Skills for a 'participatory culture' world

Henry Jenkins has written a paper for the MacArthur Foundation which is all about what he calls: "participatory culture" and what this means for 'media literacy'.

He and colleagues have also identified core cultural competencies and social skills they believe the kids of today have got to pick up if they want to participate fully.

They also argue that many are acquiring these skills informally from the way they use digital media.

It might be useful to think of these alongside your own digital publishing plans. Does what you are offering allow participation on these levels:

Play – the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking – the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgement – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Read more HERE (start with the post by Alan Moore and move on to Jenkins own blog.