At your service...
Web Schoolhouse is a subscription-based learning resource for members of the Green Mountain Writers Group.
Anyone is free to join us for weekly online workshops that cover poetry, memoir, and flow-state writing. The sessions take place on Zoom with the schedule and links provided on Meetup.
We advocate for a “participatory culture,” an environment where people not only consume but also produce and share media—writing, videos, blogs, social networks—typically in peer-driven, networked communities.
In “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” Henry Jenkins and colleagues argue that schools must teach new “participatory” media literacies, not just basic technical skills, if people are to be fully empowered citizens and workers in a networked society. They shift the debate from simple access to devices (“digital divide” as hardware/software) to access to meaningful opportunities to create, collaborate, and participate in online culture.
These new participatory skills include:
- Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
- Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
- Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
- Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
- Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
- Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
- Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
- Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
- Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
- Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
Created and sponsored by DesignWise Studios...
"In 1997, I was contracted by Marquette University to develop their first distance learning courses. During the next 3 years, I built fourteen on-line courses to train and certify Nurse Midwives. I launched three additional courses for the College of Education." - Stephen Kastner
Stephen Kastner founded DesignWise Studios in 1997. Since then he has been developing Internet marketing campaigns, learning resources, on-line news, directory and membership websites, digital imagery and videos, community portals, social media, and hosting websites. In the mid-eighties he was a professional photo-journalist... then, he discovered the Web. Stephen spent the 90s immersed in the medical industry, building Unix networks for healthcare facilities, training staff at clinics and hospitals in electronic billing procedures and eventually acting as Medical Administrator of a clinic with 8 practitioners, and then became Executive Director of a Federal Health Education Center that linked communities in need with medical students in administering more than $13 million in grant funding.
In 2006, Kastner spent 6 months in Dali, Yunnan, China to develop the curriculum and marketing plan for a Chinese culture spa, The Linden Centre, now number #1 on TripAdvisor. He writes and explores and extensive study of Social Media, and has worked with several educators including Prof. B.J. Fogg at Stanford U. to investigate the effects of Social Media on the emerging global information society.