The MacArthur Foundation's Digital Drive

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Curriculum products will include a library of day-in-the-life videos of people who have excelled in digital media and a Remixing Melville project, in collaboration with the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Students will use video, sound, and other multimedia tools and techniques to re-imagine Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick in the context of their own lives—an innovative way to introduce classic literature.

Kid-driven lessons.Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California spent time with thousands of children in a large-scale ethnographic project. Both schools were given awards to expand upon their research: over $2 million to the School of Information Management & Systems at UC Berkeley and $1,346,000 to the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC.

Led by Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist of technology use, along with information professor Peter Lyman, researchers observe children's interactions with digital media to get a sense of how they're really using the technology. The findings of this program will be shared with all the other MacArthur recipients to inform their research and to spawn innovative educational curricula and projects.

Global Kids, a non-profit youth organization, received $170,000 in 2005 to organize an essay competition and develop several online discussion forums where kids explained how they use digital media. They also developed an island within the teen spin-off of the immersive world Second Life. Created by Linden Lab, the same company that created the adult version, the Teen Second Life is inhabited by approximately 45,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 17.

Teens build educational areas and experiences to teach one another about world issues such as child sex-trafficking or the genocide in Darfur. Global Kids has received just over a million dollars to continue with this work.

Games and learning.The Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory at The University of Wisconsin-Madison received $3 million to develop a media-literacy curriculum involving computer games. Using a software application, students can design games, learn aesthetic and systems design, and figure out how to problem solve with their peers. Several other grants were made to research the power of games as educational tools. Commercial outfits such as Gamelab, a game-development company based in New York, are also collaborating.

Evaluating the results. Digital-media education is such a new and rapidly changing field that one grant ($450,000) went to Blueprint Research & Design, a strategy consultancy, to develop the metrics to evaluate the Foundation's success in developing this new field. Given the many disciplines and sectors they hope to involve, finding a common language is one of the first aims. And to keep tabs on the unfolding projects, MacArthur has created a site to host ongoing discussion.

"Ultimately, we want to understand the benefits of digital media, and accelerate research and development in this area. But we also want to be cautious, and look at potential harms," says Connie Yowell, director of education at the MacArthur Foundation. "At this stage, we need to keep asking questions to know where to go next. For instance: Are kids daydreaming in the same way? Are they physically active in the same way? How are their identities shaped by this digital media?" This forward-thinking initiative hopes to find some answers.

McConnon is a correspondent for BusinessWeek in New York.