Directions for reading and working with the post below:

• Read text all the way through to get oriented. Or read tl;dr below.
• Watch Vialogue or Voicethreads to get a feel for my close read.
• Participate by responding to the text with either or both of the tools used (Vialogues or VoiceThreads)
• Responses are not limited to these two spaces.  You can use the Google+ DiGiWriMo community, Twitter, Vine, Slack, or any other channel that thrills you including comments below.
• Reflect here on this process.  In the Hackpad link I have suggested questions to consider.  Add your own questions if you wish.  
• You can be adhoc/freeform and as iconoclastic as you wish. (I will surely add animated gifs, videos and pix to the reflection.)

tl;dr

This post describes a participatory reading process that tries to mimic the same one described in Jenkins, et al Participatory Culture in a Networked Era.  It uses a screencast reading of the opening to Chapter One of that book along with other tools to create a participatory space.

Post Begins Here

In less than a week, starting on Monday December 14, we will begin a networked reading of Jenkins, Ito, and boyd’s newest book, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era.  And by “we” I refer to anyone who wants to join in.

We are hoping to have lots of different channels going, but the hub for activity will be at the DiGiWriMo Google+ Community. You can pick up on news and prompts as well as add your own voice there.  The key to this ‘participation’ is to find your own voice on whatever platform suits you.  Just let us know where you are by dropping us a line at the Google+ community above or on Twitter, @telliowkuwp or @dogtrax.

Today’s experiment is in slow reading or, as the litcriterati of the New Criticism school called it, “close reading”.  The origins of the experiment came when my partner in participaton, Kevin Hodgson (of the must read blog Kevin’s Meandering MInd) asked me to create a screencast for beginners on how to use the web annotation tool, Hypothes.is.

The Preface to our shared read lays out the organizing principle behind the work:

Each chapter in this book represents a shared topic of concern and begins with an introductory essay by one of the three authors, followed by a conversation between the three of us. Throughout, we weave together our personal experiences, perspectives, and research with a broader analysis of the issues at stake.

As I completed the screencast, I thought that perhaps we could model our own book share along the quoted lines above.  I created a prototype close reading of the opening two paragraphs of Chapter One where Jenkins shares his definition of participatory culture.  The program I used, Screencast-o-matic, seamlessly uploads to YouTube. From there I shared it in Vialogues (see embed just below).

Vialogues allows for easy annotation and threaded conversation and was my first thought, but Kevin had another idea–VoiceThreads.

VoiceThreads, like Vialogues,  is a web program that allows you to upload media for discussion.  The big difference between the two is that responses to that media are not limited to text.  You can reply via text, audio, video, or uploaded file.  You can even phone it in. So I uploaded the screencast to VoiceThreads as well (see embed below).

The VoiceThreads space is already being populated, but I will be on Vialogues today.  My purpose is to not only share with others here but to also observe how participatory culture works via the public Hackpad I referred to above.  This project falls under the principle of “we make the road by walking it.”  I will post out when done if only to note my own discoveries, but I certainly hope many participate in this reading culture experiment for surely there is wisdom in this crowd.

My ultimate goal is to get others to take portions of the book to slow read so that I can participate in the conversation they are raising in the network.  Eventually, I will want to explore whether this is a particularly useful way to work.