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The white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Jenkins et al., 2006) identifies the kinds of participatory practices youth are engaged in today, and draws up a provisionary list of the skills these practices demonstrate. In the video below, members of the NML team share their thoughts and perspectives on the skills we call the new media literacies.
One of our key goals is to stop focusing quite so much on “do kids have computers in their classroom?” and start focusing more on “do kids have the basic social skills and cultural competencies so that when they do get computers in their classroom, they can participate fully?” Many educators assume that (1) students can only begin learning the skills they need to use technology if they actually have the technology in their classroom, and (2) that putting technology in the classroom is a quick fix that will solve any classroom’s problems. Neither of these assumptions, we argue, are good.
It’s not that it isn’t important that students have computers in their classrooms. Students with access to technology will typically be better at using technology than students who don’t. But just putting computers in classrooms doesn’t mean that they will be used well. Frequently, computers are used as an appendage to a physical library or as a word processing tool. These are good uses for computers, but they don’t really teach students about the participatory culture that exists online – the participatory culture that they will be expected to take part in as adults. In fact, many students are already engaging with participatory culture, and they’re bored by uses of computers that don’t incorporate it!
The New Media Literacies constitute the core cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in our new media landscape. We call them “literacies,” but they change the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to one of community involvement. They build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom. If these New Media Literacies are learned – and they can be learned without computers in the classroom – they can form the building blocks for students’ participation in new media.
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