Participatory Challenges

In reading "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture", I have found the tranparency issue very interesting. In the article, Shrier developed a location specific game that was used to teach American History. She had students explore the game and then asked the students how realistic they thought the game was, and if it was viewed as authentic. Shirer found that the young students did in fact believe that the game was historically accurate and true. The game that Shrier developed did not say that the historical information was ture or false, the students decided the game was authentic simply by playing it.

In school I see classemates and peers continually offering false information as concrete facts, especially Wikipedi. As an undergrad, I took a history class and was assigned a partner and we together were to do a report on Carthage, Rome. In ture group fashion we divided the work and decided to present it to one another before constructing our presentation. One week before presenting we subitted each of our slides, upon initial review of her slides I thought the information looked great. Only when I go to her bibliography did I realize that half of her sources were from Wikipedia and other unreliable Internet sources. When speaking to her she could not understand why Wikipedida was not considered reliable.

I don't know if the transparency trouble stems from tradition learning, because if you read it somewhere then it must be true. If you look at the traditional textbook for the most part that information is true and accurate, perhaps that idea has transfered from the page to the screen.