Henry Jenkins is at once insightful and frustrating. At the start of this article he nails it, saying "Do It Yourself rarely means Do It Alone." Which is absolutely right. Then he suggests, "We need to understand the specific practices discussed here as informed by norms and values that emerge from their community of participants," which is fair enough. But this examination is basically an examination of fan communities, which to me is a digression. But OK, I get the desire to talk about 'affinity spaces'. But by the end of the article, he's simply wrong.
He writes, "I want to hold onto a distinction between participatory cultures, which may or may not engaged with commercial portals, and Web 2.0, which refers specifically to a set of commercial practices that seek to capture and harness the creative energies and collective intelligences of their users." Um, what? No. And "Web 2.0 is not a theory of pedagogy; it's a business model." Huh? Here's the problem: Jenkins has no idea what is happening with web 2.0 and education; his only reference seems to be Brown and Adler's (2008) formulation of "Learning 2.0", and they haven't read any of the primary material. If Jenkins wants to criticize what we're doing, fine, but perhaps he should actually look at some of it, and not just the journal articles sitting on his desk.
He writes, "I want to hold onto a distinction between participatory cultures, which may or may not engaged with commercial portals, and Web 2.0, which refers specifically to a set of commercial practices that seek to capture and harness the creative energies and collective intelligences of their users." Um, what? No. And "Web 2.0 is not a theory of pedagogy; it's a business model." Huh? Here's the problem: Jenkins has no idea what is happening with web 2.0 and education; his only reference seems to be Brown and Adler's (2008) formulation of "Learning 2.0", and they haven't read any of the primary material. If Jenkins wants to criticize what we're doing, fine, but perhaps he should actually look at some of it, and not just the journal articles sitting on his desk.
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