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The Reality
Craig Watkins (Watkins, 2012) points out in his article Rethinking America’s Digital Divide “Truth is, we do not know a lot about what young people are doing online with their mobile phones.”(Watkins, 2012). Watkins writes "As a more diverse population joins the digital world, how do we begin to understand the different skills, interests, ethics, and cultures that produce different new media ecologies, literacies, and modes of participation in digital media culture.” (Watkins, 2012.). This is where the great hope and promise lie in media and education. This is why it’s so important to let children talk about the media they are involved in because this is where they are creating their culture and how they want to be seen and heard. In Danah Boyd’s article, The Not-So-Hidden Politics of class Online she reminds us that “Teens and adults use social categories to identify people with values, tastes, and social positions. Social networking sites begin to take on the frame of those social categories and divide youth culture along those imaginary lines.” (Boyd, 2009) It’s important to remember that even though the internet has the capability to join people together it also has the ability to magnify ways that teens and adults already separate and categorize themselves. Boyd also points out that there is no universal public online. “If you are on a given site, you have to know that you are only viewing a portion of the social conversation” (Boyd, 2009).
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The Potential
In EDCT 552 we start looking at what students are actually doing online and in truth they are behaving and interacting in ways that are very similar to what their parents and grandparents did before them. Students just want to hang out with each other, play, mess around and interact. The only thing that has changed is the tools they use to do it. Steiner-inspired schools have been resistant to implementing the very tech tools that have invaded students’ private lives. As Burbles and Callister point out, “Adopting a rejectionist position and yielding these decisions to others merely guarantees that the skeptics will be ignored and the enthusiasts given free rein.” (Burbles and Callister, 2000) It’s good to be skeptical as any educator should be, but it’s also important to try and be open minded to the ways that students are actually communicating and accessing information.
Many of the tech tools we explored in EDCT 552 had great potential and provided a wider range of communication and new ways for students to access information. Many of these tools also had the potential to create better inclusion for students with disabilities (learning or physical). Henry Jenkins writes about distributed intelligence. He defines it as: the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities, and negotiation, the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms. (Jenkins,2006) I feel that this speaks to the goals I have as a teacher. I hope as I become more adept as a student in using these new tools that I will be able to, in turn, teach my students the skills that they need. |
The Change
My view of teaching has changed significantly over this last year after becoming a student myself. I’m more empathetic to my students and their needs. My students have brought more material into the classroom from the internet as it has become more accessible to them. Buckingham points out that “at present, there is a lack of easily available support and advice that might help young people negotiate their way through the mass of confusing contradictory and often unreliable information found in new media such as the Web.” (Buckingham, 2008) My current philosophy of education is less focused on idealism and more focused on the practical ways I can help students navigate their world. Being a student has made me more thoughtful about where the theoretical meets the practical.
Finally, as a student I have never been more excited by the educational landscape that I find myself in today. As a dyslexic student I was trepadasious to go back to school even after being heavily encouraged by my students. There are new rules to what success and literacy mean in schools and as Buckingham writes “literacy is not just about making distinctions between "reliable" and "unreliable" sources: it is also about understanding who produces media, how and why they do so, how these media represent the world, and how they create meanings and pleasures." (Buckingham,2008) This new way of looking at literacy gives me incredible hope for education and hope that more voices will be heard and critically understood for the value of their thinking rather than for their style of communication or educational pedigree. References
Boyd, Danah. 2009. "The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online." Personal Democracy Forum, New York, June 30. Buckingham pp. 1-24. (Moodle), D. (Ed.) (2008). Introducing identity. Youth, Identity, and Digital Media.The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur? Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Burbules, N. C., & Callister, T. A. (2000). Watch IT: The Risks and Promises of Information Technologies for Education (pp.1-17). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Retrieved from:https://moodle.sonoma.edu/A/mod/resource/view.php?id=444 Rideout, V. (2011). Zero to Eight:Children’s Media Use in America. A Common Sense Media. USA: pp. 7, 25-27. Watkins, S.C. (2012,February 23rd). Changingthe Conversation: rethinking America’s Digital Divide. Retrieved from http://theyoungandthedigital.com/2010/02/23/changing-the-conversation- rethinking-americas-digital-divide/ |
