Students as Prosumers By: Elizabeth Collins Students today are no longer only recipients of media, but are now

creators of media. In order to learn how to successfully fulfill the role of prosumer, Henry Jenkins argues students must learn the New Media Literacies. New Media Literacies are defined as, A set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. Although Jenkins essay Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture provides a good definition of all 11 New Media Literacies, the goal of his essay was to shift the focus of learning from technological access to opportunities for participation and the development of cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement in public, community, creative and economic lives or a participatory culture. With this goal in mind, he makes the most convincing case for Play and the least convincing case for Multitasking. Jenkins states that a participatory culture is one with: 1) Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement; 2) Strong support for creating and sharing creations with others; 3) Some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices; 4) Members who believe that their contributions matter; and 5) Members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least, they care what other people think about what they have created). Play is defined as the capacity to experiment with the surroundings as a form of problem solving and what Jenkins article illustrates is that play leads to strong student motivation. When students are engaged (or connected), motivated, and feeling capable, they learn more. Students often feel disconnected to core academic areas such as mathematics because they do not understand how it matters in their real lives. Therefore, using play is a great way to integrate core academics into activities that students find enjoyable because it allows them to see how they can use these core areas as tools for completing tasks that do matter to them. In the case of Sam, his enthusiasm for baseball cards led him to acquire the necessary skills to interpret the data on the cards (i.e. statistics and phonics). He was not originally interested in these core academic areas, but his love for playing with the cards, created a deep sense of motivation to learn that led him to the acquisition of this knowledge. He turned himself into an expert on the subject and developed a strong sense of feeling capable in the process. Motivating students is the number one classroom management problem in our classrooms and play almost covertly handles the problem for us because students see the activities as fun and engaging. We do not have to push our students because their own desires to learn are ignited in play. Students want to explore and since it is in play, they do not feel the emotional stake of failing which under traditional settings may have affected their feelings of being capable and resulted in them giving up on the task. Therefore, play produces relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement because they are not internalizing failures. Students achieve self-actualization through play because they begin to realize what they are capable of doing. This transfers into the capabilities of them being a part of a participatory culture because they have developed a skill set that allows them to be involved in society and feel that their contributions matter. They have knowledge in areas that allow them to be experts and informal mentors, but more importantly they have developed competencies that allow them to work through problems in the future and to see how core areas in any given situation can lead to expertise. In contrast to Jenkins explanation of play, he does not do a great job of explaining how Multitasking will allow students to be fully involved in a participatory culture. Multitasking is defined as the ability to scan the environment and shift focus on salient ideas. Nowhere in his descriptions of multitasking does he suggest how a student would use this information to be a creator of media. The entire description of multi-tasking is strictly about students being consumers of information. If the new role of students in society is that of a prosumer, where they are both producers and consumers, then efforts should be made to show how all the New Media Literacies connect to the dual role. For example, in todays culture we can multi-task as producers of media when we use technology to simultaneously update our twitter feeds, Facebook, blogs, etc. His discussion about multi-tasking would have been more

rounded if he had included examples for the roles of a prosumer, meaning showing ways it helps us be consumers and producers. The discussions of multi-tasking do not connect to any of the conditions in which Jenkins states are necessary for a participatory culture to exist, nor does it illustrate how students can benefit from learning in ways that allow them to be participants in a participatory society. The focus of multi-tasking in the essay is only about being a consumer, thus making multi-tasking no different than having students be only consumers of information from teachers and textbooks. In order to see why all of the New Media Literacies matter, we need to see a connection to the role of students as prosumers.