Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Alan Amory
Sarah Gravett
Duan van der Westhuizen
Faculty of Education
Digital natives
• “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the
people our educational system was designed to teach.”
• Grown up digitally
For example computers, cell phones, music, video, games, interactive TV, Mix-
It, Facebook, bluetooth
• Today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from
their predecessors
• “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures“
• “Likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different
from ours “
• Students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers,
video games and the Internet.
• Immigrants: turns to the Internet for information second rather than first,
reads a manual rather than assuming that the program/device itself will teach
you how to use it
• Problem: Digital Immigrant teachers speak an outdated language and are
struggling to teach those who speak an entirely new language.
Digital Immigrants
• “Smart adult immigrants accept that they don’t know about their new world
and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate. Not-so-
smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about
how good things were in the “old days.”
• So:
• Change thinking about METHOD of teaching
• Change thinking about content
21st Century Teaching and Learning
• Learning to be
Students learn not only about something but rather learn to be something. Here
learning is the enculturation into the practice of the discipline or profession,
often through legitimate participation in authentic tasks
• Information to knowledge
Avoid delivery of information. Help to attach meaning.
• Possessing information does not imply that learning has occurred, learning takes
place ”when students act on content, when they shape and form it. Content is
the clay of knowledge construction”
• Information is not knowledge
• Merely providing information is not teaching
• Learning to speak digitally
Multimedia literacy is part of learning to be and fosters pattern-making, skill
development, nonlinear thinking, navigation in incongruent spaces and complex
story-telling
• Learning Activity Design: Foster deep learning
Learning Activity Design
• Information stream
The delivery of learning resources and other necessary information pertinent to
learning, research and administration
• Communication
Both synchronous and asynchronous modes that make use increasing
intelligent devices
• Collaboration
Provide support for social networking and community building
• Transformation
Information transformed from one, or many, information streams into more
meaningful individually or group constructed knowledge
• Professionalization
The use of technological tools associated directly with a profession (for
example, the use of Computer Aided Design software by architecture students)
• Learning to network. Social networking in a lived experience of most students
where they organize themselves into communities that are often based of race,
gender and belief systems. However, such networks do not function during
seeking solutions of complex tasks. In order words, people from diverse
backgrounds holding incongruently beliefs can work together to solve a
common problem.
• Learning to share. Rip and burn approach to music sharing is an example of
how many students make available information to their communities. While the
neo-liberal multinationals fight the “making-free” of the commodified assets,
the Open Access-Open Source-Open Content movements provides alternatives
that are based on individual freedoms that support human liberation.
Emerging Technologies Web 2.0