Just when I thought I knew something!

Helen Wu’s elephantlove.net

One of my graduating seniors came in to chat about the possibility of majoring in Economics in college, and our conversation drifted to other things as my conversations with people often do. Helen mentioned that she was into photography and art, and I made the suggestion (thinking I’d be sharing with her this new incredible tool that is Web 2.0) that she should think about putting her photos in a blog (a “photoblog” some people call them).

Alas, more humble about technology the young teacher should be. More about his students he should have known… for what did Helen reply to my innocent suggestion, but “Oh I’ve had my own website since I was 8.”

Eh hem… okay… so I thought I was special with a blog and a wiki; young Helen put me back in my place. I promptly loaded her site, Elephantlove.net and was simply blown away by the beauty in the site’s design and layout. How simple yet elegant her pages are. Her page headers are artfully and professionally designed, each page background a representation of her creativity, vision, and skill with numerous software applications. Naturally, I had more questions for Helen:

Me: “Helen, what program did you use to create your webpage?! It’s beautiful!”
Helen: “What program did I use? Notepad and Internet Explorer”
Me: “I don’t get it, how do you design a beautiful webpage on Notepad?”
Helen: “I just used code.”
Me: “What do you mean, ‘code’?”
Helen: “You know, HTML”
Me: “My gosh, how did you learn HTML?”
Helen: “You know, I taught myself when I was 8!”

Oh man, have I got a lot to learn. Here I am all excited about my great new blog, this incredible wiki revolution, RSS, Netvibes, Scribefire, bloglines, blah blah blah, and along comes this humble student who has had her own webpage, weblog, photoblog, online art gallery, resume, portfolio, game portal, travelogue, and other features I didn’t even know existed on the web since she was in the third grade! I told Helen only half jokingly that when I was 8, I was still trying to figure out how to walk right, while she was designing her first web page! And she didn’t use some generic template, or even a web design program like Frontpage or Dreamweaver, it was all created from the tips of her own fingers, typing individual code into Notepad!

I’m simply blown away by the ingeniousness and creativity of our students; they are truly “digital natives”. If you’re like me and have had to work hard to learn little things about Web 2.0, and you think that the steps you’ve made are significant and meaningful, it’s students like Helen that humbly and innocently put us back in our places as “digital immigrants”

Here’s how Helen explains her own creation on her website:

how did i do it?

I discovered the Internet the summer after third grade – I was eight. It fascinated me to see personal creations, publications of personal opinion accompanied by expressions in layout composition and design. I wanted to try it too. So, I borrowed HTML books from the public library (imagine a little, pig-tailed girl in the computer section among programmers and software engineers), and I taught myself to web design.Back in the day, I exploited Microsoft Frontpage, the infamous pagebuilder, in page building. I was able to slowly withdraw from that. Now, my only tools are Internet Explorer 6.0 and Notepad.

By the start of middle school, my personal art portfolio had been hosted by Bobbi of the former sweet-essence.net. Over the next three years, I had two domains of my own. Tiffanyandme.com was a birthday gift from my mom in 6th grade. Even then I thought the name was odd, but I gained valuable experience in maintaining my own, private space. The next year, my mom let me to switch to Rainlily.net.

Upon the start of high school, I found myself short on time to maintain Rainlily. Soon after, its host shut down without any previous notice, and I lost everything to the unexplained incident. Furious and frustrated, I lost the will to recover three years of my work. I do, however, still have some shots of Rainlily here.

But this year, between being a junior and a senior, I felt a calling for my return to web design. Perhaps is my need to relive childhood experiences before moving onto college. Having grown so much personally since I last coded a style sheet or pieced together a layout, I feel I now have so much more substance to contribute to my personal domain.

my take on the “new era”

It was years after I’d successfully published my first website, a personal art portfolio, when free “blog sites” such as Xanga, Livejournal, or MySpace gained their massive popularity.

They became so popular, in fact, that stalking and flaming became prominent crimes in these dot coms. In some cases, the consequences were much more dire. Magazines such as Seventeen and Wired, hoping to reach out to its audience, reported a series of teenage suicide threats and farewell letters published on these sites, as well as murders that originated from online networking.

People were shamelessly advertising themselves by posting flashy, flirty photos of themselves. Eventually, people started looking better online than they did in real life. Even Hot Topic now sells a tee shirt (for $20, FYI) with the slogan: “You looked hotter on MySpace.”

The combination of society’s obsession with self-image and opportunistic public blog sites drags people down to new lows. My personal favorite example was ridiculous and extreme – a post displayed a series of photos at a house party. In one photo, a teenage girl and guy were making out, drunk… on the floor. The caption read: “Man, we did some crazy stuff. I don’t remember a thing, but it’s good we took pictures.”

The worst part is that people still buy into it. Point in case. Most of the time “blogging” no longer has real substance. If it did, most people would never get this far down the page.

To all of you readers out there, if you’re a “digital immigrant” and you know it, take some time to talk to the students you think you’re pushing into new realms through blogs, wikis and other tools of Web 2.0. Chances are they already know way more than you.

To Helen, thanks for enlightening me, and please, please, keep up the good work, you’re so talented and a great inspiration to all of us backwards dinosaurs who are your teachers!

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