Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.5.09 | Henry Jenkins has identified a set of new literacies that children must master in addition to the traditional reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic. Given the digital world they inhabit, youth must develop and expand their skill set, Jenkins argues in “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture.”

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

Photo by: Thomas Favre-Bulle