Global Kids' Online Leadership Program

I was recently forwarded an article by Marc Prensky, a writer in the EdTech field famous (or to some, infamous) for coining the term "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants". Regardless of the helpfulness of this dichotomy, Prensky has views that often challenge educators to question their assumptions and was writing about things like games-based learning back in 2001, when there were far fewer voices on a subject that has now caught on.

In the article, titled "Young Minds, Fast Times", Prensky talks about the importance of bringing youth into the room when discussions about educational reform are happening. He makes very good points about both youth empowerment and how to create relevant educational design, but at the same time, I think his piece misses a lot about how youth voice really works when it comes to education.

Continue reading "[staff] Prensky on bringing youth into the educational design process" »

Posted by Rafi Santo at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

About a year ago, I wrote about GK teens assisting the Pew Internet and American Life Project in developing a survey about the effects of game play in young peoples' lives. On Monday, I got an email from Amanda Lenhart of Pew letting me know that the results of the survey, the first comprehensive study on teen gaming habits and their relationship to civic life, has just been released.

From the report, which can be downloaded here [pdf]:

The first national survey of its kind finds that virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.

There are many juicy tidbits in it; my favorites talk about how there is positive correlation between kids who play games with others in person and civic outcomes, as well as results that show that teen gamers that get involved in commenting on gaming websites and discussions boards are more engaged civically and politically than their peers that don't.

This is an incredibly powerful and important report, and has already helped shift the conversation in the media about what role video games play in the lives of youth. On CBS Evening News this week, Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation and Amanda Lenhart from Pew spoke about the report's findings. Check out the clips below:

Connie Yowell on CBS Evening News
Amanda Lenhart on CBS Evening News

Posted by Rafi Santo at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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!

Posted by Rafi Santo at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hi guys! I haven't really blogged under the Digital Media Youth Advisory, but I thought I should blog at least once for the last session. First of all, it's pretty difficult to come to the understanding that it has already been one year! Anyway, I just wanted to say that it has been an awesome year, and I really look forward to maybe coming back one day next year just to sit in on the Digital Media Youth Advisory since I will be going away to college. It's really awesome. Plus, we got our super-awesome stipends today, which is the flip camera.

So yeah, thank you Global Kids and Rafi for coming up with the cool idea. It's totally appreciated and its a pretty fitting stipend since we were the DIGITAL MEDIA Youth Advisory. So yeah, the George Lucas Foundation filmed part of the last lesson and I'd like to thank them as well. But yeah, instead of writing a long blog, I decided that a video blog was more appropriate, especially on this occasion. So here goes; please pardon my messy appearance, it's late and I'm tired. But here it is anyway:

Posted by Nafiza - TSL Intern/VVP at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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!

Posted by Rafi Santo at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This month in the DMYA, we had a visit from videographers and producers that are putting together a documentary on the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative. It was a great opportunity for the youth in the advisory to both have their voices heard about what they're actually doing online, as well as to display their skill in speaking and thinking critically about their relationship to digital media.

After this, we asked everyone to create their own maps of their digital lives, which was a really fascinating process, and one in which we all got to learn a lot about the different ways the group relates to digital media. I've included some of the maps below. Enjoy!

Continue reading "[dmya] Youth Advisory maps their digital lives" »

Posted by Rafi Santo at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

With so many great projects moving forward, it's rare to get a moment when you feel some real closure before moving on to the next thing. But in the past month or so, I've had another great milestone occur in my time here, aside from my two year mark. In late December, MacArthur announced the release of its Digital Media and Learning Series, six volumes which include writings by authors specializing in gaming pedagogy, online identity, youth civic engagement through digital media, and more.

Continue reading "[staff] Coming full circle at Global Kids" »

Posted by Rafi Santo at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Project NML and the DMYA

This past meeting the Digital Media Youth Advisory got to meet with our friends and co-grantees under MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, Project New Media Literacy. Project NML is part of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, which put out an incredible white paper (pdf) about participatory culture and media education.

We spent about two hours with them talking specifically about the skill of networking, which is defined as "the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information". As Project NML puts together its new website and works to integrate online activities that could be done to build specific skills, a lot of what they're considering is not only how to teach those skills, but also how to do so in a way that's accessible and interesting to teens.

Devante evaluates different data visualization sites

We looked at websites that related to the skill, specifically ones that dealt with data visualization. First we checked out Many Eyes, a website that allows user to upload data sets and have them visualized in different types of graphs, and then we visited a site that was really well received by the teens called We Feel Fine, which aggregated instances of statements about how people are feeling from throughout the blogosphere, and then visualizes them in a variety of engaging ways.

The meeting was apparently quite useful for Project NML, and they even sent over this nice note:

I just wanted to formally thank you for giving us the opportunity to work with the Digital Media Youth Advisory a few weeks back. Working with that impressive crew was just another reminder of what a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and insight resides in the minds and words of our young people.

Though we only had a few hours to work with this group, it only took a few minutes to see what a truly impressive crew it was. What I think was most remarkable was the respect they brought to the room, not only in how they treated each other but in how they approached the task we put to them—their responses to the material we showed them were both considered and considerate, and they expressed a clear and deep understanding of their role within a larger community. The specific suggestions they provided, and the confidence and poise with which they provided those suggestions, will help us immensely as we move forward with our project.

Again, thank you so much for giving us the chance to work with this terrific group of teens. The experience was unforgettable.

Go DMYA!

Posted by Rafi Santo at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The six MacArthur volumes of their Series on Digital Media and Learning are now available, and the DOZENS of chapters are each available, for free, for download. Go MacArthur and MIT press! The Global Kids Leaders in the Digital Media Youth Advisory contributed to the process by providing inspiration through essays and other media, helping to vet the initial abstracts, running an hour-long workshop on youth voices for all of the editors and authors, and doing research on specific topics for a number of the authors.

Info on all six volumes: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/dmal

Download Barry's chapter: Why Johnny Can't Fly: Treating Games as a Form of Youth Media Within a Youth Development Framework

An abstract of his chapter follows:

In this chapter, I use anecdotes and case studies from both work and personal experience to make an argument for treating games as a form of youth media and explore what this means for after-school youth programs. I talk about my son. I talk about a hotdog stand. I talk about two after school programs in which youth make or use games to engage with serious global issues. I explore the creation of Ayiti, a game about poverty in rural Haiti, and what it meant for youth of color to take part in its creation. I explore a teen program in the virtual world of Teen Second Life that created a maze to educate their peers about child sex trafficking. I discuss James Paul Gee's Situated Learning Matrix, the digital literacy theories of Henry Jenkins and the perspectives of other key thinkers in this volume and in the field to explore their implications for media literacy and youth development programs. The chapter concludes by talking about 21st Century Skills as a context for situating games-based learning and references Carol Channing's voice as a source of hope.

Posted by joyce at 6:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

So this year, we decided to start on the process of developing a core curriculum that directly addressed these issues, and that could be taught in afterschool programs at all of our school sites across this city. Rather than come from the top down in developing this curriculum, we figured it best to start with the teens themselves, and who better to go to than a youth advisory on digital media?

In the last meeting that we had, we began the process by brainstorming a myriad of topics relating to digital media usage that the teens felt could be included in this series of workshops. This month, after narrowing down that large list, we began the research process into four broad areas:

Protecting yourself online – Socially
How can teens:
- Recognize email scams, credit card phishing?
- Deal with ‘cyberbullies’, ‘griefers’ and online troublemakers?
- Protect themselves from sexual predators?
- Know when and how they can safely use credit cards?

Protecting yourself online - Technically
How can teens:
- Safety surf the web?
- Avoid viruses, hacking, popups, spyware/malware?
- Know how to deal with an infected computer?

Piracy, File Sharing, Remixing and Fair Use
How can teens:
- Know what intellectual property is, and why it's important?
- Know when it's ok to download content (music, videos, software) from the internet?
- Know when something is copyrighted?
- Create intellectual property of their own and determine how it will be used?
- Advocate for their own right to fairly and legally use the copyrighted material of others?

Credibility
How can teens:
- Determine whether information they find online is credible and accurate?
- Know where to go to find accurate information?
- Recognize and differentiate between amateur and expert content online?
- Understand how website design factors play into their own process of determining whether something is credible?

By the end of the workshop, we had some incredible facts and resources relating to these areas, and are working to compile them into a research base upon which both the Online Leadership Program staff and the youth advisory will work from to synthesize factsheets and activities that can be included as part of workshops. Can't wait to see how this process develops!

Check out some pics from the workshop:

Ross gets the facts on credibility!

Nafiza and Jean brainstorm about what the potential dangers are for teens that don't know how to protect themselves online from scams, cyberbullies and predators.

Posted by Rafi Santo at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)