Confirming Suspicions
The MacArthur Foundation has funded a large study on how youth engage, live and learn with digital media, and the results are here. I’ve read the summary (it’s only two pages) and read/skimmed the white paper (it’s longer), and the findings seem to confirm a bunch of suspicions many of us have had for some time:
The majority of young people primarily use new media to extend traditional relationships — relationships with people they met through school, after-school activities, geographical proximity, or through other real-life friends. In other words, although the authors feel that today’s generation is undergoing some kind of transformation, in many ways they’re not that different from generations past.
Then there are the geeks, “the smaller number of youth who 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.” They’re indeed learning. In fact, “geeking out” is highly social and engaged, although it’s a different kind of sociality (some would say a lesser kind). Young geeks are learning valuable skills and/or exploring and expressing their identities and passions, in a peer-based environment, which contrasts with the comparatively authoritarian ways of teaching they meet at school. So far, not unexpected, though we can now point to some more research to support our point of view. This is not something I expect internet-savvy people didn’t know already:
“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time online – that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”
Where it gets really interesting — or rather, where it would get interesting if the authors had answered the question instead of merely posing it — is when they ask, “what if education wasn’t primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, but instead was thought of as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally?”
Ideally, education should be about two things: it should teach how to survive and understand the society we live in, and it should help develop the natural curiosity and passions of students into knowledge and skills that can be fulfilling both to them and to society. Currently, education (especially lower education) is mostly focused on the the surviving and understanding part: it’s disproportionally about understanding a narrow cultural canon that changes infrequently and at best gives an incomplete understanding of our shared cultural background, and about how to make money. While there is a basic set of skills and knowledge that we need in order to understand the society we live in and that forms the foundation of nearly every creative and vocational pursuit we could possibly choose down the road, there’s so much more you could do beyond that minimum.
Maybe the authors of this study attempt to answer the question they pose in their book, Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Maybe someone out there is sitting on the an answer.
