HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
Ancestor: Oral Culture
Residual: Print Culture
Dominant: Mass Media
Emergent: Participatory Culture
The above refer to media systems. Media systems consists of communications technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols which grow up around them.
In each case, the emergence of a new media system does not simply displace what came before. Instead, the new media system becomes an additional layer in an ever more stratified media ecology.
Missing here is the concept of visual culture -- which can trace its history as far back as oral culture but has historically existed in the orbit of the other media systems. So, cave paintings are believed to have existed in relation to oral culture; stained glass windows and tapestries bridged between oral and print culture; comics exist inside print culture but emerge alongside other mass media, etc.
THE CURRENT MEDIA LANDSCAPE
Innovative -- a period of prolonged and profound technological change; new media are created, dispersed, adopted, adapted, and absorbed at dramatic rates.
Transformative -- a phase of social and aesthetic experimentations as the society absorbs and often anticipates new media technologies.
Convergent -- communication gets organized across multiple channels on both the corporate and grassroots level.
Multimodal -- the same story may be encountered in multiple representations.
Global -- media enables interactions between people around the world which has both positive and negative impacts on local cultures.
Networked -- Media technologies are interconnected so that messages flow easily from one place to another.
Mobile -- people can carry their communications technologies around with them
Appropriative -- new technologies make it easy for people to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content.
Participatory -- A blurring of the lines between consumer and producer, a growing emphasis on social affiliations and active engagement around media content.
Collaborative -- the emergence of new structures of knowledge and creativity which depend on shared problem-solving and deliberation.
Diverse -- the walls between cultural communities break down as media flows across various sites of production and consumption within the context of a multicultural society.
Domesticated -- Media technologies are fully integrated into our everyday social interactions.
Generational -- Sharp differences between generations in terms of access to knowledge, cultural tastes and interests, and forms of participation and learning.
Unequal -- Access to technologies, skills, and opportunities for participation are unevenly distributed across the population.
HOW ARE KIDS PARTICIPATING IN THE NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE
The key word here is participation. We are using participation as a term which cuts across educational processes, creative processes, community life, and democratic citizenship. At each level, the goal should be a move from the isolated, passive intake of information towards active engagement with others in reshaping the world around us. Our goals should be to encourage kids to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical framework, and self confidence needed to be full participants in the cultural changes which are taking place in response to the influx of new media technologies.
Kids are already part of this process through:
Affiliations -- memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around and through various forms of media. i.e. Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, MySpace Expressions -- involvement in the production of new creative forms. i.e. digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing,
zines, mash-ups, etc.
Collaborative Problem Solving -- working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge. i.e wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling.
Circulations -- Shaping the flow of media. i.e. podcasting, blogging
Challenge 1: The Participation Gap -- the unequal distribution of these opportunities to participate and thus the unequal distribution of the skills and knowledge which emerge from these practices.
Challenge 2: Ethics -- The expansion of the public roles played by children and youth in this new participatory culture raises new responsibilities that they are often unprepared to accept and that are badly understood by the adults surrounding them. Each of these forms of participation represent both opportunities and risks.
Challenge 3: The Transparency Problem -- While kids are getting better at using media as resources for doing other things (creative expression, research, social life, etc.), they often show limited ability to examine the media themselves, question the ways that they structure their experiences or shape their content, and the contexts in which they operate.
Challenge 4: Evaluation -- Students, parents and teachers remain uncertain about how to
evaluate work produced using these new media and how it might connect with earlier forms of expression.
WHAT SKILLS DO KIDS NEED IN ORDER TO BE FULL PARTICIPANTS
Preliminary Skills:
Basic Literacy -- the ability to read and write
Technical Skills -- the ability to operate core technologies and tools desired
for specific projects.
Multimodal Literacy -- the ability to process information across multiple
systems of representation.
Emerging Skills:
Play -- a process of exploration and experimentation.
Performance-- trying on and playing different identities.
Navigation -- the ability to move across the media landscape in a purposeful manner, choosing the media that best serves a specific purpose or need, or which might best provide the information needed to serve a particular task.
Resourcefulness -- the ability to identify and capitalize on existing resources.
Networking -- the ability to identify a community of others who share common goals and interests.
Negotiation -- the ability to communicate across differences as you move through a multicultural and global media landscape.
Synthesis -- pulling together information from multiple sources, evaluating its reliability and use value, constructing a new picture of the world.
Sampling -- mastering and transforming existing media content for the purposes of self and collective expression.
Collaboration -- sharing information, pooling knowledge, comparing notes, evaluating evidence, and solving large scale problem.
Teamwork -- the ability to identify specific functions for each member of the team based on their expertise and then to interact with the team members in an appropriate fashion.
Judgment -- the ability to make aesthetic and ethical evaluations of media practices and to reflect on your own choices and their consequences.
Discernment -- the ability to assess the accuracy and appropriateness of available information.
These skills each lie at the intersection between the self and others. These are cultural skills and not individual skills. The goal is communication and participation, not simply self-expression, and that requires an understanding of the impact of one's ideas on others. Any ethical framework we develop should emerge from this understanding that media may have been personalized in the early 1990s but it is now collaborative and communal in an era of networked and mobile communications technologies.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE:
A growing body of research points to the learning that takes place through these kinds of core activities and processes. There is wide disagreement about how this learning relates to the kinds of skills and knowledge historically valued by schools. Many of these processes, for example, contribute to the development of core research and analysis skills or foster improvements in communication competencies, which can have a direct payoff in schools. Yet, other scholars note that these processes work in part because they are not defined as part of school and are activities which kids choose to do on their own. The goal here is not to simply help kids do better in school but also to help them do better in life and that includes an emphasis on creativity or citizenship related skills which may not be measured on standardized tests.
This situation calls for multiple levels of intervention:
1. School based -- designed to integrated into existing school disciplines
2. after-school programs -- designed to expand creative opportunities for kids in a way which also emphasizes the cultural context and ethical consequences of those practices.
3. informal learning -- collaboration with creative industries to insure that ideas about media literacy feed back into popular culture.
4. teacher training -- designed to provide teachers with models for classroom practices which foster the new media literacies.
5. parents training -- designed to give parents the knowledge and skills they need to foster media literacy in preschool children and to support the informal learning of their school aged offspring.
We are proposing an integrated approach which works at four levels:
Exercises (E1) -- designed to refine and rehearse preliminary literacy skills.
Exemplers (E2)-- designed to illustrate creative processes and practices and provide a critical vocabulary for the aesthetic evaluation of media.
Expressions (E3) -- designed to allow kids to put these skills into play through individual and collaborative creative projects.
Ethics (E4) -- designed to encourage reflections on the social contexts in which media is produced and circulated, including a strong focus on the ways individuals relate to larger communities and the ability to make meaningful choices and weigh their consequences.
We can understand this more fully if we look at a specific subject area: digital storytelling.
Basic Pedagogical Goals:
1. A recognition of the ways stories change as they move across media (multimodal, convergent) and an appreciation of new kinds of storytelling media (mobile, immersive, interactive) which may deal with stories in different ways.
2. A recognition of the basic building blocks of canonical stories, including questions of sequencing, exposition, and point of view, as well as an awareness of the ways that these basic principles can be manipulated to create alternative storytelling practices. (transformative)
3. An appreciation of the functions stories play within cultures, including the value of stories for entertainment, transmitting traditions, opening up new possibilities and alternative perspectives, etc. (generational)
4. An appreciation of cultural differences in the form and content of stories (multicultural, global).
5. An awareness of the role which stereotypes and clichs play in the construction of stories as well as the impact that such devices can have on the ways we interact with other people. (negotiation)
6. the ability to identify core elements of stories and rework them to communicate alternative perspectives (appropriative).
7. a recognition of those factors shaping which stories get told in the media
and how those stories get structured.
8. an understanding of how story elements can be dispersed across multiple media channels in order to create a range of different experiences. (Convergent)
(synthesis)
9. practice in translating one?s own experiences into stories which can be
understood by others both in your own community and beyond.(expression, performance)
10. refine technical skills in media production as well as developing criteria
for evaluating stories within different media contexts. (Judgment)
11. recognize that people in different communities might narrate the same experiences in different terms or might form conflicting interpretations of shared stories (negotiation)
12. understand the ways that authors build upon pre-existing stories as well as recognize the current legal conflicts over who should control what use gets made of one's creative work. (sampling)
Our overall approach emphasizes comparison across different media, across different historical periods, across high and popular culture, across mainstream and experimental media, and across different cultural traditions. Any opening session needs to emphasize the diversity of current storytelling media with an emphasis on both commonalities and differences.
At the same time, this approach is designed to bring together literature, art, and social sciences so that people understand what stories are, how to express one's ideas through stories, and how stories operate within cultures. These walls may be easier to break down through an after school program but at the same time, these provide ways of integrating what happens after school back into the school curriculum.
What follows are some basic elements which might be incorporated into the opening sessions of an after school program centered on digital storytelling. It is designed to introduce some core concepts and to include work in all 4 Es. The Expressions here are designed to be quick and conceptual, ways of getting kids focused on how to build stories, with the idea that they will have a chance to do more extended and polished work later, but any of them could be turned into more fully realized projects if the teachers were so inclined. I and the students have other ideas which can extend this sequence of activities out and include more of the objectives identified above, but I ran out of time and figured at this point the goal is more to be suggestive than exhaustive. The next steps would be to begin to introduce more stories which don't look like mass media content and to begin to shift the focus from existing stories onto personal and shared real life narratives, including material on fiction and nonfiction (and how to ascertain the veracity of a story).
We begin the class by asking students to think about a familiar story -- for example, Little Red Riding Hood or The Wizard of Oz. Students and teachers work on the blackboard to identify the basic building blocks of this story: setting, characters, plot. (E1)
The teacher then presents a range of different versions of the story (E2) in the case of the Wizard of Oz, for example, one might look at clips from The Wizard of Oz (silent film), The Wizard of Oz (Judy Garland), The Wiz (Diana Ross/Michael Jackson), and Return to Oz; illustrations from various children's books; several recent comic book versions; a song from the Broadway musical, Wicked; perhaps a children's record retelling the story or advertisements which borrow from or build on the story. For each example, the class should talk about which of the identified elements is present or absent, how they are changed, and how these changes make us feel about the story. For example, The Wiz has a black and urban focus which contrasts dramatically with the more small town and agrarian feel of the Judy Garland version.
We divide into groups and select another popular children's story. (E3, E4) Each group has the task of rewriting that story, shifting the focus from the primary character (i.e. Dorothy) onto a secondary character (i.e. the flying monkeys) and retelling the story from their point of view. Retelling the story can take a variety of different forms -- staging a play, scripting a movie, designing posters, writing a comic, etc., depending on the group's abilities and interests .How would the shift in point of view change the meaning of the story? How would it alter the tone or feel of the story? How might it require us to resequence the story in order to fill in missing events which might explain why some characters acted the way they did? How much new information would need to be added to the story to help explain and justify the Flying Monkey's actions? How might this shift impact where the story begins or ends? Why was the original story structured around
the original protagonist?
Students are exposed to the concept of storyboards (E2). They look at some sequences from famous films as well as the storyboards that were used to organize those sequences. They develop a basic storyboard for a version of their revised fairy tale. Students are given some sample comic book pages and review the choices they made in organizing visual information. They may watch a segment from our exemplar library which shows a comic book artist discussing the choices which went into the design of a specific page from a comic book.
Using digital cameras, they stage and grab the shots they need (E3). Then, they use a basic photoshop-like program to develop a digital comic based on these scenes. This process involves cropping images, manipulating images visually, developing word balloons and writing text, and structuring the shape of each page. Students could publish this work on line if they felt satisfied with the results.
Students discuss the choices they made about how to represent the different characters (E4). What traits seemed central to communicating the personality of the character? What stereotypes did they draw upon to communicate those ideas?
Why might stereotypes be essential in telling simple stories? Teacher shares with them some examples of negative stereotypes used in the media and the class discusses harmful effects of those stereotypes. The class discusses how it would be possible to develop alternative "shorthand" for expressing personality types, etc., which do not build on negative stereotypes.
Students cover the television set and watch a cartoon listening only to the sound (E2). The class is asked to outline what happens in the story and how they know. They also look for moments where it is difficult to tell what is going on. Then they watch the cartoon again, seeing how closely their guesses turn out to be true. Then they reverse the experiment watching another cartoon without sound and with sound. This time the focus is on the emotional experience. What cues does the soundtrack provide into how we feel about what we are watching?
Students choose a cartoon and develop their own soundtrack for it (E3). Selecting sound effects, dialogue, and music which they think will change the way people feel about what they are watching. Students create a podcast of their soundtrack and then share their cartoons with the other groups.
Students form different teams and select another popular story known by all members of their group. (E3, E4) They are now asked to imagine that they are media producers building a franchise around this story and its characters. Students should be asked to identify examples of stories which are told across multiple media. Teachers can be given a handout describing how a modern franchise works -- building up recognizable elements which can be exploited across a range of media, using different media to create different kinds of
experiences, targeting different segments of the market through the development of different kinds of characters, etc. Then, kids would think about how they might expand on the possibilities of their original story to create new kinds of experiences for the consumer. what might people want to learn more about. what might they want to do in the world of the story. What would they need to add to open it up across media. what would each medium contribute to the mix. how might they think about different characters as attracting different kinds of consumers. This process helps them to think more deeply about how media operates and what is valuable or disappointing about the kinds of transmedia stories they are consuming. This can get them to think about the ways the stories that emerge now balance between market and creative decisions. And it is a good way to get them to articulate what the different kinds of media bring to the experience of a compelling story.
Skills deployed:
- Basic Literacy (mastering basic building blocks of story)
- Technical literacy (using digital tools to produce comics and alternative soundtracks)
- Multimodal Literacy (examining different media versions
- imagining ways to expand the story into new media)
- Performance (thinking through the perspectives of alternative characters)
- Sampling (reworking the story)
- Collaboration (comparing perspectives with other students, working on teams)
- Synthesis (thinking about how story information could be dispersed across multiple media)
- Judgement (evaluating various versions of the same story, reflecting on why it matters whose point of view is told)