Synching Up With The iKid

A great read!

Teachers who once struggled for students' attention mainly against daydreams, passed notes, class clowns, and cross-aisle flirting now also face a formidable array of gadgets and digitized content. Smart schools -- and smart educators -- are scrambling to figure out how to use these same tools and information- distribution techniques to reach and excite young minds. "You have to work with the kind of brains we've got now," says Susan Blackmore, who holds a PhD in psychology from Oxford and frequently writes and lectures on new technology's effects on consciousness.

According to Blackmore, today's brains are shaped by various information streams -- sometimes referred to as memes -- constantly popping and sparking and competing for attention. This new generation of digital learners -- call them the MEdia Generation -- take in the world via the filter of computing devices: the cellular phones, handheld gaming devices, PDAs, and laptops they take everywhere, plus the computers, TVs,and game consoles at home. A survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people (ages eight to eighteen) mainline electronic media for more than six hours a day, on average. Interestingly, many are multitasking: listening to music while surfing the Web or instant-messaging friends while playing a video game.

Educators must figure out how to compete with this frenetic memestorm coming at them from marketers and other students. Many are. The last few years have seen a rapid class- and districtwide use of collaborative course-management systems such as DyKnow as well as so-called social technologies -- blogs, wikis, and media-syndication systems based on the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) protocol -- that allow anyone to shift from consuming media to being a media creator. (Blogs, from weblogs, are simplified personal Web sites, and wikis are Web sites, either password-protected or public, that anyone can easily edit.) Giving students powerful media-authoring tools means relinquishing a degree of control, but doing so also makes it possible to help them learn in more effective ways (and tighter time frames) than ever before.

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