The article Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century brought up quite a few interesting points that I had not heard of before and was surprised by. Henry Jenkins writes about the reasoning behind why we need to extend technology into the classroom of underprivileged students and how we can bring about the change in our classroom or school.

I was most intrigued by some of the statistics presented at the beginning of the article. He presented evidence that females are more likely than males to use social activities online. It might be because I am a female who loved blogging all throughout my teenage years, but this statistic did not surprise me at all. Comparing this to my life, I have noticed a pattern of more females using blogging sites and making more use out of social media sites like Facebook  or Myspace. I was also intrigued by the lack of differences in participation levels when it came to ethnicity. I had not ever thought about how race and ethnicity played into this scenario, but it seems to make sense that the use of online participation is an even playing field.

However, I was extremely surprised by some of the statistics that he provided about urban youth being more likely to create media than suburban or rural youth. The study was done in 2005 and left out a lot of variables, but the percentage differences between the three groups was surprising. I was left wondering, why would urban youth be the leaders in this group? If they are the group that is stereotypically left with the least resources, why are they performing the best? And ultimately, if they are the group that is already performing the best, are we doing anything to bring the suburban youth and rural youth groups to the same level as the urban youth?