I only use email to talk to old people
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724 days ago
I should start by saying that I am an old person. I still use email. My son, who is 19, hardly ever uses email, though he communicates electronically much more than I do, and I do an exceptional amount of digital communication for someone as old as me.
Prof Stan Ridge sent me a photocopied article from Times Higher Education called "Learning from the Future". It talks about the cultural differences between most professors in higher education and the students they teach primarily to shed light on the issue of plagiarism. The title of this blog post is a quote from a student responding to the question of why he did not respond to emails from a tutor.
The article describes the nature of the "culture of sharing" in which young people live. It is one in which music and video have a higher utility than text, and one in which the dominant textual communication is informal and largely unstructured, rather than formal and structured. Examples of such text include SMS messages, Mixit messages, Facebook, Twitter (and other status updates systems) and blogs. The article says "We as academics need to understand this culture if we are to influence it, or we risk becoming increasingly irelevant."
We often think that in South Africa our students are crossing the digital divide when they enter University, and so we have escaped the challenges created by so-called 'digital natives' by virtue of our economic situation and the disgustingly high cost of bandwidth. We have not.
The culture of communicating and sharing is widespread in South Africa, although it is not always PC based. Indeed, to some extent, PCs are for old people. Young people are much more comfortable with mobile devices, and often engage with Web technologies that we associate with PCs using phones and interfaces that are not web browsers. I have two teenage sons. They spend a lot of time in solitary social situations...i.e. they are physically alone, or in a room watching TV, listening to music or doing homework, but are socially connected to their friends via Mixit and Facebook on their cell phones. This is the reality, it is as sensless to decry it as it was to suggest that the invention of writing would destroy oral culture a long time ago.
As academics embarking on an eLearning Journey, we need to spend a little time learning about the culture of our students, and get to understand the mediums and language they use to communicate. Embracing their world will go a long way towards helping them bridge the gap in to the world of formal learning and knowledge construction.
I hpe ths s prty clr to U. F tis nt thn phps we nd a crs abt yng ppl, jst 4 old ppl.
So as not to be guilty of plagiarism, the article is
Culwin, F. 2008. Learning from the future. Times Higher Education, 21 Aug 2008, p. 24.
digital natives mixit mobile culture youth
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14861 days ago
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14861 days ago
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Response to Steven Downes on email and old people
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713 days ago
I tried adding a comment to Stephen Downes comments on my blog post "I only use email to talk to old people". His blog has an open comment box, but when I submitted I got:
Error
Permission Denied (Check Status Error)
Fortunately, I had kept the text in a text editor just in case something went wrong, as it often does with this kind of thing. Stephen's comments are at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=46480
Stephen wrote
At no stage did I say that students should abandon formal communication, and fact ended the short post with "As academics embarking on an eLearning Journey, we need to spend a little time learning about the culture of our students, and get to understand the mediums and language they use to communicate. Embracing their world will go a long way towards helping them bridge the gap in to the world of formal learning and knowledge construction."
I think that makes my point clear. It falls in the real of the "oh duh" that they need to enter the world of formal learning and knowledge construction and the communication that goes with it. What I was attempting to say was part of an attempt to get professors who have only recently graduated from chalk to ink markers to think about other technologies, and to find ways to embrace the culture of their students to help them to "bridge the gap in to the world of formal learning". I will be following this post with some examples of what we are doing, technology wise, to provide means for bridging the gap, and hope that there will be some engagement around the 'pedagogies' thereof.
Perhaps you, Stephen, work in a world where saying that young people communicate differently is cliche. I don't. I work in a world where a tiny bit of change is an uphill battle. I work in a world where, in many cases, national policies have so messed up access to technologies that even in one of the top three Universities in the country 80% of the professors have never heard of the most popular social networking technologies, fewer than 1 in a hundred have used them, and almost none have ever thought about using Mixit or SMS (the two most popular technologies among young people here) for educational purposes.
Cliche's have context. What is cliche in New Brunswick may well be innovative and new in South Africa. Many of our professors think that these observations apply to North America, that our students - over 50% of whom grew up in conditions that do not exist in Canada - are somehow different. There is a belief that poorer students have escaped the technology revolution because of poverty.
The fact is that they are not different at all. And even if they have not had access to a world replete with technolgy, they join it very soon when they enter university, because the other 50% helps them to do so even when we as their university do not. If I can get 2% of professors in my university to think about how they can embrace hw stdnts cmcte n our cntxt, thn smthg wl hv bn achvd. Especially if they can think beyond 'Wy wrnt U N cls 2day?"
I guess I should have made the context clear, but the original post was made on the University of the Western Cape eLearning site, and copied to dkeats.com as I sometimes do. I have to think about how I do that in future, so that I take the context with the post.
Regarding how they communicate in 20 years, when I am 83, being humans, I expect via some method and formula that we have not even thought about yet.The current youth will be us, and no doubt they will be lamenting the death of the SMS, the loss of Facebook, and the final bankruptcy of Mixit. I expect that there will be a lot more voice and video, and a lot less in shorthand. SMS/Mixit shorthand is an evolutionary response to a very short term phenomenon, where communications are limited by cost. I would expect that in 20 years, with more widespread access to big computing via ubiquitous networks, the elusive speech to text might even have arrived. F nt, I grnT tht ths wl nt be th way.
I have logged a job to get RSS autodiscovery added automatically to pages that have RSS feed. The blog already uses RSS autodiscovery in the posts, but it works with the older way of doing autodiscovery, which is still very widely in use. Give us a week or so. Its not quite a simple as adding it to the template because the template is also used to render pages that do not have RSS.
Regards, derek
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Educational techniques for young people by an old dude: rap and remix as socially networked learning opportunities
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708 days ago
Livecasting was done at 14:00-14:45 South African Time on Wednesday Oct 1. Unfortunately, it did not quite work out how I meant it to. There was no setup time, so in the rush I forgot to put on the audio, and left the phone pointed at the audience. The video is jittery, but if you download it it plays fine. The talk is podcast though, and the podcast is below the video. Please note that as I do various demonstrations, the video here will change.
I HAVE TURNED THIS OFF TEMPORARILY
Abstract
Rap music began in the 1980s, but is still a popular part of youth culture today. It embraces the notion of taking parts of different music sources, and mixing them together (remix), and using the results to create musical poetry that can contain new lyrics and embrace deep meaning. The results are shared among friends, and with the advent of social networking technologies, rappers may have a substantial online following without ever talking to a record label. This remix and sharing culture is a metaphor for education, yet we seldom make the connection, and almost never exploit its potential. This talk focuses around the technologies that we have deployed in support of a Social Content project for Western Cape schools to explore how the technology can help to create an educational remix culture. It also demonstrates some uses of commonly used youth technologies such as cellphones, MP3 players, and Mixit to facilitate educational remix that can happen using the Social Content site.
