Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

12.17.08 | Stemming from our foundation within the white paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century, the question MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Project New Media Literacies developed resources from was:

• What’s the most effective and scaleable way of fostering equitable, ethical, and transparent new media literacy practices in formal and informal learning environments?

We are now in the process of beginning to share our materials with teachers and after-school program coordinators. MIT’s Project New Media Literacies has identified two new research questions we seek answers to:

• How can we integrate the tools, insights, and approaches of comparative media studies into formal classroom as a means of broadening students’ reading and writing practices through critical and creative engagement with texts?
• What type of experiences do the design characteristics of the Learning Library offer to students, when integrated into various existing informal learning communities, to enable them to apply the New Media Literacies to their community’s goals and practices?

In order to be have greater impact, our theory must start to be tested in formal classrooms and informal settings or we will be another casualty of the gap between academic research and public access. We will fall flat if educators are not prepared.  The recent grant from MacArthur Foundation will allow us to build a solid foundation with our formal classroom teachers and our informal after-school mentors through field research and events; the Teachers’ Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture professional development conference held this past August 2008 and an upcoming event April 4th and 5th, 2009 to release preliminary findings on field research of both the Learning Library and the Teachers’ Strategy Guide.