Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

9.8.09 | Kids learn best when they follow their interests. With digital media, following those interests has seldom been easier. Digital tools, from Flip Video cameras to music editing programs, lower the barriers to creating, and the internet expands access to experts, information, and others’ views. Young people can follow their nose and tap into a wealth of knowledge beyond the school walls. They can learn anywhere, anytime.

This self-directed learning, Mimi Ito and colleagues find, unfolds in three stages of progressively greater immersion and learning: what they label as “hanging out,” “messing around,” and “geeking out.” Each stage offers options for youth to develop and explore their interests at their own pace, with friends or online contacts. Ito’s findings in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009) were the impetus for the YouMedia site at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago.

In the YouMedia space, this progression happens in a social setting. Teens come to hang out with their friends, virtually or physically. While many parents worry that their kids are spending too much time on MySpace or texting friends, it’s not all bad, Ito finds. In fact, they’re learning valuable skills in navigating this highly networked world. They also begin to understand the new reality of an “always on” world—that unlike in Vegas, what one says online stays online, forever.

While teens are hanging out, they might see their friends taking photos or or filming a podcast or remixing music, and they might start messing around themselves. At YouMedia, kids can check out the bank of computers at the center of the room to search for information online, or experiment with a video game. They may wander into the music mixing room and watch what’s going on, and eventually tinker around with the equipment themselves. Messing around, says Ito, is often a transitional stage between hanging out and geeking out. It involves experimentation and exploration with relatively low investment, where there are few consequences to failure, trial, and error. The barriers to participation are also lower than in the classroom or other offline venues.

Before long, if their interest is piqued, they can sit in on a workshop and finesse their skills (geek out) and expand their horizons. Contrary to popular images, geeking out, Ito finds, is very social and engaged, although rarely friendship-based. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of becoming identified among their peers as an expert. What makes these groups unique is that while adults participate, they are not, by virtue of their age, necessarily the resident expert. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority.

Digital media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting. This self-directed, peer-driven learning will come in handy in the future and will help teens develop what Henry Jenkins has identified as new digital literacies, ranging from collaboration to appropriation to judgment to networking and negotiation.

Photo by: Mike Hawkins