About Digital Youth

Today I was chatting with a fellow Flinders student and she brought to my attention the trouble parents are finding with their kids cutting and pasting information from the internet to produce brilliant power points etc, but found they had no idea about the subject matter when questioned.. Something we need to think about when working with students and multimedia.

 Inquiry based learning and the Web

Using the Web within an inquiry-based pedagogy begins with asking or framing an essential question. For our purposes, an essential question is defined as a question that requires students to make a decision or plan a course of action. Making decisions and/or planning a course of action are essential adult skills that students need to display at a high level of proficiency. Educators need to focus on such questions; many teachers rely to heavily on "What is.." questions such as "What is cancer." Asking a student to answer such in a research project is licensing the student to move i nformation from point A to point B without concern for integrating discrete information pieces into new knowledge or fresh insights. Effectively, in this day of digital "cutting and pasting," asking a "What is.." question is a license to plagiarize.

A much better question requiring the development of an action plan regarding the cancer topic cited above might be: "What plan can I develop for reducing the chance that I will contract cancer in my lifetime?" In this scenario, a student must research the question to develop a list of strategies; the teacher then may require the student to select the top three strategies from the list and then justify why those were chosen. In this question, active knowledge construction is required.

Teachers my also ask students questions involving decision-making. Such questions as "Should Puerto Rico become the 51st state of the United States?" or "What invention of the 20th Century has had the greatest impact?" require students to engage in critical thinking and build knowledge.

 Youth Digital Ethnography

ABOUT DIGITAL YOUTH

Since the early 1980s, digital media have held out the promise of more engaged, child-centered learning opportunities. The advent of Internet-enabled personal computers and mobile devices has added a new layer of communication and social networking to the interactive digital mix. While this evolving palette of technologies has demonstrated the ability to capture the attention of young people, the innovative learning outcomes that educators had hoped for are more elusive. Although computers are now fixtures in most schools and many homes, there is a growing recognition that kids' passion for digital media has been ignited more by peer group sociability and play than academic learning. This gap between in-school and out-of-school experience represents a gap in children's engagement in learning, a gap in our research and understandings, and a missed opportunity to reenergize public education. This project works to address this gap with a targeted set of ethnographic investigations into three emergent modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies: communication, learning, and play.

The Principal Investigators on this project are Peter Lyman at the University of California, Berkeley, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito at the University of Southern California, Michael Carter of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, and Barrie Thorne of the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, the project is administered by the Institute for the Study of Social Change. With the help of a large number of graduate students and postdocs, a variety of projects are under way in both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. This project will address these objectives through ethnographic research in both local neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California, and in virtual places and networks such as online games, blogs, messaging, and online interest groups. Our research sites focus on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after-school, and in recreational settings.

This project is sponsored by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Principal Investigators Contact Information:

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito - mito at itofisher dot com
Michael Carter - mcarter at montereyinstitute dot org
Barrie Thorne - bthorne at berkeley dot edu

 

 

Tags: technolog education
Posted at 07:22PM Sep 30, 2008 by Jan Sutton  |