New Media Exemplar Library
By Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2007
Kids out there are creating content like crazy. Easy-to-use tools for blogging, sharing images, mashing, and remixing are freely available online, and countless users—fully half of all teenagers, according to a recent Pew study—are taking full advantage. To help young media mavens explore their creative potential and act responsibly along the way, there’s the New Media Exemplar Library, a Web-based video collection that documents the creative process of a range of interview subjects, from blogger and sci-fi novelist Cory Doctorow (below) to a group of graffiti artists known as TATs Cru. “These documentaries explore the decisions—creative, economic, ethical—that media makers face in producing and distributing their work,” explains Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, which oversees the Library, an initiative of MIT’s New Media Literacies project. What’s next? Jenkins says, “We are finishing entries on Wikipedia, animation, and cosplay [the Japanese trend of dressing up as characters from anime, manga, or other media, pictured above] which should go up sometime this fall.”
