With an increasing emphasis on the use of film and media in schools it’s always useful when there’s an opportunity to put those talents to good use as part of a challenge or competition. The NZ National Commission for UNESCO is a project partner in the Outlook for Someday sustainability film challenge for young people aged up to 24 years, making it idea for consideration at the senior secondary or tertiary level.

The challenge is to make a short sustainability related film, in any genre, filmed with any camera and at any length up to a maximum of 5 minutes. Entries can be from individuals, teams, schools, groups of friends etc., so the door is open to all sorts of collaborations.

Full details can be found on the Outlook for Someday website – entries close on 17 September.

I’m always interested in some of the trends and perspectives shared by those who are researching the  characteristics of the emerging generations – amid the positioning and argument, there are areas of agreement that the youngsters of today are growing up in quite a different world to what existed for my generation, and as a consequence, there are likely to be things that differentiate the way they think and act, reflecting a different set of values, expectations and aspirations among this group.

The term ‘millennials‘ (also known as Generation Y) has been coined to broadly describe those who are growing as the young adults as we enter the 21st century – and co-incidentally, includes all 5 five of my children! The infographic posted by Ethan Bloch of Flowtown shown on the left provides a very easy way to access information about the characteristics of this group – and the emerging understandings we have about their demographic from an international perspective. The section on Millennials and technology, including the data on attitudes to technology, and sources of news and information provide an indication of where some of these differences are.

On the same topic, Pew Internet have released a new report titled Millennials will Make Online Sharing in Networks a Lifelong Habit, in which their researchers have interviewed a number of experts who say that the advantages Millennials see in personal disclosure will outweigh their concerns about their privacy. The experts interviewed generally believe that today’s tech-savvy young people, who are known for enthusiastically embracing social networking, will retain their willingness to share personal information online even as they get older and take on more responsibilities. You can read the report here. (PDF download)

For someone who spent countless hours many years ago reading A Lion in the Meadow to his daughters it was a real privilege yesterday to host author Margaret Mahy in our Christchurch office. Margaret has agreed to be the patron of an exciting new online project that we’ve been developing in conjunction with the NZ Book Council and the NZ children’s book authors and illustrators organisation. It provides an opportunity to connect students in schools with authors and illustrators for ‘virtual visits’ using skype or other synchronous technologies. The project, called BookTalks, means that authors and illustrators will now be more accessible to NZ students and schools via these online technologies. There are currently over 30 authors and illustrators listed on the site, and others will be added as they express interest.

There’s been a lot written and spoken recently about the concept of ‘digital literacy’ – a response to the realisation that young people growing up in an increasingly digital world are needing to develop a range of skills and understandings for dealing with this form of media, and that this is somehow different to the traditional view of literacy as we have come to think of it in a print-dominated world.

A new white paper from the Pearson Foundation makes a useful contribution to this discussion, with some well-researched comments on the impact of a range of technologies, including television, computers, digitised toys, the internet and cell phones on the development of what they are calling emergent literacy.

The following quote sums up the view of digital literacy that the authors have…

Young children immersed in digital media opportunities will develop some degree of digital literacy, that is, the ability to use digital media for speaking, listening, reading, and writing purposes. But digital literacy includes not only traditional emergent literacy skills like reading and writing, but also the psycho-motor skills needed for keyboarding and cell phone use and the problem-solving skills needed for navigating Google sites and using iPhone apps. We can expect that, as literacy skills develop, so will skills in digital literacy, especially as young children become more comfortable using digital media as tools.

The research reveals that:

• Opportunities to engage with digital media increasingly prevail through the use of mobile devices—and in developing countries access to mobile devices is more commonplace than access to other technologies
• Developmental milestones are changing as young people’s access to mobile and digital technology grows.
• Digital media positively impacts children’s opinion of learning, providing engagement opportunities not always seen with print materials.

This study also confirms the need to continue delivering educational programs to teachers and children who otherwise would not have access to these kinds of educational opportunities.

The report can be downloaded here (641Kb PDF)

Today I presented CORE’s ten trends for 2010 to an audience of around 400 delegates at the Learning@School conference in Rotorua. The ten trends are a collection of themes and issues that have been identified by CORE staff as trends in education that we imagine will impact on the work of teachers and leaders in early childhood centres, schools, and tertiary institutions in NZ in the coming year. While our focus is on the bigger picture of education, there is a focus on trends associated with the use of ICTs in education, reflecting the fact that we are living in a world where nearly everything we do has a digital dimension.

The researchers at Intuitive Media have produced some thought provoking stuff over recent years, and their latest report on ‘children, TV and the internet’ is no exception. Surveying a sample of 4347 children, aged 6-14 who are users of their SuperClubsPLUS & GoldStarCafe projects, the researchers asked a range of questions about children’s use of TV and the internet.

The result is presented as a series of graphs summarising the key findings, and providing much food for thought in terms of the way in which attitudes about and behaviours towards the use of this media may be changing.

For those in my generation, TV was very much a passive media (one could argue the same for our reading of the newspaper, listening to the radio and the first generation of use of the internet!) The introduction of video recorders altered our behaviour a little by allowing us to ‘time-shift’ the broadcast to suit a time when we could watch our favourite programme, or to re-watch our favourite rugby game.

The result of the MyTV survey reveals that these behaviours are continuing to change, and that younger learners want to be more actively involved in what they are watching on TV – not just in terms of  when and where they want, but they also want to “be part” of it. The results of the survey confirm the trend that children today want to be contributors and participants – more than just consumers.

As educators we need to take note of this, and consider what this suggests for our adoption of digital media into schools and classrooms.

The report is available here (PDF download)

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

My colleague Malcolm Moss in the UK sent me a link this morning to an fascinating concept video on the future of digital magazines. As we become increasingly familiar with the functionality of the touch-screen on the iPhone and familiar with devices like the Kindle, this video provides some interesting perspectives on where the development of where the whole concept of layout and design might head with these devices in the future.

The basic concept being explored is how we can take the established behaviours exhibited by those who simply pick up a magazine to browse and cater for them in an e-book world. The illustrations of how this thinking is evolving and what the solutions in the future are well worth viewing in this video clip.

A comment that appeared on Twitter today led me to an article on AJC titled Cursive may be a fading skill, but so what? The article interested me in view of a number of places I’ve been recently where concerns are being expressed about the standards of literacy (or lack of them) among today’s learners – with the ability to write by hand being considered a lost art in an age of text messaging and the word processor, and where what used to be called “penmanship” is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills.

Referred to in the article are a number of the arguments used by those wanting to retain an emphasis on hand-writing:

It [hand-writing] doesn’t get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach. (ie it’s technology’s fault!)

…cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.”

…cursive writing is an art that helps teach them muscle control and hand-eye coordination.

In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don’t have electricity?

The article actually reports a range of perspectives, providing responses for those who are lamenting the lack of time devoted to learning hand-writing in schools:

The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.

and..

Just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we’re going from the art of handwriting to handwriting purely as communication.

So – what’s the verdict? Should we see more time devoted to learning that cursive script as I did when I was a student, or should we accept that digital technologies enable us to record and communicate our ideas just as effectively as hand-written tombs, and, being digital, enable us to share, use and re-use what we have written in a number of contexts.

Footnote: if I do have one concern in this area it’s reference to the idea that it is text messaging and Twitter that is replacing hand-writing. There’s a subtle second issue hidden in this debate, and that is around the ability to create quality, in-depth written prose – something more than 140 characters. Word processors, wikis and blogs provide useful vehicles for this type of writing, while IM and Twitter, in my view, simply replace the “notes-to-self” stuff we write in our diaries, or the “message-at-the-speed-of-thought” often fired across board tables on a scrap of paper. It pays to be discriminating in terms of what we are promoting I guess.

Just received a link to this post from Jedd and felt compelled to reference it here…

It comes at a very useful time as I spent part of today discussing the whole notion of literacy and technology with a colleague in Wellington (on Skype) ahead of a conference there in a few weeks.

The post is about Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University who collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions from 2001 to 2006.

Far from finding that technology is having a negative impact on literacy she found the opposite, stating that young people today write far more than any generation before them.The post quotes:

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

Read the rest yourself here.

I’m now back in NZ, getting used to the time zone differences

Over recent months I’ve read an increasing number of stories, articles and comments on the future of newspapers that I’ve been storing away to make comment on, as I see the whole debate as being indicative of the paradigm shift in the “knowledge economy” we’re all a part of. As a blogger this thinking has been percolating in my mind for some years now as i think about how I access the news, how I filter it, engage with it and report it.

The interactive map above is part of a recent initiative of the Independent newspaper in the UK, titled “what’s next for newspapers?” Prompted by the impact of the global recession on the newspaper industry, the Independent is using the opportunity to prompt a richer debate about impact of digital technologies on the newspaper industry, the implications of these changes for the newspaper industry, for journalism, and for society. The team at the Independent say that…

The aim with interactive collaborative maps of this kind is to weave together all of the salient issues, positions and arguments dispersed through the community into a single rich, transparent structure – in which each idea and argument is expressed just once – so that it’s possible to explore all perspectives quickly and gain a good sense of the scope and perceived merits of the different arguments

I see a great topic here for high school media studies students, or social studies classes for that matter. And it’s great to see the Independent actively using the debategraph tool as a means of engaging people in this debate – I’m a fan of this tool as I love the way it dynamically represents the changing perspectives in the debate, and enables large scale participation.

The Independent article refers to the thoughts of Clay Shirky, who’s post on Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable got me thinking about this a lot more just a few weeks ago. Shirky traverses the issues of ownership, control, quality, economics and impact of digital technologies in his article – focusing in on his argument that…

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Not everyone agree that newspapers are under threat, however.  John Hartigan, CEO of News Limited in Australia claims that the future of newspapers is bright. He is critical of the traditional ‘knowing a little about a lot‘ approach of newspapers to reporting the news, and sees the future involving teams of highly educated people with specialist knowledge providing more in depth news and analysis. He is not a fan at all of the notion of “citizen journalists” and dismisses claims often made by bloggers that theirs is a fresh, more democratic medium, by saying “Amateur journalism trivialises and corrupts serious debate“.

If you’re looking for some perspectives and themes to fire up your students’ thinking, then I’d recommend Ryan Scholin’s post on 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers (it would also pay to read his original post from 2007 to get an idea of what has changed.)

I’d love to hear stories of classes that participate in this debate, and the usefulness of the debategraph map as a focus for this.