From SuperGoo to Scratch: Exploring creative digital media production in informal learning

Based on work in media studies, new literacy studies, applied linguistics, the arts and empirical research on the experiences of urban youths’ informal media arts practices we articulate a new vision for media education in the digital age that encompasses new genres, convergence, media mixes, and participation. We first outline the history of how students’ creative production has been used to meet the goals of media educators and highlight new trends in media education that are instructive for creative production. Our goal is to introduce and situate the new ways in which youth are participating in creative production and the subsequent impact that this might have on teaching and learning media education today. Findings from an ethnographic study are used to demonstrate the potential of youth producing new media, such as videogames and interactive art, on media education research and practice. Media education in the digital age needs to take into account recent theoretical developments of cultural convergences, media mixes, and new forms of participation. New genres such as hypertext (Bolter & Grusin, 1999), which break with the linearity of traditional media, are now used on the Internet, and marginalized media such as videogames (Gee, 2003) have gone mainstream, all contributing to the phenomenon of media mixes (Ito, 2006). These new media mixes have been most prominently discussed within the context of convergence (Jenkins, 2006a), suggesting that we need to examine how the participatory culture has radically shifted how we conceptualize the field. As the lines between