Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids

Bringing Digital Media Into the Classroom, Grades 5-12

Jessica K. Parker

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412971508
• eBook ISBN: 9781452296197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Technology

"Until we understand the powerful learning, collaborating, and producing that teenagers do with their cell phones, mp3 players, laptops, and the Internet, we won?t understand how we can best utilize those technologies in our classrooms. Whether you?re a digital native new to the classroom or a veteran teacher struggling to learn your students? Internet lingo, this book is your guide to 21st-century teenagers, literacy, and learning. After 17 years teaching middle school English, I know that I can?t teach literacy today without this book."
—Laura Maslin Bradley, English Teacher
Kenilworth Junior High School, Petaluma, CA

Students are plugged in, powered up, and connected. Are you?

Digital media presents powerful tools for engaging students in developing critical thinking, collaboration, and other 21st-century skills. Written for middle and high school teachers, this resource explores the relationship between students and digital media and shows how to design learning opportunities that harness today?s technology.

Jessica K. Parker gives teachers a deeper understanding of the dynamic potential for increasing student learning through new technologies. Based on a three-year study of youth and their use of digital media, this teacher-friendly book includes:

• Descriptions of digital tools such as social networking platforms, YouTube, Wikipedia, virtual worlds, digital music, and more
• Vignettes about how young people use digital media
• Sidebars debunking common myths about technology
• Advice for both novice and expert teachers
• Pedagogical implications and practices, including sample activities

Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids shows how to integrate digital media into your classroom and create more engaged, student-centered learning opportunities.

1

Understanding Youth and Digital Media

Jessica K. Parker

Today’s student is likely to engage daily in numerous literate practices, from print to film to multimodal forms such as Web sites and video games. She lives in a media saturated world and averages nearly six and a half hours a day with media.¹ She is a media multitasker, watching television as she instant messages and completes her homework. When she plays video games, she usually works as a member of a team and with intense concentration even on these long, time-consuming projects. She searches for information on the Internet, displays herself on myspace.com, and takes pictures on her cell phone, then chooses between a number of media sharing sites in which to upload them. She can simultaneously be an actor, director, editor, and publisher with the movie software that came with her computer. She expects her teachers to guide her through this information era, not dictate “correct” answers to rote questions that Google can provide in seconds through multimodal means, e.g., text, video, and digital images.

For educators, this student is a symbol of ongoing change in which new media technologies offer emergent modes of communication, learning, and play. Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media Into the Classroom, Grades 5–12 addresses how new media technologies are altering and expanding literate practices among our everyday acts of communication, our informal learning environments and our leisure activities. We are living in both an exciting and nerve-wracking time as notions such as space and time shift, issues such as portability and interconnectedness become widespread and standardized, and long-standing divisions between private and public spheres are blurred (Burbules & Callister, 2000). These issues, as well as the experiences of the student described above, push educators to question how to think about the changes happening beyond school walls and how these changes affect school-based learning. The answers to these questions cannot be to ignore these changes or to be satisfied with superficial solutions such as wired classrooms or additional hardware. When educators discuss and analyze emergent modes of communication, learning, and play, we are forced to rethink long-standing practices and relations within schools.

TOUGH QUESTIONS EDUCATORS MUST ADDRESS

One of our goals as educators in understanding youth and digital media should be to frame our discussion around learning, literacy and knowledge rather than merely concentrating on the integration of and access to technological tools. For this reason I believe educators need to ask themselves and discuss collectively some tough questions:

1. What does learning look like in the 21st century?

2. What does literacy look like in the 21st century?

3. What is knowledge in the 21st century? (Or what does it mean to know something in our mediated culture?)

These are three questions we must ponder, rethink, and explore within ourselves, with colleagues and parents, and with students. Pedagogy, curriculum, and assessments are important philosophical issues and determining factors within education, but the most basic issues we as teachers need to address are our core assumptions around learning, literacy, and knowledge and the relationship between the three. The technological changes that are currently taking place—and will continue to do as they have throughout human history—are reshaping everyday practices and relations. As teachers we must try to understand this phenomenon in order to grow professionally, to continue to have influence over our teaching environments, and to support student learning. This book will assist you in understanding these changes, help you adopt some of these new media practices as your own, and present tangible ways for you to incorporate these issues into your teaching. Additionally, the book can help stimulate your thinking around learning, literacy, and knowledge in the 21st century.

Addressing these three questions will test our ability as educators to see past our training, to see past our own experiences with technology and to see past the fear and uncertainty of institutional change in order to create learning environments and interventions based on the most recent and the most informed research on youth. It is pertinent to discuss education and schooling in the 21st century, for our schools are neither situated in a vacuum nor immune to changes and conditions impacting the rest of our lives. Historically the educational system in the United States has not been prone to change, and for administrators and teachers to offer competitive, engaging classrooms, we need to account for the massive technological changes currently taking place. This is not meant to scare but to motivate us. The chapters in this book bring together the latest research on youth and digital media and offer educators opportunities to understand and explore this relationship both personally and professionally. If we are working and teaching in an institution still wedded to a dated vision of schooling, we have the ability to learn from research, ask ourselves tough questions, and strive to create learning environments in which a 21st century student is entitled.

I realize these questions do not have easy answers and one of the arguments of this book is to move away from an outdated school-based view that there is “one right answer” or one “right” way to learn. We must shift our understanding of learning and literacy as:

• Broadly conceived and not easily defined or standardized

• Complex and not based on effortless transmission

• Socially and ideologically constructed and not merely neutral entities (Street, 1995)

• Inclusive of the intellectual funds students gain at home and from youth culture (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992)

• Changing over time and not limited to static definitions

When we shift our understandings of learning and literacy to encompass these characteristics, educators can come to view new media through a relational lens and avoid discussions in which new media technologies are presented as an either-or proposition.

Unfortunately the current discourse around youth and new media technologies is based on extreme views. One extreme suggests that kids’ use of digital media is dumbing down an entire generation, while the other side suggests that school is now irrelevant and should be replaced with kids directing their own learning online. Educators cannot continue to get caught in a polarized debate only to judge if school-based learning is better or worse than informal learning. This dichotomy will not allow us to initiate a dialogue regarding new media; it will only condone or condemn such learning experiences. Starting with three tough questions about the state and nature of learning, literacy, and knowledge in the 21st century can open up new spaces for discussion, queries, insights, and change.

WHAT IS NEW MEDIA?

What is new media or digital media? New media is an umbrella term used to describe technologies of the late 20th century and that are new. This currently includes but is not limited to the Internet, cellular phones, interactive television, computer games, and virtual worlds. New media is relative though; radio was considered new in the early 1900s, although it was not considered new in the early 2000s. As new technologies are integrated into our daily lives, they become part of our everyday experiences and, as the years go by, are viewed as commonplace and unoriginal—almost invisible as a technology, e.g., writing, pencils, paper, and chalkboards.

Adding the term digital to the phrase digital media signals a form of content that is created and distributed electronically based on binary codes. Digital media is currently the predominant form of new media. Due to its digital code, content such as a digital video or e-mail can be edited, shared, and even in some cases—such as in virtual world—interactive. Social networks and Web sites in which people can read and generate content are possible due to digital computers. But I do not want to simply focus on a laundry list of digital media nor do I want to focus on technical definitions. For teachers it is important to concentrate on how new media technologies are being integrated into our daily lives. This includes how our cell phones, our laptops, our iPods, our video game players, and even our digital video cameras get woven into the ways we develop and maintain our relationships, negotiate our social status and our ability to communicate. From this relational perspective (Burbules, & Callister, 2000) we can discuss students’ participation with digital media including how they produce and distribute media and engage in appropriating, recirculating, archiving, and annotating media content in powerful new ways (Jenkins, 2006). By discussing how new media influences our lives, teachers can come to appreciate how learning, literacy, and knowledge in new media environments differ from traditional school-based experiences.

But the terms new media and digital media should not imply that all forms of mediation are new. For instance, students seem to be addicted to text messaging with their cell phones, but writing is not a new medium. What’s new is the fact that we can write to each other on our cell phones, since the telephone was previously limited to verbal communication. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the phone was something I used while at home. I was delighted when my parents finally bought a cordless phone so I could talk to friends in the comfort of my own room. Yet the cordless phone created tension and often times disagreements between my parents and me: when I was in my room with the door locked, my parents were less likely to monitor my conversations with peers and evaluate my overall time on the phone and ostensibly away from my homework. So new media can affect communicative practices and relations. Currently the age of kids who have their own cell phones keeps getting younger and younger and they often carry them at all times (and seem to be texting all the time) even though they are still using language and words to communicate.

And don’t think these text messages are unsophisticated. In fact, they are just the opposite. Christo Sims, a doctoral candidate at University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, studies how kids use technologies such as cell phones and instant messenger as part of their everyday lives and that using lower and upper case letters, misspellings, and the casual appearance of a text message can often be quite purposeful (personal communication, December 12, 2007). From a teacher’s perspective, text messages can appear sloppy and rushed. It might seem as if the student may not know how to spell or rarely puts energy into composing a legitimate sentence. Here is our (adult) mistake. We want to judge our students’ text messages based upon standards for written English. In fact, we should take the perspective that our students are communicating much more about themselves than just their mastery of English (Baron, 2008).

Christo Sims (personal communication, December 12, 2007) argues that the casual, even sloppy, appearance can be seen as an attempt to explore social connections without exposing, too quickly, the degree to which they are emotionally invested in the outcome. He draws a comparison between such writing practices and that of youth fashion. In both cases the display is highly crafted and yet done in a way that hopes to suggest casualness and ease; as many youth say to suggest “no big deal.” For youth it can be scary to put oneself out there when trying to develop friendships and, as such, youth often appear casual as a way to hide the degree to which they are invested in their friendships. Thus they slowly feel out the other person. They get to know each other by writing short messages, ones where what is said can be carefully controlled. Remember when we were teenagers and there were high stakes involved with making new friendships, being accepted by peers, publicly humiliated, or scrutinized? Those days were potentially horrible, and today’s youth use text messaging to allow conversations to develop more slowly and allow rejection to be carried out more silently. Essentially sloppy text messages may be a way for youth to protect themselves.

MYTH: Today’s high school students should be called the “look at me” generation. They are self-absorbed, superficial, narcissistic teens who are always online for no apparent reason. Their behavior is baffling.

REALITY: Our students’ forms of expression have changed from when we were kids. Once we come to understand how our students are using digital media, then their behavior becomes incredibly familiar. They may be online and texting all the time, but they are actively working to promote a social identity and, of course, maintain their friendships.

For a video interpretation of this “reality,” go to YouTube and watch “Are Kids Different Because of Digital Media?” from the MacArthur Foundation: (http://tiny.cc/teachtech_1_1).

At the most basic level, today’s students’ ability to communicate and hang out with one another looks different from our educational vantage point and may even appear like a waste of time or unproductive and does not equate with real learning. The questions and concerns around their communication practices are understandable. Hopefully after reading this book, today’s teenagers will look less like failures and more like typical teenagers who are interesting in dating, flirting, having fun, and creating and reinforcing their own creative youth culture. As today’s students develop a sense of self and identity, they become heavily invested in establishing and preserving relationships with peers; however, the way they go about maintaining their relationships just looks different from previous generations. Although these communication patterns may feel foreign and off-putting, the main thing to remember is that their forms of communication are often based on how they want to present themselves to other teenagers.

KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW MEDIA

I was fortunate enough to be a collaborator on a research project titled, “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures.” This project was funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and jointly carried out by researchers from U. C. Berkeley and the University of Southern California. One of the goals of the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Contributors
• Dedication
• 1. Understanding Youth and Digital Media
• 2. Hanging Out With Friends: MySpace, Facebook, and Other Networked Publics
• 3. YouTube: Creating, Connecting, and Learning Through Video
• 4. Wikipedia: The Online Encyclopedia Based on Collaborative Knowledge
• 5. Role-Playing: Writing and Performing Beyond the Classroom
• 6. Virtual Worlds: Designing, Playing, and Learning
• 7. Remix Culture: Digital Music and Video Remix, Opportunities for Creative Production
• 8. Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index