| Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century |  | Author: Henry Jenkins
Publisher: The MIT Press
This item is no longer available
Rating:  2 reviews
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 142
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.23
ASIN: B0030DFWZM
Publication Date: June 30, 2009
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Product Description
Many teens today who use the Internet are actively involved in participatory cultures—joining online communities (Facebook, message boards, game clans), producing creative work in new forms (digital sampling, modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction), working in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (as in Wikipedia), and shaping the flow of media (as in blogging or podcasting). A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these activities, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, development of skills useful in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Some argue that young people pick up these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture; but the problems of unequal access, lack of media transparency, and the breakdown of traditional forms of socialization and professional training suggest a role for policy and pedagogical intervention.
This report aims to shift the conversation about the "digital divide" from questions about access to technology to questions about access to opportunities for involvement in participatory culture and how to provide all young people with the chance to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed. Fostering these skills, the authors argue, requires a systemic approach to media education; schools, afterschool programs, and parents all have distinctive roles to play.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning
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| Customer Reviews:
Creative Spur August 12, 2010
Kevin L. Nenstiel (Kearney, Nebraska)
Like many teachers who grew up before the current media-saturated generation, I feel inordinately intimidated by the push to integrate new media technology into my classroom. Henry Jenkins says this fear is not unreasonable, but if I hope to do my students justice in this volatile world, I must see my way past this limitation. His intensive scholarly study makes many suggestions, but at the end, I feel more informed than empowered.
Jenkins asserts that the majority of students with access to new media already create their own content. This opens doors because, as active participants rather than passive recipients, these youth take a proactive role in their own education. Students active in media creation, from video production and cosplay to fan fiction, sampling and remixing, and online book reviewing (!) already have a leg up on the challenges of our participatory media landscape. Though Jenkins elides my concerns about how to channel those hundreds of hours of "The Sims Online" to academically productive ends, he makes a convincing case.
I can't help but note that some of Jenkins' new-media suggestions seem remarkably familiar. For instance, he speaks glowingly of one teacher's experiment in "beta-reading," in which students use online tools to read and comment on other students' drafts, helping peers (and, hopefully, themselves) improve core writing skills. When I was an undergraduate, we did that in the classroom, with hard-copy manuscripts, and we called it "workshopping." Similarly, Jenkins extols teachers who use web tools to simulate real-world politics and social movements. But when I was fourteen, back in those pre-Web days, my Social Studies teacher had us conduct opinion polls and mock debates to grasp the issues in play during the 1988 Presidential election. No tech required.
I could go on, but my point is, Jenkins' suggestions will be most influential to teachers (and I supect Jenkins would agree) when they serve education's established, traditional goals. New media technology can make education more intense, more ambitious, and paradoxically, more decentralized. Tech doesn't supplant conventional classroom teaching; rather, the new supplements the old.
But we run aground on a simple yet penetrating concern. Toward the end, Jenkins laments, "There are few, if any, books that offer parents advice on how to make these choices or provide information about the media landscape." Parents, yes, though I could say the same about teachers, too. Even Jenkins himself, for all his good suggestions, is more wide-ranging than in-depth. Tech advances so fast that, were I to invest in keeping up with the newest advances, I couldn't stay abreast of developments in my own field. In the choice between the two, who can blame me for preferring the area where I have a higher degree over the area where even paid experts strain to keep up?
Jenkins and his research team leave me and other teachers with a lot to think about. I hope to apply new tech concepts in my own classroom in coming semesters. And I thank Jenkins for his clarity, writing with a minimum of jargon and keeping a diverse audience in mind. But this study is more of a spur to thinking than a guide to action. I will need to do more research if I hope to apply Jenkins' principles in my classroom.
The importance of technology and media in the classroom. July 24, 2010
DWD (Indianapolis, IN)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Henry Jenkins has written several books dealing with technology, media, bloggers, gamers and the like. Now with Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century he has added education to the mix.
Jenkins notes several important things about the future of education (which interested me as a teacher). Formal education must address technology. It cannot be just paper and pencil. Technology is part of the modern world's media - it is not just newspapers, books, magazines, TV and movies. There are blogs, social media and a new one I hadn't really considered: video games.
Jenkins encourages the use of video games to teach. There are already several games such as Sims and the various history-based empire building games that teach rules and strategies for life. Jenkins cites the example of a young man who learned a lot about Rome (and through Rome, the structures of all societies) by playing an online game, Caesar 3. The lessons learned were interesting, but the costs was too prohibitive for any school to use. It was not monetary costs (more on that down below) but the time costs. This young man invested hundreds of hours into this game. That cannot be done in a classroom, clearly, nor can I, as a teacher, guarantee that I can find anything like this that all, or even most, of my students can find a similar interest in.
But, the point is made and it is true - modern American students must be familiar with technology of all sorts.
Jenkins makes three other important points:
1) Students must be able to interpret and verify the value of all sorts of media. It is hard for students to distinguish advertising from more objective media. Students also fall for the age old problem of judging a book by its cover. They tend to think that the more polished the website, the more accurate its information. Let's admit it, it is easy to make that mistake and requires judgment based on knowledge and experience to overcome that bias.
2) There is a technological divide. Poorer students have less access. Students who have other interests chose to access less (a topic Jenkins only brushes). How do schools attempt to bridge this divide? I don't know that they truly can. Schools have computers and programs but, as any experienced computer user knows, it is quite expensive to keep up with technology.
If a school buys a desk, it is usable for a decade, maybe longer. It is current and does not need upgrading and minimal maintenance. Any computer a school buys is nearly out of date by the time it is installed. The programs are not current and buying the newest and latest cna cost hundreds of dollars for each copy for each computer in which it is installed, or thousands upon thousands for site licenses. Throw in to that the personnel to maintain the computers, the infrastructure to make them more usable and you're talking millions of dollars for a modern American high school. Millions of dollars that has to be re-invested every few years for upgrades and replacements.
To go back to the desks, it is very possible that the first school I taught in (1990-1993) is using the same student desks that were there when I taught. That school had 3 Apple Macintosh computers in the whole building. That's it. No classroom computers. Schedules were done by hand. Attendance was taken on paper. Since then, they've made a massive investment in servers, labs, printers, wires, projectors and it all has to be upgraded all of the time.
In a time of massive budget cuts, some of this becomes mere theory rather than practical discussion.
3) To his credit, Jenkins does not recommend that the computer/media literacy he espouses become a separate class. Rather, he encourages its integration into all classes. While this sounds like a way to get around the time issue (how can you fit a computer/media literacy class into a schedule that is so full as to prohibit many students from making any true choices in their schedule as it is?) this still takes time out of every class and practically guarantees the education he seeks will stay at the very basic level throughout the student's time in school.
So, to sum up, Jenkins makes plenty of observations on the value of technology to education - all of which I have no doubt are quite true. But, in our present educational climate I am not seeing many of these proposals moving from theory into genuine action.
Parents, it always has been and always will be up to you to fill in the blanks that a general education leaves and encourage your child. Technology is no different. Reading this book will give a parent an idea of where to go and how to proceed.
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