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Many younger users have grown up using many forms of technology and therefore can be considered digital natives (Prensky, 2001). These users are generally comfortable using and problem solving across many digital platforms. However, many educators may be digital immigrants who feel less comfortable incorporating new technologies. Doing so may add stress and add a lot of extra preparation time. It is important that educators adapt to these changes and shift their views from teachers as experts and move to a view as their students being creators who are able to collaborate and build their understanding through working with peers.
Advances in technology affords students the ability to modify, create, adapt and share information in ways and on a scale not seen before. The sheer amount of information available now is simply staggering. With a few clicks of keypad or even simply speaking to a device, one can find information on virtually any topic in the world. The question becomes, what do we do with this information?
The goal is to move students from being knowledgeable to being knowledge able (Wesch, 2007). In other words students should be able to critically think about knowledge. They should be able to search for appropriate sources online, before sorting through the results, analyzing, and critiquing what they find, before modifying, sharing, or recreating this new knowledge in their efforts to collaboratively build knowledge and understanding. The question for educators is how can one create a classroom environment that encourages this?
A first step for educators is incorporating web 2.0 apps that can enable users to remix and adapt content in new and creative ways, and then share the newly created contend with peers or even the world. Social media has allowed the sharing of ideas to a larger audience than ever before. These reworked ideas can have a real effect in the world, something that pen and paper activities could never replicate. New technologies have been shifting the roles of user. Students are no longer passive recipients of information, rather they are now active creators, sharers, and adopters of new ideas and content.
Even new forms of books are moving in this direction. Some e-readers are moving beyond simply being digital copies of pages towards being interactive visual pages combined with more traditional text. Listen to Mike Matas discuss this at a recent Ted Talk.
Advances in technology affords students the ability to modify, create, adapt and share information in ways and on a scale not seen before. The sheer amount of information available now is simply staggering. With a few clicks of keypad or even simply speaking to a device, one can find information on virtually any topic in the world. The question becomes, what do we do with this information?
The goal is to move students from being knowledgeable to being knowledge able (Wesch, 2007). In other words students should be able to critically think about knowledge. They should be able to search for appropriate sources online, before sorting through the results, analyzing, and critiquing what they find, before modifying, sharing, or recreating this new knowledge in their efforts to collaboratively build knowledge and understanding. The question for educators is how can one create a classroom environment that encourages this?
A first step for educators is incorporating web 2.0 apps that can enable users to remix and adapt content in new and creative ways, and then share the newly created contend with peers or even the world. Social media has allowed the sharing of ideas to a larger audience than ever before. These reworked ideas can have a real effect in the world, something that pen and paper activities could never replicate. New technologies have been shifting the roles of user. Students are no longer passive recipients of information, rather they are now active creators, sharers, and adopters of new ideas and content.
Even new forms of books are moving in this direction. Some e-readers are moving beyond simply being digital copies of pages towards being interactive visual pages combined with more traditional text. Listen to Mike Matas discuss this at a recent Ted Talk.
One challenge that faces the technological native generation is that we seem to be progressively decreasing the quantity if not also the quality of content. Examples of this include the move from letter writing, to emails, to texts, and now to tweets. With each progression there is also a corresponding decrease in content. Other examples include the shift from movies and television to user created content like YouTube, Tweets, and Vines.
As content is increasingly produced by users rather than experts, it is important that students learn to analyze the source of information. Is the news feed in your social media coming from your friends or is it advertising disguised as peer content? If most of your information and news is coming through social media, are you really getting the whole picture? Or are you getting one biased aspect, moderated by the interests and views of your networked friends?
Furthermore, these changes are representing a fundamental shift towards increasing visual literacies. Users may now find it easier to share their thoughts through a quick vine or YouTube video, rather than typing or writing out a post. Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And if a picture is worth thousand, how many words are a video worth? Content is increasingly multimodal, with an increased focus on images, sounds, and videos (Bolter, 2001). Furthermore, we are seeing a modification of language as people increasingly use emoticons rather than text to share meaning. Again pushing content away from traditional text towards the visual medium.
The move towards sharing ideas in a multimodal format allows one to best determine how to represent one’s thoughts. Would it be best to use more traditional text, video, images, audio, or some combination? What suits your personal learning style best? Perhaps educators would benefit from increasing the amount of freedom in assignments. Moving towards student based learning and away from generic one size fits all assignments. The New London Group (1996) challenged schools to incorporate multimodal designs including: oral, visual, audio, gestural, tactile, and spatial patterns for sharing meaning into more traditional pedagogical approaches. Examples of multimodal work could be a project or portfolio that includes creating a go animate cartoon, an essay with hyperlinks to relevant websites or videos, and peer collaboration through social media, perhaps Moodle. The demonstration of understanding no longer has to be with traditional writing alone. The New London Group reminds us that we can represent knowledge in ways beyond the written form.
Through social media students are able to reach out beyond the walls of their classroom like never before. Education in the future will likely be more collaborative than ever before. Students won’t simply have pen pals, they can blog, video chat, and collaborate with others from around the world. They can challenge each in real time with math problems or work asynchronously through applications like Google Docs or Prezi. The ability for students to connect and collaborate is changing the future of education.
While social networking has many benefits including making it much easier to connect with others, organize information, share ideas, and collaborate, there is also the worry that it may also be negatively affecting real life connections. Are we ending up with more frequent online interactions, but less real world interactions? Are we developing the skills needed for real time, real life conversations? Are we able to handle times of silence or will we always need to fill that time with stimulation, pulling out our phones in case we missed some notification or another.
There are challenges for educators of the future to overcome, but technology is fundamentally changing how we communicate. We are moving towards increased visuals, more collaboration, and individualized learning. The future of education looks exciting.