Internet Mapping Project: 2019

Internet Mapping collage2

This is the third year I have brought Kevin Kelly’s Internet Mapping Project into my sixth grade classroom as part of the start of our Digital Life unit. I love how the artistic invitation — to capture yourself in relation to the Internet and technology — opens up a discussion about the intrusion of technology and the way it has woven into our lives.

Internet Mapping collage1

If you don’t know about Kelly’s project, it was an attempt to humanize our interactions with the Internet and to visualize the ways we see “home” in online spaces. I de-emphasize the “home” aspect a bit with my students, and focus on themselves as the central anchoring point.

The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It’s expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders.

And the internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there.

Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.

I’ve become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I’ve been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That’s all.  — Kevin Kelly

Peace (webbed),
Kevin

One Comment
  1. Keven, these are really great. As i looked at them they reminded me of the presentations interns did between 2006 and 2015 when they joined my group in Chicago.

    This blog shows two from 2014, who used Prezi for their intros. http://michaelcnt.blogspot.com/2014/01/interns-from-south-korea-focusing-on.html

    This blog shows an introduction from 2015. Note that she taught herself to use Prezi as she created the intro. In the years since then she dropped her Prezi account, so I used the Internet archive to find a link to the Prezi. http://michaelcnt.blogspot.com/2015/01/new-intern-helps-launch-2015.html

    Both of these illustrate the potential of expanding youth communications skills as they create their maps.

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