Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.6.11 | A look at how Steve Jobs changed social interactions and learning by turning kids into media creators.

Viewing all the tributes to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is both sobering and invigorating—a fast-paced walk through the combined worlds of technology, communications and pop culture.

Tim Carmody’s reflection in Wired on how Apple products made various forms of communication easier for people with disabilities is a standout. He shares the story of his 4-year-old son, who is on the autism spectrum, and who “cannot use a telephone and has a hard time sitting still for video telephony,” but has made breakthroughs with a “thoroughly well-loved iPod Touch, filled with videos and apps that have helped him learn to speak and augment his ability to communicate.”

The notion that a computer could enable communication and creativity is referenced with awe in numerous stories; it remains one of the biggest game-changes of the past century. From Laura Sydell’s story at NPR:

According to [Silicon Valley venture capitalist] Roger McNamee [who worked with Jobs], the iMac was the first computer made to harness the creative potential of the Internet.

“The iMac reflected the transition of consumers from passive consumption of content to active creation of entertainment,” McNamee says. “People could write their own blogs, make their own digital photographs and make their own movies. Apple made all the tools to make that easy and they did at a time when Microsoft just wasn’t paying attention.”

That point is, of course, a central component of Spotlight’s coverage on digital media and learning. While students now take such interaction and creation for granted (using any one of numerous tools and platforms), it’s remarkable to consider the speed in which Jobs’ vision was realized.

Aran Levasseur, who wrote earlier this week at MediaShift about digital literacy and learning, drives home the significance:

The timeline from the Gold Rush to Google spans just beyond 150 years, but if you look at the rate of change during this period it feels more like a geologic epoch. We’ve gone from transcontinental railroads to robotic rovers on Mars. Today an iPhone has more computing power than the entire North American Air Defense Command had in 1965.

Not everyone was an early Apple convert. And today many of us, myself included, work and play on a combination of Apple/Android/PC operating systems. Still, as Matthew Reed Baker writes, we know we have Apple to thank for innovations that made our personal devices more enjoyable to use—and much easier to look at and love.

Cathy Davidson, HASTAC co-founder and author of the new book “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,” writes that at one point she could “pontificate at length about not liking Macs”—until she noticed the cultural shift:

And then I saw what students were doing, all the ways they used this one tiny device to connect, to make a world, to communicate, to interact, and even to do good, to make connections across and between communities, using one tiny device to connect activists and organizers in communities that could not begin to afford each person to have a device or their own but, in sharing, had access to a digital world from which, by sheer economics, they would have been excluded, even as, in the industrial age, the poor were excluded.

Rescue workers connecting Durham and Haiti, educational programs for impoverished low-caste minority girls in the fields outside Bangalore, Black South African school kids learning a new world beyond the poverty and racism of the one they lived in daily through linked systems of trade and learning (together) via mobile devices. Peer-to-peer learning of ideas and skills and, well, not too get too sanguine, dreams that cost nothing but an internet connection, sometimes via a public library. So often, the tiny iPod was a conduit, over and over again, between producers and consumers and switching back and forth in ways no one could have anticipated. 

On the level of code, it may have been lock-box. On the level of connection, humanity, interaction, it was a link between all kinds of worlds at once, including those who might have otherwise been cut off, divided. All that in the palm of the hand. Genius.

Emmeline Zhao, writing at Huffington Post, describes the educational ideology of Jobs (a college dropout) and how his career “became an education for himself, his employees and his customers.”

And at Ypulse, Melanie explains in no uncertain terms the love the millennial generation has for Jobs—and his influence on their contemporaries:

Steve Jobs understood Millennials. He’d rather risk everything for innovation than to stay the course. He valued change. His Apple products and stores demonstrate that in so many ways. Millennials want to experience products and play with them before buying; many tech stores give them that opportunity, but not like Apple, which makes them feel welcome to hang around and “talk shop” with employees and friends. That’s why they like going to Apple stores to check out products and see what’s new, even if they’re not in the market to purchase anything. That’s why they’re part of the cult of Mac.

The stores’ Geniuses are another Millennial-centric idea. Anyone can be an expert, even if they’re young and wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Like the stores’ Geniuses, Jobs demonstrated a working style Millennials identify with, starting out in a garage and remaining laid back when he became a high-power CEO. Like their hero, Millennials love the free exchange of ideas; they’re collaborative and casual. Would Mark Zuckerberg be taking meetings in his infamous sandals if Jobs hadn’t changed the culture of business with his trademark jeans and black mock turtleneck?

As many stories have shown, Jobs’ life is also a lesson for students on rebounding from failure, understanding limitations, and always aiming to “make it great.” Thanks, Mr. Jobs, for everything.