“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for
their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of
California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are
myths about kids spending time online – that it is dangerous or making
them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for
young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be
competent citizens in the digital age.” — MacArthur Foundation
Some details:
The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen
engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven.
While friendship-driven participation centered on “hanging out” with
existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing
online information and communities that may not be present in the local
peer group.Significant findings include –
- There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.
- Adults
tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often
view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.- Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.
- Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.
- Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.
- The
social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as
online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate
networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.- Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.
- The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.
- Young people respect each other’s authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.
- Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.
- Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.
- Youth
can connect with people in different locations and of different ages
who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that
might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.- “Geeked-out” learning opportunities are abundant – subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.
I’m already aware of much of this. Knowing that students would rather learn from peers, I’ve added more group work, and I’ve added a requirement that students in my advance media classes publish a screencast about their final project to YouTube. In future classes, I’ll have students review those videos as part of their research process.
My younger students (in the entry-level class) are generally much more excited about new media than the upper-level students (some of whom either barely tolerate or openly loathe the “new media” component of the “new media journlaism” program). I’ve got to watch my lower-level students closely, so that I can adapt the upper-level classes to their strengths, and keep that process going throughout the major. That means I’m probably going to have to introduce more experimentaton in the lower-level classes, since I’ve got to cast a wider net to find out which techniques are the most productive.
I’m sure the luck of the draw has something to do with it, along with the fact that there are several entry-level English classes to choose from, so students may be self-selecting into Writing for the Internet. The scope of the lower-level class is broader; students who don’t like one particular activity can wait a week or so and we’ll be onto something different. In the upper-level class, students who don’t enjoy a particular unit have to stick with it for almost a month.
In that upper-level class, it’s not uncommon to hear keyboards pounded and curses uttered, as students come to terms with what it means to write code — the fact that if you forget a closing parenthesis or you type a comma instead of a semicolon, it really *does* matter.
I was talking with Sondra Lettrich recently… she expressed her concern that current teacher-education models prepare future teachers to teach students who no longer exist. I would say much the same thing about a traditional journalism program (and recent NMJ graduate Amanada Cochran recently blogged
And that’s probably the part that some students loathe — not the media itself, since they watch YouTube or draw cartoons or have a lively Flickr photostream, even if they wouldn’t voluntarily write any code of their own.
I’ve often heard students say that new media production isn’t that hard once you go through the tutorials. But getting through those tutorials requires time and concentration. Like copyediting, coding can be tedious, but the consequences of an overlooked typo, or an unchecked item on the “Settings” menu, are far more serious when you’re initiating a process that will take 10 minutes to complete, or that will involve dozens of inter-connected condition statements.
Just as there are “aha” moments in my lit-crit classes, there are similar “aha” moments in the upper-level new media classes. One student has blogged about several such moments, spread across several classes, as she approached the end of the NMJ curriculum and suddenly started noticing how the courses carefully fit together. Now that I’ve actually taught all the NMJ courses more than once, and I’ve seen several graduates work their way through the program, I’ve been trying to be more explicit about these connections… maybe part of the reason the entry-level class is going so well is that I’m doing a better job explaining how the parts fit together.
I’m certainly not getting less geeky, yet I’m seeing fewer and fewer students who think of computers as something optional that “those other people” do. Maybe I’m getting better at teaching content without triggering the student’s “I can’t do that, only specialists should be asked to do that” defense mechanism. Or maybe there has been a change on the high school level, and more students are coming to me with experience thinking critically about new media — thanks to innovative and dedicated secondary education teachers who love this stuff as much as I do.
GREAT source and good post. I like what you’re saying about group work and other experiments. Considering the fact that only a year or two separates them, and that not all incoming freshmen are all the same “young” age, I’m not quite convinced that the separation is generational so much as it might just be luck of the draw — but I think these trends are important to look at.
However, I’m also not so sure those upper-division students “loathe” new media so much as they might “loathe” critically thinking about what would otherwise ostensibly give them pleasure, or the “intrusion” of academia into “youth culture” driven areas. In other words, many students (and consumers) just want to enjoy the toys, and not understand why or how they work. Or on a deeper level, maybe they’re just uncomfortable with courses that make visible the technologies that enable the “invisible” networks of social relations. In other words, the emotional stance against technology that you’ve seen may very well be the same stance some folks take against literature classes when they love reading. It will never go away.
The fact is, high schools (which have budgets) are doing creative things with technology (like assigning research videos rather than research papers) that lead to many expectations about this when they get to college. And now that new media is the new normal of our everyday communications, perhaps they are seeing the value as well as the “cool” appeal in taking a critical stance toward the culture or a geek glee in acquiring specialized/niche knowledge.
Happy to read of your drive to “introduce more experimentation in lower-division classes.” Just as a creative writing class can win over those students who dislike the analysis of literature, so too can a new media experiment “win over” recalcitrant students to enjoying the study of technology and cyber culture. Experimental play can be the key to a door that leads to so much more — and, as many students probably want, that means careers. Thus the “journalism” tie to English could be a fundamental part of that play, particularly for those who come to these classes from other strands of the English major.
Thanks again for the link to that study. Worth saving.