What skills are needed to engage in a "participatory culture"

Just in case I am not the very last person to read Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, I will recommend it here. Published by the MacArthur Foundation in October of 2006, the 60 page white paper defines a participatory culture as one "with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices" (AKA Web 2.0) and asks what media literacy skills does one need to be fully involved in such an environment.

The paper first identifies three concerns which require the need for "pedagogical interventions":

1. The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.
   The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.
   The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.
   

The majority of the report addressess 11 "new skills" students need to be fully successful in the social networking environment:

• Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
  

About a two-page explanation of each skill is given, followed by a few paragraphs called 'What Should Be Done?"

As I read, I kept asking, Which of the skills above do we actively discourage in schools? Don't these sound like Daniel Pink's suggestions in A Whole New Mind? How well do the refreshed ISTE NETS Standards or the draft AASL Learning Standards address these skills? How do adults go about learning these things themselves - can we teach skills we are not confident of ourselves?

Ironically perhaps, I am wrtiing this after just having listened to Maureen Lese, FBI Agent from the Minneapolis Field Office, spend an hour and a half talking about how she and her staff track down online child sexual predators and child pornographers. Genuinely scary stuff.  I am guessing the viseral reaction to her talk by the 100 or so tech coordinators at the TIES conference here in St. Cloud was much the same as mine, "What in heaven's sake are we doing even letting kids near a computer! Let's double-block MySpace!" But I hope most of us reflect and realize that the only genuine protection kids have online are parents and teachers who are informed and able to teach and talk about Internet dangers. The growing power and importance of online life requires all kids to be able to navigate, discriminate and use all resouces - static and human - if they are to be considered truly educated.

Tip of the hat to Ian Jukes at the Committed Sardine blog for passing this document on to me.

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Some quotable quotes from the document: 

We are using participation as a term that cuts across educational practices, creative processes, community life, and democratic citizenship. Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture. p. 8

What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what person can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high bandwidth, and continuous connectivity. (Current legislation to block access to social networking software in schools and public libraries will further widen the participation gap.) The school system’s inability to close this participation gap has negative consequences for everyone involved. p. 13

 In her recent book, The Internet Playground, Seiter (2005) expresses concern that young people were finding it increasingly difficult to separate commercial from noncommercial content in online environments: “The Internet is more like a mall than a library; it resembles a gigantic public relations more than it does an archive of scholars” p. 16

 One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others.We may, in the short run, have to accept that cyberspace’s ethical norms are in flux: we are taking part in a prolonged experiment in what happens when one lowers the barriers of entry into a communication landscape. For the present moment, asking and working through questions of ethical practices may be more valuable than the answers produced because the process will help everyone to recognize and articulate the different assumptions that guide their behavior. p. 17

...textual literacy remains a central skill in the twenty-first century. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Youth must expand their required competencies, not push aside old skills to make room for the new. Second, new media literacies should be considered a social skill. p. 19

Beyond core literacy, students need research skills.Among other things, they need to know how to access books and articles through a library; to take notes on and integrate secondary; to assess the reliability of data; to read maps and charts; to make sense of scientific visualizations; to grasp what kinds of information are being conveyed by various systems of representation; to distinguish between fact and fiction, fact and opinion; to construct arguments and marshal evidence. If anything, these traditional skills assume even greater importance as students venture beyond collections that have been screened by librarians and into the more open space of the web. p. 19

When individuals play games, a fair amount of what they end up doing is not especially fun at the moment. It can be a grind, not unlike homework.The efforts allows the person to master skills, collect materials, or put things in their proper place in anticipation of a payoff down the line.The key is that this activity is deeply motivated. p 23