What Needs to Spread and What Needs to Stick

For the next couple of weeks, I'm focusing my posts on reflections from the book Spreadable Media by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. I chose this book because of the relevance to our desire to create engaging and meaning learning experiences.

In his introduction, Jenkins defines spreadability as "the potential - both technical and cultural - for audiences to share content for their own purposes" (2). If you've created or shared a funny meme like this one I made:

then you have spread media. Sites like memegenerator make spreading media easy and fun. My question as I read this is, what should be spread? When is the right time to get maximum benefit?

To add a further wrinkle, Jenkins moves into the distinction between "stickiness" and "spreadability." Stickiness, a concept mentioned by Gladwell, refers to content that attracts attention and engagement, a term focusing on numbers of hits on a page or mentions. Spreadability differs from stickiness because spreadability focuses on making connections. One could not track all the uses of the meme above because so many generators offer this as an option. Even without generators, several users could create them on their own. Another difference lies in the fact that spreadability leads to participation in unanticipated ways. Stickiness, as a rule, provides only one kind of experience. For example, when I shared this link on Twitter taking people to a quiz identifying their medieval alter ego (I was a princess, which made me laugh out loud), I showed the quiz to be sticky. I did forwad the quiz, and many others can take the quiz and share, but the only experience we can have is taking the quiz. I can't change the quiz or remix the quiz immediately into a new quiz (even if I get a link the tool).

Here's more - watch to see what King Arthur, Kony 2012, and other texts have in common:



According to Jenkins, both should exist. In a "world where citizens count on each other to pass along compelling bits of news, information, and entertainment, often many times over the course of a given day," the tendency to forward what sticks and remake and circulate what spreads seems almost organic (12). This means, in the world of education, I need to think about what should stick with them and what I want them to spread. I also want to engage students in the metacognitive practice of thinking about sharing in either form. Jenkins writes, "people make active decisions when spreading media, whether simply passing content to their social network, making a word-of-mouth recommendation, or posting a mash-up video to YouTube."

So, what needs to stick? To me, the list would include:

• Learning targets - what do I want my students to leave my course knowing, understanding, doing? 
• Improved communication - I want my students to be able to share their knowledge and passions in an articulate and profound way
• Significance - I want my students to understand the "so what" of my course

What needs to spread? To me that list would include:

• Significance - I know it's in the list above as well. Things overlap, and that's okay. 
• Transfer - I want the students to know how to spread the learning targets of my course to their own lives, other courses, the world, etc. 
•  Reflection - Metacognitive thinking on their part about what they share and why

 How can I start? Here are some ideas:

• Discover the extent your group feels comfortable participating within culture. In my online learning course for teachers, I begin the participatory learning course with a survey to do that. Yours would fit your situation. Here is my survey: 

• Discover the comfort level of your group with spreadable tools. In your survey, you could add a few questions about spreadable tools such as meme generators, social media proficiency, etc. 
• Design with participatory experiences in mind. As the book discussion continues, I'm looking forward to more ideas about this. 

What do you think? What sticks? What spreads? Do students sometimes leave with topics sticking that you did not intend to stick? Why? Comment below - I'm looking forward to the conversation.