MCDM alumni Jac de Haan stars in this video and explains to fellow high-school teachers and youth organizers how pugetsoundoff.org is an “open community for teens to express their views — with multimedia.”
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Pugetsoundoff.org takes on a interesting challenge: can we get teens to engage in advocacy by giving them a public space to debate their views and that links to their personal interests like music or sports? To do that, the website uses web 2.0 tools such as social networking, user-generated content and storytelling to engage this skeptical and hard-to-reach audience.
Furthermore, we developed a multimedia contest/event with The Seattle Time as a way to get new users and debate the role of citizen journalism and new media (so if you know any teenagers please let them know about pugetsoundoff.org/contest!)
Though I really think is a neat site, with the unique value of being local and teen oriented (surprisingly there are not many sites that represent teenager voices), I still feel a little skeptical about how can we really get teenagers to use the site. And if they did, can it actually influence teenagers to be more civically engaged? (civic= term teenagers detest).
I think that goes to the core question that we look in our program: How much do we influence technology and how much does technology influence human behavior?
We love to hear your views.