Children Reporting Online: The Cultural Politics of the Computer Lab

This article describes an action-research project in which children ages 8 to 11 learn internet research skills in the context of producing a community newspaper. New technologies are made more relevant to working-class African American and Latino students by using them to report on their immediate community as well as to their own lives and their own neighborhood. What misconceptions arise when children try to evaluate the information they find on the web? How does the web push children’s interest away from local politics and toward a global entertainment culture? Through an ethnographic classroom study, the article discusses the ways children have both generated and discarded story ideas; how their stories reflect their conflicting and overlapping age, gender, and ethnic identities; and how their use of computers has challenged this author to reexamine the project’s goals and the meaning of the internet in children’s lives.