Henry Jenkins joins USC from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. He directed MITs Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1993-2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism and entertainment. As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking Web sites, networked computer games, online fan communities and other advocacy organizations, and emerging news media outlets.

http://www.henryjenkins.org

From Wikipedia:

Jenkins' research explores the boundary between text and reader, the growth of fan cultures and world-making, "the process of designing a fictional universe that will sustain franchise development, one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others".^[2]

More recently, Jenkins' research has focused on how individuals in contemporary culture themselves tap into and combine numerous different media sources. He suggests that media convergence be understood as a cultural process, rather than a technological end-point. Jenkins discussed media convergence in his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and the founding of the Convergence Culture Consortium research group at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.

Jenkins' research also includes the field of video game critical studies. In his article, "Complete freedom of Movement": Video Games as "Gendered Play Spaces," he discusses the cultural geography of video game spaces. More importantly, he investigates as to what draws boys to video games and whether girls should feel the same attraction. Inspired by such cultural critics as Gilbert Seldes who believed that Cinema was unfairly victimized during his time for being a rising new medium.^[3][4]

He has also written extensively about the effects of interactivity, particularly computer games, and "games for learning", and in this capacity was called to testify before Congress in 1999. This work ultimately led to the founding of the Education Arcade group, also at the MIT Comparative Media Studies program.^{[citation needed]}

Jenkin's forms of participatory culture:

Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

Expressions — producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).^[5]

Deborah Frieze & Meg Wheatley

Walk Out Walk On

Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey Into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now

• By the bestselling author of Leadership and the New Science and

Turning to One Another

• Provides an intimate experience of how seven healthy and resilient

communities took on intractable problems by working together in

new and different ways

• Immerses the reader in the experience of each community through

stories, essays, first-person accounts, and over 100 color photos

This is an era of increasingly complex problems, fewer and fewer resources to

address them, and failing solutions. Is it possible to find viable solutions to the

challenges we face today as individuals, communities, and nations? This inspiring book takes readers on a learning journey to seven communities around the world to meet people who have "walked out" of limiting beliefs and assumptions and "walked on" to create healthy and resilient communities. These Walk Outs who Walk On use their ingenuity and caring to figure out how to work with what they have to create what they need.

Margaret Wheatley is the founder of The Berkana Institute. Meg has been working with people for many years to develop radically new practices and ideas for organizing, where people are seen as the blessing, not the problem. She is an internationally acclaimed speaker and author of Leadership and the New Science, A Simpler Way, Turning to One Another, and most recently, Finding Our Way.

There is a page dedicated to Margaret Wheatley in this e-book: http://bit.ly/MargaretWheatley

Deborah Frieze is the Co-President of The Berkana Institute. She joined Berkana in 2002 to help bring Berkana’s vision into the world. A few years later, she co-founded the Berkana Exchange, a community of leadership learning centers that are developing the capacity to solve their most pressing problems—such as community health, ecological sustainability and economic self-reliance—by acting locally, connecting regionally and learning trans-locally. She is a member of the Tipping Point Network, a group seeking to catalyze a globally sustainable economy.

http://www.berkana.org/index.html

http://www.margaretwheatley.com

Build for The World

Developing a board game for building sustainability projects, see

http://buildftw.org/content/build-better-world-game-files

A project of

buildftw.org/projects/building-buildftw

Build For the World (Build), a project of Dane County TimeBank and Time For the World, is a platform to share and connect projects that use cooperative economic tools to help solve community problems. Build is a member driven initiative. Members from around the world share local experiments, connect, and compare knowledge and experience in resilience building.

Being intentional in our experimentation processes will help us reduce the number of times new groups repeat avoidable mistakes and will help to resolve common challenges as they arise. Documented experiments help save precious time and energy among organizers both in finding resources for themselves and in providing resources for others, and will provide greater opportunity to establish and share “best practices.” Being active in cultivating our learning community will create communities of people better equipped to help each other and build many levels of decentralized leadership among diverse populations.

Our software is social; it embraces the individuals who collaborate in their communities. Build works like open notebook science: plans and observations are shared before conclusions can be drawn. Members document, map, and communicate situation, method, failure, and success within Build. They also share tools, protocols, materials and evaluation data. We then together apply more minds to understand any issue or observation and offer technique and input while efforts are in progress. The goal is to learn more faster while doing better via accelerated experimentation, curated within Build’s platform - and share all tools and results publicly and under open license.

Game Science = Action Learning Science

This is very important for integral permaculture designers because it's a very modern & successful application of the action learning model (explored in Class 1.1 on Learning, it's so crucial for us)