I work with Tim Greig most Tuesdays and Thursday. Through his MLIS course he has come up with some quite interesting reading. Last week he has gave me a copy of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century by Henry James and others.
The readers digest summary is found in six blog posts in Henry’s blog.
www.henryjenkins.org/2006/10/confronting_the_challenges_of.html
Henry James is a prolific blogger in the field of gaming and media.
Derek Wemnoth has blogged about this, but I cannot actually fnd the post on his blog at the moment.
Why this came up was thinkng about more learner centered courses. My presenting question is this: “What skills do we need to be part of a participatory type course where most of the learning is supposed to be around a personal learning trajectory?”
His definition of Participatory Culture
For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one:- With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
- With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
- With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
- Where members believe that their contributions matter
- Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
I think in our most particpant centred courses w come across evey one of these bullet points as challenges. It’s partly a mindset issue. Technology at the stage we are at at the moment often is a barrier (in what it doesn’t do or does poorly, or in it’s ease of use or otherwise, or it’s inflexibility . . .). And so is the problem of constraints in a formal bounded taught course. And the Assessment issue. Just for starters.
The main course I have in mind is TT701: teaching meets technology. This is a level seven course, and aspires to provide opportunity for a personal learning pathway. We’ve just finished for the second time. Now we are wondering how we can improve and what we can learn