Blog # 6

I read “Reading in a Participatory Culture”. Our group decided to split up the reading by each person reading 2-3 designated chapters, so I read chapters 10 and 11. The premise of our book was how incorporating Moby Dick  into modern day is helpful to students and the way the author went about incorporating the reading in an interesting way to get students excited about reading such a complex and, at times, dry story. The author chose to have the students watch a remixed play of the story, have conversations about it, and kind of find out back ground information first before diving into the reading (no pun intended). The chapters I read were about the remixing process and how to remix without plagiarizing.

For anyone who doesn’t know about re-mixing and sampling, the 2 main terms covered in my chapter,sampling is about the borrowing of materials whereas remixing is referring to a new work created through the sampling process of appropriation and recombination; it combines the borrowed and original materials. For example, the remixed play I mentioned the teacher had his students watch before reading the book was a remixed story, using the same characters and similar story line, but creating new elements to add to the story so that it wasn’t plagiarizing the original material directly. So, it’s all about borrowing stuff from an original source and merging it with new material/concepts. It kind of dances on the line of plagiarism, so you have to be careful about the remixing and borrowing process.

What I liked about this book was that it introduced ways for teachers to incorporate books in the class room in new and exciting ways so that the student actually wants to read the book after building up to it with watching a play, for example, and doing some background work on the story instead of jumping into it without having any knowledge prior to it. It gives students an idea as to what they are reading and makes them want to read the story after doing “research” on it. Reading this book and the experiences the students went through even made me and a few group members want to read Moby Dick. Our group felt inspired to not only read it, but gave us ideas as to how to approach complex books in our future classrooms.