A central goal of your work at the Media Lab has been to devise tools that empower kids to create their own media content. What assumptions about children's relationship to media technologies underlie this project? What are the implications of such a project for traditional models of teaching and learning? Calls to empower children often cause adults to fear they are losing control over their children and over the cultural influences that enter their lives? What, if any, restrictions can adults legitimately place on children's access to and use of digital media?

For the past few years, there has been a national effort to insure that school children have access to digital media. What assumptions do you think are underlying this effort to wire the classroom? What are the blind spots in this push for digital education? What kinds of resistance or backlash have you observed? How would you respond to these criticisms?

A very important thing to note is that too often, when people think of new types of digital media, they think of something like this, and they say, "oh that's cute", they give a little laughter to it, and then they say, "let's make this into a toy." Then they make it, package it, sell it in a store, and it is fun for about 5 minutes. Then there is virtually no learning is associated with it. You play with it, it dances around, and you're finished.

The richness of play and learning opportunities happens when the kids themselves are designing these -- and especially the behaviors rather than just the structures. How are they going to make the creature dance? What does it mean to make it dance? How is the dance structured? It gets them to think about how behaviors happen in the world, how behaviors of the creatures that they see in the world work, and how their own behaviors work. When these creatures are communicating, what does it mean for this one to send a message over here? You have to start thinking about what the other one already understands. Having a model of the listener is an important part of communication. By building your own communicating thing, you are compelled to confront these issues about the ways we communicate as well. So the act of creating creatures opens up a new set of ideas for kids to be think about.

We often talk about this in terms of extending the metaphor of fluency in a language. The ways that most technologies are introduced to the lives of children is a little bit like giving someone a phrase book to learn a foreign language. That can be useful in some cases. I am not fluent in Spanish, so when I go to Costa Rica, it is very useful to have a phrase book so I can go into a store and ask some simple questions. But I can't really talk to people in the street; nor can I tell my deepest feelings to the friends I have developed. The way children are introduced to technology is often equivalent to giving them a phrase book, but not helping them to develop the fluency to express themselves with this new language. What we are trying to do both with the technologies and the environments that we create. It is only by being fluent and expressing themselves that they become better readers of the technology.

I really like the article that Paul Starr wrote called, "Seductions of Sin." He talks about the role of simulations in children's lives and in the lives of policy makers, and he discusses the ways that people over-assume the legitimacy of things that come up in the simulations without thinking about what underlies them. In our minds, the way to break out of that seduction is to let everyone be the creators of those types of simulations. The only way we are going to become better readers of the new digital technologies is if we help the new generation grow up being creators with the new technologies as well.

Resnick: Children do and will continue to grow up with passions and experiences in the physical world, and we want to take advantage of that. Children can relate to things in the physical world and draw on the intuitions that they have developed by growing up in it. The hope is that children will take advantage of all of the value of the physical world and then extend it in new directions so that they can have experiences in the physical world that they couldn't have had before the computation was there.

Angela Morgenstern: I am working on a television show and Web site for PBS, and I was researching some youth sites when I ventured on to the Media Lab site and noticed Java language for kids called YoYo. Could talk a little bit about how you hope that's going to play out in the real world in some useful way?

Resnick: The project is still in its early stages, and we are just starting to do work out in the world with kids. The idea is to rethink the way that the Web has evolved as a passive medium. People don't consider it as passive because there is more video and sound, and there are a lot of things you can do with that, but in general it is not the type of thing where children can computationally create things to put out there in the world to share with others. On the other hand, languages like Java brought a way for experts to make the Web dynamic. That fit into the framework that the Web is about expert designers creating things that the rest of us use. Of course, that is a type of interaction, but the way that kids get to interact on the Web today is a very thin layer of interaction. This project is trying to enrich that by letting kids themselves become creators of more dynamic content that they can then share with others. This also relates to something that happened in the world of MUDs. Amy Bruckma n, one of my former graduate students, worked with children building things in MUD environments, so they got to do dynamic content that they put out there to share with others. We saw a rich interchange between children constructing your own content and building a community -- being constructors helped reinforce ideas of community and being part of a community helped make them better designers. The idea of children having a much larger design role on-line will make a big difference in how they experience the world. We should also pay attention to the way we design appropriate objects in the on-line world. We need to think more deeply about how we can design objects that will both connect to children's passions and interests, but also connect to the type of deep ideas that we want them to play with too. There are advantages to the physical world as a starting point, but there's a lot that can be done in the on-line world to let children construct there as well.

Resnick: Yes, I think that is a really good issue to raise. Too often people think of the digital revolution in terms of information -- it's even in our language, "the information age," " the information society." It is a real problem. To see it in that way really limits the way we see the possibilities. Information is really seen as stuff. It gets people used to thinking about access to stuff and passing along stuff. We are a little step further; in fact, talking about the information society seems a little old. It is more often referred to as "the knowledge society" which amounts to having information, but also having a context for understanding how the information is used -- but in my mind that is also lacking. It is a step better that we are not just thinking that the information itself is the same as the knowledge, and that we are recognizing that we need a context around it to make sense of it.

What is most important to me about the new digital technology is not that it is leading to a knowledge society but to a creative society, leading to a burst of new ways for us to put things together, and put the knowledge to use. If we think of "knowledge" it focuses too much attention on the operative noun. It gets people thinking in terms of the stuff that you need to get. I think the greatest contribution of digital technology is the ways we can use it for creative construction of things. Usually people don't think of using new technologies for creative expression, but the new technologies enable us to use the kindergarten approach throughout our lifetime. At the Media Lab we have tried to explicitly make the graduate school into a big kindergarten. Playful, creative design experiences are a way of learning that widens the range of the things you can do with it.

Resnick: I have some trouble seeing the connection with kindergarten because my image of kindergarten doesn't have to do with lurking. Casting the idea of just standing off and observing into the framework of lurking puts a kind of negative spin on it. If that is the only way some people experience their lives, then there are clearly some problems with that.

I'd rather move towards a context where we play all these different roles. I think it is healthy and productive at times to be a "lurker," to be observing, to be on the fringe or periphery in order to get an understanding of things, and at other times, to be the one who is diving in while others are "lurking at you." I think of these questions from the viewpoint of a designer. As we are designing new technologies, my hope would be to design them in such a way that people feel more comfortable shifting between those roles and recognize when it is useful to play the different roles. An important part of growing up as a good learner is being able to self-regulate, to know when it is useful to play which roles. We generally don't do a very good job helping kids step back and reflect in that way. The technology itself is not going to do that, but it may provide the tools to play out those different roles, and also a way to then talk about them. Even just having the term "lurker" come up gives us a way to talk abo ut this phenomenon. Part of it is to help kids grow up to be able to think about and reflect explicitly on that shifting between roles in different parts of the learning context.

Audience Member: There have been some people who have studied lurking. You could potentially think of it as a time of learning. There are a couple of ways you could lurk, and one might be to learn. Different people might take that position for different reasons...

David Thorburn: Why not call them observers instead of lurkers?

Turkle: In computer talk, lurking has become so legitimized as a social role, I don't think it has that negative connotation that you are suggesting.

Resnick: Another difference is that if you just say "observer," it could mean visible or invisible, while "lurker" generally means not seen.

Turkle: But a lurker is more active than an observer.

Peter Walsh: I haven't studied lurking, but I have written about it in the context of what Shardash said about technology, and that is that it creates ghosts. It creates this ancient fantasy of escaping your body, floating into space, observing floating away. I feel the Web in general is the fulfillment of all these ancient fantasies about being the fly on the wall. I think that it's called lurking, because the people who are being haunted have this anxiety about the lurker. They don't know who they are, what they are about or what they are doing with the information. The concern about these hauntings in the discussion rooms and things like that are all part of this folkloric idea of the disembodied presence around you. What you are saying is confirming some of these thoughts that I have had. People are actually haunting; they are appearing in these spaces so that they can be ghosts and spy on people they way people in New York spy on each other with telescopes. Calling it "lurking" comes from the anxi ety that people have about this sense of being haunted, and having people materialize in their space and then disappear without really knowing who they are.