I'm still reading all of the sections, but I'd recommend checking out Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, an interesting paper by a MacArthur-funded professor out of MIT. Among other things, the paper presents concrete ideas for using media (often, but not always, "new media") to achieve unique kinds of education and explores the idea of participatory media.

I've really enjoyed reading everybody's posts on videogaming, confessions, and the like. It seems like the topic of video games is broad enough that everyone has their own personal stories and memories of what videogaming means to them, whether it be Sims-style creations or the shoot-and-kill variety like CS and Diablo. What about happy memories of games like Oregon Trail, or Carmen Sandiego in elementary school? Does anyone remember playing video games, or rather, computer games in schools?

This article and this article talks about the various effects of using computer games in school. I feel like the idea of harnessing the popular appeal and power of video games and using them as an educational tool in schools has been around for at least a decade. The author of the first article writes that "scientists call it [video games] the next great discovery, a way to captivate students so much they will spend hours learning on their own." I feel like it's a little late to make a statement such as this, since educational video games have been around for a while now and companies learned long ago that videogames are the "next great discovery." The points that the article makes, though, definitely hold true and I can personally identify with a lot of this from grade school memories.