Jenkins GLLS 2007, final reflections

Due to the length of my final reflections, I've split them into 4 sections

At Games, Learning, and Libraries Symposium last week, Dr. Henry Jenkins identified four sets of skills that students today need:

• traditional print literacy
• research skills / information literacy
• technical skills
• media literacy

• Transmedia Navigation: For Jenkins this is the ability to deal with flow of stories and information across multiple modalities. Can we as educators use these multiple modalities through cross-curricular assignments and research? We need to find ways to take our assignments beyond their classroom context and apply them and the knowledge they bring elsewhere. Our students are prepared to do this, are we?
• Networking: On its’ surface networking includes the information literacy skills of searching, synthesizing, and disseminating information. But taken to a deeper level (as Jenkins’ example of the internet community’s mapping of Lost’s Darma Project), this synthesis and sharing of information expands well beyond our classrooms. It includes connecting our students with our faculty and helping them share information. It includes connecting our students to researchers in the field or topic of their study/assignment. It includes tapping into a larger community of learners, students, advocates, and researchers for our students to not only see the meaning of their work, but for their work to contribute meaning to others.
• Negotiation: Tapping in and taking part in the networking described above helps our students enter into diverse communities. The next step is to help them navigate those communities by respecting multiple and not just respecting diversity but valuing it. While our might often act as they are in control and in charge, placing them into a larger learning community may put them in a minority (age) and help them understand the need to value diversity opinions, regardless of race, age, gender, or experience.