Technically Teaching

The Decade According to Nine Year Olds December 23, 2009

Posted by Mark Samberg in Uncategorized.
Tags: changes, random thoughts
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The decade according to 9-year-olds from allison louie-garcia on Vimeo.

I know I’m supposed to be providing cool tools for you to use after Christmas, but I couldn’t resist posting this.  I’ve seen a lot of decade in review stuff over the past few weeks.  I think it finally dawned on people that “hey, the 2000s are over in a few weeks”.  It’s fitting that I found this video referenced on Gizmodo, and I think it underscores the need to change the way we teach.  There’s a lot more here. Read it

We can look at the big news things from ten years ago:

• Nobody had ever heard of Al-Quieda, and nobody in the United States gave terrorism a second thought.
• We were not at war.
• We were in a time of economic prosperity.

But, what I find more amazing is the way communication in society has changed in the last ten years.  Ten years ago:

• There was no iPod (was introduced in 2001).  Now, over 220 million have been sold, along with countless other devices.  Ten years ago, people were making mix CDs – CDs with only the songs individuals wanted to listen to.  Now, people load their iPods with the songs they want, and nobody carries around a portable CD player.
• Google is only 2 years old.  Nobody had ever heard of it, but it was just starting to catch on.  They only had 8 employees.
• There was no Wikipedia, that wouldn’t come until 2001.  Now, Wikipedia has over 14 million articles in 240 languages.  Google and Wikipedia are where students tend to start when looking something up.  And it didn’t exist when these 9-year-olds were born.
• There was no Facebook (not until 2004).  It started with one college, then spread to more and more colleges, then high school, and the world.  Facebook now has more than 350 million active users.
• There was no Twitter (not until 2007).  Now, there are over 16 million unique tweets EVERY DAY.
• Cell phones could only *gasp* make telephone calls.  If you were lucky, you got one when you started driving, but you couldn’t use it any other time, because it was too expensive.  You had, if you were wealthy, 300 minutes per month, no unlimited night and weekends (or unlimited anything), you paid several dollars per minute if you left your hometown, and cell phones were either Analog or Digital/Analog combinations.  Intercarrier text messaging (sending messages to people regardless of their carrier) was becoming increasingly popular.  In 2000, 17 billion (just shy of 3 per person on Earth) text messages were sent the entire year.  By the end of 2008, that number had jumped to over 1 trillion (for those keeping score, 149.43 per everyone on the planet).  Almost all of that usage in the US is by people under age 35, with a majority of that being teenagers.
• Wifi was new.  The first Wifi network was created at Carnegie Mellon in 1994.  The Wifi Alliance, which created the standards that we now use today, was created in 1999.  Places with wireless were on the bleeding edge in 1999, and wireless cards were available only as add-on cards to laptops.  Now, wireless is commonplace, almost ubiquitous.  Almost all new laptops are Wifi capable, and even the Fast Food places have Wifi available to their customers.

I’m sure there is more, if you can think of any, leave them in the comments.  We’ve all seen the Did You Know videos, but when you think of the ten-year span that we have just ended, the videos don’t really do it justice.  I hear in workshops all the time that kids today don’t live in the same world as we did when we were kids.  Forget that.  These kids don’t live in the same world as they did when THEY were BORN!  It’s my job to try to keep up with all of this, but I still have trouble.  I hear my students talk – something happens, the first thing they do is record it and put it on YouTube.  I am fully capable of recording something with my cell phone and putting it on YouTube, but even still, it doesn’t occur to me to do that.  With our students, it’s the first thing they think of.  When they are trying to do something, like bake a cake, I search on Google for cake recipes.  They go to YouTube for step-by-step with video.  These are high school students, aged 15.  Back in 1994, when they were born – there was no YouTube, or high speed internet, or Google, or anything else.  So, it’s not even fair to say that they have grown up with it.  It has grown up with them. It has evolved and changed and matured alongside them.  As they are ready to explore new technologies, new technologies are being developed for them to explore.  I was at Thanksgiving a few weeks ago with some family friends.  Their kids are all aged six and under.  I had my digital camera, and was taking pictures (which I did upload to Facebook).  As soon as I took the picture, one of the three-year-olds walked up to me and said “Can I see the picture?”.  Looking at a picture on a digital camera immediately is commonplace to me, and to many of us.  However, this struck me for some reason.  This three year old is growing up with an immediacy of access to information that nobody EVER has before.  Even the nine year olds.  Any information, digital media, recipe for cake is at her fingertips.  It’s immediate.

I often think about the difference between the two major terrorist attacks of the 2000s – 9/11 and the London subway bombings.  After the London bombings, we saw immediately cell phone pictures of the death and destruction.  It was horrific, because we saw what they saw, exactly.  It was like we were there, and we could see events unfold in all of it’s terrible glory.  During 9/11, there was none of that.  How much worse would it have been if people had seen first hand inside the buildings, if the activities on the planes had been recorded, if we could see individual first hand accounts, lots of them?  How would that have changed our perceptions of the events that unfolded, our reactions and thoughts?  How would these kids, who remember 9/11 only by stories told to them by their parents, and books in the library, how would they see 9/11 differently?  I don’t know, but it is most certainly food for thought.

So, I’m supposed to be talking about teaching, so I ask the question – what does all of this mean for teachers?  First of all, how can teachers possibly keep up with the way students communicate when the way students communicate changes between primary school and high school?  We are entering an age where students have access to all of the knowledge of the human race, instantly, and immediately.  It is important that we make sure that they can sort through these facts, make judgments, and assimilate new information (yes, it remains important for kids to KNOW things in their memories).  Just as the retrieval of information is faster, the dissemination of information will be faster too.  We will be required to teach students more information, faster, and earlier than ever before.  What used to be high school math is now taught in fifth grade, and that’s only the beginning.  But at the same time, we will be dealing with a group of students who can process information faster, if for no other reason than they will have to in order to survive.  If you think it’s hard for us to keep up – imagine what it must be like for them – they have to keep up, and usually a few steps ahead of us, just to maintain the status quo for their age group.

It also means that we are going to have to change the way we teach.  Yes, I know we have all heard this before, integrating technology, less lecture, blah, blah, blah.  But it’s not that.  We can still lecture, and good lessons are never overrun by technology.  However, our lectures must be purposeful and thought provoking.  Our use of technology must be purposeful and a means to an end.  We have to deliver the information faster, more efficiently, and on their terms.  Students can memorize information.  They can analyze, process, synthesize and evaluate.  But this is a generation of students who do information on their terms – we need to accommodate this, not because we need to conform to our students, but because this is now life, and we need to prepare them for it.  We need to teach them how to take in information, process it, extract the relevant bits, and come up with a conclusion.  Never before has that been the primary goal of education.  But here we are, the information is there – now we need to teach them the next steps.

Sorry if that went a little long.  This post is intended as a discussion starter.  Please! post in the comments.