Participate

At the beginning of the following TED Talk, Markham Nolan talks about a time when, as a child, he wrote a letter to the BBC expressing his anger that a network strike was interfering with his ability to watch cartoons. It took several weeks to receive a reply.

Watch him tell the story in the first two minutes of the video below:

In his talk, Nolan reflects that the type of participation that he was engaging in as a child in 1984 is something that happens much more quickly now, often in real time, so that those who want to participate no longer have to wait weeks before seeing the impact of their contribution to the creation of information and, in Nolan’s case, the reporting of news. Instead, this impact is felt right away.

The following quests and capstone activity will ask you to think about your own participation, including the importance of message and the ways in which that message can be both sent and received.

Capstone Assignment

In the Messaging quest, you completed an activity that asked you to look at the top news stories for three different news sites and in the Send & Receive quest, you were asked to consider how you might try to change the way a message is received by changing how it is sent. To complete the Participate challenge, you’ll be asked to combine some of those ideas by taking another look at online articles and thinking about not only the message those articles are sending but also how they have been received.

  1. Return to one of the articles you selected for the Messaging quest or choose a new one. Find the comments section for that article. Select a substantial, on-topic comment that a reader made about the article. Copy and paste a link to the article AND the text of the comment you have chosen.

  2. What message is the article sending?

  3. What does the reader’s comment tell you about how he or she received the message being sent by the article’s author?

  4. If other readers have replied to the comment you identified, what do their comments tell you about how they received the message of not only the article but the original commenter?