Participatory Culture in the Classroom: Moving Beyond Personal Learning
Here’s another post in my series on Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. I’ve finally finished the book (thanks, flight to Boston!) so look for maybe one more post on it coming soon.
In Chapter 6, Shirky looks back over many of the examples he shares earlier in the book and places them on a continuum. At one of the continuum are activities that exist largely for the personal good of participants and require relatively little interaction among those participants. At the other end are activities that exist largely for the social good and require high levels of interaction and engagement among participants. Since I read Chapter 6 on my way to the Turning Technologies Users Conference at Harvard University, where I gave a keynote on participatory culture, clickers, and deep learning, I’ll discuss Shirky’s continuum using some examples drawn from my talk.
Personal – Shirky describes personal activities as those in which participants derive value mostly from the act of sharing itself, even if it’s unclear to the participant who the recipients of that sharing might be. Shirky’s example is the lolcats phenomenon, in which people post to websites pictures of their cats with funny captions.
In my talk, I discussed the ubiquitous Facebook Like button. You can now “Like” just about anything you see on Facebook or the rest of the Web. While “Liking” someone online can have some communal value (see below), largely it’s a method of public self-expression, which is satisfying for the person expression himself or herself, but not a big deal for others. The other example of a personal activity I shared in my talk was the act of texting or calling in one’s vote for a contestant on American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance.
Communal – In contrast to personal activities, in which sharing is largely one-way, communal activities are those in which mutual sharing drives much of the value for participants. Shirky uses the example of Meetup.com groups for women struggling with post-partum depression. It’s the sharing and discussion among participations that make these groups valuable. In contrast to public activities (see below), communal activities are of little value to non-participants. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Liking something via Facebook is largely a personal activity, but if you pull up the Facebook page for, say, Justin Bieber or Glee or some local Tea Party group, you’re going to see more than just a few hundred or few thousand “Likes.” You’ll see hundreds or thousands of comments, as well. Liking something on Facebook is a way to connect with a community of other Facebook users with similar interests, and connection often leads to sharing. The more value there is for participants in peer-to-peer discussion on Facebook fan page, the more the act of “Liking” that page becomes a communal activity.
The other example of a communal activity I mentioned in my talk was what’s sometimes called “event TV.” These days certain television programs, particularly serialized genre shows (like Lost), awards shows (like the Oscars), and sports shows (like the weekly games as well as bigger events like the World Cup), aren’t just discussed the next day at the watercooler; they’re discussed live as they air through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The live, fan-to-fan discussion has become a big part of the appeal of these shows for many.
Public – Shirky describes public activities as having similar levels of interaction as communal ones but with different goals. Public activities are those that aim to create something of real value for non-participants. Shirky’s example is the open-source software community, which requires robust participation from its members in order to create software useful to non-members. One element of that robust participation that Shirky notes is the following of community norms around participation. He notes that communities that aim to create something of external value often fall apart due to internal threats, such as lack of commitment to community goals. Preventing and dealing with internal threats requires some kind of shared governance, whether that’s a “brutal technical meritocracy” as Shirky describes the Apache web server open-source community or more a “more supportive culture” like that of Responsible Citizens, a group of young people who volunteer their time to pick up trash in markets in Lahore, Pakistan.
My talk didn’t include a great example of a public activity, but my discussion of serious fan communities was headed in that direction. I mentioned the community of World of Warcraft fans who engage in collaborative, sophisticated, and mathematical reverse engineering of the mechanics of that computer game in order to excel in the game environment. That’s largely a communal activity, but my other example of a serious fan community, Lostpedia, is somewhat more of a public activity. Lostpedia is a wiki devoted to the TV show Lost, and it now consists of over 7,000 articles written and edited by fans. Like many wikis, much of the value of Lostpedia is experienced by those not contributing to the wiki. I don’t have any stats, but I would guess that at least 90% of those who visited Lostpedia frequently during the time Lost was on the air never contributed to an article. In that sense, the wiki generated some amount of public good, even if the “good” in this case was an increased understanding of the mythos of a fictional TV show.
It’s also worth noting that contributors to Lostpedia had to abide by some fairly strict community rules, such as not posting spoilers for episodes that hadn’t aired in the US yet. If those rules weren’t enforced, the wiki would quickly lose value for many of its community members.
Civic – Shirky describes these activities as structured much like public activities in that they require robust participation and shared governance. However, civic activities, unlike public activities, aim to change society so that they benefit members of society who might not even know about the activities, much less participate in them. Shirky describes one such activity, a Facebook group called the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose, and Forward Women, a group formed to protest violence against women by religious fundamentalists in the Indian city of Mangalore. A local group of fundamentalists had attacked dozens of women whose only “crime” was hanging out at a bar. The Facebook group retaliated by coordinating a mass mailing of pink women’s underwear to the leader of this group. The scale of this activity (the Facebook group had over 15,000 members according to Shirky) got the attention of local politicians and authorities who put key members of the fundamentalist group in jail in advance of their next planned attack on “loose” women. As a result, women who hadn’t even heard of the Facebook group benefitted from the group’s activities.
I didn’t mention any civic activities in my talk at Harvard, but in an earlier version of the talk this summer at the Louisville clickers conference, I mentioned a few crowdsourced emergency response activities, including Ushahidi, a service Shirky mentions frequently in his book. I first heard about Ushahidi a couple of years ago on the World’s Technology Podcast, but it’s since received lots of news coverage for its work in crowdsourcing information the Haiti earthquake earlier this year. Ushahidi is an open-source tool that allows people in crisis areas to submit reports on local conditions to a central website via text messaging (among other submission options). These reports are mapped and aggregated in ways useful to first responders and others interested in helping. I would consider Ushahidi a civic activity, and I believe Shirky would, too. The collection of hair clippings from salons to create “hair booms” in response to the recent Gulf oil spill is another civic activity, as was the rapid coordination of volunteers via social media by Hands on Nashville here in Tennessee during the recent flooding.
What implications does this taxonomy have for education? I’m reminded of the social motivators Shirky describes earlier in Cognitive Surplus. Our desires to be in communities, to share our ideas and work, and to make a positive difference in the world drive our participation in these different types of activities. These social motivators can be very strong, but they’re ones we often ignore when designing learning experiences for our students. Most student participation in a course is a kind of personal activity. The problem sets and papers a student completes are largely of benefit only to that student. Personal activities are great if there’s an intrinsic interest in participating, but if the interest is only extrinsic (as it is for many students) they’re artificial and deadening.
What if learning became for our students less of a personal activity and more of a communal one? Or even a public or civic one? These kinds of learning experiences tap into our students’ desires for community and for sharing, which is useful because, as Shirky writes, “Social motivations can drive far more participation than personal motivations alone.” To what extent is the learning in your courses communal? Or public? Or even civic?
Image: “I’ll Give You All I Can…” by Brandon Warren, Creative Commons licensed.