The Prospect of Participatory Culture

I was one of a handful of guests recently on the wonderful Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast, where the discussion centered on a white paper put out by The New Media Literacies Center at MIT. The paper, by Henry Jenkins, focuses in on the concept of how students can move forward, navigate and thrive in the new world of media and technology. (Oh, TTT is also up for an Edublog Award this year)

You can access the paper titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, by Henry Jenkins.

Listen to the podcast at Teachers Teaching Teachers

You can see a video put forth by the Project for New Media Literacies:

This is one list of skills that the white paper talks about for our students:

Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
Visualization – the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends

What do you think?
Peace (in sharing),
Kevin

5 Comments
  1. Kia ora Kevin

    This list, like, it’s wordy.

    Appropriation? Most of the time we hear about misappropriation.

    Multitasking? Like, I mean, that’s old crap – everybody knows that was just a Prenskyism. It don’t work like that.

    Transmedia navigation – multiple modalities? I seem to remember someone stuttering over that mouthful in a keynote at a conference.

    But the one that tops it for me is play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving. I think they’ve lost the Piaget plot here.

    Sorry to be such a tarnation dilbert but, teaching and learning? It doesn’t have to be couched in this sort of lingo. It also needs to be kept near the ground. Cloud 9? This list isn’t even in the atmosphere.

    Catchya later
    from Middle-earth

    • Good points, Ken. Why do we need to get so wordy with ideas?
      But here are the things I like:
      I like that Play is part of this concept — kids and adults need to play to experience new concepts.
      I like Collective Intelligence — we learn more by learning from others and by applying our own knowledge to the group (not to be confused with the Borg mentality — warning: Star Trek reference)
      I like the concept of moving across many media and navigating them all together.
      Take care
      Kevin

  2. That’s quite a bit to digest. Think I’ll try the podcast. Loved the part about Play. We should do that more often, especially in kindergarten but we are moving away from that even with the little kids. So much curriculum and not enough time to learn through that Play things like:
    Performance
    Simulation
    Appropriation
    Multitasking
    Distributed Cognition
    Collective Intelligence
    Judgment
    Transmedia Navigation
    Networking
    Negotiation
    Visualization

  3. I like this as a way to look at the big picture. The videoclip was helpful. I was happy to see play on the list. I think people need to “play” with new technologies to get familiar with them and to see what they can do with them. I never agree or disagree with an entire paper or video–but try to look at the whole of it to see if it is something I can believe in. I want to spend more time with this white paper over the next week. Thanks for sharing–definitely something worth talking and thinking about.

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