Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Youthful activism. At our university blog, I posted yesterday about Ryan Hreljac, a Canadian teen of 14 who heads his own foundation that has raised $1.5 million for digging life-saving wells in Africa. Hreljac says this about youthful activism:
Youth today want to be more involved in society. So many young Canadians are working to support positive change in their communities and in the world. Adults now recognize that kids and teenagers can and do add value.
Connect that with the passage on youthful skills and tools Will Richardson pointed to yesterday by Howard Rheingold:
The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds…The eager adoption of web publishing, digital video production and online video distribution, social networking services, instant messaging, multiplayer role-playing games, online communities, virtual worlds, and other Internet-based media by millions of young people around the world demonstrates the strength of their desire — unprompted by adults — to learn digital production and communication skills. Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production.
We should act as though this is now the most normal thing in the world, every day, until all the people around us start to see passages like these no longer as moments of idealism but as elements of common sense. For most educators, including myself, this requires a change of heart. I think of the many hours I've spent at the public university and at our local public schools, where I've seen wonderful examples of excellence mixed with unembarrassed spoon-feeding and condescending practices that students of all ages are insulted by and see right through. We have to hand over these tools without condescending, assuming that our younger fellow citizens have the same stake in the present and the future that we do, and that they will find as many serious and silly and playful ways to use the new tools as we have done. We have to believe in them as activists at least as much as we believe in ourselves, and given our own records, maybe more so.
PS. In case we think too highly of our own uses of the new tools, I offer a brief cautionary tale. When listserver software caught the imagination of academics who teach writing at the college level, many excellent conversations took place and respected elders shared ideas with great generosity and patience when newcomers asked for help. But on one of those lists someone asked one day if people knew any songs that included spelling -- such as D - I - V - O - R - C - E. For days the incoming email was maddeningly filled with obscure song lyrics, which drove at least one reader to unsubscribe. As tool users, we're as playful or as trivial as anyone else, I'd say. [0 & P]
Youth today want to be more involved in society. So many young Canadians are working to support positive change in their communities and in the world. Adults now recognize that kids and teenagers can and do add value.
Connect that with the passage on youthful skills and tools Will Richardson pointed to yesterday by Howard Rheingold:
The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds…The eager adoption of web publishing, digital video production and online video distribution, social networking services, instant messaging, multiplayer role-playing games, online communities, virtual worlds, and other Internet-based media by millions of young people around the world demonstrates the strength of their desire — unprompted by adults — to learn digital production and communication skills. Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production.
We should act as though this is now the most normal thing in the world, every day, until all the people around us start to see passages like these no longer as moments of idealism but as elements of common sense. For most educators, including myself, this requires a change of heart. I think of the many hours I've spent at the public university and at our local public schools, where I've seen wonderful examples of excellence mixed with unembarrassed spoon-feeding and condescending practices that students of all ages are insulted by and see right through. We have to hand over these tools without condescending, assuming that our younger fellow citizens have the same stake in the present and the future that we do, and that they will find as many serious and silly and playful ways to use the new tools as we have done. We have to believe in them as activists at least as much as we believe in ourselves, and given our own records, maybe more so.
PS. In case we think too highly of our own uses of the new tools, I offer a brief cautionary tale. When listserver software caught the imagination of academics who teach writing at the college level, many excellent conversations took place and respected elders shared ideas with great generosity and patience when newcomers asked for help. But on one of those lists someone asked one day if people knew any songs that included spelling -- such as D - I - V - O - R - C - E. For days the incoming email was maddeningly filled with obscure song lyrics, which drove at least one reader to unsubscribe. As tool users, we're as playful or as trivial as anyone else, I'd say. [0 & P]
| PREV page | NEXT page |