Why vs. How in Digital Communication

Today, I'd like to talk about a quote I found in the article "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century."

The goal was to allow students to set and complete their own tasks with the focus almost entirely on the production process. Little effort was made to give youth a context for thinking about these changes or to reflect on the new responsibilities and challenges they faced as participants in the digital culture.

This quote is interesting to me because it brings up two main points.
1. Teaching in the digital age is focused on production.
2. There is little context for thinking critically about digital culture itself.

In my experience, it is much easier to learn how to produce something on your own than it is to understand how something works. For example, trying to explain why blogging is interesting in the digital world and what it means to be a blogger is much more difficult than acutally going out and just writing up a blog post or two. But we still focus on teaching production.

Now, I'm not saying that we should stop teaching production. It's important to be able to make things competantly and confidently, but it's more important to focus on why we make the things we do rather than on how to do so.

But there isn't really a space for us to talk about this new "responisibility" and the "challenges" it creates. And I don't mean actual space -- obviously I'm talking about it right now. I mean a space in our social order. We don't give our forms of communication as much thought as we probably should. We don't take the time to figure out how and why something works before we go and start using it or making assumptions about it. It's time to change that.