Tuesday Sessions - NECC 2008

Understanding Digital Learners: Learning in the New Digital Landscape
Ian Jukes

Website 83 page handout on the website - Understanding Digital Kids (notes on yesterday and today)

Why are kids in your classrooms?
This is a learning conference...
How can we begin to do things differently starting RIGHT NOW to have kids want to be in our classrooms?

Getting kids to WANT to learn...

Huge gap between digital learning styles and traditional education. System thing, not a personnel thing. Digital World completely out of sync with education methodology.

7 Major Changes that Educators/Education MUST make if we are going to connect with these Digital Kids

Time for education to CATCH UP.

Kids are neurologically different - see the world differently.

The Digital Diet - One step at a time.
Go online read Zits comics
Play video games against kids - while they are listening to music
Take time to explore their online world at YouTube, Flicker, etc, etc.

1. TEACH to a WHOLE NEW MIND (Daniel Pink)
Many in the top 1/3 of classes don't need to be "taught" - they do well in tool in spite of teachers instead of because of them.

Consumers v. Producers
Move beyond 20th century literacies to 21st century fluencies
~Fluencies are unconscious skills (internalized like learning to ride/riding a bike)

2. TEACH FLUENCY
Technological Fluency - transparent use of digital tools to perform a wide range of tasks (no analysis of how ink got into a pen - you just use the pen)! This is NOT about teaching kids Excel, it's about teaching kids how to problem solve!

Headware NOT Hardware

Media Fluency - being able to look critically at the content of a website, video, bog, video game, and be able to understand how the medium is being used to shape our thinking or to communicate - not how it is used but how WELL it is being used.

Educators need to understand that students need to be able to create/communicate in all mediums.

Information Fluency - ability to unconsciously to be able to interpret information in all forms in order to be able to extract the essential knowledge
Ask Good Questions
Access & Acquire Raw Material from the MOST APPROPRIATE source
Apply - VIP - moving Vision into Practice
Assess - process and product

We CANNOT just ADD another LAYER

3. We HAVE to SHIFT our INSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH - resist the temptation to tell the whole story, sharing the product of our thinking, we are taking the excitement out of learning. There is a time for this but we can't do it all the time. We need to "teach lazy" - empower our students to be independent thinkers, independent learners.

Progressive Withdrawal in Education - Help kids become INDEPENDENT, not DEPENDENT on us for information/knowledge.

We live in an age of infowhelm - how do we keep kids engaged?!
Dale's Learning Cone, Learning Pyramid, Learning Triangle (google this to find diagaram)

4. Let our kids access information NATIVELY

5. Let students COLLABORATE
Ted McCain - spontaneous ad-hocism
DN's see the world differently than we do and will create things we do not even think of

6. Let students create products that demonstrate understanding of both CONTENT and PROCESS (not about using digital tools just b/c they are cool but b/c they enhance traditional learning and they are the most powerful tools)

7. We must RE-EVALUATE EVALUATION (still a place for traditional testing) ~ True Assessment measures so much more. Have to be used as tools for change of change and learning not just for teachers but also for teachers. Not just tools of accountability but tools to help teachers get better at what they do. Need an authentic audience in a variety of settings. Need encouragement to TRY and do things in all kinds of areas. Not just Qualitative/Sumative but Qualitative/Formative!

Committed Sardine Website

Edtags.org: Academic Social Tagging to Aid Learning and Assessment
Chris Dede, Adam Seldow

Web 2.0 Redefines what how and with whom we learn (c.dede)
Knowledge generated by experts v. knowledge generated by a community (i.e. wikipedia)

Chris_dede@harvard.edu

Adam Seldow
adam_seldow@gsd.harvard.edu
CIO - Fall River Public Schools

Collections of organizations and their inter-relationships

Whyville?

Sociosemantic Networking (polysyllabric words)

-communicating with language
-colloquial communication - tag as we speak

Sociosemantic plaforms
simpy
citeulike
scuttle
steve
furl
connotea
librarything
edtags - place where educational resources live

With a course - tag with course number
terminology and tags - reflection on what you are looking for in the class/as a teacher

Look at how mental models of the students will indicate their knowledge structures

isites.harvard.edu/edtags