Friday, June 26, 2009
Education & the Digital Native Peer Day
Hello all and welcome to the Education & the Digital Native Peer Day. We will use this blog site as a base camp to post our thoughts and comments about this topic. Under each discussion topic you will find links to video clips. Please view the clip prior to posting your comments and or reactions. Additionally, I would like all of us to post comments about each others thoughts in order to start a dialogue about Digital Natives and Education. The time frame for this will be three days. Please click on the topic for each day of the peer day and post your response to the question. Thank you all in advance for participating and I look forward to the discussion.
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Digital natives, in some ways, may be no different than previous generations. They are interested in discovery, methods of displaying creativity, exercising independence, and challenging limits.
I am 46 years-old and can recall some of my first desires to discover, display creativity, exercise independence, and challenge limits.
For instance, I can remember wanting to know who lived in what my friends in my neighborhood called the "spooky" house across the street. One day, curiosity propelled me to make the long walk up the driveway. I met an elderly man whose wife had died years earlier and who had since cut himself off from society. I think I was 8 or 9 years-old at the time and I became obsessed with him and wanting him to join society again. My efforts failed, but my desire for more discovery was fueled.
As for displaying creativity, I am the daughter of people who made their living in the arts and had tremendous access to creative outlets. But I remember my Fourth Grade year when I decided that I had found my creative outlet. It was writing and my teacher had carbon paper in her desk that she gave to me. I started writing stories to share with my classmates and eventually created a newspaper. My parents gave me an electric typewriter and with boxes of carbon paper, I churned out hundreds of pages of the Stadium Drive (the name of my elementary school.)
Displaying independence for me (and probably countless others) came when I got my first two-wheel bike and was allowed to ride down the street unaccompanied. I have so many memories of challenging limits that it is simply impossible to begin recounting them. They range from driving my sister's car when I was just 14 years-old to publishing an underground newspaper in middle school.
I listed these memories because I believe that they illustrate the same natural urges that all children face. Technology, for digital natives, is the urge to explore the spooky house, the desire to create, the motivation for independence, and the compulsion to test limits. I think it is extremely natural for digital natives to be drawn to technology for exploration and expression. It certainly requires less physical movement than earlier generations had to perform in order to accomplish the same objectives, but the mental processes, I believe, are the same and are extremely natural.
Technology is there. It would be unnatural for digital natives not to explore it, enjoy it, discover it, and try to use it to shape their futures.
This YouTube Video illustrates these points particularly well, I think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvlJ1aA2p9g&feature=PlayList&p=823EFB31F6790E2C&index=6
The StudyBudy group that they created is merely using existing technology for what a prior generation did with the technology of that time period.
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