Author Archives: zephoria

remix culture and fair use: a new study

Folks over at the Center for Social Media have just released a new study on copyright and creativity. They identify nine common types of re-appropriation practices that use copyrighted material:

  • Parody and satire: Copyrighted material used in spoofing of popular mass media, celebrities or politicians (Baby Got Book)
  • Negative or critical commentary: Copyrighted material used to communicate a negative message (Metallica Sucks)
  • Positive commentary: Copyrighted material used to communicate a positive message (Steve Irwin Fan Tribute)
  • Quoting to trigger discussion: Copyrighted material used to highlight an issue and prompt public awareness, discourse (Abstinence PSA on Feministing.com)
  • Illustration or example: Copyrighted material used to support a new idea with pictures and sound (Evolution of Dance)
  • Incidental use: Copyrighted material captured as part of capturing something else (Prisoners Dance to Thriller)
  • Personal reportage/diaries: Copyrighted material incorporated into the chronicling of a personal experience (Me on stage with U2… AGAIN!!!)
  • Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials: Copyrighted material that might have a short life on mainstream media due to controversy (Stephen Colbert’s Speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner)
  • Pastiche or collage: Several copyrighted materials incorporated together into a new creation, or in other cases, an imitation of sorts of copyrighted work (Apple Commercial)

This study interrogates these practices in the context of copyright law, namely “fair use.” They try to assess which way the courts might fall depending on practice. They also offer potential defenses that creators can make if they were sued in an attempt to build best-practices principles. They also categorize exemplar videos that fall into each category.

For those who aren’t familiar with U.S. law, fair use is quite tricky because courts address it on a case by case basis after someone is sued. There is no list of what constitutes fair use. Thus, remixers engaging in practices that would collectively be viewed as fair use never have certainty that what they’re doing is legal. Because court cases are extremely costly (especially for the lone defendant in the face of Big Mega Corp), corporations can wield a lot of power through the egregious use of “Cease and Desist” letters. Most creators bow down in the face of them even if what they’re doing is totally legit because they are terrified of being sued. In legal terms, a “chilling effect” is when practices are squelched by fear of persecution. Right now, when it comes to remix, we’re in the middle of an ice age. The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website attempts to counteract some of this effect by collecting and publishing Cease and Desists and other nefarious attempts by corporations to silence fans and critics.

It’s a really really really screwy system that pits little people against big corporations, stifling innovation and creativity. Yet, in order to change it, people have to understand what is taking place, what is at stake, and how to rethink the situation. This is the goal of this study.

the music industry would be proud: I bought music this year

I love music and I refuse to be one of those people whose listening habits were formed in college and never progress. I pride myself on acquiring music on a regular basis, but I absolutely positively refuse to buy DRM-ified music. I’ve been buying CDs and ripping them for years, grabbing music from friends, and downloading using P2P software (even though I know that all three are “illegal”). Because most of the music that I listen to has a short run on CDs (and is not carried by any of the Top 5 distributors), I usually can’t buy the CD if I don’t get to the album in the first few months. As much as I love psyshop, it’s really irritating that the majority of albums are “not available.” This means that my only option is to “steal” them. Not an ideal situation. The other problem is that I hate having to wait for CDs – they take forever, especially when they’re being shipped from Europe. Thus, I’m more likely to grab them by any means necessary than to buy them, not because I don’t want to buy them, but because the inconvenience factor is so high.

Another issue with music shopping has been the dreadful “recommendation” systems. Any system that can’t tell the difference between psytrance and house needs to be shot. I want nuance in my recommendations because “electronica” doesn’t describe my tastes. I had been really hopeful that Last.FM would be the answer, but it seems as though their algorithm is incapable of taking into consideration context. Just because I listen to Dr. Toast and Johnny Cash and Ani Difranco doesn’t mean that I’d ever put them together in a playlist. Also, people suck at tagging music. Mega suck. I need to find good new music, but the systems haven’t been in place. Historically, Fake Science always had music that I loved, but they’ve closed their doors.

To make matters worse, my music situation has always been a combination of wires and hacks and crap. And interesting new stuff comes out on PCs but I don’t do Windows. Even my nightmare with Leopard is more bearable than Windows.

Things have been changing in the music industry for a while and for the first time in a long time, I feel like the music bits came together for me. It’s a weird hodgepodge, but it works surprisingly well. For those who are curious about how others handle music, let me detail it. For those in the industry, maybe my “solution” might give you some ideas.

Setup: Airport Express attached to stereo. iPod with car iPod input. Airfoil for streaming anything other than iTunes to my Airport Express (including Pandora and Firefox). 70 gigs of current music on computer, another 100 gigs of “haven’t listened to recently” on backup drives simply for space reasons. (I’m waiting for Airport Extreme to really work.)

My iTunes is organized by genre (obsessively with genres like ClitRock and PsyChill) with smart playlists to combine my genres. Because iTunes still doesn’t do tagging (damn you Apple!), I’ve resorted to creating even weirder genres like “CalmGirl-Folk-80s” so that I can smart playlist around it. Music from iTunes gets auto-uploaded to Last.FM through the Scrobbler software.

When I want something new, I switch to Pandora. Because the Pandora app doesn’t update to Last.FM, I go through Pandora FM and set Airfoil to stream it to my Airport Express, but Airfoil doesn’t really do well when Firefox crashes so I end up listening to Pandora less than I’d like to. When I hear something that really impresses me, I jump to Last.FM to find out more about the artist and preview the tracks. I then jump over to Amazon to buy the album through the MP3 download. I don’t know what has changed in the last few months, but lately, everything that I’ve wanted to buy has been available for download at Amazon. It’s been shocking. If it’s not available, I usually don’t buy it. If I’ve heard it a bunch of times and desperately want it and it’s still not available, I decide if I want the whole album. If not, I just go P2P. Because MP3 downloads have finally happened on mass, I’m buying a whole lot more music. $7.00 or so for an album is AOK by me.

There are still things that I want. So, for you out there who are thinking about music, help a girl out.

1. Pandora/Last.FM: let me save artists/songs on a wishlist (Last.FM’s playlist feature is not good enough). Let me store the names so that I can go back to them and buy them. Right now, I put the album in my Amazon wishlist but that’s downright silly and I only do that if I _really_ like something. I’d buy more music if I had a record of the things I liked and could go back to them.

2. All y’all: while I usually love Pandora’s recommendations, I think that a recommendation system could be a whole lot better if it would combine music structure with the network structure of listening. Take into consideration context. A song relates to another song if it’s played shortly after the first one. Build networks of songs, connect them.

3. Apple: figure out how to make actually smart playlists. Learn from my listening habits, take advantage of recommendation systems. Help me listen to my own collection of music in a more interesting way. Let me start with a song and then you take me down a new path through my own music collection.

4. Labels: make EVERYTHING available via MP3 download. I know the quality isn’t as good, but y’know what, I still buy it. And if you don’t make it available for download, I don’t. What the hell are you afraid of? Yeah, I know.. you don’t like Apple having so much control and you’re not sure you want to work with Amazon.. you want something that’s just yours. Well, frankly, that’s just annoying because I never know what artist is on what label. Why can’t you all just get along?

5. Scion: while I appreciate being able to go to my playlists through my stereo, I hate that I can’t go to my genres that way. You also have the worst interface possible for scanning through 1500 artists. At the very least, let me scroll through the alphabet to get closer.

6. Someone: I almost killed my computer last week. I have 70 gigs of music on this system alone. Do you know how long that takes to backup and how much disk space I use doing so? Why can’t I “recover” through my playlist somehow? I know, I know.. evil labels think that the act of copying is akin to blasphemy and that I should buy everything over again rather than be allowed to back it up. But that’s just plain lame. Maybe this should be something insurance companies do… Tehe. I know plenty of folks who lost their music collections in a fire. Instead of having to pay them to buy it all again, imagine if the insurance companies would be able to just give them a hard drive of everything they’ve “insured.” Anyhow, labels, I know that you’re super greedy, but it might help if you respected your consumers a little bit. Give them some support when they’re down. I can’t tell you how much it sucked to have 250 CDs stolen a few years ago. And I can’t tell you how grateful I was when a nice kid in NY volunteered to burn off every psytrance CD I could remember having (and since I’m compulsive, I had an excel sheet for him with a record of all of the CDs I had owned). Yeah, it was illegal.. but y’know what? I had bought all of those CDs once and so I took the moral high ground and refused to buy them again just because some prick threw a rock through my car window and got into the trunk while I was living out of my car. So maybe y’all could get together and come up with a respectful way of preserving what people did buy?

7. Artists: please don’t go with Universal or its sublabels. They’re the worst abuser of their consumers and I refuse to buy their music in any format out of protest. There’s a lot to be said for remix and innovative distribution models and they’re so the big bully in the room. Is it really worth it?

8. Mobile phone people: WTF is up with your approach to ringtones? I know you see a big market and want to take advantage of it, but duuuuude, talk about abusive. Why is it more expensive to buy the ringtone than it is to buy the song? And why can’t I actually keep the song when I buy it as a ringtone? Definitely not humored.

OK… that’s my music rant for a while. Now back to writing…

Santa meets the IRB

Since I love the IRB sooooo much, it’s not surprising that everyone I know forwarded this message along to me over the holiday season. For all of you out there who dream of writing IRB proposals, this is for you:

Dr. K. Kringle, Adjunct Professor of Child Psychology Far Northern University

Dear Dr. Kringle:

At the regularly scheduled December 24 meeting, the IRB reviewed your protocol, “A Global Observational Study of Behavior in Children.” While we believe it has many good features, it could not be approved as submitted. If you choose to revise your study, please address the following concerns:

1. You propose to study “children of all ages”. Please provide an exact lower and upper age limit, as well as the precise number of subjects. Provide a statistically valid power calculation to justify this large of a study.

2. Your only inclusion criterion is “belief in Santa Claus.” Please provide a copy of the screening questionnaire that determines such a belief. Provide a Waiver of Authorization under HIPAA in order to record these beliefs prior to enrollment in your study. The Board recommends that you obtain a Certificate of Confidentiality as beliefs are sensitive and personal information.

3. You propose to “know when they are sleeping and know when they are awake”. How will this be done? Will children undergo video monitoring in their beds? Will they have sleep EEGs? You list 100 elves as research assistants. Are any of them a sleep physiologist?

4. Your primary outcome measure is to “know when they’ve been bad or good.” What standard is being used to determine ‘goodness’? Do children have to be good all year or just most of the time? What if they have been really, really, good except for one time when they hit their little brother?

5. You propose to conduct your research by entering the subjects’ homes through the chimney. Have you considered the damage to the roof, carpeting, etc., that this will cause? Moreover, children are likely to be startled by your appearance late at night. Please revise your protocol to conduct your home visits between 9 am and 5 pm Monday through Friday with at least one parent being present.

6. You state that compensation for participation will be “sugarplums, candy, and toys” for the good little girls and boys. This may not be appropriate for the children with obesity, dental caries, and hyperactivity. Also, your proposal to leave a lump of coal in the stockings of the bad children will be unfairly stigmatizing to them individually and as a group. In general, the Board suggests a small token of appreciation for all participants. Perhaps a $5 Toys-R-Us gift card would be better.

7. The database of good and bad children will be kept “on a scroll at the North Pole.” Please describe the security provisions you have in place to protect the research data. Is the scroll kept in a locked cabinet in a locked room? Who has access to the scroll? Are there backup copies of the scroll and how often are they compared to the original?

8. You mention the participation of “eight tiny reindeer” in your protocol. Please provide the Board with documentation of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee approval.

9. Please provide the Human Subjects Protection training dates for Mrs. Claus and the elves.

10. As this study involves prospective data collection and is more than minimal risk without prospect of direct benefit to the subjects, informed consent signed by both parents will be required. Please have the consent form translated into every language spoken by children.

Please submit 25 copies of your revised protocol to the lRB. The IRB will be on Holiday Season schedule for the next two weeks. If approved, you will be able to conduct your study sometime in January.

Sincerely,
E. Scrooge, MD – Chair, Institutional Review Board

Pew on teen social media practices (with interesting bits on class)

While I was off struggling with Leopard and pants, Pew put out another great report: Teens and Social Media. This report fleshes out what I noticed earlier – teens are much more protective of the content they post online than adults are. Yet, this report is sooo much more than that. Here are some of the new findings to whet your appetite:

  • Digital images – stills and videos – have a big role in teen life. Posting them often starts a virtual conversation. Most teens receive some feedback on the content they post online.
  • Email continues to lose its luster among teens as texting, instant messaging, and social networking sites facilitate more frequent contact with friends.
  • More older girls than boys create and contribute to websites.
  • Girls have fueled the growth of the teen blogosphere.
  • Teens from lower-income and single-parent households are more likely to blog.
  • Teens who are most active online, including bloggers, are also highly active offline.
  • Most teens restrict access to their posted photos – at least some of the time. Girls are more restrictive photo posters.
  • Content creators are not devoting their lives exclusively to virtual participation. They are just as likely as other teens to engage in most offline activities and more likely to have jobs.
  • African American teens are more likely to look for college information online.
  • Girls are more likely than boys to look up health, dieting, or fitness information on the Web.
  • The number of teens who report instant message use has dropped since 2004.
  • Visiting a chatroom has declined significantly in popularity since 2000.
  • Fewer teens are buying products online.
  • Wealthy teens are more likely to engage in multimedia Web activities.

Note: The bits on social network sites in the report are using data collected in late 2005/early 2006. Much of those findings were reported in an earlier Pew Report. I strongly believe that SNS use is up since then and that 55% is extremely low.

The whole report is extremely interesting (and I strongly encourage you to read it), but I want to take a moment to talk about the two statements that I bolded in the list above. What Pew’s data shows is that online participation correlates with offline participation. They are not able to show causality (and they do not try to claim that they can), but such a correlation still contradicts the ever-present myth that online activities cause a decline in offline activities. Of course, don’t misread this correlation in the opposite direction either. In other words, you cannot say that if you get a group of teens involved online, they will also get involved offline. Meshing these findings with my own qualitative observations, I have a sneaking suspicion that what Pew’s data is pointing to is that the hyper-motivated and/or overly scheduled teens from middle/upper class communities are extremely engaged offline and use online technologies to socialize with their friends in the interstitial times and that this cohort’s content creation is primarily to support friendships rather than create for creation sake. This also makes sense because teens who have more free time tend to have less restrictions and tend to prefer offline encounters with friends to online ones.

I wasn’t surprised by most of their findings, but one of them did make me raise my eyebrows: Teens from lower-income are more likely to blog. Because of how Pew collects data, it cannot answer the question “why?” when it finds such correlations, but I figured that my qualitative data might provide some insight and so I went back through my data. When asked about blogging, most of my MySpace-dominant users would immediately talk about the blogs that they kept on MySpace while my Facebook-dominant teens would talk about how Xanga was “so middle school” and that “everyone stopped” because “it just felt really weird writing about my day to people that I didn’t even care about.” And then it clicked. As I pointed out last summer and Eszter saw in her survey, the MySpace/Facebook split is correlated with socio-economic status. Because MySpace supports blogging and Facebook does not and because many of the teens who were once on Xanga are now using one of the SNSs, it makes sense that teens from lower-income households are more likely to blog now. They are blogging on MySpace. Now, that outta be interesting when these kids hit college where blogging is used as an educational tool.

All I need is a pair of pants.

Dear Clothing Designers,

I am disappointed in your lack of understanding of the diversity of women’s bodies. I traipsed down Broadway, into Soho, and out to the malls in search of a pair of pants that fit. I was willing to spend a decent amount of money on said pants so I visited everything from high end designers to department and chain stores. I tried on over 150 pairs and came up empty handed. I tried on pants ranging from sizes 6-12, petites, regulars, and “short.” I was even willing to get the bottoms hemmed if only I could find a pair that fit up top. I even tried on the ugly pants.

The relationship between my waist, hips, ass, and thighs appears to be completely alien to you, for none of you seem to make a pair of pants that fit all of these dimensions (let alone length). Why? Am I _that_ different? Or would you simply prefer that I conform to your body aesthetics? Like many other women, I do not belong on a hanger. I am not shaped like a model nor do I have any interest in resorting to anorexia to try to fit into your skinny clothes. I am curvy and I like my curves.

I am a confident woman, but shopping demoralizes me. Your industry sells a standard of beauty, demanding women to conform and ostracizing them when they do not. I know that I am not alone in not fitting into your clothing. Have you ever considered the impact that you have on young women’s sense of self? How hard would it be to diversify your clothing dimensions?

I long for the day when I can submit my dimensions and order personalized clothes. I know it’s coming, but I desperately want it NOW. Particularly since the only thing that is “in” seems to be tight and tighter. Why oh why can’t we personalize our clothes yet?

In the meantime, dear clothing designers, please bring back phat pants. I don’t care if they’re not “in style” but at least they fit. I desperately need new clothes for all of the ones that I bought when phat pants and flowy yoga pants were the in thing are falling apart. I have upcoming engagements and I desperately need pants. Please, I beg you, do something.

Thank you.

PS: For all of you men who think that my flowy clothing is my “style,” please realize that it is simply because nothing else ever fits. Welcome to the hell of women’s shopping.

do NOT upgrade to Leopard (why I’m offline)

I foolishly decided to upgrade to Leopard five days ago, at the beginning of my trip east for the holidays. This was the worst idea ever so for everyone waiting for me to respond to anything, please be patient… I won’t really be online until I can get back to LA and wipe my machine and start over.

For the geeks, here’s what’s going on with Leopard:

  • I cannot seem to run more than 3 major apps (Word, Mail, Firefox) simultaneously or else one freezes and the entire machine halts to a stop, requiring a restart.
  • No major app seems to be able to quit without requiring a “Force Quit” to get it to stop. Restarting seems to freeze midway through and require a hard reboot.
  • Opening a folder in Finder seems to take a good 20-30s and results in a freezing of applications, making multitasking impossible.
  • And then there’s Mail… When I open Mail with no other apps open (on network or off), it’s a disaster – trying to open each message results in a beachball. The activity monitor doesn’t seem to indicate anything strange – no hanging or anything, just regular opening of mailbox, moving and saving to mailboxes, syncing, etc. But it’s impossible to open messages because they hang for 30s before they’ll open. I don’t have the patience to wade through my thousands of message with this level of hanging. I went through all of the Apple Support notices, updated my DNS servers, and am at a complete loss.

Anyhow, if anyone has any clue, I’d be happy to provide more details and try whatever. But I can’t balance this and family and holiday shopping and hotels and keeping sane, so I’m just going offline until I get home. Plus, I need to do a proper backup before I can feel comfortable turning this thing over to anyone else. Le sigh.

Update: Thanks everyone for your comments! I ended up re-installing my machine and it’s a much happier camper. I realized that I’ve been through 7 machines and 4 OSes without ever cleaning anything out – all I do is firewire to the next one. So far, so good. But damn is email overflow daunting.
PS: Sorry about my blog… apparently the spam killed my quota and thus caused a hiccup in the comment section. Ironic, eh?

adults’ views on privacy (new PEW report)

PEW has a new report out on adults and privacy: Digital Footprints. It’s a solid report on the state of adults’ perception of privacy wrt the internet. Of course, what amuses me is that adults are saying one thing and doing another.

Adults are more likely than teens to have public profiles on SNSs. 60% of adults are not worried about how much information is available about them online. (Of course, young adults are more likely than older adults to believe it would be “very difficult” for someone to locate or contact them.) 61% of adults do not bother to limit the amount of information that can be found about them (including many who are purportedly worried).

In other words, adults (and presumably there are parents in this group) are telling teens to be careful online and restrict what information they put up there while they themselves are doing little to protect their own data.

This reminds me of adults who tell their kids never to meet strangers online under any circumstances and then proceed to use online dating sites and, rather than meet in public places, choose to go to the stranger’s private residence. Adults need to think about safety too – it’s not a story of binaries. The safe and practical approach is somewhere between abstinence and uber risky behavior.

Both adults and children need to learn how to negotiate safety and privacy in a meaningful and nuanced way. Adults need to socialize young people into conscientious participation online, both wrt to privacy and safety. You cannot simply wait until teens are 18 and then flip the switch and say GO! This has dreadful and dangerous consequences.

Anyhow, I’m not doing justice to the PEW report. Read it yourself. It’s quite interesting and there’s great data and it’s well situated.

valuing inefficiencies and unreliability

Two deeply embedded values in the world of technology development are efficiency and reliability. Companies pride themselves in maximizing efficiency and reliability and, for the most part, consumers agree. We like when our search engines produce results quickly and reliably. Yet, when it comes to social technologies, I suspect that efficiency and reliability are not the ideal metrics.

Let’s start with reliability. In some senses, we want our social technologies to be reliable – we want to know that our phones will work when we need them and that our email will get to us. While we want perfect reliability for our own needs, we also want there to be failures in the system so that we can blame technology when we don’t want to admit to our own weaknesses. In other words, we want plausible deniability. We want to be able to blame our spam filters when we failed to respond to an email that someone sent that we didn’t feel like answering. We want to blame cell phone reception when we’ve had enough of a conversation and “accidentally” hang up. The more reliable technology gets, the more we have to find new ways for blaming the technology so that we don’t have to do the socially rude thing. This is one of the reasons that LinkedIn is painful. Instead of blaming the technology, we have to blame our friends and colleagues when we don’t hear from the contacts we’re trying to reach. YUCK.

So, what about efficiency? Think about Facebook Causes. Think about how easy it is to efficiently spam everyone you know to join the Cause. Hell, the technology will spam your friends even when you don’t try. Does this actually build social capital or convince your friends to participate in that cause that you love? Probably not. Likewise, an evite is less inviting than a personalized email trying to convince you personally to come. This is also the case when it comes to trying to convince your Congresspeople of something. Thanks to email, you can efficiently spam your congresspeople with little effort. But that there is the problem – with little effort. The more efficient a means of communication is, the less it is valued. This is why politicians take personal letter (particularly written ones) more seriously than email or forms that people can quickly fill out. (Of course, if you *really* want to be taken seriously, try sending your Congresswoman a bouquet of flowers. Not only did that take effort, it actually cost something too.)

Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. One of the things that I’ve found to be consistently true with teens of rich and powerful parents is that they’d give up many of the material goods in their world to actually get some time and attention from their overly scheduled parents. Time and attention are rare commodities in modern life. Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.

When I talk with teens about MySpace bulletins versus comments, they consistently tell me that they value comments more than bulletins. Why? Because “it takes effort” to write a comment. Bulletins are seen as too easy and it’s not surprising that teens have employed this medium to beg their friends to spend time and write a comment on their page. Teens’ views on Facebook Apps reflect this same attitude. While they think they’re fun at first, they begin to loathe them after a while because they’re seen as spam that your friends send you. It’s simply too efficient to spam your friends, even if you can only send 10 a day.

In the physical world, architects and city planners often build inefficiencies into the system for a reason. I remember a talk by Manuel Castells where he spoke of forcing people to stand on line at regular intervals in public places, even when the activity could be made more efficient through technology. He viewed these kinds of inefficiencies as critical to the well-being of society because they provided a context for people to interact with strangers and, thus, build connections that glued the city together. This worked especially well when people could collectively complain about the people in charge – it provided a reason for social solidarity. (Think about the social solidarity built in NY when there’s a brownout or a transit strike.) Physical architects must constantly struggle with maximizing efficiency versus providing room for inefficiencies because of the social good that comes from them.

I have a sneaking suspicion that tech architects never even think about the possibility of creating inefficiencies to enhance social good, but I’m not sure. Since many of you mysterious readers are passionate about social technology, let me ask you. What examples of intentional (or unintentional) inefficiencies do you see in social tech? How do users respond to these?

MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning (it’s live!)

I am very very very pleased to announce that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning is now out in the world and ready for your affection. The purpose of the series is to “examine the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect a person’s sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.” The series is published by MIT Press and contains six books:

(Btw: I linked to the paperbacks. If you like hardcovers, go here.)

Each book has 8-10 peer-reviewed articles plus an intro and foreword. The articles are academic in nature, but written for a public audience and meant to be accessible and relevant to public discourse.

While I encourage everyone to purchase the books (they’re cheap!), individual articles are also available for download here thanks to MacArthur and MIT Press. My article “Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life” is part of the “Youth, Identity, and Digital Media” book. I’m super excited about this series and I hope you are too.

Also, for those who don’t know, MacArthur is doing unbelievable work in building a community for those invested in digital media and learning. To learn more, check out the website or the Spotlight blog. MIT Press is also launching The International Journal of Learning and Media to collect and publish research in this area.