Idea Lab

News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

After a year of study, countless meetings, and at least two conferences, a team of researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have released a series of papers exploring the potential and challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment (note: I played a small role in this work). If you are sitting there thinking that this is a BIG topic rife with thorny questions about the future of journalism, you're right. Which is why the papers' authors conceived of the project as a conversation, facilitated by a series of papers that look at different facets of...

• December 18, 2008
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Youth, New Media Literacies, and Civic Engagement

by Henry Jenkins
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This fall, I am going to be teaching a course on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement, which is designed to help facilitate conversations across two of the projects we run through the Comparative Media Studies program: the Center for Future Civic Media, funded by the Knight Foundation as a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, and Project NML (New Media Literacies), which is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. My goal in the class is to systematically explore a rapidly expanding body of literature which deals with the ways that new forms of "participatory culture" are impacting how young people...

• September 7, 2008
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