Howard's thoughts
From NMC-Campus
Back to Impact of Digital Media event planning...
This is the direction I'm going. I wanted to get something written before I hit the road Thursday. I will hit the ground running when I return in early October in order to get the right slides. I will probably tweak the wording, and I think this is about half of it. I'll talk very generally about specific ways some teachers use blogs, wikis, RSS, video, podcasts to teach citizenship skills, then end up by addressing the challenge of Wi Fi in the college classroom, wrap it up by referencing the MacArthur book series (what's the official name for the entire series?) as a way to engage theory, research, and practice about youth and digital media. The call to action has something to do with participatory pedagogy.
Howard
My interest in new media literacies started more than ten years ago, when my daughter was in middle school. Two phenomena in the early 1990s drew my attention: I felt that a new kind of critical reading skill was necessary after the invention of the search engine, and that 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 sat down with her and talked 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 authoritative, 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 vaguely communist plot to incite children to question authority. 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. Schools will remain places for parents to put their kids while they go to work, and for society to train a fresh supply of citizen-worker-consumers to be employed by the industries of their time. Taking participatory media literacy seriously is going to require a complete rethinking of educational methods, not just shoehorning blogging rhetoric classes into the curriculum. Wi-Fi in college classrooms are already blowing the last millennium's sage off the stage.
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 enormous fuss about pornography on the Internet (at the same time that the Telecommunication Act of 1996 was divvying up the trillion dollar new media economy in ways we are only beginning to understand). 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 1995, 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 sat up and 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 when a new medium suddenly connects young people to each other and to the world's media 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. Media literacy in the broadcast age was never more than an energetic minority of enthusiasts. 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.
The media available to adolescents today, from videocameraphones to their own websites, to laptop computers, to participatory media communities like MySpace and Youtube, are orders of magnitude more powerful than those available in the age of the deskbound, text-only Internet and dial-up speeds. Those young people who can afford an Internet-connected phone or lapto are taking to the multimedia web on their own accord by the millions– MySpace gets Google-scale traffic and Youtube serves one hundred million videos a day. Although the price of entry is dropping, there is still an economic divide; nevertheless, the online population under the age of 20 is significant enough for Rupert Murdoch to spend a quarter million dollars to buy MySpace.
I started thinking about public voice 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 blog post in response 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.
With their involvement in Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, SMS, IM, videoblogs and podcasts, it's fair to say that a significant percentage of American youth are involved in creating as well as consuming digital media. According to a 2005 survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, "The number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online." Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production. Another recent Pew study claims that more than 50% of today's teenagers have created as well as consumed digital media.
Although significant barriers remain in regard to less-privileged youth, I see an opportunity for encouraging direct civic engagement among the large minority of young people who are avid digital media creators.
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. I don't propose Internet media as the solution to young people's disengagement from political life, but as a possibly powerful tool to be deployed toward helping them engage in their own voices about the issues they care about.
Making connections between the literacies students pick up simply by being young in the 21st century and those best learned through reading and discussing texts is an appropriate role for teachers today. My fundamental assumption for beginning such a practicum in participatory media, 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.
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. The formal theories of the public sphere could be introduced only after, and in the context of, direct experience of exercising a public voice.
