The New Learning Paradigm

"Living and Learning with New Media" from the MacArthur foundation states, "Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads." So if students are not learning from us perhaps they are learning in spite of us and we had either get out of the way or climb onto the vehicle students are using to learn, social media, and guide them to the content they need enable them to embrace the exponential growth that is taking place in the digital world and that they will need to compete in an ever changing career market. In addition, the question . . . "what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?" places the challenge to teachers to explore the digital commons to find the places that students reside and meet them there and help them to find their way through to new and exciting information relevant to their lives. We need to build a bridge that not only fords the "digital divide" that exists between their in school and out of school use of the digital commons, but a bridge that gets a lot of traffic. As teachers we should want our students to be able to make connections between classroom learning and their own lives.
During a week away from school with 30 students in a remote setting in Northern Thailand I had the opportunity to listen to them about the way they are spending their time using digital media out of school and I learned that much of the time they spent "playing" is not neccessarily frivolous. Several student talked about the game "Spore" that they have been playing and how cool they found it. A visit to wikipedia found that "Spore is a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse video game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the development of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation." Here is a gaming platform that incorporates biology, socialogy, anthropology, earth science, and astronomy, with science fiction and fantasy. I've yet to explore the game myself but I can imagine the applications and implications of using it as part of that bridge accross the digital divide. As "Living and Learning in the New Media" states,"Once teens find a way to be together—online, offline, or both—they integrate new media within the informal hanging-out practices that have characterized their social worlds ever since the postwar emergence of teens as a distinctive youth culture, a culture that continues to be tightly integrated with commercial popular cultural products targeted to teens."