Learning by Doing, Participating, and Producing
10.5.09 | A New Style of Learning Emerges
Henry Jenkins, professor and director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, calls this a “participatory culture” in counterpoint to a spectator culture of passive television or movie watching or other pre-internet forms of media. Back in the 1980s while writing his book, Textual Poachers, Jenkins was casting about for a term that conveyed the difference between a community of fans and spectator “couch potatoes.”
To him, the fans had a very different relationship to media. They were appropriating and remixing content and they were socially engaged in conversation around the media that they consumed. This relationship has only intensified with online communities and social networking.
Although participatory culture has a long history, from young people creating newspapers on toy printing presses in the 1850s to tinkering with ham radios in the 1950s, it is the scale of this interactivity today that is different, and important.
Youth today have a much larger and open-ended public, Jenkins says, and an audience that will respond to creations in a way that would have taken months in the era of the toy printing press. This larger and more immediate participatory culture creates a different level of responsibility for what one produces.
“Teachers across the country are saying kids are more motivated to write if they’re writing for a potentially larger reading public than simply writing for the teacher,” says Jenkins. When the critique and ideas come from far and wide, “that level of response is very different from a teacher putting a letter grade on a paper and saying good job.”
The classroom, he says, is no longer an isolated unit. “It becomes a nodal point in a much larger network of learning.”
Learning in this participatory culture becomes less about consuming facts and figures handed down from an expert and more about what happens through doing, participating, and producing.
It is, says Connie Yowell, director of education at the MacArthur Foundation, “about process of engagement, and learning simply happens along the way.”
HASTAC Winners
The 2009 winners of the HASTAC competition all foster that collaborative and participatory culture of learning, and they represent the most innovative thinking and freshest ideas tapping digital media’s ability to help people learn.
The 19 winners of this year’s competition are designing new social networks; using $12 laptops to help indigenous children in Chiapas share media creations; and converting mobile phones so children can conduct digital wildlife spotting, among others.
Watch the video to get a sense of how the winners are advancing learning.
These innovations will engage youth, excite them about learning, and cultivate the new literacies they will need to become full citizens in this “always on” participatory culture.
Playing with Identity
One skill that young people must master in this new participatory culture is the ability to create and manage identities in meaningful ways. As Mimi Ito said at the outset of the HASTAC awards, “Web 2.0 tools allow teens to do what they have always done: experiment with identity.” Youth, she says, have a voice online, including the voice of an “expert,” and they are empowered because of it.
Spotlight reporter Cindy Richards shows in the article below how this ability to create new identities with digital media can be liberating and empowering for many youth—in this case even breaking down staunch barriers of caste in India.
“It’s time we have a new understanding of what learning looks like,” says Yowell. “It’s time we create a new vision of how to engage young people in learning.”
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