This document discusses participatory culture and its implications for education. It defines participatory culture as having low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, supporting the sharing of creations, and passing knowledge from experienced to novice members. It discusses forms of participatory culture like affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem-solving, and circulations. It also covers the participation gap, transparency problem, and ethics challenge participatory culture poses for education. Finally, it discusses new skills needed like play, performance, simulation, and appropriation and how educators might address these new literacies.

1. PML 9
Participatory culture: What does this mean for my future
practice?

2. Agenda
Blogs
Discussion of Jenkins article
Evaluations
Your questions

3. Participatory Culture
a culture with 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.

4. Forms of Participatory Culture
Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities
centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook,
message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).
Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling,
skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-
ups).
Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and
informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through
Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).

5. Implications for Pedagogy
The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities,
experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full
participation in the world of tomorrow.
The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in
learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of
the world.
The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of
professional training and socialization that might prepare young
people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and
community participants.

6. New Skills
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

7. New Skills
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

8. New Skills
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.

9. Jenkins’ Defines 21st Literacy
New Media Consortium Henry Jenkins
“the set of abilities and skills First, textual literacy remains a
where aural, visual, and central skill in the twenty-first
digital literacy overlap.These century. Before students can
include the ability to engage with the new
understand the power of participatory culture, they
images and sounds, to must be able to read and
recognize and use that write.Youth must expand their
power, to manipulate and required competencies, not
transform digital media, to push aside old skills to make
distribute them pervasively, room for the new. Second, new
and to easily adapt them to media literacies should be
new forms” considered a social skill.

10. What Might Be Done?
Jenkins suggests ways that these new skills might be addressed in
education. Discuss either the examples he presents or suggest
your own ideas about how one or more might be addressed in a
secondary English classroom. What challenges might you and
the students face? What benefits might you see?
•Play •Multitasking
•Transmedia Navigation
•Performance •Distributed Cognition
•Networking
•Simulation •Collective Intelligence
•Negotiation
•Appropriation •Judgment

11. Addressing Your Questions
Blogging in the classroom: logistics
Helps to have exemplars to show students first
Anatomy of a blog post: title, tags, images, hyperlinks, level of
language etc. Have students identify criteria and evaluate blog
posts.

12. Blogging Logistics
Staying organized. Setting up an RSS Feed.
How to create an RSS Bundle in Google Reader

13. Blogging Logistics
Book Club Blog handout and rubric.
Assessment: What is a blog? (handout)

14. Video Games
Gaming Classroom Wiki

15. Classroom Management Tips
In a lab? Review procedures first: Teacher is talking=monitors
off.
Cell phones: depends on school policy, but I prefer to have them
out on the desk, face-down, and incorporate opportunities to use
the devices for learning eg/ Google SMS search
Focus on the behaviour, not the device.
A great blog on cellphones in the classroom.

16. Digital Citizenship
As a class, brainstorm guidelines for posting information online. Possible ideas
might be:
Never post personal information: address, phone number, email
Use first name and last initial only
Do not use others’ work without permission
Never say anything online that you wouldn’t say to a person’s face
Never post something you wouldn’t want your grandmother or a future boss to see
Be supportive and constructive
Post these guidelines somewhere visible. You may even have them post them as a
practice blog post

17. Restrictions/Filters
Find out who the computer administrator is for your school
Be able to articulate why you want to use the site
The kids know how to get around filters by using proxy servers

18. But I don’t have access to a
computer lab...
Most schools now have wifi
Consider a BYOD policy (bring your own device)
Differentiated instruction: Not all students need to be doing the
same thing at the same time. Break students into smaller groups
and rotate tasks.

19. Final Tips
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