Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.1.09 | “Digital media engages young people by putting them in charge of their own learning,” MacArthur grantee Barry Joseph told Threshold Magazine during a wide-ranging panel discussion between MacArthur grantees Henry Jenkins, Daniel Hickey, and coauthor of Born Digital, John Palfrey.

In conjunction with MacArthur grantee Project New Media Literacies, the issue introduce’s educators and policymakers to an emerging “participatory culture” made possible by digital media, a world that young people have flocked to, but that adults—parents and teachers in particular—remain wary of.

The role of teachers in this participatory culture, says Barry Joseph of Global Kids, “is not to open up young people’s heads and dump in information that they can then process on their own. Rather, we need to help them learn how to access information. Our role is to model how [kids] can interact with the content they find, how to negotiate that space, and how to build meaningful and safe relationships in that space.”

Parents, says Henry Jenkins, “are not so much terrified as just uncertain. They heard about something called Facebook and they saw a news show that indicated that there might be child molestation involved with it, but they don’t really know what’s going on. What they’re hungry for is information, other perspectives, ways of thinking and walking through the issues.”

The panelists discuss many other issues in the article, including defining what participatory culture is, the new skills young people must acquire, and how teachers and policymakers can begin to think about integrating digital media in the classroom.

“There’s a tendency,” says Jenkins, “to have workshops for teachers about how to use a particular technology, but not why to use it or what is it going to help them to teach.”

In but one example of how participatory culture can reengage youth, Daniel Hickey recalled asking students to provide questions for an interview with rap artist MC Lars. Initially, Hickey says, the students didn’t take the project seriously and their questions were disappointing. However, several weeks later, when their questions were public on a blog, “the transformation was remarkable.”

“One of the students said, ‘Ohmigod, my question looks like a fourth-grader wrote it.’ And they started drafting responses, and all of a sudden they started handing things to their teacher and saying, ‘How does this sound? Does this look good? Is this right?’ The minute they went public, it completely transformed the nature of the classroom.”

Other articles in the issue feature several MacArthur grantees, including “‘Geeking Out’ on Democracy,” by Jenkins; “What is Learning in a Participatory Culture?” by Cable’s Leaders in Learning Award winner Erin Reilly; “Participatory Culture and Schools: Can We Get There From Here?” by education-technology expert James Bosco, and many others.

For the full article, see “The Future of Participatory Culture: A Threshold Forum.” Threshold is a forward-looking quarterly journal for district, state, and national education leaders.