Participatory Culture--The New Literacy

These were very interesting readings which are extremely applicable to the way students are learning with new technology.

1. Features of participatory culture that were evident in the the Networked Student Video were mostly, well, all of the them. I was extremely impressed with the initiative of the student and his curiosity to learn the way he did. With the layout of his class there was no printed textbook, and it was mostly online. The student learns to use judgment in finding scholarly and dependable resources with good content. He also uses negotiation, especially when he goes so far as to contact the author of a work he liked and collaborated to have a skype interview with the author for his class. He was also collaborative with his use of social bookmarking, where he shared useful links and found useful links as well. He used blogs online collaboratively as a way of circulation, where he spurred discussion and further learning of himself and his peers. I was very proud of this student for his the amount of work he did in this class, and the fact that he was only in high school. I thought, however, that the element of play was missing from this mode of learning. There could have been online games that the teacher could create or find to help with the learning process. But maybe the teacher wanted the students to find those types of learning games on the internet on their own. While watching the video, I was worried about whether they would actually need a teacher with this new style of learning. I was quickly reaffirmed when they directly addressed my question: yes, a teacher is present. I think though, that the role of the teacher changes in this context, as more of a guide to finding content rather than directly teaching content.

2. The learning experience of the student looks extremely different than what I was used to in high school. Only in college have a I started to use blogging, social bookmarking and the internet for online texts. In my school, the most technology I used was watching videos on YouTube, and I did a podcast once my senior year. I think the reasons that learning is so different is because of the participation gap. In high school, not everyone had access to the internet all of the time, or even knew how to properly use the technology. The teachers were not trained either as to how to use these technologies in their lesson planning. I think these new technologies will create a student that will have to do more work to find the information they need to learn. This takes a lot of initiative and curiosity on the part of the student, as does reading from a boring textbook. For me personally, I like the old style of learning because I am afraid of technology at times. As I have witnessed with my 8 year old cousins though, I am going to have to catch up with the rest of the world. My cousins will enjoy this type of learning because it is more relevant to them. They already know how to upload songs on iPods and download games off the internet. How fast things change!