ABSTRACT
In California a group of middle school youth attend an afterschool program whose centerpiece is Web 2.0 technologies. Creating digital music and digital stories, as well as t-shirts, logos, greeting cards, and drawings, these youth exchange multiple, inventive creative products with youth in South Africa and India via a private social networking site called space2cre8. Through blogs, wall postings, emails, and photos, they represent themselves, their friends, families, school, and communities, taking tentative steps toward imagining and connecting with kids who are physically, linguistically, and culturally on the other side of the world. An Oakland, California, boy named De’Von posted a photo of himself accompanied by a blog called “hello world”: “ive fi nally got a pic and im online and anybody on the cre8 hit up mr. man of the year [his profi le name] ya dig.” “My three wishes are: I want to take all my cousins to Great America. I want to be an astronaut. I want my mom to get the job she is interviewing for today.” Kassandra’s blog posting followed, and subtly indexed, a group discussion of a digital story by a girl in India, in which was paired a photograph of an outdoor cooking pot with a voiceover that “we don’t have a proper kitchen.”
