Henry Jenkins has posted on his blog about the paper he and his colleagues have written for the MacArthur Foundation, about participatory culture and media literacy. I have followed Jenkins’ lead in my attempts to learn how to link DIY media skills with civic engagement, and agree that this is about more than just entertainment — it’s about an entire approach to culture, which Jenkins calls “participatory culture.”

We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:

Play — the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Some children are acquiring some of these skills through their participation in the informal learning communities that surround popular culture. Some teachers are incorporating some of these skills into their classroom instruction. Some afterschool programs are incorporating some of these skills into their activities. Yet, as the above qualifications suggest, the integration of these important social skills and cultural competencies remains haphazard at best. Media education is taking place for some youth across a variety of contexts, but it is not a central part of the educational experience of all students. Our goal for this report is to encourage greater reflection and public discussion on how we might incorporate these core principles systematically across curricula and across the divide between in-school and out-of-school activities. Such a systemic approach is needed if we are to close the participation gap, confront the transparency problem, and help young people work through the ethical dilemmas they face in their everyday lives. Such a systemic approach is needed if children are to acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed in a modern era.

In 2000, Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam famously argued in Bowling Alone that the decline of bowling leagues in America signified a deterioration of civic culture. For Putnam, bowling leagues were a sign of social capital, or the connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.

What is the state of social capital today? Does the rise of DIY and participatory media make up for the loss of bowling leagues? As part of today’s Annenberg Center for Communication weekly seminar, research fellow Corinna di Gennaro presented survey finding from her work with the Oxford Internet Institute (part of USC’s World Internet Project). The data showed, among other things, that youth between 14-18 are more likely to make friends online but that they are less likely to engage politically both on- and off-line, than members of other age groups.

What is considered political engagement? This is a central question for researcher trying to understand the role of digital communication tools and networks in society. For the purpose of the Oxford Institute study, which focused on responses from nearly 2000 participants in England, Scotland and Wales, political participation meant grown-up politics like voting and signing petitions.

But what about student elections? WOW strategizing? Rating your professor online? In countries where the voting age is 18 (like the US and Great Britain) can we really characterize youth engagement by the degree to which they participate in a system from which they are legally excluded? (This issue was raised during the seminar by Digital Kids researcher Mimi Ito). Maybe traditional political structures and behaviors should not be the litmus test, but in the absence of a clear understanding of how youth engagement translates into grow-up political engagement Corinna’s research gives us some clues about the link between online participation and social capital.

You can read more about Oxford Internet Surveys here. And more on youth and digital engagement here.

(Via deeplinks –>boingboing)

The Digital Freedom campaign is a new joint project from EFF, Public Knowledge, the Consumer Electronics Association and the Media Access Project:

Digital technology enables literally anyone and everyone to be a creator, an innovator or an artist — to produce music, to create cutting-edge videos and photos, and to share their creative work. Digital technology empowers individuals to enjoy these new works when, where, and how they want, and to participate in the artistic process. These are basic freedoms that must be protected and nurtured.

The Digital Freedom campaign is dedicated to defending the rights of students, artists, innovators, and consumers to create and make lawful use of new technologies free of unreasonable government restrictions and without fear of costly and abusive lawsuits.

What happens when you look at the future of teaching and learning through the lens of DIY media and participatory culture? At the most recent DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center on October 19, Todd Richmond’s presentation on open educational resources and Bob Stein’s preview of a toolset that will enable people to add multimedia annotation to online texts, offered two glimpses of a possible future upheaval in education. (The slides from Richmond’s and Stein’s presentation are available as a Quicktime movie.)

(This post complements and expands on the report Adrienne Russell posted immediately after the event. Although Richmond and Stein presented as a tag team, going back and forth between their presentations, I’m separating this post-seminar report into two different posts. I hope this will afford two different conversations in the comment threads.)

Todd Richmond is currently a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television. He specializes in basic and applied research in the broad field of digital networked media, social networks, and social software. He is currently working on a Hewlett Foundation-funded research project titled “Viral University Education” which seeks to better understand and facilitate the uptake of freely available open educational content on the Internet by using a variety of social software tools and technologies to create viral learning communities and content.

In his presentation on October 19, Richmond compared the future technology-triggered transformation of educational institutions to the “perfect storm” that hit the music industry when several different factors intersected to disrupt the existing institutions for making, distributing, and monetizing music: millions of people acquired broadband connections and used sufficiently powerful personal computers, the MP3 format made it easy to encode, transmit, and decode music via the Internet, digital tools for capturing and editing audiovisual content made “studio quality” production widely available, online social networking made p2p and viral distribution possible. Richmond included one more technical factor, “common metastructure.” In music, the common metastructure of bar, beat, and temp made remix and mashup media possible.

The same forces that disrupted the music industry can be applied to education, and the content that could drive a transformation in teaching and learning — and the institutions through which it happens — is becoming available as other universities, including Rice and Johns Hopkins, joined MIT, which in 2001 began to make its “open coursware available.” Richmond sees another factor at work here, the same “commons-based peer production” at work in Wikipedia. The challenges to a wave of change in education are, Richmond enumerated, “IP, IP, IP…uptake, IP, and tools.”

Open educational resources, Chinese Backstreet Boys video, viewed one and a quarter million times on Youtube, as an example of “going viral.”

The availability of DIY media production and distribution tools changed the asymmetry between the producers, distributors, and distributors of music, Richmond pointed out, referring to that changing power asymmetry as “the delta.” With Wi-Fi in the classroom and lecture videows online, and student familiarity with laptops, remix, mashups, blogs and wikis, together with the power that “Googlepedia” teachers and learners, the delta in education is changing: the previously strictly hierarchical relationships between teacher and learner are changing.

“Resistance is futile,” believes Richmond: although existing educational institutions are not generally embracing a digitally transformed future, “the educational sector will be dragged into the future kicking and screaming by the next perfect storm.”

In education, there may be good reasons for maintaining the role of teacher, where the roles of middlemen in the music business may not be necessary. “Optimizing the delta,” Richmond calls it: how do motivated learners and skilled teachers make use of open educational resources to best achieve their aims?

In the discussion that followed the presentations by Richmond and Stein, and the smaller seminar after lunch, discussion turned, as Adrienne noted, to the way institutions can react to the forces for change that new technologies and social practices might enable. The existing university classroom has to change, but how? What might be the event or new driving forces that produces the storm Richmond predicts? Will the extensions of copyright law such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, technical barriers such as digital rights restrictions, and politically-sanctioned shifts in net neutrality become insuperable barriers to educational change? Will the non-educational reasons for schooling — a place to park the kids while parents work and boot camp behavioral trainingfor industrial-era employees and consumers — prove to be the immovable object that stops the irresistible forces Richmond foresees?

I recently spoke in Second Life about The Pedagogy of Civic Participation. Podcast available soon at the New Media Consortium site.

The USC Annenberg Center for Communication has announced Mimi Ito’s research program, part of a new initiative by the MacArthur Foundation:

Mimi Ito, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication was named among a distinguished group of researchers awarded grants through a major new research initiative on “Digital Media and Learning” announced by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation on October 19.

The five-year, $50 million initiative aims to support research which helps determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.

“Digital media are no longer experimental technologies that live in special laboratories and classrooms; they are part of our everyday lives, inhabiting our living rooms, backpacks, pockets, and cars,” says Ito on the MacArthur Foundation’s “Digital Media and Learning” blog site for the initiative.

“We need to understand how digital media has changed how young people play, learn, relate to others, get information, and create knowledge and culture.
Ito’s research, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley, includes a large-scale ethnography of young people that will provide a broad portrait of the digital generation: technology’s influence on their social networks and peer groups, their family life, how they play, and how they look for information. It will be one of the most significant attempts yet made to explore the influence of digital media on youth.

“One goal of our project is to unpack what it means to be “fluent” and “natural” with digital technology, and document the technical, social, and cultural environments that support this kind of lifelong learning and literacy,” says Ito. “Configuring an iPod, exchanging IM with friends, or posting a question to a fan bulletin board are all learning moments. Taken as a whole, these informal and everyday moments can have a longer and lasting impact on young people’s learning and development than their exposure to educational technologies in the classroom.”

Today’s DIY Media series talk on digital tools and the future of education by Bob Stein and Todd Richmond inspired a compelling meat-space discussion on the irrelevance of space and place in the digitized environment.

What will the future of education look like? Considering what Todd calls the “perfect storm” of technological innovation (mp3s, bandwidth, digital tools, social networking and common meta structures) it seems education, like other networked cultural industries, is in a period of radical transition. Todd thinks the future of education will have less to do with physical social space–campuses and classrooms–and more to do with online networks and information flows– Wikipedia and Google (or Googlepedia?). He thinks it will be more about virality than authority.

But what about the social aspects of centralized education systems? The most challenging questions under discussion veered away from technology and toward the role of education in society and the relationship between students, teachers and educational material.

Bob stressed the importance of imagining what we can do with technology to better education instead of focusing on what technology will do *to* education. And Sasha reminded us that educators and theorists like Paulo Freire and Agosto Boal (and I would add Henry Giroux) have long struggled with hierarchy in education and that any plans for the future of education should consider these idea about how to establish structures and practices that are liberating rather than oppressive.

Todd mentioned the buddhist saying “when you lose, don’t lose the lesson” to underpin his belief that education is often stymied by the fear of being wrong. This is particularly the case with educators, who seem for the most part loath to leave the comfort of the system that priviledges their authority. “Resistance is futile,” he says. What we have to to do is optimize the delta.

You can see Todd’s slides here and check out Bob’s work at the the The Institute for the Future of the Book.
Look for Howard’s discussion of their talk to be posted here soon.

Feedburner offers this RSS Feed of DIY Media Tools

Welcome to the DIY Media Tools collection - a list of useful internet-based tools for the creation of your own blogs, vlogs, web pages, newsletters, videos, cartoons, music and more. Create and share!

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I want to
Posted: 2006-09-11 11:54
How to do the things you want to do with Web 2.0. Now listing over 350 applications!

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Self Publishing Blog
Posted: 2006-09-11 11:49
101 Resources for Self Published Writers. A grab-bag of tips and ideas for creating your own written works.

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PubSub
Posted: 2006-09-04 13:41
Searches over a million blogs & streams, identifying items using your keywords. View them in your RSS aggregator or at PubSub.

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OneTrueMedia
Posted: 2006-08-08 01:27
Create a slideshow, montage, or photo book, in addition to uploading and sharing your favorite videos. Options are fairly strict but interface is very simple to use. Montages work best with audio-driven media, like creating a video to go with a song.

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VMix
Posted: 2006-08-08 00:21
Another video sharing network. This one also allows you to create video slideshows from your PJ180 slideshow maker.

Videos of the lectures in the DIY Media Seminar series are available here.

The French Democracy is a political machinima by and about the “disaffected youth” who burned cars in the Paris suburbs in November, 2005, blogged by Cory at boingboing, who said:

The French Democracy is a political film about France’s riots, made in machinima (a filmmaking technique that uses video-games as animation engines) with the new video game The Movies – a game whose objective is to make machinima films.

The French Democracy is a little rough around the edges, unashamedly political and one-sided, and could use some work on the pacing, but it’s also a stirring piece of political filmmaking, created using a $50 piece of software intended to enable its users to become one-person animation auteurs.

Most machnima is silly, or porny, or violent — but this is real political stuff, the kind of thing the First Amendment was invented for. It’s a real milestone in machinima history.

If you know of any other examples of machinima agitprop, please post a link in a comment to this post.