Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Via: Online Colleges Guide

We hear the term digital native quite a bit and I have to confess, I may have used the term myself. But is there really a significant difference between a generation who was not born digital and one born in the digital era? Is it the case that those born in the digital era adopt and adapt to new technologies more readily?

It was Prensky who introduced the terms digital natives and immigrants ten years ago and it seemed that everybody loved the idea and jumped on the new buzzword bandwagon.

Much more accurate to me is the concept of Visitors and Residents by David White. White suggests that there are residents who live day to day in the digital world and then there are those who just visit. When you happen to have been born is not so relevant.

As a self confessed nerd born somewhere around the time of the pyramids, I'd have to say I'm a resident. My interest in technology started with Mini bricks and Meccano and a Reel to Reel tape recorder in grade three.

As for my students- A small number of my college diploma students are proficient with technology but the rest are not. My students in a Master's program are similar. Some are technologically proficient and the rest are working on proficiency. Certainly at the end of the program they will all be more than proficient. Will they all be residents? I think that depends a lot on who they started out as. Not everybody wants to live digitally every minute.

OK, above is just my anecdotal experience and view. But the evidence against the idea of digital natives and immigrants is mounting .

By bringing this up, I'm certainly not saying we don't have to use technology to facilitate learning. My belief is that if the world our students live in is filled with technology and if they can use technology to learn almost anything they want to learn outside of class, then the least we can do is engage our students in the place they live.

To continue to use the terms digital natives and assume they are proficient, and those of a certain age are not, is just not true or helpful.

A few interesting articles and posts

Steve Wheeler The Natives are Revolting

Tom Whitby Generational Divide in Education

Open University research explodes myth of digital native

Jones, Chris and Shao The Net Generation and Digital Natives: Implications for Higher Education

Dan Pontefract The Fallacy of Digital Natives

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In the article What's Wrong with canned courses? Just one thing, Lisa Lane tells us that what's wrong with using and depending on too many or all of a publisher's prepared content for our courses is that we are modeling the wrong thing. We are modeling a lack of creativity, an absence of critical thinking and a lack of respect for our own profession.

I'd say the problem goes even further: we just aren't doing our job when we adopt these materials without "disassembling, reinventing, repurposing or recreating" them.

When we allow ourselves to be so removed from the actual function of our jobs, what is the point to us at all?

Pearson (Education) is being granted the right to offer degrees in England, and now they are clearly playing a game of openwashing with their new OpenClass LMS. These publishing companies realize that the paper-based textbook market is on its deathbed. It will be all e-book, digital and interactive. Their days of "pushing" paper are numbered.


Knowledge is out there, available and free.

To survive, the publishers and large LMS providers have to change their business model. Part of that change seems to be to position themselves as "open." I'd say they are about as open as BP is green with their BP logo all green and sunny. The other change to survive seems to be one where they encroach on what we as educators do. When we adopt their materials in a big big way, we turn ourselves into clerical workers who simply put up grades and shuffle virtual paper. Gosh, I hope the future of teaching is not as an assembly worker.

I'm not saying that using some of the publishers materials is all bad as long as there is a healthy dose of us in the mix, us as the curators, remixers and creators.

I think it is time to reread our job description. I don't know about yours, but in mine curriculum development is way up there.

When we give that task to Pearson or McGraw-Hill or Blackboard or someone else, are we doing our jobs? Will we have a job in the future?

Will we need colleges and universities?

Kevin Kelly at the July 2011 NExTWORK conference

"NExTWORK a one-day, interdisciplinary conference featuring world-renowned business leaders, technologists, and thinkers exploring the promise and peril of the network's future, as well as pressing digital issues and opportunities today."



A summary of his key trends:

1. Screening: We are no longer people of the book; we are people of the screen
2. Interacting: We expect interaction with everything- not just touch but gesture and voice and adaptation to us. The world is two-way mirror. We watch it; it watches us
3. Sharing: we have a web build on sharing-now we have cloud. The type of cloud we have TBD. Could be multi-cloud or single cloud. We share because we can
4. Flowing: We now have streams of things. We had file, folder and desktop and then moved to Page, Link, Web, and now we have Stream, Tag and Cloud. We have everything, everywhere, and it is always on
5. Accessing not Owning: We are moving toward just in time access where we have no storage, no maintenance or burdenship of ownership
6. Generating not Copying: the internet is a copy machine. The only value is that which can not be copied. How does one make money? Wherever attention flows, money will follow. You may pay for immediacy, personalization, authentication, interpretation, accessibility and attention.
   

Waiting for UDL
by: knwilley