John Palfrey, “Born Digital”
Note from JP: “elite” subset represented in research: hardcore tech kids globally; also note: he’s a “glass half full” sort who may sound “Pollyannaish”
Studies now show 53 hours/week digital time for the average child (Pew?)
Hardly anyone in room of 500 born before 1980 (“digital native” start date)
How to create a culture for using technology effectively?
- Digital Identities
- Interoperability
- Creativity – facile use of tools for creative production; how to leverage?
1. Digital Identities:
- Youth don’t see a distinction between who they are online and who they are offline (JP: example of constructing self for particular audience: he wore his lawyer/shark tie for the conference)
- growing up and friendship and role plays and learning all online and offline
- Danah Boyd: best paper on “speaking to unintended audiences”;
- youth forget that onlookers can see all of their identities and the interplay among them
- “Digital tatoos” they won’t be able to easily rub off
Social Media Problems:
- Security – “bad neighborhoods of cyberspace”
- Privacy – “lives that are recorded every step of the way”
- IP – case concerning Obama photo and Hope poster
- Credibility
- Information Overload
Intellectual property:
- With gift card for iTunes that students are simply spending down, act of downloading desired music/media is nearly identical to acts/gestures of piracy, so… “how do we also make them citizens?”
- Faculty express extreme confusion about rules of re-use, remix – “semiotic democracy”
- Shepard Fairey law suit pending; JP is lawyer for SF: What are the rights for taking cultural material and repurposing it or placing it into collage?
Credibility:
- the wikipedia complaint: how do students sort information? In studies, they don’t go to the History/Discussion tabs to see how the information was constructed;
- students did report that they look at the “References” section at the bottom of the entry.
- Asked students: “How do you get your news?” Nobody reads a newspaper in the morning and listens to Walter Cronkite (or Katie Couric) in the evening. a) Mostly through osmosis, “grazing” headlines; b) small subset do deep dive to analysis; c) feedback loop: very few post their own thoughts on the topic.
Info Overload:
- “not a medical condition,” but sometimes need to send kids/ourselves outside to play
[Both John Palfrey and Larry Johnson both engaged the SL audience directly. Well done!]
Creativity, Collaboration, and Learning
Creativity: “leaning into what these young people can do.”
Collaboration: “youth work extremely well in teams”
Library of Oliver Wendell Holmes: what does the ideal learning environment look like now / for these kids?”
Architecting for social learning utopia:
- intersection between virtual and real-world spaces?
- design work = our collective work
Digital Natives asked JP: “Why did you write a book?”
Answer 1: for us old fogeys: parents, educational technologists, administrators
Answer 2: a book is just a digital file, and there are many ways to experience it: YouTube videos of chapters.
Digital Dossier video by 17-year-old Berkman student
Faculty will only innovate if “it would be easy for me and useful, and if it were obvious to me that it would be a valuable transformation in my pedagogy.”
Elizabeth Warren: single best teacher JP ever experiences; no technology; honoring good teaching in all forms.
References/Resources for further exploration:
Mimi Ito, MIT Press, Hanging Out, Messing Around + Geeking Out
Digital Media and Learning Initiative
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