The following are some of the current research efforts of CMS students and faculty.

Convergence Culture Consortium

The Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (C3) is a partnership between thinkers and researchers from/affiliated with the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and companies with a keen interest in deciphering convergence culture and the implications it can have for their business. To us, media convergence is more than just a technological shift; it is a tectonic shift that has altered the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences. We believe convergence stands for a process and not an endpoint. Members of C3 gain new insights and ideas about a very intractable and urgent set of questions that they are already grappling with in the current business environment. We aim to expand the role of industrial leaders by informing them of dynamic humanistic scholarship while providing them with early access to the cutting-edge ideas that emerge through the consortium.

Learning Games to Go/ Education Arcade

The Learning Games to Go project is creating designs for computer games that address middle-school math and literacy learning, with particular attention to underserved populations. Students working on LGG will also be involved in The Education Arcade, a broad effort to research and develop new applications of computer and/or video games in education.

Metamedia

The Metamedia project provides students and faculty with a flexible online environment to create, annotate and share media-rich documents for the teaching and learning of core humanistic subjects. Using the open standards-based Metamedia framework, faculty members further pedagogical innovation by building subject-specific mini-archives that extend the use of multimedia materials in the classroom and enable the formation of learner communities across disciplines and distances. Drawing on Metamedia applications as they research, develop, and collaborate on multimedia essays or in-class presentations, students improve their media literacy skills and gain a better understanding of how media influences their lives and shapes their interpretations. The result is increased skill at communicating effectively in today's increasingly global world of education and business.

Project New Media Literacies

The New Media Literacies (NML) project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is developing a theoretical framework and curriculum for K-12 learners that integrate new media tools into broader educational, expressive and ethical contexts. This four-year project – through collaborations with MacArthur's "Digital Kids" research project at UC/Berkeley and a community of educators, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, academics and media professionals – will establish how to define new media education, how to implement it, and how to sustain it once the project is completed.

NML is partnering with classrooms and after school programs around the country to test curriculum prototypes created by CMS students and program affiliates, including the University of Chicago's Center for Urban School Improvement and Boston's YWCA. The NML team will also work with industry leaders to incorporate core project outcomes into a variety of commercial media products.

Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is a five-year research initiative that addresses important challenges faced by the global digital game research community and industry, with a core focus on identifying and solving research problems using a multi-disciplinary approach that can be applied by Singapore's digital game industry. The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab focuses on building collaborations between Singapore institutions of higher learning and various MIT departments to accomplish both research and development.