Foundation Pledges $50-Million for Education
October 19, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced plans today to give $50-million over five years to institutions to promote the use of technology in education, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Determining how young people use technology and incorporating that technology into everyday learning is the strategy behind the donation, which has already started to flow to several universities and will also be awarded to nonprofit organizations.
One grant recipient, Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will use the money to develop methods of teaching digital-media literacy to students, the newspaper reports.
“Media literacy right now is treated as an added-on subject,” Mr. Jenkins says. “We want to say, ‘No, it’s a paradigm shift.’”
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