03 August 2007

The way they learn today

The way young people use technology outside school is changing and so are the ways they learn. This project, funded by the NCSL, aims to explore children's informal learning with digital media such as games consoles, the internet and mobile phones. There are three main areas of focus:

* How young people are engaging with digital media - especially when it has not been designed to be explicitly educational. What are they learning in terms of skills, networking and collaboration?
* The potential for a new digital divide to open up which is based on parental support for media use rather than access to hardware.
* How Schools can respond to these issues.

This project is now completed.

One of the claims of the report(Link to the power point presentation giving the main results)is that "we are all digital natives now" (slide 9). Not sure I agree with that in terms of the first language/second language analogy, although I do feel the idea of digiborigenes does need to be problematised somewhat. I'm certainly giving a lot of thought to this in terms of implications for my classroom+ praxis from September.
I'm certainly asking myself the question as to why all the marking I'm doing is on paper and whether there is any reason it shouldn't be electronic. But then there's the non-gimmicky use of other stuff 'live'.

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