PALO ALTO, Calif.--Among the generation of kids growing up wired, many teens are hyper-motivated to learn a special skill like how to create a podcast, direct a YouTube video, publish an anime site, or hack an iPhone.
Now if only teachers could inspire such ingenuity.
That was one of the basic questions that had academics scratching their heads here Wednesday at Stanford University, where a group of researchers from the University of Southern California and University of California at Berkeley presented their first findings from one of the largest ethnographic studies on kids in digital environments. (An enthnographic study draws on fieldwork to provide a descriptive picture of a group. The full research will be published later this year as part of a MacArthur Foundation grant.)
Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.
"Kids associate one word with school--'boring,'" said Deborah Stipek, dean and professor of education at Stanford, who was part of a panel discussion with the group of researchers. But kids' levels of engagement with the Internet and games could give educators new ideas for upping school's status.
"The question becomes what is the role of school in this larger environment," Stipek said.
Are schools disconnected from real-world tech skills? Dale Dougherty, founding editor and publisher of Make and Craft magazines, said during the panel that his team asked an audience of programmers where they learned to write code. Only 15 percent said that they learned programming at school.
The Stanford event, which was sponsored by MacArthur and Common Sense Media, raised more questions than it answered. But one of the more interesting findings in the research showed that many kids are drawn to create media online because their work can be immediately recognized or judged among their peer group or a larger audience, according to Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist of technology use and a principal investigator on MacArthur's project. That, she said, can be immediately gratifying.
In contrast, it can take kids much longer to reap the rewards or build recognition from hard work in school.
"It's the context of publicity now (online) vs. delayed gratification of getting a job in 10 years," Ito said. "The assessment of what they do happens internal to their community (of peers). Kids get to be the evaluator as much as the producer in interest-driven groups. School is much more of a future trajectory."
"Schools are breeding these delayed-gratification animals," said Dilan Mahendran, a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, who worked on one study.
Part of this is happening because American families have shifted from a television culture in the living room to a bedroom culture, in which many kids have television or a computer in their room. Another reason is that teens go online to hang out with friends because they don't have a place to go offline, according to Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate at the School of Information at UC Berkeley and one of the researchers.
The researchers' initial findings are part of a long-range effort by the MacArthur Foundation, which in 2006 promised to spend $50 million on research and programs surrounding kids, technology, and learning. The goal was to figure out whether young people are changing through the use of digital media and technology, and if so, how? What are the effects of this digital immersion on kids' communication styles, friendships, families, and so on.
Some of the results are already in. Studies like those from Pew already show that as many as 83 percent of all kids play video games, and 53 percent of kids create media online. The thought that a majority of kids online would have a home page a la MySpace would have been laughable just 10 years ago, Ito said.
As part of her fieldwork, Ito got to know an 18-year-old girl named Anesha, who has produced several animated music shorts for YouTube. Her work was first seen by only a handful of her peers, but now thousands of people have watched her videos on Youtube, much to Anesha's delight. Ito said that the teen wants to go into film directing or editing.
"We're not saying there's going to be a digital generation whose eyes will be square," said Ito, who has studied kids in a range of online environments. "We're experiencing what 'public participation' (among young people) means, but it doesn't mean everyone will get a fancy job."
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said Thursday it awarded 17 teams a total of $2 million for contest entries to develop technologies for kids' education and digital media.
The innovative competition was unveiled last August. Seven teams won either $100,000 or $238,000 for creating new digital environments for informal learning, and 10 teams won between $30,000 and $72,000 for inventing concepts around networking in education.
One winner was Greg Niemeyer of the Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. His team, which won $238,000, developed Black Cloud, an environmental studies game that's designed to encourage high school students in Los Angeles and Cairo, Egypt, to interact virtually and physically in their respective cities.
"Teams role-play as either real estate developers or environmentalists using actual air quality sensors hidden through the city to monitor neighborhood pollution. Their goal is to select good sites for either additional development or conservation," according to the team. The kids then collaborate and share their findings online.
Another winning project was called HyperCities, led by Todd Presner, professor at UCLA. The Web project is based on digital models of real cities, with points of interest linked to oral histories of people who have lived there before. HyperCities is a collaboration of universities and community partners in Los Angeles, Lima, Berlin, and Rome. The team was awarded $238,000.
Another stand-out project surrounds the environment. Called the Sustainable South Bronx Fab Lab, the project is part of a broader initiative led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but is particularly focused on bolstering environmental building in the suburb of New York. The project, which won $100,000, is a physical lab that helps people turn digital models of urban sustainable buildings into real world constructions of plastic, metal, and wood.
As part of their awards, all of the winners will be given time with business consultants and be able to showcase their projects at a conference next year of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, according to the McArthur Foundation.
According to Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, the 17 winners (out of a total of 1,010 applicants) represent some of the "best thinking from many disciplines and professions working to harness the power of the web for learning."
He added: "We look forward to the insights they will provide."
Common Sense Media, a pro-families group, said Wednesday that it launched a national campaign to help educate parents and teachers about the effect of digital media on kids and teens. The campaign, called the Digital Kids Task Force, will develop education programs, technology to help kids learn online, and a research program to study the Web's impact on children.
The task force was unveiled in partnership with former Federal Communications Commission chairmen Michael Powell, Will Kennard, and Newton Minow, according to Common Sense. Other founding members of the group include Gary Knell, CEO of the Sesame Workshop; former California State Sen. Rebecca Morgan; and Richard Barton, CEO of Zillow.com.
"We're launching the Digital Kids Initiative so that parents and educators can make sure that kids get the best, and avoid the worst, of this new media world," Common Sense founder James Steyer said in a statement.
The group will meet with Washington, D.C., lawmakers this week to discuss funding for the project. The talks will come as the FCC prepares to auction off newly available broadcast airwaves that will allow TV programmers to offer more wireless Web access to the public, including children. Members of the Digital Kids Task Force say that some of that spectrum should be dedicated to educational programming for kids.
"We are in a new age of communications, and in order to help parents keep their kids safe and smart, we must introduce them to 'digital hygiene' by teaching them the proper rules for communicating in the digital era," Powell said in a statement.
Two-thirds of parents say that they are uncomfortable with their children participating in online communities, and roughly half of them say that online predators are a threat, according to a new study from the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. The group has conducted an annual review of the effect of Web technology on America since 2000 by interviewing the same 2,000-plus people around the country. But this was the first year it asked about perceptions of predators and social sites.
Jeffrey Cole, director of the center, said that despite those concerns, parents' opinions about the Web are generally positive. "After seven years of tracking the impact of the Internet, we are also seeing evolving trends, which show that adults view some aspects of going online by children to be as troubling as their use of other media--or even potentially dangerous."
The upside for most parents--80 percent--is that they consider the Internet a valuable source of information and more important than television, radio, newspapers, and books, according to the study. That figure is up from 66 percent in 2006.
Other findings include: a quarter of parents said their kids spend too much time online, a percentage that's risen for three years in a row. And 13 percent of parents said their children are spending less time with friends as a result of the Internet, another figure that grew for the third consecutive year.
Despite parents' concern about their kids' use of social sites, many adults age 17 and older report being avid members of community sites. About 54 percent of those surveyed said they log into their community at least once a day, and 71 percent said that their social membership was "extremely important."
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