This is the second in a series of posts examining the educational implications of an eight-part series called If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead, a white paper written for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) by Henry Jenkins and colleagues (Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf, and Joshua Green). These posts are written by Dan Hickey, Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Indiana University; Michelle Honeyford, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Culture, Literacy, and Language Education; and Jenna McWilliams, a writer and curriculum developer at Project New Media Literacies.

In this post, we use the contrasting models of "sticky" and "spreadable" media practices to consider two different approaches to developing, promoting, and disseminating curricular materials in educational environments. Specifically, we liken corporate efforts to create sticky websites and viral messages to the experimental validation and centralized dissemination of what we call disseminated instructional routines (DIRs). Just as most efforts to create "sticky" media environments have failed to capture and retain consumers, we argued that most centralized efforts to reform education have similarly failed at their stated goal of increasing gains on targeted tests, or improving education more broadly. Rather, DIR-focused efforts have actually created barriers to creating and sharing of more worthwhile approaches, which we are calling spreadable educational practices (SEPs). We believe that such an approach can better support wholesale improvement of educational practice, while also delivering measurable and consistent gains on standardized achievement tests.

This is the first entry in a planned series of blogposts taking up media scholar Henry Jenkins' notion of spreadability and considering the application of this idea to educational practices. The posts are co-written by Daniel T. Hickey, Michelle Honeyford, and Jenna McWilliams.

In his blog Confessions of an Aca/Fan (as in Academic/Fan) media scholar Henry Jenkins has serially posted eight chapters from a white paper entitled If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Jenkins, Li, Krauskopf, & Green, 2009). The paper rejects prevailing notions of viral media, memes, and stickiness for ignoring key aspects of the participatory culture in which ideas spread among individuals and become part of contemporary cultural knowledge. The authors then introduce the notion of spreadability as a more useful and productive way of thinking about these phenomena.

I warn you: This blogpost is about politics. And it is not unbiased.

Project NML has completed its first teachers' strategy guide, called Reading in a Participatory Culture, and we're field testing it at several schools. Though the curriculum itself is not quite ready for prime time--we'll most likely give the whole thing a pretty significant overhaul after we see the results of implementation--I wanted to show you just the introduction to the guide.

Today, my friends, I want to discuss the possibility of using Drawball as an analogy for the participatory model of reading.

As we continue to work on developing NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide, we are lucky to be surrounded by geniuses who continually push us to ask, and try to answer, several Big and Difficult Questions about the guide. A recent question, posed to us Veronica Boix-Mansilla, a Principal Investigator at Project Zero:

What is the added value of shifting from a traditional model of reading to a participatory model?

Take a look at this quote from Colin Martindale, in an article called "Biological Bases of Creativity":

"It would seem that creative productions always consist of novel combinations of pre-existing mental elements.... To create, then, involves the realization of an analogy between previously unassociated mental elements."

I love this quote because it emphasizes the role of appropriation in the creative process. It's something we're thinking about a lot as we develop our first teachers' strategy guide, called "Reading in a Participatory Culture."

I've been thinking a lot about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick lately, and not just arbitrarily. A big piece of my job here at NML is to head up development of a teacher's strategy guide for use in the high school English classroom. The guide emphasizes the new media literacy skill of appropriation--the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content--and uses Moby-Dick as the sample text and a theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley called Moby-Dick: Then and Now as an example of a contemporary appropriation and adaptation of the novel.

Before I came to NML, I had long lived among the multitudes who for many reasons--actually, for me it was mainly out of guilt and the heavy weight of cultural duty--keep a copy of Moby-Dick on a bookshelf with the really truly honest intention of getting through it some day. My guilt was compounded by my personal history as first an English major and then a student-writer in an MFA program. Every time I looked over at that fat little book sitting plumply on my bookshelf, I got just a little miserable all over again.  But then I thought, you know, it's a very long novel. And hard. And word on the street is that it's kind of...boring. But then I joined NML and started in on this teacher's guide and I figured, okay, it's time to end the shame. And I took a deep breath and I jumped in.