The MacArthur Foundation's Digital Drive

The nonprofit institution has launched a five-year initiative to study online culture and media literacy, and its impact on modern youth

by Aili McConnon

The world is in the middle of a seismic societal shift. Young people actively produce much more content—digital and otherwise—than previous generations, who were more passive in their consumption of commercially-generated media. One in 100 adults online create a blog or personal Web page or share artwork, photos, stories, or videos. Yet more than half of online teens regularly create such content, according to recent research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

For this reason, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently launched a $50 million, five-year initiative to investigate how and why young people—who have been bathed in bits and bytes since birth—use the Web, computer games, cell phones, and other gadgets to learn, play, and communicate.

"It's clear that for many, the richest environment for learning is no longer inside the classroom but…online and after school," said MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton at the launch of the Digital Media & Learning Initiative at the end of October (the press conference was, appropriately, also streamed in real time in the Second Life virtual world). "That's our opening hypothesis. We believe there's a new interdisciplinary cross-sector in the making, and MacArthur wants to build and support this field of digital media and learning."

Knowledge Hub

To nourish this nascent field, the MacArthur Foundation will give $10 million in grants to individuals and organizations to work on projects that stimulate research in digital media or explore new approaches to educational innovation.

The remaining $40 million will be put towards fulfilling the broader aim of connecting researchers, educators, youth, and practitioners in different disciplines (and across sectors). A digital knowledge hub is already in the works, so that teachers from around the world can compare, contrast, and share research, tools, and findings through open-source software and online forums.

Founded in 1978, The MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent, grant-making institution. It's probably best known for its "genius grants," five year unrestricted fellowships with $500,000 stipends awarded to those who "show exceptional merit and promise of continued creative work." With assets of $5 billion, the organization makes grants of some $200 million annually.

The foundation typically dips its toe in uncharted waters gently, testing projects by giving short-term grants to develop preliminary research and prototypes. Based on the results of this seed innovation, they then allocate longer, more substantial grants. In 2005, they made several short-term (eight month to a year) grants that laid the groundwork for this new initiative, and some of those projects are among the first recipients of the Digital Media & Learning grants. Most of them will be three years in length. Here are some of them:

The participation gap. In 2005, Henry Jenkins, the director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received $500,000 for research that was published to coincide with the launch of the new initiative. His paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, examines what Jenkins calls the "participation gap."

While educators used to worry about the "digital divide"—whether all students had equal access to computers and technology—they should now consider the "participation gap", or whether students who can only use computers in the school library have enough time to develop the same media literacy and skills as peers who spend hours designing, communicating, editing, networking, and learning on their home computers.

Based on the results of his research, Jenkins' Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT will receive a further $1,800,000 to develop a media-literacy curriculum in conjunction with the Center for Urban School Improvement in Chicago.