Lec 6 | MIT CMS.930 Media, Education and the Marketplace

Description: Media Literacy as a strategy for combatting moral panic.

Henry Jenkins: Henry Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American scholar, currently Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program with William Uricchio. As of July 2009, he will leave MIT and be a Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is also author of several books, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.

One of Jenkins' earlier arguments was that the boundary between text and reader has broken down, not merely in the way the reader "constructs" the text (see deconstructionism), but in the growth of fan cultures. These could be seen by how "fan genres grew out of openings or excesses within the text that were built on and stretched, and that it was not as if fans and texts were autonomous from each another; fans created their own, new texts, but elements within the originating text defined, to some degree, what they could do."

Jenkins refers to world-making as "the process of designing a fictional universe that will sustain franchise development, one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others". Some may get world-making confused with world-building or transmedia storytelling. This would be slightly off, the position were this term departs is in the world creation of multi-culture itself, not the media in which it spreads and grows. World-Making concentrates on the consumer side of franchising, not the different forms of media it spreads and connects.

More recently, Jenkins' research has been focused on the concept of "Media Convergence", arguing that the simple technological-focused view that was once hyped was short sighted and that an understanding of how individuals in contemporary culture themselves tap into and combine numerous different media sources offers a far richer understanding of the relationship between different media forms. In this respect, he suggests that convergence be understood as a cultural process, rather than a technological end-point. According to Jenkins, there are nine sites where important negotiations between consumers and producers are occurring. These sites are revising audience measurement, remapping globalization, reengaging citizens, renegotiating relations between producers and consumers, redesigning the digital economy, rethinking media aesthetics, regulating media content, redefining intellectual property rights and restricting media ownership. This research led to his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and the founding of the Convergence Culture Consortium research group at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.

He has also written extensively about the effects of interactivity, particularly computer games, and "games for learning", and in this capacity was called to testify before Congress in 1999. This work ultimately led to the founding of the Education Arcade group, also at the MIT Comparative Media Studies program.

He was featured in both Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Informer magazines, where he was asked about the effects of violence in video games. He offered a very different perspective from Jack Thompson's.

In 2006 Jenkins co-authored a White Paper for the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. This paper, called Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, led to the creation of Project New Media Literacies, a research initiative that considers the mindsets and skillsets young learners need to be full and active participants in a culture that increasingly values innovation, collaborative knowledge-building, and the ability to tap into collective intelligence networks.

Jenkins earned his MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and his PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He did his undergraduate work at Georgia State University, where he majored in Political Science and Journalism. He and his wife Cynthia Jenkins are housemasters of the Senior House dorm at MIT. They have one son, Henry Jenkins IV.

SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jenkins)

How can we harness the emerging forms of interactive media to enhance the learning process? Professor Miyagawa and prominent guest speakers will explore a broad range of issues on new media and learning - technical, social, and business. Concrete examples of use of media will be presented as case studies. One major theme, though not the only one, is that today's youth, influenced by video games and other emerging interactive media forms, are acquiring a fundamentally different attitude towards media. Media is, for them, not something to be consumed, but also to be created. This has broad consequences for how we design media, how the young are taught in schools, and how mass media markets will need to adjust.