Participatory Culture

This weeks reading was Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. "According to Pew Internet and American Life project, more than 1/2  of all teens have created media content. 1/3rd of teens who have used the internet have shared content they produced."
Emphasized in the reading is a participatory culture. By these teens being involved in the culture, they are in a culture with "relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations."

"New literacies" are the way students will be learning and creating. Also the way we will be teaching. There are multiple skills involved with the literacies.
Play- capacity to experiment with on'es surroundings as a form of problem solving
Performance- adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation- interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world process
Appropriation- meaningfully sample the remix media content
Multitasking- scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
Distributed Cognition- interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence- pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment- evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation- follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking- search for synthesize and disseminate information
Negotiation- travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms

             I found myself returning to the concept of play and performance. Though the reading did not specify art related instances, I believe through my experience play and performance and wonderful skills to use to engage students in the subject matter.
             If I look back at my little cousins, they are playing video games, watching movies and television shows that educate them with math, art, and language. In the early stages of learning, children are geared to understand a highly stimulated type of education. I find myself losing interest in an average history book compared to a video with music in the background, multiple images on the screen, constantly changing. I was the same as a child as I am now, but I believe with consistent techniques students would grasp more then they do now.
              If my little cousins begin their education with videos and play to learn, they should be able to grow with more challenging play. As teachers, by bringing play and performance into the classroom we are engaging our students, allowing them to experience rather than lecturing hoping they listen.
            Through Theory and Practice we have learned multiple games to play with students as "warm-ups." This is something I wish I had done when I was a student. I remember warm ups being a power point presentation of a couple slides of an artists work rather than artist trading cards.

            An example I am particularly fond of is the game Medieval Space. This is when students are asked to create online profiles for various historical figures studied int heir classes. Since students are already extremely interested in social networks, why not incorporate that into a lesson? Create a Facebook for Picasso. This will allow for students to research artists and become creative with stories and images. This is definitely something I would be interested in doing with a middle school or high school level class.