Using Technology with Intention

Here's a word of advice to myself and other educators on effectively integrating digital tools in the classroom: 

Teachers need to be familiar with ways that they can harness functions of individual technologies to communicate publicly and creatively.

I think that Krista Tippett and Danah Boyd have shared solid examples of how digitization can be beneficial for readers and writers. As part of a 2017 On Being with Kristen Tippet podcast episode titled, "The Internet of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," Boyd, a technology and social media scholar, says that for younger and younger people, the Internet is, "just there," and Tippett (a journalist) concurs. "For this generation, the Internet is so much in the fabric of things," she notes.

The good news, Boyd reminds us, is that the Internet isn't all bad.

For instance, she notes, for children who have access to social media, it provides an unstructured outlet that they probably crave in the face of their "over-scheduled" lives. Also, while memes and emojis may seemingly undermine the writing and reading techniques that educators push on students, they can actually be rather deep, expressing more than plain text. 

During Tippett and Boyd's conversation, they reference "Ferguson," the 2014 incident in Ferguson, Missouri when a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

She mentions #ifIwasshot, a Twitter hashtag that someone created after Ferguson. #ifIwasshot plays on how the media tends to show certain pictures of black people then they're victims of gun violence. Basically, it exposes the fact that some media outlets identify black victims of gun violence with less polished/dignified photos than others, even though these outlets have the better photos at their disposal, too.

Here is one example of the hashtag in use (Would the media show the left photo or the right one?):

“There’s a lot of beauty in memes. There’s a lot of beauty in watching people try to amplify things that are messy via social media," says Boyd. Looking at #IfIwasshot, it's clear that she's using the word meme loosely here.

In the interview, Boyd says that (just like with memes) there is value in digital languages, including text messages. This reminds me of a book that I'm reading called Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List. which was written by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. This 2007 Y.A. novel frequently includes symbols that can best be likened to emojis. As a reader, I think that these symbols help me to engage with the story because I have to make more connections in my head in order to decode them. Sometimes, they are cut-and-dry, but other times, you have to look closely and actually think about it.

Here is an example of a page from that book. Here, the world symbol in the top paragraph is obvious, while I actually had to squint to see the tornado icon that Cohn and Levithan put into the same sentence.

If readers have trouble making out the symbols-- like I did with the tornado icon--, then they must use context clues to figure out their meanings. Either way you spin it (tornado pun intended!?), when they're use appropriately, digital symbols and creations are beneficial for readers. As #IfIwasshot demonstrates, they can also promote important discussions about touchy political topics.