Group items tagged

the blog of the Digital Media & Learning Project helps me keep up with the latest thinking in the US about digital technology & youth (aggregates the work of leading social-media researchers).

This wikipedia def. is very limited: "Digital literacy is the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and analyze information using digital technology." Why do I say that? Because it deals only with consumption of information. The only thing new, here, is the means of distribution (digital or via the Internet). It disregards the other new aspects of media: both the source and the nature of the "information." In new media, content is not just consumed or downloaded but also shared and produced. As such, it has social or behavioral and multidirectional properties. So "consumers" are at least users and very often producers and need to "understand, evaluate, and analyze" or think critically about their own behavior - what is shared, produced, and uploaded as WELL as what's read, consumed, and downloaded. This is why I don't feel this definition works. This mainly refers to traditional media literacy.. So the final sentence of this paragraph - "A person using these skills to interact with society may be called a digital citizen" - is inaccurate. A digital citizen necessarily (for his/her own protection in many forms - phishers, false advertising, "predators," identity thieves, IP, etc. - also masters social literacy, now that media are social. Does that make sense?

The literacies (defined in the page bookmarked here) named by Prof. Henry Jenkins and the New Media Literacies Project are: Play Performance Simulation Appropriation Multitasking Distributed Cognition Collective Intelligence Judgment Transmedia Navigation Networking Negotiation Visualization

just a list of "new media literacies," here's Prof. Henry Jenkins's (these are covered in the new Our Space curriculum I referred you to): Play Performance Simulation Appropriation Multitasking Distributed Cognition Collective Intelligence Judgment Transmedia Navigation Networking Negotiation Visualization

Jenkins, now at the University of Southern Calif., was at MIT when he started the New Media Literacies Project and wrote the first paper on participatory culture ('06) in which the above first appeared.

Harvard's GoodPlay Project are about to release their curriculum, "Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen in a Digital World"

This was co-developed by the New Media Literacies Project at U. of S. Calif. and the Harvard GoodPlay Project, so it combines Jenkins's new media literacy with Gardner's/GoodPlay's digital ethics. What it does not cover, I believe, is physical safety and computer/network security. BUT the critical thinking herein is indeed protective against phishing and other malware attackers that employ social engineering, right?

Training offer

5:43 video + graphical bibliography, by Dr. Wesch & students Confirmation from students themselves of what is said in Thomas & Seely Brown's book A New Culture of Learning. Noting that what the student says in the video about how "we're taught that one's own ideas and those of one's classmates are inconsequential" is echoed in the Harvard findings that youth hear from adults that their experiences with media are inconsequential (see this for link to GoodPlay researcher's remarks on this).

Thoughtful, progressive new report from a longtime friend and colleague in the UK (former CEO of Childnet International), Stephen Carrick-Davies. This is written for social workers who work with vulnerable youth excluded from school ("at-risk youth" in the US) and is based on close work with the youth themselves. The third video on this page is an interview with Carrick-Davies on his process.