Heh. At least it seems like the Higher Education section of The Australian has managed to quarantine itself from the melt-down that's occurred amongst its political journalists. There's a nice piece there today about our efforts at QUT to develop the C4C framework of collaborative capacities required of graduates in the developing produsage environment - an article which was sparked by our paper at Mobile Media 2007 (and a similar paper I presented at ICE 3 earlier this year). Campus Review also reported on this recently, following a Sydney University press release. Neither note Trendwatching as the originators of the 'Generation C' meme, though, which is unfortunate...
In the meantime, and especially after reading Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture, I'm beginning to think that we may have to expand our C4C of creative, collaborative, critical, and communicative capacities to a C5C, though, which would add a further combinatory capacity. In addition to what we've said in our papers so far, this fifth capacity could be described as follows:
Combinatory: produsage is fundamentally based on an approach which deconstructs 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; as Pesce puts it, "knowledge is everywhere, freely available, but hyperintelligence doesn't confer any great wisdom". In order to effectively participate in and benefit from the knowledge space of hyper- or collective intelligence, therefore those engaging in and with produsage and its artefacts require enhanced capacities to combine and recombine these specific artefacts in their pursuit of personal understanding. But beyond the pursuit of knowledge itself, combinatory capacities are also required for active participation in produsage processes: as we have seen, 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.
At least that's what I'll argue in the education chapter of my produsage book...
