Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

8.24.10 |

The new digital landscape, writes Melissa Ludtke, Neiman Reports editor, is “a place where game playing thrives and augmented reality tugs at possibilities. It’s where video excels, while the appetite for long-form text and the experience of ‘deep reading’ is diminished, and it’s where the allure of multitasking greets the crush of information.”

For those of you who may feel a tad depressed by the idea that we may be losing our experience of “deep reading,” there is also lots of good news here. Students, researchers, neuroscientists and teachers weigh in on how production and consumption of information is changing with technology, and many see an exciting future.

“What’s Next for News: The Digital Landscape” is the summer edition of Neiman Reports, a quarterly magazine tracking journalistic trends. This edition has a broader appeal, with articles on everything from augmented reality, to Twitter as a news source, to technology’s effect on our brains.

One of the pieces I enjoyed in the magazine’s Digital Youth section was Palo Alto High School journalism teacher Esther Wojcicki’s discussion of how media education, specifically journalism, can support teenagers’ developmental need for independence and acceptance. 

In Wojcicki’s classes, students have a variety of ways to create media and showcase their work. She argues that students need access to an “uncensored Web” and need to be able to create media about issues they and their peers find compelling, without censorship from adults.

Wojcicki, who also chairs the board of directors of Creative Commons, says a good digital journalism program can be an important contributor to English education by teaching writing, critical thinking, web skills and civic engagement.

Today’s journalism curriculum can revolutionize English education by making the writing curriculum relevant and exciting. In the process, it can also train an entire generation of citizens—many of whom will be doing what journalists do today—to be responsible contributing members of the digital society.

Wojicicki also has an interesting essay about the polarized debates she had with her students about the use of iPads and e-books. You might be surprised at what side many of the students come down on.

Also in this edition of Neiman Reports, you can read what Wojicicki’s 9th-grade students think about the future of reading. You can also see examples of the incredible media her students are creating about their community (including articles, videos, slideshows and podcasts) at their online journalism web site.

In the Digital Youth section of the magazine, cultural anthropologist Mizuko Ito uses a case study of the Pokémon trading card and video games to argue that attracting the next generation of news readers depends on creating content and programming that is “easily shared, interactive and participatory.”

And Spotlight readers may also want to check out James Gee’s piece in the New News section. Gee, a professor of literary studies at Arizona State University, says journalists should be looking to video games to learn how to keep an audience engaged

Gee says video games demonstrate that people are much more likely to absorb information based on what they do than on what they read. (For more on the power of gaming, see Spotlight’s earlier discussion of Jane McGonigal’s TED talk.)

“We learn differently from content-driven media than we do from media driven by choice and problem solving,” he says.

You can download the full magazine here (PDF). Or dig deeper with an online digital library that provides links to additional blogs, video and articles connected to the topics covered.