participatory culture

We need translation zones where there’s sharing of power between interest-driven, peer-driven, and institution-driven imperatives. The Chicago YOUmedia learning lab, as well as others that are opening up around the country, are examples of experiments in this vein.

In our New Media Literacies work, we have an activity where we ask students to map their identities as readers, to identify the many different things they read and write and the roles they play in their lives – from menus and cereal boxes to magazines and websites (Jenkins, Reilly, and Mehta, 2013). We’ve had any number of students complete the activity and come to the realization that, while schools have long classified them as not very good readers, they read all the time. Reading is a key part of their lives, but they simply don’t engage in the kinds of reading that schools value. They don’t read the right things or in the right way.

Teenagers tell me that they’ve been told that Wikipedia is bad while Google is good. When I push them on this, I find that they’re often not sure exactly what this means. But they’ve been taught to read certain platforms as trustworthy and to eschew others, with no critical apparatus to understand why. I’m saddened by the low level of computational and media literacy out there and the broad refusal to engage with these issues. It’s easier to be afraid of technology and media than to engage critically with it.

What does it mean to be literate in an environment where information isn’t just at your fingertips but flooding your senses?

Rather, we should think about literacy as involving the capacity to engage with networked publics, to share what you write, and to receive feedback from some kind of larger community. In that sense, we were trying to move literacy from the capacity to produce and consume information to the capacity to participate in some larger social system. This expanded conception of literacy brings new kinds of ethical expectations – a greater sense of accountability for the information we produce and share with others given the impact of our communication practices on the people around u

useful bridge

The more authoritative a classroom structure becomes, the less students feel that their own voice and their own choices matter, the less free they are to pursue their own passions and interests, and the less likely the curriculum is to reflect the realities of their lives beyond the schoolroom.

New media technology has the possibility to reproduce many of the traditional assumptions of learning: disembodied, behaviorist, and sequestered. Examples include drill-and-practice software and more efficient testing regimes.

particularly because a better understanding of youth requires us to question our adult norms, practices, and cultural values.  

“For which kids and communities is it a positive or negative force?”

Teens are not a homogeneous or uniform population. There’s huge diversity in what they are trying to achieve, what they really care about, and how they employ what’s available to them to get there.

I think the period when youth are this super-special category of early social media adopters might be over.

but teens aren’t sharing everything.

“You know, the more that I share, the less you ask about what’s really private.”

the ways in which participants lose control of what happens to the disclosed information once it enters into digital circulation.

Now that so many grown-ups are on Facebook and are texting, maybe the idea that young people are somehow pathologically concerned about social connection can be debunked.

Young people do not need adults snooping over their shoulders, but they do need people who can help watch their backs.

“beta reading”

interacting with adults enables them to learn a whole new set of skills, technical and otherwise, that result from intergenerational interaction.

It’s not about age, ultimately. It’s about a refusal to participate. Some adults take a passive perspective: “I don’t know what these kids are doing. I hope it’s okay. I’m not going to touch that part of their life and therefore I have no accountability for it.” Some take an aggressive stance: “I can’t use this, so you shouldn’t either.” The latter group of adults can feel deeply threatened by the unknown world, by activities and platforms that were not part of their own growing-up experience. The digital immigrant/digital native language allows adults to let themselves off the hook for making the transition the rest of society has undergone.

We’d never accept the premise that immigrants bring nothing of value with them from the old world as they enter the new.

As Genevieve Bell has noted, the natives never win. They have historically gotten enslaved, killed, or “harmonized” by powerful “immigrants” (a.k.a. colonizers).

They want to be in public, but that doesn’t mean that they always want to be public.

It is only a Band-Aid on the fear.

plenty of parents

The early amateur radio movement in the early twentieth century had strong youth involvement.

some functions of social media are still more apt to be explored by those who are outside dominant structures,

moral panic response

adults

The differences between how various populations of youth use technology are as important to understand as the differences between youth and their elders.

generational rhetoric

I feel like in different ways, we have each taken on the challenge of adding some texture to blanket proclamations about “kids these days.”

Everyone can be a maker, but not many are. The vast majority of children’s engagement with media consists of consuming media, with only a small portion devoted to creating content

we did so, we solicited questions through various social media, and we made sure to address as many of them as we could. And then, we worked through the transcripts, again and again, clarifying our concepts, refining our arguments, shuffling the pieces to insure greater clarity and accessibility