Generals tend to fight the last war rather than adequately prepare for future conflicts. Many current media literacy efforts are the pedagogical equivalent of the Maginot Line: still protecting children from the old “threat” of mass media as if the digital revolution never occurred. Television is still enemy number one, media consumption is still understood in passive terms, the focus is still on effects rather than ethics, and proposed solutions still range from “turn off your television” to critical reading skills. Meanwhile, network executives are struggling to hold onto their younger viewers as they increasingly spend more hours playing games or chatting online than watching broadcast media. So what would it mean to rethink media literacy for an age when the computer game, not television, is the dominant medium in young people’s lives?

I am one of the principle investigators for the New Media Literacies Project, launched this past spring by the MacArthur Foundation. We want to identify skills, knowledge, and competencies young people need to become meaningful participants in the culture around them – skills central to citizenship, community life, and cultural expression. We will design and test new approaches to media literacy through schools, after school programs, public institutions, and commercial culture.

In this new landscape of video games, cell phones, podcasting, blogging, instant messaging and other kinds of media-intensive experiences, children are participants – not spectators, not even consumers in the traditional sense of the term. They are actively shaping the media. These new media forms and the cultures that emerge around them offer young people new opportunities for emotional growth and intellectual development but also require new kinds of ethical responsibilities. The goal of media literacy education in the 21st century should be prepare kids to live within a more participatory media culture.

Let’s be clear that participation is related to but different from interactivity. Interactivity is a property of technologies; participation is a property of cultures. Games are interactive; game culture is participatory. A focus on participation means new emphasis on the ways people act upon media content: play, performance, expression and collaboration.

Play refers to a process of exploration and experimentation. Think of games as problem sets. Each step forward involves trying out possible solutions: some work, some don’t, all must get refined through further play. When children play Sim City, they explore principles of urban planning; they experiment with different designs; they tweak their designs in response to feedback; and in the process, they develop an understanding of, for example, the relationship of mass transit to population density.

Games also involve trying on and performing different identities. Game identities are a complex mix of fact and fiction, self and other. Much of the first part of any contemporary game is spent customizing these characters. Children playing history games find themselves drawing both on their own life experiences and on things they have learned in class, much as an actor draws on a broad range of experience and knowledge in preparing for a part. This kind of performance encourages self-reflection and cultural analysis.

Expression refers to the ability to create new content, often inspired by the culture around us. In the new games culture, players are encouraged to design their own characters, make scrapbooks of their game play experience, animate movies using game avitars and share them with other consumers, take the game design tools and make their own additions to commercial games. Thinking about how to translate school curriculum into game content forces students to think about what they can do with the things they are learning and how to determine what content is most important.

Collaboration describes how members of online communities share information, pool knowledge, compare notes, evaluate evidence, and solve large scale problems. This process is perhaps most spectacularly illustrated by alternative reality games, informational scavenger hunts conducted in both digital and real spaces and involving teams of hundreds of people working together to master a particular set of puzzles. For example, in “I-Love-Bees,” a game designed to promote Halo 2, players had to recognize patterns of numbers as Global positioning data, figure out that each of those numbers referred to the location of pay phones scattered across all fifty states, get people to go to those locations at a specific time, and await instructions for the next set of problems.

Through games, young people are learning how to play, perform, express themselves, and collaborate in large-scale communities. Yet, there is another skill often missing -- judgement. Researchers using games in the classrooms are finding that children are adept at learning new content through games but the game itself remains largely transparent: few kids ask about the motives or accuracy of the ways games depict the world. Judgement requires both an awareness of the traditional concerns of media literacy educators (about who is creating what images for what purposes) but also newer questions about ethics, focused on the choices that kids are making as game players and game creators

If teachers are smart, we will build such practices into our pedagogy. Each of these skills has implications for how we will live, work, and vote in the future. Each can heighten our consciousness of ourselves and our surrounding culture. Students need to learn a new vocabulary to reflect on these new media experiences and their responsibilities as members of such communities.

Right now, kids learn how to participate by participating in popular culture. Some kids have lots of exposure to participatory cultures and are often being deskilled as they come to schools; other kids have no access to these experiences and are being left behind. And that’s where media literacy enters the picture – not as a way of protecting kids from bad media influences but as a way of empowering them to become fuller participants in this emerging culture.

Henry Jenkins, Head of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, is one of the founders of the Education Arcade, which explores the pedagogical uses of computer and video games, and a principle investigator for the New Media Literacies Project.