Experts Praise Classroom Media

A panel of experts tackled the relationship between digital media and education yesterday at the Brattle Street Theater.

According to the panel, while digital media presents excellent opportunities for education, its effectiveness will depend on overcoming the debate over its use in the classroom.

“There’s currently a bipolarized conversation going on in the U.S. around digital media and young people, both in the academy and the media,” said Constance M. Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation, who moderated the panel. “Neither answer is useful. When you start with the question of good versus bad, you’ll never get to the complexity that is at the intersection of learning and young people.”

The three panelists—gaming specialist Katie Salen from the Parsons The New School for Design, education researcher Howard Gardner of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and new media expert Henry Jenkins of MIT—dispelled some myths surrounding new media.

“We tend to forget the fact that new media literacy relies on the production of traditional literacies,” Salen said. “For kids and even for us, it’s not a distinction between old versus new. Experientially, it’s blended.”

Other topics addressed included online ethics, the isolating effect of excessive social networking, and the potential for gaming to be integrated into high school curricula.

“Computer literacy is a technical skill,” Jenkins said. “What we want to do is integrate the skills we identify across the curriculum—taking a subject like authorship in a language arts class, and showing how you reconceptualize it using these new skills and building on them. Skills don’t have to be high-tech to be effective.”

For Casey E. O’Sullivan, 25, a middle school teacher in Dover, MA, the event was an opportunity to consider new approaches to teaching.

“Gardner’s talk about ethics is going to impact how I teach my media class,” she said. “I liked Gardner’s idea of new media as a frontier, and how we need to establish rules for it. That’s a subject on which I have to help my students.”

For digital media creators, the event was an opportunity to connect with educators and gauge the success of their projects.

“It felt really good to know there were a lot of teachers in the room,” said Anna van Someren, Media Producer at MIT’s New Media Literacies project. “I like to make sure we’re actually creating stuff that can get traction in the classroom.”