Would you consider yourself to be an active participant on the web? What does that even mean?
In his 2009 report titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins describes participatory culture as “… a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices.” (Jenkins, xi)
Sounds a lot like Web 2.0, a term coined back in 2004 by O’Reilly Media, that refers to websites and applications that “…enable the creation and sharing of information.” The idea of actively participating on the web is nothing new, and now that we have had a couple of decades to make our mistakes, it’s finally time to learn from them and do better for our students.
So what impact does participatory culture have on education today? In an ever-changing world, how can we as educators ensure our students are contributing positively to the web?
Dave Cormier makes some great points in his book Learning in a Time of Abundance (if you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend it!) In it, he says:
“The internet is fundamentally participatory. The internet grows, all internet platforms grow, through the addition of content… the internet is people.” (Cormier, 166)
WOAH. What he is saying is that we can look at the web in the same way we can look at our classrooms and our communities. Everything that we do in our communities contributes to said community. Everything we do on the internet contributes to the internet.
I like to use the Alan McMasters Hoax as an example of why it’s important to check sources online. In short, someone edited a Wikipedia post claiming that the toaster was invented by someone named Alan McMasters (it was not) and put up an edited an image of themselves to use. I’ll paste part of the Wikipedia article here to explain the rest…
“…newspapers, encyclopedias, government agencies, and the Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware perpetuated the false story of MacMasters as the inventor. Alex then used these articles citing MacMasters as the inventor of the toaster to further propagate the false information.[1] A primary school in Scotland dedicated a day to MacMasters. He was nominated to appear on a £50 note by an individual who responded to a request for nominations from the Bank of England and was preselected as one of the 989 eligible names out of 227,299 nominations.[5] During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Scottish Government-funded organizations cited Alan’s story as evidence of how an independent Scotland could succeed.[3][2]“
What started out as a fun prank was cited as fact to the point that newspapers and encyclopedias were taking it as fact. What we put onto the internet changes the internet. In this BBC article about the hoax, Heather Ford refers to it as circular referencing.
Like a weird game of web telephone
The question is, are we contributing to it positively or negatively? It reminds me of that quote, be the change you wish to see in the world (which apparently was NOT said by Ghandi… thanks for misleading us on that one, internet).
Who we are online shapes the digital community. Cormier continues to say that we need to “… help build a more prosocial web.” (Cormier, 167) In short, he tells the reader that we can do this by being fair to those we disagree with, by fact-checking and citing things that we post, and by being conscious and deliberate in the way that we participate with the web.
What an important message for our students to hear:
Please participate. Do it well. Put your better values on the internet. Our society is literally being shaped by the internet right now and will be for the forseeable future. We are all watching the web we are building. The web is us. Help build a good one. (Cormier, 167)
Instead of using the web to watch what everyone else is doing, we can create a better future. Instead of lurking online, we should be leading.
Our Saskatchewan curriculum does offer a lot of opportunities to bring digital leadership into the conversation. The Digital Citizenship Continuum is a fantastic resource that educators can turn to for inspiration when connecting current outcomes to digital leadership.
I started working on connecting the continuum to outcome maps in a previous class to assist teachers in the most seamless way possible. I completed grades 5 and 6 here. Once you focus in on those outcomes through a digital lens, it really becomes second nature.
Let’s teach our students to be leaders instead of lurkers!