>>My grad students were
interviewing high-school-aged students
around the world.
In almost every case, what we
heard was young people had a richer
intellectual and creative life
outside of school than inside it,
that the things they learned
from and the things they cared
about were things they did
after the school day was over.
>>Participatory culture describes a
world where everyone participates,
where we take media in our own hands,
where we have the capacity, often,
to produce media, share media.
I trace participatory culture back
to the middle of the 19th century
when there was a Tory
printing-press movement
and high-school-aged kids
were producing publications,
hand-laying type down and sending
them across a national network.
So the Amateur Press Association
in the 19th century paved the way
for science-fiction fandom in
the 20th century, for radio,
amateur radio and ham radio,
down through the zine movements
around Riot Grrrls and punk rock,
the indie movement around Seattle
and the World Trade Organization,
down to the rise of digital media.
>>So there's a whole trajectory of
examples where communities begin
to produce media to share ideas among
themselves and where they follow some
of the practices we might
associate with a folk culture.
>>In a folk culture, media is
produced not to make money.
People produce media to
share it with each other.
When someone makes a quilt, as
my grandmother used to make,
people gathered together.
There's no expert.
There are people who are
learning from each other.
Skills get passed from
someone who knows a little more
to someone who knows a little less.
It's a social mode of production.
It's a gift, typically,
that the quilt is given.
Until fairly recently,
it was not sold.
It was passed on to a
member of the community
as the community acknowledged
a ritual in their life.
>>When we think about
media on the Internet,
it does many of those things, right?
The fan communities
I have spent much
of my career studying write
stories not because they want to get
in the industry or they
want to make money,
but because they love
telling stories and they want
to tell stories to each other.
>> If we think about YouTube,
and many of the people
on YouTube are producing media
because there's something
they vitally want to share.
It might be a skateboarder
who did a great stunt
and had their friends record
it and paste it online.
It might be an amateur remix artist
who saw a TV show they
loved and set it to music.
It could be a political commentator
or someone doing a video blog to talk
about their everyday life.
All of that becomes part
of what I'm describing
as a participatory culture.
>>The question is really, well,
how do we go from participating
in our culture to participating in
our political and civic structures?
If we look at, for example, the
young people who made videos
to support the Obama
campaign a year or so back,
how many of them got
their start making movies
of themselves skateboarding or
making fan films or whatever?
They acquired their skill by
simply playing around with media,
in the terms of the
Digital Youth Project,
"messing around" comes first.
They were messing around
with technology,
"geeking out" around a
certain set of subject matter.
So what I'm interested in
right now is what would it mean
to "geek out" for democracy?
>>What does it mean to be as
passionate about the future
of your society as you are about
anime, about games, about the sort
of forms of popular culture that
young people are involved with?
>>We could also point to, for
example, the Harry Potter Alliance,
and the Harry Potter Alliance
is a group that organizes
around human-rights
issues around the world.
So Andrew Slack, the
20-something-year-old leader
of the group, said when
he read "Harry Potter,"
what he saw was a story of a
young man who recognized evil
in his society the government
was covering up, the mass media
of his time was lying about
it, but he saw through it,
organized his classmates to
form Dumbledore's Army and went
out and changed the world.
And that's his account of the plot of
"Harry Potter," and he said, "Well,
what if we had a Dumbledore's
Army in our world?
What issues would it tackle?
What are the concerns?
What would you do?"
And now he uses that fantasy of
Dumbledore's Army to mobilize.
Now 100,000 young people
around the world are involved
in the Harry Potter Alliance
and they're going out to deal
with human-rights violations in
the Third World, Darfur, Uganda,
workers' rights issues in the
United States around Walmart,
gay-marriage propositions in Maine
and California they've mobilized on.
They just raised a cargo plane
worth of supplies for Haiti.
So they work on a range of issues.
So the people who are involved
in that are not the kids
who join student government.
They're the kids who were, you know,
playing "Dungeons and Dragons,"
the kids who, you know, were
collecting monster magazines,
the kids who read a lot
of science fiction books.
They're suddenly finding a vehicle to
think politically through these kinds
of interest-driven networks.
And we're seeing again and again
these interest-driven networks are
preparing the way for them to
think of themselves as citizens
in a new way, to mobilize the skills
they developed as contributing
to online communities
and participatory culture
and direct them toward changing
society, changing the world.
>>I mean, I'm deeply
enthusiastic about all
of this stuff that's taking
place outside of school,
but if we leave it there as sort
of the way we create feral children
of the Internet, you know, and
the idea that just let them be,
they'll learn on their own, I
think leaves a lot of kids behind
and it leaves us -- those kids without
adult guidance, without engagement
and skill, validation of those skills
that would prepare them to move
up to higher levels
and to get recognition
for what they've accomplished.
They don't need us snooping
over their shoulders,
but they do need us
watching their backs.
>>What I'm seeing is there are
individual teachers out there
who are incredibly innovative,
dedicated, willing to explore things,
willing to think in open-minded
ways about the future of education,
and those are the battles that are
worth fighting for at this point.
School systems, you
know, are locked down.
Federal policy makes it difficult.
The change, they may be in schools
where all of the affordances
of participatory culture
are locked out.
>>What's important is to
figure out how to bring
that into the educational process.
So, for example, "Moby Dick,"
we had students make changes
in the Wikipedia entries
around Melville and "Moby Dick"
and defend those changes against
challenge through the vetting process
on Wikipedia and to have some
of their changes stand the test
of the community and have to mobilize
evidence and support arguments
and demonstrate the value of the
arguments they made on something
that would be a permanent
part of the public record
and the public conversation
around these books.
And the sense of empowerment
those kids got by participating
in that process is really vital, but
to think of all the schools who say,
"Wikipedia is bad, let's not
let that in our classroom,"
that's the experience that
so many kids in America have.
>>In the short term, it's about
getting this stuff in the hands
of teachers who will
want to make a difference
and giving them the validation
and encouragement they need
to keep fighting the good fight on
behalf of the new media literacies.
