The Participatory Culture in the Age Digitization

Participatory Culture
Key qualities that define participatory cultures are,
1. there are low barriers to entry
2. individuals feel connected to their work and to other people in the community,
3. more experienced members in the community informally mentor newcomers.

Practicies in Participatory Culture

A. Literature
Remixing, Restorying, and Reimagining

Remixing is combining, and manipulating cultural artifacts of any kind

in order to make new creative blends.

Ex: fan art that depicts famous characters in new settings,

or memes that use witty captions to give iconic images new meaning?

In each case, people are creating something new by starting with something old, and
giving it a twist.

Restorying is the practice of reimagining an existing story in a new context in order to

give it a new meaning.

This practice of restorying can have similar effects when changing other aspects of
stories.
Fan fiction communities, for example, frequently re-tell popular stories
by recontextualizing key details.
The lead character might be female instead of male, for example. Or, gay instead of
straight.

Reimagining the familiar from a new perspective allows creators to assert their identity,
and share their way of seeing the world.

It's a powerful way to remix popular narratives that may not otherwise
recognize them.

The ethos of remixing is making its way to other spaces in schools as well.
Remixing, restorying, and reimagining provide the tools
to see through new filters, and apply new realities and norms
in the classroom.

B. Digital Writing

Value of Digital Writing to students

1. Students would feel connected and valued for their participation through writing.
2. Students with support and mentor each other.
3. There would be a virtuous cycle of participatory participation, creating more
participation and collaboration, making a richer, and more inclusive environment
for everyone.

The challenge here is to better understand youth writing practices,

and participatory cultures as they already exist.
And then to see how we, as educators, can preserve these best qualities
to help our students grow.

The shift to digital writing isn't just about the tools that students use,
it's a shift in how students relate to writing.

Let's take an example to contrast traditional writing, and digital writing.

A culminating assessment in a traditional paradigm
might ask students to sit silently in class for 30 minutes,
and write about a topic that the teacher assigned.
Students would write an essay on a sheet of paper, hand it to the teacher,
and a few days later receive feedback.
That same culminating moment could be completely reimagined
in a digital context.
The simple fact that students aren't writing their essays once, and locking
them into a single piece of paper, completely changes what they can do with it.
They can continually revise, and improve their work
by writing in a word processor.
They can collaborate on their work in real time
with other writers who aren't in the classroom with them.
And, they can share their work with authentic audiences,
and get feedback right away.

From the perspective of digital writing, the limitations of traditional writing begins to
seem superficial.

Why sit and write silently on a pre-determined topic?

Why be judged on a draft that you could compose only during class time?
Why write for an audience of just one person, that is the teacher,
and wait days before getting feedback?

Embracing the changes of digital writing has far reaching effects in a world when
students can compose a tweet on their own time, broadcast it to friends, or even
celebrities, and get a response right away.

Its the entire model of traditional writing that becomes antiquated,

not just the tools.
In the end, not all writing needs to be digital, and not all student work needs to be
published online.
But as the context of our students daily lives continues to change, we need to reconsider
the way we teach, and think about authorship, and writing to keep up.

Literacy

Writing online is changing how people think of writing,

and how they think of themselves as writers.
It makes sense then that a similar shift is happening with reading.
Many people spend hours, and hours every day scrolling through online
feeds, messaging with one another, reading articles and blogs.
On one hand the time we spend reading seems
to be increasing thanks to technology.
On the other hand the kind of reading we're doing
seems to be moving in a different direction.
Long articles are sometimes prefixed with TLDR, Too Long Didn't Read.
How, then, can we understand these changes?
To start, I asked you to resist the impulse
to judge these changes as either good or bad.
For now, let's just look at the changes, as well neutral differences.
Reading offline facilitates a particular kind of reading activity.
People usually read printed books in a long form manner.
Since the words don't hyperlink to other documents, reading is linear.
And so, it requires sustained focus.
This is what I call, learning in a linear knowledge space.
The reader's relationship to the writer is different online too.
Publishers spend resources to edit an author's words,
print them in black and white, and distribute them to readers.
That investment is differed from how easy
it is for anyone to publish their ideas online, and make updates
after the fact.
In a way, authorship and authority are different online versus offline,
and that affects how most people read.
This lends itself to shared, and collaborative authorship.
And finally, the sensory aspects of reading online
are different from reading on a screen.
Some research has shown that the simple fact
that printed materials engaged our sense of touch,
can help our brains engage with it, and remember it in a different way.

From the other perspective, reading online is multimodal It frequently involves images,
videos, even interactive elements in addition to just text.
This kind of reading has its own depth, and significance.
The simple existence of hyperlinks in online reading
changes how readers relate to the material they read.
When do they follow the links?
When do they not?

Reading online isn't always linear in the same way offline

reading tends to be. instead, it requires an ability to navigate between texts,
and ideas in addition to just understanding the words.
This is what I call, learning in a random knowledge space.

And finally, the way people read online is shaped by a broad range of factors
that we don't typically consider when we think of reading as an offline experience, as an
individual activity.

For example, people read for different purposes; to find information,

to entertain themselves, or to connect with others.
And people employ different strategies depending on their purposes.
Imagine, for example, if our reading habits could not
adapt to the sheer volume of content that's available for us to read online.
Our ability to skim, to jump between multiple text,
to assess a documents quality, to assess articles from different points of view,
these are valuable habits to develop as we spend more and more of our time
reading online.
So in the end, we can return to these two different kinds of reading,
and try to evaluate them.
Is reading offline better, or worse than reading online?
Is the sustained focus of the former better than the multimodal skimming
of the ladder?
The answer is, well both.
Our students live in a world that rewards readers who have the ability to navigate both
off, and online environments.
And so we, as educators, can help prepare them accordingly. That's the challenge of
developing literacy.

Points to Ponder for the Digital Educators

Let's focus on seeing the ways that reading, writing, and remixing online
are changing and potentially having an impact on our classrooms.

let's consider what might change and what should not

in the way that students of tomorrow will experience school
in a digital and connected future.

Can you imagine teaching a class that expects students to use a search
engine any time they have a question?
How would you approach worksheets and practice exercises?
How would you approach projects and tests?
Can you also imagine teaching a class that allowed students to connect with experts
around the world?
How would you change your role in the classroom?
How would that affect how students think about what they do in your class?

What about teaching a class that invited students to publish their work for online
audiences?
How could they connect with peers around the world. And how might those connections
change the way we teach things like literature, history, or world languages?

It's up to us as educators if we want to imagine and pursue

these new possibilities or if we want to exchange pencils for computers
and try to keep everything else the same.
If we do take the step to embrace digital literacy,
we won't be able to stop short at giving students connected devices
and not changing our practices.
We must re-examine our goals in today's shifting context, reconsider our curricula, and
retool our own skill sets in order to help students navigate today's digital environment.

For all that may change thanks to technology, there are also things that shouldn't change.
Focusing on pedagogy, for example, and nurturing healthy relationships
with students will always be critically important to our work as educators.
And no app or technology will ever change that.

Interview with Amy Stornaiuolo from the Reading, Writing and Literacy program
at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

First thing I wanted to know was how have young people's practices
around online communication and interaction changed
over the past decade?
I'd say that anyone who's living in the culture immediately
can recognize some of these points, but what they don't always understand
is how that impacts the education of adolescents and young people
in particular.

And I would say that three big areas are the most important to consider.

1. the way social networks now function.

So even if you think about 10 years ago, we
weren't connected socially in some of the same ways we are now.
We're always on.
So this idea that we're always connected and always
in communication with other people has really shifted how people learn now.

2. the way that young people in particular

are connecting in affinity spaces (online community where they can really
talk to one another about whatever their interests are)

3. the third big thing really is around remix. People are really using each other's
stuff to create content now. How does/will affect education? How will affect
educators?

So how do you see this affecting educators?

Are they less engaged with their students
when there's more peer to peer learning going on?
What do you think this is changing in the classrooms
since we're so connected?
Well I think one of the biggest things is
that classrooms are not as connected.
So when students aren't engaged in the peer
to peer learning that they're really used to in other ways,
it really creates some difficulties in the classroom,
especially for teachers who are trying to navigate that peer culture
and peer learning.
I think one of the other big things that is really
impacting the way educators approach classrooms and teaching
adolescents in particular now is around issues around plagiarism
and using other materials.
How can you remix, but do it in a way where you can still cite other people
and engage with those in ethical ways.
Change the librarians job, right.
And I know you've done a lot of global work
and thought about this from a global perspective.
Could you give us an example of something
you've done globally in this space, and how
is that same or different than what you're seeing here in the US?
So one of the projects that I just began was a social network for teenagers
to, what we call Write 4 Change and that's
the name of the network, where they're really using their writing
to create some kind of difference either in their local communities
or for themselves or more broadly in the world.
And I would say one of the biggest things that we found in
that space is that there are major cultural differences that we don't
always take into account in the ways we read and write online
that they've really had to grapple with.
So teachers have had to figure out how to support students
in that work and students have had to try and figure out
how they can talk to someone when they don't always
share a language or a vocabulary or even a way of thinking about the world.
And so what are ways that as educators, we can support them in that, I think,
is one of the big issues facing us.
So what does this mean to read digitally and how
is this different from the offline or paper-based reading?
So one of the biggest things that we think about now about reading
is how much we're reading.
How much of our online engagement and participation we do through text.
We also do it through image and other kind of integrated ways,
but we really read a lot of text.
So whether that's getting our news stories online or reading books
on our Kindle, we're reading an awful lot of digital text now.
And some of the concerns that people have come up with
are about deep reading.
So are we just flitting around from app to app or story to story,
or are we doing the same kind of deep intense reading.
And that's a big debate over what that's doing to our brains
and how that's affecting our interactions with one another.
And do you think-- that's a really interesting issue for me
because I have the same thing when I think about writing online.
Are we changing what we think is writing and are we changing what
we think is the necessary work to read.
I think students need to do deep reading, but at what point
will our culture or the what's needed change in the online text
will become sort of bifurcated on what you're trying to get out of the text?
I think that's the biggest issue right now, is what's
the purpose for which we're reading.
We don't need to read a news story in which we're just
trying to get the headlines of the day in the same way
that we might read a Shakespeare text, for example.
And we might not need to read a Shakespeare text anymore either.
And so we need to think about what are the purposes, what kinds of texts
are people reading.
I think one of the biggest issues is representation
in reading and writing, like in the text that we engage with.
Who's being represented.
And I think one of the things about the online space
is that we have access to new kinds of texts and ways that we never imagined.
So people are writing blogs and stories.
Wattpad is a project that I'm working on right now,
which is a social network for young writers
who are writing their own stories.
When they can't find stories that reflect their own lives,
they're writing them now.
So I think that's an exciting way, but the purposes
for which we're writing and reading are shifting,
and we need to take that into account.
It's pretty dramatic because when you think about the young people growing up
in this generation and they'll become the professors of RWL in the future,
will their expectations not necessarily change for the worse or for the better,
but there will be a change--
a paradigm shift.
Absolutely, I think that's one of the biggest areas of research right now,
is how young people are even thinking about the world and some
of the ways that we as, at least speaking for myself,
growing up in an analog age and kind of shifting over
to the digital in more of my adult years,
I think we're thinking about things pretty differently.
Yeah, you'll remember that we did talk about this in one of the other lessons.
We talked about the difference between linear knowledge
spaces and random knowledge spaces.
What do you Think
Can you talk a little bit more about what the difference is between those?
Well, in the research that I've been doing, I thought of linear knowledge
spaces is what you said.
We were sort of straight.
We got a book.
We read it from page 1 to page 300.
And at the end, we gave a test.
And therefore, you learned that information.
But now that we're in random knowledge spaces and we're chatting online
and we're reading the text just in time and we're
looking for the answers in a sort of random way
because that's the way the internet works,
it's changing the way our brain thinks about knowledge.
Absolutely, I think that's probably one of the largest shifts
that educators have to address now, which
is that people move from context to context, knowledge arena to knowledge
arena, information piece to other information pieces,
and how you knit that together, it's going to look really different now
than perhaps 20, 30 years ago.
So let's go in another direction because as we do all this online,
we're also changing the way we think about ethics and moral
and what's right to do and why, and how do we
know what's going to happen in the future.
What do you think about that?
I think actually that's one of the biggest areas for growth,
and I think that's one of the areas that teachers need to think
very carefully about supporting.
I think any kid in an online space has had
to confront these issues around what constitutes bullying, what's
an appropriate thing to say to somebody else, what
happens when you are anonymous versus when people know who you are.
And I think that we've seen in research that when
there's an educational framework helping students
to think through these scenarios, that they often fare much better.
So for example, not a digital ethics program
that might be telling kids what to do and not do, but rather helping students
think through the ramifications of different scenarios
that they might come up with on a daily basis in thinking
about how to answer somebody's profile, how
to leave a comment, what kinds of comments are appropriate
and in what context.
But from a teacher's perspective, would you
think that it's a good thing to have these blockers
and these internet safety nets, or do you think the student ought
to take responsibility for that?
I mean I do think that's one of the purposes
of education, is to help students navigate these spaces
with an ethical framework in mind.
So how can they learn really effective strategies
for how to be an ethical online communicator.
I think that's our job.
Yes, I agree with that.
So what are some ways in which teachers can engage in online collaboration
to help their practice and in a globalized networked
in a globalized world?
There are so many tools now to do that work.
There's all sorts of free and easy video communication
if you want to have a one on one exchange with another teacher.
There's a lot of online networks and communities--
so Write 4 Change is one I described earlier--
about teachers coming together to put their kids in communication.
I think one of the challenges of that though is finding
other people who are interested.
There's all sorts of logistical challenges, which
is it might be your night and my day, so how could
we do that in ways that take those logistics into account.
I think one of the biggest challenges though
is how to facilitate conversations.
Some of these conversations, I've called them challenging conversations
in some research that I've done, which is around issues of sex, for example.
So one group, they're really open about talking about gender expression
and homosexuality, whereas a different group, that might not
be an appropriate topic of conversation in the school and the teacher
has to negotiate those conversations.
So how do you have those challenging conversations as teachers
about how to create a space for those dialogues across cultures.
My concern in that space is how do teachers
find the time to engage in these collaborative communities.
We know they want that because teaching is a very isolated profession,
but how do they find the time to make time to be on these communities?
So I think teacher to teacher communities often happen
in teachers' off times where they find other networks of teachers.
But I think in terms of connecting your classes together,
a lot of the times when you can fit it within your curriculum, that's
when it's often easiest, when it's connected to a curricular goal.
So finding places where you're both working on similar topics,
so in English or history classes, those are often the easiest spaces to do it.
So for example, if you're looking at an inquiry question
around how do people understand violence in a larger space and historically,
that could be an interesting question to ask both at the current moment
and across time.
I hope all of you are thinking about what kind of communities
you're connected with and how do you find the time to be
good members of those communities.
And finally, I'd like to ask how can teachers
attend the young people's digital practices,
especially their imaginative play with new tools and audiences
as they restory themselves, and why is this important?
What does this do as they put their profiles up online?
So I think one of the biggest questions to ask ourselves is around
how we are supporting that kind of imaginative, creative work
that students are often doing in offline spaces in schools.
I've used the term restorying with one of my colleagues
Dr. Thomas here, as we've been thinking about how
do young people write themselves into stories that they've not
been a part of before.
And how can they restory those narratives
to include their own perspectives.
And I'm thinking here about LGBTQ youth who
might not be represented in mainstream narratives in the same way
that other youth are.
Or in particular, we were looking at characters of color
in mainstream novels and books.
And so what happens when kids take that into their own hands
is they create their own fan fiction and their own kinds of characters
that look like themselves or people that they wish were in the books.
So that idea of the restorying is really a way
of bringing that imaginative play into the official classroom space
and giving students realm to use digital tools to retell those stories
and get them out to a lot of other people.
So we're talking about fan communities.
Do you think that students are representing themselves
well on their profiles of what they're really like
or are they representing their fantasies of what they'd like to be?
There's a lot of impression management in online profiles,
so it's often a very curated sense of the self
where one puts on images and different kinds of postings and texts
that paint you in a pretty good light.
And I think that's particularly true for teens who are really trying
to maintain an image among other teens.
So I think that's something that they definitely are navigating.
Well we've asked you all out there in the community of this class
to also look at your own profiles and see whether it represents you or not,
and to do a Google search.
I am sure you've asked your students to do a Google search
and see what comes up about themselves.
What do you think about that?

As we're thinking about issues of representation,

I think it's a really important arena to consider,
is how do these algorithms construct and create
images and representations of ourselves that we may or may not be aware of.
So I think it's an excellent idea to do some critical analysis of that,
both see how you're representing yourself in these different publics
that you engage in and how other people are representing you.
You might be surprised at what comes up.
I think I would be, but I think also the other thing that's happening
is we look at the impact of what you're putting online
and what you're searching online, it also then pushes information to you.
So in a sense, the internet is creating what
they think your image is based on what you're doing online.
So, for example, if you're looking for dresses and you--
particular brand, then the next day, all the ads
are going to show up with those dresses or that brand.
What do you think about that in terms for-- particularly
for young people that are trying to make decisions?
What's really interesting to me when I've done research
recently asking young people about, for example,
Amazon acquiring the Goodreads community when
I was studying the Goodreads community.
And a lot of them were absolutely unconcerned about that,
and said that's just the way the world is now.
And in fact, it was very transparent to them who was advertising to them, why,
and in what way.
So I think that's actually part of the ethical framework
that we can help build, which is a critical media lens and start
parsing what are these algorithms, how do they shape what information we get
and what information about us is shared with others,
and start thinking about their own data and how
that is existing in the world on its own and circulating really.
Well that's a good place to stop because we
want to know how we exist in the world.
I think you all should take some time to check out Amy's work on the internet,
see what her profile looks like, and what she's doing research about.
I think you'll find it quite relevant to some of the things
we've been teaching in this course.
Thank you.
Thank you, Bobbi.