[-empyre-] what needs to be done (Skills For Participatory Culture)

["The Art Gallery of Knoxville" <art.gallery.knoxville@gmail.com>]

Trebor Scholz <trebor@thing.net> mailed this link to [iDC], I think it
provides some additional perspective / solutions to the question.

<http://www.projectnml.org/node/308> :
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WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE:

This situation calls for multiple levels of intervention:

1. School based -- designed to integrated into existing school disciplines

2. after-school programs -- designed to expand creative opportunities
for kids in a way which also emphasizes the cultural context and
ethical consequences of those practices.

3. informal learning -- collaboration with creative industries to
insure that ideas about media literacy feed back into popular culture.

4. teacher training -- designed to provide teachers with models for
classroom practices which foster the new media literacies.

5. parents training -- designed to give parents the knowledge and
skills they need to foster media literacy in preschool children and to
support the informal learning of their school aged offspring.

We are proposing an integrated approach which works at four levels:

Exercises (E1) -- designed to refine and rehearse preliminary literacy skills.

Exemplers (E2)-- designed to illustrate creative processes and
practices and provide a critical vocabulary for the aesthetic
evaluation of media.

Expressions (E3) -- designed to allow kids to put these skills into
play through individual and collaborative creative projects.

Ethics (E4) -- designed to encourage reflections on the social
contexts in which media is produced and circulated, including a strong
focus on the ways individuals relate to larger communities and the
ability to make meaningful choices and weigh their consequences.

We can understand this more fully if we look at a specific subject
area: digital storytelling.

Basic Pedagogical Goals:

1. A recognition of the ways stories change as they move across media
(multimodal, convergent) and an appreciation of new kinds of
storytelling media (mobile, immersive, interactive) which may deal
with stories in different ways.

2. A recognition of the basic building blocks of canonical stories,
including questions of sequencing, exposition, and point of view, as
well as an awareness of the ways that these basic principles can be
manipulated to create alternative storytelling practices.
(transformative)

3. An appreciation of the functions stories play within cultures,
including the value of stories for entertainment, transmitting
traditions, opening up new possibilities and alternative perspectives,
etc. (generational)

4. An appreciation of cultural differences in the form and content of
stories (multicultural, global).

5. An awareness of the role which stereotypes and clichs play in the
construction of stories as well as the impact that such devices can
have on the ways we interact with other people. (negotiation)

6. the ability to identify core elements of stories and rework them to
communicate alternative perspectives (appropriative).

7. a recognition of those factors shaping which stories get told in the media
and how those stories get structured.

8. an understanding of how story elements can be dispersed across
multiple media channels in order to create a range of different
experiences. (Convergent)
(synthesis)

9. practice in translating one?s own experiences into stories which
can be understood by others both in your own community and
beyond.(expression, performance)

10. refine technical skills in media production as well as developing
criteria for evaluating stories within different media contexts.
(Judgment)

11. recognize that people in different communities might narrate the
same experiences in different terms or might form conflicting
interpretations of shared stories (negotiation)

12. understand the ways that authors build upon pre-existing stories
as well as recognize the current legal conflicts over who should
control what use gets made of one's creative work. (sampling)

Our overall approach emphasizes comparison across different media,
across different historical periods, across high and popular culture,
across mainstream and experimental media, and across different
cultural traditions. Any opening session needs to emphasize the
diversity of current storytelling media with an emphasis on both
commonalities and differences.

At the same time, this approach is designed to bring together
literature, art, and social sciences so that people understand what
stories are, how to express one's ideas through stories, and how
stories operate within cultures.