MIMI ITO

Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. She was born in Japan and is the Research Director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Her doctoral work was part of the Fifth Dimension project led by Michael Cole. She worked for many years in a research group at Keio studying mobile technology use. Recently she completed a study on digital kids and informal learning. As part of this research, she did case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world, focusing on anime music videos and fansubs. 

Mimi Ito has a large work on games and believes that socializing and playing is a side of learning and that schools can have a spirit of entertaining an playing as part of what they are doing.

She believes that the kids might use the online world, media production games as environments to develop sophisticated forms of technical and media literacy. 

Connected Learning

Connected learning is one of the projects in which Mimi Ito is involved. It is a set of principles designed to nurture the students of this century, embracing new forms of learning and technology. Those principles encourage active engagement, real problems and real needs. 

Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge e expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends e institutions who share e recognize this common passion or purpose. 

From: http://connectedlearning.tv/infographic

Videos

In this video Mimi Ito talks about connected learning, children and learning environments. According to her we need to find ways to connect formal learning and informal learning in a more coordinated way in order to match school and life outside school, including computers and games contributing to foster kids intellectual and personal development and proactively engage students.

To understand better the idea of connected learning, watch the 5 minutes presentation of Mimi Ito at DLM 2013 - http://vimeo.com/40908737

Some Keynote Quotes

Peer-Based Learning in a Networked Age

(University of Michigan's Enriching Scholarship, 2010)

"Networked media offers an unprecedented opportunity to support learning that is highly personalized and learner-centered, driven by passionate interest and social engagement. But very few learners and educators are taking advantage of this opportunity. And the reason for this is that too often we separate the worlds of young people and adults, play and education."

"My argument is that we need to engage with kids’ peer cultures and recreational lives outside of school if we want to tap into the power that today’s networked media offers for learners."

"The technology itself has no power to transform learning. It is up to us to take that technology and do something new with it, something that doesn't just reproduce our tired old scripts. These experiments and explorations won’t succeed, spread or scale without a dedicated network of educators who are working together to build a new model for 21st century learning."

Why Social Mobile Media Matters for Broadcasters

(National Association of Broadcasters Show, 2009)

"One of the studies I did with my colleague Daisuke Okabe in Japan, and that was funded by Intel research, was a particularly good one for satisfying my nosy tendencies. We asked young urbanites and their families in Tokyo to show us what's in their bag, and then we tracked how they used their portable devices, wallets, keys, and other media as they moved around the city."

"What is so different about today's world of mobile, social media is that context matters as much as content does. And by context I mean the personal context as well as social context."

"The social is what gives meaning to media consumption, and media content is what feeds social buzz. Marketers talk about this as viral media. For kids its media that has social currency. If you see an elementary aged kid pull out his gameboy, if you see a teenager pull out her video ipod of camera phone in a social situation, you'll see a kind of flocking behavior as kids gather around the device. The media is the social glue, the common language that means you belong."

Latest Publications
 

Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (2012)

 This book investigates how otaku, a once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. Otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. This once stigmatized Japanese youth culture created its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction, comics, costumes, and remixes, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media. 

Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software (2009)

In Engineering Play, Mizuko Ito describes the transformation of the computer from a tool associated with adults and work to one linked to children, learning, and play.

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009)

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital media. It reports an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings -at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces. 

Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project 

This report summarizes the results of an ambitious three-year ethnographic study into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings -- at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. The authors view the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States.