Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.19.08 | In early 2006, we started the program in digital media and learning with three grants to support: a theoretical examination of participatory culture; an afterschool program to explore how young people learn media literacy skills, and a large-scale ethnographic study of young people’s participation with digital media.  MIT Professor Henry Jenkins has provided a seminal paper on media literacy and participation.  Dr. Nichole Pinkard and her dedicated team at the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute continue to create innovative approaches to curriculum, assessment, youth media production and participation, and linking afterschool practices with in school achievement.  And last, with the release tomorrow of Living and Learning with New Media, University of California at Irvine researcher Mizuko Ito, with Michael Carter, the late Peter Lyman, and a team of 25 researchers, have completed the largest ethnographic study of young people’s digital media use ever conducted in the United States.

During the last three years, it has been a privilege getting to know and to benefit from the wisdom of one of the leaders of the emerging field of digital media, Mizuko Ito.  Her collaborator Peter Lyman, from the University of California at Berkeley,  was a wonderfully gracious and insightful leader, whose loss was deeply felt.  Pulling it all together was Monterey Institute for Education’s Michael Carter, making sure that everything came together.  The report is three hundred plus pages.  Two and thirty-page summaries will make the findings easily accessible. 

I encourage you to explore the full 300-page report when it is released tomorrow.  It is here that you discover the depth of the insights from the study and the work of a new generation of extraordinary scholars, including Heather Horst, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, Rachel Cody, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia Lange, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Martinez, C.J. Pascoe, Dan Perkel, Laura Robinson, Christo Sims and Lisa Tripp.

As a parent, I am both relieved and intrigued by the findings.  As a scholar and researcher, I am impressed with the depth of the study, reminded of the significance and critical need for qualitative work, awed by the team’s ability to synthesize the mass of data, and just beginning to understand the implications of the methodology and the results for future studies.  As a foundation program officer, I believe this study represents a new paradigm for understanding learning and the possible benefits of digital media. 

I look forward to the research teams’ blogs and discussion of the study that will run here for the next eight days.  Please join us with your comments and thoughts.