Jenny C

Here's an article that someone posted on a local list.

I like the idea that kids ARE writing, it's just that some don't
recognize it or appreciate the value of it.

Here's that part of the article:

Kids today -- we're telling you! -- don't read, don't write, don't care
about anything farther in front of them than their iPods. The Internet,
<http://dir.salon.com/topics/internet/> according to 88-year-old
Lessing (whose specialty is sturdy typewriters, or perhaps pens), has
"seduced a whole generation into its inanities."

Or is it the older generation that the Internet has seduced -- into the
inanities of leveling charges based on fear, ignorance and old-media,
multiple-choice testing? So much so that we can't see that the Internet
is only a means of communication, and one that has created a generation,
perhaps the first, of writers, activists, storytellers?

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/03/14/kids_and_internet/
<http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/03/14/kids_and_internet/>





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Sandra Dodd

That article is cool. I brought some more over here:

-=-We're talking about 33 million Americans who are fluent in
texting, e-mailing, blogging, IM'ing and constantly amending their
profiles on social network sites -- which, on average, 30 of their
friends will visit every day, hanging out and writing for 20 minutes
or so each. They're connected, they're collaborative, they're used to
writing about themselves. In fact, they choose to write about
themselves, on their own time, rather than its being a forced labor
when a paper's due in school. Regularly, often late at night, they're
generating a body of intimate written work. They appreciate the value
of a good story and the power of a speech that moves: Ninety-seven
percent of the teenagers in the Common Core survey connected "I have
a dream" with its speaker -- they can watch Dr. King deliver it on
demand -- and eight in 10 knew what "To Kill a Mockingbird" is about.

-=-This is, of course, the kind of knowledge we should be
encouraging. The Internet has turned teenagers into honest
documentarians of their own lives -- reporters embedded in their
homes, their schools, their own heads.-=-

My kids are all on MySpace and are whizzes with YouTube. Holly and
Marty are great with Photoshop and digital cameras. (Kirby's too
old, maybe. <g>)

I think it would be wonderful for them to do a comparison of kids who
have internet access and those who are forbidden to use the internet
and see who's doing better. But it might just show a genetic
slowness in those whose parents want to keep their kids in 1962.

Sandra

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