I’ll be taking a break for paternity leave for the next two weeks.
Please feel free to send me interesting links or news while I’m away - and I’ll try and catch up on my return.
cheers,
Daniel
Chang Liu and colleagues at Ohio have been very busy in Second Life. Chang had a paper at the education workshop on how Ohio developed a community of practice to support the uptake of Second Life, and it looks like its turned out very well indeed - if you are interested in seeing the many projects underway there, follow this link.
BBC news has a piece saying that the digital divide could be deepening in the UK. It includes a small table of statistics from the UK government Office for National Statistics which shows that 15% of 16-24 year olds lack internet access.
While it is mainly older age groups who lack access, these figures reinforce the feeling that many of todays ‘digital natives’ are not native at all - at least not on the internet.
No, I’m not going to bother commenting just now - maybe later. This is simply so I can find it again easily 
Just found a nice interview piece from back in June, here. Features an interview with Eszter Hargittai who surveyed college students on their internet use. Some very worthwhile pieces to take away:
“There seems to be a lot of assumptions out there about young people’s savviness as Internet users,” says Hargittai. She believes that reports in the media and perceptions that young people are better at using advanced technology because they’ve grown up with its revolution have helped contribute to this phenomenon.
…
In some cases, the assumptions are true, says the researcher, but more often than not, college Internet users often feel lost online and their browsing habits aren’t all that predictable.
Eszter’s page is here, and with links to a number of her papers that I’ll have to add to my ever growing ‘must read’ pile.
Found this courtest of John Kirriemuir’s blog, Silversprite.
John Naughton gave a speech at the Society of Editors conference, which was reproduced in edited form in the Observer. While it certainly reads well as a form of wake-up-call to newspaper writers hoping to engage with a younger audience, it repeats the usual digital native myths:
They’ve been playing computer games of mind-blowing complexity forever. They’re resourceful, knowledgeable and natural users of computer and communications technology. They’re Digital Natives - accustomed to creating content of their own - and publishing it. (Remember the motto of YouTube: ‘Broadcast yourself!’)
They buy music from the iTunes store - but continue to download tracks illicitly as well. They use BitTorrent to get US editions of Lost. They think ‘Google’ is a synonym for ‘research’ and regard it as quite normal to maintain and read blogs (55 million as of last night), use Skype to talk to their mates and upload photos to Flickr. Some even write entries on Wikipedia. And they know how to use iMovie or Adobe Premiere to edit videos and upload them to YouTube.
I can verify from first hand experience that students who are the most accomplished at playing games are not necessarily the most accomplished at anything else. Sometimes I think there might even be a tendency towards an inverse correlation, but probably more likely a lack of correlation altogether.
There is a lot of extrapolating from what some young people do. Plenty of my previous posts disagree with elements of these paragraphs - but some points are simple misplaced. Yes there might be 55 million blogs, but where are the age demographics to show that this is primarily a young persons thing? As far as I know, most visitors (not just visits, but visitors!) to YouTube watch movies - without uploading them.
“knowledgeGarden is a community space used by University of Southern Queensland Faculty of Education students exploring emerging learning technologies. It it a place to open your mind, share your experiences, and lay the seeds of understanding.”
It was Bill Kerr who first directed to the site, pointing me to a page titled “The Problem with Prensky“, to which I’ve now submitted some comments of my own - a short summary of some of the previous posts on this blog.
Well, I found my original copy of this paper by James Gee (as introduced in this previous blog entry). I made a lot of scribbled notes in the margin, making a range of comments - some nothing more than simple observations, others a little more critical.
Some of the more interesting comments I repeat below - skipping over those I’ve already made. It’s quite a long piece…
[Note: Since I posted this, my wife read over it, giving me a taste of my own medicine. I've since made a few minor changes and added a few of her comments]
I had to ask my wife to hunt this out for me. She sent me this link a long time ago, but it got lost down the back of the sofa 
Last year biz/ed reviewed a report that looked at family web use and literacy - focussing on parental support/guidance and use by children. Notable findings included observations that the relative poor net literacy of parents led to poor guidance and oversight of children on the web. One finding of particular note regarding use of the web for education and research is stated most clearly in the activities section at the bottom of the page:
“5. The study identified people’s inability to evaluate content on the Internet as a major problem.”
Thus todays digital natives may be very good at using the web, but they need education and guidance when it comes to evaluating the information they find there.
The original report, which is the fourth in a series, can be found here.
Just saw this very interesting looking post on Alan Levine’s blog. There is a link to the presentations from the NMC regional conference, so a lot of material to digest, including several presentations on learning in Second Life. And a 50 minute video of Gardner’s talk “The Allegory Efffect: Metaphoric Immersion in Croquet and Second Life”.
My work is never done!
