Time for a Paradigm Shift?

The Significant Item:

• "Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write." (Jenkins, 2006, p. 19)
• "Meaning making occurs whether we use traditional, paper-based texts or digital, multimodal texts," (Rowsell, 2011, p. 57)

Jenkins makes a powerful and persuasive case for the value of "participatory culture" in both his article and TEDx talk. But as the quote above makes abundantly clear, he is not arguing for the abandonment of traditional literacy. And as Rowsell points out, there is fundamentally very little difference between "traditional" and "digital literacy". It's all about constructing meaning.

I would propose that Jenkins' notion of "participatory culture", in the broadest sense, is also about the very same thing--constructing meaning, specifically constructing a sense of the world, one's place in it, and how one can interact with others to affect the world. But schools and educators seems to be having tremendous difficulty grappling with "digital literacy", "technology", and so on. 

This is why all of the readings and the video clips have made me think ever more that "schools"--as social institutions--are extraordinarily conservative institutions which are incredibly resistant to change and in desperate need of a massive paradigm shift:

This, to me, is the greatest implication for professional practice and the ground for further questions. How do we "transform" such a large, cumbersome, and unwieldy thing as "public education"? Schools that shut down social media are doing exactly the wrong thing. Schools that discourage collaboration are doing exactly the wrong thing.

But even here in this course, we're struggling with a certain aspect or issue that is part of the questions that are being asked, having to do with intellectual property. As the NMC Horizon Report (Johnson, Adams Becker, Cummins, Estrada, Freeman, & Ludgate, 2013, p. 7) suggests, the very idea of "authoritative sources" is being broken down and replaced by concepts of openness. This is a HUGE area of consideration for academics (and intellectual property lawyers and policy makers). One person's "plagiarism" or "intellectual theft" (based on a closed and proprietary notion of ideas and information) is another person's "mashup" or "remix" (based on an open and collaborative notion of ideas and information). That said, here are my citations:

Jenkins, H. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Estrada, V., Freeman, A., & Ludgate, H. (2013). NMC Horizon Report: 2013. Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2013-horizon-report-k12.pdf

Rowsell, J. (2011). Rethinking literacy education in new times: Multimodality, multiliteracies, & new literacies. Retrieved from http://brock.scholarsportal.info/journals/brocked/home/article/view/236/174