Today we are commemorating a bittersweet day. A year ago today we lost our dear leader, Peter Lyman, to a heroic battle with cancer. It is hard to be believe that the time has passed so quickly, as he feels very much present to us all here in the digital youth team. It feels fitting to acknowledge this passing of time and the memory of Peter on a day that marks the ending of our shared project together, and the completion of our final report.

We have spent the past year working on a massive collaborative writing and analysis effort that has resulted in a book manuscript, dedicated to Peter, that we are tentatively entitling, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. We have just finished the full draft, in tandem with our official project end on June 30. We plan to do a pre-release on the Internet here on this web site in early fall.

A paper for the 2008 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association

For the past few years I have been looking for learning in somewhat unexpected places—in young people’s social and recreational practices surrounding new media. I have been guided by the belief that interactive, digital, and networked forms of media are supporting new forms of engagement with knowledge and culture with unique learning dynamics. My fieldwork is indicating that a key trigger for these learning dynamics is the peer-to-peer traffic in media and knowledge that accompanies young people’s engagement with culture and knowledge that they are passionate about. As they become more pervasive in our everyday lives, networked and digital media become a vehicle and an infrastructure for this peer based learning and sharing.

My work has looked primarily at the kid-driven learning that accompanies engagement with Japanese popular culture that is social, challenging and entertaining, for example, Yugioh, Pokemon, fan fiction, video remix, and fan comics. These forms of media all support practices with learning dynamics that differ in some important ways from the learning that kids encounter in more formal and adult-driven settings. A more complete analysis and description of these dynamics requires lengthier treatment (Ito 2008). Here I present a few general principles and some illustrative examples from my most recent fieldwork.

By Sarita Yardi, PhD Candidate, Georgia Tech University. Sarita was a researcher with the Digital Youth Project while completing her Master’s degree in Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 and 2006.

As has been well-established throughout the research on digital media and technology, kids move between online and offline worlds with ease. Even kids who have limited access to the Internet, thus lying on the fringe of youth participatory culture, perceive their online environments to have real consequences and meaning for their everyday lives, Throughout my research on the digital youth project, I wanted to understand how we could harness kids understanding and enthusiasm for digital media. As a computer programmer myself, I hoped that encouraging kids to open the black box and explore the environments they participated in might help them become more sophisticated producers and consumers of their everyday media engagements. In 2005- 2006 I carried out a semester-long study of an after-school media literacy program with Sarai Mitnick [1]. We partnered with the YWCA in Berkeley, California, a program designed to empower middle-school aged girls by teaching them to program, design websites and discuss the role of technology in their lives. The program catered primarily to young African-American girls who lived in an economically disenfranchised area of Oakland, California [2].

By Judd Antin, PhD Student, School of Information, UC Berkeley

Along with several other DigitalYouth-ers, I spent almost a year, off and on, observing and participating with a group of kids in an arts and technology afterschool program (hereafter ‘the Center’). During my time with the group, kids sat down together many times to work on collaborative projects. Sometimes they did so at the behest of their instructors and other times on their own. This story, however, is about a different kind of collaboration, one which sprung up spontaneously and serendipitously around creative practice. It represents, I think, an enlightening case study in the synergy of digital technologies and co-located collaboration.

The setting for this vignette is a long narrow room, windowed on one side, packed full of Apple computers. The machines are arranged around the outside walls and in the center in clusters of 4 (Figure 1). At one end of the room sits a restless crowd of participants, aged 11-17, who have chosen to spend their afterschool time at the Center learning about digital audio and video. Today, the exercise is to experiment with a software called GarageBand. GarageBand is a simple but powerful graphical platform for creating music based on libraries of samples, sounds, and pre-recorded instruments. The kids have experimented with the software before – enough to eagerly anticipate one of their first full-scale music-making sessions.

The video of our forum at Stanford University, "From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth," is now online. We thank Global Kids for making the video of the event public on YouTube.

There are three videos in total. The first video features Julie Stasch, the Vice President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, who is introducing the forum.

The second video features researchers for the Digital Youth Project, including Mimi Ito who discussed Participatory Learning in a Networked Society: Lessons From the Digital Youth Project; danah boyd who focused upon Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics; Heather Horst who examined family dynamics in Understanding New Media in the Home; and Dilan Mahendran, who discussed Hip Hop Music and Meaning in the Digital Age.

The final video is a panel discussion featuring Dale Dougherty, General Manager, Maker Media Division, O'Reilly Media; Deborah Stipek, Dean, Stanford University School of Education; Kenny Miller, EVP & Creative Director, MTV Networks' Global Digital Media; Linda Burch, Chief Education & Strategy Officer, Common Sense Media and moderator Connie Yowell, Director of Education, The MacArthur Foundation.

The forum was presented by Common Sense Media, the MacArthur Foundation and the Stanford University School of Education.

By Megan Finn, PhD Candidate, School of Information, UC Berkeley

In conceptualizing the media and information ecologies in the lives of University of California, Berkeley freshmen, classical adoption and diffusion models proved inadequate. Rather than being characterized by a few individuals who diffuse knowledge to others in a somewhat linear fashion, many students' pattern of technology adoption signaled situations where various people were at times influential in different ever-evolving social networks. I use the term techne-mentor to help to describe this pattern of information and knowledge diffusion. The term “technology” is generally thought to be partially derived from the Greek word, techne, which means craftsmanship. Mentor is a figure in the Odyssey who advised both Odysseus and Telemachus, and is the source of the modern use of the word, mentor. Techne-mentor refers to a role that someone plays in aiding an individual or group with adopting or supporting some aspect of technology use in a specific context, but being techne-mentor is not a permanent role. The idea of the techne-mentor is useful for expanding conversations about adoption patterns to one of informal learning in social networks.

On April 23, at Stanford, we will be giving our first major public presentation of the outcomes of our research. We are near the end of three years of ethnographic work on 22 different case studies of youth engagement with new media. The MacArthur Foundation and Common Sense Media are organizing the evening event (4:30-8:30pm).

It will include talks and poster presentations from four of our team members: Heather Horst, Dilan Mahendran, danah boyd, and Mimi Ito. There will also be a panel or respondents including Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, Deborah Stipek, dean of the Stanford School of Education, Linda Burch of Common Sense Media, and Kenny Miller from MTV Networks. There will also be an opportunity to talk to all of the other researchers on the project and learn more about the various case studies. You can prepare for both small talk and big talk by reading some of our stories.

The event is public and you can see program details and register to attend this event (By April 18) at: www.eventsatcommonsensemedia.org

I spent some time at an afterschool media-technology program and one of the things I became curious about was how the kids there, all from lower income areas from San Francisco, learned to create their MySpace pages. Customizing a profile typically involves copying and pasting chunks of HTML and CSS code from other sites.[1]

Some of the code they are cutting/copying and pasting is code to make the profile look sleek or garish. Some of the code links to media, such as videos, of content found elsewhere, such as YouTube. At the program, I had a several chances to watch how kids quickly navigated web pages, found content they wanted, found the code, and stick it back on their own or their friends’ MySpace pages. one of the teenagers told me that getting videos on his MySpace page is easy: “It’s just cut and copy… cut and copy.” I guess the pasting wasn’t the important part here!

The above warning appears on the front page of a popular pro-anorexia internet discussion group, Hard Core Anorexic (1). On this site and countless others, women separated by geography, age and lifestyle log in to share their struggles, goals, triumphs and failures in living a "pro-ana" lifestyle. Anorexia, long the staple of after-school specials and public service announcements, may have fallen off the national radar screen, edged out by public panic about obesity. Nevertheless with increasing access to new media, those with (or claiming to have) eating disorders have congregated outside of hospitals and clinics, crafting a thriving pro-eating disorder community on the internet. While some of those with eating disorders seek and develop recovery oriented spaces online, others, such as the members of Hard Core Anorexic, specifically cultivate "pro-ana" communities. As a result there is a thriving online subculture characterized by specific symbols, rituals and the identity of the "wannarexic." Together with Dr. Natalie Boero, I've been examining 15 pro-eating disorder online discussion groups, with about 35,000 members, the vast majority of whom identify as female.

Previously, on the Digital Youth Project website… [Read the first part of this story]

On February 15 2006, Dennis McCauley published a short entry on his website, “GamePolitics.com”, eloquently titled “Rockstar’s Legal Gangs Beats Down Online Art Installation”. McCauley linked the aforementioned article written by Knutsen (2006a) describing Dave Beck’s case (here erroneously referred to as “Dave Berg”), and added a few personal comments. In order to foster the readers’ contributions, McCauley did not explicitly stated his position on the matter. His strategy proved successful. It did not take long for the first comment to materialize.