[dmya] Harvard's GoodPlay Project visits the DMYA for its last meeting of the year
For our final meeting of the year, we had the opportunity to spend time with John and Andrea from Harvard's GoodPlay Project, which works on looking into the ethical issues that arise as a result of young people's relationships to digital media. The GoodPlay team, headed up by Howard Gardner, has visited us before, at a point when they were first conceptualizing a lot of the questions and issues that were pertinent to their research. Since then, they've come out with some great research papers, including a fantastic one that outlines an initial set of core ethical challenges and opportunities, titled Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media [pdf].
One of the things that they're currently working on is developing curriculum related to the five ethical areas (authorship and ownership, privacy, identity, participation and credibility) so that youth will be able to think critically about these ethical issues in an intentional way. That's where the DMYA came in. While the first time we met with GoodPlay they were conceptualizing their research, now they were at the point where they had curriculum developed around these areas, though never tested.
John and Andrea presented the DMYA with a set of activities that dealt with the issue of authorship and ownership to get a sense of if they would work with actual young people, and how they would play out. We explored ideas of remixes and mashups through watching Shirley Bassey's "Diamonds Are Forever" (of James Bond fame) and Kanye West's remix of it titled "Diamonds from Sierra Leone", and looked at a number of other examples of pieces of work that had borrowed ideas (overtly or otherwise) from prior works. All the while, we were considering the differences between a plagiarized work and and piece of media that transforms an original work into one with new meaning.
I was incredibly impressed with the amount of knowledge that the members of the advisory had coming in to the activity, from knowing the granular differences between a mashup and a remix (something I had no idea about prior to the meeting) as well as their own familiarity with issues related to creating content including attribution and copyright.
The activities and curriculum went over really well, and kudos to the Harvard team in developing them. I definitely look forward to seeing the rest of the curriculum around all the ethical areas as they put it out there.
On a somewhat sad note, the meeting was also the last of the year for the Digital Media Youth Advisory to close out what shaped up to be an awesome year for the group. One of the members even blogged and vlogged about it. W00t! A big thanks from me to all the folks that took the time to meet with the advisory this year, as well as to the advisory themselves for their fantastic work. You guys are great!
