Week 5 Reading Responses

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The focus of this article is on how educators must prepare children with the skills and experiences needed to succeed in future society. The concern is also that students should be aware of how media shapes their understanding of the world, their power to shape that media, and the responsibility that power bears.
The online world has shifted to one of participatory knowledge and we as educators must also shift our teaching to reflect that collective world.

Collective Intelligence has been defined as "the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with
others towards a common goal." This has led towards a teamwork mentality in the modern workplace. However, schools have not kept up with this trend; educators still primarily promote individual problem solving versus group as evidenced by the continued policy of individual grades. The author of this article suggests that schools need to teach students not only how to solve problems on their own but also when to work within a community to solve the problem. The suggestion was made that partnerships with experts as well as participants in multiple locations could allow students to work on problems collectively that might be too large or too complex to work on individually. I agree that this expansion of resources would be beneficial to our students in that it would stretch the classroom beyond the borders of the classroom. It would also give the students the real-world skills needed to work in a social community of knowledge.

Judgment was defined in this article as the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information
sources. The author suggests that students must be taught how to evaluate the reliability of information gathered from traditional expert sources as well as information gleaned from the collective intelligence. They must be taught that collective knowledge is an ever-changing process not a static product. The timing of this article for me as a teacher is fortunate. As a I begin instructing my sixth graders on the pluses and minuses of online research, we discuss the possibility of finding misinformation. I now realize that we must also teach students how to evaluate not only the content but also the source. Is it biased? Who is presenting the info and to whom? Although we as teachers have taught bias in such media as newspapers and TV news, we must also teach the subtleties of the online information world. Misinformation and bias are not always so obvious on the internet.

Media literacy should not be limited to one arena. Schools, after-school clubs, and parents should all be involved in preparing our children for participating fully in the modern world both online and offline.