nuances: the sound of the game, and of a supposed porn film that suddenly crops up at one point. The voice in the video is Pep's own imitation of heavy breathing. Pep thus takes three media sources and converges them into a new one: the "Angry German Kid" video, Super Mario Bros and a porn film.
Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each one of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday life.
As Pep himself explains in the interview, he had to work out how to hack the You Tube video (which currently doesn't have a download option), how to load it into a video editing program (he uses Windows Movie Maker), how to synchronize the subtitles, how to export the video, how to create his own You Tube account, and how to upload his video. Given this whole process, there is an inevitable question: what drives Pep to do it? The Internet has boosted social intelligence, with its main premise being to generate specific-interest communities. Pep had seen dozens of different remixes of the "Angry German Kid" video before he began to consider adding one of his own. Before he felt the urge to become part of what he was seeing.
Our traditional assumptions about expertise are breaking down or at least being transformed by the more open-ended processes of communication in cyberspace. The expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge, which an individual can master. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence, however, are open ended and profoundly interdisciplinary; they slip and slide across borders and draw on the combined knowledge of a more diverse community.
Jurassic Park, Lego version
Animation is another of Pep's hobbies. Somebody once explained the concept of persistence of vision to him. He soon grasped that moving images are actually the illusion of movement created when there is a rapid succession of still images. Since then, some of his small creations are linked to this.
Pep has made several animated videos using scenes or excerpts from Jurassic Park. This video is his own trailer for the third film in the series, and in the video he discusses in the interview he recreates one of his favourite scenes from the film.
New-media theorist Janet Murray has written of the "encyclopaedic capacity" of digital media, which she thinks will lead to new narrative forms as audiences seek information beyond the limits of the individual story.
Pep is part of the transmedia generation: he imitates a kind of popular form of creation (try doing a search for "Lego" on You Tube) in order to tell his own story in a video that mixes the original sound from a scene in Jurassic Park III with an animation he creates using his Lego pieces and other toys. Unfortunately, the mammoth audiovisual industry sees this as illegal divergence rather than cultural convergence. When will it be set down that a film's users can remix it to their heart's content?
Along with this industry aspect, this situation poses many questions: why do people have such a strong urge to tell their stories at this particular moment in history? can we develop a public dynamic for audiovisual culture that makes it legal to do what Pep has done, and encourages it? how can education open up in order to integrate children's need to be audiovisual "prosumers" (producer+consumer)?
The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial culture but from writing over it, modding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feeding it back into the mainstream media.
Video-playing
One day, Pep discovered Spore, a game created by Will Wright, who is also behind the popular games The Sims and Sim City. Spore «allows the player to develop a species from a microscopic organism to its evolution into a complex animal, its emergence as a social, intelligent being, to its mastery of the planet and then finally to its ascension into space» (source: Wikipedia). In Spore, you have the choice of progressing in one of two ways: by cooperating with, or attacking, other civilisations. It is not only the specialist press that considers videogames to be the future-present of audiovisual narrative, given their capacity to integrate different stories in different media. Spore, for example, can be played online and allows users to show the community how their creatures have turned out, interact with other species, etc. And Spore has something in common with The Sims and Sim City: it is an alternative reality game.
ARG's (alternative reality games) are generating "players who feel more capable, more confident, more expressive, more engaged and more connected in their everyday lives". (...) "A good immersive game will show you game patterns in non-game places".
The hyperlink is in us
Pep is currently editing a documentary he made at the beach during the summer holidays, in which he asked people what holidays meant to them. He has also discovered Game Maker, a simple program that allows him to design his own videogames. And who knows what other discoveries he will make in the coming months and years. The difference between our time and other moments in history is that Pep is not alone. You probably know somebody like him. And this is why it's important to realize that we have to keep learning, together, to read and write audiovisually instead of taking it for granted that the millions of Euros the Spanish government is spending on putting computers in classrooms is automatically going to fix the problem. This is why we have to talk about the stories that we are passionate about, not business models. And this is why we should not think of art as something exclusive to artists, but as a game that we can all take part in. This is why we have to defend the remix as a cultural ecosystem.
In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. In an information society, children play with information.
There is a Pep inside each one of us, we just have to wake him up. We are the Transmedia generation.
This is an English translation of the article "Generación transmedia". All the quotes interwoven into this text are from Convergence Culture(2006), the book in which Henry Jenkins coins the term "transmedia storytelling" and insightfully describes the changes that are taking place in the way we communicate, think, read, etc.
Felipe G. Gil, 28, lives in Sevilla (Spain) and is a member of the ZEMOS98 team, a cultural initiative which does research into expanded education, digital communication and audiovisual culture. He writes for EMBED.at, a publication about embedded audiovisual supported by Festivalito, Movil Film Fest, Yerblues.net and ZEMOS98. He is also a Star Wars fan, a proam tennis player and a fanatic of the Libanese salad.
March 24, 2010
Is New Media Incompatible with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part Two)
In this second installment of my interview with Rich Halverson, we explore some of the trends impacting contemporary schooling, including the significance of home schooling, his vision for transforming schools, his research on fantasy baseball leagues as a literacy practice, and his thoughts on how and why schools should foster failure. As always, Halverson remains a provocative and yet substantive thinker about technology and learning.
Your book writes extensively about home schooling as an alternative to the current educational system. What advantages do home schoolers have in dealing with technological change? What are the limits of home schooling?
Home schooling is an interesting phenomena on several levels. First, it represents an effort to sever the traditional ties of institutional schooling and learning, individualizing instruction while keeping many of the curricular goals and sequences in place. Second, it cuts across cultural boundaries - many families on the left home-school for academic reasons, while families on the right home often homeschool for predominately cultural and religious reasons. Finally, the integration of technology with homeschooling may well signal a new path toward individualizing instruction in traditional schools. The predominant instructional model in the K-12 world aims toward moving students toward common learning goals, playing down individual difference in the interests of standardized outcomes. Home schooling has clear limitations - it is clearly too expensive (in terms of time, materials and money) to be conducted at scale, and the virtual curriculum used by many homeschoolers is typically based on very conventional page-turning pedagogies. But homeschool communities use technological resources to provide instructional coherence while maintaining individualized attention in ways that is would be smart for traditional school designers to watch.
You describe in the book some aspects of what an emerging educational system might look like. Can you share some of that vision with my readers?
The current state of education looks like an unlikely federation of uneasy partners - some for profit, others non-profit; some non-denominational, others ideological - who provide services to students without apparent coordination. NCLB legislation alone has sparked a vast expansion of third-party tutoring, assessment and coaching services that threaten schools and can be seen as competitors for future school funding. Digital media production, social networking, mobile computing, gaming and blogging operate entirely outside the control or influence of schooling. This motley collection of education services appears more like a consumer-driven market that could not cohere into a an educational system.
However, there are several key steps that might be taken to link these services together into an emergent system. We'd like to highlight two possible steps: 1) when administrative information technologies come to integrate user-driven networking practices, and 2) when some classroom subject-matter areas move to embrace digital learning tools. Schools are developing sophisticated tools for tracking student learning and teacher quality - but these systems are largely constructed about, but not for or by students and teachers. Social networks would provide a personalized complement to such systems that could link technologies designed to measure learning with tools to facilitate the activities of learners. It is not hard to imagine profile software that students and teachers could use to link educational activities, calendars, support services, interest groups, etc. The emergence of these personalized information tools may help usher in an integration of where schools are to where they might be.
In the classroom, one key indicator may be the degree to which non-tested subjects in schools embrace new approaches. Most K12 systems are experimenting with new kinds of media-based extracurricular activities and clubs. A threshold will be crossed when core instructional efforts in vocational education, arts, physical education and language programs follow the extra-curricular example toward greater integration of learning technologies. These subject areas are currently on the fence between embracing the standards-and-accountability practices of literacy and math or moving in another direction. Significant changes in these vital disciplines could serve as an example for how digital media technologies may transform teaching and learning.
In your historical account of the evolution of American education, one key difference between the apprentice and public school systems was how they dealt with the possibilities of failure. You suggest that in the apprentice system, it was taken as given that most students would learn, eventually, what they needed to know, while the public school system starts from the premise that only a small portion of the population can fully master its expectations. Many argue that we learn through failure -- through making mistakes and correcting them -- but that for this to work, we have to lower the costs of failure. How can we do this?
The idea that the apprenticeship model was successful for individual learning is by and large true. Because the master could work closely with the learner in apprenticeship, most learning failures could be mitigated or averted. In contrast, the American public school system provided little guidance for individuals to learn from local learning errors. Public schools were expected to provide opportunities for interested students to learn, and students who took advantage of these opportunities were able to progress. Public schools structures have typically lacked scaffolded support for individual learners to learn from mistakes - particularly across grades and classes. At the system level, comprehensive public high schools, community colleges and undergraduate programs addressed the learning failure issue in part by providing abundant course and program options for learners who failed in their initial efforts. But the long-term individualized attention to learning-from-failure that came with apprenticeship learning was not a part of traditional public schooling.
The issue of learning from failure in public schooling became more complicated by the civil rights movement. In the early years of public schooling, students (and families) bore the responsibility of taking advantage of educational opportunities. However, beginning in the 1950s, public education priorities in the US began to shift. The 1954 Brown decision demonstrated that providing access to educational opportunities was no longer sufficient. The War on Poverty of the 1960s and the IDEA act and reauthorizations of the 1970s-90s shifted the national discourse from the opportunities to the outcomes of learning. It was no longer appropriate for states to provide schools where students could choose to learn (or not); instead states increasingly saw their role as creating schools that guaranteed learning outcomes. The 2001 NCLB Act make these new expectations into law by holding public schools accountable for improving the learning of all students. Thus the premise of the early public school model was turned on its head - instead of a system that created opportunities for all students to succeed now expected schools reach all students successfully. Public schools as institutions were expected to take responsibility for educational outcomes, while at the same time absolving students and families from responsibility for learning.
We can either learn from failure, or try to avoid it. Connecting high stakes consequences to institutional failure has led many public schools to pursue a risk-avoidance approach to instruction. This intolerance for failure at the system level has been translated into a similar intolerance to experiment at the classroom level. Contemporary public school policies insist that all students show learning progress, which has led to dominant models of instruction that emphasize efficiency, smooth learning trajectories and predictable outcomes. Schools are often reluctant to experiment with high-yield, high-risk, instructional practices. Innovation is risky - most innovations fail, and even the ones that succeed are usually fundamentally transformed before achieving wide dissemination. The federal educational research policies that emphasize "what works" seem to take for granted that we already know what we need to know to improve learning for all students, and that what is mainly needed is thorough vetting and rigorous implementation of tried-and-true instructional practices. Still, high school dropout rates have held steady, the achievement gap has not closed significantly, and the love of learning continues to drain out of schools that emphasize "what works" over genuine inquiry. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the tree of learning must be refreshed from time to time by the failures of policy makers, teachers and students. The wild market swings in digital media - in hardware, software and virtual worlds - continue to demonstrate the power of failure to spark new innovation. It seems that schools feel that walling themselves off from the digital media/learning circus will insulate a path toward eventual elimination of learning problems. A more likely scenario is that by cutting off opportunities for interesting failure, schools will continue to apply the same time-tested practices that resulted in contemporary institutional inequalities in the first-place.
Richard, apart from this project, you've been looking at fantasy baseball leagues as a site for learning and participatory culture, seeing them as a fusion of fan and gaming culture. What insights do you think educators can gain by looking at these kinds of alternative knowledge communities?
Participatory cultures, such as fantasy sports, highlight three critically important aspects of learning missing from many school learning activities: motivation, production and legitimate audience. Fantasy sports team owners are motivated to play because they are fans, and this (typically) far-reaching set of beliefs, passions and knowledge spark owner interest in competition. The development and maintenance of a team requires owners to produce a competitive roster and to iteratively adjust their production in terms of competitive feedback within the league. Other team owners present a legitimate audience for game play - owners are praised, ridiculed, emulated or resented based on moves against other players. Because typical fantasy leagues persist for months, owners get reputations for game play within the league. Owners acquire status as players, particularly in anonymous leagues, because of their demonstrated abilities within the game.
Many school settings have features of participatory cultures as well, but the participatory culture of schooling is often unrelated to the topics learned. Students are often motivated (or not) to succeed in academic contexts for non-academic reasons; production is typically valued (if at all) as a means toward other forms of reward (grades, etc.), and academic prowess often fares miserably as a path toward peer culture acceptance. Fantasy sports communities provide existence proofs of how learning activities can intrinsically connect motivation, production and audience in assessment rich contexts. It is not a trivial task to select the kinds of tasks around which school-based fantasy leagues can be organized, although activities such as stock-market games or Model UN can bring some common structures to bear in traditional schools. The question is not really how to make a direct translation of fantasy leagues to school settings, but for this and the next generation of educators to understand how the underlying principles of these kinds of learning environments work, then to think about how to design local environments around similar principles.
Allan Collins is Professor Emeritus of education and social policy at Northwestern University and formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education.
Richard Halverson is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.
March 23, 2010
Is New Media Incompatable with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part One)
This week, I want to use my blog to call attention to a provocative recent book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. The authors of the book are Allen Collins, formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education, and Rich Halverson, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.
I have gotten to know Halverson through the Games, Learning, and Society conference, where I will be speaking this summer, so I was curious to look at this book when it came out. Given its authors, it's no surprise that the book is well informed about contemporary debates surrounding new media and education, and like the best books that have come out in the past year or so (including those by Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins, which I have profiled here), it strives to balance between the inflated hopes of early digital advocates and the inflated fears of those who would lock technology out of the classroom.
The authors offer sage new proposals for how we might deal with the apparent tensions and incompatabilities between education as it has been conducted in this country and the new media landscape as it is lived beyond the schoolhouse gates. But the real surprise and strength of the book is the ways they are able to situate the contemporary moment of media transition in relation to the several hundred year history of American education. In doing so, we avoid the breathless sense of the "unprecidented" or "Inevitable" consequences of new media and we also avoid the sense that things have always been this way and are thus not subject to change. They show how American education's processes, policies, and structures shifted over time in response to, for example, the industrial revolution and thus give us a context for imagining the gradual yet decisive transformation of schooling which will grow out of our current moment.
I was lucky enough to get Richard Halverson to agree to an interview about the book, which I will be running over the next two installments. Much of the interview focuses on the historical insights and how they contribute to putting the present into a greater perspective.
My father used to have the expression, "never let schooling get in the way of your education." You make a similar distinction across the book. In what ways is schooling getting in the way of more informal kinds of learning today and why?
Your dad's expression was really the state of the art once upon a time! The rise of institutional schooling in the 20th century- from preK to lifelong learning - can be seen as an effort to permanently weld schooling to learning. Beginning in the early 1900s, schools rooted in formal learning environments expanded to incorporate most areas informal learning as well (consider widely available classes on knitting, oenophilia and game design). On the other side, if you didn't go to a class from a recognized institution, if you didn't have some sort of certificate/credit statement of completing, then by the mid 20th century people came to question the legitimacy of your learning. This double-movement of expansion and legitimation came to define learning in terms of schooling.
The digital media era began to call this definition into question. The inertia of maturing institutions meant that early design decisions got locked in place, and it became more difficult for schools to change core assumptions. Digital media provides a path to personalizing and customizing learning that is often at odds with the batch processing model of, especially, K-12 schooling. This has meant that digitally literate young people have come to understand that there are at least two living channels for learning - 1) an institutional channel, and 2) a peer-driven, interest-driven, and unregulated digital media channel. The bifurcation of learning experiences for young people is bound to call the institutional identification of schooling and learning into question in the coming years. We don't yet know the consequences of how this shift will play out, but unless schools figure out how to adapt to digital media our children may end up hearing their fathers say "remember when we went to school for an education?"
You open the book with the provocative statement, "There are deep incompatibilities between technology and schooling." Explain. Are these incompatibilities insurmountable? If so, what is going to change -- schooling or technology?
Our statement about the incompatibilities of schooling and technology was stated with a historical perspective in mind. There was a time, in the early 20th century, when schools were developed in concert with the most innovative technological advances. Schools grew up around the mass publication and dissemination of texts and the widespread availability of writing tools. More importantly, schools took full advantage of cutting-edge bureaucratic technologies. Although we now look back in horror at the eagerness with which early schools adopted industrial production and efficiency models, these then-innovative ideas provided important organizational techniques for delivering services at the scale required for the successful implementation of public schooling. It is difficult for us to remember just how daunting the task of mass schooling was for early school designers, who grew up with personalized pedagogies, one-room schoolhouses and agricultural-based school calendars. Early public schools took full advantage of cutting-edge technologies to gain quick and sure foothold in the American psyche.
Schools that emerged at the advent of the 21st century were, in a sense, victims of the success of the prior generation's technology, and found it very difficult to adapt to new models of information production and exchange sparked by the Internet. Technological developments later in the century, such as computing and digital media, provided a level of individualization that ran directly counter to the mass-production technologies from earlier in the century. The new information technologies that have been easiest to adapt to prior industrial models, such as standardized testing, have made the most headway into established school practices. The technologies that called on schools to alter the basic classroom relationships between teaching, learning and curriculum have met with the most difficulty. The conclusion we want to draw is that schooling and technology are not necessarily opposed, but instead are necessarily related. When considered over time, we can see the effects of institutional resistance are a consequence of the embrace of prior technologies, rather than a simple opposition of stodgy old schools to hot new technologies.
Our current educational system emerged gradually overtime in response to the pressures of the industrial revolution. What parallels can we draw between the ways the current structure took shape and the prospects of transforming education to reflect the information/knowledge revolution your book describes?
We propose that the "seeds of a new system" are already emerging as pieces of an alternative approach to education. Home schooling, for example, provides a technologically-driven alternative to institutional schooling. Distance education and your idea of participatory cultures organized around a transmedia complex provide powerful alternative visions for education. The main difference between the eras is that the 1800s system seeds such as kindergarten, common schools, textbooks and land-grant universities, converged in an era without a monolithic institution already in place. It is a much different problem to define than to redefine an institution.
We feel that digital media will continue to spark alternative forms of learning environments and to push for change in traditional learning institutions. We must not underestimate the tenacity of our collective belief in the transformative power of education. Without a civil religion, common belief in education is as close as Americans come to a common creed. If we come to feel that digital media need to be a core aspect of the learning experience of our youth, then we will re-make our institutions accordingly. As a culture, though, we seem to carry ambiguous feelings about the value of digital media for learning. For every advocate who extols the potential of media production, programming, game design or social networking, concerned citizens highlight the dangers of porn, digital bullying, appropriate use policies, child predation and, of course, GTA. This split in the perception of the value of digital media and culture may, in the mean time, create a new kind of digital divide along cultural, rather than demographic, lines. Further, locating these alternative, digital-based approaches to learning outside of public education means that families with the interest and wherewithal will access new forms of learning will, and those who won't or can't will not.
Allan Collins is Professor Emeritus of education and social policy at
Northwestern University and formerly co-director of the U.S. Department
of Education's Center for Technology in Education.
Richard Halverson is an associate professor of educational leadership
and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is
co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.
March 1, 2010
Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About Digital Ethics (Part Two)
You found that adults and teens had different understandings of the identity play which occurs online. Where do these differences come from?
GOODPLAY: In the dialogues, we asked what the participants saw as acceptable, and what they viewed as the risks and benefits of experimenting with and exploring one's identity online. Both adults and teens cited the ability to test out an "ideal self" as one of the primary benefits of online identity play. The two groups also identified common risks associated with identity play, such as not being true to yourself or becoming disconnected from your offline self.
However, as you note, we did observe differences between adults and teens in their attitudes toward online identity play. In addition to testing out an ideal self, teens mentioned the opportunity to recreate themselves online. Adults, on the other hand, were more likely to celebrate the ability to accentuate existing aspects of their personality. To make sense of this difference, we consider the fact that adolescence is generally regarded as a critical period for identity formation. Adolescents begin for the first time to ask themselves: "Who am I?" While this question is never answered once and for all, identity tends to become more stable as people leave adolescence and enter adulthood. Therefore, it's perhaps not surprising that the adult participants focused on minor alterations of existing identity elements, whereas teens considered more dramatic self-transformations.
With respect to the perceived risks of online identity play, teens focused to a greater degree than adults on the danger of developing relationships on a false or inauthentic basis. Again, this finding isn't surprising if we consider its developmental underpinnings. Interpersonal relationships become central during adolescence; it's in the context of reciprocal, trusting relationships that adolescents explore their identities. The feedback they receive from friends plays an important role in their decisions to highlight certain personal attributes and hide others. It's likely due to the centrality of peer relationships that our teen participants were more concerned than the adults about building inauthentic friendships online.
Some have argued that the emerging generation cares much less about privacy than preceding generations. Did your research bear out this oft-cited claim?
GOODPLAY: To a certain extent, yes. We found that teens are generally more comfortable sharing their lives online than adults. Teen participants had considerably more to say than adults about the benefits of sharing personal information with others online. Teens discussed the opportunities that the Internet affords them to express themselves freely, to get things off their chests, and to learn about friends and have their friends learn about them. In contrast, adults focused to a greater degree on the privacy concerns related to such self-disclosure. That's not to say that teens didn't express any concern about their privacy online. On the contrary, they were quite clear about their desire for privacy from adults!
How so?
Well, consider this quote from one teen participant: "Let me make it clear, for me Facebook is for socialising with my friends and expanding my friend circle and when my parents add me as a friend it really pisses me off so when my dad joined Facebook and added me as a friend I rejected his request that instance because I knew he was doing that to keep a check on me. for Gods sake!!! Parents should let us have our own privacy and not meddle in between as it may hinder the relationship we share." All joking aside, what sentiments like this point to is that teens aren't unaware of privacy issues, they simply have different norms when it comes to negotiating them.
Youth are often described as "the Napster generation" and accused of having little respect for intellectual property. What did you discover about the way adults and youth thought about attribution and authorship?
COMMON SENSE MEDIA: This question is interesting because both youth and adults identified how difficult it was to know what constitutes "best practice" given that the norms of the industry are in flux and because of the varying messages that artists convey to the public about how to buy their albums and from where. For instance, there are bands who have allowed customers to download their albums for the amount the customer believes is appropriate, while other bands abhor this practice.
GLOBAL KIDS: We saw both teens and adults actually call for new business models that addressed problems with downloading and made sure that authors got their fair share, while at the same time a majority of youth indeed admitted to downloading, with some being conflicted and some not about doing so. On the other hand, teens seemed quite adamant about both wanting attribution for their own work and about the importance of giving attribution to others when relevant, likely because they're creating more online remixes/mash-ups etc. than adults.
GOODPLAY: Interestingly, while a lot of teens were adamant about wanting attribution for their own work and giving attribution to others, fewer seemed to connect this to the issue of illegal downloading. When they did talk about the negative aspects of illegal downloading, they mostly worried about the negative consequences to themselves rather than the potential negative effects for the artists.
You cite one young person as saying, "the internet is a way for people to do what they want without getting in trouble." How characteristic is this of the attitudes displayed by young people in these conversations?
GLOBAL KIDS: Well, I think it's definitely representative of a certain subset of teens, though certainly not a dominant perspective. As we watched the dialogues progress and then conducted analysis of who said what, we noticed that the youth involved stratified into certain categories of thinking with regards to ethics, some that were more advanced and others less so, as GoodPlay mentioned above. We felt it was important to highlight that this sort of "do what you want without consequence" sort of thinking is indeed there, especially for teens on the younger end of the spectrum. We didn't want to be alarmist when sharing our results, as there's been plenty of alarmist rhetoric out there about young people's participation online, but rather be realistic about the views that exist and the resulting need for adult involvement in these conversations.
What insights did you get from this research which might inform the decisions made by parents? by educators?
COMMON SENSE MEDIA: I think that the biggest takeaway was that adults and teens are truly able to participate in meaningful dialogue about some of the tougher issues that emerge about life online if there's an honest and open setting to do so. Dialogues like these could be tailored to a variety of settings and could focus on a wide array of issues that might be specific to local needs in a given community. There are a lot of easy to use online tools (out of the box social networks like Ning, free forum and Listserv services, etc.) out there that can allow educators and youth workers to run online dialogues with their school communities during the school year. Increased dialogue online between teens and adults is not only important because the two groups generally inhabit the digital world in very different ways right now, but also because adults provide important guidance in terms of the ethical development of young people. Adults have always played this role in kids' lives and the more they are educated about talking about the digital aspects of their kids' lives the better.
GLOBAL KIDS: It's also important to note that this kind of cross-generational dialogue doesn't just need to happen online. We found that there are some real advantages to an online context, like a changed power dynamic where youth might feel more confident sharing openly. However, we know that having face to face conversations about these issues is critical whether it's in the home, in classrooms, in afterschool spaces or in other sorts of youth groups.
GOODPLAY: Actually, Henry, the recent collaboration between your NML team and the GoodPlay team is a great example of a school-based initiative aimed at promoting these types of conversations between adults and youth. The curricular activities that we created together - called Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World - attempt to engage high school students in a thoughtful examination of the ethical issues that arise online. We hope that these activities will be an effective way for teachers to enter into conversations with youth and scaffold their ethical thinking.
COMMON SENSE MEDIA And by bringing parents into the conversation we can strengthen home-school partnerships to help young people navigate the ethical challenges of the digital world. With the aging down of online life, it's become imperative to begin these conversations in middle school and so we are working in collaboration with the GoodPlay Project to create a 5th-8th grade digital citizenship curriculum - Digital Literacy: Citizenship in a Connected Culture Check back at www.commonsense.org in late Spring for more information and access to these materials.
Katie Davis is a Project Specialist on several research projects led by Dr. Howard Gardner at Project Zero, including the GoodPlay Project, the Developing Minds and Digital Media Project, and the Trust and Trustworthiness Project. She is also an advanced doctoral student in Human Development and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In recent work, she conducted a study investigating how girls in late adolescence and emerging adulthood use blogging as a way to express and explore their identities. For the Focus Dialogues, Katie and Carrie James, a Research Director and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, developed the framework that informed the dialogues, developed dialogue prompts, and synthesized findings.
Shira Lee Katz is the Digital Media Project Manager at Common Sense Media, where she manages the research and creation of a forthcoming Digital Citizenship curriculum for 5th-8th grade students. She is also a key point person for the Digital Media & Learning grantee network funded by The MacArthur Foundation. Shira holds a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the Focus Dialogues, Shira and Linda Burch, Common Sense Media's Chief Education and Strategy Officer, co-conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited adult participants, and produced the final report.
Rafi Santo is a Senior Program Associate in the Online Leadership Program at Global Kids, Inc. Rafi specializes in the design and implementation of educational technology projects and has done work as varied as online youth dialogues, youth advisories focused around digital media, social media civic engagement programs and youth leadership development and peer education in virtual worlds. He has collaborated on projects with many organizations and with MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grantees to strengthen their initiatives through youth voices and perspectives. Rafi has over 10 years of experience in youth development and education. For the Focus Dialogues, Rafi and Barry Joseph, Director of Global Kids' Online Leadership Program, conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited teen participants, housed and monitored the dialogues on their website, a wrote the final report.
February 26, 2010
Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About Digital Ethics (Part One)
Earlier this year, Common Sense Media, Global Kids, and the Good Play Project, three highly regarded groups, each working in different ways to promote the new media literacies, issued a report, Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About the Ethics of Digital Life, which summarized their collaborative efforts to get adults and youth discussing some core issues of online ethics. All three groups were active presences during the recent Diversifying Participation conference hosted last week by the MacArthur Foundation. I very much wanted to share the thinking behind the report with my readers and am happy today to offer you some insights from the three groups involved.
I have long believed in the importance of opening chains of communication across the generations around the uncertainities we face in the digital era. I modeled what such a conversation might look like between parent and child in an essay I wrote with my son on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, and I published a study guide for adults and youth to conduct conversations in the wake of Columbine which appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of Telemedium (now the Journal of Media Literacy).
In some ways, such conversations may be easiest to frame between adults and youth who are not directly related, since it gets us out of the raw emotions which often surround adolescence within the family space, but it is also very important for parents to have frank exchanges with their children about their values, their concerns, and their experiences with digital media. I've sometimes said in the past that young people do not need adults "snooping over their shoulders," they need them "watching their backs." By this, I mean that we often reduce such issues to questions of "monitoring' youth activity (with or without their knowledge) and we really should be creating channels of communication. The news this week that a Pennsylvania school had installed spyware on their school-issued laptops and were watching what teens did outside of school is a demonstration of what happens when adults rely on surveillance rather than conversation to shape youth behavior. None of us know for sure the best course of action in confronting some of the new situations which emerge in this still evolving space. Young people deserve our best wisdom as adults, but they also deserve our respect and trust, as they try to develop their own ways in life.
I am really excited to see what these three groups have been able to accomplish using online forums as a tool for getting adults and youth to reflect more deeply about their relations to the digital realm.
Can you describe each of the three groups and some of your previous work in this area? Why did you decide to develop a collaborative project together and what did you each bring to the collaboration?
GLOBAL KIDS: Sure. For us at Global Kids, this project was in many ways a continuation of work we've been doing for almost ten years to promote youth voices about important social and global issues. We began youth projects that used online dialogues to do this as early as 2001, when we ran E.A. 911, short for "Everything After September 11th", an online dialogue that took place six months after 9/11 where youth from around the world came together to talk about the impact of the attacks. We continued for years running youth dialogues on current events with a project called Newz Crew, a collaboration with PBS's News Hour.
The Focus Dialogues, which formed the basis for the Meeting of Minds report, were born out of the desire to bring youth voice to the emerging conversation about how new media are changing kids' lives. We held the first round of the dialogues, which were teen only, back in 2007, and we heard pretty forcefully from the participating teens that adults were checked out when it came to providing guidance in this area, which prompted us to take a cross-generational approach for the next round of dialogues. We were already familiar with GoodPlay's work on ethics online as well as Common Sense Media's work with parents, and it just seemed natural to reach out to them as collaborators.
GOODPLAY: For our part, we welcomed the opportunity to incorporate some of our research methods into this exciting initiative. Since 2006, with the support of the MacArthur Foundation, the GoodPlay team has been studying young people's understanding of the ethical dimensions of their online activities. In the first phase of our study, we conducted in-depth interviews with over 60 young people, ages 15-25, who were living in the Greater Boston area. In these interviews, we posed hypothetical ethical dilemmas involving digital media and asked participants how they would respond if confronted with a similar situation.
For the Focus Dialogues, we decided to adapt some of these hypothetical dilemmas and present them as points of discussion. We also identified several compelling quotes from our interviews in which youth participants expressed various opinions about the boundaries of acceptable behavior in online contexts. In total, we created 2-3 prompts for each of the five issues that we believe to be ethically charged in the new digital media:
identity (When does identity play cross over into deception?),
privacy (What are the boundaries of sharing information about oneself and others online?),
ownership/authorship (How has the act of creation been altered by digital media and with what effects on claims to ownership and authorship?),
credibility (How do people signal their trustworthiness online and judge the trustworthiness of others?),
participation (In a context of rapidly forming and disintegrating communities, how are norms of behavior established, maintained, and respected online?).
Each day, dialogue participants were presented with a prompt relating to one of these five ethical issues and asked to respond in a discussion thread. This approach generated some rich conversations between teens and adults.
COMMON SENSE MEDIA : As a non-profit, we were founded on the principle that dialogue among parents, teachers, and students is the way forward! One way we encourage discussion across the generations is by asking all parties to use our online ratings and reviews of movies, books, websites, and music, and to write reviews of their own. We have also conducted quantitative research about the attitudes towards media of adults and children, including a recent national poll examining hi-tech cheating with more than 2000 teens and parents. The dialogues were a creative, new way to conduct research and foster dialogue and we welcomed the chance to collaborate with Global Kids and GoodPlay on the project.
We knew the dialogues would inform our parent resources, policy work, and educational programs. We are in fact in the midst of creating a Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum for 5th-8th grade students that focuses on empowering kids to harness the power of digital technology responsibly. The curriculum, grounded in the research of the GoodPlay Project, is meant to be fun and engaging, and challenges kids to think critically about the perils and possibilities of life online. These dialogues and other focus groups and pilot research that we are conducting across the country all serve to inform this curriculum, which takes a whole community approach to engaging parents, teachers, and students in learning. As with GoodPlay, our work on digital citizenship is also supported in large part by the MacArthur Foundation.
Your key finding in the press release you've issued is that youth often lack access to valuable adult guidance in their online lives. Many have assumed that youth who are "digital natives" who do not necessarily need or appreciate adult interference. How do you respond to that argument?
GLOBAL KIDS: I think that there are a lot of ways that the digital natives argument has become more complicated and has shifted as the years have gone on. Just as people have realized that not all youth are equal in terms of technological access or the kinds of online participation they're exposed to, there's also been a growing awareness that there are many different aspects to what it means to be digitally fluent. For us, this doesn't just mean having digital skills, but also engaging online as a digital citizen. A teen might be a technological whiz and seem completely at home within complex games, but if he or she is regularly cheating new players out of virtual cash while playing those games, that's problematic. Digital skills and fluency can't exist in a vacuum, there has to be a values component to this conversation.
COMMON SENSE MEDIA: In that respect, even adults who aren't very technologically savvy can add a lot to their kids' understanding of digital life. After all, kids may possess great technology know-how, but parents and teachers have a lot of wisdom and experience grappling with "life" issues like privacy and community. At the same time, there are some distinctly new ethical challenges (that the GoodPlay Project outlines so well in its white paper) that adults should understand, many of which we address in the report. Given that adults and teens bring different prior knowledge and life experience to the online space, we believe that the conversation and subsequent learning around these issues is a two-way street. Right now the online space is seen very much as a peer dominated space in which teens talk and interact mostly with one another. In most cases, it is even looked down upon for adults to have contact with teens online. We believe that the more dialogue and mentoring that adults and teens can have online - as long as it is monitored and safe - the better.
Describe for us the process of getting adults and young people engaged in an honest exchange about ethics and digital culture. Did you learn things here that would be helpful for other groups seeking to replicate this process at a local level?
COMMON SENSE MEDIA AND GLOBAL KIDS: In terms of activity in the dialogues, we were surprised that teens participated more readily than adults, on average, especially since we saw two adults sign up for every teen that did. We chalked up the participation differences to the fact that we had a lot of youth in the dialogues that were pretty involved in online communities and were used to sharing their views online from both a social as well as technological perspective. Adults overall were a little more hesitant and some had trouble navigating the technology, and we also got the sense that many were parents that had less experience with forum based discussions and didn't realize that they actually had to build in time to participate fully.
There was a learning curve involved for some adults in terms of using an online environment, and that should certainly be taken into account for people looking to start similar exchanges in their communities. At the same time, the kind of youth engagement we saw was incredible, and we think there's something to be said for that. So often it's hard for adults to engage in dialogue about touchy issues with kids, but we found that online we saw very active sharing from the youth side.
Importantly, despite some of the differences that we observed between the two groups, it seemed that both generally saw the gray ethical areas for what they were. Adults overall did not seem too didactic or disrespectful of teens' opinions and teens generally seemed to appreciate adults' point of view. The interaction in many ways was characterized more by a kind of mutual exchange reminiscent of peers than the sort of stereotypical "parent yells at kid/kid storms off to their room" arguments that can come up when discussing difficult topics. We think that part of why this happened was that the whole interaction was framed from the beginning as a dialogue between groups, which is rare for adult/youth interactions. There's probably some lesson there for those that want to run online dialogues themselves. Both sides need to be respected and valued from the outset for this kind of exchange to work.
You report that teens are more likely to engage in moral thinking than ethical thinking. Can you explain the distinction you are drawing and what your findings were?
GOODPLAY: The distinction we make between moral and ethical thinking has its roots in the different roles and relationships that individuals experience. Moral thinking arises in the context of interpersonal relationships, such as the relationship between close friends or between a parent and child. It is perhaps most simply conceived of as "Golden Rule thinking" - treat others how you would want them to treat you. In contrast, ethical thinking requires a more abstract, disinterested frame of mind. Specific forms of ethical thinking include reflection on roles and responsibilities in online spaces; perspective taking - or the ability to take the standpoints of multiple stakeholders in an online context; and consideration of community-level benefits or harms associated with different courses of action online.
In the Focus dialogues, we found relatively few instances of either moral or ethical thinking among teens, although there were some notable exceptions. For the most part, teen participants demonstrated what we call consequence-based thinking, since they tended to focus on how each scenario would affect them personally. For instance, when participants were considering the pros and cons of illegal music downloading, they were more likely to discuss such personally relevant factors as expense, convenience, and the risk of getting caught. Less frequent were references to the potential effects on other interested parties, such as artists and music companies.
Katie Davis is a Project Specialist on several research projects led by Dr. Howard Gardner at Project Zero, including the GoodPlay Project, the Developing Minds and Digital Media Project, and the Trust and Trustworthiness Project. She is also an advanced doctoral student in Human Development and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In recent work, she conducted a study investigating how girls in late adolescence and emerging adulthood use blogging as a way to express and explore their identities. For the Focus Dialogues, Katie and Carrie James, a Research Director and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, developed the framework that informed the dialogues, developed dialogue prompts, and synthesized findings.
Shira Lee Katz is the Digital Media Project Manager at Common Sense Media, where she manages the research and creation of a forthcoming Digital Citizenship curriculum for 5th-8th grade students. She is also a key point person for the Digital Media & Learning grantee network funded by The MacArthur Foundation. Shira holds a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the Focus Dialogues, Shira and Linda Burch, Common Sense Media's Chief Education and Strategy Officer, co-conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited adult participants, and produced the final report.
Rafi Santo is a Senior Program Associate in the Online Leadership Program at Global Kids, Inc. Rafi specializes in the design and implementation of educational technology projects and has done work as varied as online youth dialogues, youth advisories focused around digital media, social media civic engagement programs and youth leadership development and peer education in virtual worlds. He has collaborated on projects with many organizations and with MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grantees to strengthen their initiatives through youth voices and perspectives. Rafi has over 10 years of experience in youth development and education. For the Focus Dialogues, Rafi and Barry Joseph, Director of Global Kids' Online Leadership Program, conceptualized the project, developed dialogue prompts, recruited teen participants, housed and monitored the dialogues on their website, a wrote the final report.
February 15, 2010
Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part Four)
This is the final part of my interview with Spanish educational researcher Pilar Lacasa for Cuadernos de Pedagogia, a Spanish language publication, about my research on the New Media Literacies. Here, we discuss learning games, mobile technologies, civic engagement, and my advice to parents and teachers.
Our challenge is then building bridges between culture and participatory democracy. Can you explain more?
The challenge is how we can help build the bridge between participatory culture and participatory democracy. I am starting to do research on what I see as proto-political behavior: the ways that these hobby or fan or game groups educate and mobilize their members around issues of collective concern. I believe that if we better understand these practices, we will be in a position to foster a new kind of civic education which starts where young people are already gathering but helps them to expand their understanding of their roles as citizens. A striking feature of these new social structures is that they are defined less through shared geography than through shared interests.
They may be better suited to support national or even global models of citizenship than those based on purely local levels of engagement. Yet, we need to be careful about making too many hasty assumptions about this. Jean Burgess tells the story of photographers in Queensland who connected through the photosharing site, Flickr. They began meeting up on weekends to visit local sites and photograph them together. As they began to share these photographs, they connected with former residents of the region who now lived elsewhere who shared older images and stories and remain linked to the local through the platform. As they began to take photographs, they began to look at their community through new eyes, starting to identify local problems and eventually working together to increase public awareness and lobby for solutions. So, a platform which is not particularly local in its organization never the less resulted in local political engagement.
You say that these on-line communities could be a new way for people practice being citizens. Could you explain these ideas a little further?
Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, sees bowling leagues as a cornerstone of American civic life in the 1950s. He suggests that communities gathered regularly at bowling allies to spend time together, increasing the social connections within the community. When they were not bowling, they were engaged in conversations -- some simply gossip, others dealing with local policies and concerns. The strong social ties which emerged in this context helped to strengthen their collective identities as citizens and thus increased voting and public service. Putnam fears that television pushed Americans out of the bowling allies and into their private homes, resulting in much greater social isolation and a breakdown of community life.
So, how do we understand the new social structures which are emerging around online gaming -- the guilds in World of Warcraft, for example. Here, people form strong shared identifications, gather together regularly to play and socialized, develop leadership which can deploy the diverse skills of the guild membership to confront complex challenges and pursue long term and short term goals. Often players say they come back night after night out of a sense of obligation to each other as much as out of a pleasure in the game play. In short, there are many of the foundations here which Putnam argued allowed bowling to seed a robust civic culture in the mid-20th century.
And video games? What can children learn from them?
Will Wright, the designer behind Sim City, the Sims, and Spore, has suggested we think of games as problem sets which students pay to be able to solve. What he means is that a good game poses complex challenges which are just on the threshold of the player's abilities, creates a set of scaffolded experiences through which they acquire the knowledge and skills needed to solve those problems, and offers them a chance to rehearse, make mistakes and learn through them. An even stronger game allows them to manipulate the simulation, shifting variables and learning what the consequences of their changes are. A great game creates a context where they are encouraged to share what they learned and what they produced with other players, enabling peer to peer learning to occur.
As James Paul Gee has suggested, games put into action many of the core principles being discussed by the best work in contemporary learning sciences. And they do so in ways that are highly motivating. Young people have clearly defined goals and compelling roles which motivate them to actively and intensely engage in the learning process. We've all seen kids who will quit early when they hit a problem with their homework and yet beg to stay up later if they hit a challenge in a game.
Could then video games have a place in classrooms?
Schools would do well to see what they can learn from games. Some are arguing that schools should build activities on and around existing commercial games which already have strong learning potentials; others that educators should be developing compelling new games which connect school content with good game design; and others are suggesting that we redesign school activities to include elements of play and game design. All of these models point to the need to incorporate a more playful mode of learning into our educational institutions and to harness the power of games for more formal kinds of education.
Right now, games are teaching young people skills -- problem solving, design, simulation -- but it is up to teachers to couple those experiences to specific domains of knowledge which get valued in the curriculum. My experiences in developing educational games suggest that the first step is trying to rethink why we want kids to learn what they are required to learn -- that is, what it allows them to do in the world. Because information that is latent in a textbook has to be deployed actively in a game, otherwise there is no learning taking place.
Do you think video games can help break down barriers between what is learned inside and outside school?
Playing the game is only a small part of gaming culture and in the case of The Sims, Spore, or Little Big Planet, it may be the least significant part of the experience. These games encourage young people to remix and reprogram their contents. Sims players may develop their own avatars, design their own furniture, and exchange it online at the Mall of the Sims. The Sims players may use an ingame camera to collect images for their scrapbooks and then use the images to construct original fictional narratives. They may use the game engine as an animation platform to construct their own movies. In Little Big Planet, they may design and program their own levels and exchange them with other players. In many games, they form communities online to teach each other the skills they need. And in games like the Civilization series, which simulate historical societies, they include teaching about real world history as well as ingame strategies and tactics.
In each case, the game becomes the entry point for a broader range of cultural expressions and in the process, helps to create sites of learning. Young people are learning to program, design, tell stories, or become leaders through their social interactions through and around games. These accomplishments need to be recognized and valued through schools just as schools have historically supported the activities of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts or after school programs like yearbook, newspaper, drama club, and the like. These activities become a crucial part of how young people define their identities and form social affiliations.
But the principles that work there to support informal learning can also be carried over into more explicitly educational activities. For example, Mitchell Resnick at the MIT Media Lab has developed the Scratch program which uses these same participatory culture principles to enable young people to learn how to program; they've created a platform where young people develop their own projects, share them with each other, borrow and remix codes, building upon and improving each other's work, through principles derived from the Creative Commons and Open Software movements. Young people around the world are using these platforms to acquire digital skills through the classroom, after school programs, and on their own.
I would like to ask you about the context of learning related to the new mobile media, for example a small NDSi or the iPhone. What implications could have this have for education?
In many parts of the world, these new social and cultural practices are developing around mobile media rather than networked computers. Cell phones are dramatically cheaper than laptops, say, and thus we are broadening who gets to engage with the new social networks. Twitter, for example, is designed to allow contributions from both mobile phones and computers, creating a system where information flows fluidly across media platforms.
A short term consequence of these developments is that young people will be able to access the information they need from anywhere and everywhere. These mobile phones will become a new kind of knowledge prosthesis which expands the capacity of their memory, allowing them to mobilize information in new ways on the fly. We call these practices distributed cognition because they involve off-loading parts of our thinking capacity onto a range of appliances and see it as a fundamental literacy.
Of course, we need to be concerned about an over-reliance on such devices if it decreases other kinds of learning, yet we also need to know multiple ways of solving a problem and the ability to off-load some tasks to our tools makes it possible for us to explore other questions at greater depth. Yet we are just starting to explore the implications of location-awareness for education. Eric Klopfer at MIT has developed a tool kit which allows educators to design augmented reality games. Augmented reality games are played in real spaces using digital handheld devices. In some cases, they allow students to access fictional information which is GPS enabled alongside their own observations of the real world.
Through the games developed for these platforms, young people learn to see the world through the eyes of urban planners or environmental scientists; they get to see their local communities as they might have been a hundred years ago. David Williamson Schaffer talks about these practices as "epistemic games," that is, games which help us learn to think like a particular professional group, deploying their real tools and practices to confront authentic problems in the real world.
Young people may not simply play such games; they might also work to develop them, interviewing people in their neighborhoods as they build games around local history or civic problems, translating what they learned in their textbooks into resources which they can deploy on the ground to solve compelling problems.
What aspects do you consider to be essential in teacher education to help kids and young peopleto develop new literacies by using these new media?
Teachers, librarians, and other educators have a vital role to play in this new electronic culture. They will become research coaches who help young people set reasonable goals for themselves, develop strategies for tracking down the information they need, advise them on the ethical challenges they confront as they enter new social and cultural communities, and recommend safe ways of dealing with issues of publicity and privacy which necessarily shape their digital lives.
In order to perform that role, they have to become comfortable with the new technologies and their affiliated practices. It is not enough to know how to use the tool; they have to master the cultural logic and social norms which are emerging around these online communities. This is too much for any teacher to take upon themselves. So, they must each take responsibility for acquiring different skills and understandings and be prepared to draw upon each other as resources for themselves and for their students. In doing so, they will be applying the principles of collective intelligence and social networks to their own practices and thus will be immersing themselves more deeply in these new media literacy skills.
We've been experimenting with an 'unconference' model for developing curriculum which bridge between traditional school content and new media literacy skills as an alternative model for professional development. The unconference starts out fairly chaotically as participants dump onto the web or exchange in person ideas, resources, practices, and activities which they think might be valuable to this subject area. Gradually, you gather together these resources, start to construct categories, and refine the activities. In the process, participants get to know each other and what each member can contribute to the group.
Many families are afraid of new media, and may even prevent their children from using them in the same way as they use a book, or a comic, a novel and so on. What would you say to them?
In many ways, parential concerns about new media are understandable. As parents, we are facing new experiences which were not part of the world of our childhood. We don't know how to protect our children as they enter these spaces and we may not know how to advise them when they encounter problems there. But those basic concerns can easily be turned into fear and even panic as they get manipulated by a sensationalistic press , political demagogues, and culture warriors. As adults, we owe it to our children not to foreclose important opportunities out of ignorance and fear. Instead, we have an obligation to learn more about the emerging cultural practices we've been talking about here. I certainly don't think we want to turn our backs on our children nor do we want to be snooping over their shoulders all the day. We need to be informed allies who can help watch their backs as they enter into situations that none of us understand fully.
We need to be there to celebrate their accomplishments; we need to be there to advise them as they confront ethical challenges; we need to be there as they acquire skills at accessing and deploying information. We need to do this because it is important to our children, their development, and their well-being.
Maybe you can tell a little more by using some example
Here's a few practical examples of things you can do: When my son was three, my wife and I began to help him develop some basic media literacy skills. Some nights, we read him a bedtime story. Other nights, we asked him to tell us a bedtime story. We recorded his stories on the computer; we could print them out and let him illustrate them, then we'd photocopy the whole and send it to his grandparents as a gift. They would read and respond to his stories. Many of his stories dealt with the media he consumed -- games, television, comics, films, toys -- and we would use this storytelling practice to talk through with him his fantasies and fears, sharing our own values about the issues he was exploring.
Telling the stories gave him a sense of being an author -- a key experience as we think about the new participatory culture -- and it paved the way for later creative experiences he would have as he moved on line.
Or imagine an older child -- a teen or preteen -- who is first becoming interested in social networking sites. Perhaps you could ask her advice in setting up your own Facebook page. This would allow you to learn more about how social networks work but also to create a context for talking about how people represent themselves on line. If she's like most teens, she is going to be at least as concerned about being embarrassed by her parent's public presentation as you are going to be about how much information she shares on line and it is through those conversations that you can exchange your values.
Teens still need adult involvement and parential advice as they move into this new world, but they also deserve to have that advice informed by direct experience and careful research into the nature of the world we are preparing them to enter. This is no different in its logic than what previous generations of parents have faced given the pace of technological change across the 20th century, even though the specifics are going to be different from anything your parents confronted in raising you.
In conclusion: How can we transform schools by using new media? Please, give us one or two suggestions for institutions, even governments, that are considering this challange, what would you say?
The first point I'd make is that we have to understand the new media literacies as a paradigm shift which impacts every school subject, not as an additional subject which somehow has to be plugged into the over-crowded school day. The push should be to have every teacher take responsibility for those skills, tools, and practices that are central to the way their disciplines are practiced in the real world rather than locking away the technologies in a special lab or a special class where it gets isolated from the real work of the school. The school needs to work together, as a community, to develop strategies for full integration across the curriculum, and to identify those skills which each member might contribute to the community as a whole.
Schools need to operate much more along principles of collective intelligence and social networking -- to identify and deploy the expertise they have in their community and to reach beyond their community to other sources of experience and knowledge, whether parents, educators at other schools, or others within their larger community. They need to create ways of sharing best practices and failures, offering advice and feedback to each other as they make this challenging transition. They need to be as concerned with how they teach as they are with what they teach.
Where possible, schools need to introduce complex problems which require their students to track down information from multiple channels and to work together to pool knowledge and combine skills . They need to develop opportunities for young people to share what they have produced with the world, getting feedback and recognition from a larger community, and taking greater responsibility for the quality of information they circulate.
Schools need to lower existing barriers which make it difficult to deploy participatory platforms through education, stepping back from software that filters or blocks access to the internet. But in doing so, they also need to work with the students to develop norms of use that respect the particular character of the school community and its goals rather than adopting an "anything goes" attitude.
February 12, 2010
Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part Three)
This is the third part of my interview with Spanish educational researcher Pilar Lacasa for Cuadernos de Pedagogia, a Spanish language publication, about my research on the New Media Literacies. This time we talk about the relations between old and new media and explore how YouTube, fan fiction and Facebook can be deployed in meaningful ways through school.
So far, we have been talking about new media, but it is clear that they do not replace the old ones.
Almost never do schools think about the relationships between new and old media. Some people may have the idea that some of them will replace the old ones. A study of American college students preparing to enter ten different professions found that educators in training were the least likely to play videogames or participate in social networks. Teachers have defined themselves as defenders of book culture, often in what they perceive as opposition to the new digital culture. This protective stance no doubt reflects the rhetoric of the digital revolution which imagined that new media was going to displace if not destroy old media. And thus, for digital culture to thrive, book culture must die.
In fact, the opposite has happened. The new media has built upon and around existing modes of communication. The average person has access to a greater array of different books now than ever before thanks to online book dealers. The average teen writes more, thanks to e-mail and online discussion forums, than the previous generation. We will live in a world where books and printed matter still matters even as students get more information from computers than ever before. They are going to need to go where the information is, know how to assess the reliability of information which comes without comfortable gatekeepers, and be able to communicate their ideas through many different channels to many different publics.
Therefore we need to use multiple media.
This situation doesn't allow us to make any easy choices between teaching print and digital literacy: students clearly need both and more importantly, they need to understand the relationship between the two. They need to understand the different structures through which traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia produce and evaluate information, for example. They need to be able to read charts, maps, and graphs, but also to be able to produce and interpret information through simulations. They need to be able to express themselves orally, with pens and paper, and with video cameras and digital editing equipment.
Many of them are already acquiring such skills outside of the classroom through informal learning practices that thrive in this participatory culture but others are being left to be raised by wolves, not able to find their way into generative practices and supporting communities, and acquiring none of the ethical norms that might govern their future activities. Howard Gardner's Good Play Project at Harvard found that many young people don't apply ethical standards to their online conduct because they don't believe that what they do online matters. We can see this as an ironic response to adults who have dismissed such activities as worthless or meaningless, rather than asking questions about how or what they are learning through their participation in this practices, recognizing their accomplishments, or advising them on their ethical conflicts.
Schools, libraries, and other educational institutions need to be both embracing the potentials and confronting the challenges of this emerging culture not as a replacement for existing print practices but as an expansion of them.
Can we think then that schools lose many of learning opportunities supported by new media?
New Media platforms, such as YouTube, have expanded our access to the rich archives of existing sounds and images from the past. We have access now to recordings that were once buried in the archives but which we now can summon up at a moments notice. We can navigate the entire media scape on the fly, at a second's notice, in response to the flow of a classroom discussion.
We could, at least, if schools were not often blocking access to these very same tools and platforms out of fear of inappropriate content or risky forms of participation. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! It is as though we were closing all the libraries out of concern that young people might track down the pictures of topless women in National Geographic!
Beyond that, the new media tools allow young people to edit and respond critically to those moving images in new ways, to create presentations which have the explanatory power of well crafted documentaries, though again, they are often blocked by schools who are uncertain about the legalities of copyright protection and thus unwilling to allow them to remix and recontextualize content. So, right now, at least in American schools, and in many other counries around the world, the opportunities afforded us by these new digital archives are being shut off through school policies that are born more from fear and uncertainty than from reasoned pedagogical goals.
Maybe your idea of transmedia phenomenon may be a way to explore opportunities offered by the media. For example, teaching students how to write narrative texts when using the Harry Potter books, movies or video games.
What I'm describing as transmedia storytelling has been a fundamental part of human expression since the dawn of time. Certainly we need young people to develop a critical understanding of how contemporary media franchises like Harry Potter operate, both recognizing the aesthetic opportunities for authors to construct worlds which are bigger than single texts or even single media, but also understanding the commercial imperatives which are marketing extensions of popular stories to them.
But this idea of transmedia might also help us to understand the world of the church in the middle ages, say. Unless you were literate and in the priesthood, you would not have experienced the stories of the Bible through a single text. Instead, those stories would surround you, conveyed through every available communications system. They would be performed on carts, expressed through stainglass windows and the structures of cathedrals, painted on the ceilings, proclaimed from the pulpet, and sung by the choir. Go back even further and think about the early cave paintings which historians believe were used as sites of performance: the live storyteller interacting with the painted image to convey the experience of the hunt. So, the earliest representations we have might have been part of a transmedia experience.
Many of the works we teach took elements of oral culture and translated them into printed prose, again suggesting that we need to understand how stories move across media if we are going to understand why and how humans tell stories. Too often, teachers have been indifferent about media, teaching the texts of plays without regard to the conditions of their performance, for example. But now, we want teachers to explore art and literature with a heightened awareness of the media through which they were produced, distributed, and consumed.
And what about social networks, a new widespread medium of communication among young people and also among many adults?
One way to understand the new power of social networks is to understand what roles these platforms and practices played in the recent Obama presidential campaign. A traditional political website works by linking individual voters to the campaign; a social network site works by linking voters to each other. At a certain point, Obama's supporters were able to take over much greater control of the political campaign. They could organize local events quickly without having to go through the centralized campaigns. They could pool resources, each member contributing what skills they could, to the shared effort. Once he's in office, they can continue to mobilize in response to public policy debates or rally around other candidates who share their vision of progressive change for the country.
These social network sites are transforming the nature of civic engagement and participation. Young people need to learn how to become a part of these powerful new kinds of communities, need to know how to navigate through social networks to connect with people who have skills and knowledge that they need, need to understand the ethics of social life within these networks, and need to understand the risks as well as the opportunities of interacting with people they do not know face to face. The Obama campaign worked at both the national and the local level, but these social networks now work on a global scale.
What is the role that these networks can play in schools?
Schools have long used pen pal programs to connect their students with children from other parts of the world. The deployment of social networks through education allows young people ongoing interactions with a global community of learners who share common interests and goals; it allows schools to dramatically expand the human resources they can draw upon in their ongoing pedagogical activities. As we think of social networks as sites of learning, we can see two levels of pedagogy -- acquiring access to the broader range of expertise supported by the networks and acquiring the skills needed to deploy social networks for a variety of purposes in the future.
As with all of the new literacy practices we are discussing here, some youth will have extensive experience deploying social networks outside of school and deploying them in the classroom will allow them to direct that experience towards mastering new content, while other youth will not know how to work through social networks and schools can provide them with a safe, supervised context for mastering those skills.
February 10, 2010
Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part Two)
Last time, we ran part one of a four part interview I did with Spanish educational researcher Pilar Lacasa for Cuadernos de Pedagogia, a Spanish language publication, about my research on the New Media Literacies. This time, we dig deeper into the concepts of participatory culture and the participation gap and talk about how the new media literacies can impact how we teach literature.
Is there anything really new in the idea of new literacies? Is it different from other processes such as reading and writing much more related to the printed materials?
Yes and No. In many ways, they are expansions of skills we've always taught which is why many of them will feel familiar to teachers and will fit comfortably within existing disciplines. In some ways, they represent the expansion of research skills into the more diverse information environment or an extrapulation of what it means to read and write to cover a broader range of communication practices.
But they also reflect habits of mind that emerge in response to networked communications or a converged media landscape. So, there is a much greater emphasis on literacy as a social and collective rather than an individual practice -- on learning to collaborate and exchange knowledge with others. There is a greater emphasis on the challenges of moving through a dispersed media landscape, interacting with groups who come from different backgrounds, shift attention between multiple channels of communication, or deploying different tools for processing information. These new skills do not so much emerge from new technologies as from new social, cultural, and educational opportunities that have emerged around those platforms.
Perhaps there is a generation gap when people use new media.
There are certainly generational differences in our experience and comfort with these new Technologies and their affiliated practices. Most adults encountered the computer first in the workplace, where-as many young people encountered it first in the home or the school. They approached it with different goals and expectations which means that they understand it in fundamentally different ways.
It isn't just that young people have grown up with the technology while adults came to it later in life. They have a totally different attitude towards what a computer is and the place it holds in their lives. That said, we have to be careful about drawing too sharp a generational dividing line here. First, the most powerful forms of participatory culture are those where adults and young people interact together in more fluid ways than would be found at school, work, church, or home. They are motivated by shared interests; they actively seek to learn from each other; and they are valued less on their age than on what they can each contribute. When we assume adults are locked out of the digital realm, we close off those opportunities for transgenerational experiences.
Second, we need to be careful about assuming that all young people have had access to the full benefits of the digital age. There are many inequalities not simple in terms of access to the Technologies but also in terms of opportunities to participate. That's what I call the participation gap. Some young people have been invited into the digital realm and feel free to express themselves there in as public a manner as is possible, while others feel excluded, cut off.. They don't understand how participatory culture works; they haven't been encouraged to participate; they don't think anyone will care what they have to say.
What could do educators to overcome these participation gaps?
Educators have key roles to play here in terms of creating a space where those who have been previously excluded can be welcomed into the new knowledge communities and can find their voice through the emerging participatory culture. But to perform those roles, they need to overcome their own fears and uncertainties about the digital World. They have to learn about the online world the way many young people have learned about it -- through active participation. They need to experiment with the various tools and platforms; they need to find a community which shares their interests and passions and plung into it deeply so they know what it is like to share knowledge through a social network and to create things through dispersed collaboration.
To do this, they may well need to sit down with a young person they know who is deeply immersed in this world and seek their advice and mentorship, reversing the normal role in the classroom, learning from their students or their children. In doing so, they will be trading different kinas of expertise -- matching the exploratory spirit of youth with the experience and wisdom of adulthood. But they need to avoid closing off the communication and learning too quickly by assuming that they already know everything the young person is going to teach them.
In these new contexts of communication we not only speak about Participatory Culture but also about Convergence Culture.
When people in the media industry use the term convergence they are often talking about a technological process -- the bringing together of multiple media functions, the uniting of multiple communication channels through a single device. Imagine say the iPhone as a tool which performs many different media functions -- from playing games to taking photographs -- and connects us to different networks -- from telephone to the internet. That's often what gets described as a convergence device.
I want to argue though that convergence is also a cultural process, one where stories, ideas, images, move across all media platforms, shaped both by the desire of companies to expand markets and by the desire of consumers to gain easier access to meaningful media. In many ways, it doesn't matter whether or not our tools are talking to each other; we are forming an integrated information ecology in our heads. Storytellers are learning to disperse information and experiences across media platforms, encouraging their readers to explore and map the storyworld through a series of encounters. Educators are discovering that we learn or do research in a similar manner, putting together dispersed pieces from many different media platforms, to form a coherent picture of the world around us. So, teachers need to encourage students to develop a core competency in transmedia navigation.
Are any specific skills necessary to take part of this new Participatory and Convergent Culture?
Transmedia navigation is simply one of a range of new competencies which we think schools should be exploring. In a white paper I helped to write for the MacArthur Foundation, we identified a series of core skills and competencies which we think are needed for young people to be able to fully enter the new participatory culture. These skills include the ability to deal with simulations and visualizations, the ability to explore the environment through play and identity through performance, the ability to deploy information appliances and social networks in processing information, and the ability to negotiate around cultural differences encountered in diverse online communities. Project NML has been developing a range of resources to help educators acquire and promote these new skills.
Could you explain what are those resources developed in the project New Media Literacy?
Our Learning Library, for example, provides a range of pedagogical challenges (a cluster of activities which allow young people to encounter, explore, experiment with, and ethically evaluate some of the emerging media practices.) which illustrate and embody the 12 skills. The library's resources are modular, so that they can be appropriated and used in a range of contexts from home schoolers to formal educators. They are multidisciplinary so that teachers can take ownership over those skills which are central to their own disciplines and thus we can integrate these skills across the curriculum.
The library is designed as an open platform which allows educators and students not simply to consume existing activities but also to contribute their own, sharing what works in their classrooms with other educators, appropriating and remixing each other's content so that we can all learn from each other. In other words, the learning library takes seriously what I've already said here about participatory culture and collective intelligence.
Who can use this library?
We are encouraging different organizations to develop their own collections for this library and are especially excited at the prospect of educators from many different countries sharing something of their own media cultures and practices through the library, allowing us to explore and learn on a global scale. I'd like to personally invite Spanish educators to try their hand at developing challenges which reflect your local educational and cultural practices.
What could be role of the curriculum content in learning new literacies?
My philosophy has been to be conservative in content and innovative in method. That is to say, we believe that these skills have something to contribute to even the most traditional of curriculum and that they are relevant across the full range of school subjects. Every field of knowledge today has been reshaped through the changes that have impacted our information environment. Scientists and social scientists for example regularly work with digital simulations and new modes of visualization as they process their data, yet these practices have scarcely impacted the way science and social science get taught in schools. Contemporary artists and writers are deploying remix practices that transform how they think about authorship but these insights about creativity have scarcely made it into the language arts classroom.
Could you mention some examples of how the curriculum can be introduced by using methodologies emerging from these new environments?
Through our Teacher Strategy Guides on Reading in a Participatory Cultture and Mapping in a Participatory Culture, we've been modeling new ways for integrating these skills into the classroom. For example, our Reading project took the American novel, Moby-Dick, as its starting point, seeking to better understand how its author, Herman Melville, created through borrowing and recontexualizing stories found in Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, and contemporary whaling lore, as the basis for his own creative expression.
We also explore how subsequent artists and authors have used Moby-Dick as a starting point for their own creation and thus how Melville has exerted a living presence in our contemporary culture. In doing so, we encourage students not simply to critically read but also to creatively rework elements from the novel to reflect their own perspectives on the issues Melville raises. And we encourage them to reflect on the ethics of appropriation -- what artists can take freely, what obligations they owe to previous generations, and so forth.
I'd imagine that this same approach might be applied productively to Cervantes. Don Quixote is a novel which centers around the imaginative life at a moment of profound media change -- not simply through the protagonist and his relationship to romantic fictions but also through the ongoing discussions of books and printing. There are so many ways that this novel can be taught in order to heighten our understanding of the personal and social consequences of changing the way a society receives and conveys information in a way that also opens students up to discuss the world they are entering at our present moment of profound and prolonged media change.
February 8, 2010
Learning in a Participatory Culture: A Conversation About New Media and Education (Part One)
A few weeks ago, I received a message in the mail from Ariel Glazer at University of Buenos Aires sharing this video, which remixed some footage from the interview I gave to the producers of Digital Nation. In many ways, it captures some of my core themes and concerns better than the PBS documentary and in the process, it helps us make connections with a range of other conversations taking place around the world about New Media Literacies.
When I taught my New Media Literacies class last semester at USC, I asked my students to interview a student or teacher about the ways that the issues in our class impacted their lives. Because these students came from many different countries, we ended up with glimpses of what was taking in classrooms from the Laplands to India, from Bulgaria to India. In almost every case, the young people interviewed described deeply meaningful forms of learning which were taking place through their engagement with affinity groups and social networks online, yet they each described school practices which shut off that learning once they entered the classroom. The teachers, on the other hand, talked about struggling to keep up with their students, about a lack of formal training to help them make the transitions being demanded, and about their fears of losing control over their classroom.
I wanted to stress the international nature of these exchanges because this week I am going to be sharing with you an extended interview which I did with Pillar Lacasa, a Spanish researcher, who has spent two blocks of time as a visiting scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program and whose work has been featured on this blog before. Lacasa is a close friend and she knows enough about my work to ask questions which help position it for readers back in Spain. Since this interview will appear later this week in Spanish in Cuadernos de Pedagogia, I asked her if I could share the original English language version here. I hope that this will be of interest especially to the many parents and educators who read this blog and may represent a response to some of the issues raised in the Digital Nation documentary.
Children and young people like to spend their free time in front of the screen. Could you give us some good reasons to that could persuade educators to introduce new media and screens in schools
At the end of the day, it isn't about the technology. It certainly isn't about the screen per se. It is about the informational affordances and cultural practices which have taken shape around the computer and other interactive technologies. It isn't about the computer replacing the book. It is about a world where students learn with a book in one hand and a mouse in the other, rather than one where they are taught that book culture is so fragile it needs to be protected from the computer.
Jenna McWilliams, until recently, part of our Project NML staff, writes powerfully about reading with a mouse in your hand. She tells us that teachers often encourage students to read with a pencil in their hands -- not simply letting the words pass over their eyeballs but critically engaging with them, taking notes, asking questions, critiquing as they go. When students read with a mouse in their hands, they take this one step further: they assume that they must actively respond to what's been put in front of them; they are poised to participate; they take responsibility over the quality of information and correct it publically if it is wrong.
Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, tells us we respond to the culture differently when we see it through the eyes of a participant rather than a consumer. And it is this participatory culture which has been facilitated by the new digital media in a way that stretches far beyond the imagination of previous generations.
Reading your book I noticed that you establish an interesting distinction between mass media and technology. How do you understand both of these concepts
?
For me, a medium is more than simply a technology. It also includes the social and cultural practices that have grown up around us. So, when we talk about television, we are not simply talking about an electronic appliance; we are talking about the programming strategies and conventions which have emerged to shape our experience of television and we are referencing the particular mind set that has evolved around watching television often in our homes with little chance of engaging with its contents directly or publically. When we are talking about the internet, we are talking about all of the activities we perform through this new information infrastructure and the mindset which emerges through our ongoing engagement and participation in the great public conversation that emerges through it.
Beyond the individual medium there is a media ecology -- all of the different kinds of communications systems which surround us and through which we live our everyday lives. Right now, for example, we inhabit a world where mass media, top down systems of communications, co-exist with grassroots media, which enable much broader opportunities for our participation. We are just starting to understand what happens when these two systems collide.
You introduce the idea of a Participatory Culture in relation to new media. Can you explain the relation between the two concepts?
Participatory culture didn't begin or end with the internet. Most of what I am describing as participatory culture can be found in any thriving folk culture. At its best, a folk culture is defined through the expanding opportunities for participation. Everyone who wants to join is accepted. Everyone who has something to contribute is embraced. Experienced members share what they know through informal mentorship with newcomers because it expands the expressive resources of the community. The exchange of folk artifacts is reciprocal, based on the ideals of a gift economy, rather than hierarchical or commercial.
This idea of dispersed expression broke down in the 20th century as most forms of cultural production became professionalized and commercialized. We moved into a world where we consumed but did not produce the resources of our culture -- never totally but largely. Throughout that period, though, there were all kinds of underground and grassroots practices which held onto the idea of shared cultural expression and participation. These practices have re-emerged and gained greater public visibility in the era of Flickr and YouTube.
These technologies have brought cultural expression down to a human scale; they have placed the exchange of stories or songs in a social context; and they have opened up a space where all of us can be welcomed as potential participants. All of the research shows that the communities of practice which grow up around this participatory culture are powerful sites of pedagogy, fueled by passion and curiosity and by a desire to share what we learn and think with others. As with older folk cultures, informal pedagogies thrive as people get together to learn based on shared interests rather than fixed roles and responsibilities.
Participatory Culture could be relate with a Collective Intelligence as present in the media too?
In a networked society, literacy is a social skill not simply an individual competency. Understanding how information circulates becomes as important as knowing how to put your ideas into words, sounds, or images. Creation is iterative: we reshape what we've created in response to critical feedback from others in an ongoing process of innovation and refinement.
There are new forms of collective authorship which have emerged around principles of collective intelligence. Take Wikipedia for example, where any given entry may have multiple authors, each vetting and refining what was written before, each adding what they know to what others have already contributed. This is different from traditional forms of individual expertise and autonomous learning.
Pierre Levy tells us that in a networked society, nobody knows everything (Forget about the ideal of the Renaissance Man), everybody knows something (expand the range of possible expertises) and what any given member of the community knows is available to the group as a whole as needed. The result is an ethics of information -- an obligation to share what you know with the group, a need to respect yet critically engage with multiple ways of knowing, an active push to embrace diversity because it expands the creative and knowledge capacity of your network.
We are evolving towards this much more robust information system where groups working together can solve problems that are far more complex than can be confronted by individuals. And schools can actively prepare students for such a world -- by allowing them to develop and refine their individualized expertise, by providing complex problems which require collective effort to resolve, by teaching them the ethics involved in working in such a highly collaborative and open-ended context. Right now, schools are often using group work but not in ways which encourage real collaboration or shared expertise -- in part because they still assume a world where every student knows everything rather than one where different kinds of knowledge come together towards shared ends.
The project New Media Literacy relates participation to new forms of literacy?
What we are proposing is an expanded conception of literacy which includes all of the ways which we communicate our ideas to each other. This concept moves beyond the idea of critical consumption which is often what people call media literacy. You wouldn't consider someone literate if they could read but not write text and we shouldn't consider someone literate if they can consume but not produce media. Over the past fifty years, we have expanded the resources through which humans can communicate with each other, in some cases making tools like video cameras more widely available, and in others creating an infrastructure which allows anyone who goes online a chance to communicate their thoughts to the world.
Schools need to prepare young people to use these new resources creatively, effectively, and responsibly if they are going to prepare them for the lives they will lead in the 21st century. Such power can be under-used if they are not taught to use it creatively or effectively; it can be abused if they are not taught to use it responsibly. Teachers need to recognize both the risks and the possibilities of these new opportunities for human expression.
February 5, 2010
How to Get Academic Credit While Attending San Diego Comic-Con: An Interview With Matthew J. Smith
Today, I wanted to share with you a fascinating experiment in media education which is conducted each year as part of the San Diego Comic-Con. I've written about the centrality of Comic-Con as a meeting point between fans and producers and as a site where academics interested in promoting the study of comics co-exist side by side with dealer's rooms and discussions with comics creators.
This past year, I had a chance to consult with two students who were part of a program being offered by Matthew J. Smith, a comics scholar who teaches classes in media studies at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH. Every year, he organizes a team of students who conduct individual and collective ethnographic projects trying to make sense of the complexity and diversity of Comic-Con. He's now in the process of recruiting students for this year's program so I told him I'd help him spread the word. What follows is an interview with Smith about his ethnographic instruction and about the culture of Comic-Con. At the end, I tell you where you can go to be considered as a recruit for this educational program.
Can you give me some sense of the approach you take to teaching ethnographic research on the ground at Comic-Con?
Students are responsible for several readings before they get to San Diego, so that we can have an informed discussion about ethnographic tools when we meet. But from our first night onward, students are thrown into the deep end of the pool, being asked to record observations and make modest interpretations starting with "Preview Night" on the floor of the convention hall floor. Thereafter, there's a good deal of note taking, and of course talking through observations and constructing interpretations with peers in daily "Breakfast Briefings." After the first few days, students are encouraged to compliment their observations by doing interviews with informants. Some students find their individual topics evolving as we progress through the week, which is just fine with me! However, they do have a week to process the experience and think through their material more before their final narratives are due.
What goals do you set for your participants?
My primary goal is to help students become more media literate for having had the experience. Popular culture is created and marketed with them in mind. If nothing else, I really want them to be aware of their role in this process and exercise greater agency in their future interactions with it.
In addition, I'd like students to realize that they can discover meaning through ethnographic methods. I don't think that the tools of ethnography are taught as widely as they should be and this is an opportunity to expose students to them in what is essentially a laboratory setting.
Comic-Con has emerged as perhaps the most important interfaces between the entertainment industry and the public. What shifts have you and your students noticed in terms of the industry's engagement with fans in recent years?
What stands out to me is the way in which Con is now a multi-media experience in and of itself. I'm not just talking about the multiple media industries that are represented on site, but the way that Con is experienced by both those who are physically there--supplemented by constant Twittering, for example--and also by those who are elsewhere around the country. I return from San Diego feeling like one of the fortunate few who get to attend the Super Bowl, as friends and colleagues come up to me and say, "I saw Con on TV (or read about it online or got the feed) and knew you were there." For that moment, I am the coolest person in the room.
Within the more than 100,000 people gathered at Comic-Con, there are representatives of a broad range of different fan subcultures. How do you and your students deal with the diversity of different fan interests represented?
Some students find the scale overwhelming for the first few days. Given so much to process, I encourage students to focus their individual projects on areas of interest to their individual intellectual interests or pop culture tastes (e.g., Marvel Comics panels). With some filters in place, the stimuli become a bit more manageable. However, I love it when students start to look out for things for one another. Often at our "Breakfast Briefings" they begin to ask one another if they are aware of this event or that person's signing appearance in the hall latter in the day. These moments of overlapping interest really make us a learning community within the 100,000 person crowd.
Many attending the con now beline to the major presentations in Hall H and Hall 20. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what goes on at Comic-Con. What aspects of Comic-Con culture have emerged through your collaborative research efforts that we would miss if the focus was only on the major events?
Where to start!? My students have found nooks and crannies of popular culture that I would not have thought to explore in twenty trips to Con. Let me share a small sample of some of the project titles to give you a sense of what they have focused on in the past:
• Twitter as a Means of Direct Dialogue between Creators & Fans
• Aggressive Marketing & its Impact on Consumers at San Diego Comic Con
• "State Your Name and Your Purpose": The Talk of Marvel Comics Fans
• Fanbois at Comic-Con: Queer Consumer/Producer Interface & the Intransitive Writing of Comics
• Hollywood Comes to Comic-Con International: An Examination of Glamour & Glitz
• Video Games: On the Bottom Looking Up
Comic-Con is one of the most racially diverse fan gatherings I've ever attended. Has your research offered any insights into how and why this con attracts more minority participants than most other fan gatherings?
In three years my students have initiated eighteen different projects, and while a number have investigated demographics like gender and sexual orientation, none have addressed race explicitly. It's a great topic that some student could investigate this summer! My own impression is that California's diversity helps set up the climate for Con's diversity. Beyond that, is it that popular culture fans judge you by your interests first and not the color of your skin?
There has been a dramatic increase of female attendees at Comic-Con in recent years, partially in response to Twilight and True Blood, and this has generated some tensions with long-time attendees. What insights has your team's research yielded into these sources of friction?
I'm waiting for the student who wants to tackle this project! Over the last two years my students and I have certainly noted the outright hostility directed towards the Twilighters and found ourselves at a loss for how one minority (the comics fan) can turn on another. Is it anger at the encroachment of Hollywood on the Con finding an outlet at long last? Is it a matter of gender? Is it that the cross-over between interests doesn't quite overlap as much as other groups present (e.g., a video gamer can also be a comics fan)? I hope we have a student or two who will want to tackle these kinds of questions this summer.
Your students give a public presentation of their findings every year as part of the Con. How has the Comic-Con community responded to their representations of their norms and practices? How does this public presentation impact the kinds of work your students do?
The reception for my students has been tremendous. Whereas most academic presentations are lucky to draw an audience larger than the number of presenters behind the dais, my students typically draw a crowd of 80+ curious minds. The best audience members are those who want to challenge or extend my students' claims, weighing their own perceptions against those of my students. I love to see that kind of interaction as the students are challenged to either further defend their conclusions or engage in expanding/refocusing their thoughts. I think knowing that a public presentation is an integral part their task focuses their work for the week that we are there and makes them accountable to an audience of more than just me as the instructor.
Critics might argue that the duration of a con is not sufficient time to really immerse yourself into any kind of rich cultural community and that there are serious problems with performing "instant ethnography." What do you see as the strengths and limits of the work your team does each year?
That's entirely a fair critique. I try to keep the course from making the pretension that it is the only course in ethnography one would ever need. To the contrary, I explicitly state that this experience is a mere appetizer meant to whet one's appetites for more and richer ethnographic projects in the future. In Communication Studies in particular, I see a lot of programs where students are typically trained as either survey administers or rhetorical critics, and I want to introduce them to another viable way of coming to know the world around them.
What qualifications are you looking for from prospective students in your program?
There are no academic prerequisite, per se, other than that one be currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program and in good academic standing at one's home institution (which usually means minimally a 2.0 cumulative higher grade point average). The course is really designed to be introductory in its approach, although I've had graduate students participate each year who report learning something new. Beyond that, I've found that the most successful students are intellectual curious, open-minded, and willing to work hard. The experience is intensive: Students find themselves on the go for five consecutive days and that takes stamina. Even so, it is terrifically rewarding to come to the end of the experience and know that you discovered something new about culture and its exercise.
Matthew J. Smith teaches courses in media studies at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH, including "Graphic Storytelling: Comic Books as Culture," "The Graphic Novels of Alan Moore," and a week-long field study at Comic-Con International each summer (details of the latter may be found at www.powerofcomics.com/fieldstudy). In 2009, Wittenberg University's Alumni Association recognized him with its Distinguished Teaching Award. Along with Randy Duncan, he is co-author of The Power of Comics: History, Form & Culture (Continuum, 2009), a textbook for college-level comics arts studies courses. The two are also editing the forthcoming Comics Criticism: Methods and Applications.
The Field Study at Comic-Con
Earn academic credit while studying the dynamics of marketing and fan culture at the largest comic arts event on the continent, July 21-25, 2010.
For complete program details and costs go here.
Application deadline is March 1, 2010
February 3, 2010
"Killer Paragraphs" and Other Reflections of PBS's Digital Nation
This week, PBS stations around the United States are airing Digital Nation, a documentary which claims to offer us insights into life in the digital age. I was happy to participate in this important production, though, I must confess, more than a little disappointed in the finished product. It raises important issues, to be sure, but does so often in a one-sided manner which panders to the biases of public television viewers rather than challenging them to look at the potentials of digital media in education through new lens.
What I value from the production is the website which gathers together extensive interviews with key thinkers with a range of views about the value of digital media in education and our everyday life and which has collected the voices of everyday people many of whom share stories of how they have built productive relationships with and through new media technologies and practices. The website allows us to chart our own paths through this debate, to drill much deeper into different points of view, and offers a more balanced picture of the current state of the debate. The website allows us to ask questions, while the television show tells us what to think. Granted it does so in a way that is much more subtle than the typical Fox News scare story, but it is hardly "fair and balanced" either.
The existence of the website with so much raw footage alongside the completed documentary offers a unique resource for teaching basic media literacy skills, allowing us to question the choices the filmmakers made, and how various rhetorical devices shape how we respond to the words and images included.
All of this points to discussions we should be having, including a consideration of the potentials and limits of multitasking and whether it is inherently linked to our relations to digital media (or rather an artifact of a much longer history of economic and social pressures which have resulted in a more demanding and fragmented lifestyle). My one comment included in the film centered around the ways that people throughout the 20th century saw their lives as disjointed, understood their eyes as pulled in many different directions, and worried about distractions, yet also developed strategies which allowed them to cope with these pressures.
One of the passages in the film that annoyed me the most was its depiction of contemporary MIT students as the advance guard of technological development and yet as somehow failing in their classes because of an over-reliance and over-confidence in their multitasking skills. I wanted to share some reflections of my own perception of the MIT students, given how prominantly Sherry Turkle's concerns about these students played in the opening segments of Digital Nation. I know Sherry well, I hold her in great affection and respect, but on many points here, we've come away with different impressions. I should note that I taught at MIT for 20 years, arriving there before digital media hit most of the country, and leaving only six months ago. I also for 14 years was a housemaster in an MIT dorm so I saw these students in the classroom and where they lived.
Let me start with the concept of "killer paragraphs," a phrase used by one of the MIT students to describe his writing. I recognize the point of the piece was that they had difficulty connecting paragraphs together to form a coherent linear essay. On that point, I think we can all agree. But I think the student who described himself as writing "killer paragraphs" was getting at something that is easy to ridicule or dismiss, yet may be a significant shift in what constitutes good writing. The writing of MIT students has to do with the production of densely written, carefully argued, powerfully presented, meaningful chunks of information. They can and often are really "killer" in that they condense together a great deal of information, they have a core insight which gets introduced and developed in a half a page to a page of prose, and then they move onto something else. It is to the traditional college essay what Hemmingway was to Hawthorne. They take you through all of the steps of the argument; they support it; they anticipate and head off potential criticism; they draw on both the readings and their
personal experience. Some of the paragraphs make you weep for joy. Yet, they have difficulty connecting them together to form larger units in part because they learned and rehearsed their writing on discussion lists, where they acquired skills at compression and where extended development is apt not to be read or dismissed as long winded. (Trust me, my own verbosity is often held up to me as a reason why I am "not really a blogger.") I am not ready to dismiss this as bad writing, but I would work hard to make sure they could create a larger framework through which to connect their ideas.
The film makes the point that they are often multitasking in the classroom and that they believe they are better at multitasking than current lab research suggests. I certainly encountered situations where most of the students had a lap top open in my class. In some cases, they were performing quite mundane tasks, such as compiling code, which required very little of their attention and would be mind-numbing if performed with their full attention. They are multitasking in the same way that a faculty colleague would knit during faculty meetings: the actions were routinized, most of the time they didn't require much thought, but they absorbed a certain amount of nervous energy. I am also reminded of Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers which described how factory workers in the Lower East Side of New York in the early 20th century would pool their money and hire someone to read to them as they did mind-numbing labor. We often see such a gesture as the mark of a literate society, yet they were also, dare I say it, multitasking, combining two tasks, one of which required manual knowledge but not intellectual engagement with another that was all brain to keep them stimulated and engaged. We might see bringing coding to class as very similar.
In some other cases, their multitasking is monitorial, they are scanning their environment looking for changes in status, much the way the guy who works at the desk in my condo keeps his eye on four or five television screens to make sure nothing bad happens to the people in the building, even as he deals with signing in packages, chatting with residents, and doing a range of other tasks. He doesn't need to stare at the screens every moment, but he does need to be peripherally aware of what's going on there and act when it requires his full attention. One of my concerns with the lab based experiments on multitasking is that they assume each task is equally critical or that they all require a high level of accuracy and attention to detail. Sometimes, all that is needed is a quick scan or sweep in between other tasks that demand more focused attention. I hope that my lecture is not what is being scanned, but I know that the humanities are not always their top priorities and I would rather they get some of the content than to skip the class altogether when the Institute demands more of them than they can deliver. I've seen a student look hopelessly absorbed in their computer work, shift into active engagement with a class discussion, make very pertinent comments, and then go back to work, just as I've seen exhausted students make a great comment and then fall asleep before they heard their classmates response. It is not the ideal in either case but sometimes it reflects the crunch of a university system which pushes its students to the breaking point and beyond, just as adult multitasking is a product of unreasonable demands placed on us by current economic practices.
Some of the students make bad choices and pay the consequences for them. But then some of them stay up too late, don't read the assignments, put off doing written work, and make a range of other decisions which also negatively impact their performance in my classes. The reality is that even bright students sometimes make bad choices, and part of our task as teachers is to help them to see the consequences of bad choices and model more constructive relations with technology.
Some of the students are indeed engaged in activities which constitute distractions from the course work, but before the computer, you would see people flipping through textbooks, reading newspapers, doodling, or simply day dreaming in class, and the computer simply makes these actions more visible to people around them. I am not happy that they are doing these things, but as a teacher, it's my job to be more interesting than these minor distractions.
Most often, they use the computer to take notes, to record information that emerges for the class discussion. This is a generation that learned its keyboard skills in elementary school and often finds penmanship torturous. Why shouldn't they be allowed to use the computer to take notes?
They might also use the computer to draw on information relevant to the discussion. I made a conscious strategy of engaging with these aspects of their computer use, posing questions for them to look up information online just as I might ask them to look up something in a book. I might suggest examples that they might want to look at later and they would pull up the links and bookmark them for consulting later. They might check me if I was struggling for a bit of data and they might propose videos from YouTube which helped to illustrate the points we were exploring in the discussion. It's hard to call many of these uses multitasking in the negative way the film uses the word, because these are very much on task and help to reinforce the lessons through alternative media channels and help increase curiosity on things they could look at later. Students would often look at these book marked materials and send me e-mail about them which encouraged us to extend the discussion through another channel.
The charge that they are multitasking and thus not retaining information rings false to me. I have found that MIT students have incredible recall -- they can recount point by point details of class discussions weeks later. Many of them are very close readers of texts, having mastered close reading through their engagement with online fan and gamer discussion lists and can apply those skills to a range of media artifacts. Many of them are gifted problem solvers and brainstormers, having collaborated through social networks and online forums for much of their life. They would tackle theories almost as engineering problems, breaking them down analytically, resolving conflicts and confusions, and putting them back together again. In a liberal arts college, students rip into the theories like a pack of savage wolves, trying to see who or what will survive their terrorizing, but at MIT, students tinker with theories, seeing what each allows them to do, looking for their strengths, and then patching together their weeknesses, to see if they can build something stronger in their place.
As someone who lived with MIT students, let me tell you that computers have not displaced books. Almost every student has a stack of well loved and well worn books in their rooms, alongside their electronic computer. In some cases, textbooks, but even there, they were textbooks they chose to keep in a world where poor students can quickly sell off used textbooks they don't value. Many more of them were literary works -- particularly science fiction and fantasy, but also classics from the high school lit class, which have continued to speak to them in meaningful ways. I've certainly engaged in long conversations with these students about the books they read, sometimes well into the night. I even remember sitting up one cold December night until dawn taking turns reading A Christmas Carol as a group -- a project initiated by the students themselves. Unlike some adults I know who want to pit the computer against the book, they have no trouble giving both their proper respect, using the computer when it seems meaningful to them, reading books when it seems the best choice. They do so programatically in search of information, but they may also use both as a source of pleasure and self reflection. What I saw in the dorm renewed my faith that the values of book culture are surviving into the next generation.
Yes, they often use computers and mobile devices to navigate through the day, coordinating their activities with other equally dispersed and mobile students. Yes, they sometimes writing emails to people who are just across the hall. But they also still hang out in each other's dorm rooms and they particularly cluster in the lobbies of dorms to talk with each other. Our dorm was a thriving community, a support network for its members, a place where a great deal of learning took place through conversations, and I worry very little about the social skills of MIT students. Our dorm was perhaps the most vital social community I've ever been a part of -- and much of this was brought about because communication ocurred at multiple levels through a range of technologies. Sometimes there were fights through online spaces, but rarely were they allowed to fester, because they could always be resolved through face to face conversations. And yes, they formed strong connections with people they never met face to face -- which expanded their social networks, exposed them to new ideas. We also saw students who had come to MIT from other parts of the world able to maintain much stronger connections with their families and friends back home (or for that matter, at other universties around the world.)
I know what you are going to say -- that these are exceptional students at an elite university and not necessarily representative of students around the country. I fully agree. But keep in mind that I didn't choose to focus on MIT students. The filmmakers did. And they were trying to make the claim that MIT looked like where other students would be going in the future -- that they illustrated the traits of digital learning pushed to an extreme because MIT students are among the early adapters of technology and live lives that are more saturated with high tech experiences than most students. I am not sure that MIT students are really representative of much more than their own local culture and on the MIT campus, each dorm constitutes its own distinctive cultural community.
As someone who works through ethnography, I do not necessarily see any group as representative of the national norms. There is no one digital culture or digital generation, simply many different ways that groups have integrated digital technologies and practices into their lives, some rewarding, some potentially destructive, but each distinctive. At that point, I see a value in locating problems but I also see a value in locating success stories which might provide models for building more constructive relationships to technology. The work I've been doing for the past five years working on New Media Literacies has been to help identify what productive relationships to new media look like and to create materials which help teachers and students master needed skills. It doesn't assume everything we do online is equally valuable to us, but it also doesn't start from the premise, seemingly advocated at places in the film, that we should bar the school house gates to digital technology. For me, the potentials are much greater than the risks.
January 15, 2010
Never Mind the Bollocks: Shepard Fairey's Fight for Appropriation, Fair Use, and Free Cultre (Part Two)
This is the second part of an essay written by cultural report and USC Annenberg student Evelyn McDonnell, being reprinted here with the author's permission.
It was into this battleground that Fairey wandered with seemingly noble intentions. Since the mysterious and ambiguous days of the Andre stickers, Faireyʼs work had become increasingly political. Influenced by punk and Constructivism, he unabashedly referred to his work as propaganda. He made a series of posters attacking George W. Bush and the war on Iraq during the 2004 election. He also created posters for the campaign of Ralph Nader.
For the 2008 election, he decided to take a different tack.
"Iʼd spent a lot of time criticizing the Bush administration, the war in Iraq -- things unfortunately didnʼt have enough power to prevent but I could at least try to dissuade people from mistaking the same mistakes again," he says. "A lot of people really respond to negative images because venting is cathartic. I had started to think about why my anti-Bush images and other peopleʼs anti-Bush images had not kept Bush from being reelected in 2004. Maybe it makes more sense to support rather than oppose. And I looked at Obama as the unique opportunity to endorse a mainstream candidate... The ceiling to a lot of the rebel culture and the real activism and quasi-activism was these people are glad to talk but donʼt do anything to engage in this process enough to make an actual difference. I said Iʼm going to engage in this process. One of the most compelling things was having a two and a half year old and being about to have another baby. And thinking itʼs far more important to have them not growing up under McCain as for me to maintain my brand as anti mainstream."
So in January 2008, as Obama was emerging as a front runner in the Democratic race but before the Super Tuesday primaries, Fairey made the Progress poster. "I made the Obama poster just like I made any other poster. The week before it was a ballot box with a speaker on the front saying ʻEngage in democracy, vote.ʼ To me it was just another political image ... I had no idea it was going to be such a hit." Fairey purposefully created a piece that showed him reaching beyond the grassroots cultures that had been his comfortable home.
"I did purposefully try to make it something that I thought could cross over that would have enough appeal to my fan base to stylistically work for them and also not be quite as edgy or threatening. And not in any way to be ironic, to be sincere. And patriotic. My feeling was that all my friends are already going to vote for Obama. The people that hopefully this image will appeal to is the person whoʼs on the fence. It needs to be something thatʼs nonthreatening. Something -- this sounds really corny -- but something that would maybe be hopeful and inspirational."
Fairey originally did with the "Progress" poster what he had done with its predecessors: Made a limited print run of 3-400 that he sold, then used the money to make more posters to distribute for free. Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama held a rally at the University of California, Los Angeles, at which he gave away 10,000 copies. In the meantime, Fairey had been in contact with people inside the Obama campaign, who liked the artwork but preferred it carry a different textual message. "Hope" and "Change" were the keywords they were trying to promote, Fairey says. So he made a new version for the campaign. "I chose ʻhopeʼ because I think a lot of people are complacent and apathetic because they feel powerless," he says. "The first thing to motivate people to action is a level of optimism that their actions will make a difference. Hope is important because so many people feel hopeless."
The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Faireyʼs artful yet simple, dramatically chromatic message struck a chord. He made the poster available as a free download on his website, with the condition that any proceeds from sales go to the Obama campaign. Soon, "Hope" was everywhere, a powerful illustration of the way in which the Internet enables fast and direct communication. Fairey received a letter of thanks from the presidential candidate on February 22, 2008, that said in part: "The political messages involved in your work have encouraged Americans to believe they can help change the status-quo."25
On January 17, 2009, the Smithsonian unveiled a mural based on "Hope."For the artʼs maker, the experience, at that point, was a positive lesson in civic engagement.
"Iʼm proud of the image. I put all the money from it back into making more posters, giving money to the campaign, organizing the Manifest Hope art shows. It was all related to supporting Obama. There was no goal for personal gain. Of course publicity wise, it was great for me. Iʼm very fortunate that Iʼm doing that well in my career that I can dedicate that much time to supporting a candidate and not have to have an ulterior motive, like the ambassadorship to Puerto Rico. It was something that was really heartfelt and Iʼm really glad Obamaʼs President."
Backlash
No good deed goes unpunished. "Hope" catapulted the already successful Fairey to a level of notoriety enjoyed by few contemporary artists. He was the subject of numerous articles and was commissioned by Leviʼs to design a line of jeans. He was hired to draw covers of Time and Rolling Stone. The style of the "Hope" poster was itself widely appropriated and parodied (more on that later). But with fame comes friction.
In February 2009, the prestigious Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston debuted an exhibition of Faireyʼs work. The show had been planned before "Hope," the artist says. But of course, the opening got a lot more attention as a result of Faireyʼs heightened profile. Not all of this attention was positive. The night of the opening, Fairey was arrested by Boston police for acts of vandalism related to Faireyʼs public admission that he had performed numerous acts of street art during his lifetime, including when he lived in nearby Providence.
"The Boston arrest was a lot of different things converging," he says. "I made the
mistake of being very candid about my practice as a street artist. The Boston police said
thatʼs an affront to the Commonwealth."
Fairey had been arrested for vandalism before. But he had never been sued by a large corporation for copyright infringement. Actually, it was the artist who, in response to letters and phone calls from AP lawyers, threw down the formal legal gauntlet; on Feb. 9, 2009, with the Stanford University Fair Use Project as his legal team, he filed suit in US District Court in New York to vindicate his rights to the image. AP, saying in a statement that they were disappointed that Fairey had broken off negotiations over the Garcia image, filed a countersuit.
Faireyʼs case centers on fair use. The suit argues that Fairey "altered the original with new meaning, new expression, and new messages," and did not create the art for commercial gain; that he "used only a portion of the Garcia Photograph, and the portion he used was reasonable in light of Faireyʼs expressive purpose"; and that his use "imposed no significant or cognizable harm to the value of the Garcia Photograph or any market for it or any derivatives; on the contrary, Fairey has enhanced the value of the Garcia photograph beyond measure."26
The AP argues that Faireyʼs use of the photograph was substantial and not transformative: "The Infringing Works copy all the distinctive and unequivocally recognizable elements of the Obama Photo in their entire detail, retaining the heart and essence of The APʼs photo, including but not limited to its patriotic theme."27 It also charges that as of September 2008, Fairey had made $400,000 off the image. In a statement available on the website, AP spokesman Paul Colford said the organization was itself acting in defense of creators: "AP believes it is crucial to protect
photographers, who are creators and artists. Their work should not be misappropriated by others."28!
In October 2009, there was a significant, but troubling, development in the case. Fairey admitted that he had misstated which Garcia photo he had originally used for the poster. Instead of a photo in which Obama was shown next to actor George Clooney, he used a photo of Garciaʼs face alone. He also admitted that he had altered evidence to cover up his misstatement.Faireyʼs lawyers have resigned from the case; he has replaced them with new counsel. He also faces possible legal censure.
Fairey says he was initially mistaken about the source and then, embarrassed, tried to hide his mistake.29 The change in source affects one tenet of his fair use argument: that he "used only a portion of the Garcia Photograph, and the portion he used was reasonable in light of Faireyʼs expressive purpose."
"I made some poor decisions that I can only blame myself for," Fairey says.
Does Shepard Have a Posse?
Even before Faireyʼs admitted lie, he had a credibility issue. The Internet is full of Shepard-haters. Diehard punks and radical left-wingers accuse Fairey of selling out not just because of his Leviʼs and Sakʼs Fifth Avenue campaigns, but because of the Obama posters. Thereʼs a whole website devoted to listing the artists and works Fairey has copied. Undoubtedly some attacks are from artists who are jealous of his success. Others have fairly well-thought-out critiques. When I wrote an article on Fairey for The Miami Herald in November 2009, it quickly accrued comments both from kneejerk radicals and reasoned liberals troubled by Faireyʼs questionable integrity (a fan posted first). Sometimes, it seems as if Fairey has a posse -- one thatʼs out to hang him.
Most disturbing are allegations that while Fairey unapologetically appropriates, he has been litigious toward people who have in turn appropriated his work. In 2008 he sent a cease and desist letter to Baxter Orr, an Austin artist and art dealer who had made a version of Faireyʼs Andre image with a surgical mask on it (this was during the SARS crisis). Orr told The Austin Chronicle, "It's ridiculous for someone who built their empire on appropriating other people's images. Obey Giant has become like Tide and Coca-Cola."30
Fairey says he was upset because Orr had been profiting off the artistʼs work by buying posters cheaply from Faireyʼs website -- in true punk rock fashion, Fairey keeps prices for his work low -- then flipping them for a substantial profit. Since this practice is only unethical, not illegal, Fairey went after the "parasite" over IP infringement instead. Orr, who later made the disturbing "Dope" poster parodies of Obama as a cokehead, had publicly bragged about his actions and needled Fairey. Fairey now says the letter was a mistake. "I didnʼt think about how it looked hypocritical. I was operating out of anger and frustration."
One could argue that Faireyʼs admitted "mistakes" make him human. Or the artist could just be caught up in the tangle of sometimes competing, sometimes converging editorial and market logics that drive contemporary media work, as defined by scholar Mark Deuze.31 My personal assessment is that as a white kid from South Carolina, Fairey will always be an outsider in the outsider worlds of punk and hip-hop. This makes him both vulnerable to attacks from those who consider themselves insider purists (like Orr) and insecure. I think Fairey considers the current, constrictive rules of copyright law a burdensome and unreasonable hindrance to the cultural practices to which he, and increasingly many new media workers, are accustomed, and that he felt therefore above the law when it came to admitting the source of the Obama image. His
hypocritical defense of his own IP against an intruder both reveals his ego and shows just how complicated copyright can be. Even those who see it as being intrusive may see it as also necessary, especially when it comes to their own works.
Fairey is not against IP. DJ Diabeticʼs views of copyright are influenced by his love of hip-hop.
"I completely believe in the concept of intellectual property. I just think itʼs got such broad latitude for interpretation that when someone wants to make someoneʼs life hell over some sort of creative transformation of something, itʼs far too easy. What I think IP is about is when someone makes something that directly impairs the market of the creator, thatʼs a problem. When something builds its own new market and may enhance the creatorʼs market, thatʼs a good thing. I think most hip-hop that uses samples should be fair use. I think itʼs completely unfortunate for that art form that the laws have gone the way they have, and thatʼs due to lawyers."
Fairey is much more careful about attribution and appropriation these days. He has begun a project on American pioneers in art, music, and culture, starting with Rauschenberg associate Jasper Johns -- thus saluting some of the figures others have accused him of stealing from. On his website, he carefully notes the Johns image is by photographer Michael Tighe.32
"Iʼm not trying to steal peopleʼs images and exploit them," Fairey says. "I feel like anything I make, Iʼm adding new value that doesnʼt usurp the value of the original. At the same time I donʼt want people to feel taken advantage of, so if I can make it be mutually beneficial, I will. This has never been about me trying to be selfish or greedy about the art I make. I try to use my art for good causes. Almost every print I do has some philanthropic element."
Free Speech + Free Culture = Democracy
Lessig and Litman have both described at length how the companies who are able to buy the most lawyers and legislators are currently winning the copyright wars. AP says it is out to defend the rights of creators, but the creator of the Obama photo has both contested the organizationʼs ownership of the image and said he thought Faireyʼs use of it had been a mostly positive experience:
"I donʼt condone people taking things, just because they can, off the Internet. But in this case I think itʼs a very unique situation ... If you put all the legal stuff away, Iʼm so proud of the photograph and that Fairey did what he did artistically with it, and the effect itʼs had."33
The Recording Industry Association of Americaʼs cynical deployment of the band Metallica aside, copyright wars are not being waged by creators against users: They are being waged by the companies who have purchased the rights from the creators and are now cynically fighting to control creativity. Copyright law was invented precisely to counter such monopolization, when England passed the Statute of Anne to break the stranglehold booksellers had on literature. Todayʼs mediacracy is every bit as powerful as those 18th century word lords.
In terms of legal precedent, Fairey may have a tough battle. You can read lawyersʼ own mixed takes on the case, if you want a bit of a head spin. But many scholars who are closely studying the way new media is redefining cultural practices see the case as an important landmark. Jenkins argues that images of public figures should be particularly seen as fair game, as the art practices of Reid and Prince have already put into practice.
"Artists -- whether professional or amateur -- need to be able to depict the country's political leadership and in almost every case, they are going to need to draw on images of those figures which come to them through other media rather than having direct access..."
"The question, then, boils down to what relationship should exist between the finished work and the source material. And my sense is that Fairey's art was transformative in that it significantly shifted the tone and meaning of the original image. The photograph as taken has nowhere near the power that Fairey's deployment of it had. The photograph was quicklyforgotten amid the flood of such images. And many other photographers captured essentially the same shot. Fairey's poster, on the other hand, is so iconic that it is likely to be reproduced in American History textbooks decades from now. The mythic power comes from what Fairey added to the image -- not from any essential property of the original, which was workmanlike photojournalism."34
The most disturbing ramification of the case against "Hope," should Fairey lose, may be not just its possibly deleterious effect on free culture, but its impact on free speech and civic engagement, the backbones of democracy. If Fairey were less of a punk-steeped radical and were to consider making the Obama poster now, he might not simply license the fee; he might remain silent all together. "I still donʼt regret it, though Iʼm a lot closer to regretting it than I ever thought I would be," he says. "Itʼs such a nightmare that Iʼm going through. Itʼs been really hard on my family."
Not just to punks, rappers, and appropriation artists, but to a large, growing segment of the population that is finding in the frontier world of the Internet a thriving creative environment, Faireyʼs actions make sense. Appropriation is part of how they create and communicate every day. "[Fairey] embodies this new dispersed, grassroots, participatory culture about as well as any contemporary figure," says Jenkins. "The battle between AP and Fairey is an epic struggle between the old media and new-media paradigms, a dramatization of one of the core issues of our times."35
In Free Culture, Lessig argues that the divergence between copyright law and
public practice is turning regular citizens into outlaws, and thus undermining the rule of law. Fairey probably didnʼt exactly mean to launch a grenade into this battleground when he created the most populist, crossover work of his life. But since his entire ouevre was rooted in practices attacking mediacracy, perhaps he couldnʼt help but be a guerrilla.
The "Hope" poster won its first objective: Barack Obama was elected president on Nov. 4, 2008. It made Shepard Fairey a celebrity. And it could just change the way we think about, and litigate, cultural creation.
1 Henry Jenkins, et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Chicago: MacArthur Foundation, 2006,
2 Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press, 2006, location 188-192, ebook version.
3 Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, New York: Penguin, 2005, page 11.
4 This and all subsequent quotes from Fairey that are not footnoted are from an in-person interview conducted by Evelyn McDonnell Nov. 18, 2009.
5 Shepard Fairey, talk given at University of Southern California, Nov. 4, 2009.
6 "Sex Pistols Artwork," SexPistolsOfficial.com.
7 Shepard Fairey, et al, Obey: Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey, Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2009.
8
Richard Whittaker, "Artist Cage Match: Fairey vs. Orr," The Austin Chronicle, May 16, 2008.
9 Peter Shapiro, The Rough Guide to Hip-Hop, London: Penguin, 2005, pages 160-61.
10 Fairey et al, page 18.
11 Randy Kennedy, "If the Copy Is an Artwork, Whatʼs the Original?", The New York Times, Dec. 6, 2007.
12 Jason Rubell, phone interview with Evelyn McDonnell, Oct. 28, 2009.
13 Rene Morales, email to Evelyn McDonnell, Nov. 23, 2009.
14 Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, New York: Faber and Faber, 2009, page 302.
15 Lessig, pages 129-30.
16 Lessig, page 9.
17 Jenkins et al, page 32.
18 Jenkins et al, page 33.
19 Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright, Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006, page 13.
20 Paul Goldstein, Copyrightʼs Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003, page 15.
21 Goldstein, page 27.
22 See Nas, Hip-Hop Is Dead, Def Jam Records recording, 2006. Also Sasha Frere-Jones, "Wrapping Up: A Genre Ages Out," The New Yorker, Oct. 26, 2009, and Simon Reynolds, "Notes on the Noughties: When Will Hip-Hop Up and Die?", www.guardian.co.uk, Nov. 26, 2009.
23 Lessig, page 181.
24 Litman, page 14.
25 Fairey et al, page. 273.
26 COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY JUDGMENT AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF, SHEPARD FAIREY and OBEY GIANT ART, INC., against THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, page 11.
27 ANSWER, AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSES, AND COUNTERCLAIMS OF DEFENDANT, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, SHEPARD FAIREY and OBEY GIANT ART, INC., against THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, page 10.
28 Paul Colford, AP Statement on Shepard Fairey Lawsuit, Feb. 9, 2009.
29 Fairey, Nov. 4, 2009.
30 Whittaker.
31 Mark Deuze, "Media Work & Institutional Logics," Deuzeblog, July 18, 2006.
32 "Jasper Johns," Obey website, Dec. 10, 2009, http://obeygiant.com/.
33 Randy Kennedy, "Artist Sues the A.P. Over Obama Image," The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2009.
34 Jenkins, email to Evelyn McDonnell, Nov. 22, 2009.
35 Jenkins, Nov. 22, 2009.
Evelyn McDonnell is doing life backwards: After more than two decades of writing about popular culture and society, she's getting her Master's in arts journalism as an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California. She is the author of three books: Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock 'n' Roll; Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Bjork; and Rent by Jonathan Larson. She coedited the anthologies Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop and Rap and Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth. She has been the editorial director of www.MOLI.com, pop culture writer at The Miami Herald, senior editor at The Village Voice, and associate editor at SF Weekly. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Spin, Travel & Leisure, Interview, and the LA Times. She codirected the conference Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1998. She has won several fellowships and awards. "Nevermind the Bollocks" is part of a larger project Evelyn is researching on artists in the age of content. You can contact Evelyn at evelyn@evelynmcdonnell.com.
January 13, 2010
Never Mind The Bollocks: Shepard Fairey's Fight for Appropriation, Fair Use and Free Culture (Part One)
One of the many highlights of my first semester in LA was the chance to see and meet Shepard Fairey. who I regard as one of the most significant visual artists of our times and a focal point for debates about the poli
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