OMG: The Totally Wired panel at the Brattle yesterday

Yesterday evening, I went to go see a panel hosted by the MacArthur Foundation and MIT Press, heralding their new 6-book volume laying the foundation for that shiny new pedagogy: Media Literacies. Participating in the panel were king of kings, Henry Jenkins of MIT's formidable Comparative Media Studies Program, Howard Gardner, the man who taught our generation's teachers to teach (and held his own on the topic pretty well despite being a self-professed luddite), and Katie Salen, who is not only a game designer, educator, and media literacy advocate, but one of those strange and beautiful creatures born as the seamless fusion of all three. Suffice to say, it was a very stimulating discussion, and I'm very excited that I was there for the "ceremony" where media literacy as an official educational discourse had finally "come out" to the rest of academia.

Henry started out by making an interesting correlation: he brought up the (somewhat cliché) image of the "good parent" who takes his/her kids out to art museums, fosters dinnertime conversation, etc., and compared that to the image of this century's "good teacher". We understand; the deeper an investment one makes in stimulating a child, the better formed that child will ultimately be.

When Jenkins made that leap, I immediately thought of that chapter in Stephen D. Hewitt's Freakonomics about the formula for "good parenting". The question was raised: if you bring your child to the art museum on a regular basis, will they be more successful than a child who was never taken? Ultimately, the Freakonomists concluded that a "good parent" doesn't get points for taking the kid to the art museum; a "good parent" is one whose natural notion of parenting is built around including their children in activities that they can enjoy as a family, that will stimulate the child to take part in family discussion, and that ultimately socializes the child in the world around him/her. I believe the quote is: "it isn't what the parent does, it's who the parent is" that makes the difference.

Similarly, you can't give a teacher some new software to teach, or a new device, or a Facebook group, and expect them to make a miracle out of it. A "good teacher" will use their unique ability to see possibilities in the contemporary, insanely digitized world, and use those in a way that will bolster a positive classroom environment. The panel did seem to do a good job of making this distinction. However, there's always the danger that this notion of greater investment could translate directly into "how about I make a game out of MySpace?" or something. (I don't want to do the whole night the disservice of glossing over the key issue; don't get me wrong, it was more nuanced than that. But, there's always that risk.) I can only hope their audience "got it". Some of the questions from the audience made me doubt. ("Have you seen these Webkinz your grandchildren are playing with?")

Sitting there, I wondered if twelve years ago these same people would have been talking about how Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is going to bridge the achievement gap. Or if, twenty-five years ago, they would have been singing the praises of Sesame Street. In any case, it boils down to an attempt by an older generation to intercept and rework the younger generation's attachments and associations with media. Older discourse has always been too quick to call this kind of enterprise "the Answer", and it's always misleading because there are some places adults cannot go, some spheres of play that can never be controlled, harnessed, or emulated. However, I have faith that the panelists are very much invested in this discourse, and will drive it in the direction it needs to go.