Released 1/13/2010

New media comes to the health care debate

Back in the day — you recall, when we sharpened flints for spears and when Bill Clinton was president — we learned about the controversial, nation-shaping topics of the day by reading about them in newspapers, and we debated them by having a nice chat with our friends over a ham sandwich.

We had a variety of sources. The Times, the News and the Post. Kids nowadays (and yes, this phrase triggers an urge to sit in a porch-based rocking chair and crotchet about recurring knee pain) get their news in ways that we might never have imagined more than a decade ago.

Our president posts his weekly addresses to the nation on YouTube. RSS feeds beam headlines to our deluxe cell phones. Blogs mine national discussions for the particular angles that appeal to their micro-audiences. The “People” function of Google’s in-development “Living Stories” feature instantly rolls out a list of all the players at the table around a particular issue, complete with headshots and notes on why they matter.

It is no surprise, then, that the way today’s students discuss the news has changed as well. The discourse has gone online with a vigor that inspires concern for the ham-sandwich industry.

Chapin’s Class 9 computer-science students are experimenters in the world of virtual commentary. They recently debated the issue of nationalized health care using a Web site called Voicethread.

Each girl created a “Voicethread,” or online slide-show presentation, that expressed her point of view using a range of media types: text slides created in PowerPoint, video clips and a digitized political cartoon, for example.

Then, rather than talking about the issue in traditional ways, they agreed or disagreed with one another’s Voicethreads, appending written thoughts, audio testimony and even videotaped perspectives directly to their classmates’ work.

Chapin students are getting information in new ways, presenting it in new ways and debating it in new ways. It’s on us to try to keep up.