Frequently, acts of participatory politics tap the public’s connection to popular culture.
So, if gone too far this can become very invasive, however, managed correctly, this is not only effective, but essential to connecting different groups to the same discourse.
Those who engage in agenda-setting, opinion formation, and action-taking through methods like the ones described above participate in “participatory politics.”
Well this is basically a key term definition, so I am just going to save this for later.
increasing access to tools supporting circulation, collaboration, creation, and connection
These are basically the four tenets through which all apps, or programs are created around. "How is my app going to do any or all of these things?"
cholars have argued that new media may be facilitating a broad shift in the form and focus of politics.
Increased agency with the influence of social media will do that. It is amazing what a few thousand "likes" will accomplish when it is shown to the right person.
informal and not-easily categorized actions.#For exam
Almost like a cipher
outside of gatekeeping institutions
"Gatekeeping institutions" like school? or work?
Millennials’ participatory zeitgeist, political urgency, and civic media fluency.
We are just growing up. It seems to me that there is becoming a deafing awareness of the need for political urgency, and as described below, there are more and more Millennials that are finding politics to be far more approachable than we lead ourselves to believe. Especially as it becomes easier to connect with people with social media, which will continue to be our fulcrum for political agency.
We struggle to balance teacher- and student-guided learning.
This seems like something that has to be addresses very often if it is to be overcome. Teachers letting their students know their intentions with when the teachers are the ones teaching, and when the students are the ones leading. Similarly, the students need to be receptive with the teachers and with each other, and ready to switch gears from being taught to getting ready to learn on their own. It's a very delicate balance and it requires a lot of awareness and effort on both sides.
peer-supported mentoring groups meet across campus
The value of mentors cannot be understated. Especially in this context where there is so much nuance between the brainstorming and the final presentation phase that not only is primary source information important, but so is constantly checking each other and trying to improve each other.
over 100 undergraduates participate in online debate, community-based service and research, and town hall meetings featuring issue experts and local stakeholders
Increasing exposure to the local elements of government is unfortunately terribly under-developed. Everyone from CEO's on down don't need to have a hand in local government if they don't want to, but everyone should at least be aware of how it works.
or a Smartphone
Fun fact: There have been entire movies that have been shot on phones and the quality is actually quite good. We'd do well to remember that a mini-computer links each one of us to each other.
it can be viewed and commented on by other youth as well as by game moderators and teachers
Literally crowd-sourcing information, ideas, research, and making a de-centralized community work towards one common goal. Imagine how many problems we could solve if millions of people at a time, from thousands of different places in the world, all contributed their ideas and time? Just make it a point to tell the users that you are using them to crowd-source maybe?
but it’s the wrong question.
It also lacks context. As a college student, I spend the majority of my time in front of a screen (probably more than 7hrs a day on average) reading, writing and researching. Just looking at the total time spent on electronics misses the point: what you're doing with that time, how you're leveraging it, is huge
Digital badges
LinkedIn has incorporated this, where you can list your skills and even have people in your social/work network recommend it
it may be more important for youth to have affordable access to Smartphones than for them to have computers at home with broadband.
I agree, phones are more portable, more customizable and more personal. I use my cellphone everyday, but my laptop is for mostly for work/schoolwork
Media literacy is also far preferable to relatively hopeless efforts to prevent youth from engaging with digital media.
Fighting social media is not only pointless, it's a wasted opportunity. If used responsibly, it literally connects you to people across the world who can share their thoughts and views with you based on their own widely differing life experience
Students identify a problem, policy, or issue and design an action project with a tangible civic goal.
This is the STAR method! Situation > Task > Action > Result, widely used to grade interview questions/responses
critical online participants
Bringing back critical thinking to online / community based sharing of information is crucial. Digital illiteracy is something that both adults and youth are vulnerable to, which we see regularly with retweets and reposts of unverified information
online groups where discussions concern sports, entertainment,
The opposite also happens. The NFL and the movement initiated by Colin Kaepernick shadowed all of the past season, and cost the NFL millions of dollars in lost revenue from people both pro- and against the movement. Ad revenue was lost (most notably during the Super Bowl) because so many artists and companies did not want to be associated with the NFL brand during that time; fans stopped going to games and/or paying for their subscriptions because they were tired by the politics overshadowing the game.
consistent with preferences revealed by prior behaviors.
"Learning algorithms" can start guiding you into a social media echo chamber, even if you didn't consciously unfollow/dislike/unfriend something.
n short, these results challenge the conventional notion that immersion in online communities are distracting or socially isolating and, instead, highlight the potential civic benefits of non-political participation in online communities.
We have several examples of social media used to immerse its members more in their community, instead of isolating them: Pokemon Go gets users out in all weathers and organizes community events to encourage participation; Yelp and Four Square encourage people to try new things and share their experience; Venmo is even trying to make splitting a bill a social networking moment, emojis and all.
This new territory does not come with a road map
Facebook's CEO recently made a public request for governments to step in to make a sort of road map that they could follow, as the task of policing "fake news", as well as preventing cyberbullying and protecting privacy, are each too big of a task for companies to be able to identify and tackle on their own.
s youth digital media saturation evolves, we suspect that this shift toward computer-based and Smartphone-based recruitment will also show exponential increases.
We're seeing this happen right now as political campaigns are dedicating more funds to online adverts, viral videos, podcasts and organizing marches instead of tv ads and traditional radio. Cities and States have their own apps announcing meetings, townhalls, and votes, all conveniently stored on your phone.
such as the sharing of fan fiction, collaboration around a video game, or the production of YouTube videos.
All of these thrive not just from the content, but the comment sections
Networked spaces allow for conversation, debate, and information sharing in an unprecedented way
It also makes the conversation escalate and turn aggressive faster. "Keyboard warriors" will say things online easily that wouldn't be acceptable behavior in person. The person you're arguing with becomes just some text on a screen, or a 2D face, that you can attack to make your point. Are we conscientious enough of this risk in our current social media usage?
The Internet is often where young peoplehear and voice perspectives
But it's also how young people risk limiting their world - when you can unfollow and unfriend any opinion/person you disagree with, are you really getting a full perspective? Or are you just narrowing your field of view and becoming less empathetic to opposing views?
Judged by traditional measures, current levels of youth civic knowledge and participation are problematic
"Traditional" measures are no longer enough. We're increasingly connected digitally, and social and political activism online should be a metric here. From civic debates on social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit to crowdfunding efforts like GoFundMe, millennials are trying to participate in the conversation.
The youngest generations participate the least in civic life, with a full 55 percent of those under thirty recently judged as civically and politically “disengaged’ in a report by the National Conference on Citizenship.
I think these numbers would look a lot different since 2016. The Trump campaign and administration has created an opposition movement that is very active and young. At the same time, approachable, dynamic figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC are appealing directly to millennials and their interests, increasing millennial civic engagement.
The organization creates morethan 250 paid jobs for youth per year in the center of Downtown Oakland
This sounds like an awesome initiative that generates interest in local youth, but also gives participants real life skills
and created by members of the affinity networkthemselves in order to serve the specialized needs of their core participants
Discord is another example: a digital media app for gamers used to coordinate community events, or find a team to play competitive games with
aming groups generally have competitive play as a core practice, while alsosupporting sub-groups and more “elite” or high-investment practices such as designing andcoding new levels, creating fan videos, or curating knowledge on a shared wiki
Mental health is becoming a bigger discussion in gaming communities, with Twitch (where gamers live-stream videos) now including its own "Mental health support" page to encourage streamers and viewers to help each other
how do my actions affect others, especially those with the most at stake?How can even my best intentions cause harm? When do I step up and when do I step back?
Self-awareness of not only yourself, but of your place within a bigger whole (the community you are a part of and acting within)
“cultural acupuncture,”
Interesting imagery. Are they saying that there are pre-determined pressure points in digital media, that if "tapped" correctly can lead to participatory politics and eventually connected civics? Or are the "pressure points" much more fluid, and depend on an emotional connection to a community before it develops into a civic interest in an issue?
e our use of consequentialconnectionsinstead.
Young people are just looking for a connection through digital media. With their friends, with their community, with strangers across the world about an interest or an issue to resolve. Politics (with the capital "P") seems like a business in comparison, with no emotional or connected depth
“hashtag activism” campaigns
(#)trashtag is a great example of this, that's created a lot of interest recently. Post a photo of an area before you (and usually some friends) clean it up, then an "after" photo of your group with all the bags at your feet)
Just as, forexample, school math and everyday math turn out to be quite different sorts of things
Is it that the education system is failing to bridge that gap ("applicable" math), or that students are failing to make that connection themselves, with all the tools available to them?
though it can, and sharing information can sometimes be anything but simpleand carry serious risk)
Media literacy - in the form of critical thinking, and checking sources - needs to be a bigger focus in schools and work life!
Deploying a “logic of connective action,” youngpeople circulate civic content across fluid social networks that don’t necessarily requirejoining hierarchical political institutions
Forums like Reddit are great for this. While moderatos keep the discussion civil, the rest of the debate is pretty fluid and redditors are more focused on contributing their opinion than in competing for a certain position within an organization
nstitutionalize their efforts in ways that make a loosely affiliated net-work into something that is socially organized, self-sustaining, and recognized as such bythose outside the original interest-driven community
Would the Parkland survivors group, advocating for gun control, be considered an example of this?
s “consequential connections”between these spheres of activity
We need to bring the civic and political discussions to people. For youth in particular, digital media is the most important forum for these discussions and connections. To not use it and leverage it, is a waste opportunity to get people interested and involved
Deus Ex
Just as an aside; Deus Ex is a fantastic game. Definitely worth being played again by future gaming generations.
It broughtback home to me, forcefully, that learning is or should be both frustratingand life enhancing.
Everybody wants to be smart, but seemingly no one wants to learn. Just as electricity follows the path of least resistance, so to does the majority of human effort.
for which I had heretofore received ample rewards,did not work.
I wonder what ways of thinking that I have learned are already starting to work against me...
lusory attitude
"The lusory attitude is the psychological attitude required of a player entering into the play of a game. To adopt a lusory attitude is to accept the arbitrary rules of a game in order to facilitate the resulting experience of play." - Wikipedia
understanding the ways in which the structures of gamesthemselves elicit particular attitudes toward action, interaction, and knowing is endlesslybeneficial
If you could find a way to make a student attack learning the way a pro-gamer attacks the mastery of game... the results would be simply incredible.
currently leveragingSecond Lifeas a platform for learning.
Apparently there have even been people that have opened up businesses for e-commerce on Second Life and made money! There are world's created for the sake of advertisements that are frequently traveled and generate revenue as well.
video game play is one deeply “tangled up” with other cultural practices.
Video games - both as a medium for learning and a large-scale industry product - are still rooted within the realm of "hobbyist" or "recreational" industry, that's why I think it is so common that video games aren't taken seriously. The largest consumer base just wants to play on the weekends outside of work, but I'm genuinely interested to see how it will be reformed for education to become more "woven" and less "tangled"
Writer, designer, reader,producer, teacher, student, gamer—all modes hold equal weight. Where we used to call themplayer-producers,prosumers,orevenmultitaskers,wenow just call themkids.
multi-faceted learning. Remixing. Early adaption to new technologies is making the creation and distribution of content not just possible, but almost necessary.
To sitdown and play through a game is to be convinced as by no argument, however persuasivelypresented.”6
It took me a minute, but I can really relate to this. When you find a good game (much like a good book), it grips you. It becomes it's own reason to complete it. and due to that investment coming from inside the player, the comprehension and desire for mastery become exponential. Somewhere usually early on, you stopped needing to be convinced to play and it becomes an itch that can't be scratched until the game's completion.
studentswereliterallyputoutinthefieldintheroleofinvestigators,situatingthembothinthephysicalityofthespaceandintheirrolesasinvestigators
It's really hard to imagine this style of immersion being implemented in all different class types, but seriously, this is the way you engage people in general, and especially children.
“strategicreading,”
The trick here is priming the investment in the reader to read strategically. I would love to see school as a video-game of comparable interest to the latest and most popular video games, but as it is the material just isn't there. I play competitive video-games to be the best, because in a way that goal is clearly defined within the techniques of the game play. "Being the best" in school, by comparison is not quite as easily defined.
enableparticipationinargumentationwithindifferentdiscourses
Allowing for more "agency" in the modern day learning environments. Maybe support more critical-thinking and problem solving and less Jeopardy-style trivial pursuit? Assume for a second that a child having the internet at their finger tips is a good thing, or the only thing that can help them solve unique classroom problems. What problems might those daily activities look like?
it sees them as technicians doing a technical jo
As a former technician having done multiple jobs, this feels real. Grab your tools, read from the manual, don't divert from the manual because reasons, follow steps 1-10, button it back up, go home. Which is great process if what you're working on happens to be a machine...
Educators seek to free ideas that have been isolated through disciplinary walls and rigidly defined roles. They use MML to push back on the traditional boundaries of School to connect learning to the real world
It's hard to predict what courses and what avenues or schools of thought are going to feature heavily in the future, but it seems to me that Mobile Media Learning is trying to give a platform to every and any new method of delivering that information. The implication being that it will always be rooted in something that is easy to access.
This can lead to a polarization of political discourse, and a growing equity gap between those who have a well-rounded view of public culture and cur-rent events, and those who do not.
"Internet Culture" is a real thing. Stereo-typically the internet is full of radicals on both sides of the political isle with large groups to refer to as "back-up". Though also fairly stereo-typically, the worst of these offenders don't often use other sources outside of their networks. No reason to "reach across the isle" as it were. Which I believe is where a lot of "well-roundedness" comes from.
The commission has argued for school reforms that include a European-style system of career-oriented tracks, which ends the public commitment to schooling at Grade 10 and then tracks students into either college-level classes or vocational education.
Where as in the states commitment to schooling extends to 12th grade w/ only some schools emphasizing college or vocation. Pity. In Europe, or at least some countries like Germany, put apprenticeships on par with college because both have equal economic value. Contrast that with the states where "apprenticeships" are practically non-existent.
the working class and middle class have been eroding as we see a growth in the impoverished class, what has been dubbed a “creative class”3
Adapt and overcome. When job and education opportunites become scare, but technology and design platforms become more abundant, you basically have to start working for yourself.
Youths need skills for working within social networks, for pooling knowledge within a collective intelligence, for negotiating across cultural differences that shape the governing assumptions in different communities, and for reconciling conflicting bits of data to form a coherent picture of the world around them.
There comes a point where being swept along is no longer enough.
the new media literacies should be seen as social skills, as ways of interacting within a larger community, and not simply as individualized skills to be used for personal expression.
As someone who doesn't use social media all that often, this hits kind of hard...
Conversations about games expose flaws in games’ construction, which also may lead to questions about the games’ governing assumptions.
A simulation video game, say, simulator of performing surgery, presents the core concepts of what it may mean to perform a surgical procedure, though there will be flaws. These imperfections may be that you have to inject a syringe in a semi-random location to lower the patients BPM when the simulation isn't going well. This is a flaw in the games construction. While arguably necessary, so as not to get bogged down in the nuance of surgery, it is nonetheless an inaccuracy that facilitates a type of 'laziness' in the operation. Meaning that further tweaks to the game or different simulations may be required to understand the full scope of events from start to finish.
Our focus here is not on individual accomplishment but rather the emergence of a cultural context that supports widespread participation in the production and distribution of media.
Rather than going through the traditional channels of create, submit, publish, and market, there is an impressive surge in the amount of tools that allow for going straight to market after the creation. No middle men, no creative content censorship, just the creator putting his name on his own creations and showing them to people. Not surprisingly, both content creators and consumers love this new paradigm. Often times the quality is much more original and some of the time it is even free to consume.
“I like bacon productions,”
He's perfect for Hollywood.
Had his teachers been attuned to his expertise development earlier, they may have found ways to build on his excellent out-of-school learning skills to reengage him in academic content. Typically, par-ents act to coordinate across settings and in Luis’s case they intervened to reallo-cate his time at the clubhouse so that he would spend more time on schoolwork rather than try to bring his talents to the attention of school staff.
This killed me a little bit. I get what a one-track mind is like. At the risk of inserting opinion where it does not belong, Luis must've just felt so bored at school. At lunch, he's making backgrounds. In class he is day dreaming about filming fight scenes from a wide angle instead of a standard angle. On his way to and from school he's got music tracks going through his mind that would be perfect for this scene! It is all-consuming. Then to have his parents and teachers tell him he's not "applying" himself... I get it.
In Luis’s case, his challenges in school led to restrictions on his club time. His parents believed that access to the club was one way that they could motivate him to work harder on his school assignments.
There is a lot to be said for facing challenge when it comes to earning even the opportunity to develop your craft, much less the techniques and modalities associated to it. The parents challenged Luis' commitment, and that's even difficult for most adults.
A focus on engagement in research on learning, in contrast to an exclusive focus on knowledge acquisition, is consistent with contemporary theories of learning that conceptualize moments of learning as part of a process of identity development (Beach, 1999 ; Nasir, 2002 ; Wenger, 1998
This is a truly awesome concept that I hope gets enacted not just to underprivileged schools, but to every school. I would learn SO much more from watching a professional try to debug a complex program then just learning about debugging myself, as an example.
While those who see gaming as an avenue into certain forms of technical expertise and learning have argued that educators and designers should work to make games attractive to girls (Cassell and Jenkins 1998; Kafai et al. 2008)
Not just girls, but anyone who wants to learn a skill involving hand-eye coordination can benefit from a well designed game. Surgeons are quickly turning to micro-machinery operated by Xbox controllers. Drone pilots of all kinds are the same way.
the extent to which parents were willing to give their kids autonomy over their day-to-day media usage also revolved around the assessment of whether parents thought their kids could or, in some cases, needed to exercise judgment, as was the case with many parents who gave their kids mobile phones.
The same issue that we are having a reckoning with now. If your child doesn't have a phone, someone at school does. Only furthering the condition of the desire to be connected. Like it or not, tech is going to improve and continue to connect us in ways we haven't thought of. Depriving anyone, much less children, of the chance to grow with that is only a disservice in the long run.
we have observed how many youth craft multiple media identities that they mobilize selectively depending on context; they may be active on Facebook and part of the party scene at school, but they may also have a set of friends online focused on more specifi c interests related to gaming or creative production.
There needs to be multiple platforms to share these different sides to people. it does promote a type of "tribalism", but the content that is created can have it's truest potential scrutinized and ultimately validated or invalidated by people who know and care about the quality of the content. Think, posting an experimental recipe on Pinterest versus Craigslist.
we fi nd that youth will often engage in multiple genres of participation in ways that are situationally specifi c.
Nice. I really like how there is a near over-emphasis on the idea that all new medias are not equal, not all situations are equal, and certainly not all situations that new medias are used are all equal. Subjectivity, all the way down the moment-of-action is important when looking at the use of new medias in youths.
New media are a site where youth exhibit agency and an expertise that often exceeds that of their elders, resulting in intergenerational struggle over authority and control over learning and literacy. Technology, media, and public culture are shaping and being shaped by these struggles, as youth practice defi nes new terms of participation in a digital and networked media ecology.
Is youth still wasted on the young?