Confronting the Challenges of A Participatory Culture (Fifteen Plus Years Later) (Part Two)

In part two of this series on the writing and publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, longtime media literacy advocate Tessa Jolls interviews two of my co-authors for the report: Alice Robison and Ravi Purushotma about their experience, what ideas from the report they think has survived the test of time, and how these ideas about education relate to their current professional and family lives. Margaret Weigel, the Research Director for the project, tragically passed away a few years ago. Katie Clinton was unable to participate.

Henry Jenkins:    Ravi Purushotma was one of the master’s students at the time. He came to us with a very strong commitment to thinking about new media in relation to learning and education. His particular fascination was language learning. He was doing really interesting things in his own life to try to learn languages using everything from video games to his iPod, to immerse himself into new language. He seemed absolutely the right person to do this work.

Margaret Weigel had just graduated from the program and was looking for work after her time with us.  We hired her as the research director of that project. The research directors play a really crucial role in my approach. As co-director of the program, I was pulled in so many different directions. I was on planes constantly, raising money, trying to manage a lot of different research initiatives. I would be distracted from one moment to the next, and I needed people for each project who would wake up every morning thinking about that project and would grab my attention when things needed to happen. Margaret played this role admirably through this phase of the research. 

Alice Robinson was hired as our postdoc to work on this project. She was a classmate of Katie Clinton who had just moved to Boston. Katie and Alice had been students of James Paul Gee at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I had met them during trips to visit Gee and Kurt Squire and they had made strong impressions on me. I'd liked both of them very much and felt that they would cross pollinate between the game centered research that Gee was doing and the more fan directed research that I had been doing. This was a good team, especially given MIT did not have its own education school for me to draw upon.

Tessa Jolls:It's interesting to look back on it and see what were the takeaways, and definitely, the participatory culture went worldwide. It was just incredible that it just kind of spread like wildfire.  So definitely, there was a need out there. There was a hunger out there for this new way of looking at the world. Were you expecting that kind of reaction, Henry? How did you feel at the time in terms of having done the work and released it?

Henry Jenkins:We had no idea what the response was going to be. MacArthur told me that they had very mixed reception on previous white papers that they had issued from research. So my expectations were relatively low.  We wrote it collaboratively using software that allowed us to share the text in process with each other, we were really trying to apply the technologies we were talking about. Ravi kept us state of the art in terms of the tools we were using to write the report. 

As we finished that first draft, Connie Yowell decided it made sense to bring in a developmental editor to increase the clarity and make it more widely accessible.  We worked with that editor closely. Yowell saw that there was real potential with us and our report became something that was really targeted at diverse stakeholders. 

Fairly late in the process, we realized that we needed not just to describe the skills and the research behind them, but also give concrete examples of how teachers could deploy them in their classes. That's where the postdocs particularly came into play. We had these brainstorming sessions where we brought that whole team together and just said, here's a skill, what do we know that's going on out there, where do we look for more examples. We reached out to media literacy organizations of all kinds to fill in those holes there. That's become an important part of the report, even though that may be the most dated part because it was describing prototypes, some of which took off, some of which didn't but it captures what was happening in the world as people saw this change coming. We were trying to get ready for it. 

But no, I didn't expect anywhere near the reception that that report got. I'm still floored by the number of discussions that I've heard about that took place as that report was released to the world. It's worth saying the two reports were released in parallel, meaning, Ito's report and my report were announced at this event at the Museum of Natural History and simultaneously a press event was held in Second Life. So that was MacArthur trying to use a new toolkit to release its reports to the world. 

Alice Robison:  I wanted to make sure that… Henry talked about Margaret because, as you know, she had breast cancer, and it was pretty severe, and she passed very quickly, and we all miss her. Margaret was just an incredibly, cool, Gen-X chick, and-- she was a true artist, and a radical and really representative of the Gen Xers. She played bass. She wore Doc Martens every day. She’s just a really cool chick and having her be a part of this paper, I miss her and I really think she would have loved to have talked to you about it. I I’m sure Margaret would be thrilled to know you were doing this.

In a true Margaret way, actually, she announced it on Facebook. She said, “Look guys, it’s not looking good, and I’ve got breast cancer, and I’m going to go in for one more round of treatment,” but it was very quick with her, like she did not catch it early. She said, “I’d appreciate it if you could just post something here,” and we did, and we all wrote to her and posted things, and her brother read them to her, and then it was I think a day or two later that he posted and said, “Thank you all. I read them all to her. She heard everything you said before…” and then she just died. It was, of course, shocking and awful, but at the same time, it was cool that she allowed us all to use that space to tell her how much we love her, and that she got to know that, and she used that tool in order to…

I do remember presenting the report at the National Media Literacy Conference in St. Louis, and I just remember how incredibly well received it was by a small minority of people who were excited about what we were talking about. It’s always true whenever you present radical ideas to educators. It’s always the minority who are most enthusiastic and most excited because they’re the closest to those changes that are happening. The further away you are, the more skeptical you are and that’s just true of anything. That minority of people were excited to know that they weren’t the only ones who were seeing the changes that we were seeing and they were so thrilled to get the validation that they had been seeking for a long time, and so for that, I’m still incredibly grateful.

There’s always going to be changes in platforms, right? There’s always going to be changes in applications and tools, but I think the principles that we described in the paper are still true. What we wrote in that paper is still very much true about distributed storytelling, and distributed cognition, and the ways that all of these media are specifically designed and created by teams of people in a very social way in a way that’s meant to be appreciated in social ways by people who love that content.

I have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old. I was explaining to their teachers, not too long ago, that for them, YouTube stars are what rock stars were to us when we were young. My nine-year-old is begging me to have her own YouTube channel because she wants to be a media creator and create content for large groups of fans. She’s not thinking about, “Oh, this is going to appeal to a specific tailored-group.” She’s thinking, “I want everyone to love Minecraft as much as I do.” I think that was one thing that we probably could have been more articulate about.

We talked about, what was it, the transparency problem, the participation gap, and the ethics challenge.  The transparency problem is the one that most people are surprised by, meaning the persistence of the myths of the digital native will never die and I fought for years against this, and it still persists, engrained in millennial parents because a lot of these folks we were writing about then are now parents of their own children.

I’m part of an online summer camp for kids here, and we are spending hours talking about how to get all of our kids together on the same Minecraft server, and these other parents are just really resistant to think about how they might have something to offer their kids about how to be present in a collaborative online space and it’s so surprising to me that they would be so resistant to think, “Hey, maybe I should teach my kids a little bit about ‘password,’ or why you might want to think about muting yourself, or turning off your video, or think about what you say to others, or what does ‘griefing’ mean and why is it important not to grief someone, or why do we want to be careful about respecting what other people build in that space,” and they just assume  that their kids can just jump right onto this game and its online space with other people and know what to do. The transparency problem is still a huge concern of mine, and we don’t talk about it enough. 

We do talk a lot about the participation gap and the ethics challenge; but for example, rural internet is still very weak, still very limited, and it’s… we’re looking at things like how are we going to have distributed learning come August. Out here, we start school the very first week in August, some districts start at the end of July, and we still don’t have plans for how we’re going to do online learning for rural districts here in Arizona, how are we going to get them access, yeah, or what can be done on mobile devices. The Navajo Nation here in Arizona is one of the worst-hit COVID-19 population. I don’t imagine anyone that’s going to want to put those kids in classroom. What do we do if you don’t even have access to water? How are you going to have access to the internet? These things are really difficult, and I do believe that schools want the best for their students. I do strongly believe that there are limited numbers of things that can be covered in any given day, but the participation gap is still just as powerful as it was 16 years ago and the transparency issue is barely studied at all, so that’s something that frustrates me.

I don’t know if you know Katie Salen Tekinbas. She’s at UC Irvine. Katie Salen Tekinbas did the school project called “Quest to Learn” in New York City, that’s a school based on principles of gaming, Salen and Mimi Ito created something called “Connected Camps.” My  nine-year-old is participating… she’s done every single camp they’ve offered. It’s been wonderful to see how the principles that we wrote about are enacted in online digital curriculum and folks who are teaching these classes have no idea where this stuff comes from. They’re just thrilled to be teaching a class in Minecraft, but it’s fun for me to see my kid do the kinds of things that I wrote about 16 years ago.

Katie Clinton and I are very close, and we went to graduate school together, and we both went to work with Henry together. Katie’s son, same thing. It’s been so great to see and… I feel like all we did was really articulate what everyone who is immersed in digital media consumption at that time already knew. We just put it down on paper.

At the time Katie Clinton and I were finishing our dissertations and we were doing research on how video games were particularly good instantiations of what we already knew about learning science and how people learn, that’s different from saying, “Video games should be used to teach content areas,” okay? We were constantly trying to distinguish between video games as good instantiations of the research on learning versus folks who were in classroom being told to teach content with curriculum that was handed to them who wanted to use video games as a vehicle for that. Those are two different things, and so in the media literacy paper, we didn’t want to make that same mistake. We didn’t want to reduce what we were observing to a set of skills because we didn’t want that to be interpreted as, “Here’s the formula that you should be teaching in your class. Teach them how to blog, how to create YouTube channel.” Instead we were saying, “No, no, no. You need to teach them how to look at these phases in a different way. What you do with that is up to you,” but these phases are being created, and interpreted, and used in all kinds of fascinating new ways, what that ends up being translated to in the classroom is up to you because it’s your classroom, but we don’t want to reduce it down to a simple activity. 

Those little sections on what might be done, those are really tough to write. We understood the need. When we got feedback from readers, “Well, we want examples. We want examples,” and so we offered those examples, and I think they were good examples, but if you’ll notice, they’re not curriculum. Each of those sections, what might be done. Their ideas, their examples, they’re meant to be taken as such. They’re instantiations of the framework and examples of things that we had seen people do, and so we wanted to hold them up as good examples of the kinds of things we’re talking about without saying, “Here. Go teach X.”

Let’s say you’re teaching world history, that’s very, very different from teaching in a radio and TV lab. You can still use these principles in both content areas, but maybe one is going to be much more applied and the other one is going to be much more conceptual, but both can use these principles and use the framework in equally successful ways. There’s so many fantastic examples of how you could talk about distributed cognition in a whole class on the video game, Legends and use it  for example, in the Connected Camp. My daughter takes a weekly class in Minecraft, learning about ancient history of Rome, and they’re using all these principles, appropriation, distributed cognition, multitasking, all of the same things that we describe in the paper, they’re doing in that space and it’s because Katie Salen said, “Hey, Minecraft is a great place to explore what it was like to be a citizen in Ancient Rome,” but it’s not a class on ancient Roman history for a nine-year-old. …

 AliceRobison, Ph.D.,is co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, LLC.

 Ravi Purushotma: Henry was just always a brilliant mind and able to predict things quite well. It’s been a blast over the last couple decades to have had such insight into where things would be going. I mean, we really took it for granted just how aware of the direction things were changing we became by being around him.

If we were re-writing the report today, we might use some different language. There was a lot of talk about things like affinity spaces back in the time and maybe today we’d be using slightly different vocabulary. But, fundamentally, the underlying concepts of how we need to develop the skills to be able to take in information from society accurately, the skills to produce content and share information back with society in the best means possible -- that students need to find their voice. I think the underlying concepts still form the same fundamental conversation we’re having today.

Tessa Jolls:  Sure, yeah. But conceptually, you think, “Hey, yeah, we captured it,” and so that’s really gratifying to feel like it’s being used or could be used today. I think in that regard, the report really did make an impact at that time. What was your perspective about the impact that the report had?

Ravi Puralena:  I’m actually probably not super aware of the impact. I definitely got a sense it was getting good distribution. I would meet people randomly in social circles who would say, “Oh, my God. We just read your report in my grad seminar at Stanford!” So, events like that definitely gave me a sense that it seemed to have been an impactful report. But, for the most part, I had switched over to educational game design after graduating and I was a bit out of the media literacy discussion afterwards.

I guess I was trusting Henry a bit on where the report would land and where it would all go. Back at that age, I was much less attached to the process and just super excited to be a part of it all. I knew I wanted to make a difference in the Education and Media landscapes, but there was always, and there still is, a lot of uncertainty in my mind about where the best insertion point for making a change is. For change to happen, a lot of different efforts have to come together in parallel: some people need to take on arguing with the skeptics or traditionalists or policy-makers; some people need to be mentoring the open-minded but hesitant people looking to take their first steps; some people need to be trailblazing with the savvy early adopters and inventing the best possible solutions. In this field, there’s different media forms associated with each of those: the first one needs to be books and whitepapers like the one we wrote, the second might be things like YouTube guides and the latter might be things like programming mobile apps. Given my strong technical background, I always felt suited to the later. There also was simply more job opportunities being in the latter than the former. Also, I tend to get better energy being on the creative/trailblazing side of things rather than the arguing with the skeptics side. Though I’m super grateful for people like Henry who are able to do that role so well, after I graduate I somewhat left that role to them. Instead I was doing things like working with a Fortune 100 company to program an app to help kids in Latin America to create, tell and record stories.

I guess, even when starting the whole paper writing process, I didn’t fully understand what it was and where it could go. I think it’s really stunning for me to think back retrospectively about actually writing the paper. At the start, I don’t think I actually understood what the term “Media Literacy” meant or how to articulate it. I got “21st Century Skills.” But, even half-way through writing the paper, if you had told me “People think about ‘Literacy’ as the ability to read a book or write a paper. But, it’s really the skill of taking information in from society and producing information to contribute to society. You need to be able to take information in from more than just books and create more than just papers in order to really be ‘Literate’ today or have a voice.” I would have responded “Wooooah! I totally never thought of it that way!!!” But, piecing it all together while writing it -- it was a crazy journey to think about how that all came together.

I guess maybe to back up a bit. Originally, I don’t think even Henry knew that the paper was going to be such a big scope or the core focus it ended up being. I got the sense, originally, at the very beginning, that this was kind of my project personally and that maybe he would come in at the end, do a bit of fine touching and what not, but, fundamentally a simple paper I was to write about 21st Century Skills. I had written over a hundred pages of the original first draft before anybody had seen anything. Then, it started to evolve with more discussions from the Foundation and become clear that we were going to turn it into a much more involved paper. Henry was able to step in and pull together the huge gaps in my understanding of the field at the time and take my hundreds of pages, and really expand then edited it into just a much more polished and comprehensively articulated work. Originally, though, it started with a very different scope before evolving to what it became.

Looking back on it, one really unique thing about the paper for the time was the way it involved having multiple people writing it simultaneously. It's something we take for granted nowadays, having such easy access to Google Docs, but, I think the tools used for collaborating really impact the content of the writing. Perhaps one reason the paper was received so well is because of how unified the different voices of the authors felt compared to other papers at the time. And perhaps one reason for that was because it was one of the first papers of its scope to be written entirely in an online collaborative environment. At the time Google Docs didn’t exist. There was a small startup tool called “Writely” which I had identified and thought could be a good tool for this paper. It was still in beta at the time and incredibly buggy. I knew it was a big ask for all these academics to take a tool as fundamental to them as their word processor and ask them to replace it with the totally new way of doing things in the midst of a project with important deadlines. And the interface was totally unintuitive. I remember how frustrating it was for Henry: at one dinner someone made a comment about what a genius he was and he replied something like “I’m no genius, I can’t even figure out how to operate my word processor!” But, I really admired his willingness to give it a try, to show humility in always asking me for help learning to use a new technical tool and navigating through all its quirks and bugs. I think most people would have just said “Just send me a Word Docs with track changes turned on like I’ve been doing for 20 years. We’re in the middle of a big project. This isn’t the time for me to be learning this Writely thing that you’re fixated on [and is making me feel inept].” Perhaps it’s because they would have felt embarrassed to be the one to say that given the content of what we were writing about. But, for whatever reason, we persevered and I think the level of collaboration we had as a result really changed the tone and voicing of the paper for the better and was a first for its time. Writely was eventually acquired by Google and became Google Docs, so, nowadays it’s essentially the standard way of writing a collaborative paper. But, at the time of Writely Beta -- or ‘Writerly’ as Henry kept calling it -- it was unique.

After I graduated, I then moved from the media literacy side of Henry’s department to the educational video game side. I worked as a research manager in the Education Arcade lab, then for a spin-off, for many years focusing on educational video games design. I had a fellowship in Germany for almost two years teaching classes and meeting with various government officials for discussions about how technology can enhance language learning & education. Then, eventually, I moved to California and have been working largely in the tech industry here, gaining a lot more programming skills and more the technical side of media development. Some more work in educational games, but also just in general industry --  web programming, mobile app development, things like that. When I first got married, I needed to focus really on income and so I was working for an artificial intelligence company creating tools for doing financial audits. Now that my wife is further in her career, I have more flexibility to kind of go back into Educational design. I started making some content for Coursera. I’m hoping someday there’ll be more opportunities to utilize my tech background for more Media Literacy work. Perhaps once I’m a parent I’ll find a way of creating more creative activities and apps for parents and kids. But, currently Media Literacy is more just a hobby. Like, a week or two ago, I made a little video I posted on my facebook page discussing religious texts and what it means for someone from today's literate society to try and interpret something from an oral tradition 2,000 years ago and apply it to their life. I’ve been putting out little videos and things on those kinds of topics and constantly discussing it with people in my religious community, and work life. So, even though I’ve left academia, it’s still a discussion and a movement I love at heart and hope all my different backgrounds will intersect again someday.

Ravi Purushotma currently authors videos, games and apps for clients looking to use digital media to make learning & instruction more engaging.

Next time, We will consider the publication of the report and its subsequent impact on our understanding of media literacy.