The Rock the Vote site within the Xbox Live network has downloadable Gamerpics, which can be added to an individual’s Xbox Live profile, in support of Barrack [sic] Obama or John McCain, the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees, respectively. There’s also voter registration information and Rock the Vote videos.
Banner ads on the Dashboard — the central hub of Xbox Live — will point people toward the Rock the Vote content. After downloading the “I registered” pic, members will get voter registration information via e-mail.
“Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City” is a comprehensive social networking website featuring an educational “game” experience where participants are encouraged to act in support of New Orleans residents. The site provides links to a variety of relief groups as well as information about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina including multiple timelines, analysis of media coverage, and supporting articles for all information presented.
In their first joint appearance since the party conventions, presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama will discuss service and civic engagement in the post-9/11, post-Katrina world during the primetime televised “ServiceNation Presidential Candidates Forum” on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 11, hosted by Columbia University in the City of New York, as part of the ServiceNation Summit.
If we may depart from our usual theoretical discussions for a moment, let’s have a look at the web-based curriculum profiled in our recent CLO report. This blogging curriculum, entitled Blogistics, is currently available as an interactive Flash presentation. Here are some questions to think about while navigating through it:
What works well and what could be improved upon? How effective is this presentation likely to be overall?
What do you think of format (interactive web-based slideshow) as a delivery vehicle for civic lessons? Might it work better for presenting some learning material than others?
Of course, feel free to comment on any other salient aspect of the presentation.
What determines whether attempts at online youth civic engagement succeed or fail? Eszter Hargittai tackles a question very similar to this one in her recent contribution to a discussion of Clay Shirky’s latest book, Here Comes Everybody. But you don’t need to have read the book to apply Hargittai’s core insight to the issues we’ve been discussing on this blog:
While it is certainly the case that new technologies, tools and services are leveling the playing field, existing societal position and resources still matter. The question is: when do they matter more or less? Under what circumstances do people with less resources still manage to benefit from the new tools in ways that would have been difficult earlier? What are the examples of mobilization that do not involve people with PhDs, ones with noteable techie know-how or one’s with considerable financial resources either themselves or among those in their networks? There are such examples, certainly, but it would be interesting to see systematically what it is that unites them. What commonality is there among such cases that suggests a true leveling of the playing field that goes beyond allocating more opportunities to those who are already considerably privileged? (On a sidenote, these issues are similar to the ones I raised while discussing Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks.)
What is important to understand from a youth civic engagement perspective is that not all youth are equally proficient at using digital media. Terms such as “digital natives” and “DotNets,” used by scholars and civic practitioners alike, imply the opposite when applied broadly to the current generation of adolescents and young adults. A better conceptualization of online youth engagement might begin by observing that only some youth fit the tech-savvy “digital native” archetype, and continue by asking how the digitally disadvantaged can best be brought to the virtual table. As a local example illustrating this divide, members of the CLO team have anecdotally observed alarmingly low levels of email proficiency among some of the low-income youth with whom they have come into contact. Instead of maintaining consistent email addresses, they seem to be caught in a ongoing cycle of email address registration, abandonment, and re-registration fueled by chronic password forgetfulness. Reaching these young people via participatory civic sites will remain a Sisyphean endeavor until they learn to master this most fundamental of online skills.
Much of the breathless internet triumphalism effusing forth from the popular press tends to downplay the strong possibility that preexisting inequalities will, in the absence of action to redress them, persist in online contexts (this is not to imply that Shirky’s book falls into this category; I haven’t read it). This holds true for youth civic sites no less than for any other type of participatory media. In addition to Eszter’s general questions, then, I would like to pose a few of my own:
What can be done to make online civic spaces more appealing to diverse groups of youth? What are some effective ways to avoid falling into the trap of simply placing a piece of technology into the world and expecting an energized, diverse user base to emerge autonomously?
What offline structures need to be constructed to ensure that youth civic sites attract more than just the “usual suspects,” i.e. young people who have already bought into the value of civic engagement?
What other online exemplars devoted to youth engagement can we look to that have managed to navigate these issues with a relative measure of success? What can we learn from them?
even the least privileged kids have profiles on MySpace and Facebook. And they’re on the internet all the time. That finding goes against past studies that have found a ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor kids.
This looks like a pretty egregious non-sequitir to me, as the fact that poor kids have social network profiles is not evidence of the absence of a digital divide. Eszter, I’d be particularly interested to see what you have to say about this. (Can’t find the actual study write-up, but here’s an interview with the PI.)
We are currently developing PSO media skills curricula at both our partnering organizations, such as the YMCA, and through the CCCE’s Becoming Citizens program (http://depts.washington.edu/ccce/civiceducation/citizens.html). However, we would love to hear our project advisor’s ideas on the following:
What are some of the programmatic pieces you feel we might want to be sure to include to go along with the PSO website?
What are some of the media pieces that you think we should teach?
Finally, what kind of youth development philosophy would you encourage?
Lance Bennett (Civic Learning Online project director) discusses the citizen identity shift and implications for civic learning in on and offline environments. If social identities and learning preferences are changing among digital natives, shouldn’t we rethink how young people are introduced to civic life?
It seems clear that teens are motivated by participatory media cultures, and this includes politics. The volume of multimedia production in the Obama campaign is just one indicator of how public life can become more vital for young citizens when they are involved in creating and sharing media content. Yet civic education in most schools remains largely a textbook exercise aimed at individual evaluation based on conventional knowledge standards. Few students have the opportunity to work in teams, interact with local communities, or communicate their experiences using digital media that capture their imagination. Outside of schools, online communities offer great potential for engaging the creative energies of young people. However, few of those environments are built on any recognized standards about civic learning or civic communication skill sets that users can take away. It is time to rethink skills and learning standards appropriate for digital natives so that practitioners and youth workers can reach larger youth populations beyond those who already bring the requisite skills and motivation with them. Bennett’s report A Generational Shift in Citizen Identity opens this conversation.
When discussing how digital media can best support civic engagement among youth, it is important to distinguish between the technical capacities necessary to navigate and manipulate various forms of digital media and the civic skills that allow young people to connect with shared issues. Howard Rheingold offers a helpful starting point with his digital skills curriculum, which attempts to demonstrate how technology can serve as an attractive vehicle for what he calls “public voice.” Public voice, as distinct from private voice, comprises all communicative acts that seek to “inform publics, advocate positions, contest claims, and organize action around issues that [young people] truly care about” (Rheingold, 2008). Positioning public voice within the context of digital media harnesses the latter as a tool to teach young people about the former. Because this specific form of communication does not come naturally to most youth, learning it is presumed to require some direct instruction.
We on the CLO team believe that Howard’s approach shows much promise, but wonder if many of its recommendations are more suited for college students than for teens in high school. For example, might the concept of a “public” be too subtle for some teens to grasp, particularly if said public does not immediately emerge to respond to their attempts to address it? Further, given the undifferentiated epistemological landscape of the internet, in which Google results place paranoid cranks shoulder to shoulder with accredited experts, might some digital natives experience difficulty in critically analyzing web content? How often are these young people asked to articulate and defend their own opinions? The answers to these questions may recommend that the public voice curriculum be revised somewhat for younger learners.
How could the public voice curriculum for a high-school age demographic? What is it reasonable for youth of that age to be able to understand and accomplish, civically speaking?
A second question that has arisen for us relates to the long-term sustainability of the skills learned in these types of curricula. Decades of education research has concluded that students retain only a small fraction of what they learn, particularly if the lessons are not practiced. Therefore, we are strongly interested in suggestions regarding ways to ensure that the civic skills we teach “stick,” as it were, as opposed to beginning and ending in the classroom.
What can be done to ensure that the skills that youth learn in your curriculum become self-sustained habits, rather than one-time lessons?
Considerable research suggests that while schools are still a major predictor of civic engagement, youth do not gain nearly the civic skills we might hope from their experiences at school. Scholars point to a number of reasons for this:
Recent trends in education policy have reduced the time devoted to arts, music, and civic education, in favor of math, reading, and assessment.
A lack of resources often prevents schools from offering programs that enable youth to develop and work on their own civic and political concerns and connect classroom learning with extracurricular activities.
A disconnect in citizenship styles has schools emphasizing a duty-based style of citizenship to young people who are much more accustomed to using expression tools to craft individual identities.
Political pressures lead many teachers and school administrators to limit political discussions and debates, despite evidence suggesting that open classroom and school atmospheres greatly enhance civic learning and engagement.
If young people are not developing civic skills at school, are they doing so elsewhere in their lives? An important question is what role online activities may play in civic learning for the millions of young people online—but most young people only occasionally pursue civic information and activities online, preferring to devote their time to social networking, gaming, and entertainment.
This produces something of a Catch-22: when they offer civic skills, most schools emphasize traditional modes of interacting with government and politics, and they present it in a dry manner. The online world is much more attractive to young people, but only occasionally offers civic learning opportunities.
This situation has us at the CCCE thinking about the potential of the new world of online youth engagement projects, especially as we prepare Puget Sound Off for its upcoming launch. The overarching question we ask ourselves is:
Can online projects create spaces for civic learning that engage young people?
And, more concretely: What functions and features should an online environment have to both hold the attention of young citizens and foster the development of important civic skills?
In developing our digital youth commons, Puget Sound Off, we have striven to make it attractive both to already-engaged youth as well as to those who are not yet quite as involved in civic affairs. It is certainly much easier to facilitate the goals and preferred methods of those who come to civic sites knowing what issues they care about and how to address them than it is to convince relatively disengaged teens that civics is worth their time. Nevertheless, we feel that it is essential to probe the limits of what digital media can do not only to encourage preexisting civic instincts, but also to inspire new commitments to community involvement.
To that end, I would like to raise two issues that might bear on a youth civic site’s ability to attract more than just the usual suspects. First, our informal and anecdotal interactions with youth have revealed that not all of them share the “digital native” orientation so frequently attributed to their generation. Our team has observed, for example, many young people (particularly those from disadvantaged economic backgrounds) experiencing difficulty with skills often taken for granted in discussions of online civic engagement. These include such fundamental competencies as possession of a regular email address and the ability to format blog posts and comments so that they can be easily read. We would like to compile a working list of potential obstacles like these with a rough sense of their relative importance that can help drive the development of training modules aimed at moving disadvantaged youth closer to par with their more empowered peers.
What common technical features that youth civic sites might use pose the most significant obstacles for digitally disempowered youth?
Second, apart from technical considerations, we are concerned that certain elements of youth civic sites—the design scheme, the language used in official communications to visitors, the featured content—may signal to some youth that it is not “for” them. To preempt this possibility, we have already decided to take steps to ensure that minority viewpoints (for multiple definitions of “minority”) are represented on the front page. But are there other steps we might be able to take to make our site more inclusive? And are there any findings that suggest steps we definitely should avoid taking?
What can site creators do to make their sites more inviting to diverse youth demographics?
Using the Internet for games, instant messaging, and Myspace is second nature to many young people, yet the medium’s rich civic potential for this tech-savvy demographic remains untapped. In this video (available below the jump), Lance Bennett discusses the potential for digital media to connect young people with public life.
For more information, an executive summary of our MacArthur-funded work is available here. Puget Sound Off, the Seattle youth media commons website, will launch in mid March. For more info on the site, click here.
Chris W, Deen and I met. Chris is going to have the BC interns begin working on creating powerpoints for the learning goals identified in the curriculum inventory/needs doc. Download Curriculum Inventory and Needs (XLS)
