David Muir's Profile

Education has consistently been a predictor of access to the Internet

The data suggest that the amount of time people spend online does affect their efficiency in finding information on the Web but is of most concern for those who use it minimally. According to Table 6, those who browse the Web less than an hour each week are able to find less information and take considerably longer on tasks than those who spend either 1-7 hours online per week or those who spend even more time surfing the Web weekly.

I find it
hard to believe that neurological structures could change to such a dramatic extent from one generation to the next.
Yet
even
if we grant that digital natives think and learn somewhat differently than older
generations, we may be doing them a disservice to de-emphasize
"legacy" content such as reading, writing, and logical thinking, or to say that
the methodologies we have used in the past are no longer relevant. For
example, as a technology instructor of pre-service teachers, I found that while most of the younger students
were proficient in using the Web, they could not adequately perform advanced
searches or evaluate the validity of the resources they
found. Digital immigrants and natives alike are bombarded with vast volumes of
information in today's electronic society, which, in my opinion, calls for an
even greater emphasis on critical thinking and research skills?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthe very sort
of "legacy" content that teachers have focused on since classical
times.

It seems
to me that Prensky overemphasizes the differences between his two groups
and de-emphasizes the similarities.

"all knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use".

So is the Daily Mail's Twitter feed the equivalent of your dad dancing in public to your favourite nu-acid-crunk band? Does a government decision to "teach Twitter" represent the site's ultimate shark-jump into banal unfashionability?

So is the Daily Mail's Twitter feed the equivalent of your dad dancing in public to your favourite nu-acid-crunk band? Does a government decision to "teach Twitter" represent the site's ultimate shark-jump into banal unfashionability?

I am thinking there are some great assignments one can develop for students to do this.

brain maintains its plasticity for life

Prensky draws the line at 1974 - born after it you're a Digital Native

"I like the saying that any teacher that can be replaced by a computer - should be,"

"A lot of teachers make a PowerPoint and they think they're so awesome," said a girl in Florida. "But it's just like writing on the blackboard."

Others blame it on today's "continuous partial attention" (CPA), a term coined by Linda Stone, who researches trends and their consumer implications. Stone describes CPA as the need "to be a live node on the network," continually text messaging, checking the cell phone, and jumping on email. "It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis," she writes. "We pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything."