It’s always interesting to do a little internet research about the writers and their work, but it was great not to have to this time- the writers did that for us by including self-authored bios in the preface. These were especially useful because they were written with the context of the article in mind.
Barbara Guzzetti has worked as a professor of literary education for over 20 years. She is a baby boomer, and therefore did not come into contact with computers until her 20’s. Diana Welsh is a library assistant in the teen center at a public library. She has been creating DIY media of all sorts since elementary school- everything from playing in bands to writing fan fiction. Kate is a full time grad student. She actually went to school with Diana and created a zine with her. She has used zines as a way to speak up on ideas that are important to her, like social justice. She uses online media to make her voice heard.
One great point they brought up was the need to make school interesting to adolescents. This is a time of constant change for these students in so many aspects of their life. They suggest that this fact be celebrated. We should tailor education to the student, not the other way around. A great way to do so is through digital media. Why write on the chalkboard when you can show a powerpoint presentation with pictures, videos and diagrams? Why assign students a paper, when they could present their work as a video or in a blog?
I also liked the terms “digital native” and “digital migrant” (pg. 1) to describe those who grew up with computers and those who were born before that time and adopted the technology later. I am definitely a digital native. My family got our first computer when I was about four years old. I remember playing games on floppy discs, crazy! One of my favorite games was a drawing game of sorts that came as a trial version on our Apple computer. I first used the internet in elementary school. A friend of mine had AOL and I would “play” with it at her house until me and my sister finally convinced my mom to get a dial up connection at our house. I remember creating a little profile for my instant messenger account, which I guess would be my first experience with social media. Then MySpace came around. I remember spending hours designing my page, having no idea that I was actually sort of learning how to code html.
Throughout my college career, I have been given all sorts of DIY media projects. My first semester, I remember having to make a website-ish thing to supplement a research paper. In the past year or two especially, I have had classes with creative research projects instead of papers. Many of them encouraged me to pick a medium that I am not familiar with. Because of this, I discovered great tools like Prezi, which has become my presentation method of choice. I think these have been very beneficial, but shouldn’t completely replace formal academic writing.
Although I don’t completely love having to write all these blogs for class, I can definitely see their importance. It helps us to get familiar with a new medium to present our work, but also encourages us to produce higher quality work because it is a public forum and people will see it.
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