Teens help create model digital library
By GREG TOPPO October 10, 2011 5:34PM
Muchin College Prep students, Amaris Alicea, Susan Contreras and Celeste Mora plays piano at YOUmedia in the Harold Washington Library Center, a Digital Library space for teens, Monday, October 10, 2011. | John H. White~Sun-Times.
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Updated: October 10, 2011 8:44PM
On the ground floor of Chicago’s Harold Washington Library, an experiment is taking place that could determine what neighborhood libraries will look like in 10 years.
Once a storage room, the high-ceiling, 5,500-square-foot space — dubbed “YOUmedia Digital Library Space for Teens” — has become a magnet for young people from across the city, so popular and influential that the library plans to replicate it citywide.
Funded in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the project sprang from research on how digital media affect kids’ literacy. “We are in one of these rare moments in time where what it means to be literate today, what it meant for us, is going to be different from what it means to be literate for our kids,” says DePaul University’s Nichole Pinkard, who first envisioned the space. Just as schools have always pushed teens to read critically and pick apart authors’ arguments, she says, educators must now teach kids how to consume media critically and, ideally, to produce it. YOUmedia owes much of its basic ideology to Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist who, in 2006, studied how teens use “new media.” After three years, her team concluded that most kids shift between three stages of consumption and creation, informally dubbed “hanging out,” “messing around” and “geeking out.” One thing different here is obvious: It’s loud. While bookshelves occupy a large central space, the sounds of music, video games and conversation are everywhere. Poet and lead mentor Mike Hawkins says, “It’s a constructive loud.”
Gannett News Service
