A reflection on “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture“, “Making Projects, Making Friends“, and “Scratch Here“.

 

Laissez-Feral?

For all of the educational promises of participatory learning, Jenkins et al note that after-school programs and informal “affinity” learning spaces are richer contexts for participation than schools seem to be so far. Since much of participatory learning is driven by personal interest, it’s natural that young people would find greater space and support for non-academic exploration outside of the school. That said, if a school’s job is to prepare students for “full participation in the world of tomorrow”, we need to find a way to better coordinate these two (or several) venues for learning.

It is tempting to conclude that since students already naturally reap the benefits of participatory learning outside of school, educators can simply “let them be”, assuming they will learn on their own. In a reflection on new media education in the Big Thinker Video Series, Jenkins says that this laissez-faire approach will only serve to create a pack of “feral children of the Internet”. This hands-off strategy could leave many students behind, denying them engagement, validation, and recognition for their accomplishments. He calls for a vision of school in which teachers are not “snooping over students’ shoulders” but instead “watching their backs”.

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If we can’t authentically appropriate venues for participatory learning into the formal educational space, then we can at least prepare students with the skills they will need to participate in those spaces.

In “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture”, we saw that new literacies build on the foundational literacy, research skills, technical skills and critical analysis skills that are taught in the classroom (4). In this sense, formal learning spaces need to continue to teach these more traditional skills while expanding on learners’ required competencies, not pushing aside old skills to make room for the new.

By presenting the challenges associated with building media education for the 21st century, Jenkins et al give a clear roadmap for the domains that educators should target in their instruction: the Participation Gap, the Transparency Problem, and the Ethics Challenge. Below I suggest a few practical ways that teachers can design instruction to respond to these challenges.

 

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Participation Gap: Process over Product

 
Why: The benefits of engaging in participatory learning seem to hinge more on the process of participating than the product that is created.

The Scratch programming environment makes the process of the projects visible. Any visitor to a project can click on a “See Inside” button to explore the component elements of the interactive stories, games, and animations they admire. This visibility helps new users to learn from more experienced community members by peeling back the hood to reveal the networked parts. Scratch also lets beginning users add small but legitimate contributions by remixing the original work or by adding comments, feedback, and suggestions to the page’s discussion comment space.

How: Schools can encourage a spirit of play, experimentation, and revision by emphasizing process rather than product. A lesson design might build low-stakes opportunities for experimentation and “messing around” as an initial stage before more formalized learning. Lowering the barriers to participation helps those learners who may not have as much experience as creators. Formative assignments could place equal emphasis on creation, introspective process-oriented reflection, and peer-review, rather than linking a grade to a single, discrete end product.  
 

Transparency Problem: Externalizing the Selection Process

 
Why: Although young people are increasingly proficient at using new media to engage in participatory learning, they may need structured guidance to be able to examine a medium and identify its core governing assumptions. Learners raised in environments in which the primary sources of information are a teacher and a textbook are not conditioned to question the authority and credibility of these sources. The Harvard Good Works Project found that aesthetic choices of format and design can often be more important than content in determining the credibility that young people assign to a website (15). Giving students a controlled space in which they can practice parsing the “truthiness” and purpose of a source helps them to develop the critical skills they will need as future citizens and consumers.

How: A research study conducted by the Harvard Good Works Project found that the following aspects of a website signaled credibility to learners (Trust Without Knowledge: How Young Persons Carry out Research on the Internet):

• Popularity of site (as indicated by search ranking)
• Professional reputation
• Previous personal experience with site
• Proof of neutral affiliation (as indicated by .gov or .org domain status)
• Tone of writing
• Elements of style (use of quotes, pictures, by-lines, newspaper layout, etc)
• Recommendation by teacher or other authority figure

Each of these criteria could serve as a starting point for exploration in a lesson on transparency and credibility of new media information. A lesson on parsing the popularity of a site, for example, might discuss SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a practice that uses tactics to artificially boost the popularity of a site by priming it for search engine algorithms. In another lesson, a teacher might explain why he or she chose a particular source to recommend to students, making the decision transparent so that students can adopt a similar selection process in their own research.
 

The Ethics Challenge: Developing Guidelines for Public Practice

 
Why: Participatory media allows users to sample and remix media content (appropriation), adopt and play with alternative identities (performance) and negotiate and accommodate diverse perspectives (negotiation). Each of these skills has exciting implications and applications for learning. At the same time, each links closely with ethical questions of ownership, personal responsibility, and civic respect. Sampling and remixing existing content leads learners into murky waters of ownership, copyright, and plagiarism. Adopting alternate or anonymous identities allows learners to distance themselves from their creative output, making space for ugly, hurtful, or dark interactions. Negotiating and accommodating multiple perspectives forces learners to encounter and respond to viewpoints that are perhaps uncomfortably different from their own. All of these ethical questions create a cognitive dissonance that can be a promising starting point for exploration in the classroom.

How: Ethical questions of appropriation, ownership, and plagiarism can be explored in a lesson about art and music. Teachers and students can examine famous cases of copyright infringement (the Marvin Gaye estate’s lawsuit against Robin Thicke for one recent example) and compare those cases with acceptable practices of “remix culture” (as used in hip-hop or DJ sampling). Another lesson might address the importance of taking responsibility for your thoughts, words, and actions by starting a group discussion about anonymous online bullying.