The Digital Youth Network

Cultivating Digital Media Citizenship in Urban Communities

Bibliographic Data

ID20032526
AuthorsBrigid Barron (0000-0003-4693-9374), Amber Levinson (0000-0002-2238-8224), Kimberley Gomez (0000-0001-9983-3499), Nichole Pinkard (0000-0002-0453-7089), Caitlin K Martin (0000-0002-5731-0099)
Year2014
Pages344
Publication date2014-06-27
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueDigital Youth Network (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherThe MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.7551/mitpress/9240.001.0001
OpenAlexW4248163291
Open LibraryOL29707486M
ISBN9780262324359
LanguageEN
Citations received30

An ambitious project to help economically disadvantaged students develop technical, creative, and analytical skills across a learning ecology that spans school, community, home, and online. The popular image of the “digital native”—usually depicted as a technically savvy and digitally empowered teen—is based on the assumption that all young people are equally equipped to become innovators and entrepreneurs. Yet young people in low-income communities often lack access to the learning opportunities, tools, and collaborators (at school and elsewhere) that help digital natives develop the necessary expertise. This book describes one approach to address this disparity: the Digital Youth Network (DYN), an ambitious project to help economically disadvantaged middle-school students in Chicago develop technical, creative, and analytical skills across a learning ecology that spans school, community, home, and online. The book reports findings from a pioneering mixed-method three-year study of DYN and how it nurtured imaginative production, expertise with digital media tools, and the propensity to share these creative capacities with others. Through DYN, students, despite differing interests and identities—the gamer, the poet, the activist—were able to find some aspect of DYN that engaged them individually and connected them to one another. Finally, the authors offer generative suggestions for designers of similar informal learning spaces

Computer Science · Impact of Technology on Adolescents · Social Media and Politics · Computer Literacy · Education · Educational counseling · Social media · united states