The document discusses the potential for participatory media like wikis and blogs to bridge the gap between traditional civic education and emerging youth experiences with self-actualizing citizenship online. It argues that teaching media literacy skills can help students engage more effectively in public life by using digital tools to inform themselves, debate issues, and organize collective action. While some resist adding media literacy training to overloaded school curriculums, the document proposes treating it instead as a paradigm shift that can reshape how every subject is taught to reflect modern media's civic role.

1. Why use Participatory media now

2. The Changing Citizenry: The Traditional Civic Education Ideal of the Dutiful Citizen (DC) versus the Emerging Youth Experience of Self-Actualizing Citizenship (AC)

3. The Challenge How to bridge these shifting paradigms, and “integrate the social and public worlds of young people online” (11). Part of this is involves helping students “use information and media skills in ways that give them stronger and more effective public voices” (12). Lance Bennett, Director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, University of Washington

4. “Public voice is generative—a public is brought into being in a sense by the act of addressing some text in some medium to it. Michael Warner has argued that any particular public…comes into being only when it is addressed by a media text, rather than existing a priori—’it exists by virtue of being addressed’” (102). “Creating a wiki about a local issue has the potential to precipitate a public that can inform itself, stage debates, even organize collective action” (102). Howard Rheingold, Visiting Lecturer, Department of Communication, Stanford University

5. Why Us? “This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance: although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today’s student cohort, there’s nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy. Internet media are not offered here as the solution to young people’s disengagement from political life, but as a possibly powerful tool to be deployed toward helping them engage” (Rheingold 99).

6. Why Bother? “Much of the resistance to embracing media literacy training comes from the sense that the school day is bursting at the seams, that we cannot cram in any new tasks without the instructional system breaking down altogether” (Rheingold 100). Media literacy shouldn’t be treated as an add-on subject. “Rather, we should see it as a paradigm shift, one which, like multiculturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject” (Rheingold 100).

7. Why Wikis and Other Such Participatory/Digital Media? “Participatory media includes blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging/social bookmarking, music/photo/video sharing, podcasts, digital storytelling, social network services, virtual environments, and videoblogs “ (Rheingold 100) “A wiki is the essence of participatory media—a community, not an individual, is the author of many wiki documents. Such communities can work together to become knowledge communities and create public goods” (Rheingold 110).

8. Resources Bennett, Lance. “Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, MIT Press 2008) Howard Rheingold, “Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement,” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, MIT Press 2008)