It has been almost a year since the release of the connected learning principles in March 2012 on connectedlearning.tv. For those of us who are part of the Connected Learning Research Network, this has been a year of digging into our research agenda for connected learning, and testing our hypotheses with ethnographic case studies, design experiments, and the deployment of a national survey. In tandem with these new research activities, we have also been involved in the collaborative writing of a report which synthesizes what we see as the current state of theory and empirical research underlying the connected learning model. We are very pleased to announce the publication of the report as a freely-available pdf. The report is also the first in a new Connected Learning Report series, edited by Ellen Seiter.

The connected learning principles were developed as a collaborative endeavor, cutting across research and practice, coordinated by the Digital Media and Learning Initiative. The research report represents the effort of our network to develop a research program tuned to these principles. As a model of learning, connected learning emerges from a wide range of existing research and practice, and is a work in progress, requiring ongoing refinement and testing through research and experimentation. It is both evidence-driven and visionary in its aspirations, and research plays a central role in its ongoing development.

It has been quite a learning journey pulling together this report with a group of interdisciplinary scholars and with the support of our network advisors and the team at the DML Hub. Our research network meets four times a year, and for two years, the writing of the report became a focal object for us to learn from our varied perspectives and expertise, and hash out our differences and disagreements. I have survived more than my share of collaborative writing projects, some much heftier than this report, but the depth of engagement, stretching, and learning that I had to do for this synthesis eclipsed my prior collaborative writing efforts to date. We were working across vast differences in methodology (humanistic, clinical, design-based, qualitative, and quantitative), disciplines (psychology, sociology, anthropology, learning sciences, communications, design), in addition to being physically dispersed and all having demanding day jobs.

Though not without compromises, I am proud of the fact that the debates, epiphanies,and give-and-take between the nine authors resulted in greater refinement and clarity about our common ground, rather than a watered-down consensus document. The integration of a socio-economic framework with educational research and design represents what I believe is a unique synthesis that mirrors the cross-sector model of connected learning and both a macro and micro learning agenda. Unless we keep in view broader questions of equity and the quality of our shared culture and civic institutions, learning techniques and approaches more often than not reproduce existing structural inequity. Put differently, a learning agenda needs to be part of a social change agenda, a commitment deeply shared by all the report authors.

As we stress in the report, the connected learning model builds on a robust body of existing research and practice, and we see the work of the network as one component of this broader conversation and growing evidence base. The writing captures a moment in time in our shared understandings; understandings that we hope and expect will evolve as the model gets tested, challenged, and reworked. The report represents the starting hypotheses that will guide the research of the network in the years to come, and we hope will provide a sounding board for a broader conversation around connected learning.

This concern has led me on a journey over the past three years, in trying to understand not only how new media can support highly engaged, geeked out, and self-directed forms of learning, but also how it can make this kind of learning available to all young people. Together with a committed group of colleagues and partners that are part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, I’ve been engaged in an effort to address this challenge, seeking to enlist a diverse constituency of educators, parents, technology makers, and young people in a new vision of learning in the digital age.

Today we are proud to announce a new research network, community site, and a set of learning and design principles that seeks to promote dialog and experimentation around a model we are calling “connected learning.” In a nutshell, connected learning is learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational and economic opportunity. Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge and expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends and institutions who share and recognize this common passion or purpose.

The Essence of Connected Learning from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

This path towards connected learning is both personal and professional for me. I grew up with a connected learner, my brother, who tended to have a troubled relationship to formal education but was always geeking out on a hobby with the support of caring adult mentors. Although he never graduated from college, he has gone on to be a successful Internet entrepreneur and the director of the MIT Media Lab. I’ve seen connected learning when my son’s teacher invites him to do a school assignment about his favorite electronic game that he plays with his closest friends and expert mentors, or when my daughter is able to direct her passion for sewing into making costumes for her friends in a school dance performance. And I’ve experienced it when I’ve been able to connect the social causes I care about to my career ambitions. These kinds of experiences shouldn’t be the province of the 1% of connected learners or learning moments, any more than economic wealth should be concentrated in the hands of the few.

We don't need to think of education as pushing scarce and static knowledge from center to periphery and of educational opportunity as being able to do better on standardized tests. We have the opportunity to tap into a much more dynamic, distributed, participatory, networked knowledge universe to capture the attention of diverse learners.

We believe we can harness the power of social media, online knowledge, and digital production tools to make this kind of learning accessible and ubiquitous. The power of digital networks is in the ability to connect learners and teachers across space and institutional boundaries, to build linkages between school, home and community, and to make information and learning resources highly accessible and personalized. Our challenge is in guiding more young people to take advantage of these opportunities. We need an expansive and diverse network of people and institutions to develop, improve, refine, and take up a vision of 21st Century learning, and our hope is to support this process of network building through our connected learning approach and principles.

I'm proud to announce the publication of a new book that I edited together with my longtime collaborator Daisuke Okabe and a new editorial collaborator Tsuji Izumi, Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World. The book is a collection of essays on otaku culture in Japan and the US, ranging across relatively familiar anime fandoms to the possibly less familiar terrain of train otaku, 2-chan, and game arcade culture. It is an effort to showcase both the commonalities of what ties together various otaku cultural forms around the world, as well as showcasing the tremendous diversity of otaku culture. The central thematic of the book is this productive dynamic between local and niche cultural forms and a networked and distributed public culture; I argue in the introduction that it is this dynamic that is in fact the distinguishing feature of otaku culture and what has made it flourish in an era of networked, remixed, and digital culture.

This book was a labor of love that spanned many years of research, translation, and editing. Like our earlier book, Personal Portable Pedestrian, the book includes articles that come from my own research, but the bulk of the content is translated work by Japanese scholars. I've always felt that it's important to bring the excellent work being done in other languages to the English-speaking world. In Japan, many key scholarly works in English get translated into Japanese, but the reverse happens much less frequently. Like with mobile phones a decade ago, we felt that the current international attention to anime and otaku culture provided an opportunity to showcase Japanese scholarly work in an international arena.

Chapters by Lawrence Eng and myself represent the English-language anime fandom, and the rest of the articles are based on research in Japan. We have work from well-established senior scholars such as Hiroki Azuma on moe, Akihira Kitada on 2-chan, and Kaichiro Morikawa on the birth of Akihabara as a otaku town. We also feature work by a new generation of otaku scholars such as Izumi's work on train otaku, Daisuke's work on fujoshi, Yoshimasa Kijima on fighting game culture, Hiroaki Tamagawa on the Comic Market, and Kimi Ishida, who writes with Daisuke on cosplay.

My own work that appears in this book comes from fieldwork on the online English-langauge anime fandom that I did as part of the digital youth project. In addition the introduction, I have one article on fansubbing and one on anime music videos. I also got to tag along with Daisuke during his fieldwork with cosplayers and doujin authors in Tokyo, and that work is also represented in this book. It was so ridiculously fun to hang out with anime fans as part of this project, I'm sad to see this chapter of my research come to a close. While I am no longer actively doing fieldwork on anime fandom, much of what I've learned from fans is key to my ongoing work on interest and passion-driven learning, and my current fieldwork on gaming and other youth-centered interest groups.

I recently gave a talk on the book at MIT. You can see some video excerpts here, and Ethan Zuckerman did a nice write-up here.

Extra bonus is the awesome cover art done just for us by Ulises Farinas.

I've devoted my career to researching how young people take up new technologies like computers, mobile phones, and the Internet and make them their own. If we pay attention to what young people do when they are socializing and having fun with these new media, it's clear that they are both highly engaged and learning a great deal. For most young people, however, this is about learning how to get along with their friends, what it takes to get a date, or how to get to the next level in Halo, and not the kinds of academic learning and civic engagement that schools are concerned with. As a parent and educator who is also an anthropologist committed to appreciating youth perspectives, I stand at the cusp of two different learning cultures--one that is about youth-driven social engagement and sharing, and the other that is embodied in educational institutions' adult-driven agendas. My biggest challenge has been to find what it would take to get alignment between the energy that kids bring to video games, text messaging, and social network sites and the learning that parents and educators care about. I have been on a quest for examples of educational institutions and programs that can bridge this cultural divide, and I'd like to share an example that has come out of collaborations I have had with some of my colleagues in the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Last month, I paid a visit to the YouMedia space in Chicago Public Library's Harold Washington Library Centre in downtown Chicago. The space was teeming with teens sitting on bright comfy sofas, chatting and eating, playing Rock Band, mixing music, heads down in front of laptops, and getting feedback from digital media mentors. Check out spoken word artist and mentor Mike Hawkins freestyling if you want to sample what YouMedia has on tap. Unlike any other library experience I had growing up, YouMedia is loud, sociable, and hip -- but it's still all about the public mission of the library to serve as a point of access to culture, information, and the media of the day, staffed by smart guides to knowledge and literacy. Nichole Pinkard and Amy Eshleman, who oversee the site, took me aside to explain that over a hundred teens come through the space every day to check out laptops, make media, read books, engage in workshops and special projects, or just hang out with friends in a safe environment. They say that since they opened their doors to this teen-only media space about a year ago, news spread by word of mouth, texting, and social media messaging peer-to-peer among teens across the city, and their population includes young people in diverse public and private schools, as well as home schoolers.

A similar dynamic is at play in how YouMedia integrates teen peer culture with learning. Too often, we assume that socializing and fun is hostile to academics, and that "peer pressure" pulls kids away from learning. Responsible adults see their role as limiting access to games and entertainment, and drawing kids away from their peers in order to insist on attention to schoolwork and learning. In YouMedia, you'll see a very different dynamic. Young people are invited to hang out, play with games, and mess around informally with technology. They deep dive into media literacy projects that are supported by knowledgeable peers and mentors. Engagement thrives when young people are allowed to experiment, socialize, and take ownership of the agenda; there's absolutely no reason why the content of that activity can't be adult-sponsored learning. When young people are supported in pursuing their own choices and interests, and when they are allowed to mobilize peer activity around those interests, suddenly socializing, fun, and peer pressure drive learning rather than detracting from it.

YouMedia supports learning that begins with youth agency and voice, is socially connected, tailored to individual interests, and highly engaged -- properties that are absent from many young people's classroom experiences. The energy level and buzz in the space is similar to what I see when young people are with their same-aged peer group, immersed in online gaming, gossiping, or sharing YouTube videos, but this is an intergenerational space framed by educational goals--an open public space, an institution of public education, where learning and literacy are seamless with youth-driven activity.

If we think of the mission of public education as providing learning opportunities to all young people and not only about supporting public schools, YouMedia represents some of the best of what public education has to offer in the 21st Century. The Obama administration has recognized this, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services recently announced that they would work with the MacArthur Foundation in scaling the YouMedia effort to thirty more libraries across the country.

Imagine what it would mean to think of public education as a mission shouldered not only by schools, but by a wide range of public institutions committed to knowledge and learning? When we think of public education, do we include the efforts of those in public and independent media, who develop radio, television, movies and games with an educational mission? Do we include organizations like Mozilla, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive committed to the production of knowledge in the public interest and in the public domain? Do we think of the efforts in broadband policy that seek to make the online knowledge accessible to families across the country? To me, these are all efforts in public education that are often overlooked in our often exclusive focus on schools.

I'm proud to say that the designers of YouMedia credit research that I was involved in on young people's social media activity as part of the inspiration for the design of the space. My research and the work, including YouMedia, that I've been involved in as part of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative takes on these questions of what it means to build a new vision of public education for the 21st Century. I look forward to sharing and discussing more of this work with all of you here.

I'm happy to announce (a bit belatedly) the first book in the Technologies of the Imagination series I am editing with Ellen Seiter with University of Michigan Press' digitalculturebooks imprint. Emily Chivers Yochim's Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity is a nuanced look at the culture and practice of skateboarders. The description of skate culture draws from popular media, as well as ethnographic research with skaters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have to credit Ellen and our editors Tom Dwyer and Alison Mackeen (formerly at UMich Press and now at Yale U Press) for seeing this book through to publication, but I am super proud to be able to claim it as part of our series!

As with all the books in the digitalculturebooks imprint, you can read Skate Life for free online, and it is released on a Creative Commons license.

We are actively seeking new manuscripts to add to our roster for this series, so please feel free to contact me with any ideas. Here is a brief description of the series, and a longer blog post is here from when it was launched a while back.

Technologies of the Imagination investigates what it means to be living and growing up in an era saturated with digital media. Through detailed studies of everyday practice, this series will feature work that offers a vivid and grounded perspective on contemporary culture, paying particular attention to the point of view of children and youth. Possible topics include:

For more information about this series, or to submit a proposal, please contact the Series Editors: Ellen Seiter—eseiter@mac.com and/or Mimi Ito—mito@itofisher.com; or the Acquiring Editor: Tom Dwyer—thdwyer@umich.edu.

I was interested to learn from the strategic plan that Wikimedia is currently sustainable by community contributions. The Wikimedia Foundation has received support from a range of private donors, including foundations, but the core financial support for Wikipedia is community-generated. As such, it follows in the footsteps of other member-supported models of public media, but is unique in not having a history of government funding, and having a transnational scope. And of course, unlike public television and radio, Wikipedia is not only community supported, but is community created. "We" the public donate not only our dollars but our labor, keeping the centralized costs of media making and distribution at a minimum.

Even if it is a sample of one, Wikipedia does provide us with a vision of how public media can be sustained in an era of Internet distribution and crowdsourced content. Like all public resources, however, Wikipedia requires broad-based buy-in as well as the investments of time, love and attention disproportionately shouldered by a core set of community members. As a researcher and proponent of bottom-up Internet culture, I give lip service to the possibilities of networked media to generate new forms of knowledge and culture, but I haven't really stepped up to the plate as far as my own practical investments in making this vision a reality. Joining the Wikimedia advisory board is what I hope will be a first step in a more dedicated and hands-on involvement in not only studying, but working to co-develop the infrastructures and models for new forms of public media.

First, we are opening the doors today on a new Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, and it's web site. DMLcentral.net. The research hub and website is a key component of the broader MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative, and is made possible by a grant that David Goldberg and I received at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The Hub will be facilitating research collaboration, organizing an annual conference, in addition to operating the DMLcentral.net web site. The press release of the announcement can be found here.

The launch of the Hub and DMLcentral also coincides with the publication of two of my books.

As a new media researcher, I've struggled to find appropriate venues for publishing and disseminating my work. In the late nineties, when studies of online communities, cyberculture, and electronic gaming were still in their infancy, and when I was launching my scholarly career, my work was never accepted into the journals of my discipline of anthropology. Educational journals didn't recognize my work on new media and play as part of their charter. This reflected my personal failures in translating my research topics into the established idioms of my discipline and field, but I expect my experience is not unique for those who work in new and emerging areas of inquiry.
Certain book series and presses were beacons for me during this period and showcased new and radical forms of scholarship, inspiring me to persevere in the untested arena of the anthropology of new media and learning. Cambridge University Press' series on Learning in Doing represented for me the most exciting work in sociocultural learning theory. Books from MIT Press in new media and science and technology studies were my models for interdisciplinary scholarly practice. Edited collections from Routledge on cyberculture studies convinced me that I was not alone in my interests, and Duke's cultural studies list convinced me that the study of popular media culture was legitimate for an anthropologist and an educator. Most of my own work has appeared in edited books that chart new areas of study, rather than in more established venues and genres of the scholarly journal, and Doug Sery at MIT Press signed my first edited book on Japanese mobile phone use.

I'm happy to announce that my next two books have been published with MIT Press this fall, again under Doug's guidance, as part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning.  This series was inaugurated in 2007, with the publication of six edited volumes. These two new books represent the first of a series of monographs that will extend the series in new directions. Together with the International Journal of Learning and Media, the series represents a key component in the foundation's effort to support the infrastructure for field-building in the area of digital media and learning. MIT Press is a key partner in our efforts at the Digital Media and Learning Hub to support and coalesce scholarship in this area.

It's an honor and privilege to have my work represented in this effort. Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software reports on work that I did as part of my graduate work in Education and Anthropology at Stanford University, in collaboration with the Fifth Dimension Project at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at UC San Diego. The book looks at how educational, entertainment and authoring genres of children's software were developed and hardened through linkages across sites of play, software production, and distribution. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media is an outcome of the recently completed Digital Youth Study, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The book was co-authored by fifteen scholars, with contributions by seven additional team members. It represents the results of a three year ethnographic study of youth new media practices, and a collaborative analysis that looked across over twenty different ethnographic case studies.

Reflecting on this moment, it's hard for me to fathom how far things have come and how quickly the terrain has shifted since that period when I was struggling to get my first work published just over a decade ago. My hope is that this book series will function as one important piece of a publication infrastructure to set our new field on more solid ground.

One of the problems with a new and highly interdisciplinary field is that there are few conferences and journals that really cater to our specific areas of interest. The MacArthur Foundation helped start the International Journal of Learning and Media to address this gap. The conference is the next step in this field-building effort.

The deadline for session proposals is approaching quickly -- October 30! Please consider submitting something and joining us for the event. I am confident that we will look back at this inaugural year of the event as the start of something memorable. There is a wiki for session organizing and more details below.

FIRST ANNUAL DIGITAL MEDIA AND LEARNING CONFERENCE
CONFERENCE THEME: "DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION"

February 18 – 20, 2010

Cal IT2
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California

We are pleased to announce the first Digital Media and Learning Conference, an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice.

For this inaugural year, the theme will be "Diversifying Participation". Henry Jenkins is the Chair of the Digital Media and Learning Conference and our Keynote Speakers will be Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins.

We invite submissions for session proposals that speak to the conference theme as well as to the field of digital media and learning more broadly. Those wishing to present work should look to propose or participate in a panel topic (see submission process outlined below).

DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION

A growing body of research has identified how young people's digital media use is tied to basic social and cultural competencies needed for full participation in contemporary society. We continue to develop an understanding of the impact of these experiences on learning, civic engagement, professional development, and ethical comprehension of the digital world.

Yet research has also suggested that young people's forms of participation with new media are incredibly diverse, and that risks, opportunities, and competencies are spread unevenly across the social and cultural landscape. Young people have differential access to online experiences, practices, and tools and this has a consequence in their developing sense of their own identities and their place in the world. In some cases, different forms of participation and access correspond with familiar cultural and social divides. In other cases, however, new media have introduced novel and unexpected kinds of social differences, subcultures, and identities.

It is far too simple to talk about this in terms of binaries such as "information haves and have nots" or "digital divides". There are many different kinds of obstacles to full participation, many different degrees of access to information, technologies, and online communities, and many different ways of processing those experiences. Participatory cultures surrounding digital media are characterized by a diversity that does not track automatically to high and low access or more or less sophisticated use. Rather, multiple forms of expertise, connoisseurship, identity, and practice are proliferating in online worlds, with complicated relationships to pre-existing categories such as socioeconomic status, gender, nationality, race, or ethnicity.

We encourage sessions that describe, document, and critically analyze different forms of participation and how they relate to various forms of social and cultural capital. We are interested in accounts of the challenges and obstacles which block or inhibit engagement to different forms of online participation. We also encourage session proposals that engage with successful intervention strategies and pedagogical processes enabling once marginalized groups to more fully exploit the opportunities for learning with digital media. Conversely, we are interested in hearing more about how marginal and subcultural communities find diverse uses of new and emerging technologies, pushing them in new directions and navigating a complicated relationship with "mainstream" forms of participation. Specifically, we seek to understand the following:

* What can research on more diverse communities contribute to our understanding of the learning ecologies surrounding new media?
* What are the technologies, practices, economic, and cultural divides that lead to segregation, "gated" information communities, and differential access?
* When and how do diversity and differentiation in participation promote social and cultural benefits and opportunities, and when do they create schisms that are less equitable or productive?
* What strategies have proven successful at broadening opportunities for participation, overcoming the many different kinds of segregation or exclusion which impact the online world, and empowering more diverse presences throughout cyberspace?
* Are there things occurring on the margins of the existing digital culture that might valuably be incorporated into more mainstream practices?

In addition to these questions directly addressing the conference theme, we welcome submissions that address innovative new directions in research and practice relating to digital media and participatory learning.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Submissions should be in the form of full session proposals. Proposed sessions may range from 1 to 2 hours in length and may include traditional paper presentations, hands-on workshops, design critiques, demos, pecha kucha, or roundtable discussions. We welcome and encourage submissions of innovative formats, but request that the proposals come in the form of session proposals rather than individual papers or presentations.

The goal of the event is to foster dialog and build connections. To that end, sessions should have at least three to four presenters and/or discussants. Session organizers should reserve substantial amounts of time for open discussion and exchange.

We have established an open wiki for potential participants to engage in session organizing. The wiki can be used to call for contributions to a briefly outlined session topic, to seek out partners to develop a topic together, to brainstorm about co-presenters, and any other functions potential participants find valuable. The wiki can be accessed at: http://dmlconference2010.wikidot.com/forum:start

Session organizers should submit proposals that consist of a title and a 200-word abstract (including proposed presentation topics and formats and the speakers and/or discussants). In addition, names and contact details for the session organizers and participants will be required. The submission system is available here

Each individual will be limited to participation on no more than two panels at the conference. Participants will be expected to fund their own travel and accommodation. Registration for the conference will be free.

Conference Website: http://dmlcentral.net/conference

Conference Wiki: http://dmlconference2010.wikidot.com/forum:start

Conference Submission System: http://www.dmlcentral.com/applicants/

Conference Committee: Henry Jenkins, David Theo Goldberg, Heather Horst, Mimi Ito, Jabari Mahiri and Holly Willis

KEY DATES AND DEADLINES
Submission System Available: September 30, 2009
Deadline for Submissions: October 30, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: November 30, 2009
Registration System Opens: December 15, 2009
Conference Program Announced: December 15, 2009
Registration Deadline: February 1, 2010
Evening Reception: February 18, 2010

CONTACT INFORMATION
Digital Media and Learning Research Hub
UC Humanities Research Institute
University of California, Irvine
Email: dmlhub@hri.uci.edu

After presenting a framework for understanding contexts for informal game-based learning, I present some areas of practice that have shown promise for scientific learning more specifically, also describing unique challenges in working in the informal space. I conclude by suggesting some areas for future research and intervention.

Contexts for Recreational and Social Gaming

Although schools have begun to adopt games and simulations, clearly informal and out-of-school settings overwhelmingly dominant kids' gaming experiences. It is worth underscoring this obvious point that gaming is primarily a sociable and recreational activity, but also that the contexts that we consider "informal" are incredibly diverse. While it is important to understand the distinctions between informal and formal learning environments (which Squire's paper effectively covers), it is equally important to understand the diversity of contexts that structure the informal space. In fact, the differences between different informal contexts are at least as significant as those the differences that distinguish the formal and informal from one another.

Social and recreational gaming is structured primarily by four sociocultural contexts that are present in varying degrees in any kind of gaming practice. This typology is informed by the Digital Youth Project, a recently completed ethnographic study of youth new media practice (Ito, et al. 2009).

Everyday peer cultures of game play. The dominant context that structures game practice is everyday social play among "given" local peers and siblings. Recent studies document that gaming is practically ubiquitous among US children and teens, and is associated more with social integration than isolation (Ito and Bittanti 2009; Kahne, et al. 2009; Kutner and Olson 2008). In other words, gaming has become a key part of what we identified as casual "hanging out" and "killing time" gaming practices. These more casual and social forms of gaming are increasingly crossing gender and age lines (Ito and Bittanti 2009).

Intentional gaming groups and communities. For kids who are more heavily invested in gaming as an area of interest, more focused "intentional" gaming groups, both online and local, become an important context. These kids are a minority, are most commonly boys, and distinguish themselves for more casual and recreational gamers, often self-identifying as gamers or geeks. Locally, kids might frequent cybercafés or set up LAN parties. The online space provides for a newly expanded set of gaming experiences that extend kids' social network specifically around a gaming interest. It is in these more "geeked out" gaming practices that we see highly focused kinds of interest-driven learning and creative production such as machinima and mods, and the production of game sites, reviews, walkthroughs, and cheats (Ito and Bittanti 2009).

Family and home life. The home and the family is the context that provisions gaming resources for most kids (consoles, titles, space, etc.), and in many families, siblings and increasingly, parents, are gaming companions. At the same time, parents and siblings compete for access to home entertainment resources in the home, and most parents will have various rules and limits in place surrounding game play. While we have seen potential for gaming to become a shared focus for productive learning in the family context, it is also an arena fraught with tension as gaming is generally considered (by both parents and kids) an activity in opposition to academic learning (Buckingham 2007; Horst 2009; Ito and Bittanti 2009; Stevens, et al. 2007).

Commercial and public media culture. The context of the commercial gaming industry is also an important factor in considering social and recreational gaming, and one that is often overlooked in more educationally-minded efforts. Any intervention in the social and recreational space will have to compete with commercial production and marketing for kids' attentions. History has demonstrated the challenges of inserting learning software and educational agendas into practices already saturated with commercial media culture (Buckingham 2007; Buckingham and Scanlon 2002; Giacquinta, et al. 1993; Ito 2009; Seiter 2005). While independent, educational, and civic games have been a marginal but persistent feature of the commercial games landscape, we have yet to witness the emergence of a robust alternative market for public interest games that are comparable to public media in television or radio.
These existing contexts of social and recreational gaming powerfully determine the potential and promise of alternative and new forms of gaming practice. Just as the classroom culture and educational accountabilities structure gaming in formal educational environments, the informal space is also saturated with structuring institutions, but of a more varied nature.

Opportunities and Challenges

In order to understand the opportunity space for informal science learning through games, educators and game designers must first come to grips with the fact that existing social and recreational gaming contexts operate largely in opposition to academic cultural domains and practice, including science. At the same time, the high degree of technical expertise and systemic thinking required of contemporary digital practices, as well as opportunities for peer-based learning and collaboration in online networks, create new openings for scientific learning. In particular, we have found that the contemporary social and recreational media environment is ripe for opportunities for self-directed, customized, and interest-driven learning, that in some instances mesh with science-oriented learning (Ito, et al. 2009). Here I describe some evidence that we do have of genres of activity and learning that have the potential to support informal scientific learning through gaming. These are domains of practice that are already established in kids' social and recreational worlds, and where science-oriented games-based learning could potentially make further inroads.

Networked Peer Publics

For those kids who are involved in "geeked out" gaming practices such as MMOs, LAN parties, and game modding, gaming can become a powerful vehicle for self-directed, interest driven learning that results in collateral learning related to technology, engineering, and knowledge seeking and exchange. As Squire notes in his review of studies in this space, online groups mobilizing through games like World of Warcraft, I Love Bees, or Whyville have demonstrated the possibilities of new forms of collaborative problem solving and collective action which exhibit properties of scientific inquiry. Even among local, more casual forms of gaming, kids develop capacities for social exchange that center on esoteric and specialized knowledge domains, and where gaming knowledge becomes a source of social capital. These dynamics have been documented with younger kids playing games like Pokemon and Yugioh in local peer groups (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004; Ito 2007; Sefton-Green 2004; Willett 2004). While kids develop some capacity for knowledge networking through local peer groups, the online environment facilitates access to more sophisticated and specialized forms of knowledge and inquiry. As the networked gaming demographic becomes younger because of games like Club Penguin, Poptropolis, Neopets, and Runescape, we can expect these kinds of dispositions towards networked knowledge to become more pervasive.

Gaming represents a domain of interest-driven learning that has low barriers to initial entry, and where kids can move along a trajectory of casual social gaming ("hanging out"), to exploration and knowledge seeking ("messing around") to more intensive forms of knowledge exchange and production ("geeking out"). Gaming can becom an entry point for a wider range of technical and interest-driven practices and literacies such as hardware hacking, video production, design, and coding (Hawisher and Selfe 2007; Ito, et al. 2009). At the same time, a few cautionary notes are in order. Although these kinds of peer based learning contexts exhibit properties of scientific inquiry and technology and media-based literacy, it is rare to find recreational gaming groups that are focused on explicitly scientific content. Whyville is one exception to this and demonstrates that a voluntary, social gaming environment that focuses on science can succeed in the informal space. At the same time, it is important to recognize that the popularity of a space like Whyville is dwarfed by games such as Pokemon, Runescape, Neopets, or Club Penguin, that have very little in the way of explicit scientific content. Secondly, the more geeked out dimensions of gaming communities continue to be dominated by boys, even as the casual gaming demographic expands to include more women and girls (Kafai, et al. 2008). Games like Pokemon (Ito 2008), Neopets, and Whyville (Kafai Forthcoming) do demonstrate that girls can be captivated by these kinds of gaming activities, but there is a still a resilient cultural bias that works against girls assuming a game geek identity.

Enrichment Activities

Shifting focus from the more purely social and recreational contexts of gaming to contexts that are more adult guided, certain forms of gaming have historically enjoyed a privileged status as an "enrichment" activity. Chess, Scrabble, and Go are examples of games that are generally adult sanctioned, are culturally validated as learning games, and can be tied to more structured kinds of clubs and competitions. The online world is breathing new life into these longstanding brain game genres. In the eighties, we saw the emergence of a genre of electronic learning games, under the rubric of "edutainment," that were largely marketed to adults as enrichment activities for kids. Games such as Civilization or those under the Sims and Lucas Learning labels were developed that were more entertainment-oriented, but had a stamp of approval from parents and educators and often crossed over to the school and enrichment space (Ito 2009). Squire's whitepaper introduces us to a new generation of learning games that exploit more of the potential of networked and social gaming. These kinds of games have the potential to become a focus for intergenerational gaming that has a more explicit learning agenda, that can be linked to more structured learning settings, and is not dominated by the commercial gaming industry and the logic of existing kids' peer cultures. Here there is more potential to insert explicitly scientific content, as well as supporting the development of capacities for knowledge seeking, inquiry, and exchange.
The genre of adult-guided enrichment activity does pose unique challenges, however. While younger children are more open to adult guidance in the media they consume, as they enter their late elementary and teen years, kids become more resistant to adults dictating their media choices. This is why the edutainment market is largely targeted towards early childhood, and why games with an explicit learning agenda find a hard time sustaining interest in the home context for older kids. Further, unlike the recreational and mainstream console gaming space, these enrichment-oriented games suffer from certain class associations, and are culturally marked as more highbrow media forms. This means that any interventions within this genre of game play needs to be attentive to issues of class distinction, accessibility, and status issues in kids' peer cultures. Research on media access has demonstrated that while game consoles and entertainment titles are pervasive in even lower income homes, PCs and learning software are not widespread (Buckingham and Scanlon 2002; Giacquinta, et al. 1993; Roberts and Foehr 2008), nor are they associated with positive social capital within kids' peer networks. Studies of homes and family dynamics have demonstrated that parental cultivation of enrichment activities and the insertion of learning agendas into kids play is associated with more interventionist middle class parenting styles (Lareau 2003; Seiter 2007). With the addition of geeky and scientific content, the potential for alienating certain populations of kids increases dramatically, as we see with the cultural stereotypes associated with playing chess and other "brainy" games. In the case of the privatized contexts of the home, these kinds of socioeconomic and cultural distinctions are in full force, because the contexts do not benefit from the same equalizing effects that we see in public educational contexts. As Squire describes in the cases of Kafai's Whyville work, his own work with Civilization, or the work of the Fifth Dimension project, afterschool spaces and computer clubs can function as mediating contexts in broadening access to these enrichment oriented genres of gaming.

Public Culture

Squire ends his whitepaper with an appeal to mobilize games in order to support the development of a scientifically literate populace. He cites the example of the educational film, Mr. Sun, which saw popular uptake in both homes and schools. Like other forms of popular media like television, film, radio, newspapers, and magazines, games have the potential to function as public media that can enrich our scientific literacy. Public television, documentaries, science magazines and features are well-established genres for this science education in public media culture. Games such SimEarth,, the Dr. Brain series, Planetary Taxi, the Magic School Bus series, DinoPark Tycoon, and the Incredible Machine opened up this genre in the eighties and nineties. Squire reviews a wave of new science-based games that update this genre of popular science gaming for the current networked games ecology. Games can clearly be a compelling vehicle for representing scientific knowledge and generating interest.

The challenge with popular science gaming is that the science learning can be very elusive and diffuse without a social context that supports deeper inquiry and engagement. We lack evidence that games in the genre of popular science lead to scientific interests, literacy, or dispositions in the absence of a social or educational context that fosters deeper engagement. In my studies in the late nineties of play with games such as The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body, DinoPark Tycoon, or The Island of Dr. Brain, I found that kids rarely oriented to the scientific content of the game without the explicit intervention of an educationally-minded adult. One their own, these games become absorbed into the dynamics of kids' play culture, and kids were more focused on "beating" the game and playing with the special effects then engagement with the scientific content domain (Ito 2009). The popular science genre functioned more as a way of legitimizing the game for the adult provisioners rather than as a focus of interest for kids. Unlike more traditional analog media, games are highly responsive to player intentionality and context, and kids can easily circumvent engagement with "content" when playing with an entertaining simulation or multimedia adventure.

A related challenge is in navigating the boundary between the genre of more school-based content and entertainment content. While many of the early edutainment games were designed for a consumer market, in today's online ecology, it is very difficult for a game in an educational genre to be successfully marketed to home-based players. Some successful commercial games, such as Spore, Portal, or puzzle games incorporate mathematical thinking or scientific referents, but are light on scientific content. More content-heavy games such as River City or WolfQuest were developed with public sector funding support, and are not designed or marketed as consumer entertainment titles. In order for games to be successful in home-based and recreational space, they need to acquire legitimacy and status within kids' peer cultures of play, and explicit scientific content is a difficult sell, particularly for older kids. While it may be possible for these public sector games to break in to more mainstream consumer awareness, like other forms of public media, it is an ongoing challenge to orchestrate a genre crossover.

Next Steps

The current state of science gaming in informal environments, and our state of knowledge about this area suggests a few areas that are ripe for future inquiry. On the research side, we need effective methodologies and frameworks for documenting and assessing learning in social and recreational gaming contexts. Most of the research on learning outcomes is derived from assessment methods designed for formal educational contexts where context is assumed to be relatively controlled, and outcomes are measured on an individual basis. In informal environments such as the home or most afterschool contexts, players can exercise much more choice, both in the selection of the game as well as in determining the mode of play. In other words, the surrounding "social envelope" (Giacquinta, et al. 1993), genre, and purpose of the activity is powerfully determining of learning outcomes, outcomes that are highly diverse and often unpredictable. It is not simply that educators must recognize that kids will experience different outcomes from participation. Some kids may orient towards scientific content, others towards knowledge networking, and others toward hacking and tinkering, all with the same gaming title. In fact, it is the ability to specialize and develop individualized and interest-driven trajectories that is one of the most important features of the informal learning space. Evaluating learning in these kinds of contexts needs to rely less on standardized measures of skill and knowledge and more on an assessment of the properties of particular contexts to support diverse and specialized knowledge seeking, exchange, and interest-driven learning.

Research also needs to look at the comparative benefits of environments such as specific home-based gaming configurations, afterschool programs, and online gaming groups to support learning trajectories towards scientific interests and identities. Further, it is crucial that we develop ways of tracing learning as it happens across these different contexts and in relation to school-based learning. Engagement with science games or media titles in purely recreational or social-peer based contexts are unlikely to be tied to durable scientific knowledge or dispositions without links to and from more academic learning contexts. Rather than simply evaluate the effect of particular environments, software, or programs on learning, we need to evaluate whether that learning builds synergistic ways with other institutional frames and social contexts, or whether those boundaries are characterized by tension and opacity.

On I related note, I would suggest that on the design and program development side, success hinges on new kinds of educational and public media partnerships that can bridge some of the boundaries between formal and informal learning spaces, the public and private sector, and educational and entertainment genres of media. While educators and technology developers tend to focus on the design of technology and programs, in order to bridge existing social practices and cultural genres, we need to spend much more energy intervening on the broader sociocultural and political economic conditions that condition how technologies are marketed, distributed, and taken up by diverse players. For example, it is as critical to spend resources on supporting gaming communities, parent outreach, and afterschool centers as it is to fund new technology development. Infusing scientific learning into kids play and social life, and conversely, mobilizing kids passions for interest-driven learning for science, both require new kinds of institutional and economic alliances, bringing parents, commercial industries, and community organizations more effectively into the agenda of science education.

References

Buckingham, David
2007 Beyond Technology: Children's Learning in the Age of Digital Culture. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Buckingham, David, and Margaret Scanlon
2002 Education, Entertainment and Learning in the Home. London: Open University Press.

Buckingham, David, and Julian Sefton-Green
2004 Structure, Agency, and Pedagogy in Children's Media Culture. In Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon. J. Tobin, ed. Pp. 12-33. Durham: Duke University Press.

Giacquinta, Joesph B., Jo Anne Bauer, and Jane E. Levin
1993 Beyond Technology's Promise: An Examination of Children's Educational Computing in the Home. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L Selfe, eds.
2007 Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century: Literate Connections. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Horst, Heather
2009 Families. In Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ito, Mizuko
2007 Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yu-Gi-Oh:,, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production. In Structures of Participation in Digital Culture. J. Karaganis, ed. Pp. 88-111. New York: SSRC.

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2008 Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix. In Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming. Y.B. Kafai, C. Heeter, J. Denner, and J.Y. Sun, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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2009 Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ito, Mizuko, et al.
2009 Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ito, Mizuko, and Matteo Bittanti
2009 Gaming. In Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kafai, Yasmin B.
Forthcoming The World of Whyville: An Introduction to Tween Virtual Life. Games and Culture.

Kafai, Yasmin B., et al., eds.
2008 Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender adn Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kahne, Joseph, Elaine Middaugh, and Chris Evans
2009 The Civic Potential of Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kutner, Lawrence, and Cheryl Olson

2008 Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Lareau, Annette
2003 Unequal Childhoods; Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Roberts, Donald F., and Ulla G. Foehr
2008 Trends in Media Use. The Future of Children 18(1):11-37.

Sefton-Green, Julian
2004 Initiation Rites: A Small Boy in a Poké-World. In Pikachu's Global Adventures: The Rise and Falll of Pokémon. J. Tobin, ed. Pp. 141-164. Durham: Duke University Press.

Seiter, Ellen
2005 The Internet Playground: Children's Access, Entertainment, and Mis-Education. New York: Peter Lang.

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2007 Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos, and Cultural Capital. In Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected. T. McPherson, ed. Pp. 27-52. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Stevens, Reed, Tom Satwicz, and Laurie McCarthy
2007 In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids' Lives. In The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. K. Salen, ed. Pp. 41-66. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Varnelis, Kazys, ed.
2008 Networked Publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Willett, Rebekah
2004 The Multiple Identities of Pokémon Fans. In Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon. J. Tobin, ed. Pp. 226-240. Durham: Duke University Press.

We selected a set of countries where there are interesting developments in new media uptake, but there is relatively little research literature available in English. The literature reviews are broken down by country, with Cara Wallis taking the lead on Chiina, HyeRyoung Ok for Korea, Anke Schwittay for India, Heather Horst for Brazil, Daisuke Okabe and I for Japan, and Araba Sey for Ghana. We will be rolling these out in installments starting today and continuing through March. You can find the posts at our Futures of Learning blog.

Although this literature review was conducted primarily to inform our ongoing research, we are hoping that this will provide a benefit to the broader research community by posting our work publicly. We are also hoping that by doing so we can get some feedback, particularly about literature we missed our gaps in our understanding.

The project has been quite a journey, and has been by far the most challenging and rewarding research project I've undertaken so far. It tested my skills at so many levels -- fieldwork, conceptually, theoretically, and in management. I feel so fortunate to for the opportunity to have undertaken this project with fabulous colleagues and a team of graduate students and postdocs who taught me so much along the way.

I'm particularly proud of the shared report that we have just released, which was a genuinely collaborative effort, co-authored by 15 of us on the team, and including contributions from many others. We took a step that is unusual with ethnographic work, of trying to engage in joint analysis rather than simply putting together an edited collection of case studies. We spent the past year reading each others interviews and fieldnotes, and developing categories that cut across the different case studies. Each chapter of the book incorporates material from multiple case studies, and is an effort to describe the diversity in youth practice at it emerged from a range of different youth populations and practices.

You can find all the details in the documents linked below, and a summary of our report. The book is due out from MIT Press next fall, but in the meantime you can read a draft of it online. Our book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Lyman.

Sadly, I won't be able to attend, but my team will be celebrating the release of our report at a reception at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco. Saturday November 22, at 6:30-8:00pm, San Francisco Hilton & Towers, Golden Gate Ballroom.

Click here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Click here to download the summary white paper.

Click here to access the full report.

Click here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher and her research team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth digital media use to date.

They found that social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research finds today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games. The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important. The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression. These activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence.

MAJOR FINDINGS

Youth use online media to extend friendships and interests.

Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations, sports, and other local activities. They can be always “on,” in constant contact with their friends through private communications like instant messaging or mobile phones, as well as in public ways through social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook. With these “friendship-driven” practices, youth are almost always associating with people they already know in their offline lives. The majority of youth use new media to “hang out” and extend existing friendships in these ways.

A smaller number of youth also use the online world to explore interests and find information that goes beyond what they have access to at school or in their local community. Online groups enable youth to connect to peers who share specialized and niche interests of various kinds, whether that is online gaming, creative writing, video editing, or other artistic endeavors. In these interest-driven networks, youth may find new peers outside the boundaries of their local community. They can also find opportunities to publicize and distribute their work to online audiences, and to gain new forms of visibility and reputation.

Youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.

In both friendship-driven and interest-driven online activity, youth create and navigate new forms of expression and rules for social behavior. By exploring new interests, tinkering, and “messing around” with new forms of media, they acquire various forms of technical and media literacy. Through trial and error, youth add new media skills to their repertoire, such as how to create a video or game, or customize their MySpace page. Teens then share their creations and receive feedback from others online. By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning.

Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age. Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority.

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented by set, predefined goals.

IMPLICATIONS

New media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn, and raise a new set of issues that educators, parents, and policymakers should consider.

Adults should facilitate young people’s engagement with digital media. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technical skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access serious online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions.

Because of the diversity of digital media, it is problematic to develop a standardized set of benchmarks against which to measure young people’s technical and new media literacy. Friendship-driven and interest-driven online participation have very different kinds of social connotations. For example, whereas friendship-driven activities centers upon peer culture, adult participation is more welcomed in the latter more “geeky” forms of learning. In addition, the content, behavior, and skills that youth value are highly variable depending on what kinds of social groups they associate with.

In interest-driven participation, adults have an important role to play. Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults. Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting learning goals, particularly on the interest-driven side where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

To stay relevant in the 21st century, education institutions need to keep pace with the rapid changes introduced by digital media. Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What, the authors ask, would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? What would it mean to reach beyond traditional education and civic institutions and enlist the help of others in young people’s learning? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, they question what it would mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally.

The first is Networked Publics, a labor of love that was the result of a year long interdisciplinary research group that I helped organize at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Big kudos go to Kazys Varnelis who did the editing work for this volume. Every chapter is collaboratively written and is a result of a weekly faculty seminar and our engagement with a series of guest speakers. The goal of the book is to provide an accessible overview of some of the broad changes in our senses of place, public culture, politics, and infrastructure that have accompanied the shift towards a networked society. The concept of networked publics is meant to signal the lateral, peer-to-peer connections between "audiences" and "users" and the ways in which these connections are transforming our notions of public participation.

You can find a few chapters, including my introduction to the book online at the netpublics site.

The other book that arrived today is Beyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, a book that takes stock of the current state of affairs with regards to girls and gaming. It has been put together a decade after the publication ofFrom Barbie® to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, and revisits the issues raised by the earlier book. Edited by Yasmin Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Sun, the book includes contributions by game makers as well as scholars looking at girls gaming. Written at a moment where gaming by women and girls has become well established, it chronicles a moment that is quite different from the earlier book, written at the height of the "girls games" movement that was aiming to design products specifically targeted to girls. While many of the issues of gender difference and access to technology persist to this day, the issue is not so much access to games, but access to particular kinds of gaming experiences that constitute a gender divide. The book has also expanded this conversation by soliciting contributions from scholars who work outside of the U.S., and I have a piece in their that discusses the gender dynamics of Japanese games.

It's great to see these works in print now, both outcomes of productive interdisciplinary collaborations that are pushing forward new paradigms in thinking about digital culture.

As part of the transition to new projects, I've moved my primary affiliation from USC to UC Irvine. At UCI, I'll be working with both the UC Humanities Research Institute and the Informatics Department at the School of Information and Computer Science. I will still continue to have an affiliation at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and will be organizing, with Holly Willis, a talk series on multimedia literacy, as part of the Annenberg Research Park Colloquium Series. Our first colloquium will be on September 9, with Liz Losh.

My move to UCI was motivated by my desire to work with David Goldberg and the Humanities Institute, and to build new bridges to colleagues in informatics, CALIT2 and anthropology at UCI. I feel that I am getting the best of both worlds by being able to stay in LA and keep in touch with things at USC, while also developing new relationships and conversations further down the 405. And the commute hasn't been half bad, thanks to my carpooling with my colleagues.

I am starting up a new effort at UCHRI to build plans for a networked studio to facilitate interdisciplinary research collaborations in the area of new media and learning. The project is giving me an excuse to do a good amount of reading in the area, and to visit with people and projects in the field, both in the U.S. and abroad. After being deeply immersed in fieldwork and writing, it's been a refreshing change of pace to pop my head up for a bit and try to take a broader survey of the field and catch up on the work of all my colleagues. I'm super-excited about the next steps that we are taking in our work with the MacArthur Foundation and the potential to build synergies between research, design, youth culture, and educational practice that can really have an influence on the shape of public education.

The code identifies, among other things, six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. They are:

• Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material


• Use for illustration or example

Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material

• Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event


• Use to launch a discussion


• Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements
  depend on relationships between existing works

And if you haven't already, check out their video -- Remix Culture -- for a great visual overview and introduction to remix video.

It was a real pleasure working with Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi, and the other committee members in putting this together. I learned a lot from the collaborative process, and was much impressed by Patricia and Peter's ability to pull together the insights and expertise of a diverse committee into a super-solid document.

Although we are still a few months shy of wrapping up our analysis and writings, we will be doing our first major public presentation of our work on April 23, at Stanford University The event is organized by our funding organization, the MacArthur Foundation, together with Common Sense Media. We will have poster sessions featuring all of our case studies, and talks by danah boyd, Heather Horst, Dilan Mahendran, and myself. We also have a distinguished panel of respondents: Dale Dougherty editor of MAKE, Deborah Stipek, the Dean of the Stanford School of Education, Linda Burch from Common Sense Media, and Kenny Miller from MTV Networks. Julia Stasch and Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation will also be presenting at the event.

You can find program details and the registration form at the Common Sense Media site.

Videos from the event are available on YouTube.