>>My grad students were interviewing high-school-aged students
around the world.
In almost every case, what we heard was young people had a richer
intellectual and creative life outside of school than inside it,
that the things they learned from and the things they cared
about were things they did after the school day was over.
>>Participatory culture describes a world where everyone participates,
where we take media in our own hands, where we have the capacity, often,
to produce media, share media.
I trace participatory culture back to the middle of the 19th century
when there was a Tory printing-press movement
and high-school-aged kids were producing publications,
hand-laying type down and sending them across a national network.
So the Amateur Press Association in the 19th century paved the way
for science-fiction fandom in the 20th century, for radio,
amateur radio and ham radio, down through the zine movements
around Riot Grrrls and punk rock, the indie movement around Seattle
and the World Trade Organization, down to the rise of digital media.
>>So there's a whole trajectory of examples where communities begin
to produce media to share ideas among themselves and where they follow some
of the practices we might associate with a folk culture.
>>In a folk culture, media is produced not to make money.
People produce media to share it with each other.
When someone makes a quilt, as my grandmother used to make,
people gathered together.
There's no expert.
There are people who are learning from each other.
Skills get passed from someone who knows a little more
to someone who knows a little less.
It's a social mode of production.
It's a gift, typically, that the quilt is given.
Until fairly recently, it was not sold.
It was passed on to a member of the community
as the community acknowledged a ritual in their life.
>>When we think about media on the Internet,
it does many of those things, right?
The fan communities I have spent much
of my career studying write stories not because they want to get
in the industry or they want to make money,
but because they love telling stories and they want
to tell stories to each other.
>> If we think about YouTube, and many of the people
on YouTube are producing media
because there's something they vitally want to share.
It might be a skateboarder who did a great stunt
and had their friends record it and paste it online.
It might be an amateur remix artist
who saw a TV show they loved and set it to music.
It could be a political commentator or someone doing a video blog to talk
about their everyday life.
All of that becomes part of what I'm describing
as a participatory culture.
>>The question is really, well, how do we go from participating
in our culture to participating in our political and civic structures?
If we look at, for example, the young people who made videos
to support the Obama campaign a year or so back,
how many of them got their start making movies
of themselves skateboarding or making fan films or whatever?
They acquired their skill by simply playing around with media,
in the terms of the Digital Youth Project,
"messing around" comes first.
They were messing around with technology,
"geeking out" around a certain set of subject matter.
So what I'm interested in right now is what would it mean
to "geek out" for democracy?
>>What does it mean to be as passionate about the future
of your society as you are about anime, about games, about the sort
of forms of popular culture that young people are involved with?
>>We could also point to, for example, the Harry Potter Alliance,
and the Harry Potter Alliance is a group that organizes
around human-rights issues around the world.
So Andrew Slack, the 20-something-year-old leader
of the group, said when he read "Harry Potter,"
what he saw was a story of a young man who recognized evil
in his society the government was covering up, the mass media
of his time was lying about it, but he saw through it,
organized his classmates to form Dumbledore's Army and went
out and changed the world.
And that's his account of the plot of "Harry Potter," and he said, "Well,
what if we had a Dumbledore's Army in our world?
What issues would it tackle?
What are the concerns?
What would you do?"
And now he uses that fantasy of Dumbledore's Army to mobilize.
Now 100,000 young people around the world are involved
in the Harry Potter Alliance and they're going out to deal
with human-rights violations in the Third World, Darfur, Uganda,
workers' rights issues in the United States around Walmart,
gay-marriage propositions in Maine and California they've mobilized on.
They just raised a cargo plane worth of supplies for Haiti.
So they work on a range of issues.
So the people who are involved in that are not the kids
who join student government.
They're the kids who were, you know, playing "Dungeons and Dragons,"
the kids who, you know, were collecting monster magazines,
the kids who read a lot of science fiction books.
They're suddenly finding a vehicle to think politically through these kinds
of interest-driven networks.
And we're seeing again and again these interest-driven networks are
preparing the way for them to think of themselves as citizens
in a new way, to mobilize the skills they developed as contributing
to online communities and participatory culture
and direct them toward changing society, changing the world.
>>I mean, I'm deeply enthusiastic about all
of this stuff that's taking place outside of school,
but if we leave it there as sort of the way we create feral children
of the Internet, you know, and the idea that just let them be,
they'll learn on their own, I think leaves a lot of kids behind
and it leaves us -- those kids without adult guidance, without engagement
and skill, validation of those skills that would prepare them to move
up to higher levels and to get recognition
for what they've accomplished.
They don't need us snooping over their shoulders,
but they do need us watching their backs.
>>What I'm seeing is there are individual teachers out there
who are incredibly innovative, dedicated, willing to explore things,
willing to think in open-minded ways about the future of education,
and those are the battles that are worth fighting for at this point.
School systems, you know, are locked down.
Federal policy makes it difficult.
The change, they may be in schools where all of the affordances
of participatory culture are locked out.
>>What's important is to figure out how to bring
that into the educational process.
So, for example, "Moby Dick," we had students make changes
in the Wikipedia entries around Melville and "Moby Dick"
and defend those changes against challenge through the vetting process
on Wikipedia and to have some of their changes stand the test
of the community and have to mobilize evidence and support arguments
and demonstrate the value of the arguments they made on something
that would be a permanent part of the public record
and the public conversation around these books.
And the sense of empowerment those kids got by participating
in that process is really vital, but to think of all the schools who say,
"Wikipedia is bad, let's not let that in our classroom,"
that's the experience that so many kids in America have.
>>In the short term, it's about getting this stuff in the hands
of teachers who will want to make a difference
and giving them the validation and encouragement they need
to keep fighting the good fight on behalf of the new media literacies.