Reuters reported a few days ago about a game created by college students which blends fantasy sports with democracy. “Fantasy Congress” has players drafting a line-up of real life lawmakers, and gaining or losing points based on their performance. As stated by the article, one intention of the game is to make people care more about politics, to get obsessed with it in much the same way as sports superfans. As one of the creators of the game said, “If people cared about politics as much as they care about sports, we'd have a better democracy.”

Just a roundup of some recent articles relevant to media literacy:

1)The Federation of American Scientists have jumped on the bandwagon of educational institutions looking to leverage the pedagogical power of video games for education.

2)On the other end of the spectrum, one study indicates that happiness in education is overrated. More specifically, countries where students who enjoy math and are confident don't actually do as well in it. These conclusions are based on student self-evaluations vs. tests results in the various nations. But high-confidence students do better than their immediate peers, so I'm not sure that the official interpretation is so cut and dry.

Thought I'd share some articles I found this week to be relevant to the project of media literacy education.

1. Via Clive Thompson at Collision Detection, researchers at Cornell have done an interesting study about the limits of multitasking. At NML, we believe multitasking is one of the new core competencies of a media rich environment, but few have sought to determine the practical limits of juggling multiple tasks across multiple media. This study suggests that limits may break down along the senses. Navigate your car and listen to an audio book? Sure. But drive and watch TV? Not so much. Seems reasonable.

On the heels of Margaret Weigel's recent blog post describing the potential health benefits of play, I came across this article about MIT Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones, who offers advice on college preparation that many may find unconventional. Describing what she sees in her job as a crisis of mounting expectations and admissions anxiety, a psychological cocktail that is literally "making our children sick," Jones advocates for a kind of educational reform familiar from the work of James Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

The New York Times has an interesting article up about the unusual theatrical NYU orientation created by students. Faced with concerns over a high number of suicides at the university in recent years, the drama program appealed to the students themselves to participate in the development of a thematically dark musical showing the realities of college life.

The chairman of the undergraduate drama program, Arthur Bartow, enumerated one of the real strengths of media created by youth, for youth: “They produce something that is much more stark, much more real, much more shocking than adults would allow themselves to write.”

Cross-posted from Henry Jenkins' blog "Confessions of an Aca/Fan". The original post can be found here.

Some of you thought Ian and I were playing a little rough with each other. Wait till you hear about the kind of rough treatment that media effects researchers have been getting lately.

CMS graduate student Sam Ford recently told the story over at the Convergence Culture Consortium blog: