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This panel is itself a remix. Each contributor has a unique project example to share, but in the end there is convergence. Remixing enables participation, and thus encourages creativity, ownership, and collaboration: the three attributes of contemporary digital culture celebrated in this edition of the annual Media in Transition conference. The academic study of new media literacy, a specialty of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, hosts the discussion and CMS fellow Alice Robison describes their efforts to examine "what happens in the space in between you making meaning and me making meaning." The New Media Literacies project has created video exemplars of topics such as remixing and DJ culture for use in schools.

One approach to learning through remixing is to provide tools that will expose the structure of media products, making it accessible to all. Erik Blankinship and the Media Modifications group unveil tools for this kind of activity on the Web at Adapt.tv.

By remixing PacMan in their own voice, Juan Devis' Latino students created a new video game, El Immingrante, about cleaning up their Los Angeles neighborhood while staying one step ahead of a pursuing vigilante enforcer.

Renee Hobbs, a longtime developer of media literacy curricula, sees remixing as a powerful way to highlight the constructedness of media content, and thus to reveal the plasticity of meaning. She has developed a suite of games that a girl can play to create her own song, by choosing a message, musical genre, set of lyrics, voice effects, and even designing a custom avatar to perform it. My Pop Studio, available on the Web since mid-2006, helps girls understand how music evokes an emotional response, while giving them the pleasure and sense of power that comes from manipulating familiar materials.

In yet another medium, theater, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley exploits remixing to make literacy more inclusive. He's adopted quite a challenge: to make more compelling for young people, while preserving the integrity of the novel. For example, children don't necessarily identify with a white whale, but they do understand "the vengeful pursuit of something that has hurt you", when the white nemesis is translated into cocaine. Ultimately it takes a community to sustain literacy, and Pitts-Wiley hopes theater can enlist widespread interest and support, much as the Bible used to provide a shared literary resource for all races and classes of people in the West.