There have been a number of reports over the last week about the Osaka board of education running a trial program in 10 schools with Nintendo DS game consoles.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20080703f2.html
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/newsArt.cfm?artid=17973
What interests me about these reports are the questions of the Black Box fallacy (Jenkins 2006) and the Cultural Technology argument.
As Jenkins points out with his Black Box fallacy idea, is the School board using the DS as the latest black box that students can be put in front of to make them better learners? Or is it more ambitious, and trying to recognise the user flexibility that might be allowed in a DS interface? (utopic or dystopic visions).
Or should we be asking another question, as Sonia Livingstone suggests, maybe we should ask not what the media is going to do to youth, but what the youth are going to do with the media. So, who knows, maybe there’ll be something quiet innovative and exciting to come out of what the japanese students do with the DS.