I love being in a place of learning! Yesterday, we had
the good fortune of meeting with Dr. Henry Jenkins, a media scholar from the
University of Southern California. He sat in on our Teaching First Year
Composition Practicum and spoke with us about the ever-changing role of media
and technology in our lives. He writes about participatory culture and digital
media.
As educators, it is our task to keep up with the times
while maintaining academic standards. We need to make our information relevant in order for it to matter to our students.
Dr. Jenkins explained to us that a lot of educators and academics he meets find it
difficult to incorporate new technologies into the classroom, and they are
baffled by his willingness to embrace them.
“Yes, it's true,” he told us. “I learned how to think in graduate
school. But I have also kept on thinking since then.” I thought that was a
profound statement that speaks to many people’s reluctance to flow with the changing times. Rather than hold back the tide, Dr. Jenkins leans
into digital culture. After all, it's here to stay.
Dr. Jenkins reminded us that everything is a remix. Even Melville was a master re-mixer of his
time, shifting genres from chapter to chapter in Moby Dick. We may not see it this way now, but it was revolutionary for the time. So what did Dr.
Jenkins do to get people reading this classic book? He asked them to re-write it.
He calls this participatory learning: getting students engaged in a text by asking
them to apply it to their world. What would the whale trade look like today?
Who would Captain Ahab be? But what Dr. Jenkins is really promoting with this
project is giving students the chance to pursue their own interests and
passions. This is where we find the key to learning.
Unfortunately, our education system does not make writing
accessible to the youth. As Dr. Jenkins remarked, “If we taught sex education
like we do writing, we’d die out in a generation!”
But actually, according to Dr. Jenkins, this generation writes a lot. They just don’t
think of it as such because it’s not writing in the traditional sense. Maybe it’s a blog
post about the Jonas Brothers or a response on a World of
Warcraft forum; the internet houses hundreds of different ways for people
to connect and communicate with one another. Because this writing is not
happening with pen and paper or in a classroom, does that make it any less
valuable? And how can we bring the kinds of communications that happen
naturally over the internet into the classroom?
I was intrigued by Dr. Jenkins' stance towards social networks and
digital media as a learning tool, and I think there’s a lot of wisdom behind
it (speaking of social networks, you can now follow The Restless Writer on Facebook!). Why not use a blog post or a Youtube video to explore the rhetorical
situation? Instead of banning Wikipedia, how about analyzing how it works by
tracing the history of a Wikipedia page? Digital culture can be a friendly point of
entry for students to embrace learning and writing.
According
to Dr. Jenkins, and I agree with him, we should be moving towards a creative
society, and anything that we can do to get people thinking and acting creatively is valuable.
As someone who has apprehensions about the internet and
social media on the whole, I found his point of view fascinating. But what will happen to reading books? I
asked him. The novel isn’t going anywhere, he reassured me. We need to keep in mind that communication is
the key, without getting caught up on the particular mode of communication. There are multiple literacies, and each mode of communication serves a different purpose. How-to books, for example, are probably not as effective as how-to
videos. On the other hand, novels as a self-reflexive form are valuable for conveying the "inter-states" of being. Novels ask a reader to imagine what a world looks like, while film asks
their audience to figure out what the characters are thinking. They both
require imagination, the key to creativity.
And so, fellow writers and friends, I’ll leave you with this last question:
What does writing do that
other technologies don’t?
Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll check out this short video with Dr. Jenkins!
