It’s an interesting idea to give kids and teenagers the opportunity to make money at such a young age. For me, this brings up questions of them getting taken advantage of or maybe gaining some kind of fame too early in life and peaking really young. Before the internet, adolescents’ art had no outlet other than school art shows and their peers, but now anyone can upload anything and have their moment of fame. I think many people use the internet for this reason, and it’s a little disheartening. Although I don’t think that is what happened the boys from Washington D.C., I do think it’s a common idea with youth that they deserve fame for no artistic merit. The positive part of this article is about giving youth a chance to not just be digital consumers, but to be “active media producers” and how we can encourage that as educators.
Then tensions that exist within this media technology and kids learning through them are good points to bring up because I feel like it’s very accurate that most older teachers are going to be generationally wary of the children learning just because it’s different than what they are used to. However, I agree with the fact that since this media technology is becoming so prevalent in daily life with almost all youth, it is important we at least try to understand it and use it to our and their benefit as learners.
This article begins with how youth first gets involved in digital media and one of the biggest ways was through social media sites and the sharing of personal photographs and videos, although it’s discussed as something to do to kill time, share memories, and look back on fun times, it can lead to something more. For example modification of online profiles, such as Myspace, Youtube, etc can lead to a more serious interest in web design through HTML and CSS. An interview with Jacob confirms this fact. While he was modifying code for his Myspace page, he found a girl who was selling layouts and realized that was something he could do for himself and that’s a powerful realization.
Another interesting thing that happens when youth use this technology on their own is that they are more free to be creative in certain ways. The article discusses this by talking about teens going into more niche categories and not having to do what all their other classmates are doing on specific school assignments.
There is also much more opportunity for youth to get feedback on their creations when they are sharing them online. Many of the websites have forums or comments built in to the process and sometimes anyone in the world can make a comment or suggestion. This is vastly different from the student setting in school, where someone is lucky if they even have a group critique and it’s usually just the teacher giving feedback. The negative aspect of this is that youth can be trying to appeal to a mainstream audience and be swayed to change for the benefit of a majority. Another is that comments may be hurtful, since they are unsupervised online, and have nothing to offer.
Near the end of the article, it does state that many young people do not aspire to be professionals in media technology or get famous, which makes me still wonder about it’s placement in the school classroom.
This relates to the other article very little but I guess my main thought about preschoolers using technology better than college students is that it’s not just about their creative process being more open. There was really nothing written about how if this has changed since technology has become more prevalent or not. That would be something I hope would be considered. In this study, the college age students might not have had technology so available to them at such a young age and that’s why they aren’t as good using it, but there is nothing to suggest this possibility in the article and that irks me.
However if these preschoolers grow up to the media users that are discussed in the first article, I think they will be even more adept at using the vast technologies offered them and we will perhaps see some other differences as well.
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