Certainly, in traditional schooling literacy is not just about reading – it is also about authoring. With digital literacy, in writing blogs or posting videos to YouTube students are using digital technologies while authoring written or visual content. They are acting as consumers of digital technology while producing content. Full digital literacy requires the ability to create new interactive experiences – i.e. programming. This view is also presented by Mitch Resnick et. al. in their recent paper for CACM:

Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., et al. (2009). Scratch: programming for all. Commun. ACM, 52(11), 60-67. doi: 10.1145/1592761.1592779

In turn, Net Gen Skeptic summarises a new report from the University of Melbourne, on a project which has been investigating how

commencing first year students and their teachers use traditional and emerging technology-based tools in their everyday lives and to support student learning and drawn on the expertise of teachers and the results of this investigation to develop and implement pedagogically sound, technology-based tools to enhance student learning in local learning environments.

Skeptic summarises the findings mentioned in the report, starting with the key note that:

The rhetoric that university students are Digital Natives and university staff are Digital Immigrants is not supported.

Read more, with links to a handbook on good practice for ‘Educating the Net Generation’ and research papers, over at Net Gen Skeptic.

Ben Goldacre considers the arguments about the effect of Social Networking on the brain and detects some scaremongering. (In the Daily Mail? How unlikely!)

Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist.

“In less than two decades, the number of people saying there is no-one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled.”

Dr Sigman says he is “worried about where this is all leading”.

He added: “It’s not that I’m old fashioned in terms of new technology, but the purpose of any new technology should be to provide a tool that enhances our lives.”

And earlier in the month there was a debate in the UK House of Lords (part of our convoluted system of national government – think US Congress without elections and less power…) on social networking. This was reported on the Grauniad’s web site today, here.

In this latter article, I note the degree of similarity between some of Lady Greenfield’s comments on the changes to childrens’ minds brought about by digital technologies – and the changes in childrens’ minds described by e.g. Marc Prensky. Very different interpretation of whether these changes are good or not, however. Personally, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle… TANSTAAFL. I’ll close with a quote from the Grauniad report,but note that the complete text of the debate is available online for any insomniacs out there – occaisional remarks in the debate show that some of the Lords are not completely out of touch with technology. (Baroness Sharp: “Lastly, children must be empowered to manage risk. As in the off-line world, one cannot eliminate risk completely; therefore one must build up resilience in children and educate them about the risks and how to minimise them.”).

Back to Lady Greenfield and the Grauniad:

She also warned against “a much more marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. After all, whenever you play a computer game, you can always just play it again; everything you do is reversible. The emphasis is on the thrill of the moment, the buzz of rescuing the princess in the game. No care is given for the princess herself, for the content or for any long-term significance, because there is none. This type of activity, a disregard for consequence, can be compared with the thrill of compulsive gambling or compulsive eating.

“The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction. So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”

Discuss.

First up, The Natives aren’t quite so restless. Christopher Scanlon critiques some points from the Palfrey & Gasser book ‘Born Digital’ (a task which has been on my to-do list for some time, and likely to remain there…) and from some of Prensky’s writing. Continues below…

Christopher’s main worry is that college administrators are uncritically buying into the idea of digital natives and trying to reform systems to suit – yet his own experience is that the majority of his students do not really fit the stereotype. He also notes that elsewhere students have petitioned against podcasts replacing lectures.

If I may conclude with some of Christopher’s own words:

And therein lies a problem for academic administrators who are tempted to radically reform the curriculum to better meet the needs of digital natives. The risk is that they are setting students up to fail by presuming their students have innate skills that they don’t in fact possess.

…

There’s no doubt that students come to the classroom with a different skill set and different attitudes than their parents. And there’s no question that educators should seek to harness and build on those skills. At the same time, exaggerated pop sociological accounts of students’ abilities do little to enable young people to develop and practise these skills.

If we are to equip students to navigate a digital world, education ought to be based on assessing students’ individual strengths and weaknesses rather than making glib generalisations that mistake using Facebook for technological savvy.

Next up, in “H. Sapiens Digital“, Marc Prensky apparently “argues that digital technology can make us not just smarter but truly wiser”. Also from the abstract:

The digitally enhanced person who will emerge from these developments, homo sapiens digital, differs from today’s human in two key aspects: He or she accepts digital enhancement as an integral fact of human existence, and he or she is digitally wise.

The idea of technologies as enhancements of the human users is not new. ( McLuhan called them extensions – so only around 50 years old as ideas go). What is new is the assumption that increased reach or power is somehow the same as increased wisdom. I have not read the paper yet – I have work to do, and I suspect I need to save this one for a less busy week. I don’t think it’ll take me too long to read, but might take me a long time to calm down after

We have questionnaire data which indicates that our students don’t like SL very much. It has had negative publicity recently which makes some of them think it is “sad”. However, the students do on the whole like our module. They seemed to enjoy making their pets and are proud of them. There is not a straightforward motivational effect for SL itself, and it would be a mistake to use it on the assumption that the students will like it because it is fashionable.

Meanwhile, my own most recent class on Collaborative Virtual Environments has a range of comments from students including:

Second Life, the website, the forums and the video conferencing were all useful…

even though i loathed them [forums and blogs] when i started this module (and to a degree i still do) i feel they have played a very important role to the CVE module, and the CGT course.

We should avoid using technology because it is ‘cool’, or we think it might be trendy. Decisions should be based on how they might help student learning… and I’m glad that this year at least my students (and Judy’s, from the sounds of things) were able to see beyond their personal likes and dislikes and benefit from the use of Web 2.0 and virtual worlds in the classroom.

This again takes me back to Sarah Robbins keynote at last year’s SLEDcc conference (slides here) where she emphasised the importance of making explicit bargains with students… explaining why the class is doing something, and bringing them onboard.

The current edition of eCampus news has a short feature asking whether exposure to technology is indeed rewiring brains, and what sort of effects it may be having. While some scientists are skeptical that there are significant changes, others do think that some changes may emerge as children learn in different ways – not all changes being something to crow about:

When the brain spends more time on technology-related tasks and less time exposed to other people, it drifts away from fundamental social skills such as reading facial expressions during conversation, Small asserts.
So brain circuits involved in face-to face contact can become weaker, he suggests.

This one is new to me, and not something I’d considered before. Though as I noted, not all scientists are convinced. But as we consider how technology can benefit students, it is worth bearing in mind ways in which technology might actually hold them back:

Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain … calls that analysis and comprehension “deep reading.” But that takes time, even if it’s just a fraction of a second, and today’s wired world is all about speed: gathering a lot of superficial information fast.
Wolf asks what will happen as young children do more and more early reading online. Will their brains respond by short-circuiting parts of the normal reading  pathways that lead to deeper reading, but which also take more time? And will that harm their ability to reflect on what they’ve read?
Those questions deserve to be studied, Wolf says.

I have to admit to a sense of vindication reading this paper… many of my comments on ‘digital natives’ are reflected here in a review that draws on a number of research surveys and a fairly wide range of articles.

The picture beginning to emerge from research on young people’s relationships with technology is much more complex than the digital native characterisation suggests. While technology is embedded in their lives, young people’s use and skills are not uniform.There is no evidence of widespread and universal disaffection, or of a distinctly different learning style the like of which has never been seen before. … Education may be under challenge to change, but it is not clear that it is being rejected.

From my current class:

• approx % of students using social networking – 20%
• approx % of students who knew how to use styles in Word (a very handy time saver!) – 10%

Via PacRimX and simultaneous email from my friend Chris, a US survey has found that more than 50% of students in grades 3-12 would want to see more educational gaming in school. The figures still do reveal a divided audience however:

In fact, 64 percent of students in grades K-12 say they play online or electronic-based games regularly.

So, 36% don’t play digital games regularly. Still a substantial number, and a case against sweeping generalisations. My own (limited) experience of schools in the Glasgow area makes me believe the figure locally might be something like 90% regularly play digital games (ages 6-12), but I have no real figures to back this up.

More commentary here on eSchool news, or get the Project Tomorrow report itself.

In ignoring screen-based reading from the study, Johnson accuses the NEA of “sleight of hand”, but I think he is equally guilty of using some degree of sleight of hand in his own arguments…

When discussing the increase in screen based reading, Johnson notes:

A recent study by the British Library of onscreen research activities found that “new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ … “

The study he is referring to is the same one I blogged about here, the report which argued that not only were the research habits of todays youth severely lacking,  but that browsing-based poor quality research methods had actually spread right through the age groups. This is what it means to ‘power browse’. Indeed, if you follow the link in Johnson’s article, you’ll find the following text in the opening bold faced paragraph:

…although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

Towards the end of his piece Johnson lays down a challenge:

I challenge the NEA to track the economic status of obsessive novel readers and obsessive computer programmers over the next 10 years. Which group will have more professional success in this climate? Which group is more likely to found the next Google or Facebook? Which group is more likely to go from college into a job paying $80,000 (£40,600)?

Aside from the issue of whether economic success should be the measure of education (there are many critics of this notion), this challenge has been heavily skewed by Johnson. A fair comparison would be obsessive novel readers and obsessive computer users, not programmers. Obsessive computer users might well fail – and fail badly – on a software engineering course, while obsessive computer programmers might well go on to earning the high income Johnson suggests.

I’ll close with a comment on a section which is not a sleight of hand, but is I think worthy of comment:

Odds are that you are reading these words on a computer monitor. Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink? According to the NEA you’re not, because in almost every study it cites, screen-based reading is excluded from the data. …

Yes, we are reading in smaller bites on the screen, often switching back and forth between applications as we do it. A recent study by the British Library of onscreen research activities found that “new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ … “

I’ll agree whole-heartedly that studies should include screen-based reading. But here we are asked first “Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles…?” then we are told “…we are reading in smaller bites on the screen, often switching back and forth between applications as we do it.”

This suggests that there is a significant difference in the reading habits and in how we relate to information. Perhaps even about how we think and process information and arguments. So we will be exercising some of the same cognitive muscles, but as the Google Generation report highlighted, we might not be exercising all of the same cognitive muscles.