Month: March 2019

Participatory culture is a hot topic born accompany with Web 2.0. Jenkins (2009) defined the participatory culture as the 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. Participatory culture could benefiting participants on peer-to-peer learning, changing attitude toward intellectual property positively, diversification of cultural expression, developing modern workplace required  skill set, and more empowered conception of citizenship.

If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefits from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life. – New London Group, 2000

With the mission of education, the participatory culture established a new access for educator to imagining how to support our current formal school education in informal setting. The coolest opportunity that participatory culture creates I think is the affinity space. In Jenkins (2009) words, affinity spaces bridge differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, and allow people take part in various ways based on their skills and interests. Additionally, because of the interest-driven property, participants in an affinity space can constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills. Along with the peer-to-peer teaching when participants learning from each others, the knowledge acquiring and refining processes are been boosted. Furthermore, on the emotion level, participants will feel like an expert when they writing comments to others. Nothing is better than the spiritual inspiration. Benefiting by the participatory culture, people have much more opportunities than anytime in the past can participating, learning, and interacting in public and community, and gain sense of identity and belonging through participation.

 

Reflection on Scratch

It is the first time I using Scratch to create some simple project. At the beginning, I can do anything according to my poor coding arsenal. I tapped this and dragged that like a headless chicken, and my interest was losing very quickly. Then I thought whether I can go to see others project in the Scratch community first to see how to play it. In the Scratch community, millions of projects are shared by creators to seeking peer comments or modification suggestions. Those creators invite other participants in the Scratch community who are interested in the same genre of programming to test their project demos and ask for support on coding. I believe it is a really cool way to find scaffolding, to exchange experience and knowledge, and to learn or teach as an apprentice or knowledge others in this authentic environment.

 

References

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Mit Press. pp. 3-11

New London Group (2000).“A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, ed. B. Cope & M. Kalantzis for the New London Group. London: Routledge, pp. 9-38.

 

Wikipedia, the website I was using as a real e-encyclopedia with highly trust until I heard all terms on this website are created and edited by users who have knowledge on specific terms. And then, I given up to use Wikipedia for several years. In recent two years, I picked Wikipedia again when I need to learn strange terms in my personal knowledge space sometimes as an addition source than Google. After viewed last week’s readings and video, I gained a more particular knowledge of wiki form websites which is pretty new to me.

As a collaborative create and edit style website, wikis give educators a new space to working cooperatively and lead students learning in a convenience team work. In the reading, the two way learning process is really interesting and I had never think a wiki site can contain such great learning opportunity. In the wiki style learning process, the two way learning are internalization and externalization (Cress, U & Kimmerle, J., 2007). The internalization process occurs when an individual’s knowledge space has difference between with wiki’s information and the individual can change his/her existing knowledge schema through enlarging or revising. The externalization process usually can been seen when a person create or edit the content on a wiki site as way to output his/her existing knowledge. Not only allow of the creation of an artifact, the externalization can lead to individual learning processes, and a contributor to a wiki article can expand his/her individual knowledge space through acquiring new knowledge units which were not part of the individual’s knowledge space before. (Cress, U & Kimmerle, J., 2007).

Another cool perspective in the reading is the Piaget’s model of equilibration (Piaget, 1977a, 1977b) reflect in the wiki’s learning opportunity. The equilibrium theory describes the way people try to maintain a balance between the environmental information on the one hand and their cognitive schemas on the other hand (Cress, U & Kimmerle, J., 2007). When people understand new knowledge based on their existing cognitive schema and then integrate those information into this schema, it could say people assimilate the new information. When people change the current knowledge schema in order to better understanding the new information rather than just integrate new knowledge into to it, an accommodation process occurs.

Thus, through learning with wikis, collaborative learning, cognitive learning, and interest-driven learning can be observed. Besides, benefiting by the internet and mobile devices’ applied in people daily life, people can learning and distribute knowledge anytime and anywhere that internet covered.

 

Wiki sites:

1. Minecraft Wiki (https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki)

A publicly accessible and editable wiki for information related to Minecraft include term definitions, code samples, and open access community projects.

2. Wikiveristy (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page)

Wikiversity is a project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

3. Google Doc and Goole Spreadsheet

Currently, a lots of instructors start to use Google Doc and Google Spreadsheet to encourage students create, edit, and share knowledge collaboratively. I think Google Doc, Google Spreadsheet, and other cloud based co-edit applications can be used as a group made wiki site.