Jenkins+Thoughts

I'm not really sure about this analysis, but I think it might be a way to talk about the challenges of "creating" a participatory culture, rather than joining one that's grown organically around a common interest or pursuit, you know what I mean??

Here's the chart I made: The top part is comments about whether the kids felt like they were in a participatory culture with the 3rd graders. The next part was whether they thought they were in a participatory culture among themselves:



Here is a narrative paragraph summarizing my thoughts about the top half of the chart:

Did the sophomores feel like they were in a participatory culture with the third graders? While the majority of the students said they enjoyed the podcasting project – it was fun and novel, different from “everyday” work in the class – I don’t think they felt like they’d really entered into something //with// the younger kids. Some students (Annie, Michelle, Sarah Sand., Jon and Lauren) said they thought it was “valuable, "fun" or "intriguing" to hear what the 3rd graders had to say. However, most students viewed the third graders’ as an audience for //their// creations rather than participants in the same project. Some students seemed to want to produce high quality segments for their audience. Jerry said having the audience of 3rd graders “inspired” him to do better work. Ellen said she gained “deeper sense of appreciation” for books written for an elementary audience. Sophia said “it was interesting to know other people would hear what we had recorded.” Others seemed to underestimate the sophistication of the 3rd graders and the literature. Katja mentioned that she “simplified” her thoughts. Nora said that because the kids were young, she “didn’t have much pressure to make a stunning podcast.” David N. said that the audience “limited his ability to project deep thinking” and thought he had to “over-simplify things to make it appeal to the 3rd graders.” David K. said the project "would have been more enjoyable" if he had had "a more mature audience" who could better understand his ideas. Lauren said “it was really fun to see the 3rd graders progress as the year went on.” I believe some of these comments reflect the fact that the kids did not “get to know each other,” but rather just listened to each other’s products. Emily said “I wished we could’ve interacted with them more.”

And here's a narrative about the bottom half: Did the sophomores feel that they were in a participatory culture with each other? Many class members wrote about conceptualizing and writing their segments with their groups. They enjoyed this collaboration, and discussed the pitfalls involved in the process. Ellen and Sarah Sand. said that it can be difficult to work with a large group because you have to incorporate everyone’s ideas. However, Anne said that working together made the product better. David N. viewed the project as a good way to collaborate with a group, as well as with the class as a whole to produce something. Jerry said the project allowed him to share ideas “in an open manner,” and Steve liked working on “creative writing” and coming up with “a brand new thing.” Free choice was a popular aspect of the project. Molly said she liked being able to pick her topic within the larger topic. Jon and David N. said the topics were “important” and timely. David K. and Fletcher wished the topics could have been less “one-sided” and more “in depth.” Many kids commented that they liked learning how to use recording software. Some planned to use it again for other projects, in school or at home on their own computers. I was surprised at how much recording their own segments in the lab increased kids’ enjoyment of the project. This changes my ideas as a teacher about media creation a bit – all the kids need to get their hands on the equipment.


 * I wrote some thoughts on each of the reasons Jenkins gives for teaching media literacy. I think this goes with findings.** Check it out:

“More often than not, those youth who have developed the most comfort with the online world are the ones who dominate classroom use of computers, pushing aside less technically skilled classmates.” On the one hand, podcasting is not a common activity in my school; so the fact that we were making podcasts in school helped kids participate. On the other hand, at first, we only used one computer (my personal laptop) to podcast, and kids from the class who already knew how to use the software handled the recording and editing. There were no opportunities for other kids to learn any skills. Part of this has to do with something else related to the Participation Gap: the equipment at my school is hard to use and fails a lot. It’s also hard to reserve lab space, especially if you haven’t planned weeks ahead of time. At the end of the year, I decided to ask the technology integrationist to help me teach the kids to use Audacity, an open-source recording software, in the media center. Each group had a microphone and edited their own segments. I was surprised to find at the end of the year, that this experience was extremely powerful and memorable for the students. Even though it was complicated to configure the microphones and even though some groups lost their work and had to re-record, kids almost all said they loved learning how to do this and many planned to use similar recording software for other projects in the future because of this experience. This tells me that taking the time to actually teach students how to use tools is important. Although they are so-called digital natives, very few of them knew before our Audacity experience how to use podcasting software. “Although youth are becoming more adept at using media as resources (for creative expression, research, social life, etc.), they are often limited in their ability to examine media themselves” (14). You have to teach kids to recognize the ways media “structure[s] our perception of reality” (14). Developing “a vocabulary of critique” (15). Kids didn’t think about the ways their messages would be interpreted by their audiences. Community college story, anti-censorship hoedown, negative narratives of “third world countries” “Yet they lacked a vocabulary to critique how the game itself constructed history, and they had difficulty imagining how other games might represent the same historical processes in different terms” (15)
 * Teaching Problems**:
 * Participation Gap**:
 * The Transparency Problem:**
 * Important quotes from this section:**
 * My narrative:**

When the Harry Potter group made their final segment in April, they took listeners on a time-traveling tour of education. The first stop was ancient Rome. Here they spoke out against inequality in education by pointing out that education was for the upper class and “almost exclusively boys.” “That’s outrageous!” said Sarah as Hermione. Then Ron and Hermione traveled to the “Middle East and North African region.” Anne told Meghana that according to a ten year-old World Bank report “only one in ten women in the Middle East and North African region can read and write.” Meghana replied, “Wow, really? But did you know that the literacy rate has been improving over the last few years?” I think she’s attempting to use a language of hope to recognize the progress of countries in this area, perhaps the same countries she referenced in her Pass the Book segment from the previous podcast, which she labeled “3rd world.” I think in these first two parts of the podcast, the kids were attempting to disrupt the commonplace by condemning the fact that education in the past has been only for the rich and male. I also think they attempt to focus and comment on social and political systems. The problems in the segment really appear in the final section on the United States. First Anna (?) echoed the message from the section on Rome: Although it’s good that kids have access to K-12 education, It’s harder today to go to college because there’s less government money available, and that makes it so poor kids don’t have as many options as rich kids. Rebecca says, “Those lower class students who do get to go to college often must attend inexpensive colleges, often community colleges. They are not very good quality, and they often don’t finish to get a degree… Community colleges educate most of the students who receive Pell Grants. Less than 40% of low-income students earn a degree within six years…. Really only the top 10% of colleges in America are very good.” The group of students in the class all expect to go to “good” schools. 85% of the students at our school go on to a 4-year college, and these students had self-selected an “advanced” track in Enriched English 10. The tone of this segment reflects an assumption that “good” kids go to “good” schools. I don’t think this group considered how this segment would position their listeners. Rebecca’s segment reflects her perspective, but not an awareness of multiple perspectives on college access and quality. This part of the project challenged us (KC and Lee) in terms of Jenkins’ Transparency Problem and Ethics Challenge. Lee could see how listening to the podcast would position the third graders and didn’t want to play the segment for them. We talked, and I agreed to re-mix the final podcast to exclude this segment. In addition, I decided to try to help the 10th graders understand the missing and hidden narratives in their segments. I had them listen to this and two other segments and respond from three different perspectives. They listened to the Harry Potter segment and wrote reactions as a die-hard Harry Potter fan, a Middle-Eastern woman, and a kid whose parent had attended community college. After we did this activity, I told the kids what had happened with the Harry Potter segment, and they understood why their segment could not be played for the third graders. Here are some of the reactions they wrote from the perspective of a kid whose parents went to community college: · Lost pride in parents · Kind of embarrassed · Defensive · Probably feeling bad/awkward. Not very proud of their parents? · Not proud of their parents · It isn’t fair that we can’t all have the same opportunities · Community college is still cheap! · That’s why my parents went to community college – because of the price. · Community college isn’t that bad · I’m offended · Hey, my parents are smart! Back off! · My parents are still smart. Any college is good. Humph! · Community college rocks! How would you know if it’s such good quality? Have you attended one? And my parents turned out fine.

In this case, it wasn't enough to participate. They didn't have the practice critiquing their work to think about the effect it might have on the audience. Perhaps decoding media messages aimed at them and unearthing the hidden narratives might have been a good activity here - they may have been able to edit their thinking before making this segment.

I see some areas for growth here. One part of it is related to my teaching practices. I wanted podcasting to be an unstructured, fun activity with many opportunities for choice. However, I didn’t approve of some of the choices they made. This put me in a difficult position (and I think it also put Lee in a difficult position because she had to talk to me about how some of the segments wouldn’t work for her kids). I also wanted podcasting to be free from some of the normal constraints of high school life, mainly earning points and grades. I wanted kids to produce segments for an authentic audience, to do it within class times, and not worry about “what they got” from me on the project. So, this was how we did it, but when I got to the final edit, and I was unhappy with some segments for whatever reason (the segment was confusing, or I didn’t agree with the message), it was kind of hard for me to go back to the kids and ask them to re-do it. I felt glad that I had been experimenting all year with Lee’s teacher-as-editor metaphor because I used that terminology (this message doesn’t fit the mission of our class press) to explain why I wanted something fixed or re-done. Another ethics issue that I didn’t deal with was intellectual property and new ways of citing in participatory culture. In media-creating communities, many products are mash-ups and appropriations of other existing texts. Our podcasts definitely borrowed from many different sources, including Harry Potter and Harry Potter Puppet Pals. One time, the group mentioned the author of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling. All groups also conducted research on their podcast topics, but no groups cited any sources in their segments. Probably I should have taught them ways to do this without interrupting their narratives.
 * The Ethics Challenge:** “One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others… for the present moment, asking and working through questions of ethical practices may be more valuable than the answers produced because the process will help everyone to recognize and articulate the assumptions that guide their behavior” (17).

“The new media literacies should be seen as social skills, as ways of interacting within a larger community, and not simply an individualized skill to be used for personal expression” (20)
 * What to Teach?**

“[Y]outh need skills for working within social networks, for pooling knowledge within a collective intelligence, for negotiating across cultural differences that shape the governing assumptions in different communities, and for reconciling conflicting bits of data to form a coherent picture of the world around them” (20). “We must integrate these new knowledge cultures into our schools, not only through group work but also through long-distance collaborations across different learning communities” (21) “Rather, we should view its introduction as a paradigm shift, one that, like multiculturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject” (57).