CI5461: A nod to this, an homage to that

The Jenkins article, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, besides being a mouthful of words, bridged "new" and "old" literacies more meaningfully than anything else I have read. As I listed off its recommended skills - play, performance, simulation, and so on - I realized that these aren't actually new at all. What is new is the technology and the way we can enhance those experiences. Well, maybe not enhance. But we can match them to our students in a more current way, and that immediately helped make sense of new literacies.

Technology is too often, I think, presented in a manner that is daunting for teachers despite the best interests of its proponents. Integrate this because it helps with learning goals. Try this out because it engages students. Yet what has been missing is this piece: The skills remain the same, but the medium changes.



Take the idea of play. We talked about that in our summer courses at good length, and I am pretty well convinced that we humans have been playing with other humans for centuries. We perform or impersonate others on a daily basis. We have always needed to juggle multiple thoughts at once, but now we call it multitasking when before it was just "thinking." We rely on others' expertise to deepen our collective intelligence. I could go on. Through this lens, new literacies make more practical sense.

Especially, though, I want to dwell a moment on what the Jenkins piece calls appropriation. As many stimuli do, it makes me think of Jurassic Park, here specifically the dinner scene where Malcolm gives his speech about standing on the shoulders of geniuses. I still agree with Malcolm. Wholeheartedly so. But this article made me realize that appropriation is different than that. Appropriation knots itself with connectedness, something we implore students to do. Why not use it as scaffolding? It made me think of the movies my friends and I made in high school, some of which were adaptations from classic stories. By appropriating plots, we could focus our creative efforts on setting, lighting, cinematography and other film techniques. We gave credit where due, of course, but does it lessen our efforts? I don't think so. The Academy hands out Oscars for original and adapted screenplays, after all.

There is merit in recombining ideas in new ways provided we realize that what we've created (or what students have created) is not solely our own. Rather, and I think Bakhtin would agree, we are always borrowing thoughts and ideas from somewhere or someone else, adding our spin, and sharing them, so that the process may continue. Also, by revealing this concept to students, I'd bet the creative process would seem much less daunting and would open them up to the pleasure of seeing and making connections. I mean goodness, that's what metaphor is.

And to think, metaphor isn't even a new literacy.

External Resource:
http://www.fas.org/gamesummit/

I intended to find a site devoted to large-scale simulation activities for students, but I came up short. Instead, I stumbled into this report from 5 years ago from the Federation of American Scientists. They determined that video games should be used in classrooms, because, namely, they require critical thinking. Quite interesting. Also, I've included this news story on the release that boils it down to the essentials.