¹ This essay will focus on the effects of digital technology and its use by our grantees. By “digital technology” I have in mind applications and devices made possible by the use of electronic technology that generates, stores, and processes data in bit form (that is, as a string of 0’s and 1’s). I also refer to the broad array of associated innovations that have revolutionized the way digitized data is stored, shared, processed, manipulated, and produced — computing, satellite, wireless, cellular, and fiber optic technologies, among others.

² While I will focus on education and media in this essay, I could have chosen other initiatives to highlight: our efforts addressing intellectual property and the public domain; our work exploring the credibility of information on the Internet; or our efforts to expand the use of digital technology at Nigerian universities, for example.

³ John Seely Brown has been a member of MacArthur’s Board since 2000. His work and writings have stimulated much of this thinking. For this essay, I draw on his speech at the 1999 Conference on Higher Education of the American Association for Higher Education, “Learning, Working & Playing in the Digital Age,” and his article, “Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn,” Change, March/April 2000, pp. 10-20.

⁴ Connie Yowell and Julia Stasch, “Proposed Grantmaking in Digital Media, Learning, and Education.” Prepared for the June 2005 Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, p. 1.

⁵ This section draws on a paper by my colleagues Elspeth Revere, John Bracken, and Kathy Im, “Media, Technology, and the Public Good,” prepared for the March 2005 meeting of the Board of Trustees of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

⁶ “Citizen journalism,” also known as “participatory journalism,” is produced by non-professional individuals who collect, report, analyze, and disseminate news and information.