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The fear is easy to understand. What we are essentially doing when we move to student-directed learning is undermining our own relatively stable (though I would argue obsolete) notions of expertise and replacing them something new and different.

One of the key arguments we are making is that the role of educators needs to shift away from being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments.

how do we identify the narrowing range of content which probably does fall into this category and which provides a common baseline for other kinds of learning?

users are not so much creating content as they are constantly reshaping context.

The very idea of remix is about the productions of new meanings by reframing or shifting the context in which something means.

You challenge here what James Paul Gee has called the "content fetish," stressing that how we learn is more important than what we learn. How far are you willing to push this? Doesn't it matter whether children are learning the periodic table or the forms of alchemy practiced in the Harry Potter books? Or that they know Obama is Christian rather than Muslim?

throughout the book, we stress that knowledge, now more than ever, is becoming a where rather than a what or how.

The explicit is only one kind of content, which tells you what something means.

The tacit has its own layer of meaning. It tells why something is important to you, how it relates to your life and social practices.

But as social interactions and technologies mature, there has been a swing in the pendulum. Professors are now approaching the teaching of social media from a pedagogical perspective, as much as a practical one.

the theories behind social media: why do things go viral, the social theories of how people act and how they communicate to a network, or one person at a time, and why do certain tools work they way they do for us

Instead of understanding social media as products, students are encouraged to treat status updates as part of a larger information ecosystem.

With social media being a pervasive, if not invasive, aspect of our lives, it makes perfect sense for the Ivory Tower to embrace social media from a theoretical perspective to help students understand the technology and its effect on their daily lives, as well as the epistemological question of "how do we know what we know?"

The medium is relatively new enough that there's no canon shaping social media, just conceptual frameworks for looking at the effects of social media on students' lives and communities and on society as a whole. The task of academics is to give students a vocabulary to understand these perspectives, tools to make sense of the theoretical discussions and think critically about social media.

"I don't think you have the credibility of doing research, of writing about, unless you get to really know that culture. And the best way of knowing the culture is to actually be immersed in it."

"no positive incentives for innovating in pedagogy."

Rheingold puts it,

Underpinning a disdain for social media in higher education is the assumption that incoming students already have an inherent aptitude for new technologies

Terms like "digital native" (those born during or after the introduction of digital technology -- computer, Internet, etc. -- and have an assumed greater understanding of how technology works because they've been using digital technology their entire lives) and "digital immigrant" (those born before this introduction and have had to adapt and adopt the technology at a later point in life) have been bandied around by experts and marketers as ways of classifying and differentiating between generations, and, more importantly, the expectations of those who fall into either category.

it has stopped educators from teaching what they need to teach. It has scared educators into thinking students know more than us. God forbid we learn something from our students. And, so, we assumed these kids already know, and we don't teach them. And we expect them to know things and we grade them; we evaluate them; we hire them based on what we think, we assume, they know. And they don't. How would you know this stuff if no one ever bothered to point it out to you that this is something you should be learning, because everyone assumes you already know?"

the lack of critical literacy.

ce students of the Digital Age have not had to acclimate to this sweeping change from analog to digi

al and are assumed to possess some innate technological knowledge based solely on the year they were born, they don't necessarily have to acclimate to the sheer velocity of recent innovations.

"We have on our hands the last generation of educators who do remember life before these tools, and so therefore, we have an opportunity to teach some critical literacy that these students may not get otherwise; this generation may not get otherwise

Rheingold puts the onus on the students to learn not just from him, but from each other. Instructors can serve as a facilitator, but the student has to want to be there, process that information, and use that information in a productive way.

"The issues around social media -- community, identity, presentation of self, social capital, public sphere, collective action; a lot of important topics from other disciplines -- aren't really being raised in academia," said Rheingold. "They ought to be because these topics, not only academically, in terms of the shifts in media and literacy that they're triggering in the world, are where the students live and work."

The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”

Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.

same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience

The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”

survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.

said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.

similar mental limitations in the types of tasks that can be multitasked.

The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”

Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.