The Good Play Project & Project New Media Literacies. (2011). Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World

The Our Space casebook is a new curriculum designed collaboratively between Howard Gardner’s GoodPlay group at Harvard University and Henry Jenkins’s Project New Media Literacies at USC Annenberg. The multi-year effort has been supported by dozens of foundations and funders and brings together two teams of scholars, researchers, and practitioners from the intersections of education and digital media. Through its multiple, modular lessons, the casebook aims to tackle a variety of contemporary issues in online ethics among teenagers and young people, by supporting thoughtful participation in online environments; fostering students’ comfort and ethical considerations in exploring identity online; exploring privacy concerns; providing frameworks to assess the credibility of online sources; and teaching about online authorship and ownership, particularly through the lens of appropriation of use of copyrighted material. The curriculum integrates a vision for newmedia literacies outlined in Jenkins’s (2009) work on new literacies in participatory culture. These new literacies engage with traditional media literacy frameworks that include access to information, analysis of media texts, creation of media in a variety of forms, reflection on media use and ethics, and taking action through civic engagement and democratic participation (Aufderheide, 1993; Hobbs 2011; National Association for Media Literacy Education 2007; Thoman & Jolls 2004); however, they also emphasize other features of participatory online engagement explored by USC Annenberg and colleagues in the Macarthur-funded Digital Media and Learning Hub and community, including play, appropriation, networking, simulation, and other components of people’s participatory engagement online. Our Space provides useful guidelines for educators seeking to explore some of these concepts as well as thornier issues in young people’s online communication. The curriculum emphasizes students’ opportunities to engage with multiple perspectives through role-play and to think critically about plausible scenarios between young people online. Public discourse around online safety has largely painted the Internet as a treacherous place that threatens the safety of children and teens. Schools who accept e-rate funds are required by law to implement some form of online filtering according to the Children’s Internet Protection Act (2001). Many parents shy away from active mediation in children’s media use, instead opting for restrictive mediation through rules and limited access (Mendoza 2009). By contrast, Our Space provides a strong philosophical rationale for young people “to think about [their] roles and responsibilities in the communities in which one participates online and offline” (Section 0, “Introduction to Our Space,” p. 2). The authors clearly appreciate the ways students can be empowered to control their communication online while also acknowledging risks they take. Educators and students are encouraged to reflect on ethics and behavior through a series of activities that draw heavily on popular culture—there are appearances from online multiplayer games, popular television series, YouTube videos, and popular music. For the most part, authors avoid hotbutton and galvanizing social phenomena such as inappropriate content, online