I’ve blogged before about how Wendy and I limit the amount of media time that Tess and Tucker get, that we struggle with knowing how much time is too much or too little to be on the computer, watch television, play the Wii or poke around on the iTouch. Most people think that since both of us spend so much time of the computer that we’d naturally let them play all they want. But we don’t. In fact, I get the feeling we’re more restrictive than many parents, ironically. (Tess swears there’s only one other kid in her grade at school that doesn’t have a phone yet.)

When I mentioned in passing our 45-minutes-a-day on the computer policy during a recent presentation, I was seriously amazed at how many people came up afterwards (and even e-mailed me later) and asked about that. There was like a whole ‘lotta angst going on in terms of people wondering if their kids were getting too much screen time and how we came to the decision to limit our own kids. I had no answer for the first part, and I felt like I stumbled through the second part because to be honest, it’s a really complex equation that is going to be different for every kid, every set of parents. For us, I think it’s a combination of having two very energetic kids who love to physically play, a reaction to the struggle for balance in my own life, and an expectation that when we’re together as a family, we’re together as a family that interacts more often than not without media. Frankly, I don’t even like it when Tess plays the apps or listens to her iTouch for long periods in the car. But she (and Tucker) can read as much as they want, and they do. We always bring their books with them and we encourage that at every turn. (For some reason, my kids don’t get car sick when reading.) Is there a huge distinction? I don’t know. Books give us something to talk about. Mario on the iTouch? Notsomuch. And there are exceptions. Tess happens to really like Google SketchUp, and she can almost always get more time if she’s making something or exhibiting some creativity. All I know is that we, and I mean we, tend to push back against technology for our kids as much as we embrace it for ourselves. And that is ironic, I know, but that’s what we’re comfortable with right now when they are 9 and 11. As they get older, they’ll get more time, but I know that we’ll monitor what their doing and have lots of conversations about it. When they get ready to start creating and publishing in earnest, we’ll certainly help them if that’s what they want to do.

Now does that mean that isn’t perfectly ok for some other parents to make other, perhaps more liberal choices about their own kids media time? Absolutely not. To each his own, and I’m not suggesting to anyone how they parent their kids. I’m also not holding myself up as the poster child for fantastic parenting. (I could tell you stories.) All I know is that’s what we’re comfortable with right now, that the real cuts and scrapes they get in their physical worlds are more important than the virtual ones at this point, that we are always struggling with it, and that for today at least, I really like who my kids are shaping up to be. They’re creative, social, articulate, thoughtful and fun to be around. Most of the time. And I hope some of that, at least, comes from our parenting around technology and media in their lives.

I remember when I first starting teaching journalism way back in the day actually using one of those stinky, buzz-inducing ditto machines to publish my students’ work “widely” up and down the hallways. I remember copy-editing by hand with green Flair pen, the same color my dreaded college journalism professors used, teaching my kids the fine art of marking up each other’s stories and adding suggestions for improvement. And I remember buying about 15 copies of various newspapers every Friday just so we could all spend some time getting our fingers black with ink as we searched for interesting and/or well written stories.

When I think of those days, I feel really old, for sure, but I also feel amazed at how much has changed in terms of media. And now, when it seems that “old” media is finally tipping full force into a “new” digital media model, I have to say I’m somewhat wistful.

Ok. I’m over it.

Yesterday’s New York Times piece by David Carr “Mourning Old Media’s Decline” got me really thinking again, however, about how much more important journalism has become in these days when newsrooms are being cut and reporters laid off. The Christian Science Monitor is closing its print edition. The Los Angeles Times, Newark Star-Ledger and others are making deeper cuts. All of which is going to increase our reliance on not only online media but participatory online media, the form of media that is largely unedited, essay-driven and agenda-ridden. All of which, by the way, should be driving our conversations about how to fundamentally rewrite our curriculum and our delivery system to prepare students to be, um, participants both as readers and as writers.

I loved this graph from the article:

Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.

The problem for us is that we’re still teaching like our kids are going to be reading those edited, linear, well-written newspapers when the reality is they’re not. And the bigger problem is that, by and large, we still don’t know enough about the “new” media world in our personal practice to push those conversations about change in any meaningful way.

We better figure it out pretty quickly, or we’ll be mourning much more than old media…

(Photo: News by Kazze.)

It’s no secret that Lawrence Lessig has been one of my heroes in this conversation for a long, long time, and I just wanted to share his most recent presentation from this weekend’s National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis. Would have loved to have been there.

I’ve always been a student of Lessig as a presenter; when I first started I ripped off his minimalist PowerPoint approach without apology and got away with it because very few of the people I presented to had ever seen him present. I’ve gone down a different path these days in terms of the technology, but I just don’t think there is anyone better in terms of making a clear point by building a contextual narrative that really gives perspective to that point and builds on it and challenges an audience to think about it in serious, meaningful, and new ways. Listen to the way he weaves the story, with just enough humor and cynicism, and how he brings it all together in the end, in this case, by getting back to the “core problem.” Very few intellectual moments in my life come close to the first time that I saw Lessig five years ago at Harvard, when I literally had goosebumps, and I am really looking forward to seeing him again in NYC in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, in case you haven’t heard his newest message, take 30 mins to watch. My bet is he’ll make you think.

Important post from Joyce Valenza that should start some interesting thinking about Fair Use:

I learned on Friday night that the critical test for fairness in terms of educational use of media is transformative use. When a user of copyrighted materials adds value to, or repurposes materials for a use different from that for which it was originally intended, it will likely be considered transformative use; it will also likely be considered fair use. Fair use embraces the modifying of existing media content, placing it in new context. Examples of transformativeness might include: using campaign video in a lesson exploring media strategies or rhetoric, using music videos to explore such themes as urban violence, using commercial advertisements to explore messages relating to body image or the various different ways beer makers sell beer, remixing a popular song to create a new artistic expression.

Basically, Joyce writes about how the scope of what we can and cannot do with our students regarding reuse and remix of copyrighted materials may be much broader than we think. Read the whole thing.

So click on the cover, then on the next page, click on the cover again, then turn the page. Pretty interesting…

Technorati Tags: media, magazine, journalism

As a journalism major, I really find the challenges that reporters and MSM are facing these days to be incredibly interesting. For me, the writing part was always the easy part; it was the reporting that I found and still find difficult, and these days the rules are being rewritten. Witness the brouhaha that’s been building over at Wired as one of it’s reporters has been trying to do a story on some Web 2.0 types who don’t want to play by the traditional rules. Jeff Jarvis deconstructs the whole affair in his blog, and if you want to get a sense of how radical this is, imaging the following as part of the new model:

As Winer says: “So if you want to work together, let’s find a new way to do it. I’m fed up with the old system. The way we start the reboot is to do all our work out in the open, real-time. Not via email, but in full view of everyone.” Examine the possible benefits of this: The reporter asks a question and I answer it. But I get it wrong and a reader pipes in to give a correction. Isn’t that a better way? I read my answers as I write them and improve them myself. What’s wrong with that? Why should the reporter get the opportunity to rewrite and edit and I don’t? Why should the reporter get to look smarter than the subjects? The best reporters, after all, go to find people who are smarter and know more than they do to get the best story. Ah, but I can hear some of you saying, wouldn’t this blow an exclusive? Well the exclusive has a fleeting value of about 30 seconds anymore anyway. And what’s exclusive about what Dave Winer has to say about Mike Arrington? If anyone owns that exclusive, it’s Dave, no? And Dave’s stance is that if he has anything to say on a subject, he’ll say it on his blog. Welcome to the transparent era, my fellow journalists. You want transparency? This is transparency.

What’s fascinating to me is just being able to watch this play out. Seems like every day the challenges mount. I know in my own case that I would much rather use the wisdom of the crowd to help me make decisions than the traditional advertisements I’ve been peppered with all my life. I mean really, how long will advertising as we know it have any effect on what we buy when we can connect to people who we actually trust to guide us?

Technorati Tags: media, journalism, education

So one of the reasons I’ve had no time to blog of late (or read for that matter) is that life is getting crazed once again. Seven weeks off goes much too quickly, but I’ve gotten into some very cool projects that I hope to blog about in short order.

Meanwhile, in case any one is interested, here is the link to the presentation that Rob Mancabelli and I did at FETC on Friday. I’d be really interested in any reaction from those of you that might listen and watch (sort of) it.

Technorati Tags: fetc07 social read_write_web

So it turns out that just about 150 feet from where I’ve hung my shingle in Flemington, NJ, one of the pre-eminent “experts” on children’s software, Warren Buckleitner has a shingle of his own. Warren writes and publishes the “Children’s Technology Review,” is a periodic writer for the New York Times, testified in front of Congress last year regarding the ratings system on games, and, most importantly, has two daughters who ride horses at the same farm as Tess. (We’re “Barn Dads.”) Warren is also the founder of MediaTech which is drop in community technology center in our town library, and we’re embarking on a cool new project for next year that you can read about here if you like.

All of which leads me to the fact that Warren was interviewed for a story on Club Penguin that ran on NPR’s “All Things Considered” last week. It was a pretty good piece that discussed this relatively new territory that is online multi role player games for tweens. Here’s the money quote from Warren:

By playing these games they are sort of like training wheels for starting to participate in the digital culture that’s certainly here already.

I like that metaphor. Now if I could just get Warren to start blogging…

Technorati Tags: games culture education social learning

Now I know on many levels I’m not normal, but there are moments in the blogging process that just give me butterflies. Many of them occur serendipitously when I’m reading and two or three pieces of content flow up from my network that begin to click together in my brain like magnets, making connections. And at that moment, my mind starts writing, composing a post that it needs to make sense of the ideas, the patterns that seem to be emerging. I’ve come to rely on the blogging to cement together the pieces and make them more of a whole, one that I know is never fully complete, and never will be. And that’s when the butterflies come, in that moment of recognition, when things seem to make more sense. They tell me some molecules have moved, that I think I know something that I didn’t before. It’s what keeps me doing this.

Obviously, that happened just now as I was wallowing in my Google Reader (having left Bloglines far behind), reading post after post that made my brain hum with thought. But what clicked were a couple of items that just led so seamlessly one into another as I pulled them up.

The first was from if:book which is one of my favorite reads these days. Kim White writes about the coming “sea change” in terms of the structure of and reading of digital books. And much of the analysis is hung on the work of Jeff Han, whose amazing TED presentation floated up again someone’s blog a few days ago, and who was the subject of a feature in Fast Company which Tim Lauer pointed to this morning. (The picture above is a snip from another video of Jeff Han at work that’s on the FC site.) Kim’s description of how 3D, touchscreen computing will affect books is compelling:

Here’s an example of how it might work, imagine the institute’s Iraq Study Group Report in 3D. Main authors would have nodes or “homesites” close to the book with threads connecting them to sections they authored. Co-authors/commentors might have thinner threads that extend out to their, more remotely located, sites. The 3D depiction would allow readers to see “threads” that extend out from each author to everything they have created in digital space. In other words, their entire network would be made visible. Readers could know an author’s body of work in a new way and they could begin to see how collaborative works have been understood and shaped by each contributor. It would be ultimate transparency. It would be absolutely fascinating to see a 3D visualization of other works and deeds by the Iraq Study Groups’ authors, and to “see” the interwoven network spun by Washington’s policy authors. Readers could zoom out to get a sense of each author’s connections. Imagine being able to follow various threads into territories you never would have found via other, more conventional routes.

Now that would be an amazing capacity, to follow the connections and gain all sorts of context as to the authors and the ideas and their evolution. And it would demand reading skills that revolve around following connections and vetting sources in ways that would challenge our current pedagogies. Talk about active reading…

In that same vein, I’ve been spending some time clicking around Daylife, which is a newish news puller-together that looks to contextualize what’s happening in the world and connect the events to the people and the history around it. It’s not the 3-D world that Kim describes, but as I read David Weinberger’s post this morning it was clear that it’s a step in the right direction. The individual topic pages (like this one on Condoleezza Rice) are full of content…pictures, articles, people who are connected in some way, quotes, Wikipedia entries, etc. It gives the opportunity to drill further down into the information in ways that newspapers can’t. Now I know this is new, and it has a ways to go in terms of building up resources, etc. But it’s the direction I find interesting.

And it leads me to a better understanding of one of my favorite excerpts from one of my favorite articles about all of this, “Scan This Book” by Kevin Kelly:

Yet the common vision of the library’s future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book’s full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Which is another vision that gives me butterflies.

In his TED presentation, Jeff Han said:

I kind of cringe at the idea that we’re going to introduce a whole new generation of people to computing with the standard mouse and Windows pointer interface. This is the way we should be interacting with machines from this point on…There’s no reason in this day and age why we should be conforming to a physical device. They should conform to us.

My question is how fast is all of this going to reach our kids…and what does it mean for our curriculum right now. These literacies aren’t necessarily new, but they are much more complex. Our younger kids, my kids, are going to need to have them. I don’t think, right now at least, most schools have much of a clue as to how to address them.

.

Technorati Tags: media, books, reading, learning, education

Did I mention I got a TIVO for Christmas? And yeah, it’s great and all that now I can watch the Daily Show and get to see some Frontline type stuff whenever I want it. But to be honest, the whole TIVO think has been a bummer on one level in that I find myself watching more television, which is something I really don’t want to do. I mean, this is the Age of Participation, right? But all TIVO and Sling and Netflix and, to some extent, YouTube (if you’re just watching it) and others seem to be doing is pulling us back to where we were before. The only difference is now we need a new term for couch potato…comp potato? Tech potato, perhaps?

So it’s not surprising, is it, that more and more of us are labeling ourselves procrastinators? 26 percent of Americans,  according to a new study, up from 5 percent 20 years ago. And as the article points out, much of it is due to the “distraction” of technology.

“It’s easier to procrastinate now than ever before. We have so many more temptations,” he said. “It’s never been harder to be self-disciplined in all of history than it is now.”

And I admit, I struggle with this too. (You should see my honey-do list.) I’d like to think it’s because I’ve got more productive things to do (like blog and write) and that the reason I’m procrastinating on cleaning up the backyard is not really procrastination at all…it’s choices.

But, as usual, I wonder about my kids and our students. I mean, let’s face it, the “distractions” are becoming more ubiquitous. The other day I was up at the farm watching my daughter ride her pony, and also in the ring was an older girl who was atop her horse, walking slowly, all the time texting messages into her cell phone. I found that to be a pretty unsettling sight. I mean, the whole zen of participation takes on a totally different meaning in that respect.

I want my kids to create, to interact. I don’t want them watching television, of which 99% is absolutely, insanely stupid, demeaning, manipulative and inconsequential. I want them to make television of a different ilk, one that makes asks them and their audience to engage and think. I thought we were heading more in that direction, but I feels like we’re headed for a retreat.

(Screenshot via TechCrunch)

Technorati Tags: media, learning, literacy

From page 170 of Henry Jenkins’ new book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide“:

None of us really know how to live in this era of media convergence, collective intelligence and participatory culture. These changes are producing anxieties and uncertainties, even panic, as people imagine a world without gatekeepers and live with the reality of expanding corporate media power.

And…

Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but cannot express themselves.

I wonder to what extent he means express themselves publically. I think this is what’s really hard for many educators to get their brain around, and to be honest, I waffle on whether teachers need to be content creators or just have to understand the potential for their students. Some of that ambivalence may be because of the look of fatigue that comes over many people’s faces when I suggest it, and the frequency with which I get asked how I find the time to learn and do all of this. (Answer: I have no life.) But I do think publishing literacy is crucial these days. Not just from the technical aspect of blogging and podcasting, but from the philosophical aspect of sharing and collaboration as well.

I just had a flash of reflection on my own experiences with all of this, that the tools were relatively easy, but the expectations of sharing widely and freely are still issues that I struggle with. Not as much as before, but as recent posts indicate, it’s still there.

And just one more extended quote from the book (page 179) to whet some appetites:

More and more, educators are coming to value the learning that occurs in these informal and recreational spaces, especially as they confront the constraints imposed on learning via educational policies that seemingly value only what can be counted on a standardized test. if children are going to acquire the skills needed to be full participants in their culture, they may well learn these skills through involvement in activities such as editing the newspaper of an imaginary school or teaching one another skills needed to do well in massively multiplayer games or any number of other things that teachers and parents currently regard as trivial pursuits.

I’ll let you read the section on “Rewriting School” yourselves…

technorati tags:Henry_Jenkins, Schoo, culture, education, schools, learning

I just finished my three-day stint at the High School’s New Face conference and I have to say I’m impressed and encouraged by the conversations here. Last night at dinner, people said their eyes had been opened and that for many at least, they felt had a real chance to make some changes at their schools. There was a lot of excitement about the technology, about the willingness to consider different models of schools (like The Met) and about the strategies for bringing those changes about.

But there was a moment in today’s last workshop session that captured the road ahead for this group and for the others that have gone down this path. I was just finishing up an hour on podcasting, showing them how to save Skype calls and mix them with music and other mp3 files, and showing them how easy it is to create an audio post and a podcast with Odeo. It was great, I mean, they even broke into semi-spontaneous applause at how easy it all was, and it was obvious they were getting juiced by the potentials. Life was good…

…until, of course, someone noticed that the number 9 listed podcast on Odeo is called “Open Source Sex.”

“So much for that,” the teacher who noticed it said. “They’ll never let this site through.” Talk about air going out of the balloon. I think I rescued it by reminding them how easy it is to do this with Audacity and OurMedia, but the point was clear. We may have great ideas and be thinking differently about learning, but it ain’t gonna fly when implementation time comes.

And so there it is. Another one of those nasty little truths about all of this. The biggest shift is not the technology, not the practice, not even the implementation. It’s the cultural, social shift that moves us from the idea that we must prevent our kids from seeing and engaging with this “stuff” to the idea that says, look…it’s a different world…they’re going to find sex and porn and bad stuff and bad people no matter how hard we try to keep them from it, but when we weigh that fact against the incredible learning potential that the Web provides, we’re going to choose to educate rather try to block and filter it all.

What kills me most about all of this is that I have yet to see anyone cover the eyes of their kids when they go into a magazine store and every skinny, big-breasted super model or super actress is right at eye level, or change the channel when scantily clad women dance provocatively in front of half naked, muscle bound men in the name of selling beer or music or whatever else, or stop them from going to movies filled with violence, abuse, objectification and the rest. Why is there no outrage over that? Is it because that’s done within full view of parents? Is it because we’ve just become so inured to it that we don’t see it. (I doubt that.) Is the Web different because the kids are at the controls? What is the mentality that says seeing it all around us in public is somehow less “damaging” than seeing a word on a Website somewhere?

Just to be clear, I don’t like it at all that this is a much more difficult, complex world for all of us to have to navigate. I’ve said this before, but every time I think what my own kids see and hear just in the course of their normal day, I get just totally disgusted with what we choose to subject them to as a society. But that’s the reality. And I deal with it by pointing it out at every turn, by making sure they have the editorial skills they need to deconstruct the image and get to the message and understand the motives behind it. And to frame all of it in a larger context of what beauty and health and happiness really is. I can’t keep them from that bad stuff. But I can help them understand it and to at least have a chance of making good decisions about it when they are confronted with it.

But we’re just not willing to deal with that in schools, it seems. Why is that?

technorati tags:media, education, society, Web

Blogged with Flock

(via BoingBoing) Chris Anderson at The Long Tail offers up these stats about the continuing shifts in our media consumption:

Flat to Down to Way Down:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999

• Television: network TV’s audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising)
  

In that spirit, don’t forget that April 25-May 1 is “TV Turnoff Week.” Spend it blogging (not journaling) instead. (I just can’t help myself…)
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Is it me or is there a bit of a lull in posting on Web logs lately? Just seems like we’re all a bit preoccupied with world events, and I know I’m finding it hard to stay motivated. As much as the act of war repels me, however, I’m finding the “playing out” of the end game here to pretty fascinating, especially from a journalism standpoint. Web loggers in Baghdad, journalists with videophones in Kuwait, a plethora of media outlets to follow from around the world. It’s amazing how far we have come with our ability to get the news at the scene. I can only believe that this is a good thing, that the truth will be told despite the wishes of our government. I keep telling my students that that is what journalism is ultimately about, the truth, but that lately it’s been harder and harder to get to.

I heard today that the Bush Administration had put aside billions of dollars in contracts for American firms to rebuild Iraq once we’re done destroying it. And, I heard that many of those firms are owned by the half dozen or so media monopolies that have co-opted the news gathering process in this country. Where is truth these days? Somehow I have to believe it’s in the hands of independent journalists who are empowered by mobile technologies and the ability to publish to an audience of millions. Whether or not they are heard or believed is another story. But the mere fact that they now have a voice is half the battle. (Poor choice of words, I know…)
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