I thoroughly enjoyed reading the articles and watching the demonstration of Scratch in the reading assignment for the current week. Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of the article was when I was reading the Jenkins paper, Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st Century, and read the examples of how middle school and high school students gained technology skills through online recreation activities and developed these skills into start-up companies and future endeavors.
To me this really demonstrates how participation in online environments can produce a desire to learn and the acquisition of skills can be obtained in an informal setting. Because I work with adult learners, I tend to place a lot of value informal training. As adults, life tends to happen quickly without a lot of time to spare. Informal training can provide the information adult learners need at that moment in small micro-units of learning and the todays technologies allow the adult learner to access informal trainings at the most opportune time for the learner.
The new media literacies that are introduced in the Jenkins reading offer new skills that will be required to be effective participants in our media rich society. There are a number of new skills for media literacy that would be effective within my population of adult learners. For example, there are a number of organizations were I work and often times, they need to come together to complete a task, they must use their Collective Intelligence in order to achieve the desired results of management. Collective Intelligence becomes important in any type of collaborative environment – physical or virtual. By having the ability to share one’s individual knowledge with others of different backgrounds, you can often put the pieces together to solve a problem.
Two other skills that could be easily integrated into my educational environment are Networking and Negotiating. Within my current environment, I feel very much that these two skills are dependent upon each other. In order to effectively understand the value in a specific topic or content area, it is important to understand the differences in opinions across the various organizations. While the organizations support the same goal, each organization is focused on different topics. It is almost like creating a recipe, you cannot remove an ingredient and expect the recipe to remain unchanged. Learning is the same way, we cannot just disregard an organization. By networking, we familiarize ourselves with other individuals who are knowledgeable in specific content areas, when we need information regarding those content areas, we can almost always rely on our network of connections to help us with our understanding.
For the adult learner, I think we need to provide the learner with more informal training that relies on these social interactions. The informal training will provide the adult learner with a greater opportunity to fill in the gaps of their knowledge and explore tangential content in what is hopefully an easy and accessible manner. However, at least where I work, adult learners are always concerned about receiving credit for courses they have completed. With informal training this can be challenging. However, I do believe that it is within a teaching departments rights to offer equivalency types of assessments. Why should we make adult learners, or students for that matter, sit through a course in which they are already capable of passing. I think these new media literacies and skills need to be introduced to students at a young age in order to build confidence on Web Technologies. In conjunction with the new media literacies, we can use virtual technologies to introduce concepts in an informal setting.