Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.30.10 | In a two-part interview, professor Henry Jenkins talks with Rich Halverson about “Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America,” the new book Halverson co-wrote with Allan Collins.

The book provides a historical perspective of technology use in American schools. Jenkins writes that it offers “sage new proposals for how we might deal with the apparent tensions and incompatibilities between education as it has been conducted in this country and the new media landscape as it is lived beyond the schoolhouse gates.”

During their discussion, Jenkins asks Halverson, an associate professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, about how the policies and structures in American education have shifted over time, often in response to events like the industrial revolution. 

When we look to history, Halverson says, we see that schools are not stodgy places resistant to hot new technologies. Instead, their resistance is often a “consequence of the embrace of prior technologies.” 

Halverson adds that these historical examples can help us imagine how digital media and today’s information and knowledge revolution may help to rethink and transform our current educational system.

Digital media provides a path to personalizing and customizing learning that is often at odds with the batch processing model of, especially, K-12 schooling. This has meant that digitally literate young people have come to understand that there are at least two living channels for learning - 1) an institutional channel, and 2) a peer-driven, interest-driven, and unregulated digital media channel. The bifurcation of learning experiences for young people is bound to call the institutional identification of schooling and learning into question in the coming years.

Halverson continues: “We feel that digital media will continue to spark alternative forms of learning environments and to push for change in traditional learning institutions.”

Halverson discusses what an emerging educational system might look like, learning from failure in public schooling, and what schools have to learn from fantasy baseball.

The full two-part interview is worth a read.