learning funded by the MacArthur Foundation which announced it in 2006. NML's aim was to develop instructional materials designed to help prepare young people to meaningfully participate in the new media environment. As Jenkins explained it: "The NML conceptual framework includes an understanding of challenges, new media literacies, and participatory forms. This framework guides thinking about how to provide adults and youth with the opportunity to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical framework, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in the cultural changes which are taking place in response to the influx of new media technologies, and to explore the transformations and possibilities afforded by these technologies to reshape education." Jenkins introduces a range of social skills and cultural competencies that are fundamental for meaningful participation in a participatory culture. The new media literacies areas given particular definitions by this project (as listed here) include: appropriation (education), collective intelligence, distributed cognition, judgment, negotiation, networking, performance, simulation, transmedia navigation, participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics problem. Convergence culture Since his work on fan studies, which led to his 1992 book Textual Poachers, Jenkins' research across various topics can be understood as a continuum with an overall theme. This research theme addresses how groups and communities in online & digital media era participatory culture exercise their own agency. Such agency is exercised by tapping into and combining numerous different media sources and channels, in both officially approved and unapproved ways; when fans or users work as communities to leverage their combined expertise, a collective intelligence process is generated. One of Jenkins' key arguments is that given these cultural phenomena, media convergence is best understood by both media scholars and practitioners as a cultural process, rather than a technological end-point. The key work in Jenkins' development of this argument was his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. As described in this book, convergence culture arises from digital era post-broadcast media landscape where audiences are fragmented by the proliferation of channels and platforms while media users are more empowered than ever before to participate and collaborate – across various channels and platforms – in content creation and dissemination through their access to online networks and digital interactivity. To help apply the insights of the convergence culture paradigm to industry, he founded the Convergence Culture Consortium - later renamed the Futures of Entertainment Consortium - research initiative in 2005