[dmi] The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning
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.
