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.