Blogging for Education

It was very interesting to read the article “Ch. 8: We Wanted Other People to Learn from Us: Girls Blogging in Rural South Africa in the Age of AIDS” (2.0) For my Digital Analysis project I did a similar thing. I blogged about the topics we discussed in class and related them to a typical high school experience that I like to call the new age “virtual high school.” I believe that there are a lot of things in today’s technology world that people are unaware of. There are many things affecting the children today, both good and bad. I believe that people need to learn about this so they can be better prepared for these good and bad effects. This is much like the blogs the girls did in South Africa. They believed that they needed to spread the word of the dangers that affect them so people could be better prepared and prevent the horrible things like AIDS that have been affecting them.This idea of using the blog to inform a greater audience of dangers coincides with the idea presented to us in Girl Wide Web 2.0, Chapter 8. The girls in South Africa formed blogs to inform the world about the issues of gender violence and HIV and AIDS. When the girls who were writing the blogs were asked about their reasoning behind the blogs they said “they felt as though their words would have an impact on a greater audience, inspiring others to change at-risk habits and views about other practices they otherwise felt uncomfortable discussing openly.” (Mazzarella, p.161) While the issues I presented have not yet reached a global audience, I did get to present these issues to an audience other than our class and to spread the idea to people I know will continue to discuss these issues and work towards fixing what they can.