Week 3 - Reflection on Jenkins' "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century"

     One topic that stood out for me in the reading was collective intelligence, one of the 11 core media literacy skills.  It is defined as "the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal" (Jenkins, p.39).  Like-minded individuals come together online and share what they know and create a knowledge bank that can be tapped by the group.  A group may develop something trivial, like a guide to a game or a movie, or work together to modify Google maps by sharing images they captured, in order to allow victims of Hurricane Katrina to find information about any specific location. 

     "The ideal of collective intelligence is a community that knows everything and individuals who know how to tap the community to acquire knowledge on a just-in-time basis" (p.42).  When I was choosing where to buy a house, for example, I "consulted" an online forum and got responses from a lot of people who actually lived in the area and were willing to share information. I didn't need to drive around and knock on people's doors to get the information.  The online community enabled me to get this information quickly and at minimal cost. 

     For me, collective intelligence is the best manifestation of the participatory culture of the Internet.  Everyone feels free to contribute and whatever they contribute is appropriately valued.  People have more community involvement and are solving problems together.  It is not just about absorbing more and more knowledge, but being able to share this knowledge with other people.  "We are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced" (p.10). 

     Using Green's Model, collective intelligence falls under the Critical Dimension, wherein social practices such as literacy are socially constructed and individuals can act on and transform literacy.  Collective intelligence is what made Wikipedia what it is, an online encyclopedia formed by contributions of all kinds of people -- from the scholarly experts to the lay person, who may know just one bit of information about a subject.

     I believe that the digital media, through collective intelligence, empowers people and makes them active participants in the community.  One person cannot solve the world's problems, however, the Internet makes it possible for people to work together for a common good, even if it is something as simple as sharing a traffic update.  As teachers, we should not only encourage our students to expand their knowledge, but also teach them how to work with others and learn the value of teamwork, social awareness and active citizenship.