MySpace/Saregama/Phonethics collaborate on school media literacy project

There's an interesting experiment going on in the media literacy space. Corporates like MySpace India (a social network), Saregama (or HMV, a music label) and Phonethics (a mobile IP and advertising company) are collaborating with students of Podar High school in Bombay, to create a series of music videos. The students are spending the first two weeks of their summer break in learning how to create media (everything from photographs, to story boards to scripts, and videos), and they will them collaborate with media professionals in making 4 music videos for 4 new Saregama artists that will then play on MySpace, etc. I was invited to give a talk on media convergence to these young media-creators last week (see pics above) and was very impressed by their intuitive understanding of what might work and not work, as well as their imagination of vidoes with trans-media narratives. The study program that the organizers have put together is good, given the relatively short time that they are dedicating to it, and it seems to be a genuine effort to participate in a conversation with these kids rather than a corporate marketing program. (Having said that, it would be nice to see such programs with longer engagement periods - say, a few months instead of a few weeks, to enable the kids to really practice the skills they have learnt. Perhaps the next iteration will take this into account.)
The afternoon brought back memories of working with the Education Arcade at MIT, where I helped Henry with a series of interviews on video game literacy. The approach, then and now, has always been that children are media literate only when they can both create and consume their own media, and at the same time critically analyze what they are doing. In the creation, consumption and analysis process, what we often realize that the type of media that they are interested in and want to consume is different from, and more interesting than the type of media adults manufacture for children, and their views on media are often more complex and nuanced that we might imagine. If you're interested, here's an interesting post from Henry Jenkins' blog where he talks about an integrated approach to media literacy education - its part of a lager white paper he has written about the theme, and you can also check out the Project NML website which explains what participatory culture means in this context and also offers a range of media literacy solutions that you might want to adopt. Meanwhile, I'm going to track my Podar kids with great interest, and see what they come up with.