Digital edutainment

>> A project at the Atwater Library teaches
low-income kids to use computers creatively

Nurturing Skills, Sparking Fun: Miriam Verburg and Hugh McGuire

by TRACEY LINDEMAN

Give a kid a video camera and they’ll fiddle around with the buttons, but teach a kid how to make movies and they’ll be feverishly posting to YouTube in no time—or at least that’s the idea behind the Atwater Library’s Digital Literacy Project.

The project aims to put technology in the hands of low-income youth from surrounding communities by working with the needs of organizations and schools in Pointe St-Charles, St-Henri, Little Burgundy and NDG.

“There’s not a lot of opportunity for people to learn creative technology if they don’t have access to it,” says project coordinator Miriam Verburg. “This is a community that is terribly under-resourced and the more people can do to create resources, the better.”

Because the institution was born of a 19th century popular education movement, the library’s board of directors felt the need to reach out to the public and redefine its purpose for the 21st century. The library secured modest funding from Heritage Canada and the Fondation du Grand Montréal to launch a pilot project last winter, which allowed six groups of students and young parents to attend audio, video, animation, Photoshop and Web-design workshops. Verburg hopes to expand the Digital Literacy Project for next year by doubling the financial support and having winter and summer semesters.

“While it’s a project based on creative Web technologies, it isn’t a super highly funded project with all sorts of fancy gadgets. We really had to find other groups to work with to get the equipment, so the focus was more on the people who were involved and trying to build something for them that they wanted to do,” says board of directors’ president Hugh McGuire. The pilot forged connections with groups like Concordia University Television, which lent the video cameras that a group of James Lyng Grade 8 students used to make a horror movie.

The project isn’t meant to serve as an after-school program to keep youth from getting into trouble, but rather, to give people skills they can use while having fun and learning how to create media and employ technology within a team. Verburg insists the workshops are meant to be fun and aren’t designed with a wholesome, good-for-you message, an approach she feels speaks louder to youth.

“The way that kids want to make media is not the way people want them to learn media,” she says. “Kids are very smart, and they get bored very easily. Part of that is just that nobody offers them things that actually stimulate them, and don’t patronize them.”

Verburg intends to develop a stronger curriculum to help participants better grasp harsh learning curves. Overall, though, she feels this year’s groups were able to develop their potential with the few resources the library could offer, and that participants left with new skills and a sense of accomplishment. At the end-of-pilot party, the 30 or so participants brought friends and family to see their finished products, which are also posted on the project’s Web site.

“You really got the sense of the level of pride of all these kids who were involved, as well as their parents,” McGuire says. “That’s the power of the Internet as a medium—not only can you make stuff, but you can make it available for people to see.”