Week Five: Digital Writing

This week's reading, from Jenkins, was a good reminder of how creative teenagers are. Our future students are likely to be creating something new at this very moment, and they're sharing it with others thanks to technologies like YouTube and Facebook. I liked the way this report validated the time young people spend creating as well as the cognitive processes they're using and the skills they're developing. With all the talk these days about the jobs of the future being in creativity and innovation, it seems students are getting more training at home on the computer than they are in our classrooms.

The section on gaming definitely caught my attention. I wrote about my experiences with video games a couple of weeks ago on my blog for the Pop Culture and Education class (http://emilyci5472.blogspot.com/2009/02/week-three-video-games.html), and I discovered that despite my lack of experience, the power that video games have to immerse you in a particular world is a valuable tool, especially if what we aim to teach is perspective-taking. It was so interesting to read the narratives of the students playing the Revolution game because they had clearly felt on some level what it would be like to live during that time in history (and isn't that a major goal of history class?) However, I believe that video games can't do all our work for us. I played a lot of Oregon Trail as a kid and while I did learn some things about what it was like for settlers in covered wagons, I would have been much more educated about the subject had my teachers devoted some of their classroom instruction to the topic.

Another section of the report that interested me was the performance/roleplay/cosplay section. While I've never dressed up as an anime character, I LOVE visiting places like Fort Snelling and Murphy's Landing where everyone is dressed up and stays in historical character. I feel I can learn so much from both walking around and observing and asking lots of questions of those in character. As a summer nanny, I took my girls (aged 8 and 12) to Fort Snelling, and their interaction with the "laundress" actually led to an opportunity to learn about a game children at the time would have played called Graces. We played the game all week, and the experience wouldn't have happened if that opportunity for interaction hadn't been there. Asking our students to "get in character" is another great way to encourage perspective taking.

The section on appropriation also caught my eye, especially the phrase "students learn by taking culture apart and putting it back together" (32). This is a relatively new phenomenon to me, but it's completely natural for our students. While they're working on digital remixes of music and video at home, we might just as easily tap into their understanding of remixing to apply it to print media (because yes, print still exists). I had so much fun in my poetry classes in college messing around with found poetry. If you're unfamiliar with the poetry of Mark Nowak, I urge you to check it out. Once I understood the link between found poetry and music styles like techno, I realized that poets like Nowak weren't stealing, they were using text already out there to create an entirely new message. I think kids will come to this understanding so much more quickly than I did, especially if you teach found poetry alongside digital appropriation like YouTube videos or music.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on the collective intelligence piece. This idea of "ours" rather than "mine" is changing. Think about how much more complicated it is to teach plagiarism, or explain why Wikipedia isn't an appropriate source for a research paper. That should be evidence that people are starting to see information as "ours" again. I love that the internet has done that for us. While it's made the idea of a "reliable source" a little fuzzy, it's a great reminder that the credit for new ideas and innovation should to to all of us because we all build on each others' knowledge.




RESOURCE LINK OF THE WEEK

http://www.bayareawritingproject.org/digitalpaper/

I came across this link to "Digital Paper," an online magazine for the Bay Area Writing Project. I'm not entirely sure the specifics on the students who participate in this project, other than than it's an offshoot of the National Writing Project. What I liked about this site is that it's so simple; it's basically just a page that showcases student writing. The articles we've been reading lately about writing and digital literacies stress the need for a real audience, and this eZine has all the features of a "real" publication. When I took a poetry class in high school, we put out a collection of the best pieces at the end of the semester. Certain students (including me) were part of the selection committee, which read the poetry and voted on which ones would go into the anthology. I realize now that this process could easily be repeated for a digital publication rather than the lame Kinko's paper book that my high school put together. I liked the model the above site uses for that.