Corrupting the Youth: Blogger Speaks to Deuel HS Journalism Class

In another sign of the erosion of our public school system, the Deuel High School Journalism class recently invited a certain well-known East River blogger to discuss propaganda. Fortunately, journalism and speech teacher Samantha Walder then invited me to repair the damage done to young minds.

Kidding aside, Mrs. Walder invited me to Clear Lake yesterday to talk about blogging with her eager journalism students. Deuel's journalists this year are all girls—the journalism class is offered the same hour as shop.

The Deuel HS Journalism class, intrepid reporters for the Birdwatcher, pay rapt attention.

In addition to learning traditional reporting and print layout, the Deuel HS journalists have been churning out an online version of the Deuel School District news since January 2009. Their blogging platform of choice: Blogger. Oh yeah.

Don't worry, parents: Mrs. Walder (right) was on hand to provide adult supervision.

An encouraging sign that Deuel HS is teaching media literacy right: their open wireless network. I was able to log into the network with my trusty little netbook and browse all sorts of webpages during my presentation, including my own blog. Some school districts have blocked the Madville Times and Blogger sites in general, much to their detriment. Not Deuel. The journalism students there have accessed and studied the Madville Times and other blogs in class. Exposing students to a wide range of online content won't damage their brains; to the contrary, it will make them smarter, more discriminating consumers and producers (conducers!) of online media.

Surely I was making an important point here.

I opened with a little history of my involvement with blogging, then spent the bulk of the hour answering student questions. They kept me going all period, asking about my favorite topics, motivations for writing, commenters, and other blog details.

Trickiest question: one girl asked if I thought Orson Scott Card had influenced the development of the World Wide Web with his incorporation of something very much like blogging into the plot of Ender's Game. How's that for a curve ball? I suggested Card might have been picking up on previous ideas like Vannevar Bush's famous memex. I couldn't think of the name on the spot, but I also mentioned the forgotten inventor of the hyperlink, Belgian inventor Paul Otlet.

The biggest point I wanted to make (and I might have amidst the excitable torrent of techno-journalistic observations that flowed forth) was that blogging has been a great learning tool for me. Blogging has focused my attention on South Dakota politics and history. Blogging has also expanded my social network and my definition of community. As I said to the Deuel journalism students, my neighbors aren't just the people here on the western shore of Lake Herman or around Lake County. When I say neighbor, I think of the kids in that Clear Lake classroom, their blogging teacher Mrs. Walder, the guys on Sunday's blog hunt, and everyone else in South Dakota... even that Noem lady.

And to top it off, one of the girls brought chocolate cupcakes. That's what education needs: more cupcakes! That, and more blogging, more authentic, public use of the Web like the online news produced by Samantha Walder's students on the Deuel Birdwatcher.

Corporate Farming Bad for Small Town South Dakota

It's one thing to hear me complain about Big Ag and big corporations sucking the life out of rural communities. It's a whole nother thing to hear the anti-corporate line from a local economic development corporation.

Briana Hoffman, director of Deuel Area Development, Inc., follows up an ag subcommittee discussion of renting land locally with a discussion of the harms of corporate farming:

Studies show that communities experiencing “corporate” farming have similar negative effects such as lower income levels, higher poverty, higher unemployment rates, higher income inequality creating a class of “haves” and “have nots.” This richer and poorer division has created social problems and breakdowns in communities, increased stress, deterioration in relationships between producers and their neighbors, decreased civic participation. Some local governments became influenced in favor of large-scale agribusiness interests, leaving local farmers and communities feeling powerless. Other effects include lower education, environmental threats, higher teenage births, decreased health, decreased retail trade and community services, decline in real estate values. Many of these effects were not seen in one or two years, but took a decade to reveal [Briana Hoffman, "Ag... the Importance of Renting Locally," Digging into Deuel, 2010.03.01].

local governments... influenced in favor of large-scale agribusiness interests... why do I get the feeling we'll never hear that kind of language from Madison's economic development corporation?

Director Hoffman has a couple other worthwhile posts discussing agriculture and economic development: one on how churches can help new farmers, and one on helping farmers do the math necessary to stay afloat. It's all part of DADi's new effort to promote local ag development.

Briana, when Dwaine Chapel gets tired of commuting from Brookings to fix Madison every day, can we hire you?