Ganley sets digital literacy project in motion

Author: Tim Miles

Barbara Ganley, former Lecturer and Tutor in Writing, left the College last spring to pursue her mission of encouraging creativity through digital media in rural communities across the country. Ganley has recently founded the Centers for Community Digital Exploration, an organization aimed at helping to strengthen small rural communities by providing a place for the members of the community to come together and explore, learn about, and create digital and social media.

Ganley described how her interest in digital media began during her years of teaching at the College. "At Middlebury, I was more and more using digital and social media as a means of exploring both the academic and creative," said Ganley. Yet Ganley was disappointed in the ways both students and the general public tend to approach digital and social media. She found that some people treat media as a way to escape from the real world and genuine human interactions.

"I found that there was a tendency to think of blogging, digital storytelling, social networking, and everything as disconnected from the lived life. They vilified the technology, saying it takes away from the lived life, for instance with people watching the woods on a computer screen," said Ganley.

Other people, Ganley found, immerse themselves too much in the trivial distractions provided by digital technology without engaging anything seriously. "People are addicted to the computer screen, lost in the dynamic, superficial aspects of the technology, where it is easy to go fast and far, but less easy to go deep and slow," said Ganley.

Ganley attempted to address some of these issues with her students during her time teaching at the College. Emphasizing the importance of bringing together the "lived-in world" with media, Ganley explained how this linkage is "very powerful for creativity, thinking, and engaging in the writing process." To explore this joining together of real life and media, Ganley had her students create blogs and write digital stories, joining traditional creative writing with new technology.

Ganley was soon inspired to take her ideas outside of the classroom. Noting the need for small communities to both retain a sense of unity in themselves and engage with the outside world, Ganley "saw a deeper, growing need in communities to become more local and more global, to learn from others to make here better." She was especially concerned with a growing, divisive gap in technology use between rural communities and the rest of the world.

"In the U.S. there is a disturbing participation gap where rural communities are isolated from the world. There are no Internet cafés there, and the assumption that everyone has a laptop is very indicative of this divide," said Ganley.

Increasingly concerned with this technology divide, Ganley decided to leave the College in order to confront this problem directly in the communities it affects the most.

Ganley's vision for the Centers for Community Digital Exploration is the establishment of "physical centers where people across traditional divides come to explore emerging practices that enable people to share information, build knowledge together, connect, and express themselves creatively." Ganley hopes to spend 2009 getting the first centers up and running in rural communities in California, Vermont, and possibly Maine. The centers themselves are designed to be open and inviting, with no traditional classrooms, but instead with spaces conducive to free flowing and creative learning and teaching.

"They will have a computer lab that won't look like a computer lab, where people will talk intensely as much as be on the computer. There will be a gathering space, where, for instance, parents concerned with safety can come and talk and children can teach their parents about something like Myspace. There will be an installation exhibition space, a new type of gallery where artists engaging in digital expression will have a place to show their work," said Ganley.

Ganley's vision for the layout of the centers is ultimately up to the communities where they are built. "The design of the center will be done with the community's input, especially engaging the youth," said Ganley. Ganley stressed that the centers are not just youth centers and she hopes people of all ages will participate.

"Imagine a local environmental group gets help form the kids with the digital social practices, then the kids get engaged, teaching and learning at the same time," said Ganley.

Like the actual layout of the centers, the types of services provided are to be determined by the centers' individual users. "For example, in Vermont we could engage local nonprofits and institutions, see what skills they want to develop, and also enable them to intersect with each other," said Ganley.

Ganley also hopes to integrate the centers into places where people naturally gather. "The site of the centers needs to be somewhere where a cross-section of people will come, for example we could put one connected to a Laundromat, so people would wander in while they do their laundry," said Ganley.

Most of all, these centers are about having a place to tell stories. "The centers give everyone access to the tools that allow lots of storytelling. People will be talking across the U.S. through storytelling, using it to tell about one another and to engage in civic action," said Ganley. These centers are also hopefully will be places that bring their communities together and connect communities with each other.

According to Ganley, these centers "bond people as a group through the process of creating digital media, and then use the media to bridge between communities."