Kids to learn about e-books, free classics and related topics: Your own idea for Court’s classes?

By Court Merrigan

TeleRead book reviewer Court Merrigan will be teaching Upward Bound kids in a summer program. Feed him ideas. Here’s one: Blogging would be a great medium for the kids’ book reviews. Second photo is from a UB project unrelated to his. – D.R.

Blogs and e-books for high-risk, high potential kids?

Topics like those are on my mind these days.

Among other subjects, I’ll be teaching Beginning Blogging. I’ll have a computer lab, about 10 kids, and 5 hours a week for 5 weeks. 

Blogging for better English

The kids are pretty switched on when it comes to MySpace, IM, and texting, and general web browsing. My goal is to get them beyond cute picture uploads and grammatically questionable texts to the world where content is king: blogging. 

I plan to introduce them to issues near and dear to the hearts of TeleReaders: why a Free Culture is great, why DRM isn’t, why literature is at the heart of our culture and how e-books could be its new lifeblood, and so on.

These kids have the potential to not only join our cultural conversation, but make real contributions.  A lot of them know things about life I can only imagine.  I think they just need an outlet and they just need to know how.

WordPress and Blogger basics

We’re not going to get too technical; we’ll offer just the blogging basics on WordPress or Blogger. Students will be free to tweak their blogs in any way they like, but for the purposes of the class we’ll be focusing on creating and connecting to great content.

I’m going to leave the definition of “great” up to the kids, but I’ll definitely be guiding them to what meets my standards.

The TeleRead angle

And this is where TeleRead comes in.  The Internet is a vast community, filled with communities like this one.  This is obvious to us, of course, but I don’t think it is to these high schoolers.  Most of them have never ventured beyond their rural hometowns and they tend to think the internet beyond MySpace is filled with kidnappers and kittycat videos on YouTube.

The whole idea of the class is to get them to join the global conversation, whatever part of it they find compelling.  But I don’t want to take a megaphone to their ears.  I’d like them to be getting ideas and connections and connected ideas from sources other than just me and Google.  For example: from you.

Your own message for smart high schoolers

What would you say to a bunch of high-risk, high-potential high schoolers to get them involved in our free culture beyond MySpace and texting?  Where would you send them?  What sites, what blogs, what writers and commentators?  It doesn’t have to be text-only’; sites of creative visual work and neato graphic design would appeal, too.  Unlike a traditional class, I want to make this one multi-sourced: just like the internet, just like our culture.

Needless to say, there’s an e-book angle here, too.  I’m going to be directing them to sites often discussed around here, like Feedbooks, Manybooks, DailyLit and BookGlutton (and TeleRead), armed with the information that not only is there great reading out there, but a lot of it can be had for free.  I’m going to show them my Kindle, but some of these kids sport mobile devices that make the Kindle look positively old-fashioned.  So: how about textnovels? 

Where else, TeleReaders?  What else?  Where is there good, cheap and / or free reading that would appeal to high schoolers who are just beginning to scout out their own potential? 

Once we’re up and running, maybe you’d like to subscribe to the kids’ blogs.  Maybe you’d like to comment on them.  Nothing would get them stoked up more than to know there are people out there, people they’ve never even met, who take an interest in what they have to say.  If there’s an interest out there, I’ll update here at TeleRead as we go.

So whatever ideas / comments / suggestions you have, please post them below.  If you’d rather send me an email, please do so at court.merrigan.ink@gmail.com . 

Thanks very much, and a special thanks to David and Paul for letting me post this here.