Futures of Learning

Yesterday, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force released the final report of the results of their work reviewing the risks that children and youth experience online, and evaluating different technical solutions for addressing these risks. The task force was led by John Palfrey at Harvard’s Berkman Center, working with Dena T. Sacco, danah boyd, Laura DeBonis, Jessica Tatlock, and a network of technology companies who have a stake in these issues.

The executive summary of the report provides a good high level summary of the findings of the task force, so I won’t recap that here, but I wanted to note just a few things that I found notable about the effort as a whole and the outcomes of the effort.

The task force began with an effort to survey the state of what we know about child safety online in order to inform the policy and technology development conversations. Though this may not seem particularly notable, this kind of careful review of research, particularly research on on-the-ground behaviors, is not done frequently enough in policy debates at least in the domain of online participation. They state, “Although numerous studies are currently underway and much research is available to address online safety concerns, very few of the findings enter public or political discourse. This is unfortunate, because the actual threats that youth may face appear to be different than the threats most people imagine.” Too often, public discourse centers on high-profile but marginal examples. These might be positive examples of kids doing unusually creative things online, or negative examples of online bullying, but rarely do we see nuanced and balanced portraits of what life online is like for the majority of kids who do not fit these exceptional categories. The task force was clearly trying to work from an established evidence base of actual behavior rather than our hopes and fears of what kids might get into online.

What the task force found in their research review is very much in line with the findings that my group recently released based on our three-year study of youth new media practice, that included many case studies of online participation. The task force focused on quantitative studies that looked at the distribution of risky practices across different populations, so it was not a review of qualitative cases. But I do think it is important to say that this review of a dimension of the quantitative work is in line with qualitative work in the field as well. In their review of the literature, the task force found that bullying and harrasment among peers is the most frequent threat that kids face online, and that sexual solicitation largely occurs between young people, not as a predatory relation between a much older adult and a teen. In our work, we found that teen online participation fell into two broad clusters - friendship-driven and interest-driven. While interest-driven sites such as fan sites and gaming and hobby sites were places that youth might connect with unknown others and adults, they did not connect to these sites as spaces to look for sex or romantic partners. By contrast, social network sites were places where kids flirt with one another, but they see these sites as spaces to connect with others their age, or perhaps slightly older or younger, but not as a place to connect with undefined others. They also thought that adult strangers who tried to connect with them on these sites were creepy and deviant. By contrast, many of them described how these peer groups in social network sites often replicated the kind of “drama” (or bullying) that they experience among peers at school. These social norms that kids described to us are clearly reflected in the task force findings.

The way in which the research review of the task force is corroborated by our qualitative work is one indicator of how bodies of research can productively inform policy debates. I think it important to look broadly at the patterns in research, human behavior, and technology trends over time, rather than to fixate on an individual study or a case. In the case of research on new technology, people often mistakenly feel that the most current study, on the most current technology is the most relevant for the policy decision of the day. I think this is a dangerous assumption in all fields, but particularly in an area that is undergoing rapid technological flux. Policy needs to be informed by the more resilient patterns in society, technology, and culture, rather than on the online site or application that happens to be popular at the moment. Youth behavior has been remarkably consistent across the past few decades, though the communication platforms young people use have changed tremendously. For example, many kids have moved from sites like Xanga to MySpace, and on to Facebook, or they have moved from IM to text messaging. While the platforms have changed, their social behavior and norms have remained consistent. Any legislation that is targeted at the current “MySpace problem” without looking more broadly at how kids socialize with their peers is going to miss the mark.

An example from a different domain might help illuminate this dynamic. It recently became illegal to “text message” while driving in California. This is an add-on to the existing prohibition against voice calls without the use of a headset. But what does this mean exactly? Is it okay to send an email, Twitter, or check my Facebook profile on my iPhone. “No officer, I wasn’t text messaging, I was tweeting!” The intent of the legislation should have been to limit the use of technologies that require text input or text access while driving. Even some rudimentary research on mobile device use and behavior could have informed policy makers of the importance of legislating not around a specific application, but around a set of core problematic behaviors that jeopardize safety.

I think this task force report is definitely one step in the right direction of providing smart and grounded input into policies that are informed by a grounded look at underlying social, technical, and cultural dynamics rather than isolated cases or specific technology platforms and fixes.

Last week was a frenetic one for many of those who write for this blog. As the final report for the Digital Youth project jittered through the media, many of the project’s researchers were navigating the windowless corridors and “imperial ballrooms” of the San Francisco Hilton, home of the 2008 Annual Meeting for the American Anthropological Association.

News of the Digital Youth report first appeared in the media on Wednesday night when the New York Times website posted a story set to appear in their Thursday print edition. Shortly thereafter the websites of several other newspapers and blogs posted stories. Ever since, it has been like watching the game of telephone being played out inside a pinball machine.

For those of us inclined towards sociocultural theories of learning, and theories of social practice more generally, a less noisy sort of news making was happening at the Hilton on Wednesday afternoon. Jean Lave — integral to the development of influential concepts such as “situated learning,” “legitimate peripheral participation,” and “communities of practice” — was receiving a career achievement award from the AAA. Of the intellectual ideas that inspired our report few, if any, were more influential than those developed by Lave, making the dovetailing of her honoring with our release, while coincidental, seem appropriately consequential.

As a way of recognizing Lave, the president of AAA invited her to host a four hour panel. The result, titled “Situating Trans-Formational Practices,” was introduced by Lave as an “intellectual party” featuring some of her favorite thinkers and collaborators over the past 20-30 years. The lineup — scribbled on a torn sheet of paper and taped to the door — read as follows: Dororthy Holland, Paul Duguid, Ole Dreier, Ray McDermott, Helen Verran, Sharon Traweek, Penny Harvey, Lucy Suchman, Discussant: Don Brenneis. Given the star status of these scholars within certain academic domains, this “party” could easily have become occasion for the sort of self-bestowed reverence that tends to give the Academy Awards or multi-day music festivals their navel-gazing feel. Luckily the organizers seemed to have anticipated this possibility and worked to ensure a more down-home informality. Note the wording on the invitation to the after-party, printed via inkjet on generic sticky-labels:

Your’re (sic) invited to a…
PARTY FOR JEAN LAVE!!!
(Dottie Holland & Lucy Suchman)
IMPERIAL BALLROOM A
Saturday 8 pm til 10 or maybe 11

Purposeful or not, intimacy and informality thankfully pervaded the session, giving serious, critical, complex ideas a welcoming demeanor. The talks were varied and rich, too much so for this graduate student to offer a satisfying, accurate, and useful account here. Instead, I’ll quickly recap each talk, telling a bit more about the talks that seemed most relevant to the topic of this blog.

Dorothy (Dottie) Holland kicked off the party with a talk on university relations with community based organizations (CBOs), arguing for an engagement that counts as scholarship and challenging reified distinctions between theory (knowledge production) and application (knowledge in use). Drawing on her own work with members of the local food movement, Holland both advocated for these sorts of practical involvements, and relayed some of the tensions she’s discovered as she’s tried to bring two communities of practice together.

Paul Duguid followed Holland with a historical account of how trademark law emerged in the US at the end of the 19th century. He began by debunking the “grand story” often told in economic and legal discourses. Such a story suggests that strong intellectual property law partially explains the second industrial revolution in the US, which occurred at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In actuality, Duguid said, trademark law didn’t go into effect until 1906. In place of the “grand story,” Duguid suggested that trademark law was a product of longer historical struggles over who owned industrially produced goods — battles over labeling/naming/owning that were played out amongst workers, unions, companies, and associations.

Duguid was followed by Ole Dreier who spoke about his recent book Psychotherapy in Everyday Life . Dreier, a critical psychologist, has been examining the role of professional practices, especially psychotherapy, in the ongoing everyday lives of “clients.” Dreier objects to how therapy, and other professional interventions, are purposely isolated from the ongoing practices of their clients. Dreier noted that therapy takes place in a “secluded site” and increasingly relies on “evidence based” accounting, mechanisms imported from medical practices. Dreier argued that such accounting measures make the faulty assumption that psychological intervention can change behavior in a manner similar to a chemical reaction. He noted that clients must take whatever happens in therapy with them into their everyday lives and pursue changes in behavior across the various contexts in which they live. While focused on therapy, Dreier’s work has many parallels with Lave’s studies of learning and, consequently, is filled with insights for those of us interested in how experts “intervene” in the way young people learn. Of particular relevance to our work is his emphasis on how the intervention is experienced from the point of view of the client/student and, in particular, how the intervening practices fit into the rest of the client/student’s life. As our project explores current and future institutions of learning, it will be critical that we don’t repeat these past mistakes, whether by using institutions to isolate youth from the rest of their lives or by holding learning institutions accountable to systems designed for studying chemistry, not social practice (more on accountability later in this post).

After Dreier, Ray McDermott gave a mesmerizing “performance” that historicized many of the panel’s themes by resurfacing the works of John Dewey and Paul Radin. Delivered with rhythmic cadence, his talk came closest to literally answering Jean’s call for an intellectual party. With quotes suggesting that we move from “kinds of minds to minds in action,” and that “things only exist in relation to each other,” McDermott reminded us of some of the historical roots of ideas that still seem fresh and urgent in 2008.

McDermott’s talk was followed by a break before the second four panelists. Helen Verran led off round two by discussing her work on “ontic politics” which, like McDermott’s reference to Dewey’s “things only exist in relation to each other,” constitutes objects as “clots and expressions of relations.” Her current work focuses on the political processes involved in an effort to “reclaim” a river in Australia, a collective undertaking that has brought together various communities of practice, each of which imagines society and nature differently.

Sharon Traweek spoke after Verran and argued for “theorizing with a middle voice,” one not bound up in conventional markers of subjectivity and objectivity, an attempt to theorize without dichotomies. Traweek’s talk was rich and diverse, drawing on research of high energy physicists and yet equally reflecting on the challenges and limitations of disciplines, especially as they actively reproduce gender hierarchies.

Penelope (Penny) Harvey reported on work she’s currently undertaking with engineers and city planners charged to shape the city and skyline of Manchester, England. Her work focuses on how the production of 3D models is taken up in these engineering efforts. Manchester’s use of models is particularly interesting as the engineers and city planners are using them as a communicative tool with the public, offering citizens a means to participate in the planning process. While the project is still going on, Harvey warned that models can never be universal and will always require some standardization and exclusion. Our focus, then, should be on matters of concern (political) rather than matters of fact (seemingly apolitical).

Finally, Lucy Suchman, who helped organize the panel with Dorothy Holland, gave a talk titled, “Situating Practices of Future Making.” Suchman has been investigating how design and innovation are often treated as specialized sites, governed by experts in “imaginations of entrepreneurism.” In their most fashioned form, such sites can approach a “science of design,” an approach called for by Humbert Simon and many others. Suchman used Margolin’s The Politics of the Artificial to critique Simon’s approach, arguing for an understanding of design as social practice. Clearly Suchman is concerned with attempts to lay claim to innovation, design, and “the new” — that is, change — in institutions governed by experts, whether they be professional designers or scientists. Instead of positioning themselves as the originators of change, she called for professional designers to be one site amongst many, not originators but participants in the circulation and shaping of ideas and change. While focused on the work of computer scientists and engineers, Suchman’s larger theme of “future making” deserves reflection from those working in the space of “futures of learning.” As experts working at the intersection of youth and technology, the work of “future making” is unavoidable. As concepts, both youth and technology are intimately constituted in their relations to the future. The questions of, “whose future?” and “what sort of future?” should be continually asked. Additionally, Suchman’s talk reminds us that our research “participants” should be involved in our work of future making, more so than as just informants.

After Suchman, Donald Brenneis, the discussant, pleased panelists and audience alike with an insightful and imaginative response. Brenneis organized his response around a series of “T-words” the first of which was “trajectory.” Brenneis said he heard in the various talks the theme of “movement across” and the “new,” implying temporality, history, and what people carry between situations, often to be reused and redeployed. Brenneis’ second T-word was “translation,” noting the need to abandon the dream of a common language and, instead, recognize the multiplicity of language, the partiality of knowledge (both as something incomplete but also as something you’re partial towards). Such a recognition needs advocates, especially now as we experience, “a rising hegemony of evidence-based medicine” and centralized accountability. This latter point should perk the ears of those involved in debates over measuring learning outcomes, the need for standards, public accountability, &tc., &tc. Brenneis notes that we clearly need to start advocating other forms of accountability, pointing towards Suchman’s call for localized accountability as one possible alternative. Brenneis’ final T-word was “transcendence,” noting that many of the panelists seemed to have been arguing against it. Common amongst the panelists was the insistence that life is embodied, grounded, complicated, and lateral. The goal, according to Brenneis, should be making lateral voices and relations possible. Finally, Brenneis argued that many had argued that form matters as much as content, noting the trademarks, the 3D models, the recurring concern with forms of recognition, forms of expertise, forms of membership and exclusion, and forms of affordances in software. Drawing on his own studies of hearing, Brenneis closed with the question of whether the problem might not be translation but transduction — processes in which external energy is connected to something we can understand and represent.

We are very pleased to announce the public release of the findings from the Digital Youth project. The three-year project, funded by the John T. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation as part of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning initiative Digital Media and Learning initiative., involved over 28 researchers and collaborators based at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley.

As an ethnographic investigation of informal learning with digital media, the project represented a unique opportunity to conduct baseline research on youths’ everyday engagements with new media, and the implications of these practices for learning. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the research team – which ranged from anthropology, information studies, media studies, psychology and sociology – the very negotiation of conducting ‘ethnography’ challenged disciplinary assumptions about the nature of knowledge production and dissemination. Rather than an edited book of 22 individual projects or case studies, we shared our research materials to facilitate the process of collaborative analysis. The White Paper and forthcoming book with MIT Press represents the culmination of this process of interdisciplinary collaboration.

You can find links to a summary of our report as well as a draft of our book which will be published with MIT Press next fall. 

We will be celebrating the release of our report at a reception at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco. Please join us on Saturday November 22, at 6:30-8:00pm, San Francisco Hilton & Towers, Golden Gate Ballroom.

Click here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Click here to download the summary white paper.

Click here to access the full report.

Click here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

--------

RESEARCH SUMMARY

Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher and her research team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth digital media use to date. They found that social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture.  The research finds today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression. Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games.  The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important.  The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression.  These activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self- directed learning, and independence.

MAJOR FINDINGS

- Youth use online media to extend friendships and interests. -

Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations,sports, and other local activities. They can be always “on,” in constant contact with their friends through private communications like instant messaging or mobile phones, as well as in public ways through social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook.  With these “friendship-driven” practices, youth are almost always associating with people they already know in their offline lives. The majority of youth use new media to “hang out” and extend existing friendships in these ways. A smaller number of youth also use the online world to explore interests and find information that goes beyond what they have access to at school or in their local community. Online groups enable youth to connect to peers who share specialized and niche interests of various kinds, whether that is online gaming, creative writing, video editing, or other artistic endeavors. In these interest-driven networks, youth may find new peers outside the boundaries of their local community. They can also find opportunities to publicize and distribute their work to online audiences, and to gain new forms of visibility and reputation.

- Youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online. -

In both friendship-driven and interest-driven online activity, youth create and navigate new forms of expression and rules for social behavior. By exploring new interests, tinkering, and “messing around” with new forms of media, they acquire various forms of technical and media literacy. Through trial and error, youth add new media skills to their repertoire, such as how to create a video or game, or customize their MySpace page. Teens then share their creations and receive feedback from others online. By its immediacy and breadth of information, the digital world lowers barriers to self-directed learning. Some youth “geek out” and dive into a topic or talent. Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships. Youth turn instead to specialized knowledge groups of both teens and adults from around the country or world, with the goal of improving their craft and gaining reputation among expert peers. While adults participate, they are not automatically the resident experts by virtue of their age.Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority. New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented by set, predefined goals.

IMPLICATIONS

New media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn, and raise a new set of issues that educators, parents, and policymakers should consider.

-Adults should facilitate young people’s engagement with digital media. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technical skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society.  Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning.Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access serious online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions. Because of the diversity of digital media, it is problematic to develop a standardized set of benchmarks against which to measure young people’s technical and new media literacy. Friendship-driven and interest-driven online participation have very different kinds of social connotations.  For example, whereas friendship-driven activities centers upon peer culture, adult participation is more welcomed in the latter more “geeky” forms of learning.  In addition,the content, behavior, and skills that youth value are highly variable depending on what kinds of social groups they associate with. In interest-driven participation, adults have an important role to play. Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults. Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting learning goals, particularly on the interest-driven side where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers. To stay relevant in the 21st century, education institutions need to keep pace with the rapid changes introduced by digital media. Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What, the authors ask, would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? What would it mean to reach beyond traditional education and civic institutions and enlist the help of others in young people’s learning?  Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, they question what it would mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally.