We Wanted Other People to Learn from Us.

Chapter 8 in Girl Wide Web 2.0 really spoke to me. I found it breathtaking that such a rural place could pick up on blogging with such little amount of computer use. I have already talked about, and agree with the author that blogging is a way to empower youth to document their lives, but I find it unbelievable that universities are having to coduct studies to see how blogs could be effective in university settings ( obviously, they can be an effective tool because we are using it here!) Sure, blogging has been used to adolescent teenage girls to write  their life stories. Like the author states in this chapter "... girls blogs were ofthen monolouges rather then discussions, and more like to offer intimate details of the girls lives" and then continues to say that the girls blogs were " more like paper journals" (pg 164) but I think that when given more direction, blogging in a university can be a helpful tool to push students in the right direction and also it becomes a tool for peer teaching and group learning. I think it is beautiful that these young girls in Africa find it helpful to be able to blog about their disease. It is important for them because they do find it hard to talk to the kids at school about it because of fear. It also gives the students who are not struggling the opportunity to read from people who live in this situation everyday, and may increase empathy for these stong young women. I really enjoyed this chapter!