Skills for 21st Century Learners: Preparing ourselves for participatory culture

January 05, 2007

Christopher D. Sessums
Skills for 21st Century Learners: Preparing ourselves for participatory culture

I recently ran across this essay Training Kids With Skills For Participatory Culture on theProjectNML (New Media Literacy) website and thought these ideas were worth sharing.
As we consider the skills needed to increase the effectiveness and impact of educators, communication competencies cannot be underestimated. Whilemass media currently dominates our Western cultural ecology, we are starting to feel the affects of emerging participatory technology (e.g., social software) that is actively shaping and recasting the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions and practices that surround us. While this new participatory medium does not replace existing media it does serve as another layer in an increasingly diverse and potentially hegemonic media ecology.
Many school children and college students readily circulate in this new participatory media landscape via formal and informal online networks (e.g., MySpace, World of Warcraft, Facebook, Second Life, message boards, YouTube, etc.). What differentiates this generation are the opportunities to produce as much of their media diet as they consume. The goal for educators should then be to assist students in developing the knowledge, skills, confidence, and ethical structures necessary to participate fully and meaningfully in the changes that result from new media technologies. The challenges include addressing a) the unequal opportunities and knowledge gained from these emerging practices; b) the ethical roles and responsibilities associated with venturing into this new risky and uncharted territory; c) the lack of critical reflection practiced by early adopters of new media; and d) the lack of clear evaluation standards associated with work produced utilizing new media as well as how it relates to previous forms of communication and expression.

The author(s) then offer a set of preliminary and emerging skill sets that they feel “kids” need in order to be full participants in the new media ecology.
Preliminary Skills:
Basic Literacy -- ‘the ability to read and write.‘
Technical Skills -- ‘the ability to operate core technologies and tools desired for specific projects.‘
Multimodal Literacy -- ‘the ability to process information across multiple systems of representation.‘
Emerging Skills include:
Play -- "a process of exploration and experimentation."
Performance-- "trying on and playing different identities."
Navigation -- "the ability to move across the media landscape in a purposeful manner, choosing the media that best serves a specific purpose or need, or that might best."
Resourcefulness -- "the ability to identify and capitalize on existing resources."
Networking -- "the ability to identify a community of others who share common goals and interests."
Negotiation -- "the ability to communicate across differences as you move through a multicultural and global media landscape."
Synthesis -- "pulling together information from multiple sources, evaluating its reliability and use value, and constructing a new picture of the world."
Sampling -- "mastering and transforming existing media content for the purposes of self and collective expression."

Collaboration -- "sharing information, pooling knowledge, comparing notes, evaluating evidence, and solving large-scale problem."
Teamwork -- "the ability to identify specific functions for each member of the team based on their expertise and then to interact with the team members in an appropriate fashion."
Judgment -- "the ability to make aesthetic and ethical evaluations of media practices and to reflect on your own choices and their consequences."
Discernment -- "the ability to assess the accuracy and appropriateness of available information."
The author(s) suggest that “these skills each lie at the intersection between the self and others,” and that these are more than simply individual skills -- they are cultural skills, that is, they are a part of the shared knowledge and values of our society.
Clearly, these skills are designed to emphasize active participation and the exchange of thoughts, messages, and information, not merely the expression of an individual’s own personality, feelings, and ideas. Moreover, these skills build on the notion of empathy and an “understanding of the impact of one‘s ideas on others,” and that “any ethical framework we develop should emerge from this understanding that media may have been personalized in the early 1990s but… is now collaborative and communal in an era of networked and mobile communications technologies.”
The essay ends with an example lesson plan that focuses on developing these preliminary and emerging skill sets to the specific subject area of digital storytelling.
In the end, The Project NML essay serves as a lesson in school reform that focuses on how educators should be thinking about literacy education, communication competencies, and schoolings impact on our collective citizenry -- not simply academic achievement. Getting educators to adopt such a stance will take longer than most of us are comfortable with, but alas, it comes with the territory.
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Project NML article:Training Kids with Skills for Participatory Culture
Photo credits:
Turntables byexacta. Retrieved 05 January 2007 from www.flickr.com/photos/exakta/29117488/.
literacy seeds”” byfocus2capture. Retrieved 05 January 2007 from www.flickr.com/photos/focus2capture/297232107/
collaboration proofsheet/highwaygirl67 byhighwaygirl67. Retrieved 06 January 2007 from www.flickr.com/photos/highwaygirl67/88584741.
teamwork bySomebody‘s Mom. Retrieved 05 January 2007 from www.flickr.com/photos/somebodysmom/172756762/.
Keywords:collaboration,communication,critical reflection,culture,digital storytelling,emergence,ethics,learning,literacy,mass media,media,media literacy,MIT,new story,participation,play,professional development, Project NML,school reform,shift,skills,social networking,social software,teaching,teamwork,technology