He sets up three divides, and focuseso n the divide of young people's skills in the online space, rather than economic and access issues.
Key opportunities:
- Digital identities -- Kids don't see a big distinction between their online and offline lives, while adults do. This can be a challenge, but it's also an opportunity.
- Interoperability -- "going online" isn't something you do, it's just something that lives in their hands and in their lives all the time.
- Creativity -- Kids know their models for expression and are very fascile -- not all kids, but more and more of them, and we can encourage this.
Some of the challenges:
- Security: There is fear that something bad will happen to kids. He suggests that there is reason to be concerned. Young people are sometimes convinced to move from seedy corners of cyberspace into public forms of cyberspace -- out of a chat room and into friending a bad guy on Facebook. However, he suggests that sexual predators haven't increased in numbers since the advent of social media. Kids are finding pornographic material if they are looking for it -- he suggests that you should teach kids. He suggests that the biggest increase is in cyberbullying -- kids are very mean to each other online. The likelihood of harm of being taunted by peers is incontrovertibly on the rise.
- Privacy: Myth: kids share too much information about themselves, and that kids don't care about privacy. He agrees with the first statement. Kids speak to unintended audiences -- they think of it as a private space. They forget about replicability. They forget about searchability. They forget about persistence. RE: the second myth, kids actually *do* care about privacy. They think that they are protecting their privacy, and don't translate lessons learned by friends into their own online practices.
- Intellectual Property: Myth: kids steal music and movies, and they don't understand what they are allowed to do. The first is true. Students do steal music. He makes the case that kids presume that the media is free; kids who buy their music are really spending down a gift card on Apple. They don't have a sense. They know their practices are unlawful. "Semiotic democracy" -- look it up. Students don't know whether they are allowed to take a snippet of a song and put it into their YouTube video.
- Credibility: Kids are using online resources -- how do we ensure that they are using good research and analytical techniques. Kids to a person described their research techniques went to Google, searched for the topic "Spanish American War", looked through search results for the Wikipedia page. Only then was there any deviation. Kids "graze" for news information, as they spend 8 hours a day online they are fed little headlines, and then there's a little bit of a deep dive if things that pique their interest. Sometimes kids actually process and create content around it.
- Information overload: He sees libraries as the guides through the world of information overload.
He suggests that we have an opportunity to define what the new learning environments are, and that they should include what we know about how students are using technologies and the opportunities and challenges associated with that. He argues that we haven't "architecturally designed" the web, including the "rooms" and the "features" of the space. I'm not sure I agree with this idea -- seems to undermine the idea of the web.
He suggests that if you want a one-stop shop for good research you should go to the DML site.
