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Accordingly, in most parts of the world, even today, the broad outlines of teaching and learning are strikingly similar to one another. Formal schooling begins at age five to seven; the preceding years include, at most, introduction to the forms of literacy, experience of working and playing with peers, and an inculcation of routine in a setting apart from the more familiar terrain of home, the streets, the playground, the open fields, or the forest/mountain/coast line. Formal pre-schools are a quite recent phenomenon, though they are becoming standard practice in several European countries.

teachers—largely women—introduce students to reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic. This introduction is done in part by modeling and in part by imitation, with some oral recitation, and some exercises in workbooks or worksheets.

But by and large, the model followed is that of “uniform schooling.” That is, there is a single way of teaching, a single way of studying and learning (chiefly copying and giving content back to the teacher), and a single way of assessing learning (through some kind of oral and/or written examination).

In much of the world, schooling still ends with the mastery of the literacies.

the curriculum features mathematics (algebra, geometry, and perhaps calculus or pre-calculus); science (with physics, chemistry, and biology the chief sciences); history or social studies (typically a focus on the history of the country or region, with a smattering of world history and culture and, possibly, some attention to current events); and in diminishing order of popularity, other sciences (e.g., geology, astronomy, social sciences like economics or psychology), geography, civics, physical education, and one or more art forms.

he United States, with its focus on sports, arts, publications, student government is an outlier here

It would be an exaggeration to claim that formal education takes place without attention to what has been learned about the processes of successful learning, such as insights into student motivation, study habits, strategies, metacognition, and other approaches obtained from experience, or, more recently and systematically, from the psychological and cognitive sciences. But it would probably be accurate to say that such accumulated knowledge is used only spottily and sporadically in most parts of the world.

The texts, the teacher-dominated lectures, the stylized interaction between students and teachers, the examinations, the graduation requirements, are not that different from those that could have been observed a century ago.

changes in communication media—telegraph, telephone, radio, television, film, film strips—it is notable how little they have infiltrated into the core of the educational process.

Education is increasingly universal. Except in the undeveloped world, almost all boys and most girls get an education at least to the secondary level. The diversity of the student body is devious

The hegemony once occupied by humanities and language is increasingly replaced by subjects related to STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

While the broad changes in education noted above are not insignificant, they have not dramatically impacted the nature of learning in many schools; the content, functioning, and organization of the typical European classroom model remains relatively unaffected despite major transformations in the world just beyond its walls, and the implementation of more meaningful changes remains stalled.

sharp contrast to the stasis of the classroom model, important changes proliferate in the world. To name a few, our global civilization must address climate change, the revolution in the understanding and use of genetic information, other biomedical breakthroughs, the power and ubiquity of financial markets, the exploration of space, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, massive immigration, and the emergence of powerful new communication media.

Digital media allow for nearly ubiquitous access to people and to virtually infinite amounts of information, as well as affording new forms of sociality, play, creativity, social activism, networking, and collaboration.

Despite significant progress in bridging the “digital divide” over the last decade, most of the world's populations are offline; only 5.3% of Africa's population can use the Internet, compared to North America's population, of which 73% are Internet users.

It is the younger generation who are often accorded such labels as “digital youth,” “digital natives” (Palfrey and Gasser 2008; Prensky 2001), “neomillenials” (Dede 2005), and “net generation” or “net gen” students (Oblinger and Oblinger 2005). These labels have been contested by scholars who point to the variation in access and digital skills among youth on the one hand, and the age variation among the digitally savvy on the other (Jenkins 2007; Palfrey and Gasser 2008; Vaidhyanathan 2008).

That said, we must also acknowledge that many American youth are introduced to digital media at relatively young ages and spend more time engaging with digital media at critical developmental stages than their older counterparts did. While adults as well as youth use NDM to build upon existing social links (Kennedy et al. 2008), the average teen spends approximately 11.5 hours a week of his or her free time creating, exploring, playing games, and communicating online (ConsumerLab 2008); over half of teens age 12–17 use a social networking site; approximately three out of five teens upload some type of creative content online (Lenhart et al. 2007); and virtually all teens engage in some type of video gameplay (Lenhart et al. 2008). The online practices of teens vary dramatically; they may be avid texters and emailers, social networkers, casual surfers, and news browsers, or deeply invested MMORP gamers and social activists.

The meaning of this teen engagement with digital media is widely contested. Critics lament the decline of literacy, divided attention, and the decline of autonomy, among other concerns (Bauerlein 2008; Keen 2007; Turkle 2008; Wolf 2007), while enthusiasts laud the social and intellectual skills cultivated in games, virtual worlds, and online communities (boyd 2007; Gee 2003; Jenkins et al. 2006; Shaffer 2006). The net impact of youth digital engagement remains to be see

In the traditional classroom, a teacher distributes text-based materials and augments them with oral information; lessons are reinforced through notetaking, homework, and textbook guides. Knowledge is possessed by the educator and imparted to his or her students in a top-down, unidirectional transfer, and a student's classroom success or failure is assessed by said educator (or by an externally mandated examination).

the contours of learning—what is deemed important to learn, and where, when, and how—evolve over time, albeit at times very slowly.

question of whether learning should take place in radically different ways—in terms of content, pedagogy, and assessment—is likely to become urgent in the very near future, in part because young learners themselves may be different from prior generations in their learning orientations; if so, these differences are arguably related to their increasingly digital lives.

youth are engaging with digital media at ever-younger ages (Rideout et al. 2003). Students walk into classrooms (even toddle into preschools) armed with new competences, learning preferences, and expectations that call into question existing curricula. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that the learning preferences and styles of youth are affected by their digital engagement. Dede argues that “people's daily use of new devices is shifting their lifestyles toward frequent mediated immersion,

develop and strengthen the cognitive skills

develop and strengthen the cognitive skills

develop and strengthen the cognitive skills

develop and strengthen the cognitive skills

30 to 100 minutes a day, five days a week, for four to 16 weeks

builds fundamental cognitive skills of memory, attention, processing, and sequencing

listening accuracy, phonological awareness, and language structures

Five studies

one study met WWC evidence standards with reservations

587 Kindergarten through third-grade students

extent of evidence

No studies

small

alphabetics and comprehension

ddressed fluency or general reading achievement.

positive effects on alphabetics