American Libraries

Henry Jenkins: I have to say I'm feeling very naked in front of you today. But it's the first time since Friday night, a little after midnight that I've appeared in public as soon as we got the book and read straight through. And I'm happy to say a little before midnight last night we both succeeded in finishing the 700-plus page book. And the fascinating thing about this crowd is that you all know which book I'm talking about, right? I don't even have to mention it by title. So I reference Harry Potter to start us out for a number of reasons. First of all, for those of you who would pause in your own epic journey through this book—thanks for taking the time to out to listen to me today. Secondly, I think it's ironic that we're starting a conference about gaming on the one weekend we know that virtually no member of the gaming generation has been near any electronic technology. The kids that I know have been camped out with a book, as I was—literally—trying to read straight through and I think that's an interesting sign about the moment we're at. This is not about games or books; it's about kids engaging with both and Harry Potter is an essential part of this culture of gamer generation. Don't let reduce this to just the gamers. The gamers consume a range of media and this book is very much a part of it. And the third to reassure you you'll get no spoilers from me during this presentation.

As someone who has written about fans for most of my career and I'm always told about the craziness of fans. I have to say this week has demonstrated the craziness of antifans, to watch what's gone on. People in San Francisco rented a plane to fly over a Harry Potter gathering with a banner telling them what happened at the end of the book. People have been sending to blogs notices with the final chapter of the book as their comments so the bloggers have to filter out these comments. People in Boston wandered through a crowd chanting the names of all the characters who died in the book. The desire of people to destroy the ending of a reading experience is, I think, the most interesting aspect, in a way, of the Harry Potter experience. And there have been a lot of people I know who didn't get to go out to the celebrations on Friday night because they were afraid of finding out the ending of a book that they've waited more than a decade to get to.

And I think that's interesting where we're at as a society, the kinds of informational relationships that emerge that someone got their hands on a Harry Potter book, scanned it, put it up on the Web. In fact it turns out in Russia a team of 40 professional translators have been standing by. As soon as it went up on the web they did a translation and by Friday morning an unauthorized Russian translation of Harry Potter was out on the web. So I'm going to talk a little bit throughout the talk about Harry Potter because I think it illustrates some of what I ascribe as participatory culture. And it helps us think this weekend in particular about some of the changes that are taking place.

But back to the regularly scheduled presentation. I'm going to begin by telling a story about how I became interested in games and education. Unfortunately, a librarian plays a bit of a villainous role in this but I promise by the end of the talk that librarians will have more than redeemed themselves. But this is a particular moment in time, it's 1996. I bought my son this game that you see on the screen, The Doonesbury Election Game, which was one of the first games I saw that might fall in the category of serious gaming as we talk about it right now. It's an extraordinary game. You could choose from 100 actual political figures, structure on tickets, organize the campaign—state by state, topic by topic, do advertising strategy, debate strategy, every aspect. Finally the outcome is determined by the Electoral College. Who wins and who loses is depends by who was successful talking about the right issues and the right states and so forth. And points were based on the actual Electoral College. This is well before Florida in 2000. This is the point where most Americans didn't really understand how the Electoral College worked. So I gave the game to my son, he went up stairs to our home library, played for 20-something hours straight, wandered back down, to where my wife and I were watching CNN. And he wandered through and he said, "Oh, I get it. So Dole is speaking to Florida and Clinon is speaking in New Jersey and Gore is speaking in California and that's because those are states with high Electoral College value." The game metaphor helped him to understand the political process and almost immediately he was beginning to apply this to thinking about the news. There was a clear transfer of knowledge that we were observing in the family.

He loved this game; he wanted to share it with all his friends. And so he wanted to take it to school on Monday and the school library had a policy that kids could come in during their lunch break and use the computers, which is a good policy, except that their policy was that kids could come in and do research but they couldn't play games. And so predictably enough, the monitor, we’ll call her “Miss Crabapple,” the librarian who I think sort of standing the gateway trying to sort out on the fly what constitutes play and what constitutes learning—a false distinction I think we're all going to hear this weekend but one that she was given the task to do. I don't want to vilify her as a person but predicatively enough, looking at the box which said “game" she said, "You can't bring that game to school." And that was her philosophy. I think if the kid had come in with a book about political process in the fall of 1996, even with Doonesbury cartoons plastered all over it, teachers would have been leaping for joy. But the fact that he was going to bring a game into the library was sufficient for her to shut it down.

It was at that moment as a parent, I was really angry. Here is this powerful technology that my son had used to learn about the political process and he's so engaged in the political process. And that was the first time I had seen him interested in the presidential politics. He'll be watching a YouTube debate that's on Monday night. He's still very actively engaged in this, it really made a difference for him in the way powerful books made a difference for me when I was growing up. Nevertheless, school trying to decide and decipher how we separate out that stuff from whether real learning took place. And as a parent, as someone interested in media, I felt strongly enough that we began to launch The Games That Teach Initiative that Kurt Squire and I began at MIT, in part of that sense of we've got to do something. We've got to figure out how do we figure out harness this powerful technology to think about how learning is taking place? How do we get it into schools and school libraries? And the good news is that we began developing educational games, that particular school emerged as one of the test sites for the educational games we developed. I was able on a very local level to turn around the way that school thought about that issue and made a difference in the local community. And I think that's what it takes: community by community, library by library, school by school, whether it's a concerned librarian, a committed teacher, or angry parent that we've got to actually change the way people think about learning, to recognize the kind of powerful learning that takes place through this technology.

From there, Kurt Squire and I partnered in developing The Games That Teach Project. It was early funded by Microsoft, later funded by an anonymous donor, along with MIT, who gave us enough money to keep us going through the lean years. I have Civilization in here because Kurt's ground-breaking research dealt with Civilization. He was taking Civilization to schools and sort of using it to explore world history. He was going to minority schools—kids who were by enlarge two years below grade level. Engaged by this game or not, he found them some mornings sneaking in and cheating by looking at their textbooks. Think about how powerful that is when the textbook becomes the cheatbook for the game. But they figured out they could learn more about how to solve the problems their civilizations were facing by actually looking at how historic civilizations dealt with these problems.

What he was seeing was that when he engaged these minority groups were a series of what if scenarios: What if the Native Americans had colonized Europe as opposed to the other way around; what if Africa had resisted colonization? How would the world be different? And by starting from that point, seeing history not as something fixed, facts in a book, but something as a process—a logic—they could get inside, learning took place. So his argument was they didn't necessarily learn the facts of history playing Civilization but what they learned was a process of history—a logic of history—on the Guns, Germs, and Steel level: What's the role of territory; what's the role of exchange in diplomacy; what's the role of war in shaping human history; how do resources matter in shaping the way historical processes played itself out? So this was very important research that informed the work that we were doing.

One of the things that informed me early on as I though about this problem was this essay by Mary Louise Pratt called The Art of the Contact Zone, which is about baseball card collecting—at least that part, most of the essay is not. She goes onto talk about the history of relations in Latin American and so forth. But there were three or four really powerful paragraphs at the beginning of the essay where she talks about her son Sam and his friend Willy and how they started collecting baseball cards. And from that it, opened a whole world of knowledge. And she says “Sam and Willy really learned a lot about phonetics that year trying by trying to decipher surnames on baseball cards, a lot of about cities, states, heights, weights, places of birth, stages of life. And baseball cards opened the door to baseball books, shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, magazines, histories, biographies, novels, books of jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, even porn. Literacy began for Sam with these newly pronounceable names of the picture cards and brought him what is easily the broadest, the most varied, most rewarding, most integrative experience of his thirteen-year-old life.” This powerful description of how one thing creates an opening for all kinds of other learning and knowledge. Librarians have long known this.

We've all had a book in childhood that opened a space where we wanted to read around it and began to explore more and more deeply some topic. And we just grew outward in this web of knowledge. And a good librarian helped us find those next steps along our journey and helped us find those next steps along our journey and helped to explore that progression. That's what happened to my son with the campaign simulator game, that's what happened to Sam with baseball cards, and what happened to Kurt Squire with a game called Pirates. They each had this experience of starting from the game and the playful engagement of the game opened up new ways of learning. And now the process is something I think libraries need to think about and not decide that to play is one thing and reading is something different.

So for me one of the places we've gone recently with this is I've been part of a team at MIT that has been working with NBC News to launch a project you're going to hear about a lot this fall called IQ. And IQ is designed to be a combination of a blog, a social network site, and a game which connects young people to current events and American history through the use of the NBC news archives, the archives of The New York Times, and The Washington Post. And it's being done in partnership with The College Board as something that will help kids do better on the Advanced Placement test for social studies. And we've had the partnership of the leading newscasters at NBC and their production team working on this. Our job at the education arcade is we monitor the results; we have access to the back end of this, see how people are using it, see what teachers are doing with it, and be able to give NBC feedback to refine it. But also use it as a laboratory to understand more fully about the kinds of learning that are taking place online through games. It's a very exciting initiative. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on here, but just to fly to you as the example of what can happen as we began to grow partnerships around the political processes. It's probably nowhere near as good a game as the Doonesbury game was fourteen years ago or whenever it was. But it, nevertheless, is something that we'll take advantage of Web 2.0 to engage kids in learning about the political process and the way that my son had been changed. And that may be the culmination of the story of my own journey here.

On the way I've also had the chance to work with this guy, Scott Osterweil, who is an extraordinary game designer. He did the Zoobinis Logical Journey games, which some of you in the room will probably remember fondly. And he now works for The Education Arcade at MIT, helping us develop some next generation games for learning. We're partnering with Maryland Public Television and a company called Fablevision to begin to develop some games designed to promote literacy and math skills at the middle school level. This one of the quotes of his that has really inspired me: "In a spelling bee a kid is challenged to memorize a bunch of words, there's a fair amount of pressure and it's kind of grim. If they get a word wrong, a buzzer goes off, they're told they got it wrong and that they're out. There's never a discussion about why they got it wrong, how they could have reasoned about the word to get it right, there's never really much of a discussion about how that word could be used in a speech. In fact, the goal of a spelling bee is to learn all sorts of words that you would never use in common speech." He continues, "compare that with the game of Scrabble where the kid sits with the letters in front of him and is moving them around, thinking endlessly about all different combinations of words, and which ones are real. They try to play one and there's a discussion about whether it's a real word or whether that's a real form of the word. Through that process, kids are engaging deeply, not just in spelling but in word usage and they're having fun while they're doing it. There's very little penalty for making a mistake, in fact the game invites kids to take a risk. That's the experience a game can provide a kid in terms of learning.

Our group at The Education Arcade works constantly with that: Is this more like a spelling bee or is it more like Scrabble? And one of the mottoes we really look at is that "it's not about serious games, it's about serious gaming." You have to put the product in the box but the entire process around which that product plays itself out. This is something teachers often struggle with: Does the game replace me; do kids just play games all day in the classroom? We don't see it that way. The analogy I often make is to the model of The United Nations, which many of us in this room played when we were in high school. It was a role-play game scenario where you are delegations from different countries, you gather together to have meetings, and so forth. And you don't just show up and play. You spend weeks get ready to play, you do research, it motivates lecture, it motivates class discussions, it motivates library work. You go there informed, engaged, ready to play, you come back out the other side of it and a good teacher has you debrief, has you share what you did with other students, has you write about it, talks about it, have discussions around it. That's part of a pedagogical process in which the game is one element but the entire span of that is about serious gaming.

We're interested in the whole context in which games are embedded. It's not just turning your libraries over to play games, it's about thinking about what playing means as an alternative system of learning that I think is where we can make a difference as a community. This is just one image of the game that Scott's been working with us on. The working title is Labyrinth. It should go up on Maryland Public Television site about a year from now. But it is very much about the logic of math. It's about set theory and proportions and those kinds of relationships—the logic of math is what we think this game will allow people to do. It was designed by our grad students that were working as first-level designers and then turned over to Fablevision to complete. And we think the result is a game that kids are going to find really engaging, just like the Zoobini games captured kids imaginations a while ago.

What I'm going to talk about right now is this framework of thinking about how games connect to learning. It emerges in the MacArthur white paper that we talked about earlier. Many of you heard The MacArthur Foundation made a commitment last fall: $50 million over the next five years to build a network of researchers, scholars, activists, librarians, teachers that are involved in thinking about learning in new ways—thinking about the informal learning that's taking place as kids operate outside of schools, online and how that can inform public institutions, whether we're talking art museums, libraries, or schools as they relate to and interface with kids. And the white paper that our team at MIT wrote was designed to provide a rationale or framework for thinking about some of the work that's gone forward. And it begins with this notion of participation. And this is a quote from the new London Group, an essay of pedagogy and multiliteracies. And James Paul Gee that you heard from this weekend was one of the co-authors of that statement and it says, "It's possible to define generally the mission of education. It could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life." And I would add creative life to that list.

How do we teach kids to participate? How do we enable skills for participation? And I focus on skills, literacy and competencies with the chart on the left which is from the Kaiser Foundation, that once a year makes a scream about screen time. They've been collecting this data that the media loves to get hysterical over that shows young people spend more and more of their time involved in screen-based medium. What's interesting is that if you look at the chart there, what their statistics are showing—this is the percentage of kids six and under who use any screen media—83% of them use screen media for more than two hours a day. 83% of them play outside for more than two hours a day, that's a line you never see in here. 79% read or are read to for more than two hours a day and 79% of them listen to music for more than two hours a day. I think that's a fairly balanced media diet. You're looking at a range of activities and if we trust one of those figures, we should trust all of them. So I think we want to look more closely at it.

There's also the problem of lumping together all the different relationships we have with screen media at the present time, the different activities, the different levels of engagement we have with it and sort of seeing screen media: Bad. If you're a good parent, don't let your kids near it. If you have to let them near it restrict the number of hours, keep it out of the kid's bedroom, end of story. Instead of saying: What do we do to encourage kids to engage creatively, ethically, actively, imaginatively with these kinds of screen technologies? How do we change the way kids relate to it? These statistics don't address that; the questions Kaiser has collected don't give us that. Whereas what MacArthur has done is put together a team of researchers with many different disciplines who are going out and trying to understand what's going on now and how that might inform where we go in the future. So it's an important process.

The Pew Center for the Internet & American Life released a study about two years now that sort of helps shape the report that from MacArthur. And they found that more than half of all American teens, that 57% of teens use the Internet could be considered media creatives. 33% of teens share what they have created online with others beyond friends and family, 22% have their own home pages, 19% blog, and 19% remix content they found online. Very interesting statistics. And some other things, it's not who you expected. It turns out that urban kids are the most likely to do these activities, followed by rural kids, and finally suburban kids. So it's not suburban white kids. Race didn't seem to be a significant variable in this study and gender showed that the gap closed between boys and girls by early high school and the girls, in fact, are more likely to engage in these activities by the time they reach high school than the boys did. So when people say, "You may see it's the suburban white boys." And it's not. It's an entire population. But keep in mind two things: Keep in mind that 57% who do these things and 43% that do not. And that's what I'm going to talk about a little later is participation gap. It's not the entire generation. Rhetoric about digital natives are racist to the degree these skills are not equally distributed across the population, these experiences are not equally distributed. And that points to the role that librarians can play—one important role that they play in confronting the challenges we're talking about.

We talk in the report about what I'm calling participatory culture. And I put up this picture of Harry Potter and kids for number of reasons: one, is obviously the timing but to remind libraries that you played an important role in shaping participatory culture around Harry Potter and these are principals I think librarians intuitively know, if they don't know them formally. So first of all, participatory culture is one where there are low barriers for artistic expression and civic engagement; where there's strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others; where there's some kind of informal mentorship in which more experienced participants share what they know with younger, less experienced participants; where members feel their contribution matters; and some degree of social connection exists between members enough that they care what other members think about what it is they're doing or what it is they're creating. And this is an important phenomenon, it's what I see when I study fan cultures, it's what I see when I study gamer cultures, bloggers, all variety of hobbyist groups that are involved in these kinds participatory culture.

The second reason to be skeptical of that phrase “digital natives” that a lot of people like to use, right? It's useful as a first order thing, it helps people get the phenomenon but then we really want to complicate it really quickly. And one of the complications is that this is not just a culture created by kids. What's interesting about these kinds of spaces is these are spaces where adults and kids learn from each other through a set of relationships that are fundamentally different from those in structured schools, where there's not a fixed age hierarchy. So what's exiting to me about Harry Potter is not that it's just a book that taught kids to read, but it's a book that taught kids to write. And I've written in Convergence Culture a lot about fan fiction—writing as an activity that involves large numbers of teens, writing stories and novels, putting them up on the web, going through a beta reading process in which other fans comment on their novels, give them feedback, help them to grow as writers. And this is a case where some of those comments are coming from adults, who are also Harry Potter fans and in some cases it's teens helping adults become better writers. So I talked to a fourteen-year-old-girl named Madeline when I was doing my book who talked about being—by age thirteen—publishing her first novel on the web and by age fourteen becoming a teacher in that community, where she was helping thirty-five— and forty-year-old women become better writers. That fluidity of relationships is what's interesting about the space.

When you're talking about digital natives and digital immigrants we create a false divide in the ways in which young people learn from each other and we sort of naturalize this idea that all people are out of the process. Whereas what's interesting is precisely the way those generations come together and learn from each other. So when I talk to Harry Potter fans, the young ones tell me they're really interested in the teacher characters in the books and they were interested the Marauders and what Harry's parents were like when they were kids, and they're interested in the teachers and what they're lives are like when kids aren't around. And so they learn that from adults. And the adults are saying, "I don't know how to write for a schoolboy." And they learn how to think about youth and adolescence from talking to young people. There's an exchange about age and experience, youth and maturity, that's central to the culture there, that doesn't occur in many other places within our culture. And it's that powerful nature in that exchange that makes a difference in fan fiction writing. So the white paper identifies what we see.

The other problem with digital native talk is it implies, "Well, just leave everyone alone and let them grow and use this stuff and they'll be fine. We don't have to step in." Well, the white paper tries to identify some core problems they do require adults to be very conscious of what children are doing online. And they're making a difference in positive sense, not by restricting access, but by enabling kids to grow and develop in new ways. The first of those is what we call the participation gap and I've already alluded to that. This is not simply the digital divide. Go back to the late 80's, early 90s—there was a lot of talk about the digital divide, we wired the classrooms, we wired the libraries, we were determined to ensure that every kid in America had access to a network computer. And that was a very, very noble effort. The reality is we're not there yet but we're very close. There are some resistant pockets of Native American reservations being one where, frankly, people have not had access to telephones in some cases and it's been difficult to move there. So we need to keep focusing on the challenge in those kinds of contexts.

But for the most part, most kids in America now have access to network computing through libraries if not at home. And that's half the problem: We've wired the classroom, now what; we wired the library, now what? And the answer is we've now got to think about social skills and culture competencies that are emerging as these kids move into these environments. And we've got this fundamental divide, which means those kids who have got 24/7 broadband mobile access—they're always online. The act of going online is alien to them because they're always connected. And we've got this generation of kids who have limited time on the computer, maybe sometimes as limited as ten minutes a day in libraries because they have to ration out access to the computers, who don't have the ability to store and upload stuff, who have the federally mandated filters on computers, blocking them from a lot of information. If the Protecting Children of the 21st Century Act were to pass, they would be blocked from social network and blogging technologies; those kids have a radically different experience.

Research coming out USC is already suggesting that for example, how they think about research online is fundamentally shaped by that. That those kids who have a lot of access understand the process, they understand the context in which online information circulates. Those kids who have ten minutes get in, get out, get the information—they have to trust it. They're much more credulous about information, much more likely to take information from commercial sources, from unaccredited sources, from other kinds of sources because of the constraints on access to time. This is the new hidden curriculum. We talked some decades ago about kids who grew up in homes with opera records, regular trips to art museums, libraries, other institutions having a different relationship to learning—being better prepared for school, speaking a language teachers recognized and respected. And now those kids who grew up playing games, blogging, doing fan fiction, being involved in these online activities have different relationships to technology; they're more likely to grab a computer in the classroom and run with it, they're much more comfortable in the online world that those kids who don't. And that's a fundamental problem. And that's what people in this room have a frontline perspective on it because you're dealing with it. And in a lot of cases those kids who have no other access to those computers, except through you. And you want to think about, "What do those kids need from you?" Not just extending hours of access and so forth—that's very important—but also thinking conceptually about the guidance they get because they've got to get it in less time and do the research. And your role as librarians is to help them think about that process is fundamentally different from those kids who are immersed at home. And you're battling that participation gap every day when you're in your library.

Second is the transparency problem, which is something that Kurt Squire alerted me to years ago. He was looking at kids using Civilization. He was discovering kids got inside the game, they learned a lot through the game, but then he asked about how the game respected history or whether the game could represent history in different lights. They drew a total blank. The game itself was accepted at face value. Are we surprised that we would have previously taken the textbook at face value? But unless we couple a critical perspective on media that understands how media is distributed, the motives behind it, the stuff that's been a part of media literacy education around the world for decades, we are not in a situation where we can help this generation really move. We are fish in an aquarium who have no awareness of the water or the glass. And we've got to open up this generation to think critically about the role that media plays in their lives.

Third is what we call the ethics problem. And here, the image on the left is kind of an idealized image of the high school newspaper. And Howard Gardner and his team at Harvard has done a lot of research showing how high school journalism plays a central role in helping people acquire the professional ethics that future journalists will use. Because of its kind of self-contained, supervised community in which people understand the norms of their own practice and pass them down to the next generation.

The other chart there is the chart of LiveJournal participation. And what you see is pretty much the peak of LiveJournal participation until you get significantly older. This first peak comes among those kids who is about the same age as the high school newspaper editors, only there's a whole lot more of them—lots and lots of kids involved in this who would never be able to participate in high school newspaper. And what amount of adult supervision goes on here? Pretty much zero. No adult around them understands what they're doing, why they're doing it, no one is helping them through the ethical questions that they're struggling with as they move into a new space. They have much more potential influence, much more long-term impact on their lives, but no one's helping them think about how to use this ethically and safely and in the ways that I think this generation needs. And that's the third challenge that we've got to think about—our role

So those are the questions that motivated the white paper: how do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experience needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society? How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate their understanding of the ways that media shapes our perceptions of the world around us? How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards which should shape their practices as media makers and as participants within online communities? And if we're going to meet those challenges, all of us have to work together. It's going to have to be through schools, it's going to have to be through after school programs, it's going to be through libraries, public institutions, churches, community centers, the media itself, parents, all of us have a role to play if we're going to address these three challenges which confront us as we think about the next generation.

In the white paper we ask, "What do kids need to know then?" First of all—and the good news for the people in this room—first and foremost, they need to understand traditional print literacy. If you can't read and write, you can't do any of the other stuff. Your social eligibility online is determined by your ability to read and write. And my son totally failed at school to connect with people and online he had one virtual girlfriend after another because he could write well and listen well and respond well online. The social skill at the present moment is basic literacy. Research skills: The stuff that libraries have traditionally borne the bulk of the responsibility in teaching—how do we collect information, how do we process information? More fundamental now than ever before in a world where there are fewer professional gatekeepers and information is circulating in these unknown spaces, spaces like Wikipedia that I think can be used intelligently. I think Wikipedia is an incredible resource but we need to teach kids how to read it and how to get underneath the hood and understand how much information there is about where information comes from in Wikipedia.

Third, technical skills: the ability to code, compute, and so forth. And that's got to push us beyond the keyboarding skills which is most of what high schools teach kids, without really having a deep understanding about the technology, because otherwise it's like confusing penmanship for composition. The difference between being able to write and literacy is a fundamental difference, I think.

Fourth, is this idea that media literacy to understand the institutions and practices through which media circulates. And that's what we've historically called media—literacy. All of that's absolutely necessary—essential, but it's not sufficient—to deal with the challenges that young people are facing as they move into this online world. So what the white paper tries to do is identify this next set of skills that we're involved with, this set of social skills and social competencies, most of which have something to do with games in one way or another. In fact, all these slides that deal with games talk about these skills. The first is this idea of the play itself as the capacity to externalize your surroundings as problem solving. You go into a game, you don't have any idea what the game is going to be, God forbid you read the instructions, you plunge yourself into the heart of this thing, you try to predict the nature of the world, you try to base your actions on those predictions, as you gradually refine your understanding of the other world through experimentation, trial and error, dying and starting over. At the end of it you've now developed a richer type of understanding of world. It's the scientific method—it's a basic hypothesis formation, hypothesis testing in a space where it's okay to fail, where you can learn by failure more than you can learn through success. You do that at school, it goes on your permanent record; you do it in a game, you're learning by making mistakes. It's a really powerful way of learning and games and play lower the risk and allow us to move into a space where we can learn in that way.

Second, simulation: the ability to interpret or construct dynamic models of real world processes. Most modern science and social science is rooted in simulation and visualization technologies. Almost none of those find their ways into the high school science and social science curriculum today; this is a fundamental gap. Simcity, Civilization, Railroad Tycoons—all of those do a better job of teaching kids how to process of information through a simulation system than, by enlarge, the courses they're taking at school. It's not just the ability to read the simulation, it's the ability to get inside the hood of the simulation, change variables and see what the consequences are and understand this dynamic model of the world that simulation technologies respect.

Third is the idea of performance: the ability to adopt alternatives identities for the purpose of improvisational discovery. Here is a game we built at Education Arcade called Revolution, which is basically a Colonial Williamsburg simulation. You're a citizen in Colonial Williamsburg, you're going about your daily business, making stuff, selling it, and you're also discovering—working—through the debates of the time, including the debates working left of the American revolution. And we had a guy, Russell Francis from Oxford who worked with the kids who were testing the game and had them write diaries in character. And we discovered a great deal about the ways there were taking this role-play as a provocation to bring their knowledge from other places.

In this game we struggled a lot with how to represent slavery. We had a modestly successful representation of the 40% of the population of Williamsburg who were not free individuals and dealt with that in a straightforward way. This young girl had written about being a house slave and how the field slaves made fun of her because she was so close to the master and suspected that she might have some white blood. Well, none of that was in the game. This is a middle school kid who learned that from other places. The game became a provocation for her to map that on to the game. It was part of how she got into character was understand that set of issues. It was a mixture of things she read in textbooks and things she's observed at school and reading those together, she came up with this idea of being made fun of in this kind of class-race antagonism, which has some basis in history. So one level in which performance mattered was she collected information and processed it through this persona that she was taking on. The other thing is another player who was a Loyalist character who went to a rally, the Red coats came in, they open fired, and shot a lot of people, including her character. And she was just furious about this saying, "How come they're shooting me? I'm on their side!" And then there was this moment when it sunk in—the nature of the Boston Massacre. There were some revolutionaries that were shot there, there were some kids, people on the Loyalist side. When you have political violence, it's random; the wrong people get hurt. And that was a real learning experience for her she got deeper into because she was playing a role, because she identified with a character in that space, she understood that history in a mental different way.

Third is what we call appropriation. And that's the ability to remix media content. We live in a remix culture. The new technologies make it very easy to mash things up. There's a lot of issues of intellectual property and plagiarism and so forth that schools need to be talking about that. But we don't get anywhere by continuing to insist that artists in the past created things out of their heads as original inventors, when we know in this room that that's simply not true. That Homer mashed up stories from his own tradition to create The Odyssey. The Sistine Chapel is a remix from the Bible. That Shakespeare wrote fan fiction essentially taking characters from other people's plays and sketching them out and developing them more fully through his own plays. That Melville was in many ways the rap master remixer of the 19th century. We know that ourselves but we don't actually say that to our kids. And I think we've got to actually think about remixing as a skill that has shaped human creativity throughout history and something schools and libraries need to talk about in new ways.

Really been shaped by this by talking to a guy named Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, who's a theatre director in Pawtuckett, Rhode Island. And Fitts-Wiley had gone to prisons and worked with incarcerated youth to get them to rewrite Moby Dick. First of all, they had to read Moby Dick but he engaged them in a different way by taking it apart and reconstructing Moby Dick for the 21st century. And he recently staged a play I was able to see up in Rhode Island where adults did this traditional Moby Dick and the kids did this street gang version of Moby Dick. It's all about Ahab's posse going out and trying to get the great big white, which is turns out to be an international drug cartel. And the obsession with revenge, destruction, he brings about incredibly powerful stuff that these kids got because they were taught to learn by taking cultural materials apart and remixing them. We're now developing a teacher's guide around Melville and Moby Dick, working with him and with Wyn Kelley, a literature professor at MIT, that basically takes apart Melville's sources and tries to understand the weirdness of Moby Dick: the fact that you're reading an encyclopedia on one page, a sermon the next, and an adventure story the next in terms of remix culture—hybrid genre work. They in fact took a lot of the stuff around them and smashed it up to create this new work. And in that using remix culture to open up a way of thinking about this novel is different than we've seen before.

All right, multitasking—another one of the media's favorite villains. I describe multitasking as the ability to scan one's environment around shift focus onto salient details on an ad hoc basis. It's about processing more information than you can necessarily absorb on a fully conscious level. No one wants to see the focused attention of previous generations destroyed. But what if we thought about this as a feature and not a bug—the capacity to also process information that's coming at you from all sides, to make quick decisions, to manage resources? The image here is Arcadia, it's a GameLab product which is out on the web where you play four arcade games at once, cycling through it, keeping all the four games in play and kids today can do it. When I started playing Pong—I was a first generation gamer—it took my full attention for hours. Now they can play those same games four at a time. This is a shift in skills that is fundamental, a skill that we should value. But understand they're going to process knowledge and learn in different ways because of it.

Distributive cognition: the ability to act meaningfully with tools, which is expand our mental capacities. This is something we've been struggling with at least since the calculator. How do we think about these tools that expand our capacity to process information and knowledge? That store things for us that we don't have to store in our own heads? The image here is from a game called Environmental Detectives that my colleague, Eric Klopfer has developed. In Environmental Detectives you're trying to find the source of a chemical leak that's leading to pollution in the Charles River. You literally walk the MIT campus with your handheld, you're looking at GPS-enabled fictional data, you drill for wells, you interview people, you're trying to put together a hypothesis of what's going on. And you're doing some, partially based on the information of the game, and partially based on your observation of erosion patterns, proximity to the Charles, the slope of the land, and you're mixing those things together to solve the problem. It's about problem-solving that combines direct observation in the real world with handheld stuff and people in places like Wisconsin are extending that platform that Eric Klopfer developed in new directions that I think are paving the way for all kinds of learning at the local level.

Collective intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal. This is a key skill for the 21st century. And the Network Society tells us it's a world where nobody knows everything, but everybody knows some things. But what any given member knows is available to the group on a moment's notice. That's a really powerful way of thinking about how knowledge works. And things like ultimate reality games really make that visible. Here's the game I love: Bees. It was created in relation to Halo 2, in part by Jane McGonigal. And what Jane McGonigal said was she really wanted to teach kids skills—working together in social networks, processing knowledge. So one problem is you're given a row of numbers, you've got to figure those numbers are GPS locations. It turns out they're GPS locations of pay phones in each of the fifty states. Certain moment of time you've got to get a person at each of those pay phones, pick up the phone, a real person calls in, asks them a question. The answer to question could be one of fifty web pages. They've got a minute and a half to answer. You can't play that game by yourself. It's a game designed to bring large numbers of people to play out the Six Degrees of Separation—all of those principles networking to enable kids and adults to pool knowledge and work together to solve these puzzles. It's a really powerful demonstration of how games can teach us new skills and processing information.

Tied to that, clearly, is the expression of judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources. How do we decide what information is reliable? This is another game Jane McGonigal has been involved in—A World Without Oil, which is going on right now and is designed to get kids to think about real world problems, the energy crisis in particular. What happens is they play the game and sort out what's fictional, what's real, what do you trust, what's reliable, where does the game end and the real world start? And those are skills that games design to cultivate in young people as they think about how to process knowledge.

Transmedia navigation: the ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities. Modalities is Gunther Kress's term. In other words, if you think about a story like Pokemon, it's not a story that rests in any one place, it's a story that's on television, it's in coloring books, in picture books, it's in collector's cards, it's in video games, it's in feature films. You're putting that information together, it turns out to be a very complex system more than 250 characters in Pokemon, with multiple states of being, multiple antagonisms and friendships—a system that turns out to be more complex than the periodic table. And these kids are learning it across media, there's no one place you go that all that information rests and Mimi Ito at USC tells us that when kids get together, they have a hypersocial relationship where two kids meet up on a playground for the first time and they begin to trade information. They exchange knowledge about these characters. It's very different than what happened when we read a self-contained book or even a series of books in school because the density of structure is facts and it's designed so no one person can hold it together. But we've got to learn to travel across and connect information together from multiple sources. And that's part of the skill set.

Networking: The ability to search for, synthesize and disseminate information; fundamental skill set. This image here is from Lost. There's a moment in the second season of Lost where this graphic flashes on the screen in split-second strobes. People freeze frame it, blew it up, put the photo captions on the web, compared them across each other, were able to decipher what all that said, then tried to figure out what it means. The activity that large numbers of people engaged in over a long period of time. It's a game we played with television. It's an example of how networking plays itself out. Now some of you know about this Protecting Childhood in the 21st Century Act that's periodically going up and down. It seems to be maybe on the ropes in Congress right now, but who knows? But this act would make it impossible for schools and public libraries to receive federal funds to allow kids to have access to social networking software. It's a fundamental fight. ALA has been an important champion on. It's a fight we should be concerned with. Now my argument to the people who are concerned about youth safety online is whether a kid is more safe doing all of that stuff on their own or having informed people around them like librarians and teachers who understand what social networking is and help those kids at risk work through it. How do we make kids safer by closing the schoolhouse gates to an activity that we know is essential to their culture, rather than insisting that librarians play an active role in shaping their access to networking skills? And we're not walking out on doing so. A fun little skill that the next generation of young people are going to need is to be able to collaborate and participate in these new kinds of social networks that are emerging. This is a fight that we really have to win because of the effect it's going to have on the next generation. (Applause)

Tied to that is negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives and grasping and following alternative sets of norms; this is about diversity. What does diversity mean in Arab collective intelligence? We decide that diversity means that there's minorities who may be included or excluded. Look at the group as a whole, all the research and reflective intelligence says the wisdom of crowds said, "The value of that comes with having diverse perspectives brought together." People know different things, have different skill sets, different ways of processing knowledge and contributing to the group effort, something different emerges. But that means we've got to learn to listen to all those diverse perspectives, we've got to understand what it means to move across communities and we have to teach this generation to respect diversity, not simply for minority perspectives, but the community as a whole. It's no longer about respecting diversity, it's about valuing it, making it part of everyday texture of our relations online. And that, I think, is fundamental struggle we're involved with as well, as we think about the kinds of learning that are taking place in this new environment.

So the white paper is out there as of the fall. Where we're involved in now as a group—Project NML I'm talking about now, the group that helped author that paper with me—is we're now developing a series of online documentaries that are resources for helping kids think about media. You can find these, as well as the white paper at projectnml.org. What we're calling these things are exemplars and the idea we discovered was lots of after school programs, teachers were involved in the production of classes, but many of them themselves lacked the language to talk about this set of skills I'm describing here, about the context in which media got made and so forth.

And so we've begun to produce online documentaries that kids and teachers and librarians can use to think more deeply about the kinds of learning that are occurring. So far we have about nine sets of exemplars up. We'll have another three up by the end of the summer, we're continuing to work. For each set we have five to ten minute segments that are three to four minutes each. They're designed to be provocations in the classroom but also things you can watch all the way through or watch in a variety of combinations. We're already starting to partner with other universities to produce; American University is starting to contribute some content to this. And long-term we're talking about universities around the world. And long-term we want to make this an open source system where communities can contribute their own content and talk about media production in their local communities. And thought I'd share a couple of segments from the one that's up now that deals with games since it sort of gives us a way into thinking about—this is a segment from dealing with big games, which are public games played outside. This documents the Big Game Festival that was held in New York. This is a section called Learning Skills Through Play.

(Video Exerpt) Jane McGonigal: There are a couple different categories of skills that I think players need to game with. The first, I think, is this really basic familiarity with mobile computing technologies. A lot of players who came to play the game had never even used the texting function of a cell phone. They didn't know how to switch from numbers to letters on their cell phone pads. And people who came to the game suddenly knew how to use all of the features of their cell phones which they had been ignoring. For I Love Bees, which is the game that we did in 2004 with 42 Entertainment where we involved a lot of GPS navigating. For a lot of players that was their first experience working with GPS coordinates and going out to navigate physical space with this kind of virtual data to make them feel like really powerful users of the technology. Anyone who plays that game now is really an expert and can go out and continue to be feel like an expert when it comes to making technology a part of their life. For me, it has to do with how you are able to be an effective citizen in massively networked culture. So are you able to collaborate with people on a really big scale and for Cruel 2 B Kind, one of the designs choices that I made was the idea that after you got killed, instead of getting thrown out of the game, you actually work with the people who killed you.

Ian Bogost: The way the game is designed—it does sort of rely on some players rising to the top and kind of taking control of the groups that they captured and coming up with a strategy and persuading the group—it could be a group of four or fifty—to go along with their strategy and then to execute them.

Jane McGonigal: They have to make decisions together in real time—all forty bodies moving together with the same goal and purpose—and to execute the strategy that was collectively decided upon. For a lot of players that part of the game got really hard and it was hard to keep everybody together it was hard to have everybody stay involved. For some designers, that would be a sign that maybe we should make the game so that you're only working in small teams. But because Cruel 2 B Kind is a research game, one of the goals really is to see how we can bring players into this sort unfamiliar future forward-looking social interaction. As you look at all kinds of collective intelligence applications unfolding on the web and smart mobs, where people are individually becoming part of a large mob, how can we take all that and teach players how to have massively-scaled real time collaboration face to face? You're sort of learning skills for the future is one way to think about it.

Philip Tan: The ability to sort out of information and misinformation becomes increasingly important today, when we have information coming from all the different sources. We don't really know who's responsible for generating a piece of information or what their true source is. And being able to do that detective work quickly and efficiently and corroborate it with other bits of evidence and share it with other people in an efficient way becomes a really important skill today.

Jane McGonigal: The players will be the people who are the first on the scene, the first people to learn these skills and techniques. And hopefully ten years from now, these will be the people who are in charge of companies an in charge of non-profits, in charge of community groups and real leaders and innovators.

Henry Jenkins: So that's one segment of about eight we have on big games an maybe sixty that we have produced so far, which were designed, as you can see in the as context of our discussion of white paper, designed to really foster an understanding of those skills and apply them in variety of new spaces. Around those are curricular guides, vocabulary sheets, further reading to allow these to be integrated into the classroom on a variety of levels. We're also working on the Melville project to design a curricular guide for school use to help teachers think of a different way of teaching Moby Dick. And we're partnered with Howard Gardner's group at Harvard to develop an ethics case book. We're thinking about the choices young people make as media makers and participants in the online world. And that's our project for the next couple of years. I hope you'll be watching Project NML to see how that unfolds. We'd love to partner with libraries to test some of these materials and activities. We're in the process of hiring a school-based community outreach person who can work with community groups to make that happen. So I'm going to close with just a couple of thoughts about how this effects the people in this room. The first is really help you along a process that you're already undergoing, from thinking of yourself as a curator or archivist of printed material to an information facilitator or coach. And I saw this really funny cartoon on the web that really captures that idea of the librarian as a search engine, rather than simply the person who manages the books physically in the library. As we deal with this participation gap, we need the librarians to think of their roles in different ways to help teach kids strategies for accessing and processing information , to help them to find the best way not to deal what's physically present in the library, but across the networks. And that's why I think that while it's important to think about adding games to your collection, it's more important to understand how games work and how games-based learning works so you can facilitate learning through games. Certainly not shutting the kid out who brings a game to the library, but possibly playing with the kid and helping them to understand how it connects to other kinds of learning. John Seely Brown talks about tinkering spaces. And this is the idea the community centers, libraries, museums create spaces where the public came together, tried new technologies, built things together to learn from each other. That we facilitate the kinds of learning and informal relations between adults and youth that are appearing online but make those available to other kinds of people who might not have access. World of Warcraft Guild is another example of ways this learning across generations occurs. The community takes ownership of training, of access to information appliances. T.L. Taylor tells us they're building new information systems online to facilitate their play and that's an important part. Libraries could be part that process. Two images of ways communities have been involved in this. The top is an image of Global Kids. It's a group that meets in Teen Second Life. Barry Joseph does amazing things with kids from around the world, getting involved in social issues, doing research, connecting with each other via Second Life as a virtual world platform. The other is from the urban games academy, which is based in Baltimore. It's a group that's helping minority youth groups learn math, programming skills, and so forth by creating a space where they learn to design games. And it's both intended to give these kids access to new kinds of learning but also to hopefully break down some of the racial divides that have shaped the American game industry where there are very few minority designers and very few minority designers in the pipeline. Libraries and schools can play a role in showcasing work that young people have produced. It's not just about mentoring, tinkering, or creating work, it's also about using the visibility you have in your community to display work, to feature the next Fellini, Spielberg and the guy with an xbox. That's the kind of creative work kids are doing through and around games. Put it out there, show what kids were doing in their community the way you might have once showcased their pictures or their stories or their poems. In the physical library, use the web space around the library to reach out and share that creativity and lend support to this participatory culture. The library also is part of a social network. You have connections with libraries around the country. And in a world of social networking, those connections become extremely valuable in helping these young people who may not have access to social networking any place else to connect with each other and forge new relationships and libraries can be helping kids develop projects in collaboration with learners around the country that involve collective intelligence, libraries can be sponsoring virtual speakers that are physically present in one library and available via Second Life to people around the country who then feel a sense of connection with people that sat in the audience group. I think that's the sort of things the libraries could be begin to explore, to take advantage of your natural role as information service providers, as technology experts to help these young people bridge those gaps and to acquire those skills we're talking about at a basic level. And you're going to be hearing about interesting projects all weekend. And people are already doing those things. So I'm not telling people in this room anything new, other than suggesting I want you to think of this as part of a games in libraries culture but think beyond it to think of what it is to think of a full range of participatory culture that kids that are involved in and what role you, as librarians, can play in shaping that. An interesting constituent are homeschoolers or unschoolers. There are large numbers of kids today who are involved in homeschooling. We found that historically, they were kids who were socially isolated. These are early adapters of technology, they're socially networked and the library can become an important hub for these people. There is an opportunity to really work with that community on a local level, as early testers, early adapters and adopters of these technologies and figure out what you're doing to provide a center where they can come together and have social experiences and take advantage of their already online network presence. So I'm going to end there with that series of challenges to think about what libraries can do. This three places you can go to connect with me. The first is my blog, I'm there five days a week at henryjenkins.org. The second is the white paper itself or the exemplars, where you can find at projectnml.org Web site. And the third is my email address and I'd love to hear from people in the audience with any questions or comments you might have. So drop me a line. That's the end of my formal presentation, so thank you.