Daniel - I think you've completely missed the point of what Henry Jenkins was talking about. My name is Heather Lawver, I'm the person the article was named for and I run the Daily Prophet - the Harry Potter fan fiction forum Mr. Jenkins was referring to. Obviously you haven't checked out any of the sites Mr. Jenkins referenced because, if you had, you would realized I'm not running anything remotely like a message board of IMing forum. Instead, Mr. Jenkins was referring to *supervised* educational publishing forums, where children are actually guided and mentored by trained individuals.
And yes, I do believe that the likes of L33T speak and the lack of punctuation so commonly seen in IMing are deplorable. But in my own experience, a child only needs to publish one story with horrible punctuation and spelling, then receive constructive negative feedback, and suddenly they realize how ridiculous they're being. It can sometimes serve as a catalyst for their education.
Regardless of that issue, I believe you've missed the point. Mr. Jenkins' article wasn't about unsupervised message boards, he was talking about actual educational forums and online tools. Please don't so vehemently dismiss something without first exploring the subject of the article.
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Daniel - I think you've completely missed the point of what Henry Jenkins was talking about. My name is Heather Lawver, I'm the person the article was named for and I run the Daily Prophet - the Harry Potter fan fiction forum Mr. Jenkins was referring to. Obviously you haven't checked out any of the sites Mr. Jenkins referenced because, if you had, you would realized I'm not running anything remotely like a message board of IMing forum. Instead, Mr. Jenkins was referring to *supervised* educational publishing forums, where children are actually guided and mentored by trained individuals. And yes, I do believe that the likes of L33T speak and the lack of punctuation so commonly seen in IMing are deplorable. But in my own experience, a child only needs to publish one story with horrible punctuation and spelling, then receive constructive negative feedback, and suddenly they realize how ridiculous they're being. It can sometimes serve as a catalyst for their education. Regardless of that issue, I believe you've missed the point. Mr. Jenkins' article wasn't about unsupervised message boards, he was talking about actual educational forums and online tools. Please don't so vehemently dismiss something without first exploring the subject of the article.