Generation @ and digital media education

In this paper, I survey some ideas of participating as teachers and learners in the contemporary digital media culture. I look at how the creative possibilities presented by electronic deliveries are evident to students in their everyday lives, but have yet to be fully utilized in the development of curricula and teaching. This paper addresses the question of how we might begin to understand the educational possibilities of the multi-media text in cyberspace. Our students are bombarded by information, yet are time poor. This is partly. This is partly because they are engaged in tribal e-communications. I utilize a narrative methodology that I term ‘A subjective academic narrative'. The struggle with meaning that moved authority to the reader from the author is one that led to postmodernism and to current cultural, literary, and textual theories being drawn together. (Buttigieg; Milner and North; Norris). It also led to the reader becoming involved in the production of meaning, of the text and of the discourse in particular ways. It is clear that the production of electronic texts in everyday lives enacts textuality and discourse in non-authoritative ways. This has immediate implications for teaching and learning in the emergent electronic culture. When such electronic spaces as Facebook, MySpace and Current allow viewers to create content, we as educators may well see the death of the author in a different and perhaps more troubling way.