Their parents hung out at the mall, but today’s teens are more likely to hang out online. Until recently, however, little was known about what they were doing online, and many parents believed their children were wasting time.

Research from the most extensive ethnographic U.S. study of youth online culture shows that young people are engaged in social and recreational activities that can be a springboard for learning. Moreover, some young people use the online world to pursue their passions and to learn — with peers — about issues of common interest.

"Digital media allow young people to be a part of specialized knowledge groups. They can dive into a topic or a talent and develop and share their growing expertise with groups of teens and adults from around the country or world. This is a unique feature of today's media environment," said Mimi Ito, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author of the "Living and Learning with New Media" (PDF) study.

Led by a team of researchers at UC Irvine, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the study observed the online activities of young people over three years, presenting a baseline for understanding how digital media affect them and how they learn. Findings from the study, which was released in November 2008, have the potential to reframe the public debate about the impact of digital media on youth and to help educators tap the power of new technology to prepare young people for the technical and social skills necessary in the 21st century.

Most teens go online for social reasons, or what Ito calls friendship-driven participation. But they also engage in interest-driven participation, pursuing hobbies that require more sophisticated technical skills than uploading photos to MySpace, according to the study. Over time, Ito said, young people can advance from "hanging out," socializing with new media, to "messing around," creating and sharing media, to "geeking out," developing a high level of online skills to participate in interest-based learning communities. And many of the study's findings support earlier research on how people learn, including play as a form of learning and the effectiveness of peer-based learning.

Digital media allow young people to learn from each other in informal settings, making learning in and out of school "increasingly porous," Ito said. "Institutions have a problem because [learning] is happening in the recreational space and is fluid," she said, adding that schools must tap into this informal learning environment. "Kids have always had activities that were not part of the standardized curriculum they have had in school," said Ito, citing music lessons as one example. "What is interesting in the current time is that access to those activities has expanded quite dramatically because of online resources. Once, how to edit video was fairly challenging and expensive and required a structured effort. Today, you can take the first few steps through access to online resources without the institutional support."

Children who do not have a home computer miss opportunities for informal learning, from posting entries on a Facebook page to googling information. They will be "digitally" behind their classmates who have home computers, Ito said.

Schools can use the new media and their informal learning opportunities to support instruction and prepare children for a digital world, Ito said. This will require a transformation in the way society views learning. As Ito asked in the study's conclusion: "Rather than thinking of public education as a burden that schools must shoulder on their own, what would it mean to think of public education as a responsibility of a more distributed network of people and institutions? And rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids' participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement?"