What mindless entertainment could be teaching your kids

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According to a leading US academic dubbed the "21st Century’s Marshall McLuhan", Western education systems are radically out of touch with the needs of students and the future they face.

One of America's foremost authorities on the digital media era, Professor Henry Jenkins, will visit Australia next week to speak at the Creating Value conference hosted by the ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation.

The digital media expert says we now live in an era when popular media has become the most important source of knowledge, creativity and community for young people and yet our schools continue to treat it as an alien force. Blogs, fan cultures, and social software sites are giving media consumers an active voice in how culture is made and shared, according to Professor Jenkins.

“Media are read primarily as threats rather than as resources,” he says. “More focus is placed on the dangers of manipulation rather than the possibilities of participation, on restricting access – saying no to television, saying no to Nintendo- rather than expanding skills at deploying media for one’s own ends.

We need to rethink the goals of media education so that young people can come to think of themselves as cultural producers and participants, and not simply as consumers.”

The Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program will join other leading overseas and local experts at the CCI’s major conference, Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons.

The centre is Australia’s premier centre for research into the convergence of cultural and economic values. And Creating Value will showcase the range of knowledge domains that need to be brought together to address gaps in the national innovation system. It will include presentations by academic, business, creative or public policy specialists on many aspects of value-creation in the context of creative industries and innovation.

“Right now, Australia should be participating strongly in a rapidly expanding digital economy,” claims Centre Director Professor Stuart Cunningham. “Creative skills are needed increasingly across the economy - there are more people working in creative occupations outside the creative industries than inside them.”

Cunningham says that CCI researchers are responding to the challenges faced by Australia’s new innovation-led economy by “exploring the synergies between technological advance and the services, consumer and creative sectors”.

“We want to be able to understand how creative input is, and can become, more deeply embedded in the wider economy at the same time as we endeavour to ensure equal access and distribution of user-led innovation.”

Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons will be held on 25 – 27 June at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre, South Bank.

For more information or to register go to www.cci.edu.au/events/creating-value-between-commerce-and-commons or phone 3138 3556.