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Saturday, April 28, 2007
Exploring the Future of Learning - SALLY HICKS, Duke University
If someone from a century ago were suddenly transported into today’s home, they would be confounded by the way that technology has transformed it. The teen-ager IMing friends, a college student visiting the online world Second Life or dad checking his work e-mail would all seem bizarre and alien. But they’d probably feel pretty much at home in a school classroom: The teacher’s still up front, talking to students in desks who are writing notes with pencil and paper. Bridging the gap between those two worlds — the dynamic, changing technology children use at home and the relatively unchanged classroom — is the subject of a conference at Duke this weekend called “The Future of Learning.” The conference will explore some of the possibilities that the digital world has to offer educators and students, says Cathy Davidson, interim director of Duke’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and an event organizer. Currently, she says, there’s a divide between the way that students raised with the Internet use technology in informal learning — video games and online communities — and the relatively unchanged format of formal learning at school, she said.
Comments:
It is difficult to negate the fact that digital natives as they have been coined, hold a level of understanding far greater than we "30-something" teachers who are often found in the classroom. The knowledge of students when it comes to information gathering, blogs, wikis, podcasting, second life, etc. can be overwhelming. How can we take this new learner and apply these skills to the areas of math, science, social studies and english? Sure we can link to fantastic sites, find engaging web based activites, but in a sense all we are doing is re-creating the classroom in an online form. There has to be another link that can connect the knowledge of students today to the pedagogies of the past . . . after all, we must still be able to balance our checkbooks.
# posted by
 : 7:45 AM
I really think the perceived knowledge of digital natives is overrated. If one examines usability research done by Jakob Nielsen, it is clear that teens and elder teens are easily frustrated by complex technology. In other words, complex gadgetry is still reserved for the uber technologists among the youth cohort and the gadgets the young are intimately familiar with can be easily mastered by 30 somethings.
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