Digital Heart

I can’t say enough about the wonderful work from MIT’s Henry Jenkins.  I ran out to buy his book, Convergence Culture, as soon as it arrived in bookstores last summer and quoted it like crazy in the lit review of my paper.   More recently, I found his October 2006 white paper, Confronting the Challenge of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, available as a PDF file at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media & Learning website.  I will be using quotes from this in my final chapter.  It validates so much of what I believe.

The chapter in Convergence Culture titled Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars echoes everything we were saying in our engaged learning heyday about authentic audiences and self-directed learning.  The white paper defines eleven new skills – or cultural competencies – that young people need in the “new media landscape.”  These skills intersect in various points with Daniel Pink’s (2005) R-Directed (for right-brained) Aptitudes for the 21st Century, Marc Prensky’s (2004) Digital Natives’ learning styles, or even Don Tapscott’s  nearly decade-old (1998) Eight Shifts to Interactive Learning. 

I particularly like three of the skills Jenkins mentions:

• Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Talk about higher-order thinking!  I hope to be updating the blog more often since I am almost finished with the dissertation!!  There may be light at the end of the tunnel??  Hard to believe…