This week’s readings and videos were especially helpful in seeing ways that students and youth engage in a participatory culture. Henry Jenkins gives his own take on what constitutes a participatory culture in his video and as cited in “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”. Basically, all of his 11 constituents boil down to different groupings of ways people interact with the online community. Most are ideas that we have read about in detail in previous weeks’ readings, but others such as networking, have barely been touched on.
In terms of learning and teaching, I think the most important aspect of participatory culture is collaborating with others. No matter what job or career our students choose in their futures, they are going to have to work with others. They will be hired by someone, have coworkers, or be their own boss and have to communicate their ideas to sell their product or service. Programs such as Scratch and games such as World of Warcraft are just two ways cited in previous readings that both youth and adults can collaborate together. Scratch has online communities of individuals who upload their creations for public review. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online game in which your character can interact with other characters in both chat and activities in the game. By participating in either of these online communities, you are building skills in collaboration.
Another important aspect of participatory culture is creativity. As an art teacher, I feel I know a lot about teaching students to be creative. However, the coursework we have done so far has really opened my eyes to the fact that there are many more tools out there that are teaching students to be just as creative as they would be in art, and in some cases even more so. In the art room, we create works of art using a specific set of tools with a specific set of guidelines. In the digital world students have limitless programs and tools at their disposal to create with what they choose. There are still guidelines and sets of tools depending on what they are doing, but otherwise, the possibilities are limitless.
It is interesting to compare my own content area with all of the Web 2.0 tools we have learned about thus far and make connections to new ways I could be teaching my students using an entirely new approach of digital learning and learning communities. I have mentioned before, just as the teacher referenced in chapter 7 from “Making Projects, Making Friends” (Brennan et al.), that critique groups would be a great way to use Web 2.0 tools in my classroom. However, with this most recent pairing of articles and videos, I realized I could expand that idea even further to critique and share artwork with other students and classrooms in other parts of the country or world. Fantastic! I look forward to reading my classmates’ blogs in the coming days and hope they are all making as many new connections to their content area as I have been.