from the blogs of Henry Jenkins and Liz Losh:

At Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit Henry Jenkins (Team Cultural Studies) and Elizabeth Losh (Team Critical Theory) offer a progress report on whether and in what ways the public schools and universities are going to be able to absorb or meaningfully deploy what Jenkins calls “participatory culture.” Rather than an abstract discussion of a theoretical construct drawn from their supposedly opposite positions studying fan culture and institutional rhetoric respectively, the two will discuss concrete experiences of young people acting appropriately or not, inside or outside the classroom. What might a participatory learning culture look like? What policies make it hard for even supportive teachers to achieve in their classrooms? What stakeholders would need to be engaged in order to change the current cultures of our school? How might participatory learning take place beyond the schoolhouse gates? What is everyone afraid of?

I desperately wanted to go to this conference in October but could not get travel time or scrape up the personal funds to go although I hope to attend in 2012 if the conference is held again.  This video is timely as I’m drafting blog posts this weeks reflecting on the pushback I’ve encountered from students and faculty this semester on participatory learning.   I’ll be writing more about this video and my own experiences as a teacher and librarian over the last semester a little later this week; I’ll also be discussing the library’s efforts to nudge toward more inquiry based research as well as efforts to scaffold digital composition and the questions I’m left with midyear.