Digital Natives: Teens, Tweens, & Digital Media: PLAYBACK: Making Media, Engaging in Democracy, and Working Toward the Future

“Great quotes” about learning and change; Pew survey on teens and videos; S. Craig Watkins on critical design literacy and pathways to youth participation; digital media literacy and civic engagement in Oakland schools—and how it all adds up to future work skills.

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Filed by Christine Cupaiuolo

Great quotes about learning and change; Pew survey on teens recording and uploading video; S. Craig Watkins on critical design literacy and remixing pathways to youth participation; new digital media literacy and civic engagement initiative in Oakland schools—and how it all adds up to future work skills.

Five Great Slides: Did you know there is a Flickr pool for “Great quotes about learning and change”? Dangerously Irrelevant pulled five great slides, including the photo above with a quote from Rushton Hurley: “If your students are sharing their work with the world, they want it to be good. If they’re just sharing it with you, they want it to be good enough.”

Teens & Online Video: According to Pew Internet, more than one-quarter (27 percent) of internet-using teens between ages 12-17 record and upload video to the internet. Those numbers come from a survey of 799 teens conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project in early to mid-2011.

One of the major differences between the latest findings and survey numbers from 2006: Girls are now just as likely to upload video as boys. The new study also found:

- 37 percent of internet users ages 12-17 participate in video chats with others using applications such as Skype, Googletalk or iChat. Girls are more likely than boys to have such chats..

- 13 percent of internet-using teens stream video live to the internet for other people to watch.

- Social media users are much more likely than those who do not use social media to engage in all three video behaviors studied.

Plus: Too many videos to share? Too many stories to read? Andrew Phelps of Nieman Journalism Lab reports that News.me is putting readers on an information diet for the month of May:

Every day for a month, the News.me team is asking someone smart or interesting or Internet-famous to share the Last Great Thing he or she saw, a video or an article or whatever, something truly lovable. There are no archives, no permalinks, nothing to read later — which is both maddening and sort of the point.

Introducing Critical Design Literacy: Reflecting on his work at Texas City High School, where students are deeply engaged in media creation—YouTube channels, music, games, Tumblr pages, art work, fashion design—S. Craig Watkins discusses the development of learning environments that support critical design literacy. What, exactly, does he mean by that?

“The concept,” he writes, “is informed by design thinking, a rich and dynamic process that emphasizes inquiry, innovation, ideation, building, and problem solving. Critical design literacy applies the protocols of design thinking to practice social innovations that lead to social transformation. In the learning environments that we will pilot we want students to become literate in critical thinking and critical designing. The former encourages students to look at their community through an inquisitive lens while the latter encourages students to design for community impact.”

Continue reading for examples of what critical design literacy look like in practice and the importance of introducing critical design literacy “across a diverse spectrum of young learners” to expand “the possibility to remix and revitalize the pathways to youth participation in their communities by addressing what Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh refer to as the civic opportunity gap in our schools.”

Engaging in Democracy: Speaking of civic opportunity, Mills College School of Education received funding for a digital media literacy and civic engagement initiative carried out in partnership with the National Writing Project and the Oakland Unified School District history and social studies department. Funded by the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, the initiative aims to better prepare and motivate youth to engage in the democratic process.

Kahne and Middaugh, research directors of the Civic Engagement Research Group, will serve as co-principal investigators for the project.

Plus: In a video posted by DML Research Hub, Christo Sims, a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a graduate researcher for the Connected Learning Research Network’s Leveling Up project, discusses his interest in studying the reproduction of social inequalities and how digital media plays into that. Highlights are posted at DMLCentral.net.

Future Work Skills 2020: The Apollo Research Institute (formerly University of Phoenix Institute) has released a report identifying 10 skills vital for success in the workplace of 2020. The report draws upon foundational forecasts developed by the Institute for the Future.

Among them: design mindset (ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes); virtual collaboration (ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team); and new media literacy (ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication). Read the full report (pdf).