Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.28.08 | by W. Lance Bennett & Deen G. Freelon

Despite the frequently gloomy pronouncements about youth engagement, it is clear that young people can become highly motivated to act politically when opportunities are created for more expressive and networked participation in civic life via digital media. The recent explosion of youth enthusiasm for the Obama campaign is perhaps the most prominent example of how the divide between networked and more conventional top-down models of civic practice are being bridged. Digital phenomena such as the "Yes We Can" viral video and the official Obama Facebook group (one of the largest on the site) have played a considerable role in making contemporary electoral politics relevant for the youngest voting demographics. It remains to be seen whether this new participatory zeal will survive into the next president’s term or lose momentum after the election as technologies for sustaining political involvement recede after the election. These impressive displays of engagement suggest that the civic learning environment itself may need to be reexamined, and that the time is ripe for new learning and engagement models to be developed.

In this spirit, the Civic Learning Online (CLO) project of the University of Washington’s Center for Communication and Civic Engagement recently held a workshop for a diverse group of practitioners and scholars. The family of projects examined during the two days covered the gamut from research to practice, including: findings from a comprehensive study of learning opportunities in a sample of 90 US civic youth sites, a look at the development process that resulted in a Seattle area civic online environment, and an assessment of strategies to link this online environment to community youth culture organizations such as libraries, schools, local youth organizations and networks of engaged young people.

These and other elements of the CLO project are animated by the notion that changing styles of citizenship, along with access to digital communication technologies, motivate young people to seek new political skills and relationships. In particular, participatory media and social networking technologies are expanding what goes on in conventional civic learning categories of knowledge, expression, joining, and action. These conventional categories of civic learning are often narrowly understood to involve top down relationships between young citizens and institutional authorities such as teachers, journalists, and government officials who convey authoritative knowledge, sanction recognized forms of public expression, recognize civic groups to join, and recommend appropriate political actions to address issues. Digital communication technologies increasingly enable young people to invent new forms of civic engagement such as peer-to peer knowledge sharing, participatory media production, bottom-up network creation, and direct action initiatives. Adding these expanded modes of learning to the conventional categories raises questions about how and whether the traditional gatekeepers of civic culture (schools, civic organizations, government) may want to change their learning and engagement models to accommodate the changing civic styles of their younger constituents.

Can schools break down their firewalls and use the appeal and richness of online environments to engage new civic styles? How can traditional community cultural organizations incorporate online communication technologies into their programs? Is the quality of civic learning in online environments necessarily more shallow than that of schools? These are just some of the questions addressed by participants at the workshop. Some of their perspectives are included in the companion blog posts in this series.

We welcome your comments on our conceptual view of youth civic engagement, which can be found in the reports and blog posts at the Civic Learning Online site.

Editor’s Note: Readers interested in the website mentioned above may also be interested in our prior blog post which discussed the site’s launch.

Also check out additional posts in this series on the Civic Learning Online workshop:

• Howard Rheingold: Listening to Youth
• Kate Goddard: Digital Media and Civics
• Joseph Kahne: Puget Sound Off, A New Form of Civic Infrastructure
• Peter Levine: New Policies for Civic and Community Media
• Eszter Hargittai: Best Practices for Skill Development