Yesterday’s post about my encounter with NYC high school students was exciting and unnerving enough to send me back to rewrite the sections of my Blogtalk paper on the digital divides (yes, plural, for I do believe there are a multitude of gaps we educators must consider as we work with students who are both bolder with the technology and hemmed in by what they anticipate–and correctly in most cases– to be the constraints on their creativity by an antiquated system of scholarship.) Then I turn to my email this morning and am sent a link by Héctor to , the new course blog for his upcoming first-year seminar, The Future of Communities. Further enlightenment. Eureka!
Now I knew that his kids (my kids, too, at this point since he and I are collaborating on an experiment, bringing these 14 students to campus a week early to a program I direct, The Project for Integrated Expression) were going to be online before they reached campus, learning to post to the blog through a knowledge tree exercise a la Pierre Lévy. I had invited this remarkable group myself, and so I knew that they all have intensely interesting life stories, dreams, accomplishments and passions. But–I didn’t anticipate how much I would learn about what it means to be them about to come here to college, and what technology has to do with them, eighteen-year-olds from every corner of the country. Not all of them have posted yet, and they are just learning about how to interact online in this forum (with Héctor’s modelling and probing), but boy oh boy are they already shedding light on what’s to come for us in all our classrooms. Read all their postings here or my excerpts/commentary below:
Eli from Alaska starts things off with a wonderfully written, wry look at his relationship with his computer–how it is, in a sense his lifeline to the world:
James from DC describes two moments when it hit him how much he depends on his cell phone:
Emily from Alabama follows up with a more ambivalent take on cell phones and the disruptive qualities of technology:
Julio from L.A. writes about his own shortcomings and disappointments with technology on a roadtrip:
And Daniel from South Pasadena, California recounts his first digital movie-making experience:
What’s clear about these incoming Middlebury students, is that they use new media technology eagerly, though not always comfortably. They see its value AND their own reliance on it. They see the humor, the potential, the dangers. They are thoughtful about how technology is changing the world and their own place within it–indeed, they are in a unique position, I think, to comment on the impact of technology and on how we teachers and educational institutions might use the tools better. We should be listening. We college educators should be out there on the road in high schools looking at what they’re doing, following their lead instead of the other way around. Above all, we all should be talking to the kids with the imagination, the time and the chutzpah to take these tools and run with them.
Instead of those “Take Your Kid to Work” days, we should institute a “Take Your Professor to Play” day. I mean it. Imagine what we would learn… I can’t wait to meet these kids.
Again we’re talking collaborative learning here; we’re back to “apprentices and experts”; we’re zeroing in on distributed knowledge, collective intelligence, emergent forms of learning.
And it isn’t, as Héctor is showing us in this class and in the Community Collaborative Digital Storytelling Project, just about using the tools at all, it’s about media literacy, about thoughtful dialogue about the place of technology in our lives–what it gives us and what it takes away.
Anyway, these kids are clearly ready for anything we can hand them–the question is, are we ready for them?
I’d like to hear Will Richardson weigh in on this topic from his perspective as a high school teacher devoted to helping teachers and students make their way with technology though I know he’s taking a well-deserved vacation from blogs and school considerations.
Filed under: Insights into New Media in the Classroom |
