Participatory Culture

It is interesting to me that most of the skills needed by today’s youth are not necessarily taught in traditional schools.  “The skills they acquired—learning how to campaign and govern; how to read, write, edit, and defend civil liberties; how to program computers and run a business; how to make a movie and get it distributed—are the kinds of skills we might hope our best schools would teach.  Yet, none of these activities took place in schools.” (Jenkins, 2006, p.5).   In those sentences Jenkins makes note to the skills exhibited by some peculiar teenagers which she describes in the previous paragraphs.  Some at the early age of 14 were running to be elected mayors of cyber communities, creating web browsers and creating web pages to foment reading and writing skills.  It seems crazy that these important skills are not being addressed in educational institutions, but are learned independently in cyberspace.

In my opinion, it is the sole purpose of educational institutions to provide its members with the skills to become productive to the needs of the many.  While our society and culture are changing ever so fast in face to changes occurring in technology and media, it seems that academia seems to trail in the preparation of citizens to conduct modern task.  “A participatory culture is 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.” (Jenkins, 2006,p.3).  It appears that educational institutions are only preventing a participatory culture.  You may wonder what leads me to make such a remark.  Let’s start with the fact that some of the most prestigious universities close their doors to most students, with their very exclusive selection process;  therefore, excluding the opinions and ideas of the many in the discussion of many topics that are only shared among closed circles of these elitist institutions.  A second more concrete example is the fact that the one of our assign reading(Networked Publics) was posted on the internet originally for free, for the consumption of the public, but was removed by at the request of the publishing house [ MIT press]. “At long last, the Networked Publics book has been published by the MIT Press. At their request, we have taken down some of the chapters. Even with one of the most enlightened publishers, it was impossible to convince them of the virtues of free information.”  This is cited from a blog on the Networked Publics website. (http://networkedpublics.org/node) .   We must move to a new era of true access to information.  A place we all knowledge and information as accessible to all equally.   

People talk about teaching pour students the skills of tomorrow.  I say let’s prepare them for today.  “Our economy, public sphere, culture, and even our subjectivity are mutating rapidly and show little evidence of slowing down the pace of their evolution.” (Varnelis, 2006).  This alone is a sign that we cannot teach the skills of tomorrow because we do not yet know what they will be.  Today skills we do know.  We must teach our children not fixed curriculums that were created two and three generations ago, but an ever evolving curriculum that meets the needs of today; a curriculum that is not limited by publishing houses, policy makers or politicians, but one that is free, not limited by money or physical space.

  Henry Jenkins list what some of these skills are in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:Media Education for the 21st Century:

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

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

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.

These are the essential skills we need to include in today’s curriculums.  Mastering these skills will provide our students with a better chance a sucking in today’s global economy and culture.