Cat Memes and the Kardashians: Can Internet Culture Support Authentic Disciplinary Learning?

Should students’ knowledge of popular culture be incorporated into teaching and learning in the classroom? This lecture describes a project to collect internet memes for the Norwegian Folklore Archive, and the archive’s collaboration with Oslo high school students. It demonstrates how three aspects of authentic learning–authentic to self, authentic to others, and the use of authentic tools–helped to engage students in the discipline of cultural history, and outlines implications for using internet culture in formal educational settings.