Cultura participativa y machinimacreaciones audiovisuales en las aulas

Abstract

In this research we show how some commercial video games, specifically Spore, can be used as learning resources that help students to become critical citizens in the digital society. Video games, and cinema, will be the elements of a comprehensive multimedia context where participants combine various technologies. To do so, students need to acquire new creation and understanding skills that enable them to master different media and multimedia resources. Also, today video games have become one of the most important phenomena, both cultural and economically. The rise of these and other technologícs has facilitated the emergence of what ]enkins calls "participatory culture" (Jenkins, 2006) where users, through Internet, can make free contributions creating a new democratic form of culture. The presence of multiple platforms around the game allows the player to be actively involved in the game world and to construct narratives around it. Our data comes from an ethnographic study (Atkinson et al. 2001; Lacasa & Reina, 2004; Pink, 2004) conducted in a secondary school in Coslada (Madrid) with students of the last year of Secondary school, during Biology c1asses. They created machinima productions (Jones, 2006), ergo, their own audiovisual products through images from the game, edited using a software called "Movie Maker". Thanks to YouTube, their classroom's creations become available to the entire online community, developing digital literacy processes and actively participating in the media culture. The results show the need to create spaces for reflection on new communication scenarios provided by the Internet and new media (Manovich, 2001).