New Media and Its Superpowers: Learning, Post-Pokémon

Think of this: The college seniors graduating this spring represent the first post-Pokémon generation. To them -- and to all kids enrolled in schools today -- a networked world is the norm, not the new.

And that, Mimi Ito, believes, is good for learning. Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California, addressed the 2010 NAIS Annual Conference in San Francisco about the power of new media in learners' lives.

Pokémon, Ito said, was a breakthrough media form with social interaction at its center. She described a plane flight during which her 7-year-old, Game Boy-toting son noticed that an older boy on the same flight was playing, too. "Pretty soon, they were racing each other," Ito recalled. "The game changed the social space; it offered an opportunity to connect with a stranger. It transformed the plane into a social gaming place."

"Media is glue," said Ito. "It invites social exchange and engagement."

Socializing around media is not new-people have always connected around movies, books, and newspapers. What's different in network media is that personalization and reinvention is involved, Ito said. Moreover, mastering the "rich knowledge environment" of online media drives skills and literacy acquisition.

Ito co-led a MacArthur Foundation-funded three year ethnographic study, the Digital Youth Project (DYP), which looked at how young people interact with new media at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces-and found much to celebrate in the learning they observed.
But many adults don't see it that way-yet. Ito projected an image of a newspaper article that appeared after DYP issued its first press release. The researchers reported that kids are engaging in diversified and valuable dimensions of learning online. The banner headline reporting their findings proclaimed, "Chill Out, Parents."

"That outtake focused more on inter-generational tension than on our findings," Ito said. "The headline assumes that parents are uptight, or should be, about kids' online activity."

Today's kids are growing up in a radically different media environment than their parents-and teachers-did. They are connected 24/7 to peers, to entertainment and to information. "Visceral, interactive, immersive experiences are available when and where kids want them," Ito said.

The availability of all that compelling entertainment and information has created a gap, Ito says, between in-school and out-of-school experience. Schools need to figure out how to leverage the power of kids' engagement with media for learning in school as well as outside it.

"This is one of the most profound shifts in recent history in how we engage with culture and knowledge," Ito said. What would happen, she asked, if adults-instead of trying to shut out these experiences, instead of complaining about their "corrosive effects"-worked to understand their potential? She urged the educators in the room to stop worrying and start leveraging kids' intense and passionate engagement with digital media.

The DYP identified two kinds of new media learning that happen in the networked space outside school walls. The first is friendship-driven, the second, interest-driven. Both are powered by peer-based learning dynamics.

Friendship-driven learning moves the traditional social jockeying and interest in who's up, who's down, what's out and what's cool into social media spaces like Facebook and MySpace. "We tend to think of this in negative terms but it is also a context of learning and engagement," said Ito. "[Kids] participate in and produce content, culture, taste and knowledge. They make decisions about how to present themselves."

Interest-driven learning happens among those smart, creative kids who might be on the margins in school, but find community and knowledge online around their passionate connection with a subject area. "It's about expanding a social circle based on shared interests," said Ito. They're creating YouTube videos, remixing, and participating in international Harry Potter podcasting groups. "Unlike friendship-driven learning, it involves specialization," said Ito. "It's not just about your local peer group anymore. There's a more far-flung network to publish to."

Interest-driven learning engages users' passionate curiosity, offering specialization, depth, and connection to a peer group of like-minded people, mentors, and experts as kids "link up the knowledge ecology that is key to learning in the 21st century," Ito said.

Take Clarissa, a 17-year-old aspiring writer who found her voice, and a new set of relationships, through "Faraway Lands," a peer-moderated online fiction space in which teenage writers create characters and situations that they share online. That experience allows what Ito called an "ethics of reciprocity," as the writers evaluate each others' work and learn to take and give criticism.

"Online, they're not doing it for a grade," Ito said. "They're doing it for a nurturing community. The network gave Clarissa a new context to support her identity as a writer."

The skills Clarissa picked up served her very well in school. In her college applications to creative writing programs she wrote about how the role playing she had done online was preparing her to be a screenwriter. She was accepted-and she thinks her writing samples from Faraway Lands made the difference.

"Clarissa took her learning and made it consequential to school-based learning," Ito said. "It is still early days for these linkages to be made, but they're starting."

Ito cited two more cases that involve intentional harnessing of the power of kids' connection with new media: YouMedia, a Chicago Public Library learning space at the Harold Washington Library downtown, and the Quest 2 Learn School (Q2L) in New York City, where learning is designed around a game-based pedagogy.

The YouMedia space at the urban library is for teens only. "They can bring food, make noise, and just hang out," Ito said. A large area is divided into "Geeking Out/Messing Around/Hanging Out" sections where kids can go online, use remixing and video equipment, or just spend time together or talking to available adult mentors. The idea is to facilitate movement among these three different ways of engaging with knowledge. Teens "link up learning across different settings" in the media-rich space, Ito said. (Those educators worried that putting digital media in libraries discourages reading will be glad to hear that book circulation at the library has skyrocketed since the YouMedia space opened.)

Q2L, which calls itself "the school for digital kids," represents "the power of Pokémon unleashed for learning," says Ito. The 79 sixth-graders enrolled in its first class are pursuing learning through student-directed, collaborative inquiry-based "quests"-the kind of interest-based learning they used to do outside school.

"These are still early days in the birth of social media," Ito concluded. "I firmly believe that the opportunity is out there to support the informal learning it creates and make that knowledge matter in the classroom."

For more information visit these websites:

http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu

http://www.youmediachicago.org

http://www.Q2L.org

http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org