Teen Bloggers Build Their Own Community
In The Next Generation of Bloggers, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb brought my attention to youthbloggers.net, a community for teen bloggers. It looks like it’s just getting off the ground but I’m happy to see kids supporting and encouraging one another as they try to get their message out to the world. Imagine that: kids helping each other with writing in their free time. So much for the, “kids can’t write because they spend all day playing video games” theory.
What does it say that teens had to create their own support community to learn how to blog? I guess they’re not getting it in schools, where I suspect the five-paragraph “sandwich” essay (”Your introduction and conclusion are the bread, the three body paragraphs are the ham and cheese!”) still reigns supreme. I guess that, faced with writing in artificial genres and for a limited audience of one (the teacher), kids have chosen to create their own learning community where they can work together to understand how to communicate in this new medium. More power to them; I’ll be watching youthbloggers.net as it grows.
One concern: many of the forum posts focus on blogging for money. I suppose that’s OK - it’s easy to forget how cash-strapped we all were at that age and how hard it is to find a job. But I hope to see kids blogging out of a sense of passion, intellectual curiosity, and activism. Hopefully, youthbloggers will help teens with something to say to develop their voice and get their message heard.
