Principal Investigator:
Ingrid Erickson

This working group proposes to seek out, analyze, test, and model the mechanisms, strategies, and protocols that are emerging as alternatives to traditional assessment as a way of moving the discourse on alternative assessment forward within the community, while solving the practical assessment needs of two learning communities in specific, the New Youth City Learning Network (NYC LN) and Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU).

To visit the project website, click here. 

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Recent research on new media has focused on understanding how young people are adopting sophisticated tools and methods for responding to media through creative production, including youth’s playing and making of video games, creating videos and animations, and contributing to and participating in massive virtual communities. While these activities have received considerable attention, current research tends to overlook dimensions of digital media that impact youth’s activities beyond the screen: namely, those aspects of media construction and design that dovetail with hands-on crafts, physical construction and design, and material play. Our working group will focus on one particularly promising application of tangible media texts called computational crafts and examine electronic textiles (e-textiles).

To visit the project website, click here.

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Principal Investigator:
Ben Williamson

Over the last decade, a small number of programs and research projects has explored how schools can respond to young people’s increasing participation in digital media culture. In particular, these initiatives have approached the school curriculum as an ongoing challenge (Lawrence Stenhouse would have called them “curriculum experiments”) rather than a fixed programme of study. Such initiatives are the focus for the Curriculum Innovation working group. These programs have taken place in different international sites (the UK, US, Scandinavia, New Zealand), with very different aims and underlying assumptions and theories. Some have begun as “grassroots” campaigns, others as interventions of commercial organizations, philanthropists, charities, or even political pressure groups. What holds them together is the commitment to working with—rather than against—the grain of young people’s experiences of new media and technology. From a more analytical perspective, each of these kinds of initiatives is responding in its own distinct, practical, or even “local” way to an emerging set of globalized debates and rhetorics about youth new media participatory cultures. So what should a curriculum aim to achieve in these so-called digital times? New modes of thinking? New forms of citizenship, or of human flourishing? New economic advantages?

The working group is made up of researchers involved in school-based curriculum innovations. It aims to identify the existing evidence and supporting case studies of curriculum development projects that have bridged the gap between young people’s opportunities for participation in digital media culture and the formal requirements of the school curriculum, and to explore how the curriculum is being positioned in relation to youth digital media in different contexts and sites. The participants are collaborating to produce a review of the relevant literature, a series of indicative case study examples for further research, and a series of publication plans.
 
Related links:
Beyond Current Horizons project website: www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk

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Our team investigated academic and practitioner literature related to digital media and technology integration and use in afterschool programs and youth services at libraries and museums. The literature review investigates the ways in which institutions and organizations contribute to notions of childhood, learning, and future participation. We link the current offerings of youth-serving organizations to the history of progressivism in the United States in order to frame our discussion of digital media and technology not as a radical break from the work of such organizations, but an extension of the work to which they have been committed for more than a century. We investigate opportunities as well as challenges presented by digital media and technology and work to move beyond descriptions of niche activities of exceptional children to demonstrate the diversity of approaches and outcomes related to digital media and technology in youth-serving organizations. The paper concludes with a discussion of youth-serving organizations as nodes of young peoples’ learning ecologies and recommendations for future empirical and theoretical work.

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The Youth and Media team at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society is in engaged in a research project concerning the online safety risks to children in developing countries. The digital divide between developed and developing countries is narrowing, and while this brings many new opportunities and resources into the lives of young people, it also exposes new groups with less digital literacy to a range of cyber threats. The working group will make a significant short-term contribution to research and practice by collecting and making available the scattered information that is available on this important, but under-researched topic.

To visit the project website, click here. 

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The working group on Service & Activism in the Digital Age brought together a group of scholars and practitioners from the fields of new media, service learning, and community-based youth organizing during the 2010-2011 academic year.

The group:

1. examined how new media is currently being incorporated into programs that engage youth in service or community activism
2. reviewed existing research literature on the effects of varying approaches to this incorporation of new media
3. identifed common understandings and areas of needed future research on the role of new media in youth service and activism.

To visit the project website, click here. 

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The New Media in International Contexts Working Group examined the intersection of youth, new media and learning in a range of countries outside of North America and Western Europe with the aim of understanding the contemporary landscape of digital media and learning outside of the contexts that have dominated the Digital Media and Learning Field. After an initial review of the documented research in a variety of disciplines, we focused upon six country case studies: Brazil (Heather Horst), China (Cara Wallis), Ghana (Araba Sey), India (Anke Schwittay), Korea (HyeRyoung Ok) and Japan (Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe) that were led by individual researchers or research teams. The six countries exemplify leading edge practices, technological infrastructures and policy orientations surrounding internet and mobile phone use, gaming and digital media production. Preliminary findings were published as a special blog series entitled “New Media Practices in International Contexts” on the Futures of Learning website between January and May 2009 and was recently published as a special section of the International Journal of Communication.

To visit the project website, click here. 

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Principal Investigator:
Eszter Hargittai

While lots of methods exist to gather data about youth digital media practices, few yield the level of richness that can be captured when users’ online behavior is observed directly. That is, when we are able to record – at the level of screen content, as well as accompanying commentary and social context – how youth are using digital media in real time, we manage to collect details which can be elusive when using other methods such as surveys or interviews. The Observational/Log Data Methods Working Group will make methodological advances in how to gather, code, analyze, interpret and compare observational and log data about youth digital media practices.

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The Participation Survey Working Group is developing a series of recommendations for a quantitative and qualitative survey to assess young people’s engagement in participatory culture. Building upon the foundational research in the Digital Media and Learning initiative, the proposed survey focuses upon the relationship between skills, the contexts of learning (homes/families, schools, online, peers, etc.) and different modes of participation (hanging out, messing around, geeking out and interest-driven and friendship-driven genres of participation). The broader aim is to understand how family structure, class and other measures of difference and inequality influence forms of participation and skills acquisition among youth.

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This working group brings together those who are designing, developing and implementing professional development to support teachers in understanding the affordances of digital media in learning. Our long-term hope is to seed the foundation of a Digital teacher Corps movement by culminating a collection of case studies exemplifying models of participatory professional development. Instead of working in silos on the same issue, coming together as a collaborative – comprised of researchers, teachers and school administrators – will foster a discussion of how to scale and sustain these participatory educational models across all grade levels and disciplines.

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