Before you equip the nursery with a plasma screen read on….

I’ve heard lots of conversation lately from parents about their kids’ screentime (television, computer, games, anything with a screen) limits, habits and the effects thereof.

To those folks I offer these thoughts from MIT profession Henry Jenkins about children, new participatory media, and ethics in the age of technology. In his recent article “The Future of Literacy Education in a Participatory Media Culture” (Threshold, Winter, 2006) he writes:

“Generals tend to fight the last war rather than adequately prepare for future conflicts. Many current media literacy efforts are the pedagogical equivalent of the Maginot Line: still protecting children from the old “threat” of mass media as if the digital revolution never occurred. Television is still enemy number one, media consumption is still understood in passive terms, the focus is still on effects rather than ethics, and proposed solutions still range from “turn off your television” to critical reading skills. Meanwhile, network executives are struggling to hold onto their younger viewers as they increasingly spend more hours playing games or chatting online than watching broadcast media. So what would it mean to rethink media literacy for an age when the computer game, not television, is the dominant medium in young people’s lives?

I am one of the principle investigators for the New Media Literacies Project, launched this past spring by the MacArthur Foundation. We wantto identify skills, knowledge, and competencies young people need to become meaningful participants in the culture around them – skills central to citizenship, community life, and cultural expression. We will design and test new approaches to media literacy through schools, after school programs, public institutions, and commercial culture.

In this new landscape of video games, cell phones, podcasting, blogging, instant messaging and other kinds of media-intensiveexperiences, children are participants – not spectators, not even consumers in the traditional sense of the term. They are actively shaping the media. These new media forms and the cultures that emerge around them offer young people new opportunities for emotional growth and intellectual development but also require new kinds of ethical responsibilities. The goal of media literacy education in the 21st century should be prepare kids to live within a more participatory media culture. ”

A far cry from “Hey, teacher! Leave these kids alone” — this seems to be a call for more intense and intentional communication with our children, our students, and young people around us in their realtime lives, their media culture participation and their development as responsible and independent thinkers.

Maybe we should worry less about limiting screentime and more about peppering their screentime with teachable moments…as someone around the office has been heard to say “Playing video games with my son IS quality time- in the same way fishing together might be.”

To hear someone smarter than myself say more on this topc see Dr. Jenkins’ further body of work.