This week’s blog post will some thoughts in reaction to the summary of new skills on page 4 of the “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” paper by the MacArthur Foundation. It also includes peripheral comments from the video: Scratch, and the article Making projects, making friends (Brennan et al.).
The paper lists eleven new media skills: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. In the following section (“The Needed Skills in the New Media Culture”), incredible success stories are listed – such as the founding of the web browser Firefox.
The idea that “[a]lll young people should have opportunities to be creators of interactive media” (Brennan et al.) is very bold. I understand that the authors are talking about opportunity – not forcing people to create, but giving them the tools to do so if they choose. However, some of the skills needed to provide these opportunities are, in my experience, skills that take much time and experience to acquire and refine. I actually found the list to be quite a comprehensive list of qualities I would look for in a prospective employee.
We read about some examples of youths using Scratch successfully applying these skills – such as negotiation, judgment, collective intelligence, etc. How can we combine these new literacies within formal education? I think encouraging participation and play in some of these learning environments/communities would help, but this would require a tremendous amount of scaffolding. Carving out the time required for this type of exploration would be quite a challenge, and would require rethinking how class and homework time can and should be used. Brennan et al. mentioned that there is a spectrum (in Scratch users) ranging from socializers and creators. If we can encourage learners to move towards the middle, they will grow in creativity and collaboration. Although outside of the required reading for the week, the Jenkins paper provides some examples of “What Might Be Done” later in pages 22 and on (I did not read them in detail, so I won’t comment on them here).
In my specific context – where I provide IT support for building energy research in a consortium of many different partners, collective intelligence is one of the most important literacies needed. The nature of our consortium is bringing different groups in different contexts to come up with integrated solutions. Many experts are not used to working on systemic issues together in an integrated fashion. Collaboration with people in different geographic locations and contexts truly requires transmedia navigation as we share information in different media, networking, negotiation, and more.
There are whispers that the current model of education is antiquated and that college degrees are increasingly meaningless. If our education system produced citizens with these eleven “new skills,” I think that the workforce of the future would be much better equipped to not only navigate the new media landscape, but also contribute with creativity and collaboration. As I’ve already mentioned, I think these new media literacies would be invaluable skills for employees in any field. Last week, we’ve already been discussing learning in and out of the classrooms; similarly, all these skills can span in and out of the workplace, to enable well rounded, participatory citizens.
Good points related to the challenges of scaffolding and sustaining an activity like Scratch within the formal classroom. In the early 2000s, a prominent theorist wrote a paper (http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ664922) on the adoption of technology in the classroom and he noted that often new technologies lose their power because they are employed within the same traditional framework of teaching/learning. I think, as you suggest, such integration needs to be carefully considered to ensure that the tool/practices aren’t diluted in power, while at the same time being well integrated in different contexts.
Jin, you make some valid points on the capabilities of learners in order to acquire the 11 skills. I have seen some of it in the gifted classrooms, in schools with a higher income population. Given a school in a low income area, or an inner city public school, it would be very difficult to acquire the means (technology tools) let alone have students be able to acquire these skills. This is in part because it is likely the lower income students do not have access to practice these skills outside the classroom as easily as the upper income students may have. Your comment about the skills being what you look for in a prospective employee was an eye opener to exactly how much prior knowledge may be needed to achieve the 11 skills mentioned.
You make an interesting point about the current model of education being antiquated. I agree that the eleven media skills mentioned in the article will be something employers look for in future candidates. I think we can connect this to Week 3 when we learned about Siemens’ ideas on Connectivism. How do you envision formal education using this knowledge to create more informal learning opportunities for students so they can develop the media skills needed to succeed? I don’t know about you, but I am beginning to feel more and more unprepared to meet the future demands of education.
Honestly, I don’t think that the media skills are needed to succeed per se. To be blunt, I think that a lot of the 11 skills are needed for management. However, I’ll go ahead and contradict myself too 🙂 – who isn’t a manager these days? Who doesn’t make decisions every day? Who doesn’t have ownership and responsibility for the success of their business/organization? Not many.
So – how do we create more of these informal learning opportunities? I think one of the other bloggers mentioned, why do we have to do all these learning activities outside the classroom when we can do them within the classroom? I think that sort of answers the first step. Students won’t use these tools if they aren’t introduced to them somehow… sure they will learn on how to use facebook and twitter on their own, but, many of them may not have the interest and passion to post a youTube video (although some of them definitely will! future media/film/art people perhaps?). So, even if it’s a little extra effort, why not make an assignment that includes making a short youtube video instead of writing a paper to introduce/familiarize the students with how they can create media/use it for learning?
I agree with how you mentioned that part of the difficulty is determining how to find enough time to incorporate technologies such as Scratch into our teaching. I love how students can use Scratch to create interactive stories and games that can be shared collaboratively with other people around the world…incredible! My only question is what would you suggest having students create with this program that will be meaningful. Do you think that they can use it in math or reading to further there understanding or summarize a new concept. After interviewing my IT specialist, Alma Row, last week, I ahve really been contemplating the effectiveness of different tools in my classroom.
I thought some of Brenan et al’s claimes were “very bold” too. Good words! I didn’t realize that these tools required so much learning and scaffolding from the teacher. Thanks for the heads up. I am seriously considering something like Scratch, so it’s good to know this before I start.
I am intrigued with your collaborative experience. You seem like a good person to go to for advice on what tools I might use to work on next week’s group project. How will your team stay in contact. I realize we will post work to the Wiki, but where will you discuss the work?
Thanks in advance Jin An.
I am actually not familiar with Scratch at all, but I can make a suggestion based on things I am more familiar with.
I think scaffolding with small/attainable (low learning curve) goals that are related to the subject area the way to go IF the class/subject is NOT related to the technology you want to integrate. For example, if I wanted students to learn some html/javascript in a math course, I would not want them to go and build a website… rather, I would have a website that is mostly built for them and they can play around with some math functions – and once they achieve the goals (as the “fast” students will), they can explore.
Jerry, our group is mostly using angel mail and google docs to collaborate. We are not doing anything synchronously. It’s going well so far.