NMC Campus Observer

Henry Jenkins in RL/SL at NMC Summer Conference

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jul 1, 2008 03:13pm

A bit of time has gone by since the 2008 NMC Summer Conference at Princeton, but we wanted to make sure we jotted a few notes on the closing plenary by Henry Jenkins- an inspirational presentation on What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media.

This was not only taking place in a gorgeuos real world facility, Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, but was also live streamed to a remote audience gathered in the Second Life version of the same room.

We have the presentation available as video, audio, and on the NMC media archive site you will find a MediaSite version synced to slides.

Quicktime video
(129 Mb Quicktime, 1:04:11)

MP3 audio (58.8 Mb MP3, 1:04:11)

Jenkkins opened with the story of rapper Soulja Boy who not only used web media to reach his dream of stardom but instigated the whole following of fans from all walks of life who created and published their own versions of his dance moves — right up to the MIT Nerd version featuring legendary Richard Stallman.

This was one of many examples Jenkins weaves in as Participatory Culture, which in interestingly, ought to have parallels or relevance in Second Life:

• low barrier for engagement (not the barrier of entry for learning SL, but that it does not take much for one to be active, if they choose)
• strong support for sharing creations with others very much evidenced by the freebies one fiinds, the giving nature of the education community, the numerous web sites, photo sharing sites sharing SL creations.
• informal mentorship which happens all the time be it Orientation Island, accidental, there are countless stories of experience Sl-ers helping newbies
• members believe that contribution matters which is the underpinnings of a user generated world
• care about others opinions of self and work – pretty much describes the grooming of avatars, the importance of building reputations

From his MacArthur Foundation white paper on Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education, Jenkins shared the 11 competencies young people need to pas new media literacies:

• performance
• play
• networking
• collective intelligence
• multitasking
• distributed cognition
• appropriation
• negotiation
• judgment
• simulation
• transmedia navigation

And he expanded more on appropriation as the competency for creating remix content:

the ability to meaningfully sample and mix media content within a context

and then went on to argue that we have a fallacy of looking historically at creativity as coming form nothing, or all as original (which as taught in school tends to intimidate learners creativity):

• The Sistene Chapel is a mashup of prior imagery
• Shakespeare practiced fan facition, re-writing characters and plays from existing works into new contexts, new meanings
• Homer was remixing Greek mythology every time he spoke

Culture operates in dialogue with other existing cultural materials

Jenkins went on to demonstrate the newer versions of this concept via fan videos, and offering remix as a form of pedagogy as demonstrated in Scratch the mix, mash, and generate software tool that allows people to create games, art, interactive stories via a simple tool set– so much that there is one new item created there every two minutes.

And he went on to show the Moby Dick was a classic example of absorbing everything from a culture and recasting it into a new, mixed form- that Melville was a “protofan” of whaling culture. He then moved into to modern remixes of Moby Dick, ranging far from political cartoons to Moby Dick House of Kabobs, and a video of how a modern version of Moby Dick was retold by kids in a contemporary setting.

Jenkins closed with some strong words on copyright, parents using media of their kids in less than appropriate ways, and took some questions from the Second Life audience (see the SL chat log for more).

All in all this was an incredible session, both in RL and SL.

Story filed under: Audio / Video, People, Places, Things, Teaching and Learning, What's Happening
Tags: nmc2008
See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)