New world order?: Challenges for screen production education in participatory culture

The continually mediated environment that today’s university students exist in often appears surreal to those who remember a time before mobile phones and computers. This paper will consider how best to engage university students in screen media courses, while also examining the challenges of teaching in participatory culture and asking how production academics can utilise new media to educational advantage: encouraging students to ’explor(e) the possibilities of participation… expanding skills at deploying media for one’s own ends’ (Jenkins 2006a, p. 270). Thereby allowing academics to explore the ways in which to best shift our media production teaching practice in order to best educate this student cohort and prepare them for employment.