cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Dan Zen
I was fascinated by this tweet this morning from #CanEdu13:
Noticing tht @courosa is referencing his slides with #twitter handles.#endofapa #ensofmla #CanEdu13
— Mitch Champagne (@MitchChampagne) May 6, 2013
I thought about the way that our students do “assignments” and many of them still write traditional “essays” that would never necessarily reference a “tweet”, blog, or YouTube video, yet there is a lot of learning that can happen from these digital spaces, they are just not what we are used to. For example, recently talking to an educator currently finishing her thesis, she told me how she was not able to reference a “blog” as it was discouraged in her cohort.
Why?
Should we not be able to curate, assess, and evaluate information from a blog as we would from a paper? Information often loses accuracy in many instances because it is time sensitive, and a journal takes a while to be published, as well as a book. Is there not any relevance in the “real-time” web?
Thinking about this, I found the following quote from Henry Jenkins’ paper on “Media Education for the 21st Century”:
“Adolescents need to learn how to integrate knowledge from multiple sources, including music, video, online databases, and other media.They need to think critically about information that can be found nearly instantaneously through out the world. They need to participate in the kinds of collaboration that new communication and information technologies enable, but increasingly demand. Considerations of globalization lead us toward the importance of understanding the perspective of others, developing a historical grounding, and seeing the interconnectedness of economic and ecological systems.”
—Bertram C. Bruce (2002)
If we are looking at how people are “moved”, some are through what they have read, but many are from what they see and hear. I am not saying to get rid of looking at “traditional” media in assignments, but how often do we encourage our students to use a YouTube video as a resource? Is this not a skill that our students need?
