Everybody’s a Writer

Better late than never, I present the first installment of our class podcasts:

http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/grad/peters/engl241/rss.xml

One of the teachers who supported technology in the classroom (while others took an unfortunately defeatist attitude) has written a response to the reviews of the program on his blog.

Also, Autumn Edows has written a blog response on her MySpace page. She feels as if she and her parents have been misrepresented. I agree–the film made her parents out to be supporting her participation in pornography, but if you look at her site, that’s not what it is.

I watched this piece on Frontline last night about kids online, mostly tweens and teens. I was impressed with how candid the kids were in their interviews, especially the Ana girl. She spoke with a maturity and self-awareness that could easily disguise her eating disorder. Although the show claimed to be aimed at understanding kids’ online lives, it unfairly focused on the negative aspects of kids’ activities. I didn’t hear anything I haven’t heard before–predators, cyberbullies, eating disorders. Those concerns are important, but I think the potential positives were glossed over rather than seriously explored. Danah Boyd made the point that many kids do engage in risky behavior online, but the same kids are also engaging in risky behavior offline. I think that is a point we forget. Many of the kids rolled their eyes at the mention of predators and said that they would never tell someone where they lived–as long as we teach them how to respond, most kids are going to make the right decisions. It’s an extension of the Stranger Danger lessons we’re all familiar with.

A point that I liked was that the internet allows teenagers to try on and display different identities, that more than one of the kids referred to as “the real me.” The creative construction of identity, I think, is enormously helpful to adolescents in the process of defining themselves. It provides a vehicle for introspection, even for kids who are not typically reflective, as they make decisions about what words, images, colors, and sounds–even new names–represent who they are and what they want to project to the world. I was an introspective kid, and I used my diary to try on my identities and try to get at the “real me,” but I did it in a very private way. I also remember longing to “reach out” because that introspective bubble can be very lonely. I also talked on the phone for hours, which has apparently been replaced by MySpace. Peer relationships are crucial to teenagers–that’s why we talked on the phone so much–and I think they process their place in the world by talking out their experiences with their friends. Online or off, some peer interaction is good and some is bad. Some can enrich you or, if negative, teach you to deal with rejection and conflict. And some can destroy you. Online or off.
I wonder about the depressed boy. He was 13 when he killed himself. When I was 13, I was depressed, partially because I was ridiculed by some kids at school for being overweight, and I’m sure also because of the hormonal upheavals and identity crises that accompany puberty and adolescence. They told a story about a popular girl who flirted with the boy and then told him it was all a big joke. Something similar to that happened to me, not online, when I was in junior high. So I connected with this story. I remember being in my room a lot (no internet), writing in my diary, crying, feeling lonely and misunderstood. I also had suicide fantasies and honestly planned to kill myself. With time, those thoughts left me, and I became more social again, more involved with my family, and generally happier. I did not confide in anyone, so no one directly helped me overcome my suicidal thoughts. But neither did anyone encourage, romanticize, or amplify those thoughts. I know that sometimes kids have friends in “real life” that do support those kinds on obsessions in each other, but they are easier to find online because they are collected in virtual communities. (Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton famously had this kind of relationship–so it’s not limited to teenagers or to the internet) I wonder how I would have responded and how I would have come out on the other side if I’d had the kind of friend that this boy had online. I think here our bigger concern is to recognize the signs of depression in kids and how to respond, not what they are doing online.

I certainly acknowledge that the internet is not always safe, but I don’t think I need to continue that discussion here–it has been hashed over in the Frontline piece and everywhere else. We need to talk more about how to foster healthy relationships that respect the kids’ need for privacy and the desire to engage in the social tools that EVERYONE else is using with the parents’ responsibility to protect and guide them (Hint: It’s not the way that PTO Mom has been doing it).

Edited to add: Check out Geeky Mom’s post on this program and the discussion there.

I just figured out that WordPress lets you upload files. So in the interest of sharing, here’s the blog project.

Blog Project

Holy cow–my students are coming up with great blog topics. We’ve got diverse topics like the environment, hip hop, sailing, boxing, spirituality–all sorts. I am so glad I went this way. I just could never feel them getting into the blogs about class content, but several of them already seem excited about their blogs and they’ve only made introductory posts so far. I’m giving them a week to get started and next week we’re going to talk about building an audience and how blog communities develop.

BTW, here’s a link to a recent column in Time, looking back on the 2006 Person of the Year: You issue, calling 2007 the Year of Them.

Now that we’ve had our first day, I am even more optimistic about this class. I’m basing this entirely on the fact that my students looked at me and responded with facial expressions. When a class won’t smile, I know the semester is doomed.

Can I just say that the English department has the best technology support? To paraphrase my colleagues, “Sarah said, Let there be podcasts, and there were podcasts. And she saw that it was good.” I didn’t have to figure anything out–I just told them that I wanted an rss feed, and they made one for me. And gave me software and headsets in my classroom! Woo-hoo! This was too easy. I need to challenge them more.

P.S. RSS link to come in mid-February. I have high hopes for our podcast series and it would be nice if people actually listened to it.

I’m getting my Moodle page set up now and I’ll be sending the URL out to students Monday. I am glad that I started the del.icio.us tag, and I have been using Google Alerts to keep up with news on a few key terms. I found out about Google Alerts when I clicked on the “news results” for a Facebook. I now have Google search for Facebook news automatically and at the end of the week, I get an email with headlines and links. I just skim the headlines and tag the ones that look like they might be good for my class. That way I keep a current list of links without having to do all the “legwork” of actually typing stuff into Google. I have Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, millennials, and generation y for now.

It’s been a little more difficult than usual making the course calendar because the topics for reading and discussion will change even as the semester goes on. I think I’m going to talk about the election and the writer’s guild strike towards the end of the semester, so there’s not point finding readings for that right now. The information will be old by the time we get to it. So the calendar this time is much looser than in previous semesters, but I like that. That’s what Moodle is for.

I’ve got enough stuff bookmarked and PDFed (thanks in part to the brilliant and generous Nancy!) to have lots of readings all semester, but now that it’s coming down to finishing the syllabus, I’m thinking maybe not so many readings. I always get resistance to readings in comp classes (what am I saying? I get resistance to readings in lit classes!) and I’ve talked to some colleagues in the past who have assigned no class-wide readings in comp. With the dynamic nature of this topic and the speed at which information becomes obsolete, I’m thinking of not making the big calendar of assigned readings. I’ve started a del.icio.us tag for the class (engl241web if you’re interested) so that I could bookmark articles as they pop up, and I’m thinking of letting that be the readings list. I won’t require the whole list, but that will be a nice store of relevant materials that students themselves can contribute to. When I want to do something specific and need some background info, I’ll point them to the link when the moment arises. Part of this idea will also be to have the students finding the course materials themselves, contributing actively to the content of the class. And other than that, we’re just writing writing writing writing writing. (And it has the unintended but welcome side effect of less prep time for me–have I heard that somewhere before?)

I have changed the critical narrative assignment to one titled “Define Your Generation.” There has been a lot of talk in popular media and in higher ed media about the generation that is currently in college and just entering the workforce. It has a lot of names–Generation Y, the Internet Generation, and Millennials are some of the more popular ones (BTW, it looks like Millennials is going to win out–that’s my prediction and you can quote me on that). The two consistent markers I have read about have been child-centered parenting (usually pointed to as a bad thing that produces wimpy and dependent adults) and the constant presence of the Internet in their lives. They don’t remember not having a connected computer at home. These labels are, of course, applied by those of older generations. This seems relevant and, I hope, interesting to my students and the goals of my class, so that’s the new assignment. It offers the opportunity for narrative–one way that they might define their generation is to interpret a personal experience that defines their identity in relation to their peers or their elders. After the essays are written, we are going to record them as audio files and publish them as a podcast series. I’m thinking about contacting the campus radio station, too, to see if they might be interested in them.

P.S. Apparently no one is talking about Gen-X anymore. We got old. But not old enough to be interesting again, like the Boomers.