Since I’m summarizing myself, I’ve taken the liberty of writing out a slightly longer version of a summary of the presentation I made at the first seminar, two weeks ago:

Two phenomena drew my attention to Internet literacy issues more than ten years ago:

Critical reading skills had become necessary in the era of the search engine, and

An education-based rather than a regulatory-based response to the moral panics that break out over young people online is badly needed.

My daughter started writing research papers at the same time that Altavista became available in the mid 1990s. When she started using search for research, I talked with her about about the way the Internet had changed certainty about authority. Unlike the vast majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine, there is no guarantee that what you will find is accurate or even vaguely true. The locus of responsibility for determining the accuracy of texts shifted from the publisher to the reader when one of the functions of libraries shifted to search engines. That meant my daughter had to learn to ask questions about everything she finds in one of those searches. Who is the author? What do others say about the author? What are the author’s sources? Can any truth claims be tested independently? What sources does the author cite, and what do others say about those sources?

Talking to my daughter about search engines and the necessity for a ten year old to question texts online led me to think that computer literacy programs that left out critical thinking were missing an important point. But I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that “critical thinking” is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority (which indeed it is). At that point, I saw education – the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time – as diverging from schooling. Education, media-literacy-wise, is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn’t looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves. The shift to the kind of pedagogy that participatory media both forces and enables is not the kind of change that takes place quickly or at all in public schools.

The second phenomenon that impressed me when my daughter was in middle-school, when the pre-web Internet was beginning to make news in the mid-1990s, was the big fuss about pornography on the Internet that took up media attention at the same time that the Telecommunication Act of 1996 was dividing up the trillion dollar new media economy in ways very few people were told about (The moral panic over Internet sexual predators led to legislation that, if enforced, could well have led to reducing all public online discourse to what you would say in front of a 12 year old). I wrote columns about the rush to stupid legislation in 1994, and my conclusion back then was that no laws or technical barriers can prevent damaging or offensive material from being available without destroying the value of the Internet in the process. I testified as such in ACLU vs Reno, my daughter offered an affidavit about using good sense online, and the Communications Decency Act went by the wayside.

The judges in that case paid close attention when I mentioned that people in some virtual communities make rules for themselves, and the court recognized that the sometimes messy and unattractive discourse taking place online back then was the very kinds of speech that the First Amendment was devised to protect. Now we have DOPA. The answer now is the same as the answer then: someone needs to educate children about the necessity for critical thinking and encourage them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices. Part of that education – the basic moral values – is supposed to be what their parents and their religions are responsible for. But the teachable skill of knowing how to make decisions based on those values has become particularly important now that a new medium suddenly connects young people to each other and to the world’s knowledge in ways no previous generation experienced.

We teach our kids how to cross the street and what to be careful about in the physical world. And now parents need to teach their kids how to exercise good sense online. It’s really no more technical than reminding your children not to give out their personal information to strangers on the telephone or the street. When it comes to helping them learn how to be citizens in a democracy, a less simple task, I believe effective media literacy education is crucial.

At the same time that emerging media challenge the ability of old institutions to change, I think we have an opportunity today to make use of the natural enthusiasm of today’s young digital natives for cultural production as well as consumption, to help them learn to use the media production and distribution technologies now available to them to develop a public voice about issues they care about. Learning to use participatory media to speak and organize about issues might well be the most important citizenship skill that digital natives need to learn if they are going to maintain or revive democratic governance.

I started thinking about “public voice” as an educational vehicle when teaching journalism majors about the ways digital media was changing the practices and institutions of journalism. One of the texts I assigned them was Phil Agre’s ten year old advice, now slightly dated in its terminology, about developing a public voice by writing for webzines. At about the same time we were discussing Agre, I read danah boyd’s speech to the AAAS that referred to this decade’s moral panic about MySpace. boyd wrote about the way kids in these online social network environments were creating publics – similar to what I was thinking when I talked to the judges in Philadelphia about ACLU v Reno. And then the news intervened with the story of high school students in Los Angeles organizing walkouts and demonstrations around proposed national immigration legislation. Putting Agre, boyd, and the headlines together, I started thinking that if – a big if – it is possible to find out what young people really care about, then they could directly learn a civic skill by deploying participatory media in service of their issue.

Constructivist theories of education that exhort teachers to guide active learning through hands-on experimentation are not new ideas, and neither is the notion that digital media can be used to encourage this kind of learning. What is new is a population of “digital natives” who have learned how to learn new kinds of software before they started high school, who carry mobile phones, media players, game devices and laptop computers and know how to use them, and for whom the internet is not a transformative new technology but a feature of their lives that has always been there, like water and electricity. This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance: although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today’s student cohort, there’s nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.

My working hypothesis, based on my own encounters with students in social cyberspaces and the advice of more experienced educators, is that “voice,” the unique style of personal expression that distinguishes one’s communications from those of others, can be called upon to help connect young people’s energetic involvement in identity-formation with their potential engagement with society as citizens. Moving from a private to a public voice can help students turn their self-expression into a form of public participation. Public voice is learnable, a matter of consciously engaging with an active public rather than broadcasting to a passive audience.

The public voice of individuals, aggregated and in dialogue with the voices of other individuals, is the fundamental particle of “public opinion.” When public opinion has the power and freedom to influence policy and grows from the open, rational, critical debate among peers posited by Jurgen Habermas and others, it can be an essential instrument of democratic self-governance. The American democracy is rather messier and less rational than the Habermasian ideal, but it does involve what Phil Agre in another important essay, The Practical Republic,” identifies as a set of communication skills uniquely associated for participating in influence networks around issues. Communication acts, whether or not they are always calmly deliberative and rational, are the fundamental elements of political and civic life.

By showing students how to use Web-based tools and channels to inform publics, advocate positions, contest claims, and organize action around issues that they truly care about, participatory media education can draw them into positive early experiences with citizenship that could influence their civic behavior throughout their lives. I’m undertaking to take my own advice by teaching courses at Berkeley’s School of Information and Stanford’s Communication Department, writing a chapter for the “Youth, Digital Media, and Civic Engagement” volume of the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, and I’ve started a wiki to compile resources for the participatory media literacy education community.