Henry Jenkins

TRANSCRIPT

Q: Let's start by talking about schools. What's happening with schools? Are they relevant anymore?

HJ: Well, I don't think we can afford to give up on schools, but I think schools are increasingly cutting themselves off from the main flow of the society. More learning, I think, is going on outside of school than on the inside of school. That kids are learning... those kids are lucky enough to have access to computers, and the Internet, and game systems, and mobile phones, are learning in all kinds of ways, all day long. There is a rich, cultural ecology around learning that is taking place. And schools by and large have barricaded themselves away from that. That if you go to a school: no Facebook, no MySpace, no YouTube, no Wikipedia, that sort of basic platforms that young people are drawing on to engage with the world, to express themselves, to seek out new content, to connect socially with other people, are blocked from the classroom. So those kids who've been immersed in that environment shed their technology and shed their best ways of learning as they enter the schoolhouse gates. A [redictionalist] experience... We've been doing some work teaching Moby Dick in schools and we discovered that the school computer filtered out all of the web pages that dealt with Moby Dick. It was like a fourth grader who sort of heard the teacher say Moby Dick and snickered because it had the word dick in it. The Internet filters do exactly the same thing. So they made it impossible for us to get access to information on Herman Melville's work in schools. That's the kind of way in which schools protect their children from poking their eyes out and not engaging with the rich environment that's around them.

Q: I know that obviously the school system is a gigantic beast that is slow to change, but what do you think really is at the bottom of why the school system has been so slow to embrace digital technology?

HJ: Well, I think, first of all, it's a generational shift, right. That we're just now getting to the point where that generation that grew up playing Super Mario Brothers are entering their first teaching jobs. And that's going to be a huge change. Except that the research shows that... a study at the University of Wisconsin looked at professional groups in training and found that, of ten professional groups, teachers were the least likely to have played video games, the least likely to have used most of the other websites that are central to the participatory culture. Teachers are, at the end of the day, creatures of the book. They have defended the book against mass culture and now they are defending the book against the web. And they have not been taught to conceptualize that we can have books and computers too. That we can enhance how we teach reading by engaging the broader community through Internet, and I think that's a central struggle. Beyond that I think there is... the Internet is based on what Cory Doctorow calls AdHocracy, that is, temporarily bringing people together toward common ends and projects. People clustering around shared interests almost without regard of age or geographic boundaries. Schools are bureaucracies, right? They are based on fixed relationships between teachers and learners, bureaucratic structures and regulations, one size fits all, standardized curriculums, standardized testing. The Internet is based on collective intelligence, we learn from each other. In a world of collective intelligence nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any individual member knows is accessible to the social network as a whole.

School is still based on the notion of the autonomous learner, that is, most forms of collaboration in the classroom are regarded as cheating. So there is a fundamental ideology at stake here between the kinds of social structures that are emerging online and the kinds of, rigid, governmental structures that have shaped education, at least for most of my lifetime.

Q: So, if you had to sell me on the notion that things are going to change by telling me that institutions with which I am familiar with, and always had confidence in, are beginning to embrace the notion of game based learning...?

HJ: Well, I think the change is going to come teacher-by-teacher, school-by-school. I think, right now, the work we're developing thorough Project New Media Literacy is designing stuff that's going to be highly module, that is, activities not lesson plans, not curriculum. Things the teachers can begin to do in the classroom that will give them a taste or glimpse of the changes that are taking place in the society around them. It's not about wholesale change; it's about localized practice. What we're finding is there really are gifted teachers in schools all across America who care about learning in the face of bureaucratic constraints, who are embracing the changes that are taking place around them because they see them open up children and young people and get them excited about things again. When they see... When they try those materials and they see that they work, they are much more ready to talk about them. Their colleagues, and they are the shock troops that bring it in to the schools. I don't think were going to see top down change that alters the way we relate to technology. The pressure from the government down has been still a culture of moral panic and anxiety about technology. A sense that whatever the story of the week is that the news media is covering; it's about how kids are at risk, and it may be violent video games or it may be sexual predators on MySpace, or it may be sexting messages on the mobile phone; they are going to embrace that, and they are going to discard most of the research which has really looked systematically at the sociology of how kids are getting together online and engaging with the world in new ways. They are going to dismiss the work of the MacArthur Foundation and other foundations that have funded massive bodies of research now on the learning potentials and learning values that are taking place in the online world. So I don't think that change is going to come top down from governmental institutions or from schools. I do think that there are plenty of teachers who get it and there are plenty of kids who get it, and together they are going to do incremental change that will gradually shift the center of education in the United States. The question is, can that change happen fast enough before a whole generation of kids turn out, drop out, decide that schools are irrelevant to them, and become even more alienated from traditional kinds of education than they are right now?

Q: What is your guess? When do you think that tide will really shift?

HJ: I wish I knew, you know. I go at this with total hope and optimism. I'm an absolute, you know, half full guy, but you face a lot of realities which are the teachers we're working with can't access basic technologies through their school. That they wired the classroom and then disabled the computer. They have opened the school up to new kinds of learning, and then told teachers "Don't go anywhere near it." And even if you bought the scenario, the danger scenario, that kids are at risk if they enter, say, MySpace. Won't we be better off as a society if we had educators who knew about the risks and the benefits of that and how to manage that risk? Talking frankly to kids about what they needed to do to be safe and ethical online, than saying "This doesn't belong in school and we're going to close the schoolhouse gates, and you're going to have to deal with it on your own. So I don't understand why we think we're making kids safer by cutting them off from education about the uses of these technologies, even if you believed they were as dangerous as some of the critics of those technologies think. What we've got to do is bring media literacy education into the classroom and have educators and librarians who become sort of informational coaches who help young people acquire the skill, develop the ethical standards, understand safe practices, and move into the space with a sense of open mindedness and creativity exploration. That's what we need to be doing through the schools.

Q: You say that you have got your first generation... I mean the kids who grew up playing Super Mario Brothers are now finally, you know, going into teaching. What's happening to schools of that?

HJ: I think schools of education right now are in a mixed space. I think some of them are embracing new modes of learning. I mean, most of the research on game based learning is coming out of schools of education. My field, media studies, has been actually fairly slow to respond to the opportunities all of this represents to reengage with education, you know? So I think schools of education have done a good job on that front, but many of them are also deeply reactionary. Many of the most outrageous statements about computers in the classroom also come from schools of education. They are becoming battlegrounds right now for people struggling to embrace or reject the direction that our society is moving. If technological change is the zone, you know, where the future is headed, then schools are the place where we are trying to sort through which of those changes we can embrace and which ones we can't. And the educational faculty at the center of that.

Q: I imagine you have met people like this, I know a few myself; there might be one or two in my family. These are people who have taught for many many years at the college level, and if you say that the generation of kids that they are seeing coming in are, you know, shallow, flip from thing to thing, can't think that deeply, you know... That the effect all of this stuff on them has actually been negative and that they are seeing tremendous losses. What do you have to say to that?

HJ: Well, and I think there's always the risk, whenever there's technological change, that some kids are going to get lost. Distraction is maybe the number one problem we face around new technologies. That said, I also think we can flip it and say that multitasking is a skill all of us need to embrace if we are going to manage the flow of information in our lives. All of us, adults and young people, are living in a world where information is coming at us from all directions all the time at a rapid pace and we need to be able to shift our attention, knowingly, between different sources of information; to make decisions quickly, based on sometimes partial information, and to try to predict or flush out the whole from the bits of information that are flying at us. That's a very different mode than sitting in a cabin in the woods reading a book all day and sort of writing with a quill pen on a piece of paper. We live in a different reality. And so yes, that ability to shift attention quickly is a skill that will enable many of these people to succeed. They need to acquire the ability to be contemplative, to think slowly, to see whole pictures, as well. It's about knowing how to shift between levels of attention, not having your attention controlled and taken over. So right now the teachers have one set of skills, the students have a different set of skills, and what they have to do is learn from each other how to develop of strategy for processing information, construction knowledge, sharing insights with each other. I think the truth has to lie in the middle between those two extremes.

Q: Do you struggle with the issue of distraction, personally?

HJ: I don't know anyone on the planet who doesn't struggle with the issue of distraction, personally. You get pulled in every direction today. That said, I think I also developed some pretty good strategies for being very focused on what I need to do to get a job done at any given point in time. And that means learning how to define goals and tasks to break those down into bite-sized parts. To be able to know when you can get something moving and when it's not going to work, to follow the path of least resistance. They are strategies adults have developed, if we have survived in the modern era, which allow us to function in a world of information overload. People as early as the 1960's were telling us we're moving to a reality of information overload. You know, this is not a new issue. So the point is that the people of the last fifty years have lived with what they perceived as an information overload. Go back earlier, read descriptions of the progressive era, walking down the streets in New York, and the sense of your eyes being pulled in every direction by the hubbub of the crowd. People described it as being like electrocuted, you know, bolts of energy shooting through you from every direction. This is a problem that we as human beings have coped with throughout most of the twentieth century, into the twenty-first century, and the good news is we survived it. As a culture we've learned how to adapt to it, and good things came out in every decade that we can talk about throughout that entire period of time.

Q: You don't think that... I mean, I know for me it feels like the last few years, just since mobile technology, you know, became what it is, it has accelerated at a pace that's almost dizzying. I mean, that personal sense of sort of disorientation and overload.

HJ: Well this is what Alvin Toffler, again, in the 1960's called "Future Shock". Right? Toffler said, again, in the 1960's the rate of change was going to accelerate to the point that we could no longer adjust to the changes that are taking placed around us. We would be sort of shell-shocked, like soldiers returning from the war. That was his prediction as early as the 1960's. 1960's Toffler also predicted that we would reach a point where we wouldn't know our neighbors across the hall from each other because we would see relationships as discardable because of the rate at which we moved from one city to the next. Those are real problems. What the good news is, we've adapted to them. Yes, I would suggest social friendships mean more today because of the availability of social networks, which allow us to carry our friendships with us as we move from place to place. I'm moving from Boston to LA. As I do so I'm fully aware that my friends in Boston are people I can remain in contact with through the Internet, and I will be able to engage with them wherever I am. That, in fact, my assistant works in New York City. She's going to continue to work with me when I work in LA, just as she worked with me when I worked in Boston. This ability to build ties has been part of what's repaired the damage caused by other kinds of change in the twentieth century. Similarly, the sense of disorientation the other generations felt. In a world where I can augment the reality around me by access to information appliances that I can access on my mobile phone, on my blackberry; pieces of information that help me to navigate through strange cities, that help me to find what I'm looking for, that allow me to have the information I need, just in time to deploy it. Those are tools that help us deal with the complexity of contemporary urban experience, and they are tools which expand my capacity to think, even as they also represent potential distractions which fragment my attention.

Q: Blows your mind. Blows your head off. OK, assuming that we are evolving, which is really what you are suggesting. We are evolving, we're adapting, and for want of a better term, digital native has come to sort of symbolize this new creature, this creature that... Can you give me a portrait of the human being you think, once this transition has resolved itself, will survive this period?

HJ: Well, I think the person who will survive this period of evolution is someone, first of all, who knows how to operate within a collective intelligence structure. That is, a structure where people pool knowledge, where they collaborate, where no one knows everything. We no longer have the renaissance man who stands apart from the world, we have people who work through problems together, who are able to expand their creative capacity, broaden their knowledge by working with other people who know things they don't, who are able to navigate across cultural divides that baffle us today. But online, the ability to straddle those divides is much greater. That my ability to communicate with someone on the other side of the planet increases, but with it then has to increase my social skills, my cultural knowledge, which allows me to deal with people who think and believe things fundamentally different from myself. So if we have survived it is going to be because we have learned to work together in a group. Now that does not mean that I no longer have individuality. We are not talking about hive minds, the collapsing of the individual expressivity. You know, we're talking about each individual has something they know, and a way of knowing it that matters in this new social structure that is going to emerge in. When we... In fact, as society, which is based on collective knowledge production is a society which places enormous value on diversity. That is, the more diverse your team is the better you can solve problems. The more things you know and the more things you can make a difference in. So in fact there are strong incentives in that culture to reach out for diversity and strong incentives for people to develop individual expertise that emerges from their life experiences, from their hobbies, their interests, their passions and so forth. What it does though is that the teams that you're working in will reconfigure rather rapidly, depending on the problems that we're working through. And we've already seen this in gaming communities and online forums and so forth; people come together. Perhaps they like a TV show that's on this season. They compare notes; they work through the challenges together. They try to figure out what's going on on the island in Lost or whatnot. And next year they regroup and reconfigure around a different question. They organize around a campaign, they elect a president, they reconfigured a deal with healthcare issues, or global warming, or some other sort of concern. This constant shifting of structures requires someone who is incredibly adaptable, flexible, open-minded, willing to try new things. And that sense of experimentation is something that I think those kids who've most immersed themselves in the Internet are beginning to acquire. But there's also this problem that a lot of kids are going to be left behind. This is what I call the Participation Gap. You know, we talked for twenty years about the digital divide, which was about how do we ensure that every kid in America has access to network computer technologies. But what we are now learning to focus on is who... access to the social and cultural experiences that emerge around those platforms. And that sense of empowerment, entitlement, desire to participate, those are things that are emerging almost organically in some homes; that those homes where people are spending a lot of time online, and adults are knowledgeable and helping young people sort through their experiences online, you're beginning to see the skills that I am describing emerge... we're beginning to see young people learn how to navigate these spaces in ways that are productive to them. This is the new hidden curriculum. Just as in the 1960's people talked about kids who grew up with encyclopedias in the home, or opera records, dinner table conversations about politics, regular trips to the museum, you know. Those kids did better in school, and more importantly, were perceived by teachers to do better in school because they spoke the language of school. Now we are at a point where some kids grow up immersed in social network sites, in YouTube and Flickr and Twitter, who have acquired the skills that navigating through the digital space. And those kids have a habit of mind, a way of processing information, that is going to serve them well in school, and serve them well in the workplace of the future. Those kids who have not had those experiences are being locked out. And the problem is, when we lock those experiences out of school as well, there is no way for them to catch up. Schools are our best tool for allowing those kids who would be left behind to acquire the skill and the sense of self-confidence that will allow them to more meaningfully participate in an environment.

Q: So it's not about access to technology, it's about something else?

HJ: We are way past access to technology. I mean, the problem is schools have technology now, I mean, they're certainly not "every school has one laptop per child," and maybe some schools have no laptop per child, but schools are, by and large... wired the classrooms, but we disabled the programs that are allowing kids to participate in meaningful ways in the digital environment. We've shot out those things that are sites where real learning is taking place and we have sort of reduced the school computer to a high class set of flip cards. You know, it's like a chart; it's like a word processor. That's it. That's not what I think the full potential of computers are. So when people say, "Should we put more technology in the classroom?" that's an open question. Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe the computer, you know... maybe we have enough computers. It's how do we use that stuff, how do we teach the core social skills and cultural competence that young people need to meaningfully participate in this new environment? How do we create experiences which utilize those skills and knowledge to deal with the content that schools are wanting to work with? How do we use computers to help people think about Melville and Hawthorne; to think about maps; to think about mathematics in new ways? It's not about teaching the machine, it's about using the social processes the machine enables in ways to enhance learning. And I think it's, sort of, getting us out of the fetishization of the computer and into a space where we understand that the computer is ultimately about a social and cultural change, not about technological change. And that's where I think we really need to be focusing our energies.

Q: So talk me though the sort of, accessible ways you can... An example of how a school would work. I mean a game that would, you know, could conceivably be used in a classroom setting to really transform [unintelligible].

HJ: Well, let's start with a game we already use in the classroom, the model United Nations. At least since I was in high school, schools have done what's essentially a simulation of the United Nations. Kids choose up roles and countries that they are supposed to represent. Each school may represent a country; they gather together, they work through the processes of the United Nations. That's a role-playing game, pure and simple. Educators have understood that for a long time. One of the things they understand about that game is that you don't just show up and start playing, that there is build up to it, right? You spend time in the library researching your country, studying the United Nation's charter, understanding how the United Nations actually operates. And a good teacher will take the experience of playing the game and bring it back in the classroom. So you debrief, you have class discussions, students talk to other classes about what they experienced. Maybe they write up their experience. The model United Nations is a game is at the center of that process, but is not the total of that process. Now swap out the model United Nations for some sort of historical role-playing game. For a while I was working on project where we modeled colonial Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution, and every student would be a townsperson. The townspeople would be actual historical figures. They would play though the process of deciding how the community of Williamsburg was going to respond to the taxes and the various acts the British imposed upon them. You don't just start playing the game; you, in fact, spend time researching the game. The colonial newspapers of Williamsburg are online, scanned, and you can actually look at primary source documents to understand the issues that community was engaged with. You don't just stop playing, you debrief. Each kid would have a different experience having played a role-playing game. Each would have seen the world from a different point of view. And just as a kid going on a field trip might have noticed different things, and therefore has something to contribute to a class discussion, those kids who play different roles in the game would have something to contribute and be able to talk through that experience in the classroom.

So, just as a kid who went on a field trip would have something to contribute to a class discussion because they saw something another classmate didn't, a kid who played a role-playing game would have something to contribute because of their different perspective on the action. So we experimented with having kids write diaries and characters; describe the characters point of view on the events of the revolution. And as they wrote the diaries they found they had to cheat by turning to the textbook and reading more deeply in order to get the information they want to use. Imagine another scenario, a game that's just been completed by the Education Arcade--our group at MIT--is about math skills. And basically the focus is on not the numbers and equations of math, but set theory, proportions, ratios, so forth. You use those principles to solve problems in the game world. The game world is a kind of world of magic, and mazes, and mythical creatures, and so forth; you solve a lot of complex problems, go into school the next day and the teacher says, "Remember level five, how did you beat it? What worked, what didn't work? Let me show you this equation. This is the principle you were working with." And then the teacher says, "Go back, play the game some more. See if you play better knowing the underlying mathematical principles." But it allows her to begin by saying, you know, "You already know what I'm about to teach you because you've used it in this game. You understand how to make it work, I'm just giving you a language to describe and explain what it is you've just done." And that sense of moving from the game play in home back to the discussion in the classroom allows you to begin to integrate a math game into the teaching of mathematics.

Q: So, let's talk about the, sort of, standbys of the system now; books and memorization, what happens to those two icons?

HJ: Well, personally I like books. I have a fair number of them myself, and I don't think books are going to go away. I think what changes is how we think about reading. So we have been working with Moby Dick, [and through] some of the work we're doing with the New Media Literacies Project, and we worked with this guy Ricardo [Fitzwally], who is an African American educator/theater director who worked in prisons to get young people to read Moby Dick from front to end, and then to rewrite Moby Dick in a contemporary setting. And so it would encourage young people to do was talk about who Ahab would be today, or who Ishmael would be today. And these people used Moby Dick as the starting point to tell their own story. And this got adapted into a stage play. And we were so inspired by the process of getting kids to read, not just to replicate what was in the book, but as a creative starting point. Much the way kids who read Harry Potter and write stories, fan fiction stories, about Harry Potter, we were encouraging kids to read this book, to rewrite it, to restage it, to remix it, and as we dug deeper into Moby Dick we discovered that's exactly what Melville had done. That it's full of the story of Jonah and so forth. Herman Melville was a master remixer of nineteenth century culture. So rather than seeing the book as something you memorized or learned how to quote on an exam, we saw it as the beginning of a creative process which allowed you to become a media maker. Much the way kids today are using YouTube, or other platforms, to just remix their culture and move forward from it. One of the actives we did there; we began with a simple activity of asking kids to map what kinds of things they read, and the kinds of people... and map who they were and how they read. So that, you know, there are a variety of identities we're going on. We had brought into our school, where kids were reading well below their grade level, but for the first time some of those kids realized, "Hey, I read all the time. It's not reading I have problems with, it's a particular way of reading, a particular kind of text that's causing a problem for me." And they began to reappraise themselves as readers as a result of it. One of the things we do is to have each student take a single page from Moby Dick, and they begin to annotate it. That is, they write in the margins, they identify key words, they draw pictures, they do what an illuminated manuscript might do, and then they present that to their classmates. So they take ownership over knowing everything they can know about Moby Dick and then they present that to each other so that they are teaching each other and learning from each other. From that point forward, as they read the book, each of them sets a goal for themselves. "Why am I reading this book? I want to follow this. I want to understand the biology of the whale. I want to understand how sea ships work. I want to follow the biblical references." And this class as a whole was not one where everyone was supposed to read for the same thing and get the same thing out of the book, but it was a place where people learned to pool knowledge, to bring together what they knew from reading the book from very different ways. Each had a sense of their own expertise and were empowered to be responsible for what they learned, and each contributed to a shared enterprise of understanding the book. And that's much more inline with the way knowledge is going to be produced in the future. So it isn't, at the end of the day, about memorizing. And it isn't about every student knows the same thing. It is about every student develops the ability to take ownership over their own learning, and each of them contributes something to the social dynamic that emerges around a given book.

Q: You know, I'm a parent as well, and I struggle with this a lot in terms of my own children, thinking about why it is, that for me, there is still a kind of, regardless of what they are actually doing on a computer, there is a hierarchy for me. There's, you know, the physical world and there is the virtual world, and I want them to be in the physical world as much as possible. And I recognize that for people like you that hierarchy may not exist, and I wonder where you fall on that? And, you know, are the two the same thing? Do you even differentiate really?

HJ: Well, when I was growing up my mother would often say, "Stop watching TV." "Stop watching movies." "Go outside and play." But now I make my living as a professor of media studies who studies film, television and the Internet. So clearly something valuable was going on there for me. I found the passion, I found something that excited my mind, I found a creative outlet, I developed a sense of curiosity through engaging with that material. And my mother was smart enough to see where that passion was and allow me to pursue it, and I'm the person that I am today. So the first thing, when I ask, is not, "Is it virtual or is it real?" but, "Where's the passion?" Where's the curiosity?" Is there something going on there that makes the kids mind come alive? And if that's online than you probably have to accept that that's online. Just as I have a son--I don't have a jock bone in my body--but my son got interested in baseball. I was there for him, right? That's what you do. It's not like every parent in America loves listening to off key performances of John Philip Souza, right? But you go to the band concert because it's what your kid cares about. And maybe you don't have to care about the video games that they are playing to see value in spending time watching them play, congratulating them on what they accomplished, asking them questions about what it means to them, and being attentive and aware of what's going on. So at the end of the day the virtual real is maybe less important than "Is it deadening or does it make your kid come alive?" You know, beyond that, yes, I think that to survive today you have to acquire skills at both levels. You have to develop, just as a social dynamic, you have to be able to process information in a computerized environment, and you have to be able to deal with people face to face. And if one is foreclosing the other, then there is a problem. If you are insisting they go play outside, the absence of learning any of this stuff that takes place online, than you've caused them a disadvantage. If you let them play online all the time, and they never go outside, their bodies are going to be hurt form that process. Sunlight is a good thing; fresh air is a good thing. Now, the other problem we face with all of this is that many kids in America today don't have backyards. Right? My son never had a house that had a backyard that I could send him out to play in. We lived in apartment housing as I was a graduate student; lived in urban areas. The amount of public space that is devoted for kids has decreased dramatically over the last block of time. So telling a kid to go play outside is meaningless if there is no outside for him to play in. And, if we can build into the virtual environment some of the things that would require playing outside, so much the better, because then the game beats having them stare blankly at the walls. You know, latchkey kids are a real phenomenon and have been for a long time, and I'd rather have a kid come home and play a game that allows them to safely engage with other people, to explore environments, to solve problems, to have a sense of accomplishment, than coming home to an empty apartment that offers none of those intellectual challenges and resources. So yes, in an ideal world I might be back in the 1940's or 1950's with kids playing in vacant lots down the street, and wading in the creek, and making dams, and all of the backyard play stuff. I love that stuff. But the reality is most kids don't get to do that and the questions are: are they better of playing games or exploring the internet, or doing what would be left to them given a lack of public space for recreation? And I think they are better off online.

Q: What do you believe about--this is probably a hard question to answer in any sort of absolute way--but the relationship between... I mean, Caitlin and I have been spending time in Second Life recently because we've been doing events in Second Life for this project, and it's really our first foray, so it would kind of be interesting to observe our own reactions, and we both have the same feeling of feeling incredibly immersed and pulled and fascinating, excited by the experience, but feeling somewhat depressed or flat after leaving it. Not so much flat like, "I don't want to go back to my life it's better there," but just a kind of almost physical sensation. And I'm trying to figure out what that is. If that's just a sort of the newness of it or if there is some way in which, because of the two dimensionality of the screen itself, that, you know, everything is mediated. It is a mediated experience, and I just wonder if you had any thoughts about that?

HJ: Well, it's a mixed bag. I think there's been interesting research done around autistic kids and Second Life, which suggests that they can actually begin to build social interactions with other people because they have stripped down the signs of social behavior.

There has been some interesting research looking at Second Life; the use of Second Life by autistic children, kids with social disorders, kids who have difficulty dealing with the overload of visual information that people give off to each other in real world social spaces. And what the research is showing is that in fact they can begin to make progress by stripping down the signs, recognizing that the avatar is controlled by another human being, that every sign that you see conveys some piece of information that person has concisely chosen to communicate with you. But it's not the sort of ticks, and jerks, and jolts of seeing a complex human being interact with you. And that simplicity gives them some sense of beginning to understand another person's point of view. On the other hand, for those of us who do live well in the world of flesh and bodies, it can seem impoverished. You know, I feel like my gestures are an important part of who I am; my ability to laugh spontaneously. The sort of information I give off from my body as I communicate with people is not so fully calculated in the real world. That I have to think about what I'm saying and what I'm doing with my body all the time, on a deeply conscious level, means I'm really restricted as a teacher. So when I go into Second Life and give a lecture, I really feel stripped down of the basic stuff that allows me, as a human being, to communicate with another human being. And so there is a sense of loss there, I think. That said, when I've gone into Second Life, I'm suddenly finding myself talking to people all over the planet who are simultaneously there, and present in the same space I am, and the immediacy of that connection I feel to those people is so visceral it seems to be deeper than talking on the telephone. You know, deeper than typing into a computer. That the sense that we have bodies; that we can see each other, we can interact with each other, I can walk over and shake hands with that person. That creates a sense of careness, of simultaneity that is so intense that I think it's unlike anything else I've every experienced.

Now, some of what we are describing is the state of the technology, right? We are still fairly new in exploring virtual worlds. And Second Life, frankly, is a clunky interface that is hard for people to program in. For all the promise of "everyone can build their own reality," the reality is that most people can't, and it's really hard to get what you want to do in Second Life. I have a tendency to fall asleep because I forgot to control my avatar, or to fly up in space and knock over things, or whatever. It's like I'm not in control again in Second Life. It's like I'm learning to walk all over again. But, so what will happen when we get more robust tools, when we have internalized what it is to live in a virtual world, and it feels more comfortable and natural to us? When we, in fact, have more expressive designs built in to Second Life that allow us to communicate more spontaneously what we are feeling and thinking, without having to hit a button, and you know, control every gesture that we make. I think something much more interesting can emerge. So, when I look at Second Life, yes, in its present configuration, it feels a bit impoverished. But what it excites in me is a sense of where we are going that I think there is something really exciting [ahead].

Q: I completely agree. And I agree with you about the difference between talking on the phone or typing an email. It is so much more rich, you know, to have these physical selves, even if they are avatars. It's incredible... An incredibly intense experience to be in there.

HJ: I think one of the things people... I use the talking phone metaphor because people forget that when you are talking on a telephone you are talking through a mediated technology, right? That we're used to... You know, if we think about where we are when we talked on the telephone, we'd be hard pressed to describe because we're, sort of where we're physically at, and we're sort of mentally where the person on the other side of the phone is. This is not a new experience. I mean, not all of us in the twentieth century have inhabited virtual worlds, and the virtual world of the telephone is simply one we've become comfortable with; we've taken it for granted, it's second nature to us. We don't think of it as a virtual world anymore. But thinking about it in those terms then allows us to say well, "What are the [affordances] of Second Life that it does allow you this sense of physical presence that extends beyond simply relaying your voice?" And you can say, all right, as mediated experiences go, it may in fact be a better experience than talking into a telephone is going to be.

Q: And it may be that as we get more and more comfortable with it, and used to it, it requires a kind of less effort from us and therefore becomes a more organic experience, [you know?]

HJ: Well, when we're talking about.... We know how to talk on a telephone; we don't yet know how to occupy a virtual world.

Q: It takes a lot of energy, and intensity to [be] in Second Life, I think. Now I'm curious about, you know, you've talked about that magic circle of play and this notion [kind of] separating play from reality, or whatever it is, and I think in terms of war games that's certainly something one can understand. But I also wonder, you know, how can on the one hand we have this magic circle of play, and on the other hand you believe that these enhancements we get in virtual worlds--these skills we learn--translate into the rest of our lives? How can both be true?

HJ: Well, I think we've got to separate out the model of effects from the model of meaning. That when people talk about video game violence causing real world violence they are in a world of effects. They are saying that playing this game makes it harder for me to separate reality from fantasy; it has an unconscious impact on myself and my relationship to the world. It's a kind of brain washing model. It's that brainwashing model that I am objecting to, right? That most of the research shows that media affects us the least when it tries to change the way we see the world. It's most powerful when it reinforces our existing understanding of the world. That we are reading media in relation to things we already know, and the reality we already live with it. So it's a critical judgment that's going on there. It's not monkey see, monkey do. It's not, the game did something and therefore I'm going to replicate it in the real world. So what I think about learning, what I'm arguing is that, in fact, we are involved in a conscious process when we play video games. We're hypothesis testing. We make a theory about how the world of the game is going to operate. We test that theory through our actions. We then try to refine our actions so we can perform better in the game, and therefore refine our understanding of the world. We're doing what the scientific method advocates. We're learning a habit of mind, a way of consciously working through information. We're acquiring skills that are about problem solving skills that we can translate into another reality. So it's... Like reading a book, I can play a game that shakes up my sense of the world, that forces me to think about new questions, that encourages me to see things from a different point of view. But the book that changed my life didn't do so by brainwashing me, it did so by opening up my curiosity and encouraging me to explore something that I never was exposed to before. The game that changes my life doesn't do so by turning me into a psycho killer, or turning me into a scientist, right? What it does is say, "Here's an interesting part of the world, maybe you hadn't looked at it before." A kid who sits down and plays Sim City and begins to think about the city in different lines. I know my kid, when once we played Sim City he was driving around saying, "Oh! This is an industrial area," "this is a residential area," "this is a mixed-use area." It was a vocabulary of seeing the world that he acquired from playing Sim City. And I think that's very different form saying if you played Grand Theft Auto you would want to grab a baseball bat and club someone. These are totally different levels of claims about the nature of education.

Q: I understand exactly what you're saying but I just forgot the next question that I was going to ask you. All right. Well, if I fail in a video game I can play again and I can get another chance, right? Failure in the real world: that's it. Is there any risk here that, you know, the more time that kids spend in this virtual space, magical space, the harder it is going to be to sort of accept the boundaries and the limitations of the real world?

HJ: Well, we learn by failing, right? We learn by making mistakes, and doing something over, and doing it better. When our schools make failure fatal they are cutting themselves off from the most vital process of learning there is. That is, learning through our own mistakes, thinking critically at our own behavior. And in schools, let's face it, failure is fatal. You know, you don't do well on that standardized test and you're out. So we do want to have people understand calculated relationships to risk. We do want people to understand that behavior has consequences, and those consequences are real, and there are some things you can't reboot and start over and try again, you know? In a personal relationship I can't--if I really hurt you deeply--I cannot say, well, "Let's start all over again, and we will try this relationship from the top." Right? If I do something in the real world that has consequences, I can't say, "Game over, reboot." That's a real phenomenon, but it is about thinking forward to think about your consequences. Now what's interesting about games is it's a medium that's all about choices and consequences. I make a choice in the game and I can play out what its consequences are going to be. I can then go back and make a different choice and play out what the consequences of those choices are. It's a way of rehearsing skills, of trying out strategies. It's a bit like throwing a ball at the wall and catching it is a way of preparing myself for playing catch. It's not the same thing as reality, but I may not be using it to do the same thing that real experiences are going to do. But it does allow me... Say that an average thirteen year old can think, what, ten minutes ahead, but they can sit down and play a video game in which they live an entire lifetime in an hour or two hours, and they see how the choices that get made affect the character as they grow and develop in response to the changes that are taking place in the world around them. As games begin to explore the possibilities of choice and consequence, they become, maybe, the best tool for exploring effects. For exploring, you know, how to make decisions. For exploring how to make choices, and understand and predict what their effects are going to be. And I think there is nothing that the classroom offers, right now, that comes anywhere close to allowing kids to really see, long term, the consequences of the choices they make.

Q: We went to South Korea last October, which you probably know is dealing with, you know, they've decided that they are having a public health crisis of internet addiction. And they have got these camps around the country. I mean, who knows what's really going on, except that it seems as though there certainly are a number of kids for whom the power of these games has, you know, addressed whatever imbalance they already had in their lives. But the effect has been that it has taken over their lives. You know? So until the real world and schools are more successful in addressing our needs, isn't there a risk that this is such powerful technology that we could get lost in it?

HJ: Well, to begin with, I think the word addiction is really a cultural category. Right? If I stay up all night [playing] a video game, I'm addicted. If I stay up all night reading a book, I'm congratulated. You know, I think if I spend weeks getting better at World of Warcraft, that's bad. If I spend weeks rehearsing and getting ready to play on the football team, that's good. It's a about a statement of values, and so we should be really cautious looking at the use of the word addiction in countries whose values are fundamentally different from our own. We don't know what's being read as misbehavior, or alienated behavior. We look at North Korea, we look at China, we look at other countries around the world which have very different social, cultural, and political systems than ours. So I would be very cautious about easily mapping claims about addiction made in those parts of the world to the American context. Now I've talked to some of the leading American researchers--medical researchers--who work on games addition. And what they say is, yes, there are some kids who do honestly seem to be addicted to games or addicted to the Internet, but there are relatively few. More often what you see are kids who are depressed, and that depression manifests itself into an unwillingness to go out into the world and face other people. That it manifests itself in a desire to do things over and over because they are comfortable and they are familiar. They minimize the risk. And that can manifest itself in terms of a behavior of staying indoors, of playing the same game over and over, not wanting to talk to other people. But the game or the Internet didn't cause that. They are not addicted to that, that's simply the vehicle through which their depression is manifesting itself. It is a symptom. It may also, though, be the therapy, because a kid who moves from playing a standalone game to playing a multiplayer game begins to interface with other people. Whether they stay at home or not, they begin to experiment with social skills. They may even discover there are things that they do well in that environment. And it can be the beginning of the cure, just as it can be a symptom of the problem. So you know, we certainly want to watch those issues very closely. I'm not saying there is no Internet addiction or no games addiction, but I think the category gets lumped on really quickly by people who simply don't like what that young person is involved for. Who don't approve of playing games the same way they approve of reading a book.

Q: Well why is it? I actually wrote a blog about this. You now, I noticed that my... I went out to dinner with my kids and I noticed that my son was reading, and that he got so lost in a book that he didn't talk to us the entire time we were eating. And I forgave it. I was just kind of like, "Oh. It is so great that he'd be [unintelligible]." If he had been on a Nintendo I would have just, you know, bit his head off.

HJ: Yeah.

Q: So, what is that? What is it about us that's so judgmental towards video games? Why is that?

HJ: I don't know. I think it's just very simple. They weren't part of the world that most parents grew up in. I don't know about you, but as a parent I found myself, in the first five years of my sons life, saying absolutely everything I swore as a kid I would never say. Right? You fall back on the scripts of parenting that you inherited from your parents. When at a loss, when you're just gasping for words because your son or daughter has done something that was utterly unpredictable and you didn't know what to do, you find yourself sounding like your mother or father, and it just spits out. We don't have a script for video games. It wasn't part of the world we grew up in. We really don't understand what's going on when kids play those games, and therefore there is sort of a mild panic that begins to take over in the minds of many adults. I don't know what he's doing. I don't know if this is causing problems for my kids. I can't tell whether this is safe or unsafe, creative or uncreative, enlivening or deadening. I don't know what to look for. And most parents, I think, who haven't grown up with games, have that moment of panic when they see the video game. Books have been part of your life or part of the lives of generations; we have a script for it. We know what our parents would have said if I read a book through dinner. You know, we don't know what our parents would have said if I played a videogame through dinner. And because it's new and alien, the first response is to say well, "That must be bad." But it may or may not be. It may be no different to play a videogame through dinner than to read a book through dinner.

Q: OK, two questions. One is, is this analogous to rock-and-roll or television, or is it bigger, I mean, as a cultural shift? [Unintelligible].

HJ: Well, I think the basic pattern holds true throughout the twentieth century. Every new media technology was embraced, first by young people who were seeking for a way to express their identity separate form their parents. It was initially met with opposition and suspicion by parents, who didn't have a script to deal with what young people were doing. That opposition frequently gets triggered by some real world incident; a tragedy, a trauma, a loss, and becomes full-fledged moral panic, where you stop asking questions and decide you've got to do something. You know? You decide you have all the answers; you're going to act even if you're wrong. The minute you act, even if you're wrong, you're going to do the wrong things, because you're not asking the right questions to govern your behavior. The end of that cycle seems to be the generation that grew up with that media, becomes parents, becomes teachers, has a different relationship with it, they have a more balanced perspective on it, they begin to understand how this thing can be used constructively as well as destructively, and they began to sort out the pieces that make judgments that are much more local rather than: rock and roll is bad, this artist is doing something that I find misogynistic or disturbing and I don't want to listen to it, this one's doing something that's socially beneficial, and so forth. So, the pattern is the same, what's changed is the scale and scope of the change. That a lot of stuff is changing all at once, has been changing all at once. We are in a, you know... For a decade or two we are in a prolonged and profound period of media transition and we don't know when it's going to end. And so it's not that individually we haven't dealt with any new technologies before, or new modes of cultural expression, they are just coming faster, and faster, and faster. And as parents, I think, we don't know what to do with it. And that sense of just gut wrenching fear and panic leads to people prohibiting things that might be valuable, not sorting out the pieces, not making the core distinctions they need to make, and finding yourself, not quite believing the stuff you heard on the late night news program, but sort of thinking, well, maybe it would be better to be safe than sorry. Maybe I'll shut off all social network access until I find out if there really are child predators online or not. And what I find when I talk to parents is they are usually fairly easy to convince if you really lay out the evidence, if you talk with reason. They don't believe, in their heart of hearts, it's doing bad things. They are seeing the good things that it does for young people, but they are afraid of making the wrong decision. And sometimes that leads to a very conservative response of: just shut it out. Let's play it safe, let's shut it down, let's unplug the thing until we know what's going on. And I think that's where we are at as a culture, and that's leading to conflicts across generations, at homes and at schools, because young people are wanting to explore, wanting to go in those spaces, wanting to try those things, and don't understand why their parents are so frightened of them.

Q: Well, I think that part of the problem too is parents don't understand why they are so frightened of them, and I wonder where... I mean [truly] video games, it seems that they are the kind of deep--and you talked about it yourself--there's just... nobody knows: Are they good for them, or are they not good for them? Where is the data, you know? What do we know? I mean, really know?

HJ: Well, the telephone: is it good for us or is it bad for us? We've used it in a variety of ways. We have used it to send ransom messages for people we've kidnapped, we've used it to reach out to people in pain, we've used it to connect with our loved ones, we've used it in a variety of different ways. Games are not good or bad, games are media. They tell stories, they create experiences, they tell stories that matter to the culture. Some of which are banal and trivial, some of which have bad values, some of which are disturbing, some of which are educational and rich, culturally, some which express new things that couldn't be expressed through any other medium. What we have to do is stop making a distinction at the level of the medium, and get down to the specifics. Just as I decide which TV show my son or daughter should watch, or which movie they should go, or whether a book is good or bad for them at that particular age, that's the level of distinction we have to make about video games. They are part of our reality. Kids are going to play games. New evidence suggests that those kids who don't play games are probably the ones most at risk because they are also cut off from other aspects of their peer culture. They are not engaging with other young people. So that's I think, you know, as big a concern as, "Oh, do they play games too much?" What we have to do is learn to say, "All right, let's look at this game. What's going on?" And I would say that the best way to do it is to watch your kid play, to engage in conversations with them, to find out what they are getting out of that experience of play. And that's situational; it's who they are at that particular moment, in response to this particular story. It's the same way that I have to sort through which video is my sons ready to watch? It just requires you to get enough inside that medium that you can recognize that there are distinctions to be made about it. So game playing is not good or bad. It has potentials, it has risks. How do we learn enough to know which is the right thing for our sons and daughters to play at a particular moment in their development?

Q: Well, you're also dealing with, I think, ways of seeing, and people who didn't grow up with this stuff don't know how to look at it, they don't know how to see it in the way that kids do. And so, it's almost like being somewhat blind.

HJ: And I think that's where we have to flip the rolls and let the kids show us how to see this new digital world. You want to understand the social network sites, have your kid work with you to build a MySpace page for yourself. Have them decide... help you decide what pictures to put up, what information to reveal. Trust me, the kid doesn't want you exposed to their friends online any more than you want them exposed online. And so they actually will suddenly say, "well, I don't know if I'd put that picture up, mom." and then it opens up a space for a conversation about values, about how we present ourselves online. You... in fact, being a little ignorant is not a bad thing if ignorance does not lead to fear. If ignorance leads to curiosity, to a desire to explore and dig deeper, ignorance can actually create a place where there can be real exchange between young people and their parents. Allow them to feel a sense of expertise, allow them to take ownership of their learning, and the culture that matters to them, and communicate it to them. And that, I think, is itself a very constructive way of parenting.

Q: What does that mean, what are the implications of spending more time with [these] media, regardless of whether they are necessarily good or bad, since its how we use them?

HJ: OK. So I think the issue of time is one of proportion. That is, one of the challenges is that many games that are designed today do require an intense amount of play experience. A kid really immerses themselves in it. Frequently not for a prolonged period of time, they may give themselves over to a game for a weekend or a couple of weekends, but they really do immerse themselves in that experience for a prolonged period of time. Certainly longer than I would spend watching a movie or even watching a television show. That is, playing a game to completion may take a hundred to two hundred hours of time. So that creates... that does shape the young person's experience. That does take over their life in a certain way. And I think the danger is not that the immersion in that world is bad, but that it may foreclose other kinds of experiences. That doesn't mean we should shut games out. It just means we should keep games in proportion. We should, sort of... I think the industry owes it to parents to design some games that can be played in shorter burst. Games that can be played, you know, in an hour or two, that allows you to explore something and move on. I think there is a real value in diversity of experiences, and exploring many kinds of spaces. And I mean both virtual and real world spaces. So if you are spending your entire life in Azeroth, it's not a good thing. But, that said, I think we have to again dig into what's going on for that kid at a particular moment in time. That is, there may be an issue they are working through. They really are immersing themselves in that world, helps them sort through something that's really troubling them, and the game then becomes a way of seeing what that issue looks like. It may mean that they formed an intense social relationship, a friendship with someone whose also playing that game. And that that game is not itself what's occupying them, it's the emerging bond with this other person. In the same way that if I discovered that the guy next door liked to play, you know, soccer, and I played soccer every afternoon, and I might not love soccer, I might just love spending time with this guy next door, and its about helping them discover other ways of interacting with that person. It may mean that they have taken on a leadership role, on a responsibility. And the guild in World of Warcraft. That's no different from being, you know, an officer; a patrol leader in a Boy Scout troop who takes on a responsibility. And Boy Scouts; I spent several nights a week through my late elementary school days as a scout, and that took a lot of time. And it wasn't just the scouting, wearing the uniform wasn't what it was about. It was all the things I was learning, and all the boys I was hanging out with, and all the ways I was pushing myself and growing. So we shouldn't reduce it to the game. We should recognize that the same game may support many different kinds of experiences over time, and we should understand that the motive may not be the game itself, but the social identities, the social experiences that it's enabling for that particular child.

Q: Why do you think the industry hasn't kind of accommodated this? I mean, why are all the games all so consuming and [unintelligible].

HJ: Well, I think the industry has... the game industry has been governed by its core demographic, and the core demographic has been the hardcore gamer. As its been preoccupied--most of the game designers come out of hardcore gamers, that's what motivates you to join the games industry. So the industry keeps saying "we design games we want to play." That means that they are designing games for themselves, and that means they are designing games to be played by people like themselves. And the result is that they replicated their own relationship to the technology over time. Now, those companies that have broken away from that have found themselves commercially successful. The casual game movement is the highest growth area for games right now, and much of that growth is in woman who are not traditionally part of the hardcore gamer demographic. We are seeing that people are embracing other kinds of shorter term game experiences through things like the Wii, that does support social play; quick turnaround games, games that are not deeply immersive. We are seeing games like Little Big Planet that allow kids to design their own levels, and to trade levels with each other. And therefore to develop programming skills that create a very different dynamic than those immersive worlds where you simply play it on a long trajectory like a track. You know, and you do exactly what you are scripted to do every step along the way. So we are seeing, I think right now, real diversification. And different kinds of games, different kids of play experiences, and play experiences of different lengths, that are attracting different demographics of players. But it has taken a long time because, I think, the hold of the hardcore gamer on the market was so strong for so long.

HJ: All right, so the Pew Center for Internet in American Life found most recently that sixty two percent of American teenagers who are online have produced media, and about a third of them have shared the media they produced with someone beyond their immediate friends and families. It does not mean that all of those kids are doing everything. It does not mean every kid is blogging, is taking photographs and putting them on Flickr, is producing videos and putting them on YouTube. But most kids are having some experience of taking media into their own hands, producing something, and sharing it. So yes, we can tell spectacular stories of kids who dig deep into one area or another and develop international reputations and global connections of friends and so forth. That's probably not typical. That's probably the high end user; the most extreme case of the early adapters. But what we are seeing is many many kids... the majority of kids, are having some experience of discovering that they are not simply the readers of their culture, they are the authors of their culture. And that's really profound. For many of those kids I think they are going to think of their place in the world in very different ways. And that is going to affect the way they work, the way they function as citizens, and the expressive lives they lead as adults. And that is what really excites me.

Q: But are you the author of your culture when you are posting photos on Flickr? I mean, is that really being the author of your culture?

HJ: I think it's a first step. I mean, I think seeing yourself as a photographer, whose work is valued by people you don't even know, is profound. Kids who put a picture on Flickr and discover someone else has downloaded it, or someone else has sent them a comment about it, who they never met before but liked their picture, that's a really exciting moment for any kid that I have ever talked to. I had an experience; there was a class of students that had been discussing the work of MC Lars who's a kind of Hip Hop artist who had done a song about Ahab. And the students had been sort of causally discussing his video. I gave them a chance to frame questions to this guy, and I interviewed him, put it up on my blog, and kids got to see their questions on the blog. And the first response of many of the kids was, "Oh my god, we look like fourth graders." And from there on the teacher who was working with them said they took their writing more seriously. They wrote better stuff. They started to see themselves as being able to communicate with a larger public, and they wanted to do better in the questions they had posted in this particular interview. What you discover is that when kids put stuff online they discover that they value it differently than when they write something and they hand it in to the teacher, and they get a letter grade on it and no comments. That that sense of writing just for the teacher stunts their sense of creativity, their sense of intellectual responsibility. So I think, yes, when a kid changes something on Wikipedia and not change sticks. When a kid puts a picture on Flickr, when they upload a video, when they write a piece of fan fiction, they feel differently about themselves in the world, and that can be a deeply transformative experience for that kid.

Q: Give me, in your mind, the most inspiring things you've seen kids do... that are going on out there.

HJ: Where to start. I mean, every day I walk into a classroom, kids inspire me. You know, their desire to go out and change the world, through whatever means they have available to them, is deeply inspirational. Their willingness to put their ideas out there on the line and fight back for their ideas when they get flamed on them in discussions. Their willingness to go someplace that scares them in a game and to try to confront their fears. Their desire to express an idea though a story, and to write and to spend, you know... I've met teenagers who wrote two-hundred page novels about Harry Potter and put them online, and read through hundreds of letters of comments that they got on them. I've met teenagers who stood up for their rights when studios tried to take their websites down and they felt like they had the right to express themselves. And they challenged these studios publicly. I think a lot of adults aren't ready to stand up for their rights nearly as much as young people are, when they are confronted in this environment. And that, again, and again, and again, I see young people taking on the courage of being public about who they are, and what they believe, and what they care about, in a way that was hard to imagine twenty years ago.

Q: And in the stepping forward and being public, is there any sort of... There's this show iCarly, I'm sure you... Do you know the show at all?

HJ: No

Q: It's a good show, and kids love it. And a friend of mine who has toddlers--three and four years old--whose kids wanted to make a web show. So they made a webcast and it's out there and, you know, looking at it it's cute, you know, it's got the iCarly music and all that stuff. And the kids are making it and interviewing each other. And they are doing all sorts of really interesting and creative things. But there is a, and it may just be generational, but there is definitely part of me that felt like, "Ah, these are toddlers out there. This stuff can go anywhere, circulating..." I mean, how do you draw the line between sort of going into public and the kind of redrawing of privacy in ways that we may not even...

HJ: Well, I think we want to teach kids to think very carefully about the choices they are making as they enter [unintelligible]. Not to introduce fear and timidity, but to introduce a reasoned caution about what the effects of your choices are going to be. So I have been working with Howard Gardner at Harvard on an ethics case book, which really takes on some of those sites that young people are involved with, and encourages them to think about the choices they are making, what their long term impact could be, what their effect on other people could be, and gives them a set of conceptual tools to think through and think about those choices. So one of the problems is that most of the adults around these young people don't understand those spaces well enough to give them reasoned advice. That they are taking unnecessary risk because they don't have adults around them to help make sense of it. So Howard Gardner's research on high school journalists looks at professional journalist: how a high percent of them went through the experience of editing a high school newspaper, or writing for a high school newspaper. And it was a kind of playpen area where you took on real word problems. You wrote, you got feedback on it; you had adults around you pushing and pressuring you on ethical issues. But out of that you developed a sense of what it was to be a journalist, and what the ethical responsibilities were for a journalist. Now let's compare that to Live Journal where many many more times the number of kids today are writing for Live Journal than are writing for school papers. But their parents probably have no clue what they are writing. Their teachers have no clue what they are writing. And if they hit a problem they don't know who to turn to to give them advice--anyone who understands what's going on in that space. They get advice from each other, which may be as misguided as the sexual advice we would have gotten from the average thirteen year old when we were kids. Right? It's not necessarily the best advice they are going to get form their peers, but it's the only advice that they are going to get for much of this digital technology, because we tried to shut it down rather than try to understand what it could do, and tried to develop some tools to help young people weigh their options and make reasonable choices.

Q: Do we have anything to teach them, though? I mean, what do we know?

HJ: Well, I think there is a lot that we know from research about how these platforms work. And I think there are some conceptual models that can really be helpful in getting them to think. And it does... most of what we know as human beings applies to the Internet. There are real human beings behind those avatars, behind those words and cursors. There are certain things that make the interface different. There are certain new issues that are cropping up. But there is a lot that adults know that is wise, and sage, and can help young people deal with those problems. But they first have to understand the actual situating the young person is confronting, and they have to master and overcome their own fear before they can give advice that's going to be actually helpful to someone. If you're governed simply by your fear and your ignorance, than why would anyone want to listen to you? But if in fact, if you dig in and try to understand what's going on, and then exchange values, offer advice, you know, try to suggest what you think is going on. I think young people generally listen to their parents at the end of the day. I know my experiences as a father is my son would push back that night, and the following day he would come around and decide, yeah, you're probably right, that's probably what I should do, and take it seriously. So yeah, you may be cruising for fight, but than you are going to come out the other side if you have built a structure of reasoned communication with them. But it's knowing what you know, and knowing what you don't know, and recognizing how to get information on those things you are ignorant on, rather than turning your ignorance into fear, and your fear into oppression, that I think makes a huge difference in terms of when you are dealing with young people.

Q: I have one quick question. What is your opinion of schools like... a model of education like the Waldorf Model, or other models where technology is, on principle, banned? Not just from the classroom, but from children's' lives entirely. The notion that schools should be a kind of oasis from all of that modern life?

HJ: You know, I think an oasis is a good thing, but I don't think as a permanent life style it's a very helpful thing. I think that schools will do better by exposing kids to the ways they are going to be thinking, and working, and creating, and collaborating in the future, than protecting them from it. Because where are they going to learn those skills? When and where are they going to master that knowledge, except though schools? So yes, I think if you want to send a kid to a summer camp where there is no technology; and they spend time in nature, and they swim in Walden Pond, you know, fine. But if that's your primary mode of education, I'm a little suspicious of it. Not because it shouldn't be an option that parents have available, but it's an option that I would recommend against, because it does leave kids disarmed and falling further and further behind in the skill sets that are gong to be needed for them to function as adults in the twenty first century.

Q: Well, one way of looking at it would be--I mean, this doesn't obviously apply to disadvantaged kids who don't have this kind of [scaffolding] at home, but kids are so immersed in this stuff all the time anyway--why not expose them to all the things they are never going to discover otherwise, when they are at school?

HJ: Well I think one of the things is that when you tell kids that what they care about outside of school doesn't matter at school, you are also telling them that what matters at school doesn't matter outside of school. You've created a wall. And instead what you want to do is ensure a range of experiences, and integrate those together. You certainly want to introduce them to the things they are not going to experience outside of school. You also want to give them a language, a way of thinking about what it is they are doing outside of school, that helps them make that connection, that bridges what they already know to what you are trying to teach them. That's a fundamental part of education; you respect what someone knows and use it as a starting point for what you want them to learn. By forcing that out of school you tell them... you strip away their expertise, their pride and their sense of accomplishment, their stakes in what they are learning. And I think it does wall off. It makes a sort of... something really special and precious about what you're teaching at school, and it's treating books like they are some specimens under glass in some museum, rather than resources we draw on in our every day life to make sense of the world around us. I want kids to know they can hold a computer and a book at the same time, and learn something from each of them, not that the book has to be protected from the computer.

Q: It's sort of like parents who have banned junk food, or candy. It's like, what's the kid going to do, really?

HJ: And then it's sort of the [Baxter], and he's going to eat the candy.

Q: Yeah, and if he walks to school and he sees candy, they are going to go get it.