Screenagers and Media Ecology

Debbie wrote on 7/31:

The book Screenagers by Douglas Rushkoff (author of ten books on media culture and values, commentator on NPR, professor at NYU Interactive telecommunications program, winner of Marshal McLuhan Award for best media book) is part of the Media Ecology Association. Here is a link to their conference for next year.http://www.media-ecology.org/activities/ It's in Mexico City...but we have some great stuff. If we took the stop motion animation week for example, we could show how play and the process of creating media intersected and created some really high level thoughts and connections about how the world operates. Fantasy/sci-fi fun is important for kids to use to understand complex realities and cooperative living structures. We have this data in our planning sheets, my documented videos during the process, and the director's cut commentaries by the kids post-production. If we don't decide to submit to this conference, we certainly should think about using this for another conference...perhaps NCTE or NRC for next year. Although the products weren't all "great" the process of "writing" and the process of "learning" that occurred (collective intelligence and cooperation in groups) was absolutely phenomenol...these are all principles Gee discussed in his book on literacy and learning in video games. Although we don't always see the significance through "teacher" gazes, if we return to innocence and look at these processes through a new lens, phenomenologically speaking "that which shows itself to someone"...we are actually seeing the transfer of Gee's principles into more traditional literacies. Our kids are structured through a traditional writing process but are still engaging in the high level learning that occurs during these cooperative processes. Bereiter discusses these learning processes in an article about hypertext Emergent Versus Presentational Hypertext. He argues that the most important learning comes through the process of creating digital works. The product is mearly a by-product of the work. The real literacy and learning occurs through the process. We are looking through "teacher" lenses and viewing the assessment and evaluation of the product. We are still caught in the traditional school web. I think if we analyzed the complex decisions, cooperation, collective intelligence, and text to text-self-world connections these kids actually made without considering the products, we'd be amazed.