Futures of Learning

Last week was a frenetic one for many of those who write for this blog. As the final report for the Digital Youth project jittered through the media, many of the project’s researchers were navigating the windowless corridors and “imperial ballrooms” of the San Francisco Hilton, home of the 2008 Annual Meeting for the American Anthropological Association.

News of the Digital Youth report first appeared in the media on Wednesday night when the New York Times website posted a story set to appear in their Thursday print edition. Shortly thereafter the websites of several other newspapers and blogs posted stories. Ever since, it has been like watching the game of telephone being played out inside a pinball machine.

For those of us inclined towards sociocultural theories of learning, and theories of social practice more generally, a less noisy sort of news making was happening at the Hilton on Wednesday afternoon. Jean Lave — integral to the development of influential concepts such as “situated learning,” “legitimate peripheral participation,” and “communities of practice” — was receiving a career achievement award from the AAA. Of the intellectual ideas that inspired our report few, if any, were more influential than those developed by Lave, making the dovetailing of her honoring with our release, while coincidental, seem appropriately consequential.

As a way of recognizing Lave, the president of AAA invited her to host a four hour panel. The result, titled “Situating Trans-Formational Practices,” was introduced by Lave as an “intellectual party” featuring some of her favorite thinkers and collaborators over the past 20-30 years. The lineup — scribbled on a torn sheet of paper and taped to the door — read as follows: Dororthy Holland, Paul Duguid, Ole Dreier, Ray McDermott, Helen Verran, Sharon Traweek, Penny Harvey, Lucy Suchman, Discussant: Don Brenneis. Given the star status of these scholars within certain academic domains, this “party” could easily have become occasion for the sort of self-bestowed reverence that tends to give the Academy Awards or multi-day music festivals their navel-gazing feel. Luckily the organizers seemed to have anticipated this possibility and worked to ensure a more down-home informality. Note the wording on the invitation to the after-party, printed via inkjet on generic sticky-labels:

Your’re (sic) invited to a…
PARTY FOR JEAN LAVE!!!
(Dottie Holland & Lucy Suchman)
IMPERIAL BALLROOM A
Saturday 8 pm til 10 or maybe 11

Purposeful or not, intimacy and informality thankfully pervaded the session, giving serious, critical, complex ideas a welcoming demeanor. The talks were varied and rich, too much so for this graduate student to offer a satisfying, accurate, and useful account here. Instead, I’ll quickly recap each talk, telling a bit more about the talks that seemed most relevant to the topic of this blog.

Dorothy (Dottie) Holland kicked off the party with a talk on university relations with community based organizations (CBOs), arguing for an engagement that counts as scholarship and challenging reified distinctions between theory (knowledge production) and application (knowledge in use). Drawing on her own work with members of the local food movement, Holland both advocated for these sorts of practical involvements, and relayed some of the tensions she’s discovered as she’s tried to bring two communities of practice together.

Paul Duguid followed Holland with a historical account of how trademark law emerged in the US at the end of the 19th century. He began by debunking the “grand story” often told in economic and legal discourses. Such a story suggests that strong intellectual property law partially explains the second industrial revolution in the US, which occurred at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In actuality, Duguid said, trademark law didn’t go into effect until 1906. In place of the “grand story,” Duguid suggested that trademark law was a product of longer historical struggles over who owned industrially produced goods — battles over labeling/naming/owning that were played out amongst workers, unions, companies, and associations.

Duguid was followed by Ole Dreier who spoke about his recent book Psychotherapy in Everyday Life . Dreier, a critical psychologist, has been examining the role of professional practices, especially psychotherapy, in the ongoing everyday lives of “clients.” Dreier objects to how therapy, and other professional interventions, are purposely isolated from the ongoing practices of their clients. Dreier noted that therapy takes place in a “secluded site” and increasingly relies on “evidence based” accounting, mechanisms imported from medical practices. Dreier argued that such accounting measures make the faulty assumption that psychological intervention can change behavior in a manner similar to a chemical reaction. He noted that clients must take whatever happens in therapy with them into their everyday lives and pursue changes in behavior across the various contexts in which they live. While focused on therapy, Dreier’s work has many parallels with Lave’s studies of learning and, consequently, is filled with insights for those of us interested in how experts “intervene” in the way young people learn. Of particular relevance to our work is his emphasis on how the intervention is experienced from the point of view of the client/student and, in particular, how the intervening practices fit into the rest of the client/student’s life. As our project explores current and future institutions of learning, it will be critical that we don’t repeat these past mistakes, whether by using institutions to isolate youth from the rest of their lives or by holding learning institutions accountable to systems designed for studying chemistry, not social practice (more on accountability later in this post).

After Dreier, Ray McDermott gave a mesmerizing “performance” that historicized many of the panel’s themes by resurfacing the works of John Dewey and Paul Radin. Delivered with rhythmic cadence, his talk came closest to literally answering Jean’s call for an intellectual party. With quotes suggesting that we move from “kinds of minds to minds in action,” and that “things only exist in relation to each other,” McDermott reminded us of some of the historical roots of ideas that still seem fresh and urgent in 2008.

McDermott’s talk was followed by a break before the second four panelists. Helen Verran led off round two by discussing her work on “ontic politics” which, like McDermott’s reference to Dewey’s “things only exist in relation to each other,” constitutes objects as “clots and expressions of relations.” Her current work focuses on the political processes involved in an effort to “reclaim” a river in Australia, a collective undertaking that has brought together various communities of practice, each of which imagines society and nature differently.

Sharon Traweek spoke after Verran and argued for “theorizing with a middle voice,” one not bound up in conventional markers of subjectivity and objectivity, an attempt to theorize without dichotomies. Traweek’s talk was rich and diverse, drawing on research of high energy physicists and yet equally reflecting on the challenges and limitations of disciplines, especially as they actively reproduce gender hierarchies.

Penelope (Penny) Harvey reported on work she’s currently undertaking with engineers and city planners charged to shape the city and skyline of Manchester, England. Her work focuses on how the production of 3D models is taken up in these engineering efforts. Manchester’s use of models is particularly interesting as the engineers and city planners are using them as a communicative tool with the public, offering citizens a means to participate in the planning process. While the project is still going on, Harvey warned that models can never be universal and will always require some standardization and exclusion. Our focus, then, should be on matters of concern (political) rather than matters of fact (seemingly apolitical).

Finally, Lucy Suchman, who helped organize the panel with Dorothy Holland, gave a talk titled, “Situating Practices of Future Making.” Suchman has been investigating how design and innovation are often treated as specialized sites, governed by experts in “imaginations of entrepreneurism.” In their most fashioned form, such sites can approach a “science of design,” an approach called for by Humbert Simon and many others. Suchman used Margolin’s The Politics of the Artificial to critique Simon’s approach, arguing for an understanding of design as social practice. Clearly Suchman is concerned with attempts to lay claim to innovation, design, and “the new” — that is, change — in institutions governed by experts, whether they be professional designers or scientists. Instead of positioning themselves as the originators of change, she called for professional designers to be one site amongst many, not originators but participants in the circulation and shaping of ideas and change. While focused on the work of computer scientists and engineers, Suchman’s larger theme of “future making” deserves reflection from those working in the space of “futures of learning.” As experts working at the intersection of youth and technology, the work of “future making” is unavoidable. As concepts, both youth and technology are intimately constituted in their relations to the future. The questions of, “whose future?” and “what sort of future?” should be continually asked. Additionally, Suchman’s talk reminds us that our research “participants” should be involved in our work of future making, more so than as just informants.

After Suchman, Donald Brenneis, the discussant, pleased panelists and audience alike with an insightful and imaginative response. Brenneis organized his response around a series of “T-words” the first of which was “trajectory.” Brenneis said he heard in the various talks the theme of “movement across” and the “new,” implying temporality, history, and what people carry between situations, often to be reused and redeployed. Brenneis’ second T-word was “translation,” noting the need to abandon the dream of a common language and, instead, recognize the multiplicity of language, the partiality of knowledge (both as something incomplete but also as something you’re partial towards). Such a recognition needs advocates, especially now as we experience, “a rising hegemony of evidence-based medicine” and centralized accountability. This latter point should perk the ears of those involved in debates over measuring learning outcomes, the need for standards, public accountability, &tc., &tc. Brenneis notes that we clearly need to start advocating other forms of accountability, pointing towards Suchman’s call for localized accountability as one possible alternative. Brenneis’ final T-word was “transcendence,” noting that many of the panelists seemed to have been arguing against it. Common amongst the panelists was the insistence that life is embodied, grounded, complicated, and lateral. The goal, according to Brenneis, should be making lateral voices and relations possible. Finally, Brenneis argued that many had argued that form matters as much as content, noting the trademarks, the 3D models, the recurring concern with forms of recognition, forms of expertise, forms of membership and exclusion, and forms of affordances in software. Drawing on his own studies of hearing, Brenneis closed with the question of whether the problem might not be translation but transduction — processes in which external energy is connected to something we can understand and represent.

From 2001 to 2006, The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies has been the home to the Media Expression, Learning, and Literacy Project (MELL). This project is one of the largest projects in Japan dealing with media literacy.This past summer, we spoke to Hisamatsu Mizushima from Tokai University about the project.

Mizushima had left a career in advertising and a job at Infoseek Japan to start graduate school in Information Studies at Tokyo University. There he met Shin Mizukoshi, a sociologist and one of the founders of the MELL project. In addition to Mizukoshi, the early participants in the MELL project included educational researcher Yuhei Yamauchi, public television producer Katsumi Ichikawa, journalist Akiko Sugaya, and high school educator Naoya Hayashi. The project was led by these five, bur also included 80 members comprised of researchers, graduate students, media professionals, teachers, NPOs and community organizations across the country, as well as 4-500 supporters who subscribed to the MELL email list. The project was funded by The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan, Benesse Corporation, http://www.moba-ken.jp/english”>NTT DoCoMo Mobile Society Research Institute.

Mizushima describes the situation in Japan at the time that Mizukoshi began the MELL project in 2000. It was a period still dominated by traditional mass media such as mainstream newspapers and television stations. Mizukoshi used to describe this as an context where government policy has populated the hills and valleys of Japan completely with cypress. The native species in each region had been cut down to make way for forests of large cypress.  In the shadows of these huge trees, grasses struggle to grow, and small animals and insects have difficulty surviving. The ecology of Japanese media had become like these cypress forests, where cable television, community radio, and other smaller-scale community media forms could not survive in the shadow of mainstream mass media.

In the nineties, Mizushima was beginning to see this situation start to change. Digital media was spreading, and the mass media were under suspicion because of various cases of false reports and faked forms of media reporting. With the adoption of digital media, there was the potential for citizens to actively participate in media rather than simply consuming mass media. The MELL project was developed based on the idea of having people make their own media while simultaneously building new networks and organizations for media making.

Mizukoshi used the ecological term “media biotope” (link to Japanese page) to describe his effort to support participatory community media. A biotope is sphere optimized for certain organisms to inhabit. His idea was to create a fertile ground for a variety of different trees to grow, and to challenge the media environment that had become blanketed exclusively by cypress. Mizukoshi writes, “Just as it is critical for humans as organisms to have access to diverse ecologies, it is critical for humans as social beings to have access to diverse media ecologies.”

Here I’d like to introduce two of the diverse projects that were part of MELL.

“Understand TV by Making TV: Let’s Make a News Program!” is a project that links schools and local television through a class on television program production. The goal of the project is to shift the students’ identity from that of a media consumer to a media producer. High school students are placed in groups of four and do research, shooting, and editing for a 3-minute news program that is broadcast over local TV. Of course, the students have questions about what kinds of themes they should take up and how they should represent them. They also frequently encounter difficulties execiting their shoot, or have to change their plans after conducting research. The staff of the TV station step in to offer advice. Through this process of trial and error, the students learn that even in the case of news that aims to portray the facts, the information that gets represented on TV is a simplified version of what has happened. By breaking down the boundaries between broadcast stations and the school, this project helps develop both a critical and expressive eye towards the media.
Another MELL project is “Let’s Make a Magazine of New Living.” In contrast to the prior project, which focuses on high school students, this project supports mothers in designing a community-oriented email magazine oriented to issues in their everyday life. Although young mothers are generally put in the position of media consumers, they share a strong interest in child rearing. This project does not simply support the acquisition of the technical skills needed to create an email magazine. In addition, it creates a cultural foundation for pushing forward a project with their own effort. The resulting email magazine, a conversation space for young mothers in one Tokyo district, continued after the MELL project members left the effort. The MELL project members did not take the role of controlling the project, but rather helped incubate it in the initial start-up phase. The outcomes of the project are very much in the hands of the participating mothers.

The MELL project conceives of media literacy in a way that is quite different from media literacy programs that look purely at the reception of mass media. Instead, the project aims to develop critical literacy as well as expressive literacy that can open up new kinds of communicative action. It pays attention to previously ignored media biotopes that correspond to small social spaces. The project’s media literacy practice involves having members consider the history and specific media contexts of the localities they work in, and to proactively build a media biotope based on this environment. This approach goes beyond media literacy approaches the focus only on how to critically interpret media texts. By mobilizing digital media, the MELL project seeks to build independent and diverse media ecologies.

Mizushima describes how over a five-year period, project members planted the seeds of the MELL project in a diverse range of practices. Although the MELL project ended in 2006, the work continues in a new project, MELL Platz (Plaza) (link to Japanese page), that brings together former members of the project. Although each individual field project under the MELL umbrella may have been small in scope, the graduate students and other project members who become involved have become organizers in a wide range of local media biotopes. Mizushima sees this as the biggest achievement of the MELL project. As the members of the project have scattered to different parts of the country, they have built local networks in different regions, and spread the seeds of the project further. MELL Platz has become the community that links these different efforts. We can expect to see small but important changes to the Japanese media landscape emerging from these distributed local efforts.

You can read the “Tokyo Declaration” from MELL Project here

One of the foci of our literature reviews involves gaming and gaming practices in international contexts. While attention to the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of gaming is emerging in the United States, Europe and Asia (see Larissa Hjorth’s recent edited issue in Games and Culture), it is often difficult to find documented accounts and analyses of gaming practices in other regional and national contexts. There are a number of reasons why this may be the case. In the first instance, gaming (at least mediated forms of gaming) requires basic infrastructure, such as gaming systems, availability of games, sources of power and, in the case of networked gaming, connectivity. Although infrastructure and availability partially account for the lack of information on gaming in contexts (particularly in the “developing” world), academic interests also play a role in the relative dearth of research on everyday gaming around the world. For many of us who conduct ethnographic research, the emphasis on text and narratives (rather than context) that dominated early studies of video games may have contributed to the lack of attention to gaming. For many anthropologists, I also suspect that the relatively lowly status of video games and mediated gaming as a legitimate object of academic inquiry may also contribute to the inattention to gaming (although see Boellsdorf 2008).

Yet, despite the empirical gaps in the research on gaming, I am not convinced that mediated gaming is not an everyday part of life, even in the most economically disenfranchised countries and regions. Indeed, in my own research on ICTs and development in Jamaica, gaming was present, but it always rested in our footnotes, fieldnotes and contributions to the “gray” policy literature. For example, when I was in Jamaica in 2004 carrying out fieldwork I often had to go to one of the local internet cafes to send attachments or lengthier fieldnotes to Danny (Miller) who was in London during portions of our fieldwork. Looking back on one of my notebooks, I recently noted that I managed to scribble on the back of the page a sketch of the inside of an internet café in one of the malls in Portmore, Jamaica. At the time what stood out was the large numbers (over 20) of television screens and monitors that were solely dedicated to gaming; the few computers dedicated to email and the internet were located at the back of the café. Depending upon the time of day, it was almost a fight to make your way through the groups of boys in their khaki uniforms gathering around the gaming computers. The popularity of the games which, in turn, spurred the congregation of boisterous boys was part of the reason that a UNICEF-sponsored internet café in Portmore restricted playing games (as well as downloading pornography and music), and the community internet café, Zinc Link), located in one of the most dangerous areas of Kingston, restricted game playing to “educational games” (see Miller and Horst 2005).

Games were also present outside of the internet cafes, in the homes, schemes and districts of rural and urban Jamaica. Even in 2004, one of the local video stores that sold original and bootlegged copies of videocassettes and DVDs also kept a small collection of desktop games behind the counter. A number of the more middle class families (ones who managed to purchase computers) had copies of games such as “Need for Speed”.  In one of the poorest areas in Portmore where I carried out research, a family received a second-hand Nintendo console in a barrel (literally a barrel drum typically filled with basic staples like rice, food, clothing and other items shipped to Jamaica) from one of their cousins living in New York. Like the footballs, food and other resources in the neighborhood, many of the members of the local “crew” gathered together in the afternoons and evenings to play games. In this particular community video games superseded dominoes, the game that is prevalent throughout the Caribbean among men. Playing games, and gaining access to new games, also was an incentive to trade and borrow other people’s cell phones. Teenagers in rural and urban Jamaica often possessed a wealth of knowledge about the particular games offered on different phone models and tried to borrow their parents’, siblings’, other family members’, neighbors’ and friends’ cell phones while they were bored, or “killing time” (see Ito and Bittanti, Forthcoming) at home. With almost one-third of Jamaica’s population being under the age of 15, and 26% unemployment rate among youth of working age, 15-24, in 2004, games on mobile phones and (in most cases) second-hand devices like gameboys or consoles were a welcome addition to their everyday ecology.

Even a quick review of my notes from our research on mobile phones in Jamaica suggests that gaming is not only present in a place like Jamaica, but that it may be being integrated into Jamaican culture in a number of fascinating ways. For example, and like many contexts in the United States, gender dynamics emerged around gaming. In the relative privacy of their home, many girls talked about how they enjoyed playing the basic games that came on their mobile phones when they were “bored”, but girls were relatively absent when the members of the local “crews” played games on the neighborhood console in more public settings. In addition, the only girls at the internet café were the girlfriends who lingered near their boyfriend while he played a game, and the (quite popular) girl who took payments at the shop. At the time I remember thinking these practices were interesting but, for a variety of reasons (time constraints, funding sources, and other research agendas), I never felt followed it up with further research. Given that so many of us carrying out ethnographic work in contexts outside of the United States may find ourselves making similar choices, I wonder what lies in the margins and footnotes of other researcher’s fieldnotes which we can and should start paying attention to in order to develop a deeper understanding of new media in everyday. Perhaps more importantly, how we can begin to bring these footnotes and partial accounts into the foreground to enable us to map the gaming landscape in a range of countries and regions throughout the world?

References:
Horst, Heather A. and Daniel Miller. 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford: Berg.

Ito, Mizuko and Matteo Bittanti. Forthcoming. Gaming. In Ito, et. al’s Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press

Miller, Daniel and Heather A. Horst. 2005. The Jamaican Internet: Supply, Demand and Education. Information Society Research Group
Working Paper Series No. 5 (June 2005).