Funny pages

Next week, a second round of digital artifacts are due in my Web-Based Technologies in Education class. This time, we're making a prototype of a media solution that addresses the needs of vulnerable/underprivileged people. We heard a bit about one another's artifacts in class this week, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what my classmates come up with. I plan for mine to involve having kids publish their own webcomics to them help learn English.

Outside of class, I've been reading Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art," a very interesting book about the stoytelling potential of comics generally. It's not an area McCloud particularly addresses, but it occurred to me that comics are a really great medium for foreign language learning. They offer such a terrific combination of picture, story, and words. A far more interesting story can be told in a comic than a foreign language learner could read in words alone, and there are visuals to cue certain vocabulary words. Plus, it's long been a pet theory of mine that stories are key to getting people engaged--the question "What happened next?" is such an essentially human one.

So integrating stories into a foreign language classroom would be good...but even better would be getting kids to write their own stories! Let them write and draw about whatever matters to them, and learn new words along the way. Plus, the fact that most of the words in comics are lines of dialogue lends itself to in-class activities around actually speaking the foreign language...in this case, English.

I never knew what a world of comics was out there on the web until I started doing the research for this artifact. There are some really gifted(mainly adult) artists and writers publishing their stories online. Of course, in many cases kids won't be able to match the talent of fully trained adults; but I found encouraging the realization that one of the most well-read webcomics out there is xkcd, which stars a lot of faceless stick figures--about as visually simple as you can get! Clearly people look for more in a webcomic than just flashy illustrations...

The group I'm targeting is rural Indian kids, so I made a particular effort to find Indian comics. Comparisons of the kids' comics I found on the Indian website Tinkle and the kid-recommended American comics I found elsewhere on the Web highlighted the importance of cultural context. For example, I don't really think Indian kids would find a comic like this one amusing...it requires understanding of Christmas and all the bizarre little holiday doodads in stores. One of the Indian comics I saw involved a man haggling with a beggar who claimed to be blind over whether he was really blind or not; I think usually in the US we wouldn't think this was an appropriate subject for a kids' comic. But in my view, cultural differences shouldn't be a deterrent to kids reading comics produced by kids in other parts of the world. On the contrary, with some adult help, it could really open up children's minds to how similar and how different kids who live far away might be.