Serendipity35

Two reports, one video, one in print that I looked at in January that are worth some time and consideration. One looks at where our students (and therefore their teachers and schools) are online, while the other suggests what technologies may be emerging this year.

On January 22, FRONTLINE on PBS ran a program called Growing Up Online which they advertised as taking viewers "inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood." The commercial promo made the Internet look like a slasher film, but the show itself was less sensationalized.

"The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it's something that really is the province of teenagers, " says C.J. Pascoe, from the University of California, Berkeley's Digital Youth Research project.

One thing that comes through in the piece for any of us who grew up in the age of television or bemoaned TV's influence on our students, TV doesn't occupy much of a teenager's time anymore. It has moved online. Is that any better? Is the fact that much of it is interactive an improvement? Is the content any better in quality or in educational potential?

When I did a search for the episode website, I also came across a post by Will Richardson who mirrors one of my responses to the piece:

"...as much as I look at these social tools and “properties” as learning opportunities, as much as they are a part of my life, I understand them only from the viewpoint of an adult, one that came to the Internet and blogs and live streaming television with a pretty healthy sense of who I am and a well-developed and tested decision making process that made navigating these spaces fairly straightforward. As I much as I think I know about all of this, as I look at my own kids and try to imagine what they are graduating into online, I realize that I know very little. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for parents who really have no context for this discussion, which is another reason why schools have to make this a part of the way we do our business, and why we have to integrate what it means to live in this world throughout the curriculum, K-12, in every subject."

On January 29, the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) released the 2008 Horizon Report. This fifth annual edition describes the research-oriented effort to identify emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education.

You can download and read the entire report (also in Spanish - plus ones from previous years), but just to get started (or in case you never read it), their six selected areas for 2008 are a good sampling of at least a few topics for this year that you'll be hearing more about here and in journals and conferences.

1. grassroots video
2. collaboration webs
3. mobile broadband
4. data mashups
5. collective intelligence
6. social operating systems