Week 4: Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century.

Digital Media: New Learners of the 21^st Century

“Probably the most important thing for kids growing up today is the love of embracing change.” 

-John Seely Brown

This is probably the most profound statement in the video, and it happens in the first eleven seconds of the video.  The primary themes of this video are empowering students in their own education and developing educational systems that leverage current and potential technologies and digital communities.

So, you can see that we could imagine a day where learning and assessment are the same thing.  That is, we build such rich learning systems, they already assess themselves. Think about it - - that would be, in the end, cheap, because we wouldn't need the testing industry anymore. We... We would just need a learning industry.

--James Gee

I love this quote. I watched this video while waiting my turn to get my hair cut.  We have been going to Mario’s for over twenty-years.  Mario and Pepé have been cutting hair in Davis Square for over thirty-years.  They come from the old country and the majority of their staff is related to them or are Italian as well.  All communication in the salon happens in Italian and so to most of their cliental, it occurs in the background of our “normal” American English existence. So much so, they step in between these two world seamlessly.  “Tieem, you go wash your hair.”

“....learning and assessment are the same thing.”  

The digital communities, technologies and operations are becoming this seamless.  I remember the days of DOS.  You really had to understand some fundamental programming to use the applications. Then we moved to icon user interface where a click of a button completed a series of actions.  Now we are at the point were we turn it on and chat or shop.

This video does a really great job of showing the collaborative realities that new schools are making work and how they are helping to empower students.  

“I think a lot of what's happening with this program (Smithsonian Institution) is that the individual student is being empowered, and they're being empowered to sort of follow a different course, maybe, or to follow a very personal sort of path to understanding what the great artists have always done.”  

--Richard Koshalek

We have moved into an age of information creation through collaboration.  We are soon going to see more novels, music, art and media done through collaboration, yet evolving the idea of authorship and originality.  Kurzwell refers to “singularity” as the point of the machine becoming self-aware.  I believe the “singularity” will involve us all. 

“Most of our learning could very well come from the interaction with the peers in this particular collective that I'm a part of because we all know that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach something. So, in peer-based collaboration, you're both learning and teaching, and that sense of having to explain to other something is often the way you discover what you yourself know and don't know.”  

--John Seely Brown

"If we teach today's students the way we taught them yesterday, we rob them of tomorrow."  

--John Dewey