Collaboration, Computation, and Creativity: Media Arts Practices in Urban Youth Culture

The focus of this paper is to turn our attention to the arts as an understudied area within the computer-supported collaborative learning community and examine how studying the learning of arts and programming can open new avenues of research. We document, describe, and analyze urban youths’ media arts practices within the context of the design studio, particularly by focusing on how collaboration, computation, and creativity play out within this context. We utilize a mixed methods design that draws upon three approaches: (1) participant observations; (2) media arts object analyses; and (3) comparative in-depth case studies. Aspects of new literacy studies, social theories of literacy, and situated learning guide the methodology and interpretation in this study. Media arts projects like these are not well understood in the research literature but have the potential to teach us about learning and literacy in the age of multimedia.