A research initiative funded in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise the publics’ understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world.

NML has posted presentations from the May 2nd conference, Learning in a Participatory Culture.

For those who were not able to attend, click here for our conference slide presentations

Videos of the sessions will be posted soon!

Project New Media Literacies has developed this community site to share learning materials with interested educators and learners. The materials provided here are in development, and represent our work within Project New Media Literacies:

• The Learning Library
• The Teachers' Strategy Guides
• The Media Ethics Casebook in collaboration with the GoodPlay Project

Material may include multimedia, instructions on conducting activities, as well as feedback forms for educators and learners. Some activities will require Internet access, while others are hands-on group activities that may require typical classroom materials. NML resources range in depth and length, from formal to informal, and we welcome any suggestions or comments about the content, theme, and technical aspects of the material.

The Learning Library is an aggregator of media from the web, such as a video, image or audio file, but it is also a publishing tool that provides participants with opportunities to integrate personal-life experiences with a learning concept. The Learning Library is designed to be a distributed application to embed into any social media platform.

The current goals of the Learning Library are to:

• Develop learning opportunities that include exemplary media resources and learning “challenges” so that users can explore and practice applying the New Media Literacies
• Design a distributed knowledge network that is built upon the expertise of multiple groups and designed as an open-content, open-knowledge application
• Create a participatory model that adapts the students’ existing learning strategies and provides materials drawn from a valuable resource for their learning, the web
• Provide a flexible, robust, and sustainable framework for students and teachers -- to design, share, and attribute their knowledge.

Reading in a Participatory Culture

Our first Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture, offers strategies for integrating the tools, approaches, and methods of Comparative Media Studies into the English and Language Arts classroom. The guide provides a set of lesson plans using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as the sample text and a theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley entitled Moby-Dick: Then and Now as an example of a contemporary adaptation. The guide is intended to demonstrate techniques which could be applied to the study of authorship in relation to a range of other literary works, pushing us to reflect more deeply on how authors build upon the materials of their culture and in turn inspire others who follow to see the world in new ways.

Mapping in a Participatory Culture

Check out our tumblr page: ProjectNML.tumblr.com

The Mapping Project is NML's newest Teachers' Strategy Guide, and is currently in development. This project will collaborate with social studies classrooms to look at evolving digital cartographies and the ways we, as a people, envision ourselves in the digital and topographic landscapes. We are excited to share our ideas and findings with the NML community online! Stay tuned!

For more information, check out the preparatory document that was sent out to the participants. It includes one-pagers about:

• NML and its initiatives
• the skills we plan to address in this TSG
• unconferences in general
• initial thinking questions
• info about the group tumblr

The learning materials in this section have been produced through a collaboration between Project New Media Literacies and the GoodPlay project. We are creating a set of curricular materials designed to help students sort through ethical dilemmas they face as communicators and to give them the tools to work through the consequences of their own choices.

Find out more about this collaboration

Featured Digital Media Ethics activities