Digital Youth Project

Developed by a joint project of the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, the Digital Youth Project is described as the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use. The link gives access to a two-page overview and a 53 page white paper released online in November 2008. The study was motivated to find out how:

• new media is being integrated with youth practices and agendas
• these practices change dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning and authoritative knowledge.

The research found that:

• not only that social network and video-sharing sites, online games and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are fixtures of youth culture, but that youth find these activities compelling and important
• through online activity youth are developing media literacy and technical skills, exploring interests and experimenting with new forms of self-expression. However, those skills are highly variable depending on what kinds of social groups they associate with.This diversity in forms of literacy means that it is problematic to develop a standardised set of benchmarks to measure levels of new media and technical literacy.
• the digital world provides avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence.
• most of the relationships online are with people they know already in their offline lives. New media is used to extend existing friendships.
• interest-driven networks can lie outside of the boundaries of their local communities. These networks provide opportunities to publicise and distribute their work and to gain new forms of visibility and reputation
• youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.

The last bullet point is one of the more significant findings. Learning from peers contrasts significantly from institutional learning. It raises a new set of issues not just for educators but for employers as well. I can’t help but feel social networking online is producing a turn-around in relationships: it is becoming a matter of not what educational institutions and educational programs can do for youth, but what youth networks can do for themselves.

I would say that Australian youth use of digital media would not be too different from the U.S.

The research findings raise the likelihood of  similar implications for the way that organisations communicate with employees and may question current practices in pursuit of  the ‘learning organisation’. Perhaps it is timely to consider how peer networks should sit alongside organisational learning programs. According to the report, erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. I would say peer networking online has the potential to become a highly productive and rewarding element of working life in the 21st century…given the chance to operate.

Social media in the classroom

Howard Rheingold has uploaded an eight minute video on his Social Media in the Classroom Co-laboratory.  The video is a superb piece, a really good overview of social media tools and the benefits to be gained. This posing is about some thoughts I want to share that viewing the video triggered for me.

A master in studying the social implications of electronic communications, Howard’s advice about keeping up with continual change is to “…keep up with the literacies that technology makes possible”. That is true for me. My understanding of social media has been helped along immeasurably through participation – through this blog, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Goofy2, del.icio.us and more.

One consequence is that my attention is being spread over more media. I’m spending more time on social media and less time on broadcast and print media. What’s more, my participation-rate online has lifted considerably over the last few months. There is so much happening.

Back to Howard’s video. Somewhat to Howard’s surprise, his students were not as well informed about social media and the benefits as he thought they would be. I am not so surprised about that. Sure, younger people consume a lot of digital media, but it’s fragmented over many sites and service offerings – diversity rather than convergence. What’s more, although there are some sites popular to everyone (such as YouTube) those aged seven to 15 years are more interested in video games whereas young adults are more interested in social networking sites.  In my experience, collaborative tools like Twitter, Friendfeed and LinkIn are more useful to adults in work such as IT entrepreneurs and technicians, journalists and researchers. 

I’ve found that people who don’t use social media just don’t get it. It’s a part of the growing digital divide. As a horizon scanner, finding out what the early adopters are doing is important to me. These days, to achieve an understanding of social media requires experience of it – broad and personal experience.

Participatory cultures

I took particular interest in this link from the Creative Economy site today:

Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st Century
Henry Jenkins and others / New Media Literacies, MIT

The paper quite rightly challenges us to move on from the ‘digital divide’ focus on technological access to those of participation – the new literacies that involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.

While the education sector is the main interest to the reports authors, I feel that organisations face similar literacy challenges in today’s networked and interdependent world. Organisations too ought be actively pursing learning and development programs that include: (extracts from the report’s Executive Summary) the ability to

- adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

- interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

- to sample and remix media content

- multitask

- pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

- follow the flow of information across multiple modalities

- networking

- negotiation