I’m deep into Henry Jenkin‘s book, Convergence Culture. The book is largely about participatory culture that has emerged with the internet around media. I’m currently in Chapter 5, Why Heather Can Write, in which he discusses the online literary movement that has grown out of J.K. Rowlings series on Harry Potter (an example is The Daily Prophet). I’ve just been struck in particular by a sentence on page 185:

To some degree, pulling such activities into the schools is apt to deaden them because school culture generates a different mindset than our recreational life.

I’ve been advocating bringing participatory culture into our education system as an answer to student engagement and learning 21st century skills. The openness of social networking such as MySpace and to some extend, Facebook, is of grave concern to many educators, in particular school administrators that must deal with the legal ramifications of predation and abuse. The fear is a part of school culture. As parents, we expect our schools to lend a certain degree of protection over our children.

So how do we balance protection and participation? We could try to bring in participatory culture and social networking from the broader internet, and filter it, but that has proven to be largely ineffective (see the Wolak, J., Mitchell, K. J., & Finkelhor, D. (2007) study in Pediatrics). Perhaps the solution lies in creating an engaging education participatory subculture.

Imagine if you will, students shifting roles from in-school to out-of-school. But the engagement level remains peaked in both roles. Flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to, is maintained not only in recreational participatory out-of-school culture, but also in-school participatory learning culture. The school environment can do this as long as the students are engaged in meaningful, global projects that reach out to a global audience for feedback.

Now imagine how these students will adopt to a workplace in which the expectation is to separate in-work global participatory collaborative culture from out-of-work global recreational participatory culture. To be sure, I have no idea if such productivity skills could transfer, but there have been numerous reports (Gartner being one source) concerned with web surfing and loss of productivity in the workplace.

This is a broad topis for discussion. This will be the first of many post on the topic of participatory culture and schools.