Michel Roland-Guill's List: Conférence UECLEO 12 sept. 2011

•   Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are   no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.  
• A really big discontinuity has taken place.    One might even call it a "singularity"
• Today’s students - K through college - represent the   first generations to grow up with this new technology.
• today's students think   and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
• it is very likely that our   students’ brains have physically changed - and are different from   ours - as a result of how they grew up.    But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty   that their thinking patterns have changed.
• our Digital Immigrant   instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age),   are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.  

   

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• Digital Natives are used to receiving   information really fast.  They   like to parallel process and multi-task.    They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the   opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when   networked.  They thrive on instant   gratification and frequent rewards.    They prefer games to "serious" work. 
•   They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and "tell-test"   instruction. 
• Often from the Natives' point of view   their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth   paying attention to compared to everything else they experience - and then   they blame them for not paying attention! 
• Smart adult immigrants accept that   they don’t know about their new world and take advantage of their kids   to help them learn and integrate.  Not-so-smart   (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how   good things were in the "old country."
• As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach   both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.    The first involves a major translation and change of methodology; the   second involves all that PLUS new content and thinking.  It's not actually clear to me which is harder - "learning   new stuff" or "learning new ways to do old stuff."  I suspect it's the latter.  
• My own preference   for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even   for the most serious content. 

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• Small, director of the UCLA Center on Aging, described results of research he and colleagues performed with volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76.
• Dr. Gary Small says bringing younger and older people together helps optimize the neural circuitry for both generations.
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• Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

• The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

     

  If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in  our culture.