Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture

Wow.  I read the report: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture.
It was packed with useful information.

A participatory culture changes the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement.   Right now, we’re moving away from a time when a few produce and many consume media.  Everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is being produced; students need access to the tools that will allow them to be participants. 
Kids are skilled at using media but limited in their ability to examine the media themselves.  They often take information at face value.  They need skills so they can determine how credible a game or site is.  Students need to understand that they’re dealing with a giant mall rather than a library.  Many kids have a difficult time picking out which pieces of a game or site are advertisements.

For this generation, games may be the best way to engage with learning.  Basically, games present a set of problems.  They’re certainly more interested in games than the stale prose in the textbooks. 
Railroad Tycoon incorporates spreadsheets, maps, graphs and charts into the game, for example.

One of my favorite pieces of media literacy has to do with appropriation.  This is the process where students learn by taking culture apart and putting it back together — in their own way.
Here’s a quote from the report:
Homer remixed Greek myths to construct The Iliad and The Odyssey.  Shakespeare sampled his plots and characters from other author’s plays.  The Sistine Chapel ceiling mashes up stories and images from across the entire biblical tradition.

To me, this is key — for beginning creators, appropriation provides a scaffolding — a place to start.
This report also names many great activities to do with students, many coming from The MIT Comparative Media Studies Program.  I love the lesson where students work on teams to transform an existing media (like a book, film, tv series or comic book) into a video games and then have to prepare a “pitch” presentation.

Another fascinating piece of information (to me) is the idea that multi-tasking is more important than attention span. 
Kids need to see the relationship between information coming at them from many directions, they need to make a reasonable hypothesis based on bits of information, fragments, or intermittent information — which is all a part of the current workplace.

Our society is in an apprenticeship phase, which I have to remember.  We’re all learning right now.

We need to stress working in teams …. We’re tapping the collective intelligence, where everyone knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any of us knows can be tapped by the group as a whole.
Unfortunately, education is still focusing on training autonomous problem solvers, mostly.  Collective intelligence communities encourage ownership of a project by a group,
but schools still grade individuals.
Schools should be teaching students to have a large background in many areas but also to know when it’s time to look to the larger community for expertise on a specific subject.

Tolerance can also be taught in cybercommunities.  They bring groups together who might never come in contact with each other in the physical world.  There are sometimes heated conflicts around values and norms, but as time goes by, this process may help an understanding arise about how different cultural communities operate.  In these cybercommunities many issues related to race, class, sex, ethnicity and religion can be worked out — over time.

The report identifies three core problems:

1. We must ensure that every child has access to the skills and experience needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic and political future of our society.
2. We must ensure that every child has the ability to articulate her understanding of the way media shapes perceptions of the world.
3.  We must ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that will shape their practices as media makers and as participants within on line communities.

So, kids need to play, perform, simulate, appropriate, multitask, tap the collective intelligence, evaluate the reliability and credibility of information, follow the flow of stories across multiple modalities, network (meaning to search for, synthesize and disseminate information) and they need the ability to travel across diverse communities respectfully.

The big goal here is that we ensure all students have access to the education, skills, resources and time so that they have opportunities in the new culture — so that they can be the pro- ams (professional amateurs) who network and find an audience for their work.  They need the chance to find out what their passions are, forge their own identities and lead expressive lives and enrich the lives of others.