You know, when even fifth graders pick up on your weaknesses, you've REALLY got some problems to work on.
Fifth-Graders Use Internet To Communicate With Soldiers In Iraq
Students, Soldiers Use Blogs To Send Text, Pictures
POSTED: 8:51 pm CST January 26, 2006
UPDATED: 9:18 pm CST January 26, 2006
TRUSSVILLE, Ala. -- Some students in Trussville are using the latest technology to learn about the war in Iraq straight from soldiers on the front lines.
Students at Paine Intermediate School are sending text, pictures and audio to troops in Iraq via their blogs.
"It's a Web log. It's kind of like a journal, except it's online and you get to talk to other people," said Whitney Webster, one of Paine Intermediate School's bloggers.
Technology teacher April Chamberlain saw blogs that U.S. troops publish while they are fighting in Iraq, so she contacted a soldier nicknamed "Grey Eagle" and asked her to correspond with her class. [...]
"We asked how were Iraqis different from us here, and what did it look like there and how it's different from America," Paine blogger Jordan Capps said. [...]
The Paine bloggers said they have learned more about Iraq, U.S. troops and the war from their new friend "Grey Eagle" than any newspaper or TV show could ever teach. [...]
The point highlighted being that even little kids can understand when they aren't getting the full story about something, and the idea that they don't have to rely on someone else to filter and frame information for them is something they will not see as revolutionary (as some of us old folks do), but as an expectation.
And, when it comes to that other group of putative information gatekeepers--educators--the problem schools face is going to be not so much teaching the use of the technology, but of equipping children to be open-minded and critical thinkers in order to understand what they are reading and to be able to apply it. (And this does not mean adopting the rigid "progressive" orthodoxy currently exhibited in education in which being "open-minded" is nothing more than slavish adherence to the peculiar socialistic ideals of an antitheistic, relativistic moral outlook and the rise of anticompetitiveness ostensibly for the sake of not damaging anyone's self-esteem.)
Teachers said incorporating new technology improves students' course work in other areas.
"I'm starting to see their writing is a little better. They still have some of the codes they use for the Internet, but I'm starting to see better writing," Chamberlain said.
The students seem to be getting a lot out of their 21st-century pen pals and hope their new friends are, too.
"It's really hard over there and they like to hear from everyone from home sometimes," Paine blogger Sydney Hansard said.
The bloggers at Paine Intermediate School hope to meet "Grey Eagle" someday. She is scheduled to train at Fort Rucker when she comes back from Iraq.
To check out "Grey Eagle's" blog, visit A Female Soldier's Story. To read the Paine Intermediate School fifth-graders' blog, visit their Communication With Grey Eagle And Fellow Soldiers.
UPDATE: A tangentially related post from Hugh Hewitt.
Similarly, the lead on the early evening newscast on your favorite local NBC was about Natalee, and the reporter just seemed stunned, stunned to learn of this revelation that college freshmen were learning alllll about Natalee Holloway from the Internet.
Guy didn't even realize he was fluffing up the competition.
Posted by: Kenny at January 27, 2006 08:59 AMAnd if there ever was a story that the local media has misreported (or malreported) every conceivable way, it's the Holloway disappearance. I don't know that the Internet is any better, but they sure shouldn't be surprised people are using it.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 27, 2006 09:06 AM"They still have some of the codes they use for the Internet, but I'm starting to see better writing"
FWIW, that made me almost LOL :)
I wonder how often teachers have to get the red pen out when the youngsters write out papers using IM/text messaging code. It is another language to master, one that comes easy for the kids but the old-farts (like me) resist. I won't get into that "shizzle" stuff.
Posted by: MarcV at January 27, 2006 09:39 AMI think I'm honor bound not to tell an anecdotal story that, to me, paints the picture of the local mainstream media's views on the so-called new media.
Can we shed that name please? It has become tiresome and not entirely apropos at this point.
As to the writing of the language, Strunk and White (best text I bought in college, and for $5.95, still sitting here at my desk too) would say that those changes come when writers of taste use them. Are we writers of taste, Terry?
Meantime they say to use orthodox spelling. I became so startled at the ghost of my first journalism professor I just went back and rewrote MSM into mainstream media.
Maybe I should read this book again this weekend.
Posted by: Kenny at January 27, 2006 10:25 AMI wanna hear the story, Kenny! Honor be blasted--this here's the Internets, and we got our own code! And cool pajamas.
As for name-shedding--I got kinda lost. Did you mean to say we should lose the tags "mainstream media" (to describe professional news gathering and reporting organizations) and "new media" (used to describe the former readership of mainstream media who have decided that since most of what gets reported is no longer who-what-when-where-how-why but a thinly disguised attempt to shape public opinion based upon the personal views of the reporter, and thus the former readership thinks, 'hey, I can provide commentary on the facts--and check facts--as well as someone like a high-paid LATimes humor columnist who couldn't find his butt with both hands'), or were you talking about something else?
As for being a writer of taste, no. I'm not about to claim any mantle of tastefulness. I do try, however, not to be tasteless.
As for conventional spelling, I think it is useful on occasion--the problem I see so much in what I read online is not the intentional misspelling used to concoct a certain effect, it's an obvious lack of concern regarding it (and grammar) in the first place. Writing well is an art form, and you have to know the basic rules of the art before you go off breaking them.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 27, 2006 10:58 AMNot really. I was just saying that to throw people off.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 27, 2006 03:42 PMStrunk and White have given many college students fits.
I love the argument on medias Terry. However, a brief look at journalistic history would show that only recently, and for only a few years, was there a pretense of ethical, balanced reported.
Darn Nixon.
Prior to that, it was all muckracking baby! Woooo!
Bring me some yellow journalism!
All I know is we have too many folks pretending to be Woodward and Bernstein, and not enough pretending to be Twain.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at January 27, 2006 04:04 PM