AASL 2012 Fall Forum

Henry Jenkins
Keynote Speaker and Primary Facilitator

AASL is proud to welcome renowned author and media studies scholar Henry Jenkins as keynote speaker and primary facilitator of the 2012 Fall Forum!

	Henry Jenkins’s scholarship and work informs our practice as we help young people and their schools bridge the gap between the informal learning accomplished in what he calls the participatory culture, and the formal learning occurring in K-12 classrooms. He believes, as we do, that research skills are more important than ever. School librarians are, he asserts, reconceptualizing their “role less as curators of bounded collection and more as information facilitators who can help users find what they need, online and off, and can cultivate good strategies for searching material.” He encourages us to teach “new media literacies” alongside, not to replace, the traditional literacies of reading and writing. New media literacies can be seen as social skills—a way of interacting within a larger community—and not simply individualized skills used for personal expression as we usually teach research skills.1 We can and should be the leaders in our schools in the integration of new media literacies such as play, distributed cognition, transmedia navigation, collective intelligence and others, into our library media programs and the subject-area curriculum. By bridging informal and formal learning and helping young people close the participation gap we will remain as vital members of our teaching faculties.
- Barbara Jansen, 2012 Fall Forum Committee Chair

Jenkins is the provost's professor of communication, journalism and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California.  He serves as the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group that originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative. The project focuses on the educational challenges of making sure that every student in America has the social skills and cultural competencies needed to participate in a networked society. To meet these challenges, the group strives to develop and test educational materials dedicated to preparing students for engagement with the new media landscape.

Jenkins blog can be found on the web at henryjenkins.org.

¹ Source cited: Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A.J., & Weigel, M. (2009). Confronting the challenges of a participatoryculture: Media education for the 21st century. Retrieved from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation website: http://bit.ly/2bnWVo

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