Group items tagged

There are a number of labels to describe the young people currently studying at school, college and university. They include the digital natives, the net generation, the Google generation or the millenials. All of these terms are being used to highlight the significance and importance of new technologies within the lives of young people (Gibbons, 2007). For some, new technologies have been such a defining feature in the lives of younger generations that they predict a fundamental change in the way young people communicate, socialise, create and learn. They argue that this shift has profound implications for education (e.g. Prensky, 2001a; Gibbons, 2007; Rainie, 2006 and Underwood, 2007). Typically, supporters of this concept view the differences between those who are or who are not digital natives as primarily about when a person was born. This paper will critique and show new evidence against this conception of the digital native as based purely on generational differences. The paper will separate the 'doing' from the 'being', that is it will propose a number of digital activities (doing) that indicate digital nativeness and then examine which types of people (being) are most likely to demonstrate these characteristics. The paper will show that breadth of use, experience, self-efficacy and education are just as, if not more, important than age in explaining how people become digital natives.

"Depending on whom you ask, members of Generation Y either have online privacy figured out, or they haven't a clue. Michael P. Kassner looks at who's right."

People are trading their privacy for influence! This irreversible global trend is shaping a communication battleground that will impact on every aspect of our future. The concept of relinquishing privacy is a scary proposition for many people, generally in loose correlation to their age. Similarly the idea of a profound change in societal influence is generating resistance and fear in traditional power centres and institutional mediators of meaning. Governments, corporations, media empires and a host of heritage institutions and their practices will change dramatically as contemporary forces shift the nature of influence.

"Cyber-bullying, update-addiction, sexting - from the perspective of a parent raising a ''digital native'' child, social media seems fraught with dangers. But new research suggests the risks inherent in social media use by younger generations might be overblown. danah boyd, assistant research professor at Harvard and principal researcher for Microsoft Research - like k.d.lang, she prefers the lower case - has completed a large-scale study on how US teenagers use the internet in general, and social media in particular. Her book is called It's Complicated, and is the result of in-depth interviews with scores of teens over an eight-year period."

Here's something to consider when writing school policy....Just keep the statements to 140 characters. Hey...why waste your texts!!

"How is Twitter interesting for a teacher or educational personnel in general? How to use Twitter for teaching? Why Teachers need Twitter? These are some of the questions that you will be able to answer after viewing the following 18 YouTube videos on How Educators can use Twitter in Classroom! "

"It took four years to hit 21 billion tweets. Now Twitter users generate nearly half a billion a day, and the Library of Congress will be archiving and indexing all of them."

For Wired's 20th anniversary, we investigate the first generation born into a world that has never not known digital life. If you want to understand the past two decades, they are perhaps the perfect subjects. The drumbeat of disruption and technological advance is their natural rhythm.

"Correctly citing an image with a Creative Commons licence can be a tricky task for both educators and their students. ImageCodr is a website that aims to help by providing a generator that will construct attributions for Flickr Creative Commons photos that can be embedded into blogs and websites."

"Using social and digital media, teachers are reaching past the classroom in unprecedented ways." Here are the most important things we, as teachers, should integrate into our practice so we can help this generation learn

"I set out to answer these questions through a study of attitudes, which compared digitally literate students' to digitally-challenged teachers and visa versa. In this study being undertaken at Swinburne University and sponsored by the Wesley College Institute for Innovation in Education, 321 students in years 9 and 10 and 100 educators were surveyed about their attitudes to digital literacy and the use of digital technologies. The schools were co-educational independent schools with laptop programs and significant differences were observed in student and educator attitudes towards each other's digital literacy. The hypothesis, "that there is a disconnect between the digitally capable students and digitally challenged educators in schools with laptop programs, limiting effective use of digital technology in the classroom" was supported in the findings. This has repercussions for educating "net generation" students and implications for the implementation of the National Secondary Computer Fund and National Broadband Network. The disconnect was revealed in terms of attitudes towards technology in the classroom, teaching pedagogy, internet use, adoption of cutting-edge technologies and limitations placed on school laptops and networks. In this study 57 statements were provided to research participants, who were then grouped into four groups: digitally capable students, digitally challenged students, digitally capable educators and digitally challenged educators."

"Hello, my name is Kara Lee and I am an Instructional Technology Facilitator. I received my Master's of Science in Instructional Technology from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. I currently work in the NC Public Education School System. When talking to staff, parents, other employees and friends, their biggest concern is keeping up with technology and the language the new generation speaks! As adults, it is our job to educate ourselves on emerging technology so that we are always aware of things our children have access to and how they are using them. I hope this site will be helpful to you in becoming more aware of things parents of Digital Natives need to know to help keep their children safe in a Digital World! "

"Do you act correctly when using social networks? Check out the video and get valuable safety tips . Get full list of do's and don'ts at http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innovation/generic/toshiba-mcafee-news..."

"LETTERBOX has been looking into the effects that the digital age is having on younger minds and has generated the fascinating infographic below that's teeming with interesting details. For example, did you know that there are more than 5 million users below the age of ten on Facebook, despite the minimum age requirement being 13? Of these users, over 200,000 of them are aged six or younger. These statistics and others listed below all point to the incredible fact that the average age for a child to start regularly consuming online media is now only 8-years-old."

As part of our Connected Learning Community, we are highlighting the importance of balance, safety and responsible behavior online (generally called "Digital Citizenship") through a variety of events, lessons and activities.

"Almost since the birth of the internet there have been computer users who have attacked and hacked other computers out of malice or just because they could. One of these types of attacks features quite regularly in mainstream news; a Denial of Service or DoS attack. That's the general name they're given but actually a DoS attack is quite an old form of web attack and one that is largely unused. "

"Generate a random fake name, address, username, password, and (usable) email address for use with online message boards, social media, or whatever else."

A useful list that clearly explains some keys to successful digital research

"At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." "