Brand new project for Aesthetics of Interactive Design. A Database of the Self. I call it Database Me. And I’d love to hear your comments.

That earlier re-blog I did of Brad King‘s Shut Your Digital Native Piehole (52 of 90) got me thinking about the differences in literacy levels. And as I followed the line of reasoning it came around to one thing: class struggle. I think this works.
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Some insightful observations. Why should we teach media literacy? Right here is a good reason.

These children have grown up with digital technologies, but in a very limited way. They know a few things quite deeply, but they – as we did at their age – have no great appreciation of the subtleties of the tools. The expanse and use of the tools. The possibilities for tools that don’t yet exist.

They can push buttons, but they can’t make them.

Brad King: – Shut Your Digital Native Piehole (52 of 90).

Definitely poignant. How do we increase the literacy of kids? This is why we need media and digital citizenry taught in school. Kids grow up with computers, but they don’t know how to really use all the tech that’s out there. There is also Henry Jenkins’ position of ethical standards not being learned in an always-on world. Being native doesn’t equal being literate. And literacy has changed.

The following is a discussion topic that I am leading with @paisian in our Media Literacy course at The New School.

As this week’s topic is Digital Participatory Culture we (Neal and Joel) thought it only suitable to collaborate entirely on the discussion piece to kick this off. We used Google Wave to formulate our ideas and get a basic outline of what’s to come and then moved it into a shared Google Document to put the last formatting touches on it.

The discussion this week will break down what we took away as the most significant aspects of the new digital participatory culture and attempt to stratify all of these new ideas with your experiences, thoughts, ideas and research.

Many of us in this course have grown up with computers and the Internet present for most of our lives. Those of us who were recently undergrads most likely connected pretty distinctly with both the Jenkins and Watkins readings.

Jenkins defines this new participatory culture as,

“A culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.”
(pp. 3)

With so much of our day-to-day lives wrapped up in the digital world, at some point you have to jump in and start contributing to the discussion. As Jörg has mentioned, Jenkins has shown us that in order to stay relevant and alive in the digital culture, we need to participate in it. Today, that takes many forms.
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I saw this on Gizmodo tonight and had to go watch them. Absolutely brilliant.

Check out their YouTube Channel »