Digital natives and the discourse of a generation

At the end of this month, high school students will take a break from academic studies to enjoy sunshine, the outdoors, travel, games, summer jobs, and relaxation. It’s also a time of transitions. Sophomores become upperclassmen; athletes rise in status onto varsity teams. Clubs, activities, and community service become embedded as part of a larger equation of identity for resumes. Soon, SATs will help establish pathways to college and career. College visits will follow.

To the high school students who read this blog, you are a child no more. You are a young adult who’s made some initial decisions about your life and future. You’ve traveled a very long path to be at this sometimes tenuous, sometimes wonderful moment in time. Before you take that last step off your high school campus for the summer, I’d ask you to take a few moments to think about life as it was for you as one of America’s children, especially in your role as a student. You can also help those of us in the field of education to know your generation a little bit more, if you will. (Please note that the comments to this blog are pseudonyms. Anonymity offers a certain freedom.)

Consider the Native American proverb, “No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.” How do you look back on your years of formal education? Are you nostalgic? Relieved? Reticent? Why? Do fond memories of simpler times resonate? Or was life never really simple? Do life lessons that once seemed traumatic now seem just an awkward stage, even cathartic? What was it like for you to be a learner at the cusp of a new millennium?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist, said, “Not in his goals but in his transitions is man great.” Life when Emerson wrote surrounded small New England community enclaves; discourse rose primarily from family and religion. Your life is very different. How did the society and culture in which you were nurtured create pathways for your academic integration into school culture? Pesky calls you “a digital native” due to the complex technology in which you have been emerged. He says:

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Do you agree with his statement? What advise to you have to offer to educators? If you were given the power, what institutional changes would you incorporate for other students in public schools who follow you? To what degree do you feel that school has been a microcosm of society? What were the best parts of school? What challenges continue as you become an upperclassman?

Dr. Michael Welch, a cultural anthropologist and digital enthnographer from Kansas State University, recently uploaded a short video to YouTube called Web 2.0, the Machine is Using Us. The video discusses how the Web is changing how and how fast humans around the globe communicate. After you view the film, offer a socio-cultural critique of Wesch’ argument. Is his view accurate? Why or why not?

As you think about your answers to these questions, I’d like to thank you on behalf of educators in the United States everywhere. You have offered us vicarious links to the energy and enthusiasm of our own youth. You’ve also introduced us to many new ways of knowing our own worlds. A part of you will live on with us and in the students we’ll help to grow as learners in the future to come.

The Barefoot Photographers of Tilonia

The Barefoot College in Tilonia, India, began in 1972 with the conviction that solutions to rural problems lie within the community.

“It is the only college in India built by the poor for the poor and for the last 34 years managed and controlled and owned by the poor following the life-style and work-style of Gandhi. It is based on very simple living, eating, and working and people come for the challenge rather than the money. No one in the college can earn more than $100 a month.”

Interested in learning more? Go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=2382&utm_source=ed0408&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=21_BFtxt6

to click on the thumbnails below to see the work of the Barefoot Photographers of Tilonia and learn about the Barefoot College's projects.

Adapted from Yes! magazine

The Barefoot College campus was designed by a semi-literate Barefoot architect and was built by a team of Barefoot architects, Barefoot solar engineers, and Barefoot water engineers. The college collects rainwater from the roofs of the campus and stores 400,000 liters of water in an underground tank built under a community stage. The open-air theater can seat an audience of 5,000 for performances. The college is fully solar electrified and powers its computers, photocopying machines, media center, pathology lab, and 700 lights and fans of its administrative offices, classrooms and living spaces with sunlight.

What do you think about the work of the Barefoot Photographers? What are the lives of these intelligent, resourceful, and motivated people like in comparison to yours? In what ways do the issues that interest you connect to the issues that interest the Barefoot Photographers? Add a comment!