The Kids Are All Right: A Major Study on the Impact of Digital Technologies on Learning Argues That Students' Online Pursuits Are Productive and Edifying, and Should Be Exploited by Teachers for Educational Gain

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WHEN THE JOHN D. AND CATHERINE T. MacArthur Foundation launched its $50 million digital media and learning initiative three years ago, expectation was that research in this area would expand our understanding of impact of digital media and communications technologies on how young people will learn in future. By time first study funded by this initiative was underway, that expectation had shifted dramatically. We decided we would peer over horizon to see if new digital media tools might affect how kids think and learn in, say, five to 10 years, says MacArthur Foundation Vice President Julia Stasch. Then reality hit: It's not future. It's not 10, five, or even two years. It's now. The results of first study, entitled Kids' Informal Learning With Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures, were published earlier this year. As an ethnographic study, it was anthropologic in nature, inquiring into texture and culture of youth life, and billed as the most extensive ethnographic study of youth and new media to be conducted in United States. A team of 28 researchers and collaborators at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, interviewed more than 800 young people and their parents over a three-year period. They spent more than 5,000 hours observing teens on websites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and other networked communities. And they conducted diary studies, in which youthful subjects documented their everyday use of digital media. The researchers believe their findings fill significant gaps in our understanding of how young people learn and develop social skills online, and that awareness gained in study offers much that teachers can use to cut into distance between them and their students that digital age has lengthened. What we have been looking at are properties of learning and participation that happen in networked publics of digital media creation and sharing, Mimi Ito told attendees at a Stanford University forum last year in a preview of then forthcoming research. Ito, a research scientist in Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine (UCI), was a principal investigator on study and report's lead author. When you have an ecology of culture and communication that supports peer-to-peer/many-to-many connections, how do kids exploit it for their own learning agendas? A Need for Openness A bedrock conclusion of study is its defense of constructiveness of time kids spend online, whether they're on Facebook or MySpace participating in, as study denotes, friendship-driven activities, or indulging their offbeat pastimes in interest-driven pursuits with other like-minded users. In fact, researchers found that internet is empowering a tech-savvy generation to pursue a central element of 21st-century education--self-directed learning, performed on kids' own terms and time schedules. It's a finding that compels educators to disregard any lingering notions that internet is strictly unproductive playtime. One of most important things I think educators should take away from this study is that they need to find a way to be open and receptive to things students are doing online on their own, says Heather Horst, an associate project scientist at UCI and a researcher on project. Horst was part of a research group whose work identified differing degrees of kids' online involvement, which group called of participation. Together, these genres provide a framework for understanding youth participation in different social groups and their online cultural associations. Though they come with rather unscientific tags of hanging out, messing around, and geeking out (see How Invested Are They? …