Summary: This radio show discusses the book Reading in a Participatory Culture and the complementary digital book Flows of Reading. The show examines what it means to be a reader and writer in an increasingly participatory and social culture, in which readers read across different media and understand reading as an act of sharing, deconstructing, and making meaning. This resource is useful in digital learning professional development and also offers curricular ideas, including an extended discussion of how the authors worked with an inner city theater director to re-think Moby-Dick in this new context. A few sections may be of special interest: at 2:31, Erin Reilly discusses the book’s “big idea”–what it means to talk about reading in a participatory culture. At 10:55 a description of teacher professional development begins. Around 40:20, discussion moves to the Moby-Dick project.
Original Date of Publication: October 24, 2013
Listen to the Show
Duration: 1 hour
Excerpt
Erin Reilly, Creative Director & Research Fellow at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, on changing our definitions of what can be counted as reading:
We often denote reading with traditional print literacy and books. Not that we have anything against books, but sometimes for kids of the digital age, the way they begin to understand and identify as a reader is to let them realize that they are reading when they’re actually looking at comic books or graphic novels, or reading the game that they’re playing on the Wii or Xbox, or reading the movie that then extends to the book or extends to even posters out on the wall. Every one of these types of platforms are ways that we engage in reading.
Download “Reading in a Participatory Culture”
Visit the Digital Book, Flows of Reading
Related Resources
- Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education of the 21st Century
- When Students Take a Critical Lens to Traditional Literature: Protest and Student Voice
Original Source: National Writing Project, https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/4208