Kristen Nicole Cardon and Dr. Gideon Burton, English Department
My field study in India last summer was successful on many levels. I was interested to find that, contrary to my expectations, the effect of digital media on the Tibetans‟ efforts to preserve their culture was not wholly negative. Certainly, digitalization brings with it much Western and specifically American culture, but the nearly universal response to my interviews and surveys was that digital tools have had a positive effect on Tibetan cultural preservation. One administrator explained to me that the school structure itself was created to reinforce Tibetan values. Essentially, he said, the pedagogy itself is the natural preservation of culture (Field Notes 8 July 2011).
It was interesting to note that on any given day, the single most-visited web site for any grade level was facebook. Students spent nearly all their time on the social networking site, chatting with friends, browsing pictures, sending messages, and writing on walls. They were almost always consumers of information—rarely did they have the means to upload pictures themselves, and they seemed much more interested in looking through pictures and reading other walls than they were in producing their own content.
Digital literacy is a hallmark of the rising generation. “It has long been recognised [sic] that literacy, and a literate population, are keys not only to economic development but also to personal achievement and social well being everywhere . . . but only recently have we begun to understand the importance of „beyond literacy‟ developments such as information literacy, digital literacy, and complementary literacies” (Ameen and Gorman 100). Digital literacy requires, at its foundation, proficiency with technological hardware and basic internet functions such as navigating browsers, websites, and search engines. Beyond these, the digitally literate are comfortable with unfamiliar programs, online collaboration, and multi-tasking.
TCV students not only demonstrated such digital literacy in their use of internet, but they self-reported the literacy in the surveys I distributed. Students are enrolled in computer courses from the time they enter middle school, so they are intimately familiar with the tool by the time they reach high school. All but a few students reported confidence in their ability to use the internet and computer programs, even when they were unfamiliar with them. Yet, paradoxically, the students reported that they were only able to go online once a month at the least. Resources on the campus included internet access in the high school computer lab, available for students leisure use after school hours, as well as a cyber café with ten older computers from leisure use, but both of these labs charged the normal rate of 10 rupees per hour, and students either did not have the pocket money to spare or chose to spend it elsewhere.
I set out to probe the ways in which Tibetan students in India “demonstrate creativity and innovation, communicate and collaborate, conduct research and use information, think critically, solve problems, and make decisions, and use technology effectively and productively” (“NETS for students”). From a self-report, an average student in grade 10 uses the internet primarily for emailing, researching educational topics (usually an assignment for school involving simple searches and cut and paste), and viewing news. The same student reports that his favorite online activities are watching videos on YouTube and chatting on Facebook. From my understanding, Tibetan students in the TCV are using the internet almost exclusively to consume, which they do primarily on Facebook and Google searches. They are relatively efficient in these uses, but they rarely produce content to add to the web.
The exiled Tibetans have long been interested in cultural preservation, especially now that the rising generation of Tibetans in India has never known their homeland. “The idea of intellectual, and to some extent political, universalism is historically and substantively linked with literate culture” (Goody 50). For contemporary Tibetans, raising a digitally literate generation means keeping their cultural identity intact. The students are well aware of this goal and report using sites like phayul.com, which is a site dedicated to news about Tibetans. Students often reported understanding of the ways that internet can influence the Tibetan cause for good by providing a world-wide audience for their story. As one student said, “I think internet make[s] Tibetan cultural preservation easier because it helps out in connecting with each other then only we can preserve Tibetan culture.” In the minds of many young Tibetans, the internet is closely associated with uniting their culture, which is crucial for its preservation.
I am still working on analyzing the results of the research, but I plan to present them at the NCUR conference at Weber State in March. I anticipate that I will be presenting at BYU‟s Inquiry conference around that same time as well. Since several of the head administrators at the TCV where I conducted my research are interested in reading the final report, I will also be sending them a copy of the final paper.