This week’s readings and activities relating to participatory cultures were interesting, timely and fun. The executive summary reading identify the new skills and many of them where appropriate to the activities of using Scratch play, performance, simulation, networking, negotiation, distributed cognition as well as appropriation.
With the Scratch application, it was apparent that Appropriation, which in the video they talked about Remixing was a significant part of building the network of users, judgement and collective intelligence of the participatory culture of those who use the application and helped shape meaning making.
I’m not sure which came first but there’s another application extremely similar to Scratch called Alice. Alice was created at Carnegie Mellon compared to Scratch which is MIT. They both have created their own unique participatory culture in the shaping of people’s understanding basic computer programming concepts. Several years ago I used Alice in my IST 110 course to give students a better (and visually more immediate) understanding of basic program elements (If then, for loops etc.).
In the second reading they described their idea of participating culture as ” the online community in terms of a spectrum ranging from socializing to creating. At one end of the spectrum we observe the socializers-participants who are predominantly motivated by socializing, the group dynamic, and interactions with others…. At the other end of the spectrum we observe the creators-participants who are predominantly motivated by creating by the individual processes and products of programming.” Page 78. That is a very good description of both Alice and Scratch in that there are some who are very interested in the creating and/or producing new items, while others are more interested in learning from their community. This is different than the participatory culture of the new craze that’s out there… ( I have even gotten sucked into it) of course I’m talking about Pokémon GO.
Now, of course I can’t talk about collaborative participatory without talking Pokemon GO! We’ve all heard much about Pokémon GO from the different media outlets, both the good and the bad. For me the one original benefits of playing the game is that there are eggs that only hatch if you walk. I recently got a Fitbit and thought that this might be a great combination to get me to walk more, which it has. My step count prior to installing Pokémon GO was somewhere around the 5000 to 6000 range. Since installing the game my step count is closer to 11000/12000. So it’s a win!
But the added benefit is that the campus on which I work has a number of Poke stops as well as a gym (if you’re not familiar with the game the stops give you stuff to help capture Pokémon and the gym trains your Pokémon and if you team holds the gym gives you additional stuff). As I walk around campus I noticed something interesting. There are groups of students, other staff members and faculty members in some of these locations each talking to each other. Outside their normal context developing affiliations and collaborating on how best to use the different items that each member has regardless of their team color red, yellow or blue. Given that it’s a Penn State campus most are on team blue but even those that chose red or yellow are included and makes the dynamic more interesting. So, although the framework for this community building (socialization) is different than that of Scratch, it still has the same elements just not the creator aspect and maybe it will help me loose a few pounds. 😉