DIGITAL
C
Our Choice for Two Lives or One?
The following is from Jason Ohler’s new book, Digital Community, Digital Citizen (Corwin Press, 2010), available through
Amazon.com.
the broadest sense for many years to come. In its simplest form, the question is, Should we consider students to have two lives or one?
We
Allow me to restate this question with a bit more detail: Should we consider students to have two separate lives—a relatively digital free life at school and a digitally saturated life away from school—or should we consider them to have one life that integrates their lives as students and digital citizens?
The “two lives” perspective contends that our students should live a traditional educational life at school, much like their parents did, and a second, digital life outside school. It says that the technology that kids use is too expensive, problematic, or distracting to integrate into teaching and learning. It says that issues concerning the personal, social, and environmental impacts of living a digital, technological lifestyle are tangential to a school curriculum. Above all, it says that kids will have to figure out how to navigate the digital world beyond school on their own and puzzle through issues of cyber safety, technological responsibility, and digital citizenship without the help of the educational system.
On the other hand, the one life perspective says it is time to help students blend their two lives into an integrated, meaningful approach to living in the digital age. It says that if schools don’t make it their primary mission to help students understand not only how to use technology but also when and why, then we have no right to expect our children to grow up to be the citizens we want them to be and that the world needs them to be. It says that if we don’t help our digital kids balance personal empowerment with a sense of community responsibility, then future generations will inherit a world that does not represent anyone’s dream of what is best for humanity. It says that if we don’t understand that schools are exactly the place for kids to learn how to use technology not only effectively and creatively but also responsibly and wisely, then heaven help us all (p. 9).
SHIFT FROM TEXT-CENTRISMTO MEDIA COLLAGE If literacy means being able to read and write the media forms of the day, then today this translates into being able to construct or at least manage an articulate, meaningful, navigable media collage. Media collages abound in many forms, including webpages, digital stories, mashups, virtual environments, and social media sites. (figure 1) Keep
8 | (figure 1)
in mind that the essay media form on the left in this picture represents what we test for in school, while the collage media form on the right represents what we hope and pray kids will be able to produce before they enter the work force. The cognitive dissonance this produces fractures kids’ lives in two, a nondigital one at school, and digital one out of school. Should we help our kids live two lives or one?
While mediasts may claim to understand the pedagogical implications of media, the reality is that much of what we know about media and learning was developed before Web 2.0 exploded and created the plethora of new media that are now widely available. Thus, while everyone may have an opinion about how to approach Web 2.0 learning, expert advice is in short supply.
What should our school board do? Encourage teachers to experiment fearlessly with their own work and the work they ask students to create. Movies can show scientific processes or document history concepts; social media can be used to create lively, informed discussions about a poem, piece of art, or item in the news; and so on. Experiment, trust your instincts, become an action researcher in your classroom, ask your students for guidance in the use of media, and troll the web for what other educators are doing. We are all relearning our sense of literacy together.
VALUE WRITING, NOW MORETHANEVER Amidst the explosion of new media, writing has become more important than ever. There are new reasons for this that might not be immediately apparent.
First, while the essay form of writing is still very important, long narrative pieces don’t read well on the web, where they appear as walls of text to everyone except the few who are truly committed to their
Conference 2011 | MACULJOURNAL
have a fundamental question to address with regards to educating our Digital Age children. How we answer this question will determine how we plan for and implement education in
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