Eleven Skills Teens Will Need

[Timothy Gangwer]

In 2006 the MacArthur Foundation launched a five-year initiative to determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. As part of this initiative, Henry Jenkins, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, identified the following set of 11 skills that young people will need-and schools and parents will need to spend more time fostering — if they are to be what he considers "full, active, creative, and ethical participants" in the emerging participatory culture.

- Play: the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

- Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.

- 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 (eg., computer, cell-phone, TV).

- 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.