least they care what other people think about what they have created). Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued. Jenkins has also highlighted these key forms of participatory culture: Affiliations — memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media (such as Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace). Expressions — producing new creative forms (such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups). Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling). Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging). In addition, Jenkins and his collaborators have also identified a range of media literacy skills needed to be effective members of these participatory culture forms - see the New Media Literacies section below. Fan studies Jenkins' work on fan culture arises from his scholarly interests in popular culture and media as well as reflection on his own experiences as a media fan. This also shaped his interest and understanding of participatory culture. Jenkins has described himself as an "aca-fan", a term that first gained currency in the early 1990s that he is credited with helping to popularize more widely (together with Matt Hills' concept of the "fan-academic" in his 2002 work Fan Cultures) to describe an academic who consciously identifies and writes as a fan. Jenkins' 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture is regarded as a seminal and foundational work on fan culture which helped establish its legitimacy as a serious topic for academic inquiry, not just in television studies but beyond. Jenkins' research in Textual Poachers showed how fans construct their own culture by appropriating and remixing—"poaching"—content from mass culture. Through this "poaching", the fans carried out such creative cultural activities as rethinking personal identity issues such as gender and sexuality; writing stories to shift focus onto a media "storyworld's" secondary characters; producing content to expand of the timelines of a storyworld; or filling in missing scenes in the storyworld's official narratives order to better satisfy the fan community. New media literacies Building on his work on participatory culture, Jenkins helped lead Project New Media Literacies (NML), one part of a 5-year $50 million research initiative on digital