Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids
* Book: Jessica K. Parker. Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom, Grades 5-12.
URL = http://teachingtechsavvykids.com/
Discussion
Howard Rheingold:
"From 2006 to 2008, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito and the late Peter Lyman led the largest study of youth media habits ever conducted, involving 18 researchers who interviewed more than 800 young people and their parents, spent more than 5000 hours observing teens in online social network spaces. Jessica K. Parker, assistant professor in the school of education at Sonoma State University and one of the participants in what came to be known as "the Digital Youth Project," based her book, Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom, Grades 5-12, on what the MacArthur-sponsored research found.
In the foreword to Parker's book, New York University Professor of English Education Glynda Hull makes an important point: "A hallmark, then, of the digital practices described for us in Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids is that they originated in domains of play, work, and social activity outside of school. Learning what it means to come of age in a digital world - by documenting the social, literate, and creative activities of young people as they are mediated by the Internet, cell phones, social networks, multiple digital modalities, and a range of related tools and practices - is a super starting point, perhaps the most important one, for rethinking how to engage young people in traditional school settings and the knowledge of texts and disciplines to be acquired therein, and also in gaining insights into how such settings could themselves do with alteration and transformation."
Mizuko Ito (who, it should be noted, is associated with this website, DMLcentral.net, and its umbrella entity, the Digital Media & Learning Research Hub) spoke at the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age event held at Google headquarters on Oct. 27 and 28, 2009, and observed: "The online world is where [young people] go to first for information, for social connection, and for learning, Are we taking seriously the kind of learning that they are doing online when they are going by their own learning agendas and when they are able to use technologies with the freedom to use them the way they want to use them? What we think about is how we limit and monitor kids' access to online worlds and we think about how technology can reinforce our existing adult-centered learning agendas and institutions rather than looking at it from the kids' point of view. I think it's very important that we bridge this generation gap and that we start reframing these issues. Kids' online peer spaces have tremendous potential as drivers of learning in a digital and networked age. I would go so far as to say that peer-based social exchange is the key to unlocking the full potential of learning in a digital age." (http://dmlcentral.net/blog/howard-rheingold/its-learning-not-technology-jessica-k-parker)