Content creation and the NZ curriculum

Most people who work with me know that I am all about content creation. For me, it's a big part of being a constructionist practitioner. As students make their own meanings, by relating to something they already know or by being entranced by something, or through taking or whatever, then I think they should be creating their own content too.

Recently, I was reading through the summary of the findings of the Digital Youth Project, which I think has some fascinating research with big implications for education. In particular, I was really taken with their definition of youth interactions online as taking one of three main forms - hanging out, messing around and geeking out.

Here's how the researchers introduce their topic:

Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out are three genres of participation that describe different forms of commitment to media engagement, and they correspond to different social and learning dynamics. In this section, we draw from the lengthier description in our book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out to highlight the key features of these genres of participation, supported with illustrative examples. The examples highlighted here represent only a portion of the more substantial ethnographic support for the findings in our book, which are organized according to key domains of youth practice: friendship, intimacy, family, gaming, creative production, and work. Here we draw from this material in order to highlight the three genres of participation and focus specifically on the learning dynamics that we documented.

Now, apart from the way I made immediate grabby fingers about wanting to get the actual book, I also had a few moments of thinking about what the intersection between being a constructivist teacher and a web2.0 teacher might look like.

Now, I plan to dig into this further. There are a lot of papers to be read, resources to be gathered and so on. But to me, the key to being both a constructivist and a web2.0 pedagogue lies in the concept of content creation

By that I mean not just using web2.0 tools for instruction, no matter how awesome it is to show youtube clips to illustrate concepts. Yeah, that's great, but we need to go further and have students using these web2.0 tools to create their own content. Content that means a lot to them as well as to me. Importantly, it's also content they can share with others.

So. My plan for the next little while is to delve into this and make a case for it - using web2.0 technologies in a way that encourages content creation amongst students.