Archive for June, 2007
A paper co-authored by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, considers the proliferation of online content creation and networking activities by teens in the USA.
Jenkins’ paper explains that most of these teens are involved in participatory cultures:
“A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). Forms of participatory culture include:
- Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).
- Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).
- Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).
- Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).
A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.
The new skills include:
- Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving.
- Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.
- Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.
- Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.
- Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
- Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.
- Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.
- Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.
- Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.
- Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.”
“A central goal of this report is to shift the focus of the conversation about the digital divide from questions of technological access to those of opportunities to participate and to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement. Schools as institutions have been slow to react to the emergence of this new participatory culture; the greatest opportunity for change is currently found in afterschool programs and informal learning communities. Fostering such social skills and cultural competencies requires a more systemic approach to media education in the United States.”
Question: is this relevant to youth and educators in developing countries? Can the same appropriation of technology be expected of youth in South Africa? Is there an equal need for cultural competencies and social skills needed there? And can these activities, which are clearly engaging for young people, be used as a vehicle for other forms of learning?
At Molotech we are very interested in exploring these questions. We believe that the answer to most will be “yes.”
June 12th, 2007
The following statistics were revealed by a 2005 study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project titled Teen Content Creators and Consumers:
- 57% of online teens (ages 12-17) in the USA create content for the internet. That amounts to half of all teens, or about 12 million youth.
- 33% of online teens share their own creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos.
- In the ages 15-17 (older teens), 25% of online girls keep a blog, compared with 15% of online boys.
In 2007, Pew Internet & American Life Project published the results of a national survey titled Social Networking Websites and Teens, as follows:
- More than half (55%) of all of online American youths ages 12-17 use an online social networking sites.
- Older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites. For girls, social networking sites are places to reinforce pre-existing friendships, while for the boys who use the sites, the networks provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends.
- The most popular site is MySpace.com (85% of teens surveyed used it).
- In focus groups, teens explained that a social network profile is more engaging if it changes frequently. Thus, those who are most interested in maintaining an appealing profile must make frequent visits to social network sites, both to edit one’s profile and to view the profiles of others. Almost half of social network-using teens visit the sites either once a day (26%) or several times a day (22%).
The question for those in developing countries is simply: with limited access will the same high adoption rate of online social networking sites occur? If a South African teenager can only change her profile once a week, is the online dynamic between her and her friends still engaging?
Two facts begin to point to an answer: 1) in the second Pew study, the statistics for teen activities remained much the same across racial and economic lines, and 2) in South Africa the massive popularity of MXit shows that teens do connect with each other via technology. A solution that combines the pervasiveness and affordability of MXit, with the persistence of an online profile page, is surely something worth exploring.
Of course the overriding question is: what does this mean for education? Can these online activities be harnessed for educational value?
June 12th, 2007
One of the most fundamental issues for developing country users is no/limited access to the internet.
“Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.
- LocalServer: Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
- Database: Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
- WorkerPool: Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously”
This Beta-status extension works on PC, Mac and Linux. It might be simple, but some of the best applications of technology are low-tech.
June 13th, 2007
Last week Steve Vosloo assisted in the inaugural 3-day Digital Storytelling Workshop for Educators at the Center for Digital Storytelling, Berkeley, CA. Eleven participants, mostly teachers from across the USA, created their own short digital stories — following the classic digital storytelling process, including participation in a story circle, writing and recording scripts and the production of the stories using digital technology — and also shared experiences and ideas of incorporating digital storytelling into classrooms.
In the USA, digital storytelling can be fitted into curricula standards for writing/language arts, communications and social studies. A challenge is that digital storytelling actually provides learning opportunities that are not accounted for or measured within the standard curricula content and tests.
One of the participating teachers, Ben Grey, has had his 5th-grade students create and publish podcasts about school and community-related content in a project called News from the Greypevine.
June 23rd, 2007
Steve Vosloo has volunteered as a participant in a survey by the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA. The short study explores the space between the influences and decisions related to buying something (off line or online) and the actual purchase itself, as well as the mediating role that mobile devices play therein. Study participants will be taking photos of products from within shops and immediately recording the emotions around a purchase via their phones and the web.
June 23rd, 2007
According to a press release from Nokia, the company “and Vodafone have launched a new website designed to help share ideas on how to use mobile communications for social and environmental benefits. The site, www.shareideas.org, was created in direct response to NGO calls for better tools and information to help them use mobile services more effectively in their work.”
The site is based on a wiki platform and allows users to submit case studies, which are grouped into six key areas - civic engagement, economic empowerment, education, environment, health and safety, and humanitarian relief projects.
June 24th, 2007
The Intel® Learn Program is a global education initiative to teach children the 21st century skills needed to work in a knowledge economy: technological literacy, critical thinking and collaboration. The program is a hands-on, interactive curriculum comprised of two 30-hour units entitled Technology and Community and Technology at Work. Using a project-based approach, the curriculum’s activities and projects demonstrate to learners how technology can contribute to and help improve their communities.
Has it been successful in teaching the desired skills? According to a Review of Evaluation Findings for the Intel Learn Program published in 2006 by SRI International, the answer is yes. The two-year evaluation focused on eight countries where Intel Learn is offered to a total of 192,691 learners, mostly in informal educational settings. In general, children who participate in Intel Learn make gains in the three primary program goal areas. Key findings are as follows:
- Across ages, genders, and regions, learners show high levels of engagement in program activities and motivation to attend. 97% of participant learners complete the program.
- Improvements in technological literacy: program instructors overwhelmingly report that learners in the program improve their technical skills (graphics, word processing, spreadsheets and multimedia are measured). Further, local evaluators who worked with SRI International documented that in Egypt children are teaching the technology skills they have learned through the program to parents and siblings.
- Critical thinking: a majority of educators observed positive change in learners’ critical-thinking and problem-solving abilities by the end of the course.
- Collaboration: students in all countries learn to work effectively as members of a group, relying on each other to gain new technical skills and solve technical problems, to develop their ideas for projects and activities, and to review and revise their work. Students in the program come to see their peers as key resources for learning.
- It’s not only learners that benefit from the program: teachers generally find that the program lets them rethink their role to place less emphasis on dispensing information and more emphasis on promoting students’ active exploration, problem solving, and creativity. One classroom teacher noted the new insights and capabilities she gained from the program, saying, “Even though I was teaching for the last 2 years, it is now that I understand how to facilitate [student learning].”
References in the report that are of particular interest:
June 27th, 2007
This week John Kuner will present a paper he co-authored with Steve Vosloo at the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies at Michigan State University. The paper Mobile Storytelling and Video Sharing for Inter-Cultural Communication: How Personal Expression Leads to Job Skill will be presented during one of the conference workshops.
June 27th, 2007
