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Participation vs. Contribution
Alec Couros- Discusses Participation vs. Contribution So that's a really interesting question, this
idea of participation vs. contribution, ah, we live...... there's a fantastic article
from Henry Jenkins' ah, it's a white paper on participatory culture, and i......i....
it produces a lot of challenges, because you know we often think that if we, if we like
something, for instance on Facebook that we've done something, there's a there's a term that
they use called 'slacktavism', that you know if we click on something, we feel better about
ourselves, but we've really done nothing in that particular sense.
So I think we have to move well beyond that and become contributors, and to become a contributor
means um, ah.... a different sort of position, so for instance; one of the things that I
use with my students is, I ask them these two questions that we based there assessments
on, the first question is; How am I merking..... making my learning visible? So a big part
of that is making their learning visible, through Blogs, or Twitter, or whatever else,
and that might be in form imposed, that might be in a number of different ways.
But in a very transparent way making learning visible, the second assessment point that
we use is; how am I contributing to the learning of others? And that is something we've never
thought about, because we've always been in this mind your own business mode, we've never
thought that; my learning is ah, linked to the learning of another person, and when we
start to think differently, when we create this different mind set, that, that, this
is a social learning ah, environment, that this is all about social learning, it's not
simply about individual learning, we... we think differently about our contributions.
So where more often, if we can, if we can create a mind set around this ah, that it's
not simply clicking something for our delight, and to make someone smile, on the other side
of that, but to actually go deeper, and to actually create a contribution.
And really want it comes down to it, if you look at examples, you can take nine year old
blogger Marther Pane from Scotland who created a food blog, there's something she ran home
after school, to create this food blog, to improve the food in her cafeteria.
This is a fantastic example of a nine year old who basically decided in her own hands
to make a part of her world a little bit better, so with all these technologies, social media,
net works, all of these things that we have access to, that if we don't create a better
world, if we don't create a more inform world, if we don't contribute to the learning of
others, what are we doing with it?
What's the use of having all this? So I think it's really important that we teach contribution,
that we teach the idea for the first time in our lives, we can create more than we consume,
we can develop things that are amazing to others, w.... we can share those particular
artifacts.
Whether were...... if we don't feel were creative ah, we..... we may seem very creative to someone
else, and so I think we have to kind of move beyond the vulnerabilities that we may feel,
ah, beyond the sort of the hesitance to share, and to really create something, and it starts
within our local communities.