What challenges occur when students are empowered to create online "text" and share globally with others?

As students and teachers use the internet as a medium to create and share original content they must be aware that their creations will meet a variety of audiences.  Through the sheer nature of human variance, and the differences in individual human experiences as well as understandings, any content which is shared will never receive completely homogenous reactions.  If you write a poem and share it, every person who reads it might decide it means something wildly different, and they wouldn’t necessarily wrong.  When we create content we compile information and sometimes that information might not mean what we intended it to.  Gunther Kress does an excellent job explaining the nuances of semiotics and multimodal communication.  For an example from a teacher’s perspective; they may create a visual explanation to go along with a lesson.  Yet if that visual isn’t finely controlled and crafted it may convey unintended or even conflicting meanings.  A more direct example of this would be the importance of denoting how visuals and diagrams are scaled.

Another way that we must be careful of our information is how words, images, sounds, and symbols constantly get reappropriated, reinvented, and redefined.  In his TED Talk,Kirby Ferguson discusses how many famous innovators built upon the hard work of those that came before them.  Ferguson’s point is that no one really invents or creates something purely from their own imagination.  Everything is a remix of something else and in a similar sense, our individual experiences shape how we interpret information and make meaning.  A classic example would be the Swastika which has carried many different meanings throughout history and in different parts of the world.  Symbols, imagery, and words, and other multimodal forms of communication carry the intended meaning as well as any connotations and relationships that the audience can come up with.  It is for this reason that teachers need to be explicit in what they mean during instruction.  Similarly, students should be aware of at least some of the interpretations of their work when it is being shared with online since the audience increases from their classroom to potentially thousands or even millions of people.