Opportunities for Teenagers to Share Their Writing Online

Marcella J. Kehus

Editor's Message

As inexpensive personal computers began entering schools in the early 1980s, the use of word processors for learning to write soon became one of the most widely used applications. The new tool offered many advantages over traditional pencil and paper.

• With convenient editing features, students did not have to copy over in order to make changes in their writing.
• These editing features also supported free writing and various ways of exploring and manipulating texts.
• Printers made the writing easier for others to read, thus expanding the possibilities for writing to real audiences.
• Multiple copies of writing for classmates, parents, and portfolios could easily be produced.
• The use of keyboards, although at times a barrier, was also an aid to students who were learning to spell and compose.
• Associated tools such as spell checkers and formatting programs helped many students focus more on the content of their writing, or the purposes they were trying to achieve.

The advent of the Web a decade later extended these advantages. It was now possible to share writing with much wider audiences and to link it with the writing of others. New tools for graphic design and interactivity further enhanced what students could do.

Today, most teachers know that the combination of word processing with the Web holds a great potential for student writers. Many are discovering ways to overcome the initial barriers of finding equipment and beginning to integrate these new tools into writing across the curriculum. But as with any technology, there are unanticipated consequences of their use. Because new technologies spread so rapidly, issues of access, privacy, plagiarism, commercialism, cost, and community arise in new guises and usually before most of us are ready.

In this month's column, Marcella Kehus shares her experiences with helping students write for audiences not only beyond the teacher, but beyond the classroom, the school, and the geographical community. She works with TeenLit.com (see Literacy Web Page of the Month), one of the best sites for teen writers, and her study of its use is an all-too-rare example of what we must do if we are to understand more about the meaning of new technologies for developing literacy.

-- Bertram C. Bruce

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Issue

Working with teen writers online: Policies, procedures, and possibilities

I became interested in the issues of policies, procedures, and possibilities of online communities through my experiences as one of the creators and hosts of TeenLit.com. The roots of TeenLit.com stem from two colliding ideas I had a few years back. First, I have always believed that publication is the key motivator and application for teaching students to write, but I was continually frustrated by the scarcity of real publishing opportunities for my teenage students. Second, as I was doing some Web publishing outside of my teaching responsibilities, I was struck by the relative ease, immediacy, and low cost of publishing on the World Wide Web and even more impressed with the potential and growing audience for reading work published there. And so, toward the end of 1999, with this idea, a few hundred dollars, and a teacher friend of mine as partner, TeenLit.com was born on the World Wide Web. Since its inception, TeenLit.com has been concerned with two primary goals: (a) providing authentic purpose and audience for teens' writing and (b) providing a place for a community of such adolescent writers to form and thrive.

For example, in an initial study of TeenLit.com (Kehus, 1999), I provided an online bulletin board for visitors to post messages about the published writing or even drafts of their own. As you can see from the Figure, activity on the site has been high and increasing fairly steadily between its start in the first week of January 1999, with 89 visits, to the last week of July 1999, with 754 visits.

On average today, we have approximately 1,500 visitors a week to the site (based on weekly average of unique visits from 4/16/00-5/13/00). Postings to the Web are detailed in Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 summarizes the formal genres of writing published on the site, while Table 2 shows the distribution of postings to the discussion board.

It's clear that we've accomplished our initial goal with TeenLit.com. Our visitors are active in posting original writings, comments to other members, and so forth that serve a broad audience of adolescent writers and readers. However, whether or not we can say we have an actual community of writers is open to doubt. I believe the lack of a feeling of community can be traced to four key reasons:

1. Our site is public and anonymous. Because of this, visitors can post any kind of message without regard to good taste, amount of personal information included, and so on. Thus, there are occasional inappropriate postings (rude, personal, or dangerous information).
2. TeenLit.com is unbounded and dynamic with an indeterminate audience. Because any visitor can post and read messages here, the population of this community has no known bounds and is ever changing. Someone about to post a message, then, is not clear who the audience is. A visitor posting a message for a particular author has no guarantee that this author will read the message, while it is certain that many others can.
3. Giving feedback to other writings has been the most popular type of posting (30%), yet less than 10% of the published writings have drawn any feedback, and many postings (35%) have had no replies.
4. The site's broad, public, anonymous nature prevents making connections or building relationships.

Building on these lessons, I am currently studying a subset of TeenLit authors who have elected to join a smaller, private online community known as eWeb. Because this group will be a private and identifiable group of voluntary involved authors from TeenLit, empowered by a number of Web-based technologies, I continue to examine the development and possibilities of such an online community.

From my first study, as well as my current work, I have learned a great deal. In this column, I share some of the lessons I've learned about publishing on the Web, working with adolescents online, and attempting to establish community. For, indeed, the World Wide Web is murky water, especially when dealing with minors, and we have had to be continually responsive in our policy making and action within this Web site. The Web is constantly changing and broaching new frontiers, and so some of this information may be quickly outdated. Because I believe that students' work on the Web is both powerful and problematic, I hope to guide you through some of our lessons. I'll begin with the broadest forms of public policy in the United States regarding content rating, children's online privacy, and copyright.

Policies from the outside

Content rating. Before censorship advocates push for U.S. government regulation, the Web publishing community has voluntarily created and used its own content-rating system. This system provides for hidden code in the header of pages that browsers read to determine the appropriateness of a site given the user's (or parent's) guidelines. Web site administrators are responsible for registering their site with either one or both of the two emerging regulatory sites, RSACi (www.icra.org/) or SafeSurf (www.safesurf.com/), and for placing the appropriate codes on their Web pages. Using a standard known as PICS, both of these sites currently have volunteers rate their sites' content on violence, nudity, sex, and profane language. SafeSurf has added categories for intolerance, homosexual/heterosexual themes, gambling, and glorifying drug use. With these ratings in place, parents, schools, and other concerned individuals can set Web browsers up to view content that meets their specific standards, in alliance with PICS. This can be done with independent software or directly from within the most recent editions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA, at www.ftc.gov/reports/privacy3, or www.idg.net). Issues of privacy on the Internet are hot topics today, and nowhere are they more alarming than when soliciting information from minors. Thus, the U.S. government, specifically the Federal Trade Commission, has enacted COPPA. This Act is being implemented with a “sliding scale” that will gradually become more strict over the next 2 years as technology and Web masters work to catch up with its demands. In final form, the latest version of this Act requires written verifiable parental consent before anyone on the Internet can get information from a child under the age of 13 in such situations as joining an e-mail list, submitting a form, or posting to a bulletin board. Thus, our site requires participants to be 13 years of age or older, and we attempt to verify this by asking this question of age before allowing any submission, posting, or addition to the mailing list. (To generate your own privacy statement: http://privacy.linkexchange.com/.)

Copyright (lcWeb.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html). As with any text, as soon as someone puts his or her work in writing, that text is copyrighted to the author. However, plagiarism on the Internet is as easy as copying and pasting, so copyright(s) of the author(s) need to be made clear and foreboding. Although one can still register a copyright for further proof and protection, regulations now allow the use of the © symbol along with the year of first publication and the author's first and last name without formal registration. On TeenLit.com, our privacy policy clearly explains that authors retain all copyright (allowing us to publish online once) and may revoke this privilege from us and have their writing removed from the site at any time. On a few occasions, outsiders have wanted to use our students' writing for various purposes, such as publication in an anthology, use in a class, and even use on statewide testing. When these persons contact our site, we simply work as the intermediary, passing their requests on to authors, yet maintaining authors' privacy by not sharing their e-mail addresses, full names, or other contact information. Ultimately, the authors, as holders of copyright of their own writing, make the decision and follow through on such requests. (See www.teenlit.com/policy.htm.)