Participatory Culture in the Present Day

Participatory culture is the idea of creating something of meaning as a group or community. On a small scale perspective, participatory culture could be something such as the passing down of a family heirloom that someone created within the family. For myself, my great grandfather was a woodworker and he made a bookshelf that has been passed down for generations with myself currently in possession. On a bigger scale, participatory culture could be a group of people that come together with similar interests and skills that are actively participating in creating and engaging with New Literacies. These groups could use types of media that interests them collectively to try and influence others such as using video making for commercials or blog entries for social media to influence political aspects in life.

I can embrace the best of participatory culture into everyday practices of my classroom by allowing students to work in groups and use their media/technology strengths to present information of their findings. I think it would be an interesting idea here to survey what students like to do and then place them in groups where the student interests in the group all match, so all students that like video making would be in the video making group, all the students that like to do blogs would be in the blog group, and so on. Students could be given a topic or problem to solve and then it would be up to the students to find a creative way to present their information to the class using whatever means of presenting that they would like. This idea would be great for a statistics class when students are trying to prove whether or not something is statistically significant or if they have to prove if one option is better than another option. The possibilities are endless!