Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 44

The Struggle Over What Gets Taught in Texas: An Interview with Rebecca Bell-Meterau

Like many of you, I have been reading with some horror about the culture war which has been taking place down in Texas over the revision of their social science standards, especially because Texas remains a key influence on national curriculum and textbook development. A group of highly reactionary candidates have gotten elected to the school board there, in some cases in races where they ran without opposition and where voters had limited access to information about their views, with the...

"A Kind of Vast Game": An Interview with Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks) (Part Two)

Throughout the book, you hint at a mainstreaming of geek culture, which is also evoked in the quotation above. How close are we to seeing this happen? What is gained or lost for the communities you studied if geek goes mainstream?

I think the mainstreaming has happened already. Once you see the term "geek" being co-opted and used by other subcultures --- wine geek, film geek, fixed gear bicycle geek --- you know the word, at least in its pejorative sense, has passed. And films like Lord of...

"A Kind of Vast Game": An Interview with Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks) (Part Two)

Throughout the book, you hint at a mainstreaming of geek culture, which is also evoked in the quotation above. How close are we to seeing this happen? What is gained or lost for the communities you studied if geek goes mainstream?

I think the mainstreaming has happened already. Once you see the term "geek" being co-opted and used by other subcultures --- wine geek, film geek, fixed gear bicycle geek --- you know the word, at least in its pejorative sense, has passed. And films like Lord...

"A Kind of Vast Game": An Interview with Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks)

My book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture begins with a critique of the stereotypical construction of the fan as someone who suffers from arrested development, has limited social life, is driven by consumption, and is incapable of separating fantasy from reality. This stereotype has had an unbearably long shelf life. It would have been recognizable to Cervantes when he wrote about Don Q., the man who confuses windmills for giants, and it still persists to the...

Transmedia Generation

Participatory culture is a global phenomenon. Young people all over the world are embracing the expressive and distribution resources of the computer to create and share their own cultural materials with each other. In countries all over the planet, they are mixing together local traditions of folk culture with the now globally accessible forms of digital expression in ways which could not have been imagined by previous generations. And as they do so, educators and parents are starting to...

More Talk of TRONSmedia

A week or so ago, I shared the first installment of a series of videos, produced by Mike Bonifer, based on a conversation which I had with Tron creator Steve Lisberger. I've jokingly compared the exchange to My Dinner with Andre, except we were both so busy geeking out that we forgot to order any food!

You never know what people will pick up on once your brain children move out and get their own apartments. Over the weekend, Ain't It Cool News picked up on the series, focusing on a brief...

More Talk of TRONSmedia

A week or so ago, I shared the first installment of a series of videos, produced by Mike Bonifer, based on a conversation which I had with Tron creator Steve Lisberger. I've jokingly compared the exchange to My Dinner with Andre, except we were both so busy geeking out that we forgot to order any food!

You never know what people will pick up on once your brain children move out and get their own apartments. Over the weekend, Ain't It Cool News picked up on the series, focusing on a brief...

Is New Media Incompatible with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part Two)

In this second installment of my interview with Rich Halverson, we explore some of the trends impacting contemporary schooling, including the significance of home schooling, his vision for transforming schools, his research on fantasy baseball leagues as a literacy practice, and his thoughts on how and why schools should foster failure. As always, Halverson remains a provocative and yet substantive thinker about technology and learning.

Your book writes extensively about home schooling as an...

Is New Media Incompatible with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part Two)

In this second installment of my interview with Rich Halverson, we explore some of the trends impacting contemporary schooling, including the significance of home schooling, his vision for transforming schools, his research on fantasy baseball leagues as a literacy practice, and his thoughts on how and why schools should foster failure. As always, Halverson remains a provocative and yet substantive thinker about technology and learning.

Your book writes extensively about home schooling as...

Is New Media Incompatable with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part One)

This week, I want to use my blog to call attention to a provocative recent book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. The authors of the book are Allen Collins, formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education, and Rich Halverson, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and...