I only use email to talk to old people
Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
683 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
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post | 
|
