Jenkins-Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture

Jenkins, Henry, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robison, Margaret Weigel. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century." Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning.  2006. The MacArthur Foundation. Web. 8 Sept. 2011. <http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=enJLKQNlFiG&b=2108773&ct=3017973&notoc=1>

Active Link to White Paper

They begin by examining participatory culture and give examples of poor students who have done great things with media because of their "play" in new media. Using this as a basis, they argue that the skills are important, that our culture and expectations of what makes a contributing citizen are changing. Part of the problem is that students feel disconnected from the material in classrooms right now because they are "powerless" in that structure. They get no say, and can feel no connection because it's depersonalized and abstract. With that in mind they support the need to teach these skills in classrooms for three reasons: participation gap, transparency, ethics. They then go on to question what should be considered literacy, and explain that they see new media skills as social skills because of the effect they will have on their ability to work within society. This is followed by a list of core media literacy skills. The authors go through a list of skills giving detailed examples of why they're important and how they're playing out currently. The skills are: play, simulation, performance (role play), appropriation, multi-tasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking and negotiation. Finally, they discuss who should doing the teaching: schools, after-school programs, parents.

I liked that they essentially covered the WWWWWH's of 21st century literacy. I also liked that they didn't suggest throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They brought up a lot of good points about the positive effects of learning these skills, but also supporting why they should be learned in a "controlled" or safe environment. The examples and sources they use do a great job of explaining their point and examining how we'll do it. In fact, I'll be raiding their bibliography to read some of those studies firsthand. This document does, on the whole, play into the readings by Ohmann and Selfe & Selfe in that they suggest we teach students to criticize technology (as we should be) and they support closing what they call the "participation gap" by teaching students the skills necessary to function in our society in order to be successful (loosely related to Ohmann in that he suggests that technology is power of the haves over the have nots). This does raise the questions of: what is success? are we just preparing them for the "real world"? and if so what's wrong with that?

This first video is almost a video representation of what Jenkins has to say. It's about 2 mins. long.




This second video is interesting. A collection of teachers went out to find out how other practitioners define literacy. It was updated in 2009. It's about 8 mins, so a little longer, but interesting none the less.