Learning Futures

Spotlight. Who are the Digital Natives and What is Web 2.0?

Australian National University

Who are we?

• Funded through governments, education.au belongs to all members of the Australian education and training community.

• Help individuals and organisations achieve their vision of the future

• Provide tangible cost savings to stakeholders through avoiding duplication

• Design, build, adapt, enhance and manage national services

• Advise on how emerging technologies can enhance learning and learning outcomes

Digital Natives

• Grown up with technology

• Rate of change is exponential

• New digital literacy is programming

• Neuro-plasticity

• Digital Immigrant

Time

Change

Marc Prensky, Delivering 21st Century Skills and Learning

Digital Natives

• Networked public spaces

• No distinction between virtual and real

• New forms of privacy – profiles, friends and comments

• User generated content

danah boyd, generation myspace

Digital Natives• Formal and Informal

Learning• With words, music,

photos and videos, students are expressing themselves by creating manipulating and sharing content online.

• Social gaming• Learning about

strategy

Creating and Connecting, National School Board Association

Digital Natives• Mobile, connected, social• Kids express their identity and

ego through these networks• 71% of decisions kids make

are made on recommendations on their social network site

• Gen C own their mobile – 76% won’t lend, 67% say the mobile is their best friend – intimate

• 37% of the planet have mobile, 95% of China will access the internet via mobile phone

• Killer application on 3 G is social networks

Jennifer Wilson, Head of HWW Mobile, Generation myspace

Digital Natives• Use of technology

completely normalised• Use new media tools to

make life easier• Creative production and

socialising

Sun Herald

• Moral Panic versus the Digital Faith - new digital divide

• Put up barriers…they’ll find ways to get around them

Digital Natives• Minister Bishop

• ‘dealing with a whole new paradigm’

• 19th century buildings, 20th century teaching for a 21st century life and workplace

Marc Prensky, Delivering 21st Century Skills and Learning

APEC, Sydney, Friday

• Chilean President• Today’s students are clearly

not the same as those for whom traditional education systems were designed.

Weekend Australian, Sep 7-8

What is Web 2.0?

• The world is appropriately interpreted, understood and responded to in broadly physical industrial terms.

• Value is a function of scarcity• Products as material artifacts• Tools for producing• Focus on individual intelligence• Expertise and authority ‘located’

in individuals and institutions• Space as enclosed and purpose

specific• Social relations of ‘bookspace’; a

stable ‘textual order’

• The world cannot adequately be interpreted, understood and responded to in physical-industrial terms only.

• Value is a function of dispersion• Products as enabling services.• Tools for mediating and relating• Focus on collective intelligence• Expertise and authority are distributed

and collective; hybrid experts• Space as open, continuous and fluid • • Social relations of emerging ‘digital

media space’; texts in change

Mindset 1.0 Mindset 2.0

Blogging as Participation: The Active Sociality of a New Literacy, Colin Lankshear, 2006

What is Web 2.0?

Flickr/Youtube

Wikipedia

Blogging

Participation

Wikis

Tagging (‘folksonomy’)

Google

Mashups (eg Yahoo Pipes, Google Maps)

Viral marketing

Aggregators (eg Blogbridge)

Social Networks (myspace, facebook)

Ofoto

Britannica Online

Personal websites

Publishing

Content management systems

Directories (taxonomy)

Netscape

Database import/export

Traditional marketing

LibraryCommunication tools (forums etc)

Web 1.0 Web 2.0

Based on O’Reilly 2005

What is Web 2.0? What’s changed?

• The web as a platform• Accessed largely via a browser, mobile 3G phones

• Software as a Service• Not dependent on installed software

• Interconnectedness• Systems connect to share and use data

• Designed on an open and collaborative model• Accountability determined by tracking use rather than by lockdown

• Social connections and relationships• Social networks, sharing and tagging sites

• User generated content• Devices capture text, visual, aural – mix and re-mix – IP ‘muddier’

What is Web 2.0?• What is happening in our schools?

• Most popular• Blogs, wikis, podcasting, flickr• Del.ic.ious – excellent networks tagging good resources

• Some systems designing safe online web 2.0 services• Ban access to Youtube, wikipedia, mp3 files, myspace,

Facebook etc• Immersive environments (eg Second life) not used at all• Barriers to uptake

• Fear of unknown, loss of control, better understanding of how technology will enhance T&L, access and reliability, access to right tools at right time, copyright and IP, bans on mobile phones and iPods.

• In summary, patchy uptake with excellent pockets of innovation happening

In Summary• Has it really changed?

• The Book Video

References• Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, James Cook University, Australia, and

Montclair State University, U.S. Paper presented to the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, US. April 11, 2006. http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/bloggingparticipation.pdf

• What is Web 2.0? Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly, 2005 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html accessed 10 July 2007

• Marc Prensky, Delivering 21st Century Skills and Learning, March 2006, http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/Jahia/home/pid/202

• danah boyd, generation myspace, August 2007, http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/Jahia/home/network

• Jennifer Wilson, Generation myspace, August 2007, http://media.educationau.edu.au/db-JenniferW-Melbourne.mp3

• Their Space, education for a digital generation, Green and Hannon, DEMOS, 2007, http://media.educationau.edu.au/db-JenniferW-Melbourne.mp3

• Creating and Connecting, National Schools Board Association, 2007, http://files.nsba.org/creatingandconnecting.pdf