The ninth article: Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture.

Henry Jenkins et al. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. Media Education in the 21st Century. 

In the foreword Henry Jenkins claims that it is necessary to teach children new media concepts so that they would be able to take part in the participatory culture (Jenkins, xiii) in order to become full society members. He names a set of social skills that are necessary to be learned in the classroom or after-school activities. The skills are necessary to navigate wisely in new media, and among them he names play, multitasking, collective intelligence, judgment, networking, and negotiation.
"According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than half of all American teens - and 57 percent of teens who use the Internet - could be considered media creators (Jenkins, 3).

The author defines participatory culture as having "relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, and strong support for creating and sharing creations with others. Members who feel some degree of social connection with one another." (Jenkins, 5-6). The author notes that everyone is a participator in such community and all people are at ease when producing content, because they know that it will be valued at a smaller or larger scale.

He has studied various studies which confirm that participatory media will be of greater value among peers, because everybody is allowed to create content themselves. Also the youth who grow up with computers and use them on a daily basis, will be able to communicate via electronic channels and with people from different cultures more easily.

But nowadays there is not an issue whether children have access or not, because a 2005 report from the United Kingdom concluded that now children are categorized into two: a) those to whom the Internet is a diverse, rich environment, and b) those to whom it remains unengaging, and narrow (Jenkins, 17). Those who use computers at home are more dominating in these skills and the other, less skilled pupils are left aside, and the latter find themselves struggling in the Internet.

The author claims that the importance of media education should be ethical issues, enabling acccess to skills and experiences in order to become a full participant in current society, and to ensure that every child would be able to verbalise understanding of new media or interactive media (p. 26-27).

Also he declares that "adolescents need to learn how to integrate knowledge from multiple sources, including music, video, online databases, and other media". This information has to be processed. The need to participate in online collaborations is on demand, because the world is globalizing.

As this was a book preview, not all of the content was captured, but I hope that I got some ideas for my essay. Together with globalization we could make all learning easier with students and teachers from different countries communicating with students via Internet.