Digital Media Youth Advisory

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].

Each month, our Digital Media Youth Advisory meets with people that are doing work in the field of digital media and learning, and this month was no exception. What was different this meeting though, was that the person they met with, Deen Freelon of the Puget Sound Off project, was about 3,000 miles away. Pictured above, Deen joined us from Seattle via Skype video.

Puget Sound Off is a project out of the University of Washington that aims to create youth engagement around local civic issues in their community, from education to technology to animal rights. It's part of a larger initiative to study how youth civic engagement is changing as a result of the digital media. The members of the DMYA spent about an hour and change with the site, testing out everything from building profiles to uploading pictures to leaving comments on blogs. Hopefully their feedback will be helpful to the project, and all the DMYA members wish it luck as it gets ready to launch!

On January 9th, I hit my two year mark here at Global Kids. To some, I know this sounds like a short amount of time, but to me, it's an age. To begin with, working in GK's Online Leadership Program means that we're in a field that's moving at breakneck speed. The contours of the new media landscape are shifting beneath our feet. Every month feels like six. We've been both nimble and (definitely) fortunate enough to ride this proverbial wave, and so our team has grown and projects shifted an enormous amount as well in the short time that I've been with GK.

This past Friday we had our monthly meeting of the youth advisory, during which we really delved into the process we started last month of creating a series of teen focused workshops on issues related to digital media. The driving question behind the development of these workshops: What do teens need to know about digital media usage that they do not?

Over the past half-dozen or so years, Global Kids staff, most of which work on the ground in New York City public high schools, have come across all sorts of new challenges in regards to our students' use of the internet, cell phones and games. From figuring out ways to circumvent blocks that schools put up for certain web sites to socializing in what often seemed like imprudent ways on sites like MySpace, it was clear that some discussion and education, for both staff and teens, needed to happen. And while the Online Leadership Program conducts educational programs that use digital media and often (though not always) have teens actively reflecting on many of the social issues surrounding digital media usage, this is only a fraction of the teens we work with on the ground.