I am a teacher of Religious Education and one of the most engaging topics for Year 10 students is Working for Social Justice.  Quite soon into the topic it became apparent that these 15 year old girls living in Wollongong, Australia receive a highly filtered view of the world and the issues being faced by people in it.  Their consumption of media is extremely prejudicial with a bias towards commercial news of very low intellectual value and news which is actually thinly veiled advertising and cross promotion. 

When we began discussing topics like Dafour or Burma, there was a pervading level of ignorance from even the most talented of students. 

How, in this digitally connected world, can my students remain untouched by news that touches the very root of what it means to be a human in community?  I found it porfessionally and personally distressing, cosnidering my belief that it is to students like these that we must look to help solve the inequities and imbalances in the world.

PageflakePageflakes is a web based  RSS and XML aggregator.  It is highly customisable and adds elements of social networking to the idea of news aggregation.  I thought “If my students won’t seek out the news, then I will pushthe news to them!”.  They all signed up for a Pageflakes account and grabbed hold of a Pagecast I had prepared called “My Conscience”. This page drew together news feeds from Amnesty Internaltional, The United Nations, blogs from intellectuals and activists in Africa, news headlines, Flickr images for poverty etc.  The students then worked with this as a starting point and customised the page to suit themselves.  This then became their homepage for the browser.  If they were proud of a page they had created, they would pagecast it and email me an invitation to come and look.

I am hoping that the next time I ask “What do you think about the junta’s crackdown in Burma?” I will not be met with 28 blank expressions.