This is How Teenagers Consume Media, but How Do They Produce It?


by Ann Abbott
I read with interest one teenager's explanation of how teenagers in general consume media. Aside from using Facebook alot, everything else is very different from how I myself consume media.
But as an educator, I am interested in how teenagers and young adults produce media. More and more I find myself asking this question: Do they even want to produce it?
It's commonplace for educators to say, "Our students know how to use technology better than we do." Hmmmm. Some technology. Not all.
Reading the piece, it struck me that everyone he said about media and teenagers suggest that they use it for entertainment and building relationships. They don't seem interested in using media for education. So should we be so intent on forcing it on them in our classes?
I do think there are lots of reasons to use technology in our teaching, but we must go into it knowing that they don't already use many of the devices/platforms that we do.
For example, I tried very hard to have students make videos and upload them to YouTube. It didn't work well. Students were consumate consumers of YouTube material, but few of them actually knew how to produce and upload simple videos.

Comments

  1. Darcy LearJuly 22, 2009 at 11:49 AM

    I have had the same experience with using technology in education. There's some apathy towards using it in class (an active resistance to figuring out how the online quizzes work, for example, while the time it would take to figure it out is consumed complaining about it). But also I think those of us who grew up with the electronic age were forced to learn more of the behind the scenes stuff (first computer with a tape recorder and you programmed it yourself using BASIC language or first websites you built using html coding) that today's students are generally clueless about.

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