Skills
The theoretical foundation for our workshop is based on the paper “Confronting the challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st century”, by Henry Jenkins.
In this paper, Jenkins describes a set of skills which are needed, or need to be developed, to be able to fully participate in contemporary media-rich society. As said, the way media is embedded in our lives is changing at a rapid pace. Not only do we consume media, but we as an audience are acting also as media producers.
For our workshop we picked out some of the skills as described in Jenkins’ paper. These four skills -collective intelligence, performance, judgment and networking- are cited below.
From Jenkins’ paper “Confronting the challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st century” :
“Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery”
“Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal”
“Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources”
“Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information”
We’ve picked specifically these skills (out of a total of 11), because in our view, they play an important role in the way our target-audience interacts with media. We chose young teenagers in the age-group of 13 to around 20 as our target audience, for different reasons:
First of all, these so-called millenials (as always, there are different definitions of the term), are growing up in a networked society. They are also the ones who grew up with downloading, uploading, msn, social media, youtube etc.
They are the ones consuming and producing, navigating trough cyberspace with the ease of a toddler on his tricycle.
Furthermore, we believe these teens are still susceptible to any sort of “media-literacy-training” that is offered to them. In a traditional format, or in a way that is more in line with their daily online activities (e.g. online tutorials).
