[DMEC] Essay Finalist: Digital Media in Education or "Hey, I'm a Nerd!"
As you probably guessed from the title, my name's Alister. Over the next few pages, I'm going to be giving a little talk about my life, and how digital media, computers, and the Internet have helped me with my education. Please, try and concentrate, and if you really have to crunch on potato chips, please wait until the end of the talk.
I started out in my secondary education in a school in Wales. It all went fairly OK for a term, apart from the usual boring lessons and the absolutely diabolical canteen food (take one bite out of it and throw the rest away kind of diabolical). Then, as usual, the obligatory bully came along and made life hell for me. I eventually was told, leave or be expelled, so I left the school peacefully. I then was home educated for about 6 to 7 months, with the occasional mathematics lesson from my mother. This didn't go down well though, as I didn't have my own computer at that point, and Internet access was a 56Kbps dial-up effort.
I eventually enrolled into another school out of sheer boredom, and started again. My teachers were fairly average, and the lessons were boring as usual. I think it would have been OK, had I been allowed to mix with the older children. In the UK, however, I might as well have asked to shoot the Queen, as they would have taken that sort of request the same way. A term went by, with the obligatory bullies (yes, plural this time) generally making my life hell (again). I pulled out after the first day of the second term, as I found I had been assigned to the remedial mathematics class after not only not having covered the work, but also having done my exam on a faulty paper. The photocopier had only cloned the one side, meaning I only did half the test. And here's where the home education began.
For my birthday, I got given a modestly equipped eMachines e220 personal computer, and the family installed a 1MB/288KB broadband line. I then discovered the sheer usefulness of the Internet as an educational tool. I got myself interested in computer programming by discovering an offer from Microsoft's developer network (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and downloading Visual Studio 2005 Express free of charge. With the help of Google, CodeProject and various other programming-oriented websites, I progressed steadily in Visual Basic, Visual Basic .NET, Visual C# .NET and Visual C++ .NET to the level I am at now. Around this point I upgraded my computer with a new case, 64-bit CPU and a GeForce 6800GT graphics card. I used the left over parts to build another computer, which is largely my old eMachines 220, on which I later installed Fedora Core Linux v3. I used this server to host web applications, after getting a copy of Macromedia Studio MX from my father, who is a web designer. This is where I started to learn web design (HTML, ASP) and database programming (SQL, MS Access). Around this point I discovered the South Wales Home Educator's Network, which helped me out a great deal on the social side of things. I'm currently working towards a Microsoft Certified Professional qualification, probably MCAD (Microsoft Certified Application Developer).
I am also a member of an online community called "Second Life", developed by a San Francisco based company, Linden Lab. Their website is http://www.secondlife.com (http://teen.secondlife.com for the Teen Grid, which I am a member of). Second Life allows people of any age to build things, make money and interact with people all round the world. Second Life implements a scripting language called LSL (Linden Scripting Language) which is similar in syntax to C or C++. It allows you to do all sorts of things, such as make a door that only opens when someone says the correct password, or make a jetpack that allows you to fly at extremely high speeds, and other cool stuff like that. My Second Life name is Alister Harrington. I am in the process of developing a commerce website for use inside SL, similar to the real world Amazon.com. The site will be a subsite of TSLClassifieds (http://www.tslclassifieds.com) and will allow users to list and sell their creations instantly online. I will be developing the website mostly in ASP. It will work using Second Life's XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) interface to deliver items, and use email inside & outside Second Life to communicate with the web server. I will probably complete this project within about three to four weeks.
Digital media has definitely played a very large part in my life and education, being involved in most or all of the things I mentioned above. Without digital media such as computing, the Internet, etc. I would be finding it very hard to get a job or make money. As it is, I now have several windows of opportunity open to me.
Thanks for bearing with me, and not walking out in the middle. Anyone wanting to crunch on your potato chips can now do so safe in the knowledge that you won't distract me, as I've finished now. For those of you who want to put the paper somewhere and get on with your lives, the filing cabinet is over there, and I think there's a free drawer somewhere in it. Or you could do what most people do these days, which is chuck it on your desk and forget about it. I hope you enjoyed reading this short story of my life, and I hope it wasn't too boring for you.
Alister H. is a Second Life finalist from England. This essay was a finalist in the 2006 Global Kids Digital Media Essay Contest. For more information, please visit GlobalKids.org.
