Participatory Culture - Week Three

“If it works on an organizational level to mobilize citizenship, shouldn’t we bring it into our classrooms?” were the closing words of Henry Jenkins in his presentation on Participatory Culture in the TEDx NYED video. These words sum up my sentiment on the use of digital technologies in the classroom. I have heard many students, my own children included, ask the question, “How does this apply to real life?” in regards to the curriculum they are being taught. Yet, it appears that participatory cultures have found a way to teach and develop transferrable skills at play and through leisure activities.

            In his White Paper, Jenkins points out how participatory culture games use the world of politics to allow those who normally stand on the side lines to get into the game.  He states, “The new participatory culture offers many opportunities for youth to engage in civic debates, to participate in community life, to become political leaders, even if sometimes only through the “second lives” offered by massively multiplayer games or online fan communities. Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic context: we learn the skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and gradually coming to understand the choices we make in political terms. Today’s children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious tasks later.” (2006: p.10) He also makes reference to the Pew study (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), which found that “young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy.”

            I’m sure it is no surprise to most of us that students learn by doing. Digital technology presents an opportunity for students to have hands on activities that we can’t necessarily give them in the classroom. Yes, we can teach them the mechanics and the principles offline, while online they learn the value of not plagiarizing or of active citizenship.  Still, there are so many challenges that we face on this matter. These include ethics, access to technology, and cross-curricular skills development.  I believe the main challenge of the 21^st century educator is to find the pedagogical recipe that interfuses the lessons students can learn in the informal classroom called the internet with the formal lessons we teach in the schoolroom.

Response to Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

As an educator I neither view digital media as a threat to nor a replacement for traditional media.   To me it is an opportunity to embrace a new culture, a culture that our students were born into, making them natives, and the rest of us, immigrants. That aside, new media presents educators with an opportunity to teach new skills and further develop old ones. 

            The internet is a gateway to participatory cultures where there are “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.” (Jenkins 2009: p. 3) Such interactivity can be difficult for a teacher to monitor and nearly impossible to control, yet it does present numerous teaching moments.

            Teachers that allow their students to participate in these cultures will encounter opportunities to build critical thinking and ELA skills.  Students are capable of being taught to evaluate sources and check information against those deemed reputable for accuracy. Participatory sites that are plagued with spelling, grammar, and content errors can be used to hone students’ skills by having them find the inaccuracies and re-write the text correctly offline, or online in the case of wiki community participation.  Student blogs can be used to encourage civic participation, engaging students in the democratic process. Character education can be integrated to teach responsible participation and responsible use of web resources and school technology. Progressive educators will capitalize on the opportunity to “build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.” (Jenkins 2009: p. 4)

Using New Literacies

The multimodal nature of contemporary texts that combine writing, images, animated objects, music, etc. (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 6) allow individuals to thrive in today’s information age in a way they may not have been able to using traditional text. My Smartphone allows me to send images, photos, sounds, animations, video, emoticons, and hyperlinks in messages. My Facebook posts often contain links to other pages or tags to other people. I find that the visual elements in messages make concise communicate easier in a society with a microwave temperament, whose citizens are often too busy to spend too much time on any one task. It also allows participation by people whose literary skills would be challenged by the use of traditional text alone.

New literacies’ interactive nature makes it easier to acquire and share information.  My favorite interactive category is the hyperlink. It makes information gathering so much easier when I can click or hover over a word or image that directs me to more information about something or someone I am researching or reading about. I found myself longing for such links today as I tried to find out more information about Green’s model, which we are supposed to use as we write our weekly reflections. I found numerous references to Green in online articles, and one or two properly placed links would have shortened my search considerably. I had no idea if Green was a man or a woman neither could I find the name of the work he published in 1988 that was frequently mentioned by other authors. Why didn’t any of these pages have a link to a book, an article, or biography of Green? After all, Green is not a unique name and since everyone is talking about “going green,” the word is all over the internet today. Finally, I found a reference to Bill Green by Lankshear and Knobel (2011, p. 191). Now if only I knew which of the dissertations published in 1988 was the original work in which he shared his thoughts about this model.

I use texts to inspire, encourage, enlighten, educate, and amuse. When I learn something new, I share it. The use of texts in our digital society makes sharing so much easier.