User-Led Education

Characteristics

Axel Bruns:

"It is possible here to outline the five pillars upon which it is founded (and which in turn are based on the fundamental characteristics of the new processes of produsage which are common to Generation C). What has already become obvious from the discussion above is that for effective and successful participation in produsage processes, Generation C graduates will require a set of capacities which, while not entirely new, nonetheless sets a number of new priorities. These graduate capacities can be summarised as collaborative, creative, critical, combinatory, and communicative capacities – or in short, as C5C (also see Cobcroft et al., 2006).

• Creative: not to be misunderstood as pertaining purely to artistic creation in a narrow sense, creative capacities are crucial to Generation C. Produsage itself is fundamentally concerned with content (art, information, knowledge) creation; while the development of creative capacities in this broad sense has of course been an aim of education virtually throughout the ages, what is important for our present context is a focus especially on the development of creative capacities which can be exercised successfully in the collaborative environments of produsage (as exemplified inter alia in the technological environments gathered under the Web2.0 banner). Crucial to this form of creative capacities, then, is particularly the ability to act as collaborative co-creator in flexible roles, or in short, as one amongst a number of creative produsers rather than as a self-sufficient creative producer. To the extent that the reasons for this are not yet already self-evident to contemporary learners, it may also be necessary to provide the motivations for engaging as active content creators in produsage environments. Such motivations are both economic (given the significant shifts brought about by the rise of produsage, the ability to participate in such environments is increasingly sought after by employers and governments), social (open collaborative content development in areas such as knowledge management, journalism, software development, research, and creative work can create high-quality but freely accessible resources which are of benefit to overall society), and individual (in the online environment, non-participation increasingly equates to invisibility, while sustained and constructive participation enables the accumulation of positive social capital and thus generates significant career opportunities).

• Collaborative: as noted above, collaborative engagement under variable, fluid, and heterarchical rather than hierarchical organisational structures and in shifting roles is fundamental to produsage processes. As societal as well as workplace processes move towards a greater embrace of produsage principles, collaborative capacities therefore become all the more crucial. In this context, it is as important to be able to collaborative effectively as it is to know when, where, and with whom to choose to collaborate, and under what circumstances not to do so. Further, collaborative capacities also require an advanced understanding of the consequences of collaboration – that is, of questions pertaining to intellectual property and other legal rights in a collaborative environment. (Additionally, of course, it is important also to develop the specific skills to collaborate within the major technological environments of produsage – such as blogs, wikis, or immersive 3D environments –, but such skills are subject to rapid change as the technologies themselves continue to change. It is by now well recognised that rather than to focus on building expert skills in using specific systems, teachers should ensure that students develop a life-long personal interest in updating their technological skills.)

• Critical: as a corollary to collaborative capacities, critical capacities are exercised in establishing the appropriate context for engagement in produsage processes. This requires a critical stance both towards potential collaborators and their work (in order to identify the most beneficial of all possible collaborations) and towards one’s own creative and collaborative abilities and existing work portfolio (to gauge whether a potential collaboration would constitute a good fit of styles, abilities, and experience). Additionally, a critical eye is also needed in identifying the appropriate venues and conditions for effective collaboration – and further, during the collaborative process itself, critical capacities are indispensable in the giving and receiving of constructive feedback on the ongoing collaborative process and the artefacts it produces. Finally, and just as importantly, critical capacities are also crucial to an engagement with the outcomes of produsage processes at times when one acts mainly as user rather than active contributor – only well-developed critical capacities enable users to discern whether a particular piece of information is to be trusted, to look beyond the surface to examine the sources for that information and the process of its produsage (such as, for example, the edit history of a Wikipedia entry), and to compare the relative merit of multiple perspectives on the same issue as they may be expressed in one or a number of related produsage artefacts. Such capacities were already highly important during the mass media age (but were frequently underexercised as a result of a sometimes misplaced trust in the quality of established media brands); however, the recent proliferation of media alternatives, to which produsage processes have contributed significantly, has further increased the central importance of a healthily critical stance towards all available information, whatever the source.

• Combinatory: produsage is fundamentally based on an approach which deconstructs larger overall tasks into a more granular set of distributed problems, and therefore in the first place generates a series of individual, incomplete artefacts which require further assembly before becoming usable and useful as a whole. As a result, information and knowledge as generated through produsage processes is itself distributed and inherently incomplete. To effectively participate in and benefit from the knowledge space generated by the collective intelligence (Lévy 1997) of produsage communities, therefore, those engaging in and with produsage and its artefacts require enhanced capacities to combine, disassemble, and recombine these specific artefacts in their pursuit of personal understanding. Beyond the pursuit of knowledge itself, combinatory capacities are also required for active participation in produsage processes: produsage in many contexts also proceeds from the reappropriation, reuse, and remixing of existing content in new combinations which themselves create new meaning and new understandings of knowledge. Learners must therefore develop the capacities to identify and harness individual chunks of existing information which may be constructively employed in this fashion, as well as the capacities to undertake such recombination and redistribution of information and knowledge through the shared collaborative environments of produsage projects.

• Communicative: inasmuch as communication underpins every social and communal human endeavour, it is necessarily already implicitly embedded in the other capacities outlined here. However, in addition to overall, generic communicative capacities it is particularly important to develop an explicit focus on effective and successful communication between participants within the collaborative environments of produsage – this addresses for example the communication of ideas generated in exercising one’s own critical capacities (that is, an ability to be constructively critical), as well as communication between participants about collaborative, creative, and combinatory processes (what could be described in other words as metacollaboration). Such communicative capacities are not necessarily a natural outcome of general communicative development, but may need to be fostered specifically in order to enable graduates to act effectively and successfully as members of Generation C. (Once again, while this might also require the development of a more in-depth understanding of communicative processes within specific produsage environments, it is important not to focus all too specifically on current communications technologies employed by produsage communities, as these are subject to change.)" (http://snurb.info/files/2011/Beyond%20Difference.pdf)