Homeless bloggers share their voices

The digital divide is real and needs to be addressed, but this article from Wired came as a surprise to me today:

Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he’s managed to run a ’round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados.

Sacramento resident Terri Hellerich has been homeless and maintains the livejournal blog “False Thoughts Set Loose.” Kevin Barbieux, who lives in Las Vegas and has been homeless off and on since 2002, maintains the popular blog “The Homeless Guy.” The tagline of his blog is, “There is more to homeless people than being homeless.” WanderingScribe is the blog of a homeless woman in England. According to the Wired article,

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.

I don’t know how this strikes you, but I am pretty amazed. Lots of folks talk about how the read/write web, and blogs specifically, permit people to discover and share their voices in powerful ways– but these are some of the most amazing examples I’ve read about to date.

Do you think students in our schools should be blogging? I absolutely DO. Not only from a literacy development side, but also from an identity search and “human voice” side. What do young people you know care about? What do they want to change? What are they doing about those issues? Yes, the blogosphere is full of people’s personal diaries, but it is also filled with people who are sharing their voices to draw attention and encourage action on issues that matter to them. I strongly believe that in schools, we should not merely be trying to “grow good, passive consumers and disinterested citizens.” We want to help students of all ages acquire and refine their literacy skills so they can USE those skills to improve their lives and improve the world.

If you look at the history of major social movements– from the abolition movement to the civil rights movement in the US– they included lots of noteable participation by young people. Why? Well, in part I am sure that young people can tend to be more idealistic and less jaded / pessimistic than older people. Young people may burn with a more passionate fire to change the world, and want to make a difference today– not in 30 years after they retire from a job.

Personally, I think these stories of people blogging even when they are homeless are quite remarkable. Accessing their published ideas, and even interacting with them via blog comments, is definitely an example of transformative “level 2” technology use. The larger question their writing begs, however, is this: What are we doing about conditions of poverty today in the United States, and elsewhere in the world. One of the big things we SHOULD be doing is improving and reforming our educational system, so more students remain engaged in it and are successful completers rather than dropouts. As one of my professors noted, the lion’s share of many state budgets (certainly in Texas) fund two things: education and prisons. You can pay now, or you can pay later. But we are all paying.

Education can open the door to opportunities. Is technology a panacea? Certainly not. But it certainly can serve as a loudspeaker and platform for people to express themselves and their ideas to a global audience that would otherwise likely remain unexposed to their viewpoints. That’s level 2 technology use, and it’s what we need to be doing more in our schools.

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On this day..

• Safety Tip When Paying with Plastic – 2019
• #Playingwithmedia – Go beyond paperless – 2012
• TEDxOU in January 2012 and TEDxOKC 2011 Videos – 2011
• Sharing YouTube Activity Digital Breadcrumbs – 2011
• Avoid Controversial Related YouTube Videos When You Embed on a Blog #gct – 2011
• Jaycut, not YouTube, has the best online, free video editor today – 2010
• Mac OS 10.5.3 Address Book Syncs to Google! – 2008
• links for 2008-06-22 – 2008
• Hallmark of 21st Century Learning: Use of web video – 2007
• Administrators Who Blog, Read Blogs, and Podcast – 2007