Liberal Education Today

MIT professor Henry Jenkins is offering a keynote at the Educause ELI 2008 annual conference, titled "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies". Jenkins describes a Wikipedia study project conducted by MIT's Comparative Media Studies program.

He began by focusing on higher education's engagement with Wikipedia, starting with the Middlebury College controversy. After expanding on the controversy's complexity, Jenkins recommended that higher education conduct a dialogue on the topics Wikipedia evokes, a form of teaching the debate.

Jenkins then addressed the Macarthur Foundation project on digital media and learning, arguing that what's at stake now is how to add to knowledge, rather than losing from cultural heritage. Participatory culture is one way of approaching this. The "digital native"/"digital immigrant" metaphor limits cross-generational social connections.

Participatory culture skills are very social, bound into communities. Some skills are participatory, requiring involvement in online environments. Jenkins asked us to consider the difference between media effects (what media does to us) and media affects (ethical interaction).

Challenges facing the rise of participatory media:

1. The participation gap, access to cultural experiences which help students use technologies.


2. Transparency problem, students immersed in media but lacking language to reflect upon it.


3. Ethics, or students not perceiving the consequences of their online communication. Jenkins recommended discussion and education instead of panics.

Within that header, Jenkins identified several skills applicable to Wikipedia: collective knowledge, judgement, networking, and negotiation. Openness and transparency help foreground the process of knowledge. Jenkins cites Middlebury College professor Jason Mittell's argument that Wikipedia is teaching us to think about knowledge in new ways. He adds that Wikipedia challenges the expert paradigm, raising crowdsourcing and other collaborative forms as alternatives. Jenkins drew on other forms of digital social behavior to expand on this, including gaming, from alternate reality gaming to massively muliplayer online gaming.

Other blog posts covering this talk: Intellagirl.

Technorati tag: ELIAnnual08