Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

Released on October 19, Henry Jenkin's brilliant and practical white paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, explores new frameworks and models for media literacy.

To quote just one section:

A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement.Schools as institutions have been slow to react to the emergence of this new participatory culture;the greatest opportunity for change is currently found in afterschool programs and informal learning communities.Schools and afterschool programs must devote more attention to fostering what we call the new media literacies:a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape.Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy,research skills,technical skills,and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.

The new skills include:
• Play- the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation- the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking- the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation- the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking- the ability to search for,synthesize,and disseminate information
• Negotiation- the ability to travel across diverse communities,discerning and respecting multiple perspectives,and grasping and following alternative norms

Furthermore, on page 27, when offering examples of how the skill of simulation has been explored in a formal setting, Jenkin's writes:

"Students need to learn how to manipulate and interpret existing simulations and how to construct their own dynamic models of real world processes... Groups such as... Global Kids in New York City involve kids in the design of their own games. These groups see a value in having youth translate a body of knowledge... into the activities and iconography of games. Here,students are encouraged to think of alternative ways of modeling knowledge and learn to use the vocabulary of game design to represent central aspects of the world around them."

And this came out the week BEFORE we launched Ayiti! This is a fantastic document for anyone working with new media and youth, and not just because we got the Jenkin's shout-out.