The following series of posts will appropriate these ideas for education in general, and particularly for research about educational policies and practices. These posts will be written by Dan Hickey, an Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Indiana University, in collaboration with Michelle Honeyford, a doctoral candidate in the department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at IU, and Jenna McWilliams, the Curriculum Specialist for Project New Media Literacies. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative, the three of us have been collaborating for the last year on designing participatory classroom assessments for NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture, a high school language arts curriculum that embraces Jenkins's ideas about 21st Century media practices and participatory culture. These blog posts reveal our conviction that Jenkins' ideas about spreadability are directly relevant to the spread of practices within and across three overlapping teaching/learning communities: students and teachers enacting these practices in their classrooms; teachers refining and sharing them with other educators; and researcher and innovators interested in supporting these efforts. Along the way we will share some of our insights about the ways that innovative assessment and evaluation can support the spread of worthwhile educational practices.

We argue that the critiques that Jenkins and colleagues level at prevailing conceptualizations of the transmission and construction of ideas in media have a lot in common with the way instructional routines are transmitted to educators and then presented to students. Traditionally these ideas have been transmitted via textbooks and other formal curricular materials. As with traditional media, this "filter then publish" model made sense given the costs of publishing traditional textbooks and the relatively modest canon of knowledge school children needed to learn but is increasingly cumbersome, ineffectual, and inefficient in an environment that allows for on-demand publishing and dissemination of material. We think that the emerging "publish then filter" media model made possible by digital social networks can revolutionize the way we identify, refine, and share worthwhile curricular practices. We believe that such an approach can accommodate learning needs in a world where the feasibility and usefulness of learning a core body of content is decreasing.

We aim to present an alternative to the current widespread research efforts to identify and disseminate instructional routines that are "proven" to impact achievement via conventional experimental research methods. The most notable example of this trend is the US Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse. The Clearinghouse reviews empirical evidence of practices against rigorous empirical criteria (e.g., randomized assignment, use of comparison groups, externally developed outcome measures). These results are then disseminated in Practice Guides "with concrete recommendations about effective approaches to a range of the most talked-about approaches in education today" US (DOE, p. 2). Behind this effort is a well-funded federal training grant program for both graduate and post-graduate students to conduct such research. Given that the idea behind this major policy thrust is the broad dissemination of experimentally-validated instructional routines, we have elected to label this approach to educational reform as disseminated instructional routines (DIR).

In the following series of posts, we explore why the DIR approach will fail to impact education generally or even achievement more narrowly, for the same reasons that Jenkins argues that most efforts to create viral media message fail as well. We further propose the notion of spreadable educational practices (SEP) to consider how the kinds of educational practices that follow from newer participatory views of education might have a greater impact on education more broadly and on achievement more narrowly.

In their first post, Jenkins and colleagues examine some fundamental problems with the widely-known concept of viral media and its ties to the theory of the meme. They point out that the biological metaphor of the viral transmission assumes that the properties of the viral media lay in the message itself, or perhaps those who crafted the original message. They argue that the biological metaphor reduces consumers (often the most unpredictable variable) to involuntary hosts and maintains the idea that media producers can design messages that can be directly injected into the culture for dissemination. In their first post, Jenkins and colleagues examine some fundamental problems with the widely-known concept of viral media and its ties to the theory of the meme. They point out that

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication—that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. In focusing on the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media industry. A close look at particular examples of Internet "memes" or "viruses" highlight the ways they have mutated as they have traveled through an increasingly participatory culture.

For Jenkins et al., the term "viral media' is problematic because "definitions...suffer from being both too limiting and too all-encompassing" and offer a flawed metaphor for the ways in which content is distributed through informal or ad hoc consumer networks. They argue that the biological metaphor reduces consumers (often the most unpredictable variable) to involuntary hosts and maintains the idea that media producers can design messages that can be directly injected into the culture for dissemination.

To begin our meta-metaphorical journey, we see lots of initial parallels here with the assumption behind DIR. From a participatory perspective, teachers and (particularly) students are likewise "often the most unpredictable variable." However, the DIR approach reduces them to involuntary reproducers of validated routine. This is because it assumes that researchers can experimentally define and validate instructional routines which can then be disseminated and dutifully implemented by teachers and followed by obedient students.

Jenkins and colleagues further critique the notion of memes. This influential notion was introduced by evolutionary biologist Dawkins in 1976 and popularly applied to media studies by Rushkoff in the 1994 book Media Virus. Contrary to Rushkoff, Jenkins et al. argue that memes do not actually self-replicate and that people are not actually "susceptible" to such viral media. They further argue that whatever is behind memes and viral media, they are not self-replicating meaningless "snacks" of information. The first problem with the notion of memes concerns agency. Jenkins points out that the processes of cultural adaptation are more complex than the notion of viral media acknowledges. In particular, this perspective overlooks human choice, and how the decisions of numerous individuals (which are shared with each other) influence whether a particular idea is transmitted and how it gets transformed in the process.

We see clear parallels in current efforts to identify and distribute instructional routines. The DIR approach overlooks the participatory assumption that curricular practices are not really implemented so much as they are enacted. Whereas DIRs focus on the behavior of teachers and the thinking practices of students, a more participatory focus on enactment of practice focuses primarily on the communal discourse that ensues, viewing the behavior and cognition of individual participants as secondary outcomes of this discourse. As such, even the most well-structured instructional routine will be enacted very differently by any two teachers, and even in two different classes taught by the same teacher. Even if teachers choose to follow a scripted routine to the letter, the students may actively choose to resist or passively choose to not engage meaningfully. Rather than taking "on faith" that a seemingly unproductive routine will have a long term impact on test scores, teachers are likely to simply abandon the routine or transform it to the point where it is unlikely to impact achievement (or any other meaningful outcome). We think that the sharing of truly worthwhile instructional practices is more likely to occur if it follows the trajectory that Jenkins and colleagues use to describe how knowledge emerges from digital social networks: "a product not of the strength of particular ideas but of many, many individual choices as people decide what ideas to reference, which to share with each other, decisions based on a range of different agendas and interests far beyond how compelling individual ideas may be."

The second problem of agency Jenkins and colleague raise is that memes overlook the medium through which ideas are circulated. They point out that the digitally networked media in which memes are transmitted also afford rapid transformation through remixing and broad transmission of the remixed message. Citing the work of Knobel and Lankshear (2007), they argue that this continual remixing and adaptation afforded by the medium is what affords the notion of memes in the first place. In a similar way, the DIR approach continues to support transmission of instructional routines via 19th Century means: textbooks and print curriculum (though perhaps now delivered less expensively via the internet). As will be outlined in the following posts, we think that the same media that have given rise to vast new stores of cultural knowledge via rapid remixing, adaptation, and sharing can also give rise to vast new stores of effective instructional practices via these same processes.

Jenkins and colleagues close their first post with a thoughtful consideration of the recent lolcats internet meme. The ubiquitous pictures of cats with superimposed texts in "pidgin kitty" were themselves the embodiment of an affinity group with a low barrier to entry. Not only can users upload their own pictures and enter their own text at sites like icanhascheezburger.com, visitors are invited to add captions to existing photos, share them with others, post them for comments, etc. More recently, the basic idea has spread to other contexts. Some are equally fanciful (loldogs, lolruses, etc.) while some are more serious (e.g., a lolbible site devoted to illustrated translations of both the old and new testament into lolspeak; lolpunditry devoted to political pictures). New applications of the lol meme seem to appear every day.

We see overlapping theoretical and practical inspiration for education in this seemingly insipid cultural phenomenon. Theoretically, it is worth considering why this idea has been transmitted so broadly and so widely. There is really no message or even a core idea at the heart of the phenomenon. Rather, it is quite simply a new way for people to make new meaning. Jenkins et al. explain that "the adaptation of the LOLcat form to different situations—theory, puppies, politicians—constitute processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them." What we aim to explore in the following posts is the possibility that the most spreadable and worthwhile educational practices will similarly lack a single core instructional routine. Rather they will consist of the most effective way of allowing students and teachers to use the conceptual and linguistic tools around them to make meaning.

In practice, we find that the lolcat phenomenon actually has quite direct implications for educational practice. Take, for example, a religious studies teacher interested in motivating students to closely read religious texts and make connections to their own lives. While many observers surely see the lolcat Bible as blasphemous, inviting children to participate in the continuing wiki-based editing of the lolcat translation might be one of the very best ways of getting students to engage in a deep and consequential reading of the original text. The transformative point here is found beyond the banality of "ceiling cat" reading the book of Genesis. Rather, it requires recognizing the ways in which communal participation in meaning making in a persistent and public space leads to a deep engagement with important and difficult texts and a commitment to aiding in the group's collaborative efforts at building knowledge and solving problems.

Like some adventurous teachers in schools across the country, we have obtained initial support for just such a curricular practice in our ongoing refinements of Project NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide, a curriculum drafted by Project New Media Literacies to engage students in deep and consequential reading of classic texts such as Moby-Dick. We recently incorporated one of the social media exercises published by Howard Rheingold and Sam Rose at Social Media Classroom. In addition to distributing a promising open source educational social networking software, this site maintains a wiki of simple classroom exercises for introducing students to social networking practices. Several of these practices involve ways of helping students learn to edit Wikipedia. One exercise has students make simple edits and additions to an entry with which they are quite familiar and feel most comfortable. In the English Language Arts classroom of Becky Rupert at Aurora Alternative High School in Bloomington, Indiana, this meant editing the entry for Aurora at Bloomingpedia, a local wiki. Reflecting our vision of how practices need to spread within classrooms, one of the students who had far more experience than any of the teachers or researchers and took the lead in showing students the nuances of wiki-editing. This prepared the students to then begin editing the Wikipedia entry on Moby-Dick, a text that that they had already been engaged in for some weeks. The class worked together intensively to make a number of edits to the Wikipedia entry. While students were dismayed when several of the edits were reversed by other users, many of the edits remain. The actual contribution to the Wikipedia entry was of modest consequence, but the process of carrying out the edits were very consequential for the manner in which these students read and reread the text, as well as secondary resources. Quite specifically, the act of editing a public and persistent document fostered what our colleagues Sasha Barab and Melissa Gresalfi at the Indiana University Learning Sciences program call consequential engagement.

For us, this experience includes several sources of inspiration.

• This was an alternative school for students who had not been experiencing success in more traditional school settings. These students were engaged not only in developing a deep understanding of a difficult text but in conveying this effort in a public forum. Their work required that they deploy multiple literacies, both in reading and in writing.


• These students were reading a text that was among the most often cited at LibraryThing.com on a forum thread discussing "most hated books."


• The Wikipedia entry effort was delayed for a few days because the students had to wait out a school-wide ban from Wikipedia due to prior vandalism tracked to the school's domain address. It was clear to us that contributing to the Moby-Dick entry was a very different form of engagement with Wikipedia than most of these students had previously experienced.


• The students' reflection of the Wikipedia exercise demonstrated a much deeper understanding of the notion of collective intelligence and its implications for reading in a participatory culture than they had been able to previously articulate.


• The Wikipedia activity generated what we call a re-mediation of classroom assessment. Based on our earlier efforts to design participatory assessments for the activities in the Teachers' Strategy Guide, Becky designed a new activity that invited students to apply their new collective insights about editing Wikipedia. She invited them to collaboratively write a position paper (using Google docs) on the contested practice of using Wikipedia in school, making sure that in the process that students enlisted the key ideas that were introduced in the first activity.


• We were inspired by the ease with which we were able to adapt the original Wikipedia exercise for use in this context. Excited by its simplicity and participatory design, Dan had used the exercise in an advanced graduate Learning Sciences course where students made edits to Wikipedia entries that were particularly relevant to the specific educational dilemmas that each student had elected to focus on. Rather than narrowly defined instructional routines for training students how to edit Wikipedia, the exercise was really more of an idea--a set of suggestions--for helping students engage in this socially mediated practice. As such, it was readily adaptable to our core goal of engaging students as participants in making meaning while consequentially engaging in important texts as a part of a class assignment.

As additional evidence of spreadability, we recently learned that a similar Wikipedia exercise is being used by Global Kids, another program funded by MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning program. We are aware of many others out there. In this case, Shawna Rozensweig and Rafi Santos have developed an exercise for use in their afterschool program for urban youth. Many educators, in fact, are developing strategies for helping their students develop a public voice via Wikis and Wikipedia. What is needed now is a central place where the insights gleaned from these experiences can be shared readily.

The Wikipedia exercise, and the reflective assessments generated around it, seems to have all of the elements of a spreadable educational practice. Over the following series of posts, we will explore how the insights about spreadable media practices introduced by Jenkins and colleagues might help us better understand and foster continued refinement and distribution of such seemingly spreadable educational practices, and the classroom assessments that we are developing for them.