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Friday 19th June 2009 8:27 am

Tools for Teaching Digital Literacies

A series of videos by Project New Media Literacies helps educators cultivate new media literacies in their students. 

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MacArthur grantee Henry Jenkins, director of Project New Media Literacies at MIT, argues that young people need to master an additional set of skills to be successful in today’s participatory culture. To help youth build these skills, Project NML produced a set of videos that offer insights into a day in the life of an artist or creator in new media. Select videos are used in learning activities, or “challenges”, within the Learning Library. These multimedia challenges incorporate tools and games from other websites, and offer opportunities for students to create their own content, and to submit that content to the Library.

In the videos, a DJ, for example, might discuss the ethics of sampling, which aligns with the identified new media skill of appropriation, or the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

In the challenge “Expressing Characters across Multimedia,” youth practice the skill of “transmedia navigation” by first learning about storytelling, and then watching a video with NBC’s Heroes creators Mark Warshaw and Jessie Alexander. The two discuss how they use the characters in the show across different media, such as in a graphic novel or even through toys. (To find this video and activity, go to the Learning Library and search “transmedia navigation.”)

Students then explore how the character Claire Bennett navigates and is featured in different media platforms, including the television show, in her Myspace account, and as an image in a graphic novel.

“Originally the video collection was somewhat static,” says Anna van Someren, Creative Manager, Project New Media Literacies. “But we’ve pushed it a lot farther now. We wanted to move toward a new framework - the Learning Library - that allows users to interact with the material. It’s a much more community-based, dynamic experience now.”

The video collection can be found here.

Category: Unexpected

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