CNET News.com interviewed Henry Jenkins about the new digital divide, and how digital environments are influencing children. He makes a number of important points;
“…there still are some fundamental differences between those kids who have 24/7 broadband mobile access to every new media appliance and those kids who might have 10 minutes of access a day if they’re lucky”
“(Research has shown) that 57 percent of teens online have produced media and about a third of them have produced media that they shared with people beyond their immediate friends and families. A good chunk of those produced media by remixing it, so this is a generation that is not just consuming media, but producing media.”
“…these are kids who are learning to share knowledge, to collaborate over distances, to work with people from diverse backgrounds, to participate in a global culture–those are really powerful things that are emerging in this generation.”
Jenkins points to the changes needed in schools to counter this growing “participation gap”.
Read/Write web describes a new study released today by the National School Boards Association that shows
“96 percent of students with online access use social networking technologies - defined as as chatting, text messaging, blogging, and visiting online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz. 81 percent say they have visited a social networking Web site within the past three months and 71 percent say they use social networking tools at least weekly. The report also claims that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork.
The study also shows that students are engaging in creative activities on social networking internet sites; including writing, art, and contributing to collaborative online projects “whether or not these activities are related to schoolwork“.
The report, ???Creating & Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social and Educational Networking,??? is based on three surveys: an online survey of nearly 1,300 9- to 17-year-olds, an online survey of more than 1,000 parents, and telephone interviews with 250 school districts leaders who make decisions on Internet policy. The complete NSBA report, is available on NSBA???s Web site.
Findings include:
* Video: Nearly a third (30 percent) of online students say they download and view videos uploaded by other users at least once a week. Almost one in 10 say they upload videos of their own creation at least weekly.
* Photos: Nearly one in four (24 percent) of online students say they post photos or artwork created by others at least once a week. 22 percent say they post photos or artwork oftheir own creation at least that often.
* Blogging: More than one in six (17 percent) of online students say they add to blogs they???ve created at least weekly, and 30 percent of students have their own blogs.
I was alerted to the KnowledgeWorks Foundation’s Map of the Future Forces Affecting Education by a mention in a post today by Will Richardson. This is a stunning visual representation of how future forces will affect the components of public education. Viewers can navigate across the map and dig into any of the trends, dilemmas or hotspots that are arrayed according to their position on the axis - the impact areas and drivers.
You can spend a lot of time exploring the map - and there would be many ways this could be used to stimulate discussions in schools. Also each trend, hotspot and dilemma leads to a collection of discussion forums, and real world applications.
Ewan McIntosh points to a stimulating pop!cast by Wired editor Kevin Kelly, who explores “the nature of technology through technology???s eye”. Kelly takes on implications of collective intelligence - the “planet pulsing with a more-than-massive data-sharing mind” described and developed by Howard Bloom (Global Brain, 2000)- with a particular emphasis on his experiences wih technology.
A good discussion of informal learning at infed, including this quote:
“We must move away from a view of education as a rite of passage involving the acquisition of enough knowledge and qualifications to acquire and adult station in life. The point of education should not be to inculcate a body of knowledge, but to develop capabilities: the basic ones of literacy and numeracy as well as the capability to act responsibly towards others, to take initiative and to work creatively and collaboratively. The most important capability, and the one which traditional education is worst at creating is the ability and yearning to carry on learning. Too much schooling kills off a desire to learn…. Schools and universities should become more like hubs of learning, within the community, capable of extending into the community… More learning needs to be done at home, in offices and kitchens, in the contexts where knowledge is deployed to solve problems and add value to people’s lives.” (Leadbeater 2000: 111-112)
“The mental habit of dividing one’s attention into many small slices has significant implications for the way young people learn, reason, socialize, do creative work and understand the world.”
“Decades of research (not to mention common sense) indicate that the quality of one’s output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks.”
“...there’s substantial literature on how the brain handles multitasking. And basically, it doesn’t.”
Three quotes from a Time Magazine article from 2006, that quotes from research and researchers, describing multitasking as sequential processing, where the brain moves from one activity to another. “When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and
it takes far longer–often double the time or more–to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially.”
Website for Digital Youth Research - kids informal learning with digital media. The project is focused on 3 general objectives; “1. To describe kids as active innovators using digital media, rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. 2. To think about the implications of kids innovative cultures for schools and higher education, and engage in a dialogue with educational planners. 3. To advise software designers about how to use kids innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software.
Includes a list of publications, some online, in categories such as Media and Culture, Digital Media and Learning, Youth Cultures, as well as a number of projects well worth watching. One that caught my eye was the project “Digital Media in an Urban Lansdscape,” a study into how L.A. urban youth are using new media both within school and outside of school. “Student interviews and observations in the classroom will help us understand, from the point of view of youth, what is important and interesting about new technologies and how the child uses them both within school and out of school“.
Henry Jenkins in his “Convergence Culture - where do old and new media collide” cites Pierre Levy throughout the books, and so this afternoon I spent some time tracking him down. He is known for his studies of collective intelligence and knowledge-based societies, and is “a world-leading thinker on cyberculture”, according to his wikipedia entry, with a more recent focus on semiotics - the study of signs and symbols and how meaning is constructed and understood.
Jenkins quotes from Levy’s 1997 book Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in Cyberspace) including “the distinction between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters, will blend to form a circuit” … of expression, with each participant working to “sustain the activity of others”. Interesting that this was written ten years ago, and these concepts are now central in discussions about user creation of online content. Also “no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity” - so the concept of collective intelligence refers to the ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members - the knowledge community.
Significantly, he draws a distinction between shared knowledge (information held in common by the group) and collective intelligence (the sum total of information held individually by all members of the group and accessible to all). He explains… “the knowledge of a thinking community is no longer a shared knowledge for it is now impossible for a single human being to master all knowledge”.
A wiki I set up for a discussion in the ICTPD discussions area in 2006, intended as a space to collect links to NZ teacher and student bloggers and podcasters continues to have a life, growing slowly as more teachers become regular bloggers/podcasters.
The page for student blogs and podcasts gets updated from time to time, and the new additons include many gems - check out 7 year old Geogia’s podcast, especially her interviews with her great grandmother, and the Appleby School Airwaves podcast. If you know any others that could be included, suggest it to the the authors…
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Andy Carvin has pointed out an example of what we can expect to be a growing trend - the recording of classroom activity which is then used without permission for what could be anyone of a number of purposes. In the case described in Andy’s blog, a 16 year old US student, troubled by his American history teacher using his classroom as a platform for airing his religious views, recorded the teacher???s comments and eventually media carried excerpts from his recording. Along with the issue of the teacher’s permission to be recorded, some students whose voices were heard on the tape complained to school officials that they were recorded without their permission. I know of cases in 2006 where teachers were unknowingly recorded on cell phones, and the recording shared outside of school, and then there’s the “happy slapping” phenomenon. Andy asks for discussion in his blog around this topic, and it’s probably a good discussion to be taking place in our schools too.
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