Week 5 Reading Reflection

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In this article the author discusses how educators need to prepare children with the technology skills needed to succeed later on in life. One concern is also that students should be aware of how media shapes their perception of the world, but aren’t having that experience because school programs, after school programs and informal programs are not consistent with helping students understand the
“new media landscape” that’s around them. Participatory culture shifts focus from literacy to one that had individual expression, and involves social skills that are developed through collaboration and networking.

Collective Intelligence:
Collective Intelligence is the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal. In other words, like-minded individuals gather to discuss one common topic with much different information being processed. “Everyone knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole.