Mimi Ito - Weblog

A few years ago, I conducted a study with a large team of researchers on how young people were learning through electronic games, social media, and digital media production. We saw many reasons to be hopeful as to how the online world could support learning that is social, participatory, and driven by the personal needs and interests of the learner. We were inspired by young people who were taking to the online world to learn complex technical skills, create and share sophisticated media works, engage in social causes, and pursue specialized knowledge. At same time, we found reasons for concern. While highly activated and motivated youth were mining the learning riches of the Internet, these young people were a decided minority, and tended to be those who were already technologically and educationally privileged. Were we in fact seeing a new kind of equity gap, an emerging digital learning elite? Why weren’t the majority of young people taking advantage of the opportunities that new media offered for learning?

This concern has led me on a journey over the past three years, in trying to understand not only how new media can support highly engaged, geeked out, and self-directed forms of learning, but also how it can make this kind of learning available to all young people. Together with a committed group of colleagues and partners that are part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, I’ve been engaged in an effort to address this challenge, seeking to enlist a diverse constituency of educators, parents, technology makers, and young people in a new vision of learning in the digital age.

Today we are proud to announce a new research network, community site, and a set of learning and design principles that seeks to promote dialog and experimentation around a model we are calling “connected learning.” In a nutshell, connected learning is learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational and economic opportunity. Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge and expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends and institutions who share and recognize this common passion or purpose.

The Essence of Connected Learning from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

This path towards connected learning is both personal and professional for me. I grew up with a connected learner, my brother, who tended to have a troubled relationship to formal education but was always geeking out on a hobby with the support of caring adult mentors. Although he never graduated from college, he has gone on to be a successful Internet entrepreneur and the director of the MIT Media Lab. I’ve seen connected learning when my son’s teacher invites him to do a school assignment about his favorite electronic game that he plays with his closest friends and expert mentors, or when my daughter is able to direct her passion for sewing into making costumes for her friends in a school dance performance. And I’ve experienced it when I’ve been able to connect the social causes I care about to my career ambitions. These kinds of experiences shouldn’t be the province of the 1% of connected learners or learning moments, any more than economic wealth should be concentrated in the hands of the few.

We don't need to think of education as pushing scarce and static knowledge from center to periphery and of educational opportunity as being able to do better on standardized tests. We have the opportunity to tap into a much more dynamic, distributed, participatory, networked knowledge universe to capture the attention of diverse learners.

We believe we can harness the power of social media, online knowledge, and digital production tools to make this kind of learning accessible and ubiquitous. The power of digital networks is in the ability to connect learners and teachers across space and institutional boundaries, to build linkages between school, home and community, and to make information and learning resources highly accessible and personalized. Our challenge is in guiding more young people to take advantage of these opportunities. We need an expansive and diverse network of people and institutions to develop, improve, refine, and take up a vision of 21st Century learning, and our hope is to support this process of network building through our connected learning approach and principles.

I'm proud to announce the publication of a new book that I edited together with my longtime collaborator Daisuke Okabe and a new editorial collaborator Tsuji Izumi, Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World. The book is a collection of essays on otaku culture in Japan and the US, ranging across relatively familiar anime fandoms to the possibly less familiar terrain of train otaku, 2-chan, and game arcade culture. It is an effort to showcase both the commonalities of what ties together various otaku cultural forms around the world, as well as showcasing the tremendous diversity of otaku culture. The central thematic of the book is this productive dynamic between local and niche cultural forms and a networked and distributed public culture; I argue in the introduction that it is this dynamic that is in fact the distinguishing feature of otaku culture and what has made it flourish in an era of networked, remixed, and digital culture.

This book was a labor of love that spanned many years of research, translation, and editing. Like our earlier book, Personal Portable Pedestrian, the book includes articles that come from my own research, but the bulk of the content is translated work by Japanese scholars. I've always felt that it's important to bring the excellent work being done in other languages to the English-speaking world. In Japan, many key scholarly works in English get translated into Japanese, but the reverse happens much less frequently. Like with mobile phones a decade ago, we felt that the current international attention to anime and otaku culture provided an opportunity to showcase Japanese scholarly work in an international arena.

Chapters by Lawrence Eng and myself represent the English-language anime fandom, and the rest of the articles are based on research in Japan. We have work from well-established senior scholars such as Hiroki Azuma on moe, Akihira Kitada on 2-chan, and Kaichiro Morikawa on the birth of Akihabara as a otaku town. We also feature work by a new generation of otaku scholars such as Izumi's work on train otaku, Daisuke's work on fujoshi, Yoshimasa Kijima on fighting game culture, Hiroaki Tamagawa on the Comic Market, and Kimi Ishida, who writes with Daisuke on cosplay.

My own work that appears in this book comes from fieldwork on the online English-langauge anime fandom that I did as part of the digital youth project. In addition the introduction, I have one article on fansubbing and one on anime music videos. I also got to tag along with Daisuke during his fieldwork with cosplayers and doujin authors in Tokyo, and that work is also represented in this book. It was so ridiculously fun to hang out with anime fans as part of this project, I'm sad to see this chapter of my research come to a close. While I am no longer actively doing fieldwork on anime fandom, much of what I've learned from fans is key to my ongoing work on interest and passion-driven learning, and my current fieldwork on gaming and other youth-centered interest groups.

I recently gave a talk on the book at MIT. You can see some video excerpts here, and Ethan Zuckerman did a nice write-up here.

Extra bonus is the awesome cover art done just for us by Ulises Farinas.

Originally posted on the Huffington Post.

I've devoted my career to researching how young people take up new technologies like computers, mobile phones, and the Internet and make them their own. If we pay attention to what young people do when they are socializing and having fun with these new media, it's clear that they are both highly engaged and learning a great deal. For most young people, however, this is about learning how to get along with their friends, what it takes to get a date, or how to get to the next level in Halo, and not the kinds of academic learning and civic engagement that schools are concerned with. As a parent and educator who is also an anthropologist committed to appreciating youth perspectives, I stand at the cusp of two different learning cultures--one that is about youth-driven social engagement and sharing, and the other that is embodied in educational institutions' adult-driven agendas. My biggest challenge has been to find what it would take to get alignment between the energy that kids bring to video games, text messaging, and social network sites and the learning that parents and educators care about. I have been on a quest for examples of educational institutions and programs that can bridge this cultural divide, and I'd like to share an example that has come out of collaborations I have had with some of my colleagues in the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Last month, I paid a visit to the YouMedia space in Chicago Public Library's Harold Washington Library Centre in downtown Chicago. The space was teeming with teens sitting on bright comfy sofas, chatting and eating, playing Rock Band, mixing music, heads down in front of laptops, and getting feedback from digital media mentors. Check out spoken word artist and mentor Mike Hawkins freestyling if you want to sample what YouMedia has on tap. Unlike any other library experience I had growing up, YouMedia is loud, sociable, and hip -- but it's still all about the public mission of the library to serve as a point of access to culture, information, and the media of the day, staffed by smart guides to knowledge and literacy. Nichole Pinkard and Amy Eshleman, who oversee the site, took me aside to explain that over a hundred teens come through the space every day to check out laptops, make media, read books, engage in workshops and special projects, or just hang out with friends in a safe environment. They say that since they opened their doors to this teen-only media space about a year ago, news spread by word of mouth, texting, and social media messaging peer-to-peer among teens across the city, and their population includes young people in diverse public and private schools, as well as home schoolers.

When Youth Own the Public Education Agenda">Continue reading "When Youth Own the Public Education Agenda" »

I'm happy to announce (a bit belatedly) the first book in the Technologies of the Imagination series I am editing with Ellen Seiter with University of Michigan Press' digitalculturebooks imprint. Emily Chivers Yochim's Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity is a nuanced look at the culture and practice of skateboarders. The description of skate culture draws from popular media, as well as ethnographic research with skaters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have to credit Ellen and our editors Tom Dwyer and Alison Mackeen (formerly at UMich Press and now at Yale U Press) for seeing this book through to publication, but I am super proud to be able to claim it as part of our series!

Skate Life">Continue reading "Skate Life" »

As of this week, I am officially part of Wikimedia's advisory board. I'm super excited to be part of the Wikimedia team and community, and am feeling rosy about the promise of all I will learn and hopefully even contribute. Like hordes of other net users, I rely on Wikipedia almost daily as my outboard brain, a taken-for-granted benefit of living in a networked age. I've made some edits and contributions to Wikipedia along the way, but mostly I've treated it as a public resource there for the taking. When I visited Wikimedia a few months ago, and took a look at their developing strategic plan, it was my first sustained look at some of the complexities of infrastructure and governance that lurk beneath the surface of a public resource that is quietly indispensable in my life.

I was interested to learn from the strategic plan that Wikimedia is currently sustainable by community contributions. The Wikimedia Foundation has received support from a range of private donors, including foundations, but the core financial support for Wikipedia is community-generated. As such, it follows in the footsteps of other member-supported models of public media, but is unique in not having a history of government funding, and having a transnational scope. And of course, unlike public television and radio, Wikipedia is not only community supported, but is community created. "We" the public donate not only our dollars but our labor, keeping the centralized costs of media making and distribution at a minimum.

Wikimedia and the Future of Public Media">Continue reading "Wikimedia and the Future of Public Media" »