Participatory Culture

As noted by Jenkins (2006), a participatory culture is defined as “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.” (p.3) This concept aptly underlies the assessment tool we talked about in class the week before, namely, electronic portfolios, or interchangeably blogs. First, an alternative to standardized tests, e-portfolios serve as a venue onto which learners upload assorted artifacts they see as reflections of their learning process, be it journals, essays, pictures, and the like. And thanks to the wide availability of commercially-oriented websites that give away free spaces along with an almost plethoric number of blog templates, building a weblog is only a few clicks away. On top of that, as opposed to the print materials characterizing the more traditional vanilla-foldered portfolios, the multimodality featuring e-portfolio makes possible the incorporation of sound files, animation, and even video clips to further enrich and personalize the blog, a function that embodies the concept of relatively low barriers to artistic expression. Furthermore, e-portfolio possesses the function that enables viewers of a blog to comment on it in terms of the aspect that arouses emotion of any sort in them. With this function, e-portfolio nurtures this learning community among bloggers that promotes and values a feedback-giving culture. This somehow lends support to the “beta-reading” (or editorial feedback) brought about by Jenkins (2006) that is believed to contribute to the growth of bloggers as writers by virtue of the giving and receiving of feedback. Last but not least, unlike the traditional portfolios whose target audience is usually if not always the teacher, e-portfolios are open to anyone with internet access. Knowing that friends as well as strangers will be reading their artifacts/work, bloggers would definitely care and take caution when it comes to what goes on their blogs, since to certain extent the blog would come to represent them in the virtual world. This, again, reifies the concept of a participatory culture stating that bloggers “feel some degree of social connection with one another and care what other people think about what they have created.” (Jenkins, 2006:7) (The video clip below demonstrates another reason why bloggers should take caution in dispatching postings. Check it out!) All in all, e-portfolios, a.k.a. blogs, could serve as a pertinent example of the participatory culture put forth in Jenkin’s article.



*This video clip comes from YouTube.


Ever since the class we had on Monday, this thought have been lingering in my mind till this moment: does the multimodality of the internet stifle the imagination of learners? True, the old “mono-modal” written texts indeed allow more room for imagination. You get to paint the pictures of the good-looking prince/princess in your mind when dealing with a story that portrays everything simply by words. So, when the multimodal internet kicks in and saves those thousand words that describe a picture by simply giving the picture away, readers/viewers are left with very little imagining to do. I find it hard to disagree with this argument because it is so true. Yet, to look at this multimodality issue from a different perspective, I guess we might say it provides viewers another motivation to keep on viewing because it presents the information in a more vivid and lively manner. Plus, we might think of it as offering those not-so-into-reading people the access to the information that would otherwise be absent from their world.