Mimi Ito - Weblog

I have been working for most of my research career in the field of digital media and learning, an area that was just emerging in my years as a graduate student, and has more recently become a growing and recognized area of research and practice. In the past five years, I have benefited from the MacArthur Foundation's investment in this area, and today, in tandem with the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age event, have a series of happy announcements to make that represent many pieces of this work coming to fruition.

First, we are opening the doors today on a new Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, and it's web site. DMLcentral.net. The research hub and website is a key component of the broader MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative, and is made possible by a grant that David Goldberg and I received at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The Hub will be facilitating research collaboration, organizing an annual conference, in addition to operating the DMLcentral.net web site. The press release of the announcement can be found here.

The launch of the Hub and DMLcentral also coincides with the publication of two of my books.

Continue reading "Announcing the Digital Media and Learning Hub, dmlcentral.net, and 2 new books" »

For the past year or so, I've been working with David Theo Goldberg at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in planning for and establishing a new research hub in digital media and learning. This is part of the work of the MacArthur Foundation in supporting research and field-building in this area. Starting this fall, we've been kicking off a new range of activities meant to support communication and collaboration. One centerpiece of our efforts is an annual conference that we are organizing, the first of which will be convened in San Diego February 18-20. The theme is "Diversifying Participation" and Henry Jenkins will be chairing. I will be part of the conference committee, together with David Goldberg, Heather Horst, Jabari Mahiri, and Holly Willis.

One of the problems with a new and highly interdisciplinary field is that there are few conferences and journals that really cater to our specific areas of interest. The MacArthur Foundation helped start the International Journal of Learning and Media to address this gap. The conference is the next step in this field-building effort.

The deadline for session proposals is approaching quickly -- October 30! Please consider submitting something and joining us for the event. I am confident that we will look back at this inaugural year of the event as the start of something memorable. There is a wiki for session organizing and more details below.

Continue reading "First Annual Digital Media and Learning Conference" »

Next week, I will be presenting a response paper for the National Academy of Science's Committee on Learning Science: Computer Games, Simulations, and Education. They are convening a workshop, open to the public, on games for science education. It should be an interesting meeting for games and learning folks in the DC area. I am presenting a paper in response to Kurt Squire's look at science games and simulations in informal learning environments. The text of my response is below.

Continue reading "Sociocultural Contexts of Game-Based Learning" »

For the past few months, I have been working with a team of researchers in conducting a literature review of new media uptake in different parts of the world. This work has been part of our work with the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative to understand the ways in which new media is intersecting with young people's everyday learning. Our work thus far has been focused on the U.S. context, but now we are trying to understand how what we have learned relates to developments overseas.

We selected a set of countries where there are interesting developments in new media uptake, but there is relatively little research literature available in English. The literature reviews are broken down by country, with Cara Wallis taking the lead on Chiina, HyeRyoung Ok for Korea, Anke Schwittay for India, Heather Horst for Brazil, Daisuke Okabe and I for Japan, and Araba Sey for Ghana. We will be rolling these out in installments starting today and continuing through March. You can find the posts at our Futures of Learning blog.

Although this literature review was conducted primarily to inform our ongoing research, we are hoping that this will provide a benefit to the broader research community by posting our work publicly. We are also hoping that by doing so we can get some feedback, particularly about literature we missed our gaps in our understanding.

It's been over three years in the making, but we are at long last releasing the results of our Digital Youth Project. The goal of this work was to gain an understanding of youth new media practice in the U.S. by engaging in ethnographic research across a diverse range of youth populations, sites, and activities. A collaboration between 28 researchers and research collaborators, this was a large ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of their Digital Media and Learning initiative. I was one of the PIs on the project together with Peter Lyman, Michael Carter, and Barrie Thorne.

The project has been quite a journey, and has been by far the most challenging and rewarding research project I've undertaken so far. It tested my skills at so many levels -- fieldwork, conceptually, theoretically, and in management. I feel so fortunate to for the opportunity to have undertaken this project with fabulous colleagues and a team of graduate students and postdocs who taught me so much along the way.

I'm particularly proud of the shared report that we have just released, which was a genuinely collaborative effort, co-authored by 15 of us on the team, and including contributions from many others. We took a step that is unusual with ethnographic work, of trying to engage in joint analysis rather than simply putting together an edited collection of case studies. We spent the past year reading each others interviews and fieldnotes, and developing categories that cut across the different case studies. Each chapter of the book incorporates material from multiple case studies, and is an effort to describe the diversity in youth practice at it emerged from a range of different youth populations and practices.

You can find all the details in the documents linked below, and a summary of our report. The book is due out from MIT Press next fall, but in the meantime you can read a draft of it online. Our book is dedicated to the memory of Peter Lyman.

Sadly, I won't be able to attend, but my team will be celebrating the release of our report at a reception at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco. Saturday November 22, at 6:30-8:00pm, San Francisco Hilton & Towers, Golden Gate Ballroom.

Click here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Click here to download the summary white paper.

Click here to access the full report.

Click here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

Continue reading "Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project" »