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Michelle’s response to Judy O’Connell’s keynote address to the “Flat Classroom Project 2010-1” (posted on “Hey Jude” February 7, 2010)

            Judy O’Connell’s keynote address to the Flat Classroom Project 2010-1 demonstrates quite clearly that the main concepts behind this global collaborative project are participation and digital media literacy.  With an aim of ‘flattening’ or lowering classroom walls and enabling communication, interaction and collaboration between students from all over the world, the project calls on students to work together to expand possibilities for global understanding.

           

            It is clear from O’Connell’s keynote address that the project, inspired by Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, provides students with all the benefits of participatory culture with opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, creative expression, skills development and an empowered conception of citizenship while simultaneously, for these students at least, addressing the issues of the transparency problem and ethics challenge identified by Henry Jenkins (Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison & Weigel, 2006, p.3).  The project fosters skills in many of Jenkins’s new media literacies, including Play, Distributed Cognition, Collective Intelligence, Judgement, Transmedia Navigation, Networking and Negotiation – all skills which will prove invaluable to these students in the future.  Students are provided not just with opportunities to practice the technological competencies of working online within social and collaborative networks, but are also reminded to consider the social and ethical implications and responsibilities of a networked world with a timely reminder from O’Connell to never forget the significance of their “digital footprint” and its potential impact on their future.

           

Through meaningful tasks built around global consciousness and utilising new media and participatory culture, students in the Flat Classroom Project are learning the social and core media literacy skills they will need to be equal participants in tomorrow’s world (Asselin & Doiron, 2008, p.12; Jenkins et al., 2006, p.21) as they undertake to build bridges to a future world of interaction, collaboration and partnerships in social, cultural and business environments (O’Connell, 2010).

Participatory culture in education? The Flat Classroom Project has got it covered!

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References:

Asselin, M., & Doiron, R., (2008). Towards a Transformative Pedagogy for School Libraries 2.0. School Libraries Worldwide, 14(2), 1-18.  Retrieved August 21, 2010, from ProQuest Education Journals.

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J. & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century [Occasional paper]. Retrieved August 20, 2010 from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=enJLKQNlFiG&b=2108773&ct=3017973&notoc=1

O’Connell, J. (2010, February 17). Flat Classroom Project: Fresh Start in a New World. [Blog entry on Hey Jude blogsite]. Retrieved  September 23, 2010 from http://heyjude.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/flat-classroom-project-fresh-start-in-a-new-world/