ARE WE READY TO BE CHALLENGED BY CHANGES
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Victor Frankl
Taken fromhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fqg3sT37sc&feature=related
Can you imagine ourselves still living as people used to live many years ago? Making fire with rocks? Living in caves? Communicating through only signals? Every living thing is the consequence and cause of evolutionary changes and human beings are the heart of those changes. Why do changes happen? The principal cause of changes is the needs, when we need something we start exploring and testing new things to find out a solution. Human creativity and willingness to explore is huge, these aspects make everything that surround us to suffer a constant change. Change is an essential and natural part of our life and without it we would be like rocks on a desert.
Technology is the aspect that most changes has had and has brought to us. In the last years technological inventions have grown like a weed and so our lives. TV sets, radios, computers, laptops, internet, mobile phones, video cameras, to mention some, are supplies that make of our life a new and lively experience. Those new technologies make people interact, be informed, create, improve, negotiate meaning, and become active members of a world that never stops. We are not any more passive receivers who used to take what was given by powerful people because now we can make ourselves powerful and empower others just by sharing our knowledge and taking the most from the tools that have been being invented through time.
Technology has also brought with it a new generation. “Net generation” is the term given to those people who have grown up surrounded by every kind of technology; for them “technology is as natural as breathing” (Tapscott, 2009). According to Tapscott (Ibid) this new generation wants freedom and speed in everything they do; they like to innovate, collaborate, personalize, inquire and analyze. All of them are multi-tasking, it means that they can do many things all at the same time: they can spend hours and even complete days, in front of a computer chatting in the messenger, with many people around the world, watching videos in you tube, playing online games, having a look at the news, doing homework, downloading music, uploading photos, checking and commenting their social net lives, talking by their mobile phone, and watching TV. The Netgeners know everything about everything, they do not have barriers because all of them are connected and interacting constantly, constructing knowledge and cooperating with each other, “For the first time ever, we can speak of a worldwide youth generation” (Geraci, n.d.).
The Net generation is changing the role of teachers as well. Teachers used to be the authority inside the classroom, but as everything change, we need to start thinking that “each one of us is, in some way, an authority in some domains and a student in other domains. We must be prepared to learn major things from our subordinates and vice versa” (Seely, n.d.). As digital natives, the netgeners are expert on everything regarding technology, we, as digital immigrants have to take advantage of that expertise to enhance our teaching practice and our students’ learning process.
We need to start implementing technology in our teaching procedures otherwise netgeners will choose not to learn with/from us. Classes must be student centered; it means we have to be aware of and address their needs, likes, interests, and learning styles. Prensky (n.d.) said “most useful education for the future is not happening at school. It’s happening after school, particularly in personal robotics clubs, etc., and on the entire Internet – it’s happening in games. It’s not on a test…So they go to what is really turning them on.” We need to make of our classroom the place where they are turned on, the place in which they choose to pay attention, collaborate, construct meaning, learn and share “(learners’) attention spans are not short for games, for example, or music, or rollerblading, or for spending time on the internet, or anything else that actually interest them. It isn’t that they can’t pay attention, they just choose not to” (Ibid).
As we start implementing technology, there arise another change and so another need: literacy is not any longer what we thought it was and we need to start learning multimedia language. “Change increasingly defines the nature of literacy and the nature of literacy learning. New technologies generate new literacies that become important to our lives in a global information age. We believe that we are on the cusp of a new era in literacy research, one in which the nature of reading, writing, and communication is being fundamentally transformed.” (Leu, n.d.). Before technology, a literate person was the one who could read and write. Now, a person might be considered illiterate if he/she is not able to use a computer and all the multimedia resources available. The term literacy has changed for multiliteracies because there are multiple ways people can communicate and perceive ideas, feelings, and knowledge. Now, people can not only learn from a book or state in a book what he/she knows but write a blog, access e-libraries, collaborate on the construction of knowledge, becoming active rather than passive members of a community.
What does it all mean? It means that we, teachers, need to be aware of this situation and start updating our knowledge and developing multimedia skills for being able to teach learners in the way they will really learn and face their daily life. We need to enable creativity and start maximizing the potential digital natives already have. We and learners need to take risks, experiment and learn from those experiences. Let’s include digital native tools in our teaching practice and we will have motivated students learning meaningfully because “when learning is pleasurable, it can happen even more rapidly” (The New Media Consortium, 2005).
Nonetheless, we cannot deny that the variety of content, images, tools, perspectives can also be prejudicial for children. Here it is where the role of the teachers is of vital importance on developing in students critical skills. Fjeldstead (1991) said “think critically about the meanings of what you are seeing, hearing, sensing, and experiencing” (as cited in Bamford, 2003). We need to make learners to see the different perspectives from which an image, movie, song, web page, and any content can be analyzed. By doing this, we are helping digital natives to be critical and be able to make informed and assertive decisions on what they can do with the multiple options from which they can choose and start constructing meaning.
We have been challenged by changes!!! Let’s take the risk to change and improve our teaching procedures so that we can challenge our learners and give them what they deserve; opportunities to learn in a netgeners world.
References
Bamford, A. (2003) The Visual Literacy White Paper. Adobe Systems. Retrieved from http://www.adobe.com/uk/education/pdf/adobe_visual_literacy_paper.pdf
Tapscott, D. (2009) Grown Up Digital How the Net Generation is Changing Your World. MacGraw Hill
The New Media Consortium (2005) A Global Imperative: The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/Global_Imperative.pdf
